Category: Deseret Language and Linguistics Society Symposium

Chauncey C. Riddle
April 1993

1. Contracts are always entered into on the basis of inexact human strength and might languages; redress always involves inexact interpretation of those same inexact transactions by a third party. New and Everlasting (N&E) Covenant transactions are always conducted in three languages simultaneously: heart, mind and strength. The first two provide for the possibility of exact understanding; the third is a witness in case of the default of the human participant. If a human being is not prepared in heart and mind for the covenant, they are apparently held responsible only for the weak strength aspects which their human powers enable them to partake of. But they cannot gain the benefits of the covenant on that basis.
2. The essence of contract transaction is consideration, enhancing the might of the parties. The essence of covenant transaction is heart, God sharing his pure heart with the human participant. Thus contract functions to change what a person controls, so that both parties fulfill their desires. Covenant functions first to enhance what a person is, then to enlarge what the person controls.
3. The transactions of contract leave the parties unequal, as they began. The transactions of the N&E Covenant bring men to the stature of a god, making men equal with God.
4. The transactions of contract are finite in time, space and material consideration, and have no meaning when men are dead. The transactions of the N&E Covenant are infinite in time, space and material consideration, and pertain both to this life and to eternity.
5. The transactions of contract make men of ill will enemies, because to the evil, their fair share is never enough. The transactions of the N&E covenant enable participating men and women to become brothers and sisters to all mankind, good and evil alike.
6. The remedy for improper transactions of contract is not only insistence on performance but also punitive penalty. Redress for improper transactions by men of the N&E Covenant is also punitive, but only to bring the person to attention; when the person remakes the covenant, the improper transactions are forgiven.
7. Contract needs to have all four kinds of language transaction. Heart language would assure bargaining in good faith. Mind language would assure perfect understanding, true meeting of the minds. Strength language would be technical and exact, forming a better record. Might language would result in perfect order and accomplishment for a better world. But contract only enjoys strength and might language functions. Covenant already has all of these four kinds of language transaction in place.
8. Contract is the human counterfeit of the covenant. Contract serves well in a fallen world to achieve worldly goals, but only when the participants abide in the light of Christ are contracts enforceable. Where men are wholly given to evil, only the law of the jungle prevails. In Zion and in heaven, covenant will replace contract. Contract is terrestrial, a shield to protect good men from unscrupulous men; covenant is celestial. Telestial and perdition-type persons use contract as a sword, not as a shield.
9. Thus the only sure and fully satisfying language transactions which bind men in cooperation are those of the new and everlasting covenant. All other modes of language transaction ultimately fail because the heart and mind language transactions are insufficient.

Language Transactions in Covenant and Contract

Premises:

1. Humans have four kinds of language ability: Heart language (love, hate); Mind language (ideas, concepts); Strength language (conventional colloquial and artificial languages); and Might language (dress, furnishings, landscaping, architecture, etc.)
2. All four language abilities are in constant use by each normal human being.

Primordial state: Individuals are their powers (each is what he or she does). Each person does what his or her powers enable to fill that person’s desires. Law of the jungle prevails.

Contract Civil governments are created by men to ease the power struggle of the jungle. Individuals are defined by governments by their rights and residual powers not claimed by government. Rights granted by civil governments enable individuals to exchange rights they have for rights they desire to have. Rights to exchange rights are the laws of contracts. Rights necessary for contracts, granted by governments: Rights to have and to exchange information. Rights to perform and exchange services. Rights to own and exchange goods. Rights to redress (remedy) in wrongful exchange. Contracts flourish in an atmosphere of free exchange of information about present rights and abilities and willingness to exchange. Result: Offers to contract. Essentials of a good contract: 1.           Meeting of the minds. Each party agrees to specific relinquishment of rights in order to gain desired rights. The promise of exchange must induce detriments (giving up of rights). 2.           Performance. Each party uses its present powers and rights to fulfill the agreements of the contract.

New and Everlasting Covenant God creates man in his own image and gives each varying degrees of powers with which to become individual human beings. He gives to each: heart, mind, language, knowledge, wisdom, health and physical strength. He puts each in a world where the individual’s strength results in might, or dominion. All men are free, subject to their own desires, except as they are impinged upon by the jungle or by civil government. God speaks to man to empower them, offering to become again their father and to enable each to become as he is. (This is the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.) The Gospel is a flow of information which constitutes an offer to covenant. Requirements to be able to covenant: An understanding of the difference between good and evil, that God exists and is good, that Jesus Christ enables all men to do only good and to recompense for the past evil which they have done; and an understanding of the covenant. (Mind) A desire to accept the covenant. (Heart) The New and Everlasting covenant is an agreement to exchange powers and services (not rights). For there is no third party to create those rights nor to give redress. The N&E Covenant operates in the context of the law of the jungle, not needing any civil government. The persons party to the covenant are always unequal, God being all powerful, and manbeing only what God has given him to be, of himself nothing.

Chauncey C. Riddle
Brigham Young University
14 Mar. 1989

Riddle, Chauncey C. (1989) “Truth and Language,” Deseret Language and Linguistic Society Symposium: Vol. 15: Iss. 1, Article 4. Available at: http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/dlls/vol15/iss1/4

The challenge of this paper is to say enough about the subject of truth in a short space so that the picture of truth that emerges is not a false witness.

You may be aware that in the long history of the problem of truth there have been some principal answers as to what truth is. The correspondence theory of truth holds that truth is ideas or statements which are perceived empirically to correspond to the nature of the universe. The main problem with the correspondence theory is that empiricism often yields false results. Another historic theory is that truth is the property of propositions which rationally cohere with certain fundamental truths; this coherence would be good if we could only find those fundamental truths. The pragmatic theory of truth says that what works may be taken as true; but what that theory supports is that what works does work, not why it works or what it is that works. A recent entry into the arena is the linguistic theory of truth as initiated by Wittgenstein and articulated by Garth L. Hallett in the book Language and Truth (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1988). This linguistic theory holds that statements are true if they are faithful to the linguistic norms of the culture in which they are uttered. I believe there is a good deal of merit in Hallett’s formulation in that he does well represent how the word “true” is actually used in society, but that his theory also falls short by not giving a clear statement as to what truth is and in failing to handle the problem of untruth in ordinary usage.

I therefore now proceed to give my own theory of truth and true, hoping to shed light on this important subject.

I define truth as a synonym for reality. Reality is all that exists, or has existed or yet will come into existence. One cannot discuss reality without making fundamental metaphysical commitments, which I now proceed to stipulate for my ideas of truth.

I understand existence to be composed of material things in various orders, arrangements and functions. These material things and their relationships constitute a whole, each part of which is essential. Thus truth is one, and cannot be divided. To be grasped as truth, it must be grasped as a whole, all that is and was and will be in all of its whys and wherefores, particles, subsystems and totality. Needless to say, this truth is beyond the grasp of any human being.

Each human being is a particular part of the whole of truth, a participant. Each of the feelings, ideas, and representations of a human being are part of the whole truth. The pertinent and pressing question about any given human being is then how he or she represents the truth of the universe to self and to others, and how intelligently one takes ones place in that great truth.

Of principal concern to us is representation of truth. We shall define “true” as a quality of something which measures up to a standard. Thus human beings are true to their word if they do what they have promised to do, and their statements are true if and as those statements measure up favorably to the truth of the universe. What are the possibilities that what an individual thinks or says can be called “true”? To answer that question, a taxonomy of human representations must be posited. We will now explore a taxonomy which begins with representations which have the greatest possibility of being most true and ends with those least true.

The general label which I give to all human representations of truth is “factitions,” from the Latin facere. I use this term to emphasize that in every case, human attempts to characterize truth are for each individual a creative making and doing. Human beings do not passively reflect the universe at any time in their characterizing of it. There is a personal element in each factition which is ineradicable. To use the analogy of a landscape painter, every human factition of truth is an attempt to paint some piece of the universe in a helpful manner. But the painting is never exactly true relative to the truth for at least two constant reasons: first, every human representation is an abstraction from truth, leaving out much that is true; second, no human representation can capture the whole, and only the whole is the truth.

The first level of human representation is perception. Perception, or conocer, kennen knowledge, is the direct sensory inspection of some aspect of the universe. In that direct sensory relationship perception is as close to the truth of things as a human being can get. Sensation is always particulars and of particulars. But this perception is ordinarily flawed by the fact that sensation is not perception until it is interpreted by the mind of the person. That interpretation is done on the basis of the total contents of the mind of the person; all of his previous sensations, ideas, theories, hopes, fears and inhibitions color his interpretation of sensation. Sensations must be read, just as a book must be read, to make any “sense.”

The categories of understanding which the person uses to interpret the particular sensations are usually themselves universals. These universals are theories as to what is important and true in the universe and what is not. The more truth the person already has in mind, the more true will be his perceptions. But it is quite safe to say that no human ever perceives ill things truly. The best and paradigm case of human perception is found in the direct, continuous, present, proximal sensing of a limited and very familiar aspect of the universe by one who is an expert on that subject. At best direct perception is once removed from the truth, which is to say that the best representation of the truth a human can make may yet be false.

The second degree or echelon of representation is the understanding of an experienced person. This is saber, or wissen knowledge of the world. At its best and surest this understanding is limited to the spatial, temporal, and causal sequences with which the person is very familiar. Identities, differences, continuities, etc., are part of this domain. At its weakest, this type of representation may be so flawed by false theories of the universe as to render the individual without a workable hypothesis as to what is being perceived, as is seen in certain types of mental illness. At best, these representations are twice removed from truth; at worst they are wholly untrue.

The third echelon of human representation of truth is found in the ability to do what one wishes to do. This ability exists only in doing what one wishes to do. This is koennen knowledge, can do in English. This kind of representation of truth comes after perception because the desire to do things comes only after understanding the possibility that they might be done. This can-do knowledge is a representation of truth by emphasizing what works, what the effective sequences of action are that are necessary to produce a certain result. Producing results does give us the truth that a certain action has produced a result, which is a specialized form of understanding, but knowing that a thing has happened does not involve knowing why that thing happened. Thus a full understanding of echelon two is a better representation of truth than the partial understanding of what works as found in echelon three. And echelon three is thrice removed from the truth.

Perception, understanding and the ability to do something are personal representations of truth within the individual. They have been the inspiration for the correspondence,   the coherence, and the pragmatic theories of truth. Though not truth, they are the representations of truth closest to the truth and therefore the most true ideas which the individual may have. They are not linguistic, but they reflect heavily the prior linguistic experience of the individual. The remaining categories of representation of truth by persons are all linguistic functions.

The fourth echelon of human representation of the truth is found in the individual’s witness of his own perceptions. Using his own personal perceptions as a base, the person formulates some verbal means of expressing a new perception. All words represent universals. When an individual tries to express the particulars of his experience in words he always faces a mismatch between what sensations are and what words can do. That problem, compounded with the universals of interpretation and understanding which color all perception, make an individual’s testimony as to what he has personally perceived four times removed from the truth.

The fifth echelon of human representation is in the witness an individual gives of his understanding of actual experiences he has had. All of the problems of perception and the reporting of perception are here augmented by the potential flaws in his understanding. A person might honestly report a temporal or spatial or causal sequence which he has observed, but be so thoroughly mistaken as to what actually was happening as to be a totally misleading witness. This fifth echelon is five times removed from the truth.

The sixth echelon of human representation of the truth is in the individual’s linguistic representation of what has worked for him as he has tried to fulfill his objectives as a person. Colored by his perceptions and limited by his understanding of the truth, this echelon is further hampered by the fact that when an individual is successful in accomplishing something he seldom can give an exhaustive account of all that he did and of all that the environment furnished to bring about his desired result. The individual knows that in situation X he did Y and obtained Z, but cannot give a full and accurate account of X or Y or Z. Therefore, this sixth echelon of representation is six times removed from the truth.

The seventh echelon of human representation is human witness as to inductive generalizations he has made about the world out of his own experience. We have now crossed the line from the possibility of inadvertent error in representing truth to the overt and deliberate embellishment of what the individual has experienced. In other words, we are now in the realm where pure guesswork characterizes the attempts of the individual to represent the truth. All interpolations and extrapolations are technically guesses, and these guesses suffer even more from the possibility of wishful thinking than do the previous levels of factitions. Valuable and useful as some inductive generalizations of experience may be, such representations are at least seven steps removed from the truth.

The eighth echelon of representation is theory. Theories are understandings that are deliberately invented to characterize some aspect of truth which cannot be the subject of direct empirical observation. Thus discussion of the nature of atoms, of space-time matrices, of how man came to be on the earth, of what is good and evil—all such are inventions of men to try to overcome their lack of ability to see for themselves the truths of these matters. All historical accounts and all interpretations of linguistic formulations are types of theories. This echelon includes all quotation of other human beings. While it is true that logical consequences of a theory sometimes offer the possibility of empirical confirmation, no empirical experience necessitates either the adoption or the rejection of any theory. Theories are often accepted and rejected on non-experiential criteria. Theories are eight times removed from the truth.

The ninth echelon of human representation of truth is found in overt fictions. These are counted as representations of truth because one main use and value of fiction is to   present ideas as to the way things really are in some respect using non-historical characterizations. These characterizations are usually attempts to present inductive generalizations or theories of truth in an artistic form, one that is pleasing or attention-getting. But as representations of truth, fictions are at least nine steps removed from the truth of things.

The tenth and final echelon of human representation of the truth in this taxonomy is found in the deliberate lie. This lie is a deliberate mis-representation which is known to the positor of the lie to be a lie but which he hopes he can get other humans to accept as true, as adequately representing truth. Lies are very effective in a world where truth is important and valued, where truth is difficult to come by, and where people are not always very careful as to what they accept as a representation of truth. Such is the world in which we live. Thus lies are ten steps removed from the truth. But they are not very far removed from those representations which are close to it in the echelons of representation.

Sometimes human beings do recognize the importance of truth and take special precautions to try to eliminate falsehood from linguistic exchanges. In law there is a recognition that the personal testimony of an eyewitness to an event is more valuable in establishing the true representation of an historic event than any other kind of representation, and that the testimony of several witnesses is better than that of only one. Also recognized is the testimony of expert witnesses, who are allowed to tell of their understanding and can-do knowledge, sometimes even of their inductive generalizations and theories. But since that kind or representation is from four to eight times removed from the real truth, the justice of our courts of law sometimes miscarries because it must accept such a poor representation of the truth as this, for want of better. The scholarly world recognizes that primary sources (fourth echelon representations) are much better evidence of the truth than are secondary sources (eighth echelon representations).

Science as an institution has sought to rid itself of the problem of representing truth by eliminating all personal knowledge and witness of truth, the first four echelons, and by replacing them with inductive generalizations and theories which are agreed upon by the majority of competent scientists. Science thus focuses on the seventh and eight echelons of truth representation. Scientists essentially say to the rest of mankind: We will manage your truth concerns for you; just put your trust in us and we will deliver you from error, because anything different from or outside of what we propound is error. Historical insight reveals that science is not omniscient but advances by replacing one scientific representation by another through time. The power of science is of course not in its representations. Its power and prestige come ultimately from the fact that the technology associated with modern science is formidable. Science is accepted as a painter of truth because of the fireworks it can produce. Producing fireworks does show that sometimes the inductive generalizations and theories of science do have some positive relationship to the truth.

Art in some of its forms is a non-literal attempt to represent truth, as discussed above in the matter of deliberate and overt fictions. Another side of art is that it attempts to create truth, to bring to pass new being which is valuable in some way. The attempt to capture ideals in artistic production is the attempt to “realize” things which are taken to be true, good and beautiful. The question about such art is, does it fully embody the ideal which the artist set out to create? Inasmuch as an artist does create, his artistic production becomes truth, part of the whole being of truth, which itself must and may then be represented by some one of the above delineated ten echelons of human representations of truth.

We come now to some conclusions and applications.  

1. Truth is a whole and cannot be represented adequately by human beings. Therefore a large measure of humility is appropriate in every human attempt to find or state something which could be called true.

2. There are no degrees of truth. Something is either the truth or it is not. But human representations of truth certainly do come in degrees, in at least the ten steps of removal from the truth as explicated in this paper. The trueness of a representation is thus a qualitative variable which may vary from 1 to 10, 1 being best. But human beings have no human means of being sure that their representation of the truth is true. Error always lurks as a real possibility.

3. There is also a quantitative measure of truth as well as a qualitative measure. How much truth a human being represents is a function of the amount of experience he has had with whatever fraction of the universe he has experienced.

4. All human representations of the truth are creative, factitious, and are therefore as much a measure of the artificer as they are of the truth being represented.

5. It is easier to know truth, to represent it to oneself, than it is to speak truth, to represent it to others.

6. Most of human discourse, statistically speaking, lies at the untruth end of the spectrum rather than at the truth end.

Which brings us to the necessity of including in what we say some mention of spiritual matters. Spiritual matters are part of the reality of the universe, and to try to discuss truth without saying something about spiritual experience would be deliberately to falsify everything that has been said. There are two troublesome problems that must be dealt with in connection with spiritual matters. One problem is that every human being is more an expert on his own spiritual experience than is any other human being. This is good in that it fosters individual initiative and independent thinking. The other problem is that because there are two spiritual sources, many persons latch onto a spirit that fosters untruth, and in their independence, are difficult to assist. A typical human attempt to overcome these problems is to encourage people to denigrate all spiritual experience in favor of trusting in some human authority. We shall show that that is a poor expedient, if getting close to the truth is the goal.

The individual in his own personal experience of truth can be closer to the truth than any linguistic and socially acceptable account of the universe could ever be. Personal experience is always spiritual, and furthermore each honest person knows that there are at least two spirits besides his own which affect him constantly. Let us then make a brief account of truth in light of those two spirits which affect human beings.

One spirit is the spirit of truth and the other spirit is a lying spirit. By whatever names these spirits are known to men, they are known to men. Whenever a person attempts to characterize the truth, to know it or to speak about it, one or both of those spirits is at hand to assist in the process.

It is the mission of the spirit of truth to assist the person to see, to understand, and to be able to do all that he needs to do in this world. But the spirit of truth is not primarily interested in truth. What the spirit of truth is more concerned about is righteousness, doing good in the world. Truth is a means to doing good, but knowing truth is never more important than doing good. So the spirit of truth comes to a person first to tell them the importance of doing good, then to tell them what truly is the good to be done by them in their situation, then to tell them any other truth they need to know to be able to do the good they should do. Should what that person needs to do to do good involve linguistic characterizing of the truth about the universe for the benefit of another human being, the spirit of truth will instruct the speaker as to what to say,   and then will interpret for the hearer, so that the exact portion and quality of truth necessary for both the speaker and the hearer to do good will be communicated.

The lying spirit is of course also not principally interested in truth and error. That spirit is principally interested in getting human beings to do evil to one another, to damn and hurt one another. The chief weapon of this spirit is lies, thus this is a lying spirit. He will tell truth and will influence human beings to know and speak truth whenever that will bring about evil, and he promotes lying whenever it will bring about evil.

So if a human being understands the difficulties of representing truth and also knows these two spirits, how can or should he or she act? We shall first delineate the case of the follower of the spirit of truth, and then the case of the person who follows the lying spirit.

How will a follower of the spirit of truth act in this world? Such a person will seek to feel the influence of the spirit of truth in all situations. He or she will be apt to listen to and quick to do that good which that spirit of truth commends, seeking also to gain true perceptions, true understanding, and true ability to do that which needs to be done. Should this person need to speak of the truth, he or she will assiduously strive to measure every gesture, word and characterization to itself become a good and a true representation, acting and speaking as humbly as possible under the influence of the spirit of truth. When one speaks by the spirit of truth, though words cannot convey the truth, the truth of the matter can be manifest to the hearer by that same spirit of truth by which the speaker speaks. Thus it is the spirit of truth that is responsible for the truth, not the human speaker. This does not give license for the speaker to be careless with the truth, for he must attempt always to speak truly, by the spirit of truth. But truth is yet the province of the spirit of truth.

Should the follower of the spirit of truth encounter the words of another human being who speaks by the spirit of truth, that hearer will pay close attention to the personal witness of particulars which the speaker relates out of his own experience. If the matter is important, the hearer will go to see for himself. He does not want to depend on the word of another, even a good word, because words are always further removed from the truth than is personal observation under the influence of the spirit of truth. Should the good speaker speak of things not in his personal knowledge, that person will speak only under the influence of the spirit of truth, and the hearer will then apply to the spirit of truth to receive a personal manifestation of the matter from the spirit of truth for himself. He knows that personal knowledge is always closer to the truth than a manifestation reported by another, even if the speaker is truly saying what he has been led to say by the spirit of truth. Thus the influence of the spirit of truth is to cause every person to seek to know for himself both the natural things he may observe and the unseeable things concerning which he may receive his own personal instruction from the spirit of truth.

When one who hears by the spirit of truth hears a person who speaks by the lying spirit, the results are much the same. The hearer will not accept the reported personal knowledge of the speaker, but will go see for himself. Neither will he accept the witness of things which are not personal knowledge, but will seek further from the spirit of truth the truth about the matters on which the person of the lying spirit speaks.

What happens when one of a lying spirit hears another who speaks by the spirit of truth? In this case the person of the lying spirit will accept whatever is in the personal knowledge witness that the speaker gives which the hearer finds to be useful or pleasing, and will reject the rest. The person of the lying spirit hears the speaker who speaks of unseeable matters by the spirit of truth in such a way as to reject what is said unless it can be twisted or interpreted to become pleasing or useful to the hearer.  

When one of a lying spirit hears one who speaks by a lying spirit, the witness of personal knowledge is again accepted if it is pleasing or useful. But if the hearer wants to use that knowledge to accomplish something in the real world, he will go find out the truth of the matter by his own personal observation, for even liars must abide truth in that which they wish to accomplish. But in the matters which are not the personal knowledge of the speaker, the hearer of the lying spirit will hear what pleases himself or what he will find useful in promoting lies with others.

Now for some conclusions and generalizations about spiritual matters related to truth.

1. A person of the spirit of truth wants the real truth no matter how unpleasing it is, because only the truth enables him to work in a real way to solve the real problems with which he is confronted.

2. A person of a lying spirit must leave that lying spirit and seek truth to be able to do anything in the natural world, for nature cannot be flattered into cooperation by lies as people can.

3. People who speak truly by the spirit of truth will often be rejected by those who hear with the lying spirit, because the truth does not please them. If truth pleased them, they would seek and hold to the spirit of truth rather than the lying spirit.

4. Persons who seek influence in society by the lying spirit only need to tell those who hear by a lying spirit what pleases them in order to gain power.

5. No person can assure any other person of the truth. That is the domain of the spirit of truth.

The conclusion of the matter is then that two factors must be accounted for by one who would make truth his standard. First he must be more interested in righteousness than he is in truth, for then he will be able to find the spirit of truth and to hold to abide in it without error. Second, he must understand the difficulties and problems in knowing and speaking truth, so that he will believe and speak only by the spirit of truth, and not be tempted to let go of the spirit of truth and propound on his own as if he were some sort of non-human paragon of truth. For to propound on our own that which pleases us is to have fallen into the arms of the lying spirit.

Chauncey C. Riddle
Brigham Young University
18 Mar. 1988

Riddle, Chauncey C. (1988) “Language and Human Being,” Deseret Language and Linguistic Society Symposium: Vol. 14: Iss. 1, Article 17. Available at: http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/dlls/vol14/iss1/17

Introduction

The human be-ing considered in this paper is the dynamic becoming of Aristotle, the concern with what happens as one acts as a human being rather than the static essence of being projected in a Platonic fashion. This paper is thus the attempt to answer the questions, What happens to human beings as they use language? What is the unique contribution to being a human being which the use of language affords?

An initial attempt was made to cast the answers to these questions in naturalistic terms. It was soon perceived that such an approach, in addition to being a deliberate falsification of the context, yielded but a very impoverished account of the human situation. There are two pieces of knowledge which we have that bear powerfully on the questions at hand: all men are the literal children of the gods, and those parent-gods have given to men the language which they enjoy. This second point is not meant to deny the historic development of individual languages, which may be considered naturalistically. It is simply to note that there was an initial endowment of language, a superior language, which was given to men no more than two hundred human generations ago. The effect of that endowment is the subject of this paper.

Theses

Normal acquisition of any “natural” human language accomplishes four things:

1. Language enables each human being to attain to a fullness of agency and to accountability, which are the measures of being a fully functioning human being. The power of language unto choosing good or evil is so great and so important that everyone who enters mortality must acquire language before his or her mortal probation is complete.
2. Language enables each human being to understand the message of salvation from God, to enter into a covenant with God to receive that salvation, and to abide that covenant unto the receiving of salvation.
3. How we communicate is a large part of our salvation; using language correctly is the key to that perfect communication.
4. The choices one makes between good and evil using language thrust one beyond being a human being into becoming either a devil or a servant of Jesus Christ.

1. Agency and accountability.

Definition of agency: There are three necessary and sufficient conditions for agency: There must be (1) an intelligent (goal-oriented) being, who has (2) knowledge of alternatives among which to choose to solve his problems (fulfill his goals or desires), and who has (3) power to carry out the choices he makes to fulfill his desires. There is a rudimentary agency which higher animals may be said to have, for instance, as they select a preference as to where to rest or what to cat as they fulfill desire by doing as they choose. Human beings without language (e.g., wolf children) have this rudimentary agency after the animal fashion.

But a fullness of human agency comes only with linguistic development. Language and the rich communication it makes possible greatly expand the range of desire (expands the horizon of possibilities) for each individual. Language and the resulting communication furnish vastly increased knowledge, including the possibility of tapping the corporate memory of humankind (the writings and memories of other persons), thus to increase the range of means available for choice unto the satisfaction of desire. Language and communication bring to men vastly increased technical and other ability to implement the means chosen for the fulfillment of desire. The end result of this increased agency is what we call civilization, a plethora of choices, understandings and power which enables human beings seek successfully and revel in a marvelous panoply of satisfactions. Language enables a human being to desire things both real and imaginary, to reach for the stars or to plumb the depths.

Accountability, unlike agency, is made possible only through language acquisition. Accountability is the ability of a person to give a linguistic account of what, how and why he or she has acted. Accountability presupposes normal human agency: that the person accounting acted out of choice as to what, how and why he or she acted. While agency is relative (one person has vastly different powers of choice, knowledge and action than another), accountability only demands that the person acted by choosing and can give an account of that choosing. This accountability is what enables human beings to act rationally, according to a principle or rule, for if one can give account of the past, one can also bind oneself to act in a certain manner in the future. This ability is the basis of most cooperation, of contracts and legal arrangements, of law and order in civilization. Two great barriers to civilization are thus inability to communicate through language and mendacity when communication is possible. Clearly it is the communication of good things in a truthful manner which advances civilization.

Choice always involves values as well as mere physical alternatives, thus necessitating a consideration of good and evil. One construal of the value dichotomy is to see good as that which one has learned by induction fulfills his desires, or is sufficiently like what has fulfilled his desires that it is reasonable to believe by induction that the desire will be fulfilled again by the look-alike. Evil is the value attached to things which are undesirable, which past experience has shown to bring pain or dissatisfaction, and this value is extended by induction to things which appear to be like the bearers of dissatisfaction in the past. This definition of good and evil explains the actions of human beings and of many species of animals, all of whom have a measure of agency and can learn from experience.

The Restored Gospel perspective tells us that the definition of good and evil given above is not sufficient, that there is another good and evil which may be considered the real thing, with the former being but a preliminary. In the Restored Gospel, Good is the will of God and only the will of God. The will of man in choosing either the good or the evil under the first definition of them constitute what is Evil in the Restored Gospel. Thus in the Restored Gospel, the emphasis shifts from the anticipated utility or non-utility of making a choice to a recognition of whose will it is that is determining the choice. Motive or reason for choosing becomes more important than what is being chosen. Thus the new standard is that only God is good, and men to become good-doers must relinquish doing their own will to doing the will of God if they desire to escape from the doing of evil.

Thus men may and do choose between good and evil pre-linguistically, even as do animals. But to be able to choose between Good and Evil one must have normal human linguistic development so that the understanding of Good and Evil may be made manifest to an individual. Good and Evil are abstractions which have no physical exemplifications, whereas good and evil are based on physical experience. Thus Good and Evil are seen only through the eye of faith, which is believing in the revelations of an actual non-human being who speaks to men, to each person in his own natural language and concepts, to explain to each the new understanding of Good and Evil. One then learns that he has known Good all along, for it is the light of Christ which is given to all men.

It is what one has done with the knowledge of the Good, given by revelation, that each man must account before his Father and his Maker. This agency to know the Good and the Evil, and to be able to account for what one has done with that agency is so important that no human being is ever judged by God until he or she has received full linguistic development to enjoy that agency.

2. Language and Salvation.

Salvation in the Restored Gospel is to be placed beyond the power of our enemies. It is essentially a passive matter, though it requires all we can do. What we can do is never sufficient, but does enable us to receive the gifts of salvation from Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ saves men from four things. He saves them from the grave (from the power of Satan to prevent a reuniting of body and spirit in the resurrection). He can save them from the eternal consequences of having committed sins. He can save them from the littleness of knowledge and power and righteousness which so characterizes human beings. And he can save them from the evil in their own hearts which makes them unable to love God and keep his commandments. Resurrection, the salvation of the body, is given as a free gift to all mankind. Rut the other forms of salvation, which are sanctification, justification and purification, come only by covenant, by contract. One has to enter into an agreement with God to act in a certain manner (to choose and do only the Good). It is not possible to understand either the offerer of that covenant or the covenant except through language. There must be an understanding of things which are not seen, and an agreement to live by influences which are not seen; these things can only be accomplished by way of language, building on what is seen. Thus language is an indispensable clement in the salvation offered to men through Jesus Christ from anything but the grave.

3. The covenant of salvation involves how we communicate and how we use language.

Communication is any affect which one being has upon another. The following is a taxonomy of communication:

1. Sensory communication:
2. Visual: Seeing or appearing (to be seen).
3. Auditory: Making noise or hearing.  
4. Tactile: Touching or being touched (e.g., shaking hands).
5. Olfactory: To emit or to detect an odor.
6. Gustatory: To taste or be tasted.
7. Impact communication: To apply sufficient force or energy to another person to move or change some part of their body; or to receive the same.
8. Substance communication: To give or take from another person’s possession something material.
9. Chemical communication: To introduce a substance into the body of another person which changes their body chemistry; or to receive the same.
10. Indirect communication: To affect something another person owns or holds dear by any of the means of communication; or to be affected in this manner.
11. Privative: to deny another person any of the above communication modes when that person desires and expects the same, or to suffer this same treatment from another person.

We honor other persons in the Restored Gospel manner only by communicating to preserve their agency. When we use language to communicate with them to gain their full cooperation and agreement as to other possible means of communicating with them, we honor their agency, their choice. Thus we will not communicate with others except visually, and through language (which may involve auditory or tactile language forms), until we have their full permission to do so. Thus a doctor would not operate on someone who has agency until he has explained the proposed procedure and has gained the patient’s cooperation (unless the patient is unconscious or not accountable for some other reason).

We can and do honor God in the Restored Gospel only by communicating with anything or anyone just as he instructs us. Thus God instructs his servants as to how to pray, how to speak, how to govern, how to teach, how to administer, how to preach; in all things we are to do his will.

We cannot abide the covenants of the Restored Gospel except we communicate as he, God, directs: to honor and love him and our fellow human beings. Thus our keeping the covenants and obtaining salvation involves using language, the increase in agency which he gives us, in a very special manner.

One of the special manners of communication which God makes available to his faithful servants is the power of the priesthood. The priesthood is the power of God, which faithful servants may use as he directs. To use the priesthood is to speak in the name of God, to command or to instruct using the power of God to bring to pass his eternal purposes. As men increase in righteousness, their priesthood power increases and the necessity of communicating to control or to subdue evil by physical communication is lessened, as when Enoch set at defiance the armies of the enemies of Zion by using his priesthood power. By speaking, the gods created the heavens and the earth. By speaking, the mind and will of God arc brought to pass by one who has learned to abide the mind and will of God by obedience to every word that proceedeth forth from his mouth.

4. Language, the tool which makes us fully human, is so powerful that the experience of using it thrust us beyond be a human being to become a devil or an eternal servant of Jesus Christ.

It is language which makes us fully conscious of good and evil and which enables us to understand clearly Good and Evil. Thus men have become as the gods, knowing good and evil. Knowing good and evil, men must choose between good and evil in all things. That choosing has eternal consequences, one of which is the fact that human choices are either for Good or for Evil in all we do. Thus in all things man gives allegiance to God, or to Satan (who is the author and proprietor of Evil).

As a man chooses the way of Good and of God, he becomes godly and a candidate for glory. Eventually everyone except the sons of perdition will choose the Good and God, and will inherit glory. Some will make that choice late, and will be inheritors of a telestial glory. Others will choose earlier, and will inherit a terrestrial glory. Some choose Good and God when they first have the opportunity, and thus qualify for the celestial glory, the presence of the Father and the Son. But all who choose Good are servants of Jesus Christ, doing his will and furthering the cause of Good in the universe, of their own free will and choice, to all eternity.

Those who first know the way of Good and God, accept it, try it, taste of the powers it brings—and then renounce Good and God, are the sons of perdition. Through language they come to understand the spirit and manner of God in pursuit of Good, then they use language to lie, to deceive, to curse, to fight against the Good. Thus if they go down to their deaths in such a condition, they are past the possibility of repentance and thus must remain in the state they have chosen to all eternity, servants to Satan, whom they have chosen over God.

Thus language is the power which makes us fully human, but is so powerful that we cannot remain in this human condition. The power of language is so great in giving us knowledge and opportunity and in enabling us to act for Good or for Evil, that we are thrust beyond being human beings to become immortal beings, persons who espouse and promote Good or Evil, according to their own choice, for all eternity.

Conclusion

Thus language is the greatest power and instrumentality which human beings possess. It is the power which opens the whole expanse of eternity to each person, then closes one’s own choices upon one alternative for that eternity. It is difficult to overestimate the importance and place of language in the human scheme. We are judged by what we do. But only through language can we do the greatest Good or the greatest Evil.

Chauncey C. Riddle
Brigham Young University
27 Mar 1987

Riddle, Chauncey Cazier (1987) “The Logic of Meaning,” Deseret Language and Linguistic Society Symposium: Vol. 13: Iss. 1, Article 20. Available at: http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/dlls/vol13/iss1/20

Logic has two major applications to language. One is the relating of truth-value, taking units of language as wholes and relating them to each other in the manner of the propositional calculus. This we shall call macro-logic. The second application is the study of the logic of meaning relationships in language, which we denominate as the micro-logic of language. The concern of this paper will be with the micro-logic of meaning. But first we must lay some groundwork.

A. Background Considerations

Certain premises govern all that is said in this paper. The first is that language is a system of actions whereby a person affects the universe about him. It is an intentionally devised and intentionally used human tool. The principal use of this tool is one person affecting or controlling others. We note the following categories of this social affect and control by distinguishing three kinds of language usage:

1. Phatic usage: Language used to fill up time.
   1. Esthetic usage: Language used to stimulate imagery and/or feelings.
   2. Informative usage: Language used to formulate testable hypotheses about the universe.

It is noteworthy that in usage, these categories are not usually found in the pure state. Language usage may be phatic, esthetic and informative all at the same time. But usually one of these functions will be dominant in a given usage.

The informative use of language itself has three subdivisions:

1. Disclosure: The speaker reveals his inner states.
   Example: I have a headache.
2. Directive: The speaker reveals his desired hearer response.
   Example: What time is it?
3. Description: The speaker reveals his ideas about something outside himself.
   Example: This dog is old.

Every informative use of language is disclosure, because the speaker is revealing himself, but some disclosures are also commands (directives). Some disclosure commands are also descriptions. In all three the speaker reveals himself, but in some he purports to reveal the nature of the universe as well.

Revelations about the universe may take one of two forms, or be couched in two different types of language. The difference comes in the mode and precision of definition being used. One type of language is “ordinary,” the common vernacular languages of mankind which everyone learns as a child. The basic form of definition used in this language is ostensive. By induction a person learns to see pattern in objects which arc given names by his mentors. Dogs have aspects in common, and as one   observes enough dogs a pattern forms in his mind which he then uses both to understand and to indicate that pattern when conversing with others. This kind of pattern or meaning is not exact, is not usually specifiable in terms of a specific number of elements all of which are common to the pattern dog. This is “family resemblance” meaning, as celebrated by Wittgenstein.

The second type of informative language is technical usage. Technical terms are those which have a precise meaning, a meaning based on essence rather than family resemblance. To have an essence means that there is a finite set of qualifications which necessarily apply to an object being referred to. This does not mean that the object may have no other characteristics: it need not be pure. It means that speaker and hearer both intend that the object referred to has at least the characteristics, the “essence,” agreed upon by prior stipulation. For instance, to be a legal contract in the technical sense, certain factors are stipulated in advance, such as:

1) both parties must be competent to contract;
2) there must be a meeting of the minds;
3) there must be an anticipated benefit to both parties; and
4) there must be an exchange of consideration.

If those stipulations were the agreed essence of a contract in a society, any agreement lacking one of those components would not be considered a legal contract and could not be enforced.

It is noteworthy that many of the terms used in a technical listing of essential characteristics themselves need further technical definition, such as “meeting of the minds” and “consideration” in the example of the preceding paragraph. But eventually all technical definitions must rest on terms which are not technically defined. Formally speaking, this is to say that defined terms must be defined in terms of undefined primitives. In the real world, our primitive definitions are non-technical, family resemblance definitions which we invent by induction through ostensive definition. This is to say that all technical use of language is embedded in a larger context of ordinary language. Technicality is a matter of degree. Only one term of a conversation might be used technically. Or a majority may be used technically. When the number of technical terms becomes so great that the non-initiated hearer cannot grasp the gist of the conversation, the language has become technically oriented jargon.

Meaning is a matter of pattern. The meaning of any word or sentence is the pattern of ideas which the speaker intends or the hearer infers. The atomic elements of these patterns are either irreducible sensory items (a shade of blue, the fragrance of lilac) or constructed elements (line, wishing, angry). Constructed elements usually may be further subdivided at the constructor’s desire; thus to be elemental is to be considered elemental by the constructor. The meaning of tulip is, for ordinary language, the indication of a spring blooming bulb which produces a flower of greatly varied shapes and colors, the pattern being a vague one which enables its constructor to identify tulips with a high (say 90%) rate of success. The technical meaning of tulip specifies exactly the parameters necessary for a plant to be tulip, enabling the user to identify correctly with something like a 99% rate of success.  

B. Parameters Necessary for Truth

We are now in a position to ask, what are the parameters of information necessary to make an informative statement about the universe? We find that there are four basic kinds of information necessary to form a minimum complete statement.

These are:

a) A target pattern,
b) An overlay pattern,
c) Affirmation or denial of the overlay,
d) Specification of relevance factors.

We will explain each of these factors.

The target pattern is something like the subject of a sentence, but it is the meaning subject, not the grammatical subject. In the sentence “It is raining,” the target pattern is “current weather.” Be it a simple or a complex pattern, the target pattern is simply the subject being operated upon in a given situation of linguistic usage.

The overlay pattern is the pattern being brought to bear upon or to modify the target pattern. A sentence functions to overlay or to add the overlay pattern upon the target pattern. In the example of the preceding paragraph, “raining” is the overlay pattern.

The third clement of an informative sentence is the affirmation or denial of the overlay. Affirmation is to assert the overlay, as in “It is raining.” This sentence would be used principally in case the pattern of current weather in unknown to the hearer or to emphasize the fact of the overlay. Or we might deny the overlay by saying, “It is not raining.” This sentence would ordinarily be used when the hearer is uncertain whether or not it is raining, or has been afraid it might be raining, or believes that it is raining because someone has said so. Affirmation or denial is strictly an on/off matter. It admits of no degrees or variations. Should degrees or variations be necessary, those factors would be put into the pattern of the target or overlay class, as in “It probably is raining.” In this example we have an affirmation of overlay of “probably is raining” on target pattern “My idea of current weather.” This shifts the focus of the sentence from description of the weather to epistemological considerations about whether one knows what the weather is or not.

The fourth consideration, relevance factors, give the information necessary to test the pattern established by overlay or subtraction of overlay against the “real world.” Four relevance factors are necessary: 1) Spatial location, 2) Temporal location, 3) Mode of reference, and 4) Specification of ordinary or technical usage.

Spatial location is the designation of the boundaries within which the overlay pattern is asserted to hold. Just where is it raining? Difficulty of description limits most usages of the example sentence to specification of the fact that it is raining or not raining at a particular spot. Weather persons on television have the ability to show satellite photos with areas of rain indicated.

Temporal location is again best done by specifying time when it was raining at a particular place, or saying that rain began at a certain time and continued to a certain time. To speak of future time is to forecast, which is the relevant issue since the past is already gone and that past rain rains no more. But future rain has very practical consequences. Needless to say, forecasting future time rain is a guess, but sometimes a very sophisticated guess which turns out to be vindicated.

Mode of reference designates whether one is speaking in the disclosure, directive, or descriptive mode. The same sentence could be used in any of the three modes, hence the need to specify. In real life this factor is seldom overly specified because the context makes evident what is going on. But sometimes the context is insufficient. “It is raining” could be a description if the person has been asked what the weather is. That sentence could be a directive if the speaker previously had told the hearer to move indoors as soon as it started raining. And that sentence could be a disclosure if it is a response to the question “What is your guess as to what the weather is right now?”

The specification of ordinary or technical usage is of great practical importance. Weather reports almost always are given in ordinary language. This means that though rain is reported over a certain area at a certain time, that does not mean that every open square foot of the area is being rained upon. The meaning is approximate, family resemblance type, and is thus usually given in percentages. “There is a 70% chance of rain falling in this area.” Such a statement seems silly when one looks out the window and sees pouring rain. But the statement is intended to give a percentage over an area, not at a specific location. Technical usage would have to assure rain or not rain at a specific number of specified areas.

Thus we see that two kinds of information are needed in the relevance factors of language usage: Where and when to look to see if something is true, and what kind of language usage the speaker is using to assert what he does. Only as these relevance factors are explicitly specified can the exact nature of the utterance be described. This is to say that we are attempting to give a technical definition of the relevance factors necessary to linguistic usage.

It is interesting to note what is necessary when verbal communication is reduced to the absolute minimum, when context provides everything but the minimum. The minimum is the specification of the overlay pattern. Thus when someone cries out “Fire,” this word is a specification of the overlay. The target pattern (conditions), the affirmation, the present time and place, the mode of reference, and the ordinary use of language are all assumed.

C. The work of Jean-Marie Zemb

In an unpublished paper entitled “The Trios, the Duos and the Solo in the Structure of Propositions” (Translated by Alan K. Melby of Brigham Young University), Jean-Marie Zemb of the College of France has approached the problem of the relationship of the grammar of linguistic usage as related to the structure of meaning. He concludes that the structure of meaning is not tied to grammatical form as is inferred by the hearer as the hearer infers the meaning of the sentential formulation.

Zemb analyzes the structure of meaning in a manner similar to that which has been done in this paper. He concludes that the structure of the proposition is that of thema-phema-rhema. Thema is analogous to what we have designated as the target class. Rhema is like that which we have called the overlay class. Phema is a pattern like that of the affirmation or denial of the overlay.

If one uses Zemb’s terminology we see that a fourth element is necessary. That fourth element has been called above the relevance factors. To match Zemb’s terminology one might designate these relevance factors as schema, the pattern or ordering of the assertion relative to the universe of human experience.

Zemb has made a contribution by showing clearly that grammar and meaning are not correlated uniquely. His suggestion of the thema-phema-rhema is seen to be consonant with the pattern employed in this paper. Zemb’s focus is on the proposition, whereas this paper focuses on the assertion as the basic unit of human language. But it is possible that a fruitful accommodation of terminology may consolidate Zemb’s work and the present paper into a viable approach in the philosophy of language.

D. Conclusion

The conclusion of the matter is that the micro-logic of meaning is very simple compared with the macro-logic of truth. The logic of meaning is simple addition or subtraction of overlay pattern to or from a target pattern. Using this device of overlay recursively, any meaning can be reduced down to its simplest elements or built up into a most complex idea, such as the idea of the universe.

Chauncey C. Riddle
Brigham Young University
13 Feb. 1986

Riddle, Chauncey C. (1986) “The Basic Unit of Human Communication,” Deseret Language and Linguistic Society Symposium: Vol. 12: Iss. 1, Article 11. Available at: http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/dlls/vol12/iss1/11

This paper attempts to give a definitive answer to the question: What is the basic unit of human communication? The inquiry will proceed by establishing communication as a systems concept and will then propose that assertion-in-use-context is the basic unit of human communication, showing the superiority of that unit over others which might be reasonably considered as the basic unit.

In systems theory we may distinguish three kinds of systems, each of which has an appropriate companion definition of communication. We shall assume that in reality there is only one system in existence, which is the totality of the universe. The term system used below should be read as sub-system of the universe. Static systems are geometric arrangements of non-changing parts of sane arbitrarily defined whole. Each static system has internal parts (each of which has some internal relationship with every other part), a system boundary, and an environment. Communication in a static system is unobstructed contiguity of parts of a static system. This is a non-transitive relationship. For example, we say that the kitchen of this house communicates with the living room because there is a doorway which leads directly from one to the other. We say that tunnel A does not communicate with tunnel B in the mine because one must go outside the mind into another static system to gain access from tunnel A to tunnel B.

Dynamic systems are first static systems to which change or functioning of internal parts and the external environment have been added. The dynamic aspect of dynamic systems is construed in terms of input from the environment, internal processing of that input, and output from the system to the environment. Communication in a dynamic system is the effect which one or more parts of a dynamic system has upon any other part. This communication is to be taken as transitive, effect transferring from part to part, contrary to the non-transitive nature of static communication. The unit of dynamic communication may be taken to be effective force applied through time, as in foot-pounds of work per minute. For example, the engine of an automobile delivers an output of foot-pounds of power which is transmitted through the transmission, drive shaft, differential, axles, wheels and tires of the automobile; that power translated into friction between the tires and the pavement propels the vehicle along the surface of the pavement. Thus the engine communicates with the tires to accomplish the work of the automobile. If any linkage part is missing or defective (e.g., if the differential is stripped), then the engine no longer communicates with the tires and the functioning of the system is defective.

An agent system is a dynamic system of which at least one part is an agent. An agent is a being whose acts are discretionary: given any act performed in its specific context, if the actor could have acted otherwise then the actor is an agent. This is an ideal definition, for it presupposes an omniscient observer. For mere humans, agency is attributed when the actor acts first one way am then quite another in apparently identical but time differentiated situations. Communication for an agent system is (1) action of the agent upon the environment to attempt to effect a desired change in the environment; or (2) action by the agent to interpret present input from the environment in order to project a hypothesis as to what will happen next as a basis for communication (1). In other words, agents both send and receive communication as agents. In the agent communication situation the universe is divided into two systems: the agent and all he controls, and the remainder of the universe. Thus agent communication is simply any output from the agent system to the remainder of the universe or any input from the remainder of the universe to the agent system. For example, an agent who reads a newspaper is being affected by an input from the environment in the receiving of communication; he may then write a letter to the editor in the attempt to create a change in the environment by sending communication. Negative examples would be failure of the delivery of the newspaper (so that no effect of the newspaper is possible on the agent) and failure of the letter to reach the editor (thus making impossible any change such as that which the agent desires).

It is now necessary to posit two hypothetical creatures to answer the needs of the two kinds of agent communication posited above. The receiving of communication from the universe by an agent we shall denominate assessment; the sending of communication to the universe by an agent shall be denominated as assertion. Thus an agent receives input from the universe and processes it. This processing is never a simple result of the universe acting upon the agent in a mechanical fashion: the agent is always a creative participant, injecting his desires and beliefs into the construction which he creates to represent in his own mind what is happening “out there” in the universe. Likewise, his attempt to project a cause into the universe which will create a desired change in the universe is clearly a function of the agent’s desires and beliefs. Thus, agent communication is significantly different from either static or dynamic communication. Whereas static communication is wholly a matter of internal relations constrained by spatial contiguity, and whereas dynamic communication is a mechanical type of input and output constrained in a mechanical fashion by the physical properties of the environment and the receiving and producing system, so the input and output of an agent system is internally shaped by the desires and beliefs of the agent (beliefs being a function of the desires of the agent). Incoming and outgoing action is not mechanically determined but is always factored by the unique nature of the desires of the individual agent.

When we compare assessment with assertion we see that both are necessary to communication. But assertion is action, whereas assessment is reaction. Assertion is public and objective, whereas assessment is private and subjective. Assertion is fixed and final for a given time and place, whereas assessment may be ongoing, perhaps never concluding definitively among several possibilities. Assertion is intrusive, offensive; assessment is protective, defensive. Assertion is a reflection of the assessments of the asserter, though assessment may remain mute, silent. Assertion tends to increase in importance with increase of the agency of the asserter, whereas assessment does not necessarily do so. An asserter is found out for what he is, whereas an assessor may simply be a blotter. These contrasts suggest that assertion is the primary factor in agent communication, a better target for fixing a single unit of communication than assessment would be.

Assertion is the intentional act of an agent who attempts to effect a change in the universe (the universe outside of himself) in order to change how the universe affects him. He makes this attempt by a more or less calculated launching ofa perturbation (an effective force) into the universe. This assertion can take a verbal or nonverbal form, the universe seeming to be indifferent to which form it is. Thus an assertion can be a sentence, an exclamation, any noise, any gesture, any movement of body, perhaps even a thought process, should thought processes be detectable by am therefore influential on sane aspect of the universe.

We must also distinguish between assertion in the abstract and assertion in the context of a specific usage by a given agent in a specific environment. Abstract assertions are in reality not assertions but only hypotheses. They are potential assertions, having the form of assertions but lacking the pertinent autobiographical and contextual realities to make them real assertions. All real assertions are thus assertions by an agent in a specific, unique, historic situation. One final preliminary stipulation is necessary. We shall make a basic inclusion of human communication within agent communication. This inclusion cannot be made categorically, for not all humans are agents, and it is typical of adult human beings to be agents. Therefore this stipulation will suffice for the present concern.

It is now possible to state the thesis of this paper precisely. This is the thesis: The basic unit of human communication is an assertion in its historic context of actually being propounded by a real agent. We shall use this concept of assertion-in-use-context as the focus of attention for the remainder of this paper, and shall refer to it by the acronym AIUC.

We shall now state basic laws which apply to the AIUC.

1. Every AIUC is unique, individuated by space, time, quality and author.
2. The summed series of a given author’s assertions are his history. (assessments are presumed to be reflected in subsequent assertions.)
3. Every agent is propounding an assertion at every moment.
4. The AIUC of a given moment is the being of the agent.
5. The measure of the agency of an agent is the sum of the agency of the agent assessors which respond positively to his assertion, plus the sum of his effect on non-agent reactors.
6. The limiting factor on the expansion of the agency of an agent is his ability correctly to assess the desires of other agents as an instrument in the fulfilling of those desires of other agents.
7. AIUC is the unique vehicle of message.

Messages are assessments of AIUCs. Messages exist only in the minds of assessors. They are different from intentions, for authors may intend one thing then see that their own assertion must be assessed to have a different message than that which they themselves intended. Messages are the reaction of each sentient, intelligent observer to a given AIUC, including the reaction of the asserter.

Messages have the following components:

1. The asserter’s intent is hypothesized.
2. There is a propositional decoding of the assertion.
3. There is an attribution of strength (urgency, importance, authoritativeness, truthfulness, rightness, all these positive or  negative) for that assertion.
4. There is an estimate of the impact or result on the universe of that AIUC being assessed (present result and probable future results.)

Propositional decoding is the observer’s mental action of translating the signals of the AIUC into a concatenation of concepts which the observer deems to be a full and adequate representation of what the asserter is saying. This translation may have two or more versions. One version may be the “literal” meaning of the asserter’s words which is then contrasted with the deeper or “real” meaning. When someone say’s “How are you?” upon meeting you for the first time in the morning, it is usually best to ignore the literal interpretation of the words spoken and answer only the “real intent,” which is often simply an acknowledgement that they recognize your presence. This propositional decoding is not necessarily a translation into a standard spoken language. It may be this in same cases. But it is always a translation into the personal concept language of the individual.

The personal concept language of the individual is those concepts which have been formed out of experience and need by each person. If people have many experiences in common, the concepts with which they think about those common experiences will tend to have greater similarity than if they do not have such experiences in common.

The hallmark of understanding of one another’s concepts is the ability to cooperate. When people work together over a period of time, language becomes adequate to facilitate extensive cooperation. This, for instance, is what makes government of the people and by the people possible. When a group of people are familiar only with oppression and tyranny, when they have learned to survive that tyranny only by being selfish and devious, they do not have the mind set nor the cooperative habits and attitudes which enable them to govern themselves peaceably. Another way of saying this is that there must be a language of freedom and responsibility in successful use before a people can enjoy freedom and responsibility.

The construction of a message by an observer is very much like the process that takes place as one watches a person draw, and shoot an arrow. If one wishes to understand the archer, one must figure out the archer’s target, assess the nature of the arrow (poison tipped, well-fashioned, etc.), have some sense of the power behind the arrow (full or partial draw, 20 lb. bow or crossbow, etc.), and estimate the damage the arrow will inflict on what it strikes as well as the future consequences of that striking. If the arrow is aimed at us, the urgency of determining the message is great, and those slow to translate sometimes do not survive. It is noteworthy that the shooting of an arrow is always an assertion, an AIUC, since all actions by a person are such, as noted above.

It would be extremely helpful if one were able to construct the true and correct message related to each AIUC which one observes. Most persons are aware through the passage of time and the confirmation or disconfirmation of subsequent events that their message constructions vary widely in their degree of accuracy. Intelligence would have us study this matter to learn to be as accurate as we can be at all times, hoping and striving for complete accuracy, but still being cautious enough to recognize that we probably will not attain such extraordinary perceptiveness as mortals. The substitute for this unerring perceptiveness which most people desire to have is power. The more power one has, the less one needs to be accurate in judging the assertions of others (up to a point). A potentate commands, not needing to cooperate; whatever interpretation he places on his own AIUC will often stand for the truth even if not true. Of course, the downfall of potentates often comes when they blindly paint themselves into a corner in not correctly assessing the intent of someone close to them who intends to usurp their power.

True message portrayal is the province of the gods. Belief that one’s message portrayals are true is the province of fools and those who think they are gods. Mere mortals must simply do the best they can, shoring up their guesses by redundancy, tentativeness and humility as needed.

True or false, partially true or insufficiently so, whenever we utter our interpretation of another person’s AIUC we are asserting ourselves, and it is then up to our observers to guess what we really mean and how correct we are in interpreting the AIUC which we report. The fabric of society is thus one great AIUC fair wherein everyone is taking in everyone else’s AIUCs, making judgments and hanging out their own AIUCs for everyone else to judge and comment on. No wonder the course of wisdom is sometimes to remain silent.

The message one creates for the AIUC of another is the meaning one attaches to the AIUC. No AIUC is self-revelatory. All meaning is attributed by an observer. With a multiplicity of observers there will undoubtedly always be a multiplicity of meanings for any AIUC. Meaning, like message, which meaning is, is always specifically related to the context of assertion.

Thus words and sentences in mention-context have no meaning. Hypothetical or mock-up meanings can be made up for them. But ordinarily they are not intended to be used, which is to say, to have meaning. There are meanings-in-general of words and phrases, which are the modal uses of the linguistic item in question in historic contexts of use. But there are no proper meanings, no necessary or correct meanings of any linguistic structure.

It is important now to compare AIUC with other candidates for the position of most fundamental unit of language. Comparison will be made with phoneme/character, morpheme/word, phrase, sentence, proposition and message.

Phoneme/character: An isolated phoneme/character may mean anything because it means nothing. These are units of syntactic structure, and they play a necessary and decisive role in the use of language. They are the critical factors in creating and determining morphemes and words. But they are not the basic units of language because apart from their use in or as morphemes or words they have a mention-value only.

Morpheme/word: A morpheme or a word apart from an actual use in a living context has no meaning but may have several potential standard meanings and always has an infinite number of potential use meanings. These cannot serve as the basic unit of language because each, until used, can have no meanings.

Phrase: A phrase is yet incomplete, having the same position and shortcomings of morphemes and words.  

Sentence: Sentences in use are assertions in use, even as words and phrases in use may be assertions in use. But to isolate a sentence from a specific use context is to leave it as potential language, not real language. Assertion-in-use-context is an actual linguistic unit, have a manifold richness of meaning indicators both in the body language of the speaker and in the spatial and temporal context of utterance. So we must reject sentence as our candidate for most basic unit of language.

Proposition: Propositions are whatever they are construed to be by their authors, ranging from true descriptive assertions to the essential informational content of any assertion. Propositions are thus specialized sentential usages and suffer the same problems relative to AIUCs as do sentences.

Messages: Message is always the subjective reaction of a participant in the assertion context. Linguistic structures in mention context do not have messages, and messages related to use context are always answers to the question as to what is being asserted. These messages grow and improve with time and the interpretive ability of the observer, even relative to a given AIUC, and they may also deteriorate with time. To make the subjective reaction of the observer the unit of language would be to beg the question, for to ask what is the basic unit of language is to ask what is the basic unit of meaning.

We are thus left with assertion-in-use-context as the basic unit of human communication. Only that unit is an objective starting point for human inquiry, for the interpretation process. Only the AIUC has the reality and richness to provide determinative clues as to what a given person really means by mankind an assertion is some manner in some particular context.

There are other points which favor AIUC as the basic unit of language.

This use of AIUC is continuous with common sense. Common sense is not always a touchstone, but to defy it is to assume the burden of proof in any matter. But it does seem that we all know that our language teachers are saying something important when they tell us, time after time, that the specific meaning of some syntactical usage must be determined by context.

The AIUC gives us the most behavioral target possible for our interpretive quest, even allowing the electronic capturing of the nuances of speech utterance, body language, physical context, etc. Such capturing is never complete, for the full context of any utterance is all that has gone before and much of what comes after. But we can generally agree on the assertion as an assertion in a specific context, even if we cannot agree on the interpretation.

The use of AIUC is metaphysically parsimonious. It does not necessitate the invention of such creatures as “deep structure,” “objective referents” or “platonic categories.” It simply points to language use as the self-expression of particular human beings in particular contexts.

This use of AIUC recognizes agency in both the speaker and the hearer of language. Thus communication is not forced into the narrow reductionistic or mechanistic frame which robs it of its agentive spontaneity and creativity.   This freedom allows language to rise above human resources and to partake of whatever supernatural potential for language the speakers and hearers may have at their disposal. While this point is a debit rather than a credit for a person of naturalistic philosophic bent, it enhances the linguistic understanding of that majority of mankind who savor contact with the supernatural.

AIUC as the unit of language facilitates consideration of non-verbal languages and non-language actions as part of the actual communication phenomenon. Considered attention to these often-neglected aspects of communication has given dramatists power through the ages and advertisers commercial application in modern advertising techniques, which, even with all the advertisers pecuniary diverting of basic principles, still function as prime examples of expert communication.

This use of AIUC is also helpful in that it helps to prevent hubris in the human species by reminding us that there is no human voice that is final and authoritative—about anything—and that every assertion in its actual context of use is always the personal bearing of personal testimony. Much as we would desire to be the last word, to state eternal truth the way it really is, we must simply settle for saying the best we know and for hoping that someone can successfully construe what we mean to their own edification.

The conclusion of this matter is the hope that focus on AIUC will provide an enhancement to the use and understanding of language by seeing it ecologically, as it really grows in a real world.