The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 8

Telephony as a practical experience in modern communication revived orality under circ.u.mstances of highly integrated, parallel, and distributed forms of human activity on a global scale. On the digital networks that increasingly represent the medium of self-const.i.tution, we are goal and destination at the same time. In one click we are wherever we want to be, and to a great extent what we want to be or are able to do. With another click, we are only the instantiation of someone else's interest, acts, knowledge, or questioning. The use of images belongs to the same broad framework. So does television, omnipresent and, at times, seemingly omnipotent. We became connected to the world, but disconnected from ourselves. As bandwidth available for interacting through a variety of backchannels expands from copper wire to new fibergla.s.s data highways, a structure is put in place that effectively resets our coordinates in the world of global activity. Defying the laws of physics, we can be in more than one place at the same time. And we can be more than one person at the same time. Understanding language under such circ.u.mstances becomes a totally new experience of self-const.i.tution.

Still, understanding language is understanding those who express themselves through language, regardless of the medium or the carrier. Literacy brought to culture the means for effectively understanding language in a civilization whose scale was well adapted to the linear nature of writing and reading, and to the logic of truth embodied in language. However, literacy lacks heuristic dimensions, is slow, and of limited interactivity. It rationalizes even the irrational, taking into bureaucratic custody all there is to our life. Common experience, in a limited framework characteristic of the beginning of language notation, is bound to facilitate interpretation and support conflicting choices. Divergent experiences, many driven by the search for the useful, the efficient, the mediating, experiences having less in common among themselves, make language less adapted to our self-const.i.tution, and thus less easy to understand. In such a context, literacy can be perceived only as a phenomenon that makes all things it encomapsses uniform; therefore literacy is resisted. Far from being only a matter of skill, literacy is an issue of shared knowledge formed in work and social life. Changes in the pragmatic framework brought about the realization that literacy today might be better suited to bridging various fragmented bodies of knowledge or experiences, than to actually embodying them. Literacy might still affect the manner in which we use specialized languages as tools adapted to the various ways we see the world, the manner in which we try to change it and report on what happens as a result. But even under these charitable a.s.sumptions, it does not follow that literacy will, or should, continue to remain the panacea for all human expression, communication, and signification.

The Functioning of Language

To function is a verb derived from experiences involving machines. We expect from machines uniform performance within a defined domain. In adopting the metaphor of functioning to refer to language, we should be aware that it entails understandings originating from human interaction involving sign systems, in particular those eventually embodied in literacy. The argument we want to pursue is straightforward: identify language functions as they are defined through various pragmatic contexts; compare processes through which these functions are accomplished; and describe pragmatic circ.u.mstances in which a certain functioning mechanism no longer supports practical experiences at the efficiency level required by the scale of the pragmatic framework.

Expression, communication, signification

Traditionally, language functions either are a.s.sociated with the workings of the brain or defined in the realm of human interaction. In the first case, comprehension, speech production, the ability to read, spell, write, and similar are investigated. Through non-invasive methods, neuropsychologists attempt to establish how memory and language functions relate to the brain. In the second case, the focus is on social and communicative functions, with an increasing interest in underlying aspects (often computationally modeled). My approach is different in that it bases language functions in the practical experience, i.e., pragmatics, of the species. Language functions are, in the final a.n.a.lysis, sign processes.

Preceding language, signs functioned based on their ontogenetic condition. As marks left behind-footprints, blood from an open wound, teethmarks-signs facilitated a.s.sociations only to the extent that individuals directly experienced their coming into being. Cognitive awareness of such marks led to a.s.sociations of patterns, such as action and reaction, cause and effect. Biting that leaves behind teethmarks is an example. Pointers to objects-broken branches along a path, obsidian flakes where stones had been processed, ashes where a fire had burned-and, even more so, symptoms-strength or weakness-are less immediate, but still free of intentionality. Imitation brought the unintentional phase of sign experience to an end. In imitative signs, which are supposed to resemble whatever they stand for, the mark is not left, but produced with the express desire to share.

The function best describing signs that are marks of the originator is expression. Communication is the function of bringing individuals together through shared experiences.

Signification corresponds to an experience that has signs as its object and relies on the symbolic level. It is the function of endowing signs with the memory of their const.i.tution in practical experiences. Signification expresses the self-reflective dimension of signs. Expression and communication, moreover signification, vary dramatically from one pragmatic framework to another.

Expressions, as simili of individual characteristics and personal experience, can be seen as translations of these characteristics and of the experience through which they come into being. A very large footprint is a mark a.s.sociated with a large foot, human or animal. It is important insofar as it defines, within a limited scale of experience, a possible outcome essential to the survival of those involved. Expressions in speech are marked by co-presence. The functioning of language within orality rested upon a shared experience of time and s.p.a.ce, expressed through here and now. In writing, expression hides itself in the physical characteristics of the skill. This is how we come, for example, to graphology-an exercise in a.s.sociating patterns of the marks somebody wrote on paper to psychological characteristics.

Literacy is not concerned with this kind of expression, although literacy is conducive to it and eventually serves as a medium for graphology. Rather, literacy stipulates norms and expectations of correct writing. People adopting them know well that within the pragmatics based on literacy, the efficiency of practical experiences of self-const.i.tution is enhanced by uniform performance. As we search in our days for the fingerprints of terrorists, we experience the function of expression in almost the reverse of previous pragmatic contexts. Their marks-identifiers of parts used to trigger explosions, or of manufacturers of explosives-are accidental. Terrorists would prefer to leave none.

The a.n.a.lysis can be repeated for communication and signification. What they have in common is the progressive scale: expression for kin, expression for larger groups, collective expression, forceful expression as the scale of activity increases and individuals are gradually being negated in their characteristics. Communication makes the process even more evident. To bring together members of a family is different from achieving the togetherness of a tribe, community, city, province, nation, continent, or globe. But as available resources do not necessarily keep up with increased populations, and even less with the growth in need and expectations, it is critical to integrate cognitive resources in experiences of self-const.i.tution. Communication, as a function performed through sign systems, reached through the means of literacy higher levels than during any previous pragmatic phase.

Another increase in scale will bring even higher expectations of efficiency and, implicitly, the need for means to meet such expectations. Only as practical experiences become more complex and integrate additional cognitive resources do changes-such as from pre-verbal to verbal sign systems, from orality to writing, and from writing to literacy, or from literacy to post- literacy-take place. In other words, once the functioning of language no longer adequately supports human pragmatics in terms of achieving the efficiency that corresponds to the actual scale of that pragmatics, new forms of expression, communication, and signification become necessary.

These remarks concern our subject, i.e., the transitional nature of any sign system, and in particular that of orality or that of literacy, in two ways: 1.

They make us aware of fundamental functions (expression, communication, signification) and their dependence on pragmatic contexts. 2.

They point to conditions under which new means and methods pertinent to effective functioning complement or override those of transcended pragmatic contexts.

As we have seen, prior to language experiences, people const.i.tuted their ident.i.ty in a phase of circular and self-referential reflection. This was followed by a pragmatics leading to sequential, linear practice of language and language notation. With writing, and especially with literacy, sequentiality, linearity, hierarchy, and centralism became characteristics of the entire practical experience. Writing was stamped by these characteristics at its inception, as were other practical activities. With its unfolding in literacy, it actively shaped further practical experiences. The potential of experiences sharing in these characteristics was reached in productive activities, in social life, in politics, in the arts, in commerce, in education and in leisure.

The advent of higher-level languages and of means for visualization, expanding into animation, modeling, and simulation in our day, entails new changes. Their meaning, however, will forever escape us if we are not prepared to see what makes them necessary. Ultimately, this means to return to human beings and their dynamic unfolding within a broader genetic script. To make sense of any explanatory models advanced, here or elsewhere, we need to understand the relation between cultural structure-in which sign systems, literacy, and post-literate means are identified-and social structure, which comprises the interaction of the individuals const.i.tuting society. The premise of this enterprise is as follows: Since not even the originators of the behaviorist model believed that we are the source of our behavior (Skinner went on record with this in an interview shortly before his death), we can look at the individuals const.i.tuting a human community as the locus of human interactions. Language is only one agent of integration among many. The s.h.i.+ft from the natural to the cultural-with its climax in literacy-was actually from immediacy, circularity, discreteness, and the physical realm to indirectness, sequentiality, linearity, and metaphysics. What we experience in our time is a change of course, to the civilization of illiteracy, characterized by msny mediating layers, configuration, non-linearity, distribution of tasks, and meta-language. In the process, the functioning of language is as much subject to change as the human beings const.i.tuted in succeeding practical experiences of a fundamentally new nature.

The idea machine

Functioning of language cannot be expressed in rotations per second (of a motor) or units of processed raw materials (of a processing machine). It cannot even be expressed in our new measurement of bits and bytes and all kinds of flops.

Expressions, opportunities for exchange of information, and evaluations are the output of language (to keep to the machine model and terminology). But more important is another output, definitive of the cognitive aspect of human self-const.i.tution: thoughts and ideas.

We encounter language as we continuously externalize our biological and cultural ident.i.ties in the act of living as human beings. Attempts within primitive practical experiences to capture language in some notation eventually freed language from the individual experience through sharing with the entire group practicing such notation. Even in the absence of the originator of whatever the notation conveyed, as long as the experience was shared, the notation remained viable. Const.i.tuted in human praxis, notation became a reality with an apparent life of its own. It affected interactions as well as a course of action, to the degree that notation could describe it. Notation predates writing, addressing small-scale groups involved in relatively h.o.m.ogenous practical experiences. As the scale grew and endeavors required different forms of interaction, the written evolved from various co-existing notations based on const.i.tutive experiences with their own characteristics. Together with the experience of writing, an entire body of linear conventions was established.

Circ.u.mstances that made possible the const.i.tution of ideas and their understanding deserve attention because they relate to a form of activity that singles out the human being from the entire realm of known creatures. Ideas, no matter how complex, pertain to states of affairs in the world: physical, biological, or spatial reality embodied in an individual's self-const.i.tution. They also pertain to the states of mind of those expressing them. Ideas are symptomatic of human self-const.i.tution, and thus of the languages people have developed in their praxis. What we want to find out is whether there is an intrinsic relation between literacy and the formation and understanding of ideas. We want to know if ideas can be const.i.tuted and/or understood in forms of expression other than verbal language, such as in drawings, or in the more current multimedia.

Humans not only express themselves to (enter into contact with) one another through their sign systems, but also listen to themselves, and look at themselves. They are at once originators (emitters, as the information theory model considers them) and receivers. In speech, signs succeed themselves in a series of self-controlled sequences. Synthesis, as the generation of new expression by a.s.sembling what is known in new ways appropriate to new practical experiences, is continuously controlled by self-a.n.a.lysis.

Pre-verbal and sub-verbal unarticulated languages (at the signal level of smell, touch, taste, or language of kinesic or proxemic type) partic.i.p.ate in defining sensations directly, as well as through rudimentary specification of context. The relations.h.i.+p of articulated language and unarticulated sub-verbal languages is demonstrated at the level of predominantly natural activities as well as at the level of predominantly socio- cultural activities.

One example: Under the pragmatic conditions leading to language, olfaction played a role comparable to sight and hearing, effectively controlling taste. This changed as experience mediated through language replaced direct experience. Within the pragmatics of higher efficiency a.s.sociated with literacy, the sense of smell, for example, ended up being done away with. The decrease of the weight of biological communication, in this case of chemo-physical nature, is paralleled by the increase of importance of the immaterial, not substance-bound, communication.

Granted, there are no ideas, in the true definition of the word, that can be expressed in smell. But practical experiences involving the olfactory and the gustatory, as well as other senses, affect areas of human practical experiences beyond literacy. Identification of kin, awareness of reproduction cycles, and alarm can all be simulated in language, which slowly a.s.sumed or subst.i.tuted some of the functions of natural languages.

Writing and the expression of ideas

When the sign of speech became a sign of language (alphabets, words, sentences), the process described above deepened. The concrete (written, stabilized) sign partic.i.p.ated in capturing generality via the abstraction of lines, shapes, intersections, in wax, in clay, on parchment, or on another medium. The succession of individual signs (letters, words) was metamorphosed into the sign of the general. For centuries, writing was only a container for speech, not operational language. This observation does not contradict the still controversial Saphir-Whorf hypothesis that language influences thinking. Rather, the observation makes clearer the fact that active influence did not originate from language itself, but is a result of succeeding practical experiences. Had a recorder of spoken language, let us imagine, been invented before writing, a need or use for literacy would have taken very different forms.

Humans did not dispose of a system of signs as a person disposes of a machine or of elements to be a.s.sembled. They were their own scripts, always re-const.i.tuting in notation an experience they had or might have had. In other words, the functioning of languages is essentially a record of the functioning of human beings. The Hebrew alphabet started as shorthand notation reduced to consonants by scribes who retained only the root of the word before recording its marks on parchment. Due to the small scale and shared pragmatics of readers, this shorthand sufficed. In Mayan hieroglyphics, and in Mesopotamian ideographs, as well as in other known forms of notation, the intention was the same: to give clues so that another person could give life to the language, could resuscitate it. Increased scale and consequently less h.o.m.ogenous practical experiences forced the Hebrew scribes to add diacritical marks indicating vowels. The written language of the Sumerians and Mesopotamians also changed as the pragmatic framework changed.

That writing is an experience of self-const.i.tution, reflected in the structure of ideas, might not sound convincing enough unless the biological component is at least brought up. Derrick de Kerkhove noticed that all languages written from right to left use only consonants. The cognitive reading mechanism involved in deciphering them differs from that of languages using vowels, too, and written from left to right. Once the Greeks took over the initially consonantal alphabet of the Phoenicians and Hebrews, they added vowels and changed the direction of writing-at the beginning using the Bustrophedon (how the oxen plow), i.e., both directions. Afterwards, the direction corresponding to a cognitive structure a.s.sociated with sequentiality was adopted. Consequently, the functioning of the Greek language changed as well. Ideas resulting in the context of pre-Socratic and Socratic dialogue have a more p.r.o.nounced deductive, speculative nuance than those expressed in the a.n.a.lytic discourse of written Greek philosophy.

One can further this thought by noticing the so-called bias against the left-hand that is deeply rooted in many languages and the beliefs they express. It seems that the right (hand and direction) is favored in ways ranging from calling things right, or calling servants of justice Herr Richter (Master Right, the German form of address for a judge), or favoring things done with the right hand, on the right side, etc. The very idea of what is right, what is just, human rights, originates from this preference. The left hand is a.s.sociated, in a pragmatic and cognitive mode dominated by the right, with weakness, incompetence, even sin. (In the New Testament, sinners are told to go to the left side of G.o.d after judgment.) While the implicit symbolism is worth more than this pa.s.sing remark, it is worthwhile noticing that in our days, the domination of the right in writing and in literacy expectations is coming to an end. The efficiency of a right-biased praxis is not high enough to satisfy expectations peculiar to globality. The process is part of the broader experience through which literacy itself is replaced by the many partial literacies defining the civilization of illiteracy.

Since ideas come into being in the experience of language, their dissemination and validation, critical to the efficiency of human effort at any given scale, depends on the portability of the medium in which they are expressed. Through writing, the portability of language was no longer reducible to the mobility of those speaking it. Ideas expressed in writing could be tested outside the context in which they originated. This a.s.sociated the function of dissemination through language to the function of validation in the pragmatic context. A tablet, a papyrus scroll, a codex, a book, or a digital simile have in common their condition as a record resulting from practical experiences; but it is not what they have in common that explains their efficiency. Portability is telling of pragmatic requirements so different that nothing before the digital record could be as pervasive and globally present. Except for a pa.s.sword, we need nothing with us in order to access knowledge distributed today through networks. We are freeing ourselves from s.p.a.ce and time coordinates. Literacy cannot function within such broad parameters. The domain of alternatives const.i.tutes the civilization of illiteracy.

Future and past

Do we need to be literate in order to deal with the future?

Reciprocally: Is history, as many believe, the offspring of writing? Moreover, is it a prerequisite for understanding the present? These are questions that resonate loudly in today's political discourse and in the beliefs of very many people. Let us start with the future, as the question raises the issue of what it takes to deal with it.

Pre-sensing (premonition) is the natural form of diffuse perception of time. This perception can be immediate or less immediate. It is extended not from now to what was (stored in one's memory or not), but to what might be (a sign of danger in the natural environment, for instance). The indexical signs partic.i.p.ating in these representations are footprints, feathers, bloodstains. Speech makes premonition and feeling explicit, but not wholly so. It transforms acc.u.mulated signs (past) into the language of the possible (future). In fact, in the practical experience of re-const.i.tuting the past we realize that each past was once a future.

Still, as we want to establish some understanding of the unfolding of the present into the future, we come to realize that while possibilities expand, the future becomes less and less determined in its details. Try to tell this to the champions of technology who predicted the paperless office and who now predict the networked world. Alternatively, tell this to those who still const.i.tute their ident.i.ty in literacy-dependent practical experiences: politicians, bureaucrats and educators.

Neither of the two categories mentioned seems to understand the relation between language and the future expressed in it, or in any sign system, as plans, prophecies, or antic.i.p.ations.

An idea is always representative of the practical experience and of the cognitive effort to transcend immediate affection.

Monoarticulated speech (signaling), as well as ideographic writing, result from experiences involving the pragmatic-affective level of existence. One cries or shouts, one captures resemblance in an image when choices are made and feelings evoked. There are no ideas here, as there is very little that reaches beyond the immediate. Ideas extend from experiences involving the pragmatic- rational level. Speech can serve as the medium for making plans explicit. Drawings, diagrams, models, and simulations can be described through what we say. Indeed, before writing the future, human beings expressed it as speech, undoubtedly in conjunction with other signs: body movement, objects known to relate to danger and thus to fear, or successful actions a.s.sociated with satisfaction. When finally set in clay tablets or papyrus, the language regarding the future acquired a different status-it no longer vanished, as the sounds or gestures used before. Writing accompanies action, and even lasts past the experience. This permanency gave the written word an aura that sounds, gestures, even artifacts, could not achieve. Even repet.i.tion, a major structural characteristic of rituals, could not project the same expectation of permanency as writing. Probably this is what prompted Gordon Childe to remark that "The immortalization of a word in writing must have seemed a supernatural process; it was surely magical that a man long vanished from the land of the living could still speak from a clay tablet or a papyrus roll."

Within the context of religion, the aura s.h.i.+fts from the mytho-magical- transmitted clues for successful action-to the mystical-the source of the successful clues is a higher authority. Even social organization, which became necessary when the scale of humankind changed, was not very effective in the absence of doc.u.ments with a prescriptive function. Recognized in ancient Chinese society, this practical need was expressed in its first doc.u.ments, as it was in Hindu civilization, in the Hebrew and the Greek, and by the civilizations to follow, many taking an obvious cue from the Roman Empire.

Language use for prescriptive purposes does not necessitate or even imply literacy. This holds true as much for the past as for the present. There was a time, corresponding to increased mobility of people, when only those foreign to a land were supposed to learn how to write and read. The requirement was pragmatic: in order to get used to the customs by which the native population lived, they had to gain access to their expression in language. Nevertheless, once promises are made-a promise relates structurally to the future-the record becomes more and more written, although quite often sealed by the oral, as we know from oath formulae and from oath gestures that survived even in our days. In all these, linear relations of cause-and-effect were preserved and projected as the measure, i.e. rationality, for the future.

In contemporary society, the language characteristic of the past is used as a decorum. Global scale and social complexity are no longer efficiently served by linear relations. Subsequently, means for formulating ideas regarding the future make literacy not only one of the many languages of the time to come, but probably an obstacle in the attempt to more efficiently articulate ideas for the future. Keep in mind that almost all people dedicated to the study of the future work on computational models. The outcome of their effort is shorter and shorter on text, which is replaced with dynamic models, always global in nature. Linearity is effectively supplanted by non-linear descriptions of the many interlocking factors at work. Moreover, self-configuration, parallelism, and distributive strategies are brought to expression in simulations of the future.

As far as history is concerned, it is, whether we like it or not, the offspring of writing. Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders state bluntly: "The historian's house is on the island of writing....

Where no words are left behind, the historian finds no foundations for his reconstructions." Indeed, history results from concern with records that are universally accessible, hence within the universe of those sharing in literacy. We never know whether a grammar is a summary of the history of a language, or its program for the future. Grammars appear in various contexts because people recognize the need to verify the voices within a language. Histories appear also, motivated by the same stimulus, not so much to do justice to some army, general, king or party, but to maintain coherent records, make them speak in one and only one voice, and probably link the records to recreate the continuum from which they emerge.

While the future and the self-const.i.tution of the human being in new pragmatic contexts are directly related, the past is connected to human practical experiences in indirect ways. The unifying element of the various perspectives of the future is in the new experience. In the absence of such a unifying perspective, writing history becomes an end in itself, notwithstanding the power exercised by examples. From the beginning of the Middle Ages, the written record and the a.n.a.lytic power of language sufficed for const.i.tuting history and shaping historic experience. But once the methods of historic research diversified, probably as much as the pragmatics of human existence did, new perspectives were introduced. Some of these have practical implications: What were the plants used in primitive societies? How was water supply handled? How were the dead disposed of? Other perspectives had ideological, political, or cultural ramifications. In each of these pragmatically determined instances, history started escaping the prison of literacy.

Linguistic archaeology, anthropological and especially paleoanthropological history, computational history, are only some of the post-literate forms of practical experiences const.i.tuting a new domain of history. This domain is characterized by the use of non-traditional tools, such as genetics, electronic microscopy, computational simulation, artificial life modeling, and inferences supported by artificial intelligence. Memetics, or the life of ideas and awareness of them, pertains no less to the past than to the present and future. It sprang from genetics and bears the mark of an implicit Darwinian mechanism. Its focus on ideas made it the catch phrase of a generation feeling dangerously severed from its relation to history, and no less endangered by a future falling too fast upon this generation. Technological extensions of memetics (the so-called memetic engineering) testify to expectations of efficiency which history of the literate age never seemed to care about or even to acknowledge.

Based on the awareness thus gained, we would have to agree that the relative dissolution of literacy and the a.s.sociated ideals of universality, permanency, hierarchy, and determinism, as well as the emergence of literacies, with the resulting att.i.tudes of parochialness, transitoriness, decentralization, and indeterminacy are paralleled by the dissolution of history and the emergence of specialized histories. Hypertext replaces sequential text, and thus a universe of connections is established. The new links among carefully defined fields in the historic record point to a reality that escapes the story (in history), but are relevant to the present. The specialized historian reports not so much about the past, but about particular aspects of human self-const.i.tution from the past that are significant in the new frame of current experience. It sometimes seems that we reinvent the past in patches, only to accommodate the present pragmatics and to enforce awareness of the present. The immanent sequentiality and linearity of the pragmatic framework within which languages emerged and which made, at a later juncture, literacy and history necessary, is replaced by non-sequentiality and non-linear relations better adapted to the scale of humankind's existence today. They are also better adapted to the complexity of the practical process of humankind's continuous self-const.i.tution. In addition, primitive, deterministic inferences are debunked, and a better image of complexity, as it pertains to the living subject, becomes available.

As an entry in a database (huge by all means), the past sheds its romantic aura, only to align itself with the present and the future. The illiterate att.i.tude, reflected, for instance, in the ignorance of the story of the past, results not from lack of writing and reading skills. It is not caused by bad history teachers or books, as some claim. Decisive is the fact that our pragmatic framework, i.e. our new practical experiences of self-const.i.tution, is disconnected from the experiences of the past.

Knowing and understanding

Probably one of the most important aspects of current pragmatics is the connection between knowing and understanding. We are involved in many activities without really understanding how they take place. Our e-mail reaches us as it reaches those to whom we send messages, even though most people have no idea how.

The postal system is easier to understand. We know what happens: letters are delivered to the post office, sorted, and sent to their destinations by bus, train, plane, or boat. Determining the paths of an e-mail message is trivial for a machine, but almost impossible for a human being. As the complexity of an endeavor increases, chances that individuals const.i.tuting themselves in the activity know how everything works and understand the various mechanisms involved decrease. Still, the efficiency of the experience is not diminished. Moreover, it seems that knowledge and understanding do not necessarily affect efficiency.

This statement is valid for an increasing number of practical experiences in the pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy-not for all of them. We can conceive of complex diagnostic machines; but there is something in the practical experience of medicine, for example, that makes one physician better than another. We can automate a great deal of other activities-accounting, tax preparation, design, architecture-but there is something implicit in the activity that will qualify a certain individual's performance as above and beyond our most advanced science and technology. There are managers who know close to nothing about what their company produces but who understand market mechanisms to such an extent that they end up winners regardless of whether they head a bank, a cracker-producing factory, or a giant computer company. These managers const.i.tute themselves within the experience of language- the language of the market more than the language of the product.

Therefore, it is useful to examine the evolution of knowledge and understanding within succeeding pragmatic frameworks, and the role language as a mediating element in each of these frameworks.

The sign of language represents the contradictory unity of the phonetic and semantic units. Within a limited scale of experience, literacy meant to know what is behind the written word, to be able to resuscitate it, and to even give the word new life. As the scale increases, literacy means to take for granted what is behind the written word. This implies that dictionaries, including personal dictionaries, as they are formed in const.i.tuting our language, are congruent. Learning language is not reducible to the memorization of expressions. The only way to learn is to live the language. With knowledge acquired and expressed in language comes understanding.