Words as Maps for Meanings
As time-binding, map-making organisms able to achieve consciousness naturally (nothing supernatural), i.e., as Korzybskian semantic reactors, we work more or less vigorously to square our intentional and extensional worlds. In this squaring is the source of human motives. As the mother of all cognitive tools, language is the cultural resource that binds time and maps reality to help us fulfill motives on journeys in, around, and through our private and public worlds.
Vygotsky’s separation of the language function into a) private and inner speech as a tool of cognition and b) public speech as a tool of communication locates learning to write as the seminal moment making possible the spoken, heard, or read word, partly because the seeds of writing to serve cognition are planted earlier than for reading, speaking, and listening to serve communication. In fact, writing is itself the mother and father of literacy, phylogenetically and ontologically, a miracle on the order of fire.
Just as the inner voice as we have seen dispenses with the accoutrements of language used socially, syntax, phonology, pragmatics, grammar, and uses just semantics to push and pull cognition, writing (visual signs and symbols) bypasses these labor intensive components and can assign meanings to words, help retrieve it, hold it in mind, without phonemic and orthographic baggage. It’s only when writing becomes a secondary symbol system representing spoken language that we need spelling, decoding, and the like.
In a chapter titled The Prehistory of Writing (Mind in Society, 1978), Vygotsky cautions us to avoid the “…naive view of development as a purely evolutionary process involving nothing but the gradual accumulation of small changes…” (p. 106). The first revolutionary transformation in the prehistory of writing has nothing to do with the alphabet.
“The gesture is the initial visual sign that contains the child’s future writing as an acorn contains a future oak. Gestures… are writing in air, and written signs…are simply gestures that have been fixed” (Mind in Society, 1978, p. 107).
The second revolutionary transformation occurs several years later, after years of childhood experiences with objects as symbols representing meaning during play: “All symbolic representational activity is full of…indicatory gestures; …a stick becomes a riding horse…. [S]ymbolic play can be understood as…’speech’… [that] indicate[s] the meaning of playthings,” Vygotsky explained (p. 108). He experimented with and observed older children who “…placed individual marks on different parts of the page in such a way as to associate a certain phrase with each mark—one mark in one corner means ‘cow,’ …another…means a chimney-sweep.”
“Thus the marks are primitive indicatory signs for memory purposes. We are fully justified in seeing the first precursor of future writing in this mnemotechnic stage” (p.115).
Later, a third revolutionary transformation occurs when the alphabetic principle takes hold. Vygotsky discerned that children change from relying on gestures, writing in air, as signs, to using objects as symbols, to making marks or scribbles or drawings as mnemonic assists, to a complex coding of physical speech and visual letters standing in for words.
After experience learning to use an orthography, after machining the cognitive tools (syntax, grammar, phonemic and morphemic awareness, etc.), we follow the breadcrumbs from print to spoken word, and we then learn to strip away the accoutrements of language when they cause cognition to choke, when trivial features of signage and structure that exhibit wild variability across linguistic communities get in the way of thought; we give those two vowels out for a walk the cold shoulder, those rules we worked hard to master in school, to return to fulfillment of our primary motive as semantic reactors, finding and using meaning.