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The thing is not itself: artefactual metonymy and the world of antiques.

Article Excerpt
GENERAL SEMANTICISTS routinely draw attention to the non-identification between the symbolic realm and first-order processes of reality. This distinction underlies many different expressions within GS: "Whatever I say a thing is, it is not," "The map is not the territory," "Symbols are not what they symbolize," "Representations are not the things they represent," and even Alan Watts' comical refrain: "The word is not the thing, the word is not the thing, Hi Ho the Derry-O, the word is not the thing" (Watts, 1974, p. 8). Not only do GS scholars commonly note the differences between the realm of words and the realm of first-order processes of reality (i.e., realm of not-words), they also commonly acknowledge that words operate at multiple and varying levels of abstraction. Consider, for example, a few illustrations from Irving Lee's Language Habits and Human Affairs:

These illustrations are clear and helpful, and they are representative of the images throughout Lee's book. At many different places Lee illustrates not only varying levels of abstraction, but he demonstrates the kinds of confusion that emerge from failing to stay vigilant in these distinction. He advocates a careful practice of moving from observation to description to inference. All said, Lee differentiates many layers of abstraction: an event-process level, an objective level, a descriptive level, and finally, an inferential level (cf. 1941, p. 204).

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For all that Lee's depiction does in clarifying the nature of abstraction, it unfortunately seems to suggest that inferential aspects should or ought enter with speech and description. First order abstractions are cast as sheer processes of sense organs and the nervous system transforming the silent eventfulness, the electronic dance, into a stable appearance of things, objects, and the world more generally. In this account, people use language too inferentially and too commonly fail to take the opportunity for careful observation and description prior to making their inferences. Stated a bit reductively, Lee's program seems to suggest that semantic confusions can be alleviated by always ensuring that description precedes inference.

If at first this appears to be little more than a residual difficulty, it grows into a pernicious one as we consider the degree to which we remain unable to bracket out all of the aesthetic connections within our social and physical worlds. Part...

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