Transcription
Hi, I'm Dr. Steve Klein from the Department of Communication at the University of Missouri. This is another in a series of online video lessons intended to provide you important concepts and methods for rhetorical criticism. In this lesson, we're going to take a look at the idea of symbolism and meaning. How is it that we use signs and symbols to actually communicate meaning with other persons? And where do these meanings come from? And how does this whole idea of symbolic communication work?
In order to do that, first I need to take you through a little exercise. I'm about to put something on the screen in front of you, and what I want you to do is make a note of what you think this is as soon as you see it. Don't agonize over what the right answer is. I'll even let you know in advance it's a trick question, but I just don't want you to self-censor. Just what do you think it is as soon as you see it? One, two, three, go.
Okay, what was it? Most of you are saying it's a pipe. Well, some of you are saying it's a pipe; some of you are saying, "I know I'm supposed to say it's a pipe, but you already told me it's a trick question." Let's take a closer look. Well, we've got something that certainly looks like a pipe, and then we've got this curse of writing in the French language underneath it. Apologies to my French-speaking friends, that is an atrocious pronunciation. What we've got here actually is a painting by René Magritte entitled *The Treachery of Images*, that was painted in 1929. Well, actually what we've got is a digital video representation of a print of a painting of a pipe, right? And indeed, the French curse of writing at the bottom roughly translates: "This is not a pipe."
So now you're thinking, "Well, of course it's not a real pipe; it's a picture of a pipe; obviously it's on a computer screen." But here's the thing: that's not where your brain went to immediately. Where your brain went to immediately was "pipe." Now you consciously, rationally know it's a picture of a pipe, but that wasn't your instinctive reaction. Now this ambiguity between your rational understanding of representation and your immediate knee-jerk response that something is what it looks like gets at the fundamental message of Magritte's painting, and that is: representations can construct powerful reality for us, but representations are not the same thing as reality. In that sense, so representations are reality, but at the same time they're not reality.
So we're going to tackle this relationship between symbolism and meaning in two parts. In the first part, I'll share with you a model of communication called the semantic triangle, which helps us understand the relationship between representations and the things they represent. And then, in the second part, we're going to take a closer look at signs, the representations of meaning, and a particularly important version of signs called symbols, which comprise much, if not most, of how we communicate with other people. But first, let's go back to the 1920s, the days of René Magritte's *Treachery of Images*. Ogden and Richards, in their *The Meaning of Meaning* in 1923, present this idea of the semantic triangle. It's a basic theoretical formulation for how representations of meaning communicate that meaning. We've got three elements here as part of the triangle.
First, we have the sign: the representation, the word, the sound, the image, the picture of the pipe, right? Next, we have the referent: the object being represented. So Magritte paints a picture of a pipe that is supposed to represent a pipe; the pipe being the object that's being represented. The image is not the pipe, but the image is representing the pipe. And then the third part is the reference. This is what happens in your mind when you are perceiving and engaging in cognition to try to make sense of either the sign that you're seeing or the referent that you're referring to: all of the various connotations, beliefs, related values, reactions, past experiences, related knowledge—all of those things in your mental database.
Let's think about the implications of this model. Notice that the bottom of the triangle is a dotted line between sign and referent. Ogden and Richards are trying to communicate the idea that the relationship between symbol and referent is unstable. What does this mean? That means that the same sign can be used to represent any number of different referents. There's no one referent for any particular sign. So an example of this: you run across the words "the president." Now immediately something has probably already popped into your head. Let's hang on to the stuff that's popped into your head; we're going to get to that in just a moment. But what does "the president" refer to? Well, in one contextual circumstance, it could refer to this person; in another contextual circumstance, it could refer to this person; and if you're a fan of the classic film *Animal House*, it could refer to this person. Now each of these persons has been referred to as the president, so that is an accurate representation of each of these individuals, but there is no one referent to which the president is the one and only sign. Okay, so we can see that the relationship between sign and referent is unstable.
Let's go with this "president" for just a moment. Now when you read the words "the president," and/or you see this image of the current U.S. president at the time this video is being recorded, what kinds of things are popping into your head? What is the reference? What are the thoughts or connotations that attach to this sign as well as this referent? Well, you might think about the office and institution of the presidency. You might think about where the president lives and the seat of executive power in the Oval Office. You might think of recent presidents that, while you've been alive, have been the leader of the United States. You might think of past presidents from U.S. history, especially the ones that have played particularly important roles. You might think about our democratic system of government and how presidents are selected, and the last time that perhaps you yourself voted for a president.
What this idea is getting at is that the relationship between references and the rest of it—the relationship between references and signs, the relationship between references and reference—can be both individual and social. You can have your own unique connotations that depend on special experiences or knowledge that you have that nobody else has; that's very possible. At the same time, people that live in communities and larger societies and cultures that live together that use these signs that refer to the same reference, often we develop symbol systems in which we're going to share a lot of these references. And that's one of the fundamental things that makes communication possible, because we share these various cognitive perceptions of what we mean by a certain sign or the kinds of things that come into mind when we encounter a particular referent. It's the shared cognitive understandings that enable us to communicate.
So in brief, that's the semantic triangle. If you have any questions about the content of this video or any of my videos, please don't hesitate to reach out by contacting me directly or leaving a comment. Otherwise, I'll see you next time.