Lost in the Cosmos

Helen spelled “baby” and pointed to the nurse. All the way back to the house she was highly excited, and learned the name of every object she touched, so that in a few hours she added thirty new words to her vocabulary. Here are some of them: Door, open, shut, give, go, come, and a great many more. *
Roger Brown and Ursula Belhigi (writing in “Three Processes in the Child’s Acquisition of Syntax”): Some time in the second six months of life most children say a first intelligible word. A few months later most children are saying many words and some children go about the house all day long naming things ( table, doggie, ball, etc.) and actions (play, see drop, etc.) †
Philip E. L. Smith: Having inherited from more primitive ancestors large and efficient brains, as well as a serviceable technology, these new humans proceeded to make a quantum jump greater than anything seen before in a comparable length of time. In esthetics, in communication and symbols, in technology and adaptive efficiency, and perhaps in newer forms of social organization and more complex ways of viewing their fellows, these first modern men went on to effect a transformation worldwide in its impact. *
    The signal-using organism has an environment.
    The sign-user has an environment, but it also has a world.
    The environment of an organism is those elements of the Cosmos which affect the organism significantly (Saturn does not) and to which the organism either is genetically coded to respond or has learned to respond. There are many gaps in an environment, i.e., there are elements which are without significant effect. A honey bee takes account of the bee dance of another bee indicating the direction and distance of a nectar source, but not of a grouse dance.
    The sign-user has a world.
    The world is segmented and named by language. All perceived objects and actions and qualities are named. Even the gaps are named—by the word gaps. An African Bushman has hundreds of names for plants which are either noxious or medicinally beneficial. But he also has a word bush to name all other plants. The Cosmos is accounted for willy-nilly, rightly or wrongly, mythically or scientifically, its past, present, and future. All men in all cultures know what is under the earth, what is above the earth, and where the Cosmos came from.
    The sign Canada is part of the world of most sign-users. It can signify whatever lies at hand to be signified, either a place and a people one knows or a large pink place on a map transected by longitudes and latitudes.
    If there is an unknown territory in the heart of Africa, it is labeled as such on maps and known to sign-users as “unknown territory.”
    A cat has no myths and names no real or imaginary beings. It responds to the Cosmos exactly as it has learned or been programmed to respond.
    For the sign-user, a world is imposed upon the Cosmos—to which he still responds like any other organism.
    For example, he still responds to signals, to heat, light, hunger, sudden noises, perhaps also to female pheromones, perhaps even to the magnetic field of the earth and the gravitational attraction of the moon. But there are other segments of the Cosmos to which he does not respond, even though astrologers say he does.
    The environment has gaps. But the world of the sign-user is a totality. The Cosmos is totally construed by signs, whether the signs be the myth of Tiamat, Newtonian cosmology, or through the auspices of such popular signifiers as “outer space,” “out there,” “the heavens,” “the sky,” “stars,” and so on.
    Not all items of an environment are part of the world. A noxious element—say, an increase in ultraviolet radiation—is a significant environmental factor and may cause skin cancer. But it is unknown to the patient and not part of his world. But the signs unicorn and boogerman may be very much a part of a person’s world and yet have no known counterpart in the Cosmos.

    The Strange World of the Triadic Creature

    Note some odd things about the self’s world. One is that it is not the same as the Cosmos-environment. The planet Venus may be a sign in the self’s world as the evening star or the morning star, but the galaxy M31 may not be present at all. Another oddity is that the self’s world contains things which have no counterpart in the Cosmos, such as centaurs, Big Foot, détente, World War I (which is past), World War III (which may not occur). Yet another odd thing is that the