9. Symbolic Learning (I)

How Meaning Became Intersubjective

Finally, we come to the sort of semantic information processing unique to human beings: Symbolic Learning.

Such learning is distinct from all other kinds in that it participates in inter-subjective socio-linguistic contexts. The day a child is born, it becomes immersed in a linguistic world, a cultural Umwelt of shared words, concepts, ideas, etc. Indeed, long before it can actively participate in this discursive world itself, a child is spoken to, sung to, and made a passive recipient of conversations, symbols, social customs, and so forth. By means of these, a person will gradually learn to navigate their world through reference to shared abstract symbols.

Such symbolic information is hardly the invention of just the rearing parents, of course, but predates and transcends them, too. Child-rearers are largely passing on what they themselves learned in their own rearing and cultural immersion. Education, from the beginning, aims to initiate humans into a transpersonal socio-linguistic world. This is called enculturation or socialization: the process by which human offspring are slowly molded into active participants within their linguistically-mediated culture.

The period of educational dependency lasts far longer for human children than for other animals in large part because of the specific demands of such a learning process.^[i] During this time, children have to learn not only the kinds of sensory-motor skills that other animals develop to physically navigate the world, as well as the group dynamics of complex social mammals, but also the intricacies of the purely symbolic world of their culture’s meaningful concepts, ideas, stories, norms, etc.

The symbolic language that enables such mental activity moves beyond mere ostensive reference (e.g., communicative signals tagged to specific phenomenal signs, such as animals use) to an entirely new register of cognitive organization. This is marked by the appearance of grammar and true propositional claims. Not just “gazelle, there,” but “a gazelle is there.”^[ii] This important transition, argues Henriques, marks the advent of Culture proper, as it initiates the uniquely human dynamics of justification.

According to Justification Systems Theory (the UTOK metatheoretical framework for understanding the basis of the Culture plane of complexity; see Figure), human language’s development of propositional claims opened up a new discursive space of claim and question, argument and counter-argument. With the linguistic declaration “a gazelle is there” comes potential rejoinders: “Is it?” “Are you sure?” “How do you know?” etc. This development from animal communication to propositional justificatory language set off a cascade of adaptive pressures and opportunities that would radically transform the Umwelt of Homo sapiens, marking the transition from minded animals to genuinely enculturated persons.

Justification Systems Theory is an ambitious metatheory that would account for those aspects that make human beings unique from other animals by revealing how the emergence of language utterly reshaped human consciousness and meaning-making. Its three core claims Henriques summarizes this way:

(1) the evolution of propositional language generated question–answer dynamics framed as the adaptive problem of justifi­cation, and this in turn shaped both the evolution of human self-consciousness and human culture such that; (2) the nature of human consciousness can be framed by the “Updated Tripartite Model” that differentiates it into three different domains of (a) the experiential self, (b) the private ego, and (c) the public persona; and (3) humans are transformed into persons as a function of being socialized into systems of justification, such that, relative to other animals, human persons operate in a new complex adaptive plane that can effectively be framed as Culture with a capital “C.”^[iii]

Understanding these developments is key if we are to appreciate how the meaningful information processed through Symbolic Learning emerges out of and builds upon that of Cognitive Learning. So let’s unpack them—paying special attention, as we do, to the meaning dynamics as they unfold.

We’ll start with claim 1 in this post, then cover claims 2 and 3 in the following post…