The signal-user has an environment. The sign-user has an environment, but also has a world.
The environment of an organism is those elements in the Cosmos which affect the organism significantly and to which the organism either is genetically coded to respond or has learned to respond. There are many gaps in an environment.
The world is segmented and named by language. All perceived objects, actions, and qualities are named. Even the gaps-- by the word gaps. The Cosmos is accounted for--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 world of the sign-user is a totality.
Inventing, using, and transforming language seems to be what featherless binocular bipeds do with our ecological niche, the way coral colonies create reefs with their niche. We are the creature that communicates, and thinks about communicating: Homo sapiens fiberopticus. Our human propensity is to embrace new communication tools and use them to remake ourselves.
Our vocabulary has three distinct domains.
1) A core lexicon of modern education includes basic words from world history, world cultures, geography, and the physical and biological sciences. Taught in all national educational systems, and not confined to any particular national language, it is the most broadly shared literate vocabulary in the world.
2) The core vocabulary needed for literacy in English, no matter in what country the language is used, includes words like Achilles, Scrooge, Falstaff, and Cinderella.
3) Finally, every literate person today has to possess information and vocabulary that is special to his or her own country (for example, Corn Laws and cricket in Britain, baseball and the Bill of Rights in America).
You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it.
Facts are always filtered through an interpretive grid. Since this matrix includes the norms and criteria by which facts themselves are established, bare data are never visible. Facts exist only linguistically, as terms in a discourse.
Language designates the complex structure of symbols, codes, and conventions that, existing prior to and independent of any particular subject, guides all thought and action. Language functions like a template that patterns human behavior. The self-conscious subject does not deliberately create or intentionally construct the linguistic structures that direct his life.
Human speech is commonly recognized as the dividing line between ourselves and the rest of the animal world. It must also be an important dividing line between us and our ancestors. The reasons why the ability to speak is such a sharply defined boundary goes deeper than the mere existence of a method of communication. It is what we have done with language that counts. Language paved the way for all the special human abilities that we so value--abilities such as self-awareness, higher emotion, and personal memories. Language provided the building material with which evolution could write revolutionary new software for the hardware of the ape brain.
What an animal focuses on is dictated by the environment. It has no mechanism to decide for itself what it wants to concentrate its awareness on. But humans, by using words to clip out bits of the world with mental scissors, can deliberately focus attention on virtually anything.
Once we have tagged a fragment of the world with a word, we are also able to shuffle perceptions around in our head. Using the words as place markers, we can assemble a mass of detail to create imaginary scenes. We use the words as handles to pick up sets of ideas and put them down together on the brain's visual surface to see what sort of picture results.
Factual memory uses exactly the same mechanisms as personal memory, but there is an important difference. Personal memories are mostly constructed by ourselves without any help or correction from those around us, whereas factual memory is packaged by the societies we live in. Factual memory is the distilled wisdom of a civilization, parceled up for easy learning and taught in systematic fashion using every means from proverbs to textbooks and churches to classrooms. Personal memories are formed almost by accident but factual memory is deliberately stamped into the minds of impressionable youngsters because it is usually considered vital to the workings of society.
Thought is whatever happens to be running through the tight central focus of our minds at a certain moment. It is almost as if evolution built a vehicle without a driver. The brain is a powerful engine and the body provides a set of wheels but the vehicle is driven by the demands of the environment. A cat sees a mouse and pounces but when the cat sits in the sun with no mice to be seen, it is not, as has been argued, likely to be daydreaming about extra-plump mice or reliving earlier mouse-hunting expeditions.
The point of this example is that being rational is really something that we do in public once we have cracked a problem in private. And we solve problems not with dry logic but by hitting on the right mental images. This metaphor-driven thought is in turn based on the sort of rich blurred nets of knowledge that all animals use to power thought. The difference is that humans have control over the process. We do not need both the question and the answer staring us in the face, like the chimp in the banana and stick experiment. We can imagine problems in the privacy of our heads and then scour our memory banks for possible matches with other images.