The fact that “our friend the glass” has a clearly dominant category in our minds (the category glass, obviously) may make it harder to accept the idea that it doesn’t have one single fixed identity. The same could be said of most artifacts (objects made by people with a certain narrow purpose in mind). That narrow purpose will dominate our perception of the object’s identity, making us feel that it is indeed the object’s true and sole identity.
But playing the game of “musical categories”, as we did above, shows that things are not that simple. To be more concrete, let us come back to the just-mentioned case of Ann and ask: Is she first and foremost a human being? A woman? A lawyer? A living being? A mother? An animal? Everyone would agree that Ann is “all of the above”, and, depending on the state of mind of the person (or the mosquito) perceiving her, she will be more one than another of them. Who or what, though, would decide whether Ann is intrinsically more a living being, more a human being, or more a woman? And why would there have to be a “winner” among these diverse viewpoints?
And the crustacean swimming in the aquarium in the restaurant — is it more a member of the category lobster or more a member of the category food? And what about at the moment when it has just been thrown into the pot of boiling water? And what about at the moment when it arrives on a plate for a diner to consume? And what about after the diner has consumed it? And the cow that is grazing in a meadow, whose short-lived future is already clearly readable in the crystal ball of its human owners, and small pieces of whose cooked flesh will soon be served on plates — is it a cow or is it future meat? And what about when it is sitting on the plate next to a side of fries? And is the last half-cookie on the tray more a cookie or more a morsel of shame? Our point should be clear: such debates are not going to wind up yielding precise answers, because the questions make no more sense than did ancient questions about whether various familiar objects (doors, walls, lakes, mountains, the sun, the moon) were “intrinsically” masculine or feminine.
Certain cases of ambiguous identity are particularly helpful in making this point, because they show that one has no way of deciding once and for all what a given object most deeply is, or even if the very notion of true identity even applies at all. For example, is a concave piece of granite found on a hike and placed on a table in the hiker’s living room as a receptacle for ashes and cigarette butts more a rock or more an ashtray? Is a piece of cow skeleton found in a field and now used to keep papers from flying away more a bone or more a paperweight? Is the little four-legged piece of plastic in a dollhouse more a table or more a toy? Is the remnant of a tree in a garden on which one often spreads a cloth and eats meals more a stump or more a table?
Is the flexible dangling “snake” made of little linked rings of metal, and tugged in order to turn a lamp on and off, more a chain or more a switch? Are smoke signals more smoke or more signals? Are the waves carrying today’s news to your television set more oscillating electric and magnetic fields or are they more images? Does a dentist’s patient sit on a chair or lie on an operating table? Is a hanger that has been twisted so that it can open a locked car door a hanger or a car-opening tool? Is a paper clip that has been straightened out more a toothpick or a paper clip?
Are the first few measures of a Mozart symphony as played in electronic tones on a cell phone more Mozart or more a mere ringtone? Is a receptacle held out by a beggar in order to collect money more a hat or more a purse? Is the City of the Dead in Cairo, Egypt, where vast throngs of people live in and among tombs, more a cemetery or more a city? Is a fenced field that is covered with the rusting carcasses of old automobiles and in which a farmer has put a couple of dozen cows out to graze more a junkyard or more a pasture?
Is a gold-plated leaf attached with a pin to a woman’s sweater more a leaf or more a brooch ? Is a bedsheet that has been hemmed at the top so it can be hung in front of a window still a sheet, or has it taken on the fresh new identity of curtain, not unlike the way a naturalized citizen of the United States has taken on a new identity? Is an umbrella fixed to a table and used to shade people from the sun still an umbrella, or has it metamorphosed into a parasol ? Is a mechanical pencil that has no more lead but still has plenty of eraser still a pencil, or is it an ex-pencil, or has it been demoted to the status of glorified eraser? Is a set of a few dozen shipwrecked people who have lain down on the sand of a desert island to form the letters “SOS” more a crowd or more a cry for help ?
Is a decorative glass pyramid more a pyramid, more an artwork, or more a piece of glass? Is the dark red spot that just appeared on the tablecloth some spilled wine, or is it a stain? Are the tresses of a young girl more pigtails or hair? Is the vehicle that was totaled and has now been squashed down into a dense cubic foot of metal still a car or is it now merely scrap metal ? Is the device with which a hanging is carried out a rope or a noose? Is an extended third finger a finger or a vulgar gesture? Are the people sitting in the concert hall and listening to classical music an audience or are they the board of directors of Crocodile Computer Company? Are the 500 animals running in collective panic across a field a herd of cattle or are they a stampede?
And finally, is the retired but still-proud Concorde that was placed on a large pedestal at the Charles de Gaulle airport so as to evoke the glory of French aviation more a member of the category airplane, or of the category Concorde, or of the category ex-Concorde, or of the category statue, or of the category symbol ?
You can surely enrich the aforegoing list of category dilemmas with examples of your own, but more important, for our purposes, than the question “Is this object primarily an X or not?” is the following question: “Why can’t we suppress the inner voice that protests: ‘Everything you’ve said is true, I concede, but in the final analysis the damn thing really is a glass, isn’t it?’ ” In other words, why is there such a powerful tendency, even in the most reflective of people, to cling to the belief that any entity has a “true identity”, and why do people so valiantly resist the thought that entities are no more and no less than what one’s perspective on them makes them be? This nagging question will be taken up again in Chapter 7.
The Telltale Trace of Marking
In language, one sees category membership shifting in a striking fashion thanks to the phenomenon of marking, which allows an entity to shift its category membership without changing its lexical label, but simply by changing the level of abstraction that applies to that label. Marking is the phenomenon whereby a word is used sometimes as the name of a general category and other times as the name of a subcategory of the general one. When such a word is used in its broader sense, it is said to have its unmarked meaning, while the narrower sense is the marked meaning. Marking is worth careful scrutiny, for above and beyond being an intriguing aspect of language, it is the linguistic trace of a mechanism that goes well beyond words, and on which our cognitive system depends totally: the mechanism of conceptual growth.
The Declaration of Independence famously states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” We cannot be exactly sure what the men who drafted this noble-sounding document meant by the term “all men” or by the capitalized term “Men”, since they did not extend the right to vote to women, much less to slaves of either sex, but we will charitably assume that “men” was meant to cover not just males but females as well. Accordingly, we assume that the category they had in mind was man2. If one takes the word “men” in the (unmarked) sense of man2, then women are indeed men (of a specific sort) — an idea that we still hear echoed in many contexts, even today.
If Man descends from the apes, does it not follow that Woman does as well? The first man on the moon might conceivably have been a woman. If one hears the cry “man
overboard”, one isn’t intended to draw any conclusions as to the sex of the unfortunate individual. The phrase “man’s inhumanity to man” presumably includes man’s inhumanity to woman as well as woman’s inhumanity to man, and last but not least, woman’s inhumanity to woman. Although we would probably tend to assume that the richest man in the world, the chairman of the board, a first baseman, a garbage man, a snowman, and a college freshman are all members of the male sex, it could nonetheless happen, at least in principle, that any or all of them could be females. And as for Aristotle, who famously declared “All men are mortal”, well, he couldn’t possibly have denied the truth of the statement “Madonna is mortal”, because, after all, the latter would flow by ironclad syllogistic reasoning from his premise taken together with the self-evident truth “Madonna is a man.”
In other situations, however, things are quite the reverse, which is to say, there are clear-cut cases where the word “man” (or its plural, “men”) unambiguously excludes all females. This is the marked case of the word, and we will call this category “man1”. Thus, for instance, when one speaks of the “men’s baseball team” one is pretty sure that there are no women on it. When someone speaks of the men’s rest room or the men’s clothing section, one understands that these are not intended for females. And of course there are countless cases where the words “man” and “woman” are used in a single sentence in parallel positions, which means that they are being contrasted, so one understands that the “man” being referred to has to be a male man, not a female man. For example, “a woman and a man are staring at each other silently”, or “a crowd made up of 500 men and 500 women”. If someone heard the word “men” in the latter sentence in its unmarked (inclusive) interpretation, whereby women are men, it would be a very strange way of stating that there were, in fact, no males present at all. (Imagine someone saying, “There are 500 mammals and 500 cows standing in that field.” At first you would think that there must be 1000 beasts altogether, but then you realize that the 500 mammals coincide with the 500 cows.)
Although these last examples may strike you as being so weird that you would never expect anyone to come out with anything like them, we have in fact heard sentences quite like them in ordinary conversations. For instance, a French friend of ours who was teaching a course said to us (in French and utter seriousness), “In my class there are thirty-four étudiants, but only seven of them are étudiants.” In her sentence, the word “étudiant” changed horses midstream, so to speak, for in the first clause it meant “students” in a generic sense, while in the second clause, just a few words later, it meant “male students” (a female student being an étudiante, although she is of course also an étudiant). When we laughed at this, our friend at first defended her sentence as perfectly logical, reasonable, unstrained, and unfunny, but after a couple of moments of thought, she too was starting to be quite amused by her off-handed remark. An analogous example in English might be if someone were to say, “There were thirty-four actors at the party last night, but actually, only seven of them were actors” (meaning that twenty-seven of the actors were female). After all, the Screen Actors’ Guild certainly includes both males and females.
Marking can sometimes create genuine ambiguities. For instance, if the order for a group of people in a café is “Three coffees, a macchiato, a double espresso, and a cappuccino”, two conflicting interpretations exist, depending on how the term “coffees” is understood. If the server takes it from an inclusive or unmarked point of view (“coffee” standing for the concept coffee2), then the terms “macchiato”, “double espresso”, and “cappuccino” serve an explanatory role, in which case it’s clear that only three beverages have been ordered in toto. Contrariwise, from the marked point of view (where “coffee” means coffee1), this is an order for three “default” coffees (that is, American-style coffees, not fancy Italian-style ones) plus three Italian-style drinks. You can try this out on your own and check whether the phrase is indeed heard differently by different people.
The ambiguity inherent in marking can be cleverly exploited. Thus, here is a very short horror story: “The last man on earth was being held in a tiny little hut. All at once there was a knock at the door.” The reader shudders, imagining the dire fate that is about to be doled out to the last surviving specimen of the human race, but then relief comes in the next sentence: “It was the last woman on earth.”
As this example shows, marking sometimes leads to ambiguities that few people notice but that, once pointed out, can make us smile. Here are some more examples:
“What moos but is not a cow?” This riddle puzzles people (at least children) until they realize that “cow” can be taken to include just females (cow1), at which point the answer “a bull” pops to mind. Although a bull is a fine member of the more abstract category cow2, it is not a member of the less abstract, marked category cow1. At that lower level of abstraction, the words “bull” and “cow” are diametric opposites.
“Who lived in caves 30,000 years ago, raised crops, used tools, and wore clothes, but wasn’t a caveman?” (Hint: recall the opening of the Declaration of Independence.)
A. says, “I’m bushed; these last two days I haven’t slept a wink.” B. replies, “What’s your problem? Over the past hundred days, I never slept a wink and I’m in perfect shape!” Explanation? The term “day” sometimes means day2, which is twenty-four hours long and includes nights, while other times it means day1, which is half as long and contrasts with “night”; in this case, day and night are as opposite as night and day.
“Passengers with children or babies may board now.” Babies are children2 but here they are being contrasted with children1 . In another context, however, such as a dinner party, it would be very confusing to hear someone say, “I have a baby but I don’t have any children.” Babies are children and yet babies are not children. And incidentally, are babies members of the category passenger ?
On the one hand, “Human beings, like all other animals, need food to survive.” But on the other hand, “Human beings, in contrast to animals, have developed language, culture, science, and literature…” Thus humans are animals2 but not animals1, to which in fact they are seen as forming a natural contrast, much as pepper does with salt, or dogs with cats.
Then there are portraits. One would certainly not object if a friend, looking at one’s passport photo, were to say, “That’s a very nice portrait of you!” On the other hand, one would not object either if a friend walking through one’s house were to say, “Those photos of you and your husband in the hallway are great, but do you have any portraits?” A photo can be a kind of portrait (portrait2), but it can also be contrasted with a portrait (portrait1).
If you’re very tall, are you tall? Of course! Anyone who is “very tall” is necessarily tall2. And yet, of course not! On a scale of heights where “tall” runs from, say, 5' 10" to, say, 6' 2", then anyone of height 7' 2" is way out of the “tall” range. Thus “very tall” contrasts with tall1, although it is a special case of tall2. Moreover, a child can perfectly well say, “I’m 4' 3" tall”, thus showing that all heights count as cases of tallness.
A man and his two children are talking about movies. The son says, “You know, in all the big adventure films, such as Harry Potter, Star Wars, Spiderman, and Batman, the hero is a guy.” His sister chimes in, “Yeah, that’s true — think of Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Daredevil, and Indiana Jones.” Then the father tosses in his own two bits’ worth: “Hey, guys, you’re right — the hero is always a guy, but the heroine is never a guy!” And thus we have hero2, which subsumes the two contrasting concepts, which are hero1 and heroine. For that matter, we also have guy2 and guy1…
Marking is not limited to nouns; it can also come about in the case of verbs, and it can wind up in usages that seem extremely strange when placed under the microscope. For example, the verb “to grow” has, over time, acquired a broader meaning than the one most people spontaneously think of. Thus changes that
go in either direction — toward the smaller as well as the larger — are often described by the word “grow”. This claim may sound so silly that native speakers of English might deny it at first — until they are shown a sentence such as, “As soon as Alice had drunk the vial of potion, she started to grow smaller and smaller”, at which point they will admit, “Oh well, I guess we do say that, after all…” We frequently use the verb “to grow” in its unmarked sense without thinking in the least about how it contradicts the marked sense.
It seems that what matters is not size but simply the fact that things are changing in time. For instance, it’s quite normal to say, “The bottle grew lighter and lighter as the water evaporated”, “The ticket line had grown a lot shorter”, “The average intelligence quotient has grown lower and lower over the decades”, and so forth. No native speaker of English would bat an eyelash at any of them. We thus see that although “to grow” often means “to become larger” (this is its marked sense, grow1), the same verb can also simply mean “to change over time” (this is its unmarked sense, grow2). However, it is overwhelmingly the idea of grow1, not grow2, that tends to come to mind if a native speaker is asked “What does ‘to grow’ mean?” For this reason, certain perfectly standard uses of “grow” can make one smile, because on the surface they seem to involve the contradictory notion of “increasing while decreasing”.
How can one explain this paradoxical property of language, whereby two words can, in one context, be each other’s violently clashing opposites, while in another context, the one merely denotes a subset of the other? Why is it that we would use the very same word to denote two different levels on a ladder of abstraction? Why do languages insist on being so miserly with their words, when it would seem so very simple if, for each different category, there were a different word? The answer is summed up by one word: “adaptation”.
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