The Virtues of Marking
Marking is actually a well-adapted and useful way of exploiting ambiguity in order to maintain flexibility, allowing people to use a word in a variety of contexts. Indeed, although precision is crucial in communication, it’s equally important that precision should not entail a stifling rigidity, preventing one from understanding familiar words in unanticipated situations. Marking allows precision (the designation of a very specific category) to coexist with flexibility (the looseness of interpretation that comes from the freedom of finding the appropriate level of abstraction).
As we will see (note that this “we” is broader than we1, which consists of just your two authors, since it includes our readers as well, hence this “we” means we2) in the next few paragraphs, if we (note that this “we” is even broader since it includes all of humanity, hence it means we3) couldn’t categorize things simultaneously at different levels of abstraction, it would lead to some unfortunate consequences:
Gyro Gearloose is extremely proud of his latest invention: a car that obeys spoken commands. No longer does he need to pilot his vehicle; all he needs to do is tell it what he wants it to do.
As they are approaching an intersection, Gyro says to his car, “Go straight at the crossing, but first make sure that no car is coming on either side; if there is one, then slow down and let it pass first.”
At the intersection, Gyro’s car doesn’t slow down in the least, and thus it gets sideswiped… by a truck.
And so, in the final analysis, are trucks cars? In this light-hearted anecdote, one sees the classic signature of marking, since trucks sometimes certainly are cars, yet at other times they certainly are not cars.
When Megan’s father says “Now watch out for cars!” as Megan is setting out for school each morning, he doesn’t expect — and Megan knows this very well — that she will blithely step out in front of the first onrushing truck that she sees approaching. What he means by “cars” is anything moving that might possibly constitute a danger to Megan along her way to school, so it includes big trucks and also pickups, motorcycles, motorbikes, bikes, trikes, and scooters — and if, perchance, some unexpected kind of moving entity came along, it too would be naturally understood as squeezing in under the rubric of “cars”, even if neither father nor daughter had ever anticipated any such entity when the warning was issued. Thus “car” as an umbrella term would cover a tank in a military parade, a horse-drawn carriage, and a group of teen-aged roller-bladers. All of those possibilities, far-fetched though they may be, were implicitly part of Megan’s father’s idea when he told his daughter to “watch out for cars” — perhaps lying out toward the fringes of the category of “car”, but nonetheless conceivable as members of the category when encountered in the street.
In other situations, however, “car” is more restricted in its meaning. It doesn’t include bikes or roller-bladers, but it does include trucks and motorcycles of a certain horsepower — this on highways in Europe where signs designate what kinds of “cars” can travel down them. When Mr. Martin goes to the car dealer looking for a good deal, he totally excludes in advance the idea of trucks and pickups from his category car, and also anything that has fewer than (or, for that matter, more than) four wheels.
The riddle of these highway categories doesn’t end here. Thus: are pickups trucks? Are SUVs trucks, or are they station wagons, or are they vans? Are SUVs cars? Are motorbikes and motorscooters motorcycles? Are roller blades roller skates? All these categories are marked categories, and thus they can take on wider or narrower senses depending on the context, which in certain situations leads to an affirmative answer, and in others to a negative answer. The fact that a single lexical item denotes categories at different levels of abstraction allows one to select the appropriate level as a function of the situation, and thus to deal with things in an appropriate manner. And so Megan is spared the sad lot doled out to Gyro Gearloose’s invention, because she, like other humans, has the ability to adapt her level of abstraction of categorization to the context that she finds herself in.
The fact that one single word or phrase can be attached to a number of related categories, all residing at different levels of abstraction, encourages adaptation to the context. The construction of such categories is carried out by a process of category extension that tries to combine the two crucial features that we pointed out above: namely, categorization allows people to make distinctions and also to see commonalities.
And thus, what might seem at first merely to be a phenomenon of interest solely to some specialized linguists and philosophers turns out to be at the heart of the development of concepts, for, as we shall now see, marking provides a kind of linguistic pedigree of a category’s history over time, all the way from its babyhood to its adult state. The reason that a single term is so often used to denote different categories is that there are abstraction relations between categories, and the understanding of these relationships develops at the same time as the categories themselves develop.
How Did They Bump into Each Other?
Below is a pair of father–son exchanges that clearly show how the phenomenon of marking is correlated with the development of concepts in a human mind. These two short conversations took place when little Mica, aged five, was taken by his parents to Egypt. Here are Mica and his Papa talking during their vacation:
“Papa, what’s the difference between a camel and a dromedary?”
“A camel has two humps and a dromedary has just one.”
“But Papa, what do they bang into to get them?”
“Papa, how do divers breathe when they’re under water?”
“They have bottles on their backs.”
“But Papa, why do they need to drink when they’re under water?”
These small exchanges might be seen as merely amusing demonstrations of a child’s naïveté. Adults who read them usually don’t even see what Mica could have been thinking at first, and then when they do, they burst out laughing. And indeed, who wouldn’t find the image amusing of strange beasts wandering around the vast desert, banging into random objects (each other? cliffs? exotic trees?), and thus getting humps, bumps, or lumps? (The conversation took place in French, and all of those rhyming notions are blended together in the French word “bosse”.) And is the image of undersea divers swimming around with bottles of milk, orange juice, beer, or other drinks strapped to their backs any less amusing?
But something more than just naïve charm can be found in these snippets — namely, a revelation of how categories are born, in part through marking. In these dialogues we see major differences between Mica’s categories and his father’s. Where Mica had just one concept for the word “bosse” so far, his father had several. Their mutual incomprehension came from the fact that though they were using the same words, those words denoted different categories.
Several varieties of humpy, bumpy, lumpy things existed for Mica’s father. His most abstract category for the word “bosse” corresponded roughly to the idea of a gentle rise off of a flat surface, and it allowed him to see camels’ humps, speed bumps on roads, lumps from mosquito bites, and so forth, all as manifestations of one single, general bosse idea (and this even includes “math bumps” — a linguistic relic from the nineteenth-century pseudoscience of phrenology, but despite the notion’s lack of scientific validity, in France people still speak casually and metaphorically of someone endowed with mathematical ability as having “la bosse des maths”).
For Mica, however, the category denoted by “bosse” was far narrower. For him, the presence of a hump, bump, or lump meant merely that a human being or an animal had banged into something — as surely as the presence of smoke somewhere means that there is a fire nearby. And so the question that leapt to Mica’s mind becomes totally natural and obvious, since he was simply trying to get to the bottom of a fact that he had just heard.
Similar remarks hold regarding the two speakers’ understandings of the bottles strapped onto dive
rs’ backs. Mica’s father’s life experience had given him a very wide and general concept of bottle, and when he said the word, he had in mind, and intended to evoke in Mica’s mind, a certain subcategory of that wide category of bottle, but again, it was not the one that Mica envisioned, because in Mica’s limited experience, a bottle always contained some kind of drink.
We can rewrite these two snippets from Mica’s point of view, showing explicitly how he heard what his Papa said:
“Papa, what’s the difference between a camel and a dromedary?”
“Camels have two humps (because they’ve banged into two things), and dromedaries have just one hump (because they’ve banged into just one thing).”
“But Papa, what kinds of things do they bang into that give them humps?”
““Papa, how do divers breathe when they’re under water?”
“They have bottles (which are full of drinks) on their backs.”
“But Papa, why do they need to drink when they’re under water?”
Despite appearances, it’s not the gulf between a child’s and an adult’s mental mechanisms that makes the difference here. It simply depends on the repertoire of categories one has built up. The existence of a marked category reveals a good deal of experience in a domain, because the speaker has to have constructed both a wide category and a narrow one, which share the same linguistic label.
As an afterthought, it is amusing to point out that Mica’s father, who had little knowledge of desert beasts, actually replied slightly incorrectly to his son; once again, it has to do with marking. The truth of the matter is that even the word “camel” is a marked term. Officially speaking, it denotes both a wide category including both one-humped and two-humped beasts (camel2), and a narrow category including only two-humped beasts (camel1). In other words, whereas the narrow category camel1 is in contradistinction to the category dromedary (much as car1 contrasts with truck), the wide category camel2 is a superordinate of (i.e., contains) the category dromedary (much as car2 includes truck).
Mica’s father could thus have given his son a different reply, based on the wider sense of the word “camel”, as follows:
“Camels sometimes have one hump and sometimes two. When they have only one, people call them ‘dromedaries’.”
Such a strange reply, though technically correct, would have left Mica rather confused, and would still not have explained how these curious beasts managed to bang into various things. It would, however, convey the extra information that the two species of animals belong together, as well as what makes them different (camel ⇒ two humps; dromedary ⇒ one hump). Zoologists tend to use the word “camel” in the inclusive, abstract fashion, but non-specialists tend to do the opposite — namely, they prefer stressing the oppositeness of camels and dromedaries.
Compared to children, adults typically have a higher level of expertise with concepts such as hump and bottle, just as zoologists typically have a higher level of expertise than random adults do with concepts such as camel. The possession of a higher-level, more abstract concept allows experts and, more generally, experienced people to distinguish the essence of a concept from certain traits that are more contingent. Whereas Mica, at five years of age, had only a single concept of bosse — a lump resulting from a collision — which led him to imagine a collision as the raison d’être of any lump he heard about, his father, much older, had found a deeper idea in the concept of bosse, allowing him to distinguish numerous subcategories of the notion, as well as one generic or “umbrella” category that covered all the varieties, thus uniting disparate phenomena that share the central idea of some kind of protrusion.
To examine more deeply this process of extraction of the quintessence of a concept through the operation of marking, we’ll turn to an example of marking that has come up only rather recently in our society.
How a Concept’s Essence Emerges
If you possess a computer, you are very likely to possess two desks: the desk that is shown on your screen, and the desk on which your computer sits. As will surprise no one, this terminological coincidence is not a coincidence. One of these types of desk — the screen-based one — is a metaphor, or an analogue, based on the other one. People who regularly use computers, which means nearly all of us today, have long since internalized the metaphor and seldom hear it as a metaphor based on something known earlier. The idea of a “desktop” on a screen is simply a dead metaphor, no longer (or very rarely) evoking any prior notion, just as the expression “table leg” is a dead metaphor that was rooted in the legs of humans (as well as the legs of animals — non-human animals, that is).
Much like the concept hump for Mica, the concept of a solid desk — a piece of furniture — was, for adults who grew up before the era of personal computers, a category with an old town, a downtown, and suburbs, like so many other categories. To make this vivid, we can cite a dictionary definition dating back to the pre-computer age. In particular, the following enormous and admirable vintage-1932 dictionary:
FUNK & WAGNALLS
New Standard Dictionary
[Reg. U. S. Pat. Off.]
OF THE
English Language
UPON ORIGINAL PLANS
DESIGNED TO GIVE, IN COMPLETE AND ACCURATE STATEMENT, IN THE LIGHT OF THE MOST
RECENT ADVANCES IN KNOWLEDGE, IN THE READIEST FORM FOR POPULAR USE,
THE ORTHOGRAPHY, PRONUNCIATION, MEANING, AND ETYMOLOGY OF
ALL THE WORDS, AND THE MEANING OF IDIOMATIC PHRASES,
IN THE SPEECH AND LITERATURE OF THE ENGLISH-
SPEAKING PEOPLES, TOGETHER WITH PROPER
NAMES OF ALL KINDS, THE WHOLE
ARRANGED IN ONE ALPHABETICAL
ORDER
PREPARED BY
MORE THAN THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY SPECIALISTS AND OTHER SCHOLARS
defined the word “desk” as follows:
desk, n. 1. A table specially adapted for writing or studying, often having a sloping top serving as a cover to a repository beneath; by metonymy, position at a desk; the occupation of a clerk: as, from the desk to the bar. 2. A table or stand to hold that from which one publicly reads or preaches: sometimes, by extension, applied to the entire pulpit or to the clerical profession in general. 3. A case or box holding writing materials, and having on the top, or when opened, a sloping surface to write upon.
And in exactly the same year, 1932, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française defined the word “bureau” (French for “desk”) as follows (the original was in French, of course):
A piece of furniture having drawers in which one can store papers and having horizontal surfaces on which one can write or draw. By extension, a table on which one does written or other work.
These definitions are based on the idea of a desk as a piece of furniture. That was the “downtown area” of the vintage-1932 concept of desk. To be sure, even back then, there was already a good deal of conceptual urban sprawl in various directions. But back in 1932, no one could have dreamt of the kind of desk that we information addicts now spend most of our workdays working “upon”.
Let’s give the name “hard-desk” to the concept of the 1932-style piece of furniture. It has a physical existence, and it is heavy and rather awkward to move around. Today’s screen-based version of the concept — we’ll call it “soft-desk” — is immaterial, or in any case it is material only in a highly indirect fashion; it is transportable, instantly copyable, easily sharable, and fits handily on a flash drive, carryable in one’s pocket.
One might think that, although one of these categories gave birth to the other one (hard-desk being the “mother” of soft-desk), the two categories would subsequently have become fully independent of each other, and that each would have followed its own developmental pathway without regard for the other, as is often the case in nature for mother and child, and as is also often the case with words that engender other words. Take, for example, the word “brand”, a close cousin to “burned”. Originally it meant simply
a flaming stick, but at some point it acquired a second meaning, generalized and abstracted from the first meaning — namely, the kind of mark made with such a stick on the hide of an animal or the skin of a criminal in order to label them forever. At a later point, this second meaning was further generalized and abstracted to the idea of a publicly recognizable symbol permanently identifying any entity, and thus eventually it took on its current overwhelmingly dominant meaning of the name of a company that manufactures goods — a far stretch indeed from a burning stick! Clearly these three very different concepts (a flaming stick; a mark on an animal; a company’s name), all associated with the noun “brand”, diverged long ago and simply went their separate ways. Of course, this etymological story is unlikely to have much to do with how these concepts are represented in the mind of a person who grows up with them.
What we just said about brands does not, however, hold for desks, for hard-desk and soft-desk have clearly retained their deskness, which means that they are both work spaces. Indeed, any time we want to prepare or edit some document, it would be perfectly reasonable to consider which of the two types of desk might be preferable. If we want to write a handwritten letter with a pen and paper, well then, hard-desk will be our choice; if we want to produce a professional-looking printed document, then soft-desk will prevail. But interestingly enough, in many contexts, we can talk about “the desk” without it being relevant whether we mean hard-desk or soft-desk. Thus, hard-desk and soft-desk are sub-categories of general-desk, which could be defined as any kind of workspace, whether physical or virtual, for producing documents. Often all one needs to know is that the speaker is referring to a general-desk, and we don’t need to know which of the two subcategories — hard or soft — the speaker has in mind, just as when someone says they’ve had “a coffee”, we get the picture without knowing if it was a café crème, a cappuccino, or an espresso. Likewise, we can perfectly understand a sentence such as “I bought a car today” without needing to know what color the bought car was. Understanding is a mental action that can get along just fine without a great many details. If someone says “my desk is cluttered” or “I spent the whole afternoon organizing my desk”, we can understand this perfectly without having any idea if it was a hard-desk or a soft-desk.
Surfaces and Essences Page 35