Cassirer on symbols

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date: 202406121605

tags:

• trace
• symbole

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For the sake of a clear statement of the problem we must carefully distinguish between signs and symbols. That we find rather complex systems of signs and signals in animals behaviour seems to be an ascertained fact. We may even say that some animals, especially domesticated animals, are extremely susceptible to signs. A dog will react to the slightest changes in the behaviour of his master; he will even distinguish the expressions of a human face or the modulations of a human voice. But it is a far cry from these phenomena to an understanding of symbolic and human speech. The famous experiments of Pavlov prove only that animals can easily be trained to react not merely to direct stimuli but to all sorts of mediate or representative stimuli. A bell, for example, may become “a sign for dinner,” and an animal may be trained not to touch its food when the sign is absent. But from this we learn only that the experimenter, in this case, has succeeded in changing the food-situation of the animal. He has complicated the situation by voluntarily introducing into a new element. All the phenomena which are commonly described as conditioned reflexes are not merely very far from but even opposed to the essential character of human symbolic thought. Symbols – in the proper sense of the term – cannot be reduced to mere signals. Signals and symbols belong to two different universes of discourse; a signal is a part of the physical world of being; a symbol is a part of the human world of meaning. Signals are « operators »; symbols are « designators. » Signals, even when understood and used as such, have nevertheless a sort of physical or substantial being; symbols have only a functional value.

(Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man, Yale University Press, 1944, p. 31-32)