Page 33 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

Io Communication and Evolution of Society

a. Epistemic relations between experiential acts and their objects. In
this sense, the act of understanding relates to the symbolic expression
(here of the observation sentence), as does the act of observation to
the events observed.
b. Relations of representing an aspect of reality in a propositional
sentence. In this sense, the interpretation represents the semantic con-
tent (here of the observation sentence), as the observation sentence
in turn represents certain events.
c. Relations of expressing intentional acts. In this sense, the under-
standing (here of the observation sentence) is expressed in the propo-
sitional content of the interpretation, just as the observation is ex-
pressed in the propositional content of the observation sentence.

Apart from the fact that all three types of relation point to
fundamental problems, there is an additional difficulty in specify-
ing the precise differences between the epistemic relations of the
observer and the interpreter to their respective objects and between
the representational relation of the observation sentence to reality,
on the one hand, and that of the interpretation sentence to sym-
bolically prestructured reality, on the other. This specification
would require a comparison between observation and interpreta-
tion, between description and explication. For the time being, the
diagram merely illustrates the two levels of reality to which sen-
sory and communicative experience relate. The difference in level
between perceptible and symbolically prestructured reality is re-
flected in the gap between direct access through observation of
reality and communicatively mediated access through understand-
ing an utterance referring to events.
The two pairs of concepts—perceptible reality versus sym-
bolically prestructured reality and observation versus understand-
ing—can be correlated with the concepts of description versus
explication. By using a sentence that reports an observation, I can
describe the observed aspect of reality. By using a sentence that
renders an interpretation of the meaning of a symbolic formation,
I can explicate the meaning of such an utterance. Naturally only
when the meaning of the symbolic formation is unclear does the
explication need to be set off as an independent analytic step.
In regard to sentences with which we describe events, there can
be questions at different levels. If the phenomenon described