1: Introduction [and Summary]
---- Seneca, De Beneficius, VIII.I.
Meanings are the sociocultural interpretation we give to mental or physical objects. Two intersecting sticks have the meaning of a cross, a Cadillac means
1: Introduction [and Summary]
---- Seneca, De Beneficius, VIII.I.
Meanings are the sociocultural interpretation we give to mental or physical objects. Two intersecting sticks have the meaning of a cross, a Cadillac means wealth and power, floating garbage means pollution, a certain facial expression means smugness. Meanings tie together and functionally integrate diverse human activities and objects. Simply consider the almost infinitely diverse but meaningfully integrated aspects of the "U.S. Government," such as military bases in Hawaii, aid to schools in Chicago, a U.S. ambassador's trip to Paris, war in Vietnam, a Watergate scandal, a social security check, a passport, and so on.2
Values are the sentiments, emotions, importance, and desires we attach to meanings and material things. Is it good or bad, something we want or reject, beautiful or ugly, deplorable or joyful, and so on? These values may be of the highest, attached to God, humankind, nature, and comprising what we call ethics and morality. They may be of our political-secular world, woven into the cluster of meanings we call democracy, socialism, capitalism, or communism, and constituting our "isms." They may lie at the heart of concepts people have died for, such as France, liberty, equality, independence. Or they may be the humdrum, everyday values reflected in our choice of a movie, our daily bread, our gossip. Remove values from meanings and you deprive us of our essence; you deny us our purposes, our self-determination.
Vehicles are the object which carry meanings-values, such as the cloth which is the flag, the expensive clothes that connote status, the house that means shelter and security, the paper that is a treaty, a contract, or a page of a book. Vehicles form our material culture as physical objects, as aspects of our environment (consider just the religious meaning that storms, the stars, and the mountains have had) and biology.
Agents are the human actors or groups who interact within the sociocultural field.3 The field contains our system of meanings, our values and norms, and the diverse vehicles manifesting them. Agents may be individuals, behaving in their own capacity, or organized groups for which individuals act in some official role. Now, groups, whether state, church, business, or college, do not behave. As clusters of meanings they have an integrated sociocultural life; as clusters of material vehicles, they obey physical laws; as clusters of people, they form subsocieties. But, they cannot behave. Only we can, and when we speak of the United States threatening Cuba, or of the Justice Department taking IBM to court, we are elliptically speaking about the cluster of behaviors of individuals acting mainly in their official roles for the group. Behaviors of groups are not simple acts as with individuals. An individual may shake hands with another, and this constitutes one continuous physical event between them. A behavior of a group, however, involves many different people in their official roles and comprises discretely different actions, all adding up to the complex called a group act. For a much simplified example consider when one state recognizes another. This requires much in government discussion and consultation, the decision to be made, and the implementation through the diplomatic chain of command and public media, ending in the communication of such recognition to the other government as well as to one's people.4
Returning to the major point, social reality consists of meanings-values, vehicles, and agents. Although they form one unified field, we can for analysis consider each separately as fields and spaces, and then reconsider the whole once the nature of these "Parts" is clear. Here, I will focus on the sociocultural space of meanings-values, leaving the fields of vehicles and agents to succeeding chapters.
How do we place a meaning or value in its proper relationship to others? First, meanings (at this point, let me extend the meaning of meanings to encompass values) form into systems which we learn as part of our socialization and acculturation. "Addition" we learn of as a part of the system of meanings called "arithmetic" and as an operation carried out on "numbers." All three meanings, "addition," "arithmetic," and "numbers," we learn to associate with "mathematics," a higher system of meanings we have come to differentiate from such meanings systems as "science," "philosophy," and "art." A "citizen" we come to appreciate as part of a system of "rights" and "duties," which themselves are parts of a larger system of meanings interrelated with "government," which in turn is part of the interrelated meanings we know as the "state."
Thus, meanings fall into interrelated systems, each nested in some higher system, all forming a complex mosaic called sociocultural space. To understand the nature of this space, let me move back down the ladder of abstraction to deal with individual meanings. Now, a meaning (as both content