Commentary: Models, Signs, and Universal Rules
Temas
Detalles
In Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics, Thomas A. Sebeok concludes that language with its grammar, possessed by only one species, is a secondary modeling device and that human culture is a tertiary modeling device. For Sebeok the primary modeling device is something we share with other species: All animals use their sensory systems and brains (if they have any) to interpret the world. The young of every species become adults and survive because of both instinct and experience, or learning. Therefore, what they “know” constitutes their world model. A frog survives with nothing we would call a brain, but we can infer from its behavior that to it the world is divided into wet and dry, small things that fly by and are edible, and large things such as herons that it had better avoid.