Everyone understands the child who says, for example, “I saw a scary man” the child’s description is immediate and concrete, even though he or she has attributed to the object of perception qualities that are in fact context-dependent and subjective. The magic is of course due to apprehension of the specific cultural and intrapsychic significance of the thing, and not to its objectively determinable sensory qualities. For people operating naturally, like the child, what something signifies is more or less inextricably part of the thing, part of its magic. The object, after all, is the proximal cause or the stimulus that “gives rise” to action conducted in its presence. The significance of something – specified in actuality as a consequence of exploratory activity undertaken in its vicinity – tends “naturally” to become assimilated to the object itself. Everything is something, and means something – and the distinction between essence and significance is not necessarily drawn. Everything a child encounters has this dual nature, experienced by the child as part of a unified totality. The status of the object, by contrast, consists of its meaning – consists of its implication for behavior. The empirical object might be regarded as those sensory properties “intrinsic” to the object. The baby girl has simultaneously encountered an object, from the empirical perspective, and its socioculturally-determined status. More importantly, however, she has determined that approached in the wrong manner, the sculpture is dangerous (at least in the presence of mother) has discovered as well that the sculpture is regarded more highly, in its present unaltered configuration, than the exploratory tendency – at least (once again) by mother. The child has just learned a number of specifically consequential things about the sculpture – has identified its sensory properties, certainly. Suddenly her mother interferes, grasps her hand, tells her not to ever touch that object. She observes its color, sees its shine, feels that it is smooth and cold and heavy to the touch. Imagine that a baby girl, toddling around in the course of her initial tentative investigations, reaches up onto a counter-top to touch a fragile and expensive glass sculpture. This is knowledge, in the most basic of senses – and often constitutes sufficient knowledge. To explore something, to “discover what it is” – that means most importantly to discover its significance for motor output, within a particular social context, and only more particularly, to determine its precise objective sensory or material nature. That there is a difference between knowing what there is, and knowing what to do about what there is Those who, by contrast, accept the scientific perspective – who assume that it is, or might become, complete – forget that an impassable gulf currently divides what is from what should be. Adherents of the mythological world-view tend to regard the statements of their creeds as indistinguishable from empirical “fact,” even though such statements were generally formulated long before the notion of objective reality emerged. The fact that one mode is generally set at odds with the other means only that the nature of their respective domains remains insufficiently discriminated. No complete world-picture can be generated, without use of both modes of construal. Science allows for increasingly precise determination of the consensually-validatable properties of things, and for efficient utilization of precisely-determined things as tools (once the direction such use is to take has been determined, through application of more fundamental narrative processes). The latter manner of interpretation – the world as place of things – finds its formal expression in the methods and theories of science. This meaning, which is shaped as a consequence of social interaction, is implication for action, or – at a higher level of analysis – implication for the configuration of the interpretive schema that produces or guides action. ![]() The world as forum for action is a place of value, a place where all things have meaning. The world can be validly construed as forum for action, or as place of things.The former manner of interpretation – more primordial, and less clearly understood – finds its expression in the arts or humanities, in ritual, drama, literature, and mythology.
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