Thirdness

To use words to sense reality is like going with a lamp to search for darkness.

—Alfred Korzybski

What is a word?

It seems straightforward: a sound or written symbol that stands for something else and conveys meaning. And not just any meaning, but a shared one. Imagine how difficult it would be to communicate to people what you thought or felt if you weren’t allowed to speak or write. I guess you could act it out, or draw a picture. Games like charades and Pictionary are fun because we have to arrive at a common answer through frantic trial and error. In a way, what you’re doing is creating words from scratch by consensus—two parties test out symbols until they can agree that they stand for the same thing.

If you’re smart, though, the gestures and lines you use to get your partner to guess something won’t be invented whole cloth. You’ll probably indicate things like size by pinching your fingers together or spreading your hands apart, or draw a bird with a pair of curves that meet in a “V,” which only looks like the silhouette of a bird at a glance if you’ve seen it used dozens of times. Were the game to go on forever, you would only need to reproduce whatever gesture you used the last time to repeat an item. After a while, charades becomes sign language, and your drawings, like letters, are standardized hieroglyphics.

Alfred Korzybski said that, “Words don’t mean, people mean.” There is nothing intrinsic in any of these symbols to connect them to an object. Oiseau is just a funny group of letters if you don’t already speak French. Rather, they’re associated by people within a context. I hear a certain word, maybe with pointing at a certain event, and after a number of such events, I pick up a pattern. What I sense as feathers and wings and beaks becomes “oiseau,” the broad category of birds. Things that are too general, like “animals,” and too specific, like the sparrow, or the duck, or the cassowary, get excluded.

A word, then, serves as a mental category. It can be very specific, like “Alfred Korzybski,” or so broad as to defy an easy agreement on its meaning, as in the concept of “being.” Not everyone thinks in words, but many people do, and all of us make use of them in one language or another when we want to communicate. A simple set of furniture assembly instructions and a rarefied philosophical tome both make use of words to share ideas. So do newspapers, friends, and this essay. Some of us narrate our day to ourselves. If we want to be able to live autonomously, it’s a safe bet that we need to understand the power of words as well as the pitfalls.

Consider your name. What does it tell people about you? How accurate is it? In many languages, names are common words of the same tongue that have meaning outside of the person referenced. English only does this on occasion. For example, we know what “Hunter” means, but what about my name, “Kyle”? Even if you could come up with a single epithet that described you better than any other, I suspect it would hardly sum you up. That would require a description. A book. Could you fit your whole life and character into 300 pages, for that matter? Something is bound to be left out.

That’s true of all signs. The difference is that we rarely assume a fleeting glance or an isolated memory to describe something in totality. I may claim I’m not fooled by words, either, but often enough I’m willing to accept them without further investigation. It’s “just” that. Nothing fills us with confidence that we know something like being able to name it. The Jeopardy contestant who rattles off answer after answer seems smart. I’m better than average at trivia, which conceals the fact that I know nothing of the topic beyond a word association.

Signs of thirdness begin with words, and extend to judgments and arguments. That’s an albatross. They like to fly long distances over the sea. You can read all about it in this book.

Few human works carry as much magic as language. It allows me to utter a sound and call up images and sensations in the imagination of another. I name a rose, and those scratches on a page bring you a red flower, perhaps a scent, a texture of petals or thorns, the memory of someone’s garden, a line from a play, or the Rosicrucian concept of unfolding consciousness. Language works irresistibly. Even someone with aphantasia, who hears no narrative and sees no images, cannot help but take meaning from an overheard snatch of conversation, largely without realizing it.

Of course, you’ve seen by now that meaning requires much more than words. But let’s take a moment to appreciate the focused power of speech. Someone who can say, “Wolf. River,” and in a moment alert his companion to the presence of a predator in a certain location, convey a personal history, and share a social favor, earns a tremendous evolutionary advantage. These are powerful signs if we learn how to wield them.

The problems I hope to address come in when we use them unconsciously. Words aren’t static. They flow and evolve over time, and that evolution differs between languages, peer groups, and individuals. No word means the same for any two people. We can get close, but what we try to describe remains our own, and it colors our definitions, which may never become explicit even to ourselves.

Signs of thirdness are highly generalized. They’re categories that remove the individual sensations of firstness, and the personal connections of secondness. What remains is only the vaguest skeleton that can be agreed upon by most of the people utilizing the terms. The value of these signs is that of prediction. If I say a word or a sentence—“There’s a wolf down by the river”—you don’t get to experience exactly what I did. What you get is a general notion of what sort of things you might experience, in your own terms, under certain future conditions.

Yet we often disagree on what they mean. At times, the disagreement is explicit, but we can also diverge without knowing it, and end up talking across each other while thinking we’re on the same page. Beyond simple definitions, the structure of words and meanings—our grammar—also differs. Again, sometimes we notice how verb tenses or genders are marked in our language and others. Other times, we use cryptotypes—covert categories of meaning—without knowing it. For example, you can play in a group, but not on a group; you can play on a team, but not in a team; and don’t try to work on a team, either! There are no overt categories to tell us how to relate spatially to things using prepositions, but native speakers just know what’s right and what’s wrong.

We do have words, which are categories, to describe categories of words—nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. Now notice that sensation out of the corner of your eye. Was it a “bird”? “Flying”? “Brown”? Probably better to say, “A brown bird flew by.” We can always add detail with more words, but is it detail, or more vague categories?

At the higher end of thirdness, we run into statements and arguments. The airborne avian just mentioned became more specific by essentially drawing three circles that all overlapped in a narrow portion. Can you see no matter how many more you add, it will never be your direct experience in firstness? I’ll conjure up my own birds, my own flight patterns, my own palette of browns.

If I say that, “The species of bird you see here flies south in the winter,” onto what do I assign that judgment? Is it the bird we’re looking at? The species of which that bird is representative? The clause [The species of bird you see here]? Ultimately, it’s a word, or group of words. I pile abstraction upon abstraction. The thing I convey with language already has many values loaded into it. There are aspects we’ve agreed fall under the name, others we’ve agreed to ignore, and still others that may hang in confusion. As with the lantern in the opening quote, we can’t shine more light on the primary processes of meaning by adding more tertiary signs. Those are worlds unto themselves, and our words depend on them to carry life. The verb “run” has no less than 645 definitions (yes! I mean that literally). What gives it meaning is context, and what gives us context are the signs of firstness and secondness.

Identity

The term Alfred Korzybski used to describe the vast collection of signs we file under a word is identity. Nouns offer the firmest examples. The things they describe—Kyle, Louisiana, Wednesday, rice, joy—aren’t static. My body ages, my present actions change, and the past actions people remember shift like the coastline. Time passes, food digests or rots, and moods find their level again. Identification allows us to conceive of a baffling flux as something permanent so that we can predict what it will be like in the future. The verb to be is especially powerful. I am describes an eternal state of being, absent from any real world experience. Even adjectives and verbs define characteristics, albeit more fleetingly. I may cease my running, but to run is an infinitive. There is no end to those aspects that qualify something under that verb.

Identity is built into language in varying degrees. It’s immensely useful for sharing information that we otherwise couldn’t speak of. How hard would it be to talk about your closest friend if you perceived every encounter as a new person you’d never met? The permanence of words gives us an anchor for meaning, but it’s one that isn’t present in the objective world. Things grow or decay. Atoms cycle through and no two things precisely repeat in material state or relations.

While that’s technically true, it isn’t quite how we perceive the world. It isn’t true, but might be truer, to say that some things stay the same in their form and change very little. They carry a particular momentum. You recognize me the second time we meet, though my clothes, hair, and demeanor have altered. We don’t name a ripple of water because it vanishes too soon. Instead, we group them and name the river.

We run into problems with identity when we perceive it as objective fact rather than a convenience of language. When we confuse the object with the name, we relinquish those signs of firstness and secondness from which we built it in the first place. The pencil becomes the archetype of the pencil, and we lose the ability to sense important changes. Instead, we treat people, places, things, ideas like eternal beings who exist only in the ways that we agreed on when we first called them by a sound. The longer that illusion persists, the more likely it is that key factors have shifted beneath our awareness, leading to errors in judgment.

The great error in thirdness is to strip away the rich history for a simplified account. To ignore the one in front of us, in all its living, incomprehensible glory, in order to address it as a favored archetype. Words aren’t bad, nor are tertiary signs inferior to their predecessors. Only when we preference a few sign types to the neglect of others do we experience the world in misleading ways.

Exercise 3

Words have the most power over us when we forget that they’re tools and use them unconsciously. It’s important to remember they’re rough maps. The name is not the thing named. The argument narrows, it never encompasses. To avoid the pitfalls of identification, we must periodically return to earlier signs. Let the word fall away, and re-sense what’s in front of you.

Distrust the labels. Consider how much you think you already know of “a Democrat” or “a Republican” before you meet them. Does the “crowd” still scare you because all crowds are the same eternal kind of awful? When was the last time you looked and listened to your lover or your best friend as if you were meeting them for the first time?

3. Using the instructions from Exercise 1, find an object and experience it as signs of firstness. Then, using the instructions from Exercise 2A, let it associate in as many ways as possible with other objects, feelings, and memories.

Now, give it a name. Just one word. Experience the object as that name rings aloud or in your head. Once you’ve done that, let the name fall away, similar to Exercise 2B. Reassess its associations. Then let those, too, fall away into another round of primary sensations.

Finally, return back up the chain and give it another one-word name. It could be a synonym, a foreign language term, an adjective, a different concept entirely for the same object. Repeat the whole process until you’ve gone through at least three distinct words, and ended again where you began, with the perceptions of firstness.

You’ve managed to combine all three semiotic exercises into a single flowing movement that functions very much like the way we organically take signs. By practicing the process in all its steps, we retrain ourselves to find whole meanings rather than defaulting to our favorite habits. We notice change in both manifestation and relationship to the past, assign useful categories, and constantly reevaluate our perceptions.

Is there a particular stage of this process that you find hard or boring? One that you find easy? Take note, and smooth out the flow as best you can.