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the objects and actions in the story get “placed” in a way that can be either
quasi-visual or kinesthetic or both. If you can't put the elements of the story in
their places then you won't be able to hang onto them, just as we had trouble
hanging onto the balcony and windows in the ticket seller's instructions.
This story connects to a larger theme about language. I want to believe that
an utterance has no meaning outside the particular concrete setting where it's
used. But then how can we can talk about things that are distant or hypothet-
ical? Consider the examples that linguists ask you to evaluate out of context,
like those sentences where you're supposed to indicate whether the pronoun
can refer to (a) John or (b) Bill. Often I've found an interpretation not-OK
until I work out a hypothetical context that makes it OK.
I suspect that such exercises get consistent results only because of cultural
conventions about the default contexts. The willingness to evaluate decontex-
tualized sentences
at all
is culturally specific. The cognitive anthropologist A. R.
Luria (1976), for example, found his informants refusing to answer syllogistic
reasoning tests until they knew the particulars of each sentence - the equiv-
alents of the John and Bill who remain so comfortable as ciphers in my own
culture. These people haven't learned the language game of decontextualized
grammar and syllogism quizzes, and don't care to.
Heath (1983) describes how this capacity for decontextualization arises.
She found that middle-class parents use rituals like bedtime-story-reading to
introduce children to decontextualized letters, words, and forms of speech.
Children who don't get this training have a harder time relating to decontex-
tualized school exercises. Decontextualization is a complex and culturally spe-
cific skill laid on top of the more natural ability to relate language to familiar
contexts. This has led to two quite different phenomena - one of them more
fundamental and universal than the other - being run together and confused,
with the later, more articulated phenomenon (the ability to perform certain
tricks with decontextualized representations) getting all the credit.
A story about my routines for reading the Sunday Globe
This is a story about the indeterminacy of plans. The plan was something I
said to myself as part of a settled routine. And I have a theory about the role
of plans in settled routines. A routine might start out being mediated by an
imperative utterance, such as a command you subarticulate to yourself. As the
routine settles down, I hypothesize, it will still exhibit all the underdetermina-
tion, ambiguity, and indexicality of the original utterance, long after you've lost
