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“Order” is another concept that we are commanded to see in things
rather than in our perception of things. Of the two sequences A and B,
A: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
B: 8, 5, 4, 9, 1, 7, 6, 3, 2
sequence A is seen to be ordered while B appears to be in a mess, until we
are told that B has the same beautiful order as A, for B is in alphabetical
order (eight, five, four, . . .). “Everything has order once it is understood”
says one of my friends, a neurophysiologist, who can see order in what
appears to me at first the most impossible scramble of cells. My insistence
here to recognize “order” as a subject-object relation and not to confuse it
with a property of things may seem too pedantic. However, when it comes
to the issue “law and order” this confusion may have lethal consequences.
“Law and order” is no issue, it is a desire common to all; the issue is “which
laws and what order,” or, in other words, the issue is “justice and freedom.”
Castration
One may dismiss these confusions as something that can easily be corrected.
One may argue that what I just did was doing that. However, I fear this is
not so; the roots are deeper than we think. We seem to be brought up in a
world seen through descriptions by others rather than through our own per-
ceptions. This has the consequence that instead of using language as a tool
with which to express thoughts and experience, we accept language as a tool
that determines our thoughts and experience.
It is, of course, very difficult to prove this point, for nothing less is
required than to go inside the head and to exhibit the semantic structure
that reflects our mode of perception and thinking. However, there are now
new and fascinating experiments from which these semantic structures
can be inferred. Let me describe one that demonstrates my point most
dramatically.
The method proposed by George Miller (1967) consists of asking inde-
pendently several subjects to classify on the basis of similarity of meaning
a number of words printed on cards (Fig. 1). The subject can form as many
classes as he wants, and any number of items can be placed in each class.
The data so collected can be represented by a “tree” such that the branch-
points further away from the “root” indicate stronger agreement among the
subjects, and hence suggest a measure of similarity in the meaning of the
words for this particular group of subjects.
Figure 2 shows the result of such a “cluster analysis” of the 36 words of
Fig. 1 by 20 adult subjects (“root” on the left). Clearly, adults classify accord-
ing to syntactic categories, putting nouns in one class (bottom tree), adjec-
tives in another (next to bottom tree), then verbs, and finally those little
words one does not know how to deal with.
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