Sunday, September 6, 2009

Signal Reactions

Its almost creepy how much Language in Thought and Action applies to daily life. My house is currently under constuction and we don't have a kitchen. We've been eating off of paper plates, and these get thrown in trash cans around the house. My dogs then find these paper plates and rip them to shreds, leaving those shreds all over the carpet for us to clean up. This morning, I found these wonderful shreds in our living room and I wondered why my dogs insisted on eating these plates. They aren't food. But then I thought of Hayakawa and his chapter on signal versus symbol reactions. My dogs are having a signal reaction to the plates. The plates smell like the pepperoni pizza my brother had for lunch yesterday, so why wouldn't they be the pepperoni pizza? Dogs aren't as advanced as humans and therefore don't realize that the symbol is not the thing symbolized. If the plate smells like pepperoni pizza, they think it must taste like pepperoni pizza. This leaves me to clean up whats left of the plate, which will most likely be attacked again unless it is put out of their reach. Its a good thing humans have symbol reactions instead, or we'd being eating plates too.

~Elizabeth Campbell

2 comments:

  1. I like this post! It's a good example of symbol vs. thing symbolized. Your dogs' signal reaction was undelayed, unlike human reactions. We smell the pepperoni but pause to think our actions through.

    -- tori lee

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  2. Thanks! I was wondering though: do you think that your stomach growling when you smell food would be considered a signal reaction?

    ~Elizabeth Campbell

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