Blog 10 - Ramblings about Articulation and Perception

               In thinking about this week’s readings, I am most moved by the excerpt from Locke’s essay, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. For me, the take-home message was two-fold: first, words are flawed (see pages 817 and 818) and, second, despite these flaws, words do have at least some value (e.g., communication to self [see page 817] and in civil/legal matters [see page 821]). Thus, overall, I believe Locke was arguing that while words may be capable of describing attributes and characteristics of things, sufficient for some types of discourse, they are not sufficient for explaining the deeper philosophical traits/attributes associated with the thing—thus, words cannot really convey truth. I think we saw this same struggle with Augustine, who embodied truth as God. In piggy backing this with what we learned from our studies in Sophistry, in which humans allegedly cannot even perceive full truths, then we see a double whammy in the transmission of knowledge: roadblock one is our own ability to perceive, and roadblock two is our ability to articulate the perception into something appreciable by others.

                Many people might not even be overtly aware of these limitations, but as Technical Communicators, realizing these limitations is, in my mind, the first step in trying to overcoming them—or at least ensuring a reduced signal loss through the discourse event (perceptionàarticulationà response from theother party). While I am not prepared to layout in great detail an actual method for reconciling these issues, I do think being aware of the problem/limitation/scope of our abilities is at least one step in the right direction, and I do offer one idea below that might help strengthen the signal.

                This idea of perception and articulation and the limitations we have, to me, suggest that there is some internal filtering mechanism—perhaps some we are unconscious of as we perceive, but something we are perhaps more conscious of as we articulate. We consciously choose words that we hope will best convey our intended meaning through an almost lightning-fast decision-making process that is often on autopilot.

                I surmise that if we consider “ethics,” momentarily, we can see the same process, but eventuated in slow motion---such that we are fully conscious of the mental weighing we are doing in determining our next step or action. If the processes are similar, I hypothesize, it might be possible to slow-down our language-thought processes in order to weigh wording options more carefully, and, in doing so, we might be able to ensure a more precise transfer from intended idea to articulated idea---thus, at least addressing some aspect of the overall knowledge transmission issues cited by Locke and the Sophists. In terms of enhancing our perception abilities, like Cicero, I can only deduce that a well-rounded education may be a way to help expand our minds and build neuron connections that might in some way deepen and broaden our understanding of the word around us, thereby enhancing our perception of it.