Burke Entitlement

Kevin (Kyoo Sang) Jo

Professor Ellen Quandahl

RWS 602 Weekly Paper 2

February 4, 2014

1. Author: Kenneth Burke

2. Title: What Are the Signs of What?

3. Publication info: Berkeley, University of California Press, 1966.

4. Project (Harris page 19 offers helpful questions)

 Aims: To shed light on the relation between words and things and to prove that things are the signs of words

 Methods: Thinking of speech as the “entitling” of complex nonverbal situations, considering modes of abbreviation whereby the whole sentence considered as a title, and considering the social content in words as receptacles of personal attitudes and social ratings due to the fact that language is a social product

 Materials: Augustine’s “Confessions,” equality idea in the Declaration of Independence’s formula, Dramatistic approach, Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Flaubert’s “Madam Bovary,” Horne Tooke’s “Diversions of Purley,” Spinoza’s “Ethics” and “Coriolanus,” and Coleridge’s “The Constitution of Church and State.”

5. Keywords (not just a list, but also how you’re coming to understand them/think about them/come to terms with them)

 Things: a set of existence which have own nature itself

 Words: the symbol system that human invents to communicate with others

 Context of situation : the mood or circumstance which is not exposed in words

 Entitling: to give speeches or sentences a title that describes complex nonverbal situations

 Universal: the particularized instance that does not change depending on a different context of situation

6. Notable passages in the text, pieces about which you have questions, pieces that you see as notable claims:

“Furthermore, such a nonverbal scene or context of situation is capable of being defined in terms of varying scope, or ‘circumference’ . . . Thus, the ‘same’ act can be defined ‘differently,’ depending upon the ‘circumference’ of the scene or overall situation in terms of which we choose to locate it” (360).

This passage shows that words can be understood exactly if they should be interpreted depending on the circumference or nonverbal context.

“I afterwards observe how I first learned to speak, for my elders did not teach me words in any set method, as they did letters afterwards . . . So it was that by frequently hearing words, in duly placed sentences, I gradually gathered what things they were the signs of . . . I thereby expressed my will. Thus I exchanged with those about me the signs by which we express our wishes, and advanced deeper into the stormy fellowship of human life, depending the while on the authority of parents, and the beck of elders” (362-363).

This Augustine’s Confessions demonstrate the commonsense relationship between words and things.

“That is, a theory of origins would not serve as adequate grounds for any purely logical or linguistic speculations; but the logical position might serve as its grounds.  Or, more simply: the theory of origins would be a translation from logical terms into corresponding narrative or temporal terms” (364).

I am confused in getting the meaning of those two terms: a theory of origins and temporal terms. In a theory of origins, is it about origin of words?

“Thus, instead of starting with the relation between words and the things of which the words are the signs, we start with the verbal expressions (even whole sentences) that are to be treated as ways of entitling, or of summing up, nonverbal situations” (370).

I think that this quote means that examining concepts of titles is helpful to understand the relationship between words and things.

“‘Things’ are now the signs of words, quite as, if someone asked you the meaning of bicycle, you might define the word by showing him one. Here the thing would obviously be a visible, tangible sign of the essence or spirit contained in the word itself. For you can’t see a meaning, though you may point to things that, as it were, make that spiritual condition manifest to the nonverbal senses” (373).

This quote well explains why things are the signs of words by giving an example.

“Let us think of four terministic pyramids, each of which contains words for a certain realm, or order. These four are: (1) words for the sheerly natural (in the sense of the less-than-verbal, the realm of visible tangible things and operations, the realm that is best charted and described in terms of motion and position); (2) words for the verbal realm itself, the terms of grammar, rhetoric, poetics, logic, dialectic, philology, etymology, semantics, symbolism, etc.; (3) words for the sociopolitical realm, for personal and social relations, including terms like ‘justice,’ ‘right,’ and ‘obligation,’ etc.; (4) words for the ‘supernatural’” (373-374).

I cannot get the reason why the author proposes four orders in developing his argument. What do these four categories functions in his discourse? 

7. Unfolding sense of the overall argument or arguments

The author raises a question against the commonsense view of the relation between words and thing. The commonsense view favors the idea that “words are the signs of things.” That is, the words are said to be the “signs” of those corresponding things. However, words communicate to things the spirit that the society imposes upon the words which have come to be the “names” for them in mediating between the social realm and the realm of nonverbal nature. In effect, the things are the visible tangible material embodiments of the spirit that infuses them through the medium of words. Therefore, things become the signs of words.

8. Connections with other texts that we’re reading

I think that the author’s overall argument, “things are the signs of words,” is more or less consistent with the concept of “terministic screens.” Terministic screen involves the acknowledgement of a language system that determines an individual’s perception and symbolic action in the world. Burke defines the concept as “a screen composed of terms through which humans perceive the world, and that direct attention away from some interpretations and toward others.” In other words, terministic screen is a conduit to understanding reality. We usually become to have a different terministic screen depending on which words we choose to explain something. Our thought is influenced by the words we choose because there could be various words explaining a same thing. Therefore, a thing itself can be more specific, certain, and unequivocal rather than a word to direct the thing. In this sense, things would be the signs of words.