Anthropology Through a Double Lens. Daniel Touro Linger
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Conduits Versus Inkblots
Michael Reddy’s “The Conduit Metaphor” (1979), a classic of cognitive linguistics neglected by anthropologists, argues that English language descriptions of communication mistakenly portray words as conduits—as little packets of meaning shooting from speaker to hearer. Reddy begins with three typical comments on failed communication:
(1)Try to get your thoughts across better.
(2)None of Mary’s feelings came through to me with any clarity.
(3)You still haven’t given me any idea of what you mean. (1979: 286)
He points out that each exemplifies what he calls the conduit metaphor.
After all, we do not literally “get thoughts across” when we talk, do we? This sounds like mental telepathy or clairvoyance, and suggests that communication transfers thought processes somehow bodily. Actually, no one receives anyone else’s thoughts directly in their minds when they are using language. Mary’s feelings, in example (2), can be perceived only by Mary; they do not really “come through to us” when she talks. Nor can anyone literally “give you an idea”— since these are locked within the skull and life process of each of us. Surely, then, none of these three expressions is to be taken at face value. Language seems rather to help one person to construct out of his own stock of mental stuff something like a replica, or copy, of someone else’s thoughts—a replica which can be more or less accurate, depending on many factors. If we could indeed send thoughts to one another, we would have little need for a communication system. (Reddy 1979: 286–87; emphasis in original)
In the appendix to his article, Reddy lists 141 examples of conduit metaphor expressions. He argues, in sum, that our metalanguage—the language we customarily use to talk about language—encourages us to make the absurd assumption that “human communication achieves the physical transfer of thoughts and feelings” (1979: 287).
Reddy proposes an alternative model of communication, which he calls the “toolmakers paradigm” and illustrates with a parable. Each of Reddy’s toolmakers lives in a sealed off compartment of a compound shaped like a wagon wheel (see Figure 1). The compartments are landscaped differently, though all have water, trees, plants, and rocks. The toolmakers can exchange crude diagrams through a device located in the hub of the wheel, but they cannot visit one another, nor can they exchange anything they make. Now suppose a toolmaker invents a useful implement. The problem Reddy poses is how can this toolmaker communicate the invention to another?
Figure 1. The toolmakers’ compound. Adapted from Michael J. Reddy. “The Conduit Metaphor—A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language About Language,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 293.
Suppose that person A . . . has learned to build a rake and finds he can use it to clear dead leaves and other debris without damaging the living plants. One day person A goes to the hub and draws as best he can three identical sets of instructions for fashioning the rake and drops these sets in the slots for persons B, C, and D. . . . Person A’s environment has a lot of wood in it, which is probably why he has leaves to rake in the first place. Sector B, on the other hand, runs more to rock, and person B uses a lot of rock in his constructions. He finds a piece of wood for the handle, but begins to make the head of the rake out of stone. . . . When B is about halfway finished with the stone rake head, he connects it experimentally to the handle and realizes with a jolt that this thing, whatever it is, is certainly going to be heavy and unwieldy. He ponders its possible uses for a time, and then decides that it must be a tool for digging up small rocks when you clear a field for planting. He marvels at how large and strong a person A must be, and also at what small rocks A has to deal with. B then decides that two large prongs will make the rake both lighter and better suited to unearthing large rocks. (Reddy 1979: 293–94)
B sends instructions to the others for his rock-pick. A makes one—of wood—but finds the thing useless in his rock poor environment. He thinks B has misunderstood him, and sends new detailed instructions for the rake head. B cannot figure out what A’s implement is good for. A and B continue to exchange messages, but they become increasingly frustrated. Finally, A, driven to distraction, sits down angrily, grinding two stones together in his hand—and has an insight. He sends new instructions, using icons for rock and wood; B now understands; the previous instructions all make sense to both toolmakers. A and B “have raised themselves to a new plateau of inference about each other and each other’s environments” (Reddy 1979: 295)—they have achieved intersubjectivity.
We are all, of course, Reddy’s toolmakers; we inhabit disparate, mutually inaccessible subjective universes. We send each other concrete messages in the form of signals (public symbols),7 but deciding which to send, and making sense of those received, are complex tasks. Private worlds of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions can be represented only obliquely and must be inferred by others. Our habitual assumption that the exchange of signals equates to the communication of meanings obscures the fact that intersubjectivity is an accomplishment, not a natural consequence of signaling.
Reddy’s own argument is an unintentionally telling, paradoxical piece of evidence for the position he espouses. His main point—that we easily fall prey to the illusion that symbols convey meanings—is underscored by an ambiguity that verges on a contradiction. If (as Reddy asserts) symbols do not convey meanings, then wherein lies the power of the conduit metaphor? By pinning the blame for our confusion on what he calls “our language about language,” does not Reddy fall victim to the very model he renounces?8 For this metalanguage is not reified thought, a symbol system that smuggles warped ideas into our brains, but an objectification to think with. The problem, as I see it, is not that English speakers are coerced by their language, but rather that conduit metaphors articulate closely with an entrenched way of thinking: evocative symbols and evoked thought seem nicely equilibrated, mutually reinforcing. As Naomi Quinn observes,
Metaphorical systems or productive metaphors typically do not structure understandings de novo. Rather, particular metaphors are selected by speakers, and are favored by these speakers, just because they provide satisfactory mappings onto already existing cultural understandings—that is, because elements and relations between elements in the source domain make a good match with elements and relations among them in the cultural model. (1991: 65)
We process such metaphors more or less automatically: they make immediate sense, because their linguistic components link up readily with existing cultural models, that is, complex, broadly shared meaning systems (D’Andrade 1984; Holland and Quinn 1987).
Such “automatic” concordance between language and thought, while common, is hardly inevitable.9 And restructuring thought through language is often difficult. For example, the toolmakers paradigm, an alternative symbolic rendition of communicative events, evokes a way of thinking that vanishes before we can grasp it securely. Focusing now on ideas rather than language, Reddy writes, “I do not claim that we cannot think momentarily in terms of [a nonconduit] model of the communication process. I argue, rather, that that thinking will remain brief, isolated, and fragmentary in the face of an entrenched system of opposing attitudes and assumptions” (1979: 297–98). Reddy’s own seeming inconsistencies (and the many which, I am sure, the reader will find in this chapter) suggest the difficulties of both toolmaker thinking and its objectification in symbols that can sustain the new understanding.10 That is, the interaction between mind and symbol is highly unstable: both understandings and symbols tend to revert to the conduit pattern.
The toolmakers paradigm is, unfortunately, a cumbersome symbolic construction. To facilitate nonconduit thinking about communication, let me offer an alternative, more concise trope: the inkblot. Projective tests like the Rorschach, in which people are asked to comment on blotches of ink, evoke meanings on the basis of highly ambiguous stimuli. Because inkblots cannot easily be thought of as conduits, viewing ordinary symbols as if they were inkblots draws our attention