from the development of mathematics and its applications. (At one point Cassirer says that material objects are composed of our sense impressions; but I think he meant that our representations of material objects are constructions or inferences from sense impressions.) ``Symbol,'' naturally a key and much-employed term, is never clearly defined or described. Symbols are to be distinguished from mere ``signs,'' but I couldn't tell you how. Animals are allowed signs, but symbols are reserved for us forked radishes. I think the idea is that a given symbol has many possible meanings, while a given sign has only one. Unfortunately, the example Cassirer gives in this connection (ch. 3) is that multiple phrases can have the same reference, which is not only irrelevant to how many senses a symbol can have (in different contexts), but is even true of conditioned stimuli, which he takes to be prototypical signs. Cassirer ignores the problem of how to gradually evolve symbolic capacity in merely signing animals (if the chasm is that profound). To be fair, at the time macromutations were still being defended by Goldschmidt, so he had a biological authority for big sudden jumps. Likewise, he has some very odd-seeming comments about language, the brain, the effects of brain-lesions, etc., which seem to derive from the German school of holistic neuropsychology, now quite discredited. But clearly his impulse to respect what the brain-fanciers and the animal-trainers had discovered was eminently sound. (I can't help but wonder whether Dennett will look similarly antiquated in fifty years.) I am uncomfortable with his statements about how symbols exist in a parallel world to the merely physical universe: the real problem, I should think, is to explain how physical objects and events can come to be symbolic --- how semantics emerges from physics (taking both very generally). I learned a good deal from reading An Essay on Man, and if I'd read it three yea...
