Poles of Meaning: Pushing Language Up and Down

I discuss the problem of using the emotional/cognitive duality as a satisfactory way of formulating the problem of linguistic origins and of the distinctiveness of literary language. I address in particular Shanahan’s use of the work of Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer. I point out that Cassirer offers us a multileveled model of language’s sense-functions which avoids false oppositions and that Langer shows that literature does not belong to the discursive but to the presentational order of symbolism. Such insights strengthen rather than weaken Shanahan’s main points about the ‘localization’ and nature of meaning.

Robert E. InnisEmail:

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Robert E. Innis   is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is the author of many works, both systematic and historical, dealing with the intersections between philosophy, semiotics, and the human sciences, including Karl Bühler: Semiotic Foundations of Language Theory (1981), Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology (1985), Consciousness and the Play of Signs (1994), and Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense (2002). He was also twice Fulbright Professor at the University of Copenhagen and has been a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Cologne. He is currently preparing a book, Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind, to be published by Indiana University Press.