caliper configuration held against different edges rectangular to each other (Fig. 5.3).
In so doing, she initiated a percipient event for herself (in touch, sight) and another one for her peers (sight). She maintained her argumentative position on numerous occasions during this lesson, despite repeated attempts on the part of Sylvia and Jane to convince her otherwise, and despite the attempts on the part of the graduate student and teacher interacting with her and requesting explications. It is apparent that the percipient events led to the identification of different recurrences, and that the form was not the same event though the material constituting this second portion of the continuum was not at all under question. Their problem can be found in the sciences too, where, for example, psychologists might argue over what exactly a named phenomenon entails; and they resort to operational definitions to ascertain that they all are talking about (“mean”) the same thing when using a concept. The methods sections of research articles describe what has to be done to see what the results sections report that had been seen.
In the case of the girls, another problem emerged, where an abyss opened between kinesthetic memory of the past – what Melissa remembered to have per- ceived and felt – and present kinesthesis – what she is feeling while showing her procedure to ascertain the cubical nature of the mystery object (Fig. 5.3). This is particularly interesting in light of the fact that Melissa’s right hand and arm moved in the way she also told to have done within the box – and where she had felt a
«cube». Like scientists, she described what she had done (method) to bring about a particular kind of percipient event (result). She not only said that it was a cube, thus linking a sound to an experience of touch, but she built one, so that both the event of touch could be reproduced and felt outside the box. Recurrent experience arises from “doing it again,” whereby an earlier experience comes to be present again. But here the object is present itself, in the movement and associated perceptions, rather than made present in a different modality.
In the end, a strategy was born for more directly bringing the two recurrences into a more direct relation. Rather than using words, the children had in fact been asked to create iconic signifiers, that is, signifiers that had the same shape as the thing signified. We may understand this lesson as part of a more extended learning event in which signifiers are employed that have increasingly less visual similarity with aspects of the original event. Another example of this are the different ways in which tenth-grade students illustrated on their physics test what they had done and seen during a particular experiment in which they rubbed transparency sheets, held glow lamps to them, which, when they lit up, provided evidence of the presence of charges. Some students subsequently explained what was done and observed by making literal sketches of the transparency sheets, the glow lamps used, and stick figures representing the experimenter literally standing on the (electrical) ground (Fig. 5.5a). Others still used literal figures for some aspects (e.g. hands, glow lamps) while drawing more abstract signifiers – such as “+” and “–” for presumed electrical charges (Fig. 5.5b). Still others denoted a larger number of aspects by means of signifiers that less similarity with the situation in the laboratory. Thus, instead of having a literal depiction of the glow lamp, its use is indicated by a square with two opposing plates; and instead of having a person or hand holding the glow lamp, we
find the symbol commonly used in electrical diagram to denote the connection to ground (Fig. 5.5c). This again is not so uncommon in the sciences, as shown in one project that shows the slow transformations that turn a real piece of land into a graphical representation of the depth distribution of soil types in the transition from savannah to forest (Latour 1993). There is no mystery to the elusive “meaning” of words when we take the evental perspective, where those measuring events signified are related to the events signifying them. In my own research of an advance biology laboratory, what the scientists were seeing on a microscopic slide (Fig. 5.6a) depended on what they were seeing in a graph (Fig. 5.6b); and what they could see in the graph depended on what they were seeing on the microscopic slide (Roth 2009). That is, two percipient events were related. In their communications with peers – in journals – they would use the graphs as the signifier standing in for the kinds of things that could be seen on a slide.
The upshot of this analysis is that there is no mystery to the birth of signs when it is considered to be an occasion in which two event come to intersect – because of the work done (event) in which one portion of the living continuum comes to be associated to another portion of the continuum. The end result is that the event of one also evokes the presence of the other. The presence of this other portion may be direct (e.g. when we become aware of the specific person metonymically referred to as the “ham sandwich” or “green hat”) or when past experiences come to be present
Fig. 5.5 From (a) through (c), we observe increasingly “abstract” ways of making present a stu- dent experiment involving transparency sheets and a glow lamp, which lights up in the presence of charges when one metal cap touches the sheet and the other is held in the hand
Fig. 5.6 Scientists often are in a situation not much better than the second-grade girl, as what they see (the dumb bell shaped cell in (a) and what they know it to be (a red part of a double cone as per the shape of the graph in (b) depend on each other. The two percipient events are coordinated
in more or less explicit ways (e.g. when we know what is said by the phrase “He sat on a chair” even though “he” and the “chair” are not present in the situation of the phrase).