Property: Quality

Reference (What’s this about?)

Property - Quality

0.0 MARY: Now, a third major aspect of reference, property, of which there are two major aspects, quality, let’s say the color of something, and quantity, whether it is just one thing, or a countable thing, something of which there is more than one.

Qualities can help us to identify instances, this specific thing can be distinguished perhaps because it has this particular color.

They also help us define concepts, a certain kind of thing is to be distinguished by its predictable color.

Quantities are always one in the case of an instance, zero in the case of an absence, and anything other than one in the case of a concept.

Entities have properties (adjective-like), and so can actions (adverb-like).

1.06 MARY: You can see now that none of these aspects of the reference is a separate thing. The distinct names we have given them and the visually distinct places we have put them in the diagram give the wrong impression, though of course this is hard to avoid when we are using text and image to explain an idea.

To make sense, we always need to be on the move, crossing from one aspect of meaning to another, because the meaning is in the crossing. This is why I am now talking through the diagram with you. The meaning of reference is in the transposability of these different aspects, the slip-sliding we need to do between one function of meaning and another in order to make sense.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 135-37

1.56 BILL: Let’s focus now on qualities. Qualities are represented in text as adjectives and adverbs, as visible features in an image, as shapes in objects, in bodily sensations, in sound by such things as pitch and volume, and the phonic emphases. These are some a few aspects of quality, because there are be many more.

We’ll look at one quality as an example, color.

2.12 BILL: Let’s go back to our philosophers of meaning. For Rene Descartes, the reality of mind is more certain than the realities of bodily sensation, because things I think my body touches, sees, hears and feels could always be dreams, imaginings or figments of my perception. If the qualities of experience are forever questionable, the only thing we can be certain of is our thinking. So famously, cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. So color must be a figment of our thinking.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 138-40.

2.55 BILL: Here’s an example of how this plays out for color, in a famous piece of research by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. They gave this color chart to speakers of 98 different languages, and they asked them to identify colors in their language. They were looking for basic color terms, or words that uniquely describe a color. So, in English, “blue” is a basic color term, but “orange” is not because its meaning comes from its association with the name of the fruit.

3.27 BILL: They found some languages that only had two basic color terms - Dugum Dani in New Guinea; Ngombe in Congo; Paliyan in India the called “stage 1 languages.” (The dots were the names the respondents gave to colors across the color chart.) Some that had three, the second diagram.

2.51 BILL: Some languages had five, others six, until they reached languages that had up to eleven basic color terms. Russian has two different basic color terms for “blue,” unlike English which as to resort to composite descriptors like “light blue,” “dark blue” or “navy blue.” With the theorists who take a language-centric approach to meaning, Berlin and Kay conclude that the colors we see are in a defining way a figment of our of language. With Descartes, they say that the way we see color is a creature of our thinking. I think therefore I see, to apply Descartes.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 141-43.

4.7 BILL: Here’s what John Locke has to say about color, by way of contrast: “We come by those ideas we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, and all those which we call sensible qualities; which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions. This great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon our senses, and derived by them to the understanding, I call sensation… If a child were kept in a place where he never saw any other but black and white till he were a man, he would have no… ideas of scarlet or green.” So, mind follows sensible matter. I see therefore I think, to reverse Descartes.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 138-40.

6.06 BILL: Let’s jump forward a few centuries. Here we see pixels, the little dots that make up an image on a screen. The top ones are on the screen of an old-fashioned cathode ray tube, the bottom ones the LCD screen that I guess most of you must be looking at now. So, if you like, in the digital world we have only 3 basic colors, red, green and blue - or 5 if you include turning off the pixels entirely to make black, plus white when you turn all three up to full strength.

6.53 BILL: Different combinations of pixel combination strength can, with 24 bit encoding, create over sixteen million colors, though the eye can only pick out about two million of these. These two million colors, the eye actually sees and is able to differentiate. There is too much happening here for us humans just to be making up, and we see much more than we can feasibly name. So when it comes to this particular quality, image can far exceed what is possible in speech.

8.30 BILL: Then, we have color matching systems like the Pantone system created in the 1950s, with nearly two thousand colors, many with fanciful names, all with numbers. Here is another striking difference between speech and text. We are very limited in the colors that we can speak from memory, so we have to read from text if we need to remember some important color differences connected with painting a room or designing a brochure.

9.25 BILL: And now, PMS colors can be converted into the universal digital language of color, the International Color Profile based on spectrophotometer readings. There’s no arguing with these measurements of the quality of color. Here we are edging towards the next transposition we want to explore, the transposition of quality into quantity that is now such a ubiquitous part of our digital world.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 148-49.