Human Studies 12: 365-375, 1989. © 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Lecture Thirteen 1 On Proverbs

I 'm going to talk about proverbs, trying to develop what's interesting about them. I'll begin by doing something I don't normally do, which is to read you the way that proverbs are largely used by social scientists - because it's quite relevant to the task they seem to have set themselves. The first quotation comes from page 3 of a book called A Study of Think- ing by Jerome Bruner and some associates of his.

That there is confusion remaining in the adult world about what constitutes an identity class is testified to by such diverse proverbs as "plus qa change, plus la meme chose" and the Hericlitan dictum that we never enter the same river twice.

A very similar sort of remark comes from pages 1-2 (these always come in the first several pages of a book) of George Homans' Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms.

My subject is a familiar chaos. Nothing is more familiar to men than their ordinary, everyday social behavior; and should a sociologist make any generalization about it, he runs the risk that his readers will find him wrong at the first word and cut him off without a hearing. They have been at home with the evidence since childhood and have every right to an opinion. A physicist runs no such risk that the particles, whose social behavior in the atom he describes, will talk back.

The sociologist's only justification is that the subject, however familiar, remains an intellectual chaos. Every man has thought about it, and mankind through the centuries has embodied the more satisfactory of the generalizations in proverbs and maxims about social behavior, what it is and what it ought to be ... What makes the subject of everyday social behavior a chaos is that each of these maxims and proverbs, while telling an important part of the troth, never tells it all, and nobody tries to put them together . . . . every man makes his own generalizations about his own social experience, but uses them ad hoc within the range of situations to which each applies, dropping them as soon as their immediate relevance is at an end, and never asking how they are related to one another. Every one has, of course, every excuse for this short-

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coming, if it be one. Social experience is apt to come at us too fast to leave us time to grasp it as a whole.

I don't intend to make any detailed comments about those remarks, except to note parenthetically that Homans' procedure for starting a book is one of the most recurrent you'll find, and in a way it's enough to tell you about the kind of book you have here. He has to have an excuse to study the phenomenon he wants to study. That it happens is not a suffi- cient excuse. He has to show some problem. And he starts off with the supposition that persons think they know about the thing he wants to study, so he finds a way to show that they don't. Now, to notice that is to notice that in the ordinary world, in everyday life, 'engaging in inquiries' is an accountable thing. Where, then, the work of sociologists remains

constrained by that format. I want to focus on this sort of thing, available in both these quotes: It's

a very usual use of proverbs among academics, to refer to them as 'propositions' and to suppose then that it goes without saying that the corpus of proverbs is subjectable to the same kind of treatment as, for example, is scientific knowledge. They then build the basis for an inquiry

- which has nothing to do with proverbs - by virtue of the fact that these propositions, when compared - without showing that they are actually compared in their use - are inconsistent.

So one question is, are the collections of proverbs indeed a set of propositions in the sense that Homans proposes? Do you find any reason to suppose that that's so? For example, here's something from a newspaper:

Premier Krushchev's removal was viewed in Paris today as a serious blow to the improvement of relations between the Soviet Union and the Westem powers. The primary reaction of government officials and diplomats was surprise. But they were also deeply concerned. "Better the devil you know," one diplomat said, "then the one you do not know."

Would somebody seriously say to this fellow, "What's the evidence for that?" If it were a proposition in the first place, then the statement "How do you know?" which is used not only among scientists but is offered by Members, might occur.

But one of the facts about proverbs is that they are 'correct about something'. That fact is especially important since some of them contain rules, and are invoked to govern various situations. Now, for many other kinds of roles, even in highly mle-controUed situations like the legal

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courts, if you invoke a rule by reference to precedent, the occasion of using it can provide the occasion for reconsidering that rule to see whether, not only in this instance but in general, it ought to obtain for anything. So that a rule introduced to govern a situation in a law case can be changed altogether. Which is to say, even a strict precedence system such as that, doesn't have objects as powerful and as limitedly attackable as proverbs.

It's in part that this is so that makes it quite irrelevant when a proverb was established - and in that sense, Bruner's citing of "the Hericlitan dictum that we never enter the same river twice", which is several thousand years old is a correct use of proverbs - whereas it might be relevant in, say, a lawsuit, when a rule was established and what the circumstances were that generated it. So, for example, in current Civil Rights cases you occasionally find an extremely old statute introduced, where, then, the fact that it was introduced many years ago by reference to, say, the buying and selling of slaves, can be used to argue that it really isn't worth anything now. For proverbs, such considerations are just quite irrelevant. Likewise, the organization of the society within which they were established is often almost as irrelevant. Where an American court would never think of using a Russian precedent, those Russian proverbs we come to know are treated as quite appropriate in ordinary discourse. For one, then, the object 'proverb' is enormously widely found, and further, many proverbs are applicable quite across cultural boundaries.

Now, aside from the social scientists' orientation to proverbs, anything I 've ever looked at on that matter involves a list of proverbs and where they come from, their age, variations, etcetera. Nobody seems to deal with

actual occasions of their use. And that's because it is the folldorists, with their particular interest in proverbs, who have been conecting them. I want at least to make a start on considering proverbs in terms of occasions of actual use.

There is a class of proverbs known as 'proverbial phrases', one set of which I'll focus on; things like "You're stacking the deck", "He's hitting

below the belt", "You're way out in left field", etcetera. This set of proverbs comes from domains which have clear parameters. In baseball there are demarcated areas, so that "left field" is a locateable place within that domain. And "stacking the deck" is a locateable violation in playing cards. It seems to me that, for one, this sort of proverb may provide a clarification of the sense in which we might talk about 'families of

actions'. And by 'families' I mean this kind of thing: Wittgenstein talks

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about 'families of games' and proposes, for example, that there is some intersection of rules between games in a same 'family'. I once tried to see

what such an intersection of rules might involve, with the following kind of trick. We took violations of rules in one game, which were not viola- tions in another game, and began to use them just to see what might

happen. So, for example, if you're playing cards, it's not proper to stand behind your opponent and look over his shoulder, but there's no rule about it in chess. It's nothing. So we did it in chess, and it did cause some kind

of disturbances. There was a sense that somehow something must be wrong. And that perhaps had to do with the fact that it was a violation of a rule in s o m e game. It seems, then, that there may be a sense in which rules in games can carry over into situations for which they haven't been

specified as rules. And for 'families of actions' we might talk about the following sort of

situation. For some kind of activity there may be an event which is, in that activity, not regulated. It's not even seen as an event; there's no language for it, or if it's pointed out descriptively, nothing much would be said

about it. But if you invoke a rule from another activity - especially those

which can be produced in proverbial form - then you find that you can come to see the event as indeed an 'event', and as possibly illegitimate.

So, for example, suppose we have a meeting, and there are various interests present at the meeting. The way in which persons arrange their seating may not be treated as something noticeable, and if pointed out

would only be treated as, "So they happen to be sitting in some order, so what?" But with respect to playing cards, the way in which a deck is shuffled is something that's regulated. And there are clear ways of

violating that, which are observable, and which are talked of as "stacking the deck." And when we propose at a meeting that "the Commies are stacking the deck," then it's clear what it is that's going on, and it's treated

as something suspect. So apparently one uses proverbs of this character to make events

noticeable, perhaps to make their ordered character noticeable, and then to formulate their ordered character by reference to their possible il- legitimacy - where there is in the first instance no rule governing this or that particular event. We might loosely talk of this as matter of 'analogy', though it only becomes analogy once it's proposed that some order is

relevant in both circumstances. What we can come to see is that there can be a very limited set of

paradigms or models, each of which may have demarcated areas of order

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which can operate generatively for an enormous range of further areas -

without, however, it being necessary to produce a further set of rules at all,

or to further demarcate the parameters of this other mass of events. Once one knows that "stacking the deck" is something that can be done with a set of cards, it can be seen that ' something like it' is being done with a set

of people. Or, for example, where "hitting below the belt" is something that is done in an exchange of blows, it can be seen as comparable to something that can happen in an exchange of remarks, and thus to operate in conversation and other sorts of exchange activities. One doesn't have to construct a new language, but can retain the base source of this or that rule, as providing the terms.

I want to turn now to a consideration of proverbs as pieces of the language. In Archer Taylor's classical book The Proverb, he mentions in passing one aspect of these things, which got me started on the line I'll be discussing. Right at the beginning of the book he's talking about defining proverbs:

The definition of a proverb is too difficult to repay the undertaking; and should we fortunately combine in a single definition all the essential elements and give each the proper emphasis, we should not even then have a touchstone. An incommunicable quality tells us this sentence is proverbial and that one is not. Hence no definition will enable us to identify positively a sentence as proverbial.

When I read the book a couple of years ago, what was important in that statement just never occurred to me. I'll formulate it in what may sound a very queer way: If we take it with the linguists and the grammarians that

the sentence is constructed according to some rules, and that it is a kind of

unit, then one question we might be led to ask is, what other ways, aside from linguistically, can we talk of a sentence as 'a unit'? What can be

done with it? That is, what are the sorts of activities that persons can hope to accomplish within a single sentence?

Such a question is obviously relevant to the analysis of social activities.

Leaving proverbs aside for the moment, we could say that there would be

at least a special kind of tension in a world where single sentences could do exceptional work. For instance, in the phone calls I collected at an emergency psychiatric hospital, you'd occasionally get the following. A man might report that he's suicidal and offer as the immediate warrant that after 25 years of marriage his wife said, "Well, the fact is I never really loved you." A statement like that has a dual consequentialness. It not only can bring something to a close, but it can provide that some series of

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events have been falsely seen; that is, it can erase them. And there is a whole set of things like that. Some religions are carried

on that feature. The fact that you can know that at any last moment - if you get a last moment - you can always change your ways sufficiently to erase whatever it is you've done in the past, means that you do not have to order your sins day by day. That is, no matter how your sins have added up, it's possible at any last moment to change, and to get what anybody can get no matter what they've done earlier. Of course the fact that you may not get that last moment, itself sets up a variety of other kinds of considerations. But the sort of religious existentialism which focusses on every moment as a possible last moment, is itself only relevant given the notion of what can be done in any given moment.

So the issue of what can be packed into some single unit is obviously interesting. And with respect to language, we can examine the variety of ways that the resources of a language have been explored in terms of how much can be packed into something while retaining such central features as, for example, transmissibility and reproduceability. Now, poetry and proverbs have taken a quite different tack from other explorations. It is said that poetry is very similar to mathematics, in the sense that you pack in knowledge with far more economy than prose would offer. And that is shown in elementary mathematics books when they ask you to "rewrite in English the following equation." The same kind of test can be done for a poem. And it may be recalled that early Greek science, for example, did use poetical forms to write up the results.

Now, one of the crucial things about proverbs is that they're objects from an oral body of knowledge. They do indeed get written down, but their basic power and relevance seem to be as oral objects. There is a literature on oral traditions and how they're preserved and used, and I 'd like to suggest a most extraordinary book on this subject which is mislead- ingly titled if you're looking for material on oral traditions, and that's Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock. It is about Plato, but you could have no interest at all in Plato and leam an awful lot from it. Its basic concern is, what is Plato up to in his attack on Homer? Havelock argues that for the Greeks, Homer was an encyclopedia. His poems stored the enormous amount of relevant knowledge that the Greeks had to use, where the Greeks in this period did not, except in very exceptional circumstances, use writing. Homer's poems were one of a variety of very powerful devices used to store that information. Plato's concern was to break down that way of preserving knowledge because of a variety of things that

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bothered him about it. It's not that Plato didn't like poetry, in the modem sense of poetry, but that he was aware of the ways in which poetry is

powerful - and the limits of that kind of power. I couldn't begin to give an elaborate discussion on the relation of poetry

and proverbs, but I can say a few things. Proverbs, like poetry, have a large use of metaphor, and they often have a kind of alliteration, rhyming, etcetera. There are more or less standard forms which are used, to which any given instance is fitted as far as I know; proverbs are formed as single sentences or phrases of sentences, they're not longer than that. And, like poetry, their reproduction consists of the exact repetition of them - a poem and a proverb lose their character when they're paraphrased. These sorts of features have some real advantages for maintaining a body of knowledge; we can say that they are constructed in mnemonically effica- cious ways. That is to say, they're very easily remembered and are thereby transmissible as 'that very item' and not in a paraphrase. Their stability, then, can be something independent from any occasion of use.

Now for proverbs, I take it that one of the core features of their sense and of their use is that they are 'atopical' phenomena. So, for example, the sense and relevance of 'a rolling stone gathers no moss' is not found by reference to geological or botanical considerations. Some of the work of the neuropsychologist Kurt Goldstein and his associates may be relevant here. One of the things they've found for children, brain-damaged persons, and sometimes among schizophrenics is that a kind of test devised by psychologists indicates that these people cannot handle proverbs - they don't understand them, they don't know to use them. There are many protocols of persons presented with a proverb and asked to interpret it, and

they produce long discussions about various features and behaviors of, for example, stones and moss.

Goldstein proposes on the basis of those tests and other indicators, that there's a big split between what he calls 'abstract' and what he calls 'concrete' thinking, and that persons who can't use proverbs are persons involved in a failure of abstract thinking. But I take it that if you look at

the protocols, the persons involved seem to be quite capable of dealing with proverbs 'abstractly'. First of all, the proverbs themselves are quite abstract. 'A rolling stone gathers no moss' doesn't contain any reference to a particular rolling stone, a particular kind of moss, etcetera, etcetera. And these people who are not able to deal with proverbs properly are nevertheless talking abstractly. They'll talk about "a stone" and how it might roll, and say this or that about moss, without any insistence that it

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has to be some particular stone. That seems to me to stand in contrast to 'concrete' thinking. So, let's

say, when you talk about some kinds of schizophrenics being 'enmeshed in the concrete', you might be pointing to certain kinds of strange things they can do that nobody else can do. For example, one day I was sitting having lunch with a friend of mine and she said, "What day is it today?" I told her what day it was, and she said "Last year on this day I had the following for lunch ... two years ago this day I had the following for lunch..." and she went through ten years, just spieling out the details of her menus. That, I take it, is a pretty clear example of concrete thinking. But the troubles in dealing with proverbs were not of that sort. Again, if the proverb contained the item 'cat', then people would talk about cats and use the plural term "cats". They did not start talking about "my cat".

This suggests that we may not be dealing with inability to do 'abstract' thinking, but an inability to do 'atopical' thinking. Where, then, proverbs can be seen to constitute a very clear example of whole collections of pieces of knowledge that are organized atopically. And I take it that it may be this feature that I 'm calling 'atopical organization', that Homans proposes as a possible "shortcoming", in the remarks I quoted earlier:

What makes the subject of everyday social behavior a chaos is that each of these maxims and proverbs, while telling an important part of the truth, never tells it all, and nobody tries to put them together ... but uses them ad hoc within the range of situations to which each applies, dropping them as soon as their immediate relevance is at an end, and never asking how they are related to one another.

But there are some obvious virtues to having a body of knowledge organized in an atopical fashion. You get a piece of knowledge, like 'a rolling stone gathers no moss', which is in the first instance correct about

something. If you paraphrase it into some particular domain, like "a man who doesn't settle down doesn't gather possessions", then it may not have the same kind of correctness; it may be questionable. And as I mentioned earlier, one of the most striking things about proverbs is that while on any occasion of use they may be, for example, inappropriate, people do not propose about them, "Is that so? .... What is your evidence for that?" If

there is a question about them, it is in terms of, is it appropriate to apply that proverb to this person, activity, etcetera? That is, proverbs are in the first place correct. And that can be accomplished by formulating a proverb from a domain within which it is correct, and having it always be used elsewhere. In that way, instead of constantly revising a body of knowledge

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by reference to the discovery that it's not correct here, now, for this, you maintain a stable body of knowledge and control the domain of its use.

I 've already mentioned the feature of 'single-sentence packing' for proverbs. Let me offer a few more remarks. It's the case that both maxims and descriptions can be produced as proverbs, formulable as single sentences. "A woman's place is in the home" is an instance of the former, and for the latter, they are frequently those 'proverbial phrases', "stacking the deck", "hanging by a thread", "barking up the wrong tree", etcetera. Both types of knowledge, then, can be had and used via the single sen- tence, and thus it's not necessary to have some combination of sentences so as to minimally understand and transmit such information. Having that, you have a setup designed to permit you to learn new members of that class of information much more quickly than might be otherwise possible. That is to say, at that point when children can make single sentences, their task is now to see what it is that can be packed into that form they've learned. And that provides that they will have solved the theoretical problems of being able to know norms, or know knowledge. They would not then be faced with such a task as learning which set of sentences can constitute a piece of knowledge. Rather, once the single sentence is gotten, a whole series of things can be fitted to it, instead of having to deal with various combinations, which might set up quite different sorts of tasks.

In this regard, an extremely important thing about proverbs is that they have the character of being potentially descriptive or relevant. Persons learn them and have them available for use. They don't, that is, learn them on the occasion of their appropriate use. We could imagine that humans were built such that their language was alike to that of other animals, and to the way in which young children very heavily use language; either as narrative comment on what they're doing, "Now I 'm putting on my shoe", or only uttering something on the occasion that it's appropriate - though it may be wrong, they could say "That's mommy" and it's not mommy; that is, the domain of application would be correct or incorrect, but the thing is not uttered apart form some possibly appropriate occasion. But you can have these potential descriptions and see them as 'correct for something', where what it would be correct for remains to be seen.

And if you watch kids learning language, then learning that sort of thing seems to be an important part of it. Observations have been made of children talking to themselves before they fall asleep. And it's been found that they're not coming out with a bunch of random noises, but with a training procedure. For example, they've been observed doing exercises in

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phonetics, combining and assembling phonemes. I don't think it's been pointed out that once they have words, they play with combinations of terms that involve building possible descriptions. We could say it would be strictly a matter of learning the linguistic features of the language - learning the language in this very technical sense - that kids begin to use, in close relation to each other, the paired antonyms (things like in-out, up- down, etcetera); that is, to produce these paired items as pairs. However, if they not only did that, but did - as I think they do - use them in proper sequence, then we've got them learning something more. They're learning potential descriptions. That is, they don't say, for example, "He fixed it, he broke it", but "He broke it, he fixed it." And for such things as in-out, which in some cases have proper sequences and you don't turn them around, then they do them in proper sequence, "Kitty got into the box, he got out." And if they do turn them around, they do it properly: "Kitty got out of the box, he got in again." They're learning, then, not only the relation of certain types of words, but that strings of words can assemble potential descriptions, only in certain arrangements. And that is to say, they're learning that there is a correct way of assembling potential descriptions, apart from the particular occasions of their use.

Now, the phenomenon of 'potential description' has a variety of special consequences. One of them is that it sets up the possibility of a logic which involves examining statements apart from an occasion of use - and by 'an occasion of use' I mean an application to some actual situation, not, for example, an attempt to make a proof. Another is something which I had to be brought to see as noticeable, and that is the possibility of literature; stuff that is, about nothing in particular, in which an author isn't talking about any actual set of events. It occurred to me that the phenomenon of 'the possibility of literature' is something noticeable while I was looking at psychiatric reports about delusions that patients have. In these reports, the writers take it that the delusions are understandable, though what makes them 'delusions' is that they couldn't possibly describe something. Literature has a similar character; it's composed of possible potential descriptions and possible potential rules, and a reader can look at assembled strings of language and decide that it's "realistic" or "not realistic", compelling or not compelling. And in that sense, the possibility of literature and the possibility of logic are very, very closely related.

These sorts of considerations may have a bearing on a classical con- troversy, mainly within linguistics, which concerns the question: Are

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grammar and meaning separable? It may be that "Are they separable?" is not the problem, but that if 'meaning' is, in part, reference to something, and grammar is understandable apart from reference to anything - that is, formally correct in some way - then it's not simply a technological linguistic question, whether it's so that they're separable, but that it's an essential fact of language that they are separate.

Note

1. A combination of Winter 1965 Lecture 8 and Lecture 9 pages 1 and 8-12 (transcriber unknown on these two) and Fall 1964 Tape 13 Side 1.