The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names. (E. O. Wilson, as cited by Elizabeth J. Rosenthal, Birdwatcher: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson)

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Mway Loses the Stick

April 14, 2010.  Wednesday.
Situation:  In the morning it looks like I’ll have to work afternoon and evening, and won’t have a chance to take Mway for a walk again today, but as it turns out some of my afternoon work falls through, and I have time to take Mway for a walk around 2:30.  I have to change from my work clothes into my walking clothes, and find Mway in her bedroom, lying on the floor, near Moi lying on the bed, but awake.
State of the Path:  I am very tired today and suffering congestion from allergies or a cold, so I don’t feel like looking at much.  But it is a pleasant walk, a nice cool day.  In the old orchard I walk toward the kids’ old fort to look for jack-in-the-pulpits, chasing away a squirrel, which Mway only senses vaguely.   I find no jack-in-the-pulpits, but notice, as the sun shines down on their green parasols, that there are actually about six different spots where the may apples have come up in the orchard; this is in addition to the may apples down by the creek, below the deer stand, with a few further up where the path narrows.  The violets have also spread from the orchard into the field; and down in bug land the point blue eye grass is spreading across the soggy area by the pines.  I think I even see some of the point blue eye grass in the strawberry patch, although that could be strawberry blossoms, I’m not sure.
State of the Creek:  Some very large minnows in the pool behind the log jam.  Water striders again cast shadows against the rocks, that make the bugs look three times the size they really are.
The Fetch:  One fetch – which is all right with me.  But when I arrive in the back yard, I see Mway running by the side of the house, after visiting the Boy, who is scraping paint in the front yard, and she doesn’t have the stick in her mouth -- the fine one that I’ve been using for months.  “Where’s your stick?” I raise my arms, and we go to the front of the house, and eventually throughout the yard, looking for it.  Moi comes out into the yard, and I tell her what has happened.  “That was a pro-quality stick,” she commiserates.  I look around a few more minutes, then finally give up – I will probably find it next week when I’m mowing the lawn.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Second Conceptual Barrier

When it first discovers that reading material is a system of signs, the canine, as we have seen, is still laboring under two understandable misconceptions: first, that the word, or words, on the page, which it perceives as odor pockets, are solely indexical signs that point in the first instance to a picture on a page; second, that the odor pocket, the scent that it perceives, is in itself that indexical sign. But now that it has appropriated reading material as an object of interest, it will, as any sentient being does, seek to understand the materials of the object correctly, and whereas at one time it was content with access to whatever reading material happened to be lying before it, it will now even actively obtain more reading material, so it will have more examples for study. The canine recognizes both misconceptions as such, and it proceeds to correct its understanding by the simplest process of logical elimination, as it would do with materials in the field: if not p, then perhaps q. Let us consider the second misconception first, because it is the one the canine usually notices first, even as it is developing its recognition of the reading material as a system of signs. Even though it has made the connection between the odor pocket and the picture, it is troubled by two facts regarding them that simply do not correspond to what he understands about signs in the field. The first is that the scent of the picture is not like the scent of the sign, and the second is that all the signs smell more or less alike, regardless of what they are in proximity to. Not wishing to relinquish its newly discovered concept of reading material, it persists in treating the odor pockets as signs and instead modifies its assumption about them, drawing upon its knowledge of the morphemics of scents in the field: if the scent itself is not the material that makes up the sign, then perhaps it is the distribution of the scent that does. The canine notices, over a long period of time, and by comparing many pictures to the scent distributions near them, that certain pictures tend most often to be in close proximity to scents of a certain distribution. Although the morpheme of scent distribution, as we have illustrated earlier, is only one of several types of morphemes in the field, the canine hypothesizes that reading material consists only of this one type of morpheme, applicable to all referents. It is thus now prepared to exclude the scent itself from consideration and focus entirely on its distribution, and, further, to determine the extent of the distribution to a high degree of acuity, even to the point where it can perceive, with some ocular exertion, a correspondence between the odor distributions and the visual markings. The canine thus adjusts its conception of reading material signs to a consideration of the graphic image as the sole kind of morpheme. Although it has not yet recognized the function of letters, it now understands that the basic material constitution of reading material signs, the signifier, or word, is a graphic image, and it is now prepared, in its continued study of a large number of pictures and captions, to connect signifier with signified to a greater degree of accuracy.