Dialog/Anticipation

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Anticipation

V 1 — You know, R, I'm a little confused by this page name. What do you mean? It doesn't make much sense to me to say, "We study anticipation."

R 2 — Fair enough. I've been wanting to find a way to group all the different forms of human communication, of expression or utterance, under one heading. I've thought about it quite a bit and most possibilities don't quite seem to work in my opinion.

V 3 — Well what's wrong with utterance? That seems pretty general.

R 4 — To me it's a bit ugly and not really so general. I find it hard to think of art or music as utterance. But I'm most turned off by how it objectifies intentional processes, shearing the fact of the locution from the intention of its speaker. I'd prefer Expression. We associate that with some meaning, not a simple grunt.

V 5 — OK, but you seem not fully satisfied with expression. What does it lack?

R 6 — It's pretty good, but it seems a bit too ex post facto, referring to something prior that it expresses. Maybe that's cutting it too fine. Expressing and thinking do connect with thinking prior to expressing. But I have a hunch that by reflecting on how anticipating may enter in will yield some interesting insight and I'd like to see if we might develop it. If it takes us into a cul-de-sac, we can go back to talking about expression.

V 7 — I'm game. But let me check one thing. For practical purposes, we are introducing what we study in addressing the modes of cultural expression—writing, painting, music, sculpture, photography, dance, graphic design, computer code, symbolic logic, architecture, and so on.

R 8 — Right. And I want to tentatively suggest that these are better understood as modes of anticipation, rather than modes of expression.

V 9 — And I take it you are going to suggest this understanding not from the point of view of the objective observer describing external behaviors, but that of the living person who is engaging in communicating culturally.

R 10 — Yes. A living, sentient, thinking person is using cultural forms, trying intentionally to affect other living, sentient thinking persons in particular ways, and another person, also living, sentient, thinking, is seeking intentionally to apprehend reciprocally what the first is seeking.

V 11 — Hmm. That's how I thought you would see it, how I anticipated it. Is that the anticipation we are talking about?

R 12 — In effect, in part. But I suspect it is really more complicated.

V 13 — Yeah. I should've known. It's always more complicated. Fill me in.

R 14 — [* To be clarified and continued. *]