A difference can be given to a subject through the senses before the subject has named, classified, or explained it. Semantic determinacy is related to the way the subject understands what has been distinguished and incorporates it into their activity. This document examines the connection between these aspects of distinction and the role of categories in organizing what takes place.
Categories and the Activity Being Distinguished
The terms junior, middle, and senior establish three levels of qualification. However, the activity itself does not prescribe precisely this number of levels. Subjects could distinguish two levels or a thousand, draw the boundaries differently, combine some cases, and separate others.
One person solves a task independently; another seeks assistance. A subject is capable of discovering this difference in activity. The names of the levels introduce an additional determinacy: they establish which category a person belongs to and what position they occupy in the accepted system.
Choosing the number of categories does not make everything distinguished through them arbitrary. Independence, the nature of assistance, and ways of solving a task may matter for collaborative work. However, grouping them into a level and drawing the boundary between levels depend on the relationship to the activity that the participants establish and the purpose for which they distinguish it.
The boundary of a category may change while the person’s way of working remains the same. Conversely, a person may begin working differently while retaining the same job title. Here, what occurs in the activity and the way it is organized semantically can be distinguished. In both cases, the act of distinction is performed by a subject; this distinction does not introduce a ready-made list of differences supposedly drawn in advance without the subject.
How a Category Participates in What Takes Place
An accepted category becomes a basis for assigning tasks, compensation, authority, and expectations. Through these actions, a semantic distinction participates in the organization of further activity.
A person receives tasks of a certain level, masters them, and receives or does not receive assistance. A category initially introduced to describe qualification thereby participates in the circumstances of its subsequent change. The connection between what takes place and its semantic organization runs in both directions: discovered differences prompt the introduction of categories, while applying categories changes the activity.
Names and the practice of applying them make it possible to maintain the boundaries that have been drawn. In this case, the connection with form is revealed through the repeated distinction of situations and people within an accepted relationship to the activity.
Sensory Differences
A subject distinguishes sounds through hearing, surfaces through touch, and colors and movement through vision. Differences are also accessible through other senses, including the experience of one’s own bodily state. Distinction is not limited to verbal judgments and categories.
One can hear that a sound has changed without knowing the source of the change or having a name for it. One can feel a difference between two surfaces without knowing their composition or explaining the cause of the sensation. What has been discovered already has a determinacy sufficient for continuing to engage with it, although its nature remains unknown.
The expression “sensory difference” indicates the manner in which a difference is given to the subject. The words “material” and “physical” would raise a different question, namely the nature of what is being distinguished. They would also narrow the original example too much: independence in solving a task cannot be described merely by pointing to a physical property.
The Connection Between the Sensory and the Semantic
The sensory and the semantic do not form two isolated classes. One can distinguish a sound by its loudness, recognize it as the voice of someone familiar, and hear irritation in it. Sensory distinction, recognition, and understanding are connected within a single engagement with what takes place.
Therefore, two aspects are distinguished here: how a difference is given to the subject and what semantic determinacy it acquires in the subject’s relationship to what takes place. This formulation does not establish a mandatory temporal sequence in which everything sensory must first be completed before the semantic can begin.
The absence of an explanation also does not mean the absence of any relationship whatsoever. Sensory distinction itself takes place within the subject’s relationship to what is happening. In the thesis “distinction without interpretation,” interpretation means explaining, determining the nature of, or classifying what has been discovered. If the word is taken to mean any form of relating one thing to another, the thesis will require a different formulation.
Memory and Returning Without an Explanation
A subject may remember that something sounded different and return to that difference without ever having an explanation for its cause. A difference between sensations from surfaces may likewise be retained without knowledge of what caused it.
In this way, sensory distinction provides another case of holding what has been discovered within the unknown. The determinacy of a difference and the determinacy of its explanation may change in different ways. The possibility of returning does not require an explanation ever to have been formulated.
At the same time, memory does not guarantee an exact reconstruction of what came before. The question remains: on what basis does the subject recognize precisely the earlier difference, and how does the subject distinguish a change in understanding from a change in the boundary being maintained?
What Requires Further Examination
- How are sensory distinction and semantic determinacy connected in a particular act? The example of a voice shows their joint participation but does not yet explain how this connection works.
- How do what takes place, the task, and the subject’s relationship participate in drawing the boundary of a category? The possibility of two, three, or a thousand levels does not in itself establish the justification for each division.
- What allows an earlier sensory difference to be recognized when memory, circumstances, and explanation change? The preservation of recognizability does not yet reveal how the difference is maintained between acts.
Related Materials
- Relationship as a Condition of Distinction — relationship, participation of the subject, and the inexhaustibility of further distinction.
- What Distinction Is — the act in which “this / not this” is established.
- Sensory Modalities as Modes of Distinction — ways in which differences are given through the senses.
- Memory and the Holding of Form — returning to what has been discovered and the question of recognizing an earlier boundary.
- Open Form — holding a difference without a ready-made classification.
