I was
walking along a path with my wife. She twisted slightly her ankle when stepping
into a narrow trench that was hidden in the grass. Later, on our way back I
stepped into the same trench but did not get hurt. I only whooped. My wife said
that she immediately felt the pain in her ankle.
How is my
wife’s sudden experience of pain to be explained? There was a temporal interval
of two hours. Her pain had eased soon after the incident, but reappeared when I
cried out. It is obviously not a causal relationship that is involved here. My
cry referred to the event that she had experienced. My wife also saw that I
stumbled, which was enough to generate a vivid recall of the original event.
She “knew” how I felt, although not quite accurately because I did not twist my
ankle and hence did not feel any pain.
Referential
relations do not obey the requirement of immediacy that characterise our
understanding of causality. There must be either an immediate temporal or a
spatial relationship between cause and effect. Referential relationships do not
obey such strict rules. When an event generates a sign (as the pain in the
ankle), this sign bears the reference to the event regardless the temporal or
spatial remoteness between the event and the sign.
All our encounters with the world generate and
re-generate signs that refer to the particularities of such encounters. In
addition to the personal experiences that are created in this way, we are
surrounded by a culturally generated semiosphere that contains a myriad of
signs to which we are gradually introduced during ontogeny. Our brain is
primarily endowed to deal with these signs and referential relations that they
embody as well as the complex networks that are formed between them. The above
described incident made me think of the mirror neuron system that seems to
mediate referential relations that are established in communicative signs. If
we can find a set of referential relations that match the sign we encounter, we
can empathize with the person who has expressed it.
