Symbolic system

1. Systems in which 'images', namely the cognitive structures of persons, enter in an essential manner. Images are systems of extreme complexity and delicacy, especially at the symbolic level. Although the image of an individual person is subjective, it is not necessarily private in the sense that it is unrelated to other images. A public image, however, consists of the shared images of many individuals. A public image is the product of a universe of discourse, namely a process of sharing messages and experiences.

2. Human life is sustained culturally by varieties of symbolic systems. Each generation takes over, makes over, and passes on a heritage which consists basically in specific ways of appreciating and acting in each situation. This heritage subsists at any point in time in the organization of countless individual minds, never wholly shared; yet it is a social artefact, dependent on communication both for its continuity and for its change, yet itself giving meaning to the communication on which it depends. Time establishes a close correspondence between the needs and concerns of the society and the shared, symbolic system by which these are represented and interpreted in language and thought. It is essential to any society that its appreciative system shall change sufficiently to interpret a changing world, yet should remain sufficiently shared and sufficiently stable to mediate mutual understanding and common action and to make sense of personal experience. These demands conflict with each other increasingly as rates of change accelerate and contacts between disparate cultures multiply.