Kelsey Garegnani - signifier and the signified

One story that I loved was the story in class about telling a child that a troll under a bridge is not lying because in a sense that is what is under there! She was not able to conceptualize death yet, but she knew what a troll was because of books and stories. She knew that they et you up, which means death, and therefore to her is the same thing. Since she is young and hasn’t learned a lot yet hasn’t discriminated between wider groupings and learned specific words or symbols. In psychology, Pavlov was able to discover, through animals, that learning is a pairing process that can be shaped and there can be discrimination or inclusion. Learning discrimination means the subject learns to recognize small differences between things in order to better separate things. Through inclusion though, which can be learned but is mostly a more natural response, means the subject uses a wide and general descriptors that create large groupings. We can see how younger children, without the knowledge to begin discrimination, tend towards inclusions. They can make these connections at all because of the idea of pairing. In the same way the girl paired the troll with death , we pair things too. In its most applicable sense we use symbols, such as words, and pair them with ideas and things we know. The word dog becomes the signifier which is paired to the signified, which is the actual dog. Through this we have no only created a language but also formed cultural understanding in our society such as how fire trucks represent emergency to us.