When linguist Kenneth Pike penned the words: “A person may distort innate positive universals into negative particular actions,”  he was addressing a problem common to all societies, the problem of what is constant and what is real.  Does there exist beyond the phenomenal world another world, a world of Ideas aka Forms common to all to which there are attached Divine meanings which are not only real, but constant?

 

Before Plato founded the first institute of higher learning in the Western world, Chinese philosophers living at the time of Abraham proposed there existed a structure of unlearned “innate knowledge...rooted in the heart of all men, a knowledge which can be demonstrated by the fact that children all know how to love their parents, and that, when men suddenly fall into a well, a sense of mercy and alarm is inevitably arouses in their hearts.”  They called this unlearned Meta-Script “rooted in the hearts of all men” The Mandate from Heaven.

 

In other words, does the unconscious mind possess, as proposed by Plato in the Western world and the Chinese in the Asian world,  a priori Ideas or Forms to which are attached inherent or Divine meanings?  In addition, has there been structured in the unconscious mind a Universal Lexicon containing these unlearned Universal Ideas, Ideas which contribute to the psychic unity of mankind?

 

While it is accepted that "We cannot know the form without the content,”  when exactly, we must ask, were universal forms and particular meaning-content linked together?"   From a theistic perspective, form and meaning-content were linked together when man was created in the "image and likeness of God."

 

At that precise moment the universal forms and particular meanings were linked together, meanings which were Divine, fixed, and constant.  The naturalists, as well as contextuaiizers, strongly disagree. In the words of contextualizing missiologist Charles Kraft, “meaning is the structuring of information in the minds [aka brains] of people.”

 

Representing the later is French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.  He wrote: "Language was born all at once. ...a change has taken place, from a stage where nothing had meaning to a stage where everything had [meaning].”    According to Lévi-Strauss, all that existed before language was “born” were invisible universal "forms common to all" structured in the brain awaiting the precise moment when meanings imported from the outside would be attached to the appropriate forms.

 

At that moment the appropriate forms and the particular meanings imported from the outside were magically connected and language, mind, selfhood, consciousness, and a particular worldview came into existence.  In the words of philosophy professor  J.F. Moreland, 

“Prior to this level of complexity, matter contained the potential for mind [as well as language and selfhood] to emerge —and at the right moment these  potentials were activated, consciousness was sparked into existence. …It is a view that matter is not just inert physical stuff, but that it also contains porto-mental states in it. …The world began not just with matter, but with stuff that is mental and physical at the same time.” 

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Rejection of an Innate Divine Universal Lexicon                                                             

Now if universal forms held in common have attached to them meanings which are fixed and constant, it would imply the existence of a Divine Universal Lexicon structured in the mind. But it also implies that these meanings could be "triggered" and brought to consciousness in a socio-linguistic situation. In this case, such meanings are "acquired" by every child rather than being “learned.”

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Supporting this view is the late American psychologist Jerome Brunner for whom there exist "certain classes of meaning to which human beings are innately tuned and for which they actively search. Prior to language, these exist in primitive form as protolinguistic representations of the world whose full realization depends upon the cultural tool of language."

 

When these meanings are brought to consciousness,  the child will "actively begin searching" for the correct symbol to attach to the correct concept. “Such [acquired] knowledge,” according to Peter Carruthers, “will make its appearance at some particular stage in normal cognitive development.”  “The child is now commonly viewed as coming to the language-learning task well equipped with a basic stock of concepts”

 

So instead of Divine meanings being attached to universal forms when Adam, the first man, was formed in his Creator’s image, for the naturalist, the meanings must first be created by SOCIAL EXISTENCE.  After coming into existence, these created meanings, according to Lévi-Strauss and Kraft,  are imported to the mind/brain where they are attached to the correct form. 

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But one must ask:  How is this possible? To believe that Natural Selection and “the elements of the world” (Col. 2:8) aka “environment” actually knew to which form or concept the contextualized meaning should be attached necessitates a belief in magic.

 

 

Convictions

1. If "meanings belong to the people," as  promoted by Kraft, then no word has a "true" meaning which is constant. And verbal inspiration is a theological myth.

2. Since innate knowledge of meanings attached to forms common to all people are not “learned” but “acquired,” acquitition of this knowledge begins when the child is exposed to the relevant stimuli in a linguistic-social environment in which the child is searching for the correct symbol to attached to the form. 

3. Universal forms having positive meanings promote ORDER; universal forms having meanings "belonging to the people" increase DISORDER and logical thinking

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