Aesop tells of a dog crossing a stream with a piece of meat in its jaws. Looking down, it sees another dog in the water carrying a larger piece, and it snaps at the prize. The meat it was holding drops into the current. We usually read the fable as a lesson about greed, and it is one. It is also a small drama of perception. Something clear and sharply outlined on the surface of the water is taken for something that could be eaten. The dog has not reasoned badly. It has not reasoned at all. What fails is the joint between what it feels and what it sees.
In a new article in the journal Cognitive Semiotics, Yi Yuxi of the School of Philosophy at Fudan University calls the dog’s blunder an error of symbolic reference. The phrase belongs to Alfred North Whitehead, who set out the idea in Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect, a book of lectures published in 1927. Yi’s claim is that this slim book answers a question the sciences of the embodied mind have learned to ask but not to settle. How does a feeling in the body become something that means?
Where the Mapping Stops
Since Metaphors We Live By appeared in 1980, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have argued that metaphor is no ornament laid over literal speech. It is how thought works. We grasp abstract things by borrowing structure from bodily ones, so that quantities rise and fall and understanding becomes a kind of sight. The theory calls these borrowings mappings, from a sensorimotor source domain to an abstract target. They grow out of experiences that keep occurring together: a pile grows taller as more is added, and the mind learns to hear “more” as “up.”
For Yi, the theory did real work in loosening the old picture of meaning as disembodied and literal. Its account, however, stays at the level of correlation. It says which bodily regularities go with which concepts, not how body and world couple in the living moment to produce the pairing. The mapping is still a finished mental representation, and the process that yields it goes untheorized. Read through process philosophy, the theory keeps a hidden Cartesian habit of treating its domains as static entities.
Two Ways of Being Touched by the World
Whitehead’s alternative begins from the claim that perception runs in two modes. The first he called causal efficacy. It is the vague, heavy sense of the world pressing on us out of the immediate past. Yi’s examples are dizziness at a cliff’s edge, the ease of a familiar footstep, the discomfort of an angry gaze. In Yi’s reading these feelings are not laid on top of perception. They are perception in its primordial form.
The second mode is presentational immediacy. Here the world arrives as colours, shapes, and sounds, each sharply located in space, as though projected on a screen. Its clarity has a cost, since it is cut off from time and from the body’s feeling. Taken alone it is an abstraction, and to mistake it for the concrete world is what Whitehead elsewhere called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
Symbolic reference is what happens when the two modes meet. The vague feeling is given definite shape by the clear data, and the clear data are charged with the feeling’s weight. The word is worth pausing over. To refer is, at its Latin root, to carry back, and in Whitehead’s usage the carrying runs from the felt past into the presented now. The dog at the stream joined its hunger to a bright image that held no meat. For Whitehead, Yi stresses, a symbol’s power lies less in what it points to than in what he called its lure for feeling. A word, a rite, or an image moves us because it summons feeling the body has accumulated over time.
The Moment of “I See”
Yi’s sharpest demonstration takes a standard case. Someone explains a difficult point, and the listener says, “I see what you mean.” Lakoff reads this as a fixed mapping from vision onto understanding. Yi asks what occurs in the listener.
At the level of causal efficacy there is pressure: accumulated puzzlement, the tension of an unfinished thought. These are bodily feelings, not concepts, the past still pressing toward resolution. At the level of presentational immediacy, the speaker’s words arrive as sound, sharply edged in phoneme, rhythm, and intonation, and by themselves empty of felt significance. Symbolic reference fuses the two in real time. The pressure is coloured by the sound, and the sound takes on the weight of the pressure.
The listener does not first hear the words and then decode a metaphor. The fusion is the understanding. On this account “I see” is not a figure standing in for “I understand.” It literally names what has just happened, because coming to understand shares a form with seeing: a gathering of the past into a single present act. That is why the expression feels apt rather than merely conventional. Whitehead’s word for such a gathering is concrescence, a growing-together.
In the model Whitehead associated with Hume and Kant, symbol and world either match at an instant or they do not, as a key fits a lock. In Whitehead’s own model the relation is a transmission, continuous and directed, whose force depends on its intensity and duration. Yi finds a bodily counterpart in work by Gil Carvalho and Antonio Damasio on the interoceptive nerves, whose slow fibres carry a continuous flow of bodily feeling. That flow, Yi proposes, is the physiological correlate of causal efficacy. Lakoff and Johnson’s neural theory of metaphor, on Yi’s account, tells the history of an association from outside. It describes the wiring. Whitehead describes how the transmission feels from within as meaning takes hold.
The idea that knowing is an activity rather than a reception has an older Italian ancestor, and Yi names it in passing. In 1710 Giambattista Vico published On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, which reasoned from Latin words toward a metaphysics. Its first chapter observes that for the Latins verum and factum, the true and the made, were interchangeable terms. Vico concluded that we know fully only what we make. The same chapter lingers over two verbs. Intelligere, to understand, he took as a complete gathering of a thing’s elements, reserved for God, who contains them all. Cogitare, to think, was the human version, a gathering of elements outside the mind.
Yi’s single sentence on Vico holds that the convertibility of the true and the made anticipates Whitehead’s rejection of misplaced concreteness, since both treat knowledge as active engagement. Vico’s verbs make the kinship audible. For him understanding was already a gathering. For Whitehead it is a gathering of the felt past into the vivid present.
The Weight a Symbol Carries
For Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose body schema is Yi’s phenomenological interlocutor, a menacing face is grasped as menacing directly, by a body already attuned to its world. Whitehead analyses the menace one step further, into a felt impact from a causally related person, projected outward as colour and shape. The difference shows when no face is present. A news report of a distant famine offers no gaze to meet. On Whitehead’s terms its words and photographs gather up a reader’s accumulated sense of vulnerability, and the fusion yields the felt fact that the famine is terrible. In this power to carry feeling across distance, Yi locates empathy and moral imagination.
Ernst Cassirer’s animal symbolicum, the creature who lives in a world of language, myth, art, and science, receives a parallel reading. Cassirer’s forms rest on a priori structures and classify. Whitehead’s process is generative, and so supplies the foundation in nature for Cassirer’s cultural analysis.
On this view a symbol’s weight is not its accuracy. It is the intensity and duration of what it carries. Borges imagined cartographers whose map of the empire coincided with it point for point, a map perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. Orwell imagined Newspeak, stripped of every ambiguous or historically layered word. In Yi’s reading both are experiments in removing the temporal depth of meaning. Yi proposes that such depth could be studied through research on interoception.
Since Whitehead credits every actual entity with some primitive feeling, Yi follows John Pickering in extending the account into biosemiotics, the study of signs across living nature. Causal efficacy runs along that whole continuum. Symbolic reference in the full sense belongs to organisms able to join both modes.
The article ends with community. Symbols give individual feeling a form a group can share, and language binds a people less through the concepts it names than through the emotions its words call up. Yi’s last words are an old sundial motto, pereunt et imputantur, which the poet Martial wrote of the days that perish and are charged to our account. Yi renders it: time passes and is accounted for. The hours do not simply vanish. They are reckoned, and the reckoning is the weight a word carries when it reaches us.
Yi Yuxi. “Whitehead’s Symbolic Reference as a Theory of Embodied Semiotics: From Causal Efficacy to Meaning.” Cognitive Semiotics, published ahead of print, October 19, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1515/cogsem-2026-3007.
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