Human beings show up with behavior ready-to-hand. And while use of language is a behavior, the capacity to use language is not the same as the capacity to communicate, which is also a behavior.
Behavior often elicits a response, but behavior is not in itself a means of communication whether or not we interpret it as a noun or not. We simply tend to align action with communication as a metaphor, which makes [all] action a form of signaling.
Perhaps signaling is the pervasive metaphor of our present-day technology, indeed of our world, as we have the capacity to make sense of signals and thereby give them meaning.
But behavior is often noise, a signal that distorts other signals.
Signal and noise constitute communication theory, but too, we might re-do communication theory as a theory of signaling.
Indeed, we are prone to think of behavior as communicative, but breathing, eating, drinking, ... , however ritualized, however socially constructed, have no immediate dependency on language or on our ability to communicate what they are as such. Whether or not we give these gerunds language, we do them. But our doing them often becomes a context for a discussion about influence, namely, the influence of thought, of language, of various other types of behavior on these behaviors.
Essentially, within the dualism made by the distinction between thought and action, when we take the linguistic turn, we make reality a construction of thought, thought which is made manifest through language, ... .
But foregoing the linguistic turn, on the level of behavior, with no dualism in play, we speak yet of influence, and reality at this level is not a construction so much as an interplay.
Directionally, when we assume the primacy of our use of language, which is, after all, a type of behavior, rather than the primacy of behavior itself, we live under the influence of an assumed need for language and of constructions thereof.
Note: Though agreed that reality is not entirely a social construct, the use of behavior is intended to give a general basis of action, but it is not used to imply a distinction between the subjective and the objective, whatever such a distinction might entail.
The use of behavior, here, rather, is close to the behavior defined by this sort of behavior analysis, and behavior analysis generally plays well in relation to social constructionism.
Which phrase fits the situation better?
We are our language.
We are our behavior.
For example, we speak of the influence of social media on behavior. A problem most immediate here is that our behavior on social media is still a behavior of a sort.
On this level too, we need not discuss the influence of social media on behavior as we might just as well discuss the impact of our behavior on some other behavior. For example, the influence of action on thought.
The following questions concern our ability to escape influence as well as our power to influence:
Do we live within socially constructed realities? Yes. Do we have the capacity to escape socially constructed realities? Yes and No. Do socially constructed realities constitute our world entirely? No, ... our world has gaps, gaps often of the asemic sort.
Related Themes
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