This book introduces and reclassifies disorders across the board from the vantage point of a more dynamic, comprehensive, consistent, and coherent theory of sign systems. In doing so, it presents newly discovered theoretical connections along with up-to-date published empirical and experimental demonstrations. It is becoming increasingly evident that disorders and disease conditions, especially the unexpectedly persistent ones singled out as “communication disorders,” invariably involve problems in representation. Such problems range from difficulties at the deepest levels of genetics to the highest levels of human emotion and intelligence manifested in experience, actions, language, and reasoning. More than ever before it is clear that health depends profoundly on dynamic representations, especially true ones, of the way things really are and how they are changing over time. Disease conditions and disorders invariably involve mistaking fictional or deliberately false representations for true ones. Disease agents, it is clear, can falsely represent themselves to the body’s defenses. Toxins can disrupt the capacity of the body and its immune systems to represent things correctly from genetics upward through metabolism and on to the highest levels of emotion, cognition, language, and reasoning. When fictions are mistaken for true representations, as when deliberate deceptions or mere fictions are taken to be true representations of actual facts, problems result. Such communication problems at the deepest levels from genetics and metabolism right on up to the most general forms of language and thought, form the underlying basis for disease, disorder, and mortality. Without exception, disorders of communication and disease conditions in general, are the consequence of breakdowns and failures in systems of representation. At the core of the distinctly human capacities of communication are the dynamic pragmatic mapping relations by which sensory impressions of the physical world are linked through actions to abstract concepts of the linguistic kind. The simplest examples involve naming: For instance, if we refer to one of our editors as “Sandy,” we aim to map the surface form of the name onto a certain person. If we succeed, our representation qualifies, as far as it is intended to qualify, as a true and valid representation. Another simple example of the pragmatic mapping relation would be a baby waving goodbye when someone else is actually taking leave of that baby, or vice versa. In that case the waving would be appropriately associated by way of reference or signification with the act of taking leave. Such pragmatic mapping relations, as well demonstrated in the study of communication disorders, are fundamentally programmed into our neurological systems. It is not too much to say that they are dynamically built-in to the architecture of the brain. With that in mind as the basis for the dynamic connection between abstract ideas and concrete things through intelligence, it is also becoming increasingly evident, as our readers and students are discovering, that the many fields of study concerned with human communication and its disorders are undergoing a paradigm shift from static theories of distinct bits and pieces, surface forms, and independent components, toward theories taking account of dynamic, interconnected, systems that communicate with each other. The dynamic systems-oriented approaches to human experience are central to the paradigm shift that we believe is already underway in the health sciences. The shift is bringing with it a better understanding of the central role of valid communications to well-being. It is ultimately the dissolution of representations themselves, or we could say the development of communication disorders, that leads to diseases and disordered conditions. This book chronicles the initial stages of the paradigm shift that we believe is underway and it anticipates some of the ways in which the �systems orientation must continue to develop in the coming months and years. Teachers who adopt the book and course, and their students, are assured of a cutting edge introduction to the best of current theories and ongoing empirical research being applied to test them. No other introduction offers as much historical depth or experimental currency concerning well researched cases. Nor does any other course provide a simpler, more coherent, or more intelligible theoretical perspective.
