Ostensive Imperative World

The ostensive and imperative signs constitute a kind of loop: once we are looking at the same thing we can request, and if the request is complied with we can confirm that by repeating the name of the thing. Eric Gans, in The Origin of Language, uses the relation between surgeon and nurse to illustrate an ostensive-imperative dialectic: the surgeon requests the “scalpel,” and the nurse passes it to him, repeating, “scalpel.” We can think of this as a self-contained world in which we are in direct contact with others and with objects, and where practices are, we could say, self-confirming. We could think of it as a world into which questions don’t enter and where knowledge is tacit. The concept certainly overlaps with attempts within philosophy and other disciplines to distinguish more intuitive, habitual or unconscious regions of the human being from those regions made explicit and available through concepts and conscious manipulation.