Instructing the Imagination
The functional specificity of language lies in the very particular functional strategy it employs. It is dedicated to the systematic instruction of imagination.
From The Instruction of Imagination, by Daniel Dor:
Language cannot be a general-purpose communication technology. There is simply no such thing: had there been, we would never need to invent anything else. Every communication technology is functionally specific. Every technology employs a specific functional strategy, and the specificity of the strategy determines the technology's functional envelope: what it can do with high levels of efficiency, where its efficiency declines, where it collapses, and what it cannot do to begin with . . .
The functional specificity of language . . . lies in the very particular functional strategy it employs. It is dedicated to the systematic instruction of imagination: we use it to communicate directly with our interlocutors' imaginations. . . . Language is the only system that goes beyond the sharing of experience. It allows speakers to intentionally and systematically instruct their interlocutors in the process of imagining the intended experience—instead of directly experiencing it. The speaker provides the receiver with a code, a plan, a skeletal list of the basic co-ordinates of the experience—which the receiver is then expected to use as a scaffold for experiential imagination. Following the code, the interlocutor raises past experiences from memory, and then reconstructs and recombines them to produce novel, imagined experiences.
