If we speculate about the realization that signs are signals, it is evident that a very important stage in this evolution occurs when the organism gradually ceases to respond "automatically" to the mood-signs of another and becomes able to recognize the sign as a signal: that is, to recognize that the other individual's and its own signs are only signals which can be trusted, distrusted, falsified, denied, amplified, corrected and so forth.

Clearly, this realization that signs are signals is by no means complete even among the human species. . . . What I encountered at the zoo was a phenomenon well known to everybody: I saw two young monkeys playing, i.e., engaged in an interactive sequence of which the unit actions or signals were similar to but not the same as those of combat. (SEM 179)

The next step was the examination of the message "This is play," and the realization that this message contains those elements which necessarily generate a paradox of the Russellian or Epimenides type - a negative statement containing an implicit negative metastetement. Expanded, the statement "This is play" looks something like this: "These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote." . . . (SEM 180)

Paradox is doubly present in the signals which are exchanged within the context of play, fantasy, threat, etc. (SEM l82).

We face then two peculiarities of play: (a) that the messages or signals exchanged in play are in a certnin sense untrue and not meant; and (b) that that which is denoted by these signals is nonexistent. (SEM 179)

Our approach is based on that part of communication theory which Russell has called the Theory of Logical Types. (A. N. Whitehead and B. Russell. Principia Mathematica, Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 1910.) The central thesis of this theory is that there is a discontinuity between a class and its members. The class cannot be a member of itself nor can one of the members be the class, since the term used for the class is of a different level of abstraction - a different Logical Type - from the terms used for members. Although in formal logic there is an attempt to maintain this discontinuity between a class and its members, we argue that in the psychology of real communications this discontinuity is continually and inevitably breached, and that a priori we must expect a pathology to occur in the human organism when certain formal patterns of the breaching occur in communication. We shall argue that this pathology at its extreme will have symptoms knose formal characteristics would lead the pathology to be classified as a schizophrenia. (SEM 202-203)

If our formal summary of the symptomatology is correct and if the schizophrenia of our hypothesis is essentially a result of family interaction, it should be possible to arrive at a formal description of these sequences of experience which would induce such a symptomatology. What is known of learning theory combines with the evident fact that human beings use context as a guide for mode discrimination. Therefore, we must look not for some specific traumatic experience in the infantile etiology but rather for characteristic sequential patterns. The specificity for which we search is to be at an abstract or formal level. The sequences must have this characteristic: that from them the patient will acquire the mental habits which are exemplified in schizophrenic communication. That is to say, he must live in a universe where the sequences of events are such that his unconventional communicational habits will be in some sense appropriate. The hypothesis which we offer is that sequences of this kind in the external experience of the patient are responsible for the inner conflicts of Logical Typing. (SEM 206)

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