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This colloquium, sponsored by the American Psychoanalytic Association, was held December 11, 1969. Victor Rosen, the chairman, felt the linguistic definition of a symbol, as an arbitrary representational stand-in for something else, had replaced the former psychoanalytic usage that more clearly corresponded to the idea of the sign, which is related by simile. Tom Bever, a professor of linguistics, asserted there were built-in developmental regularities that account for the apparently arbitrary relationships between a sound pattern (word) and its referent from a different sense organ, e.g., vision; this idea of an organizational rule was carried over to language itself in the belief that humans intuitively have such rules available to generate adequate grammatical sentences. Bernard Kaplan, a professor of psychology, disagreed with Bever, claiming that representation in a medium other than that of the percept is arbitrary. Kaplan also cautioned against carrying over to human psychology the conclusions reached in the study of lower animals, since the organization of behavior, not the comparability of particular responses, is the central issue.
Jerrold Katz, a professor of humanities working in the area of linguistic theory, philosophy of language, and semantics, held that the capacity for structuralization of sentences so that understanding is made possible by the composite functioning of their parts is categorically present in the human mental apparatus.
Jonas Langer, a professor of psychology, sketched the role of symbolization in cognitive development. The ontogenesis of symbolic activity, he stated, is necessary for the transformation of sensorimotor, practical logic into the first forms of intuitive logic. Symbolization is central to the construction of the concrete, actual, and conventional cognition of the physical and social environment of the human being between the ages of two and eleven; it is less important, perhaps disruptive, to formal logical reason