unt together. Understanding one another means that
objects, including sounds, have the same value for both with respect to
carrying on a common pursuit.

After sounds have got meaning through connection with other things
employed in a joint undertaking, they can be used in connection with
other like sounds to develop new meanings, precisely as the things for
which they stand are combined. Thus the words in which a child
learns about, say, the Greek helmet originally got a meaning (or were
understood) by use in an action having a common interest and end. They
now arouse a new meaning by inciting the one who hears or reads to
rehearse imaginatively the activities in which the helmet has its use.
For the time being, the one who understands the words "Greek helmet"
becomes mentally a partner with those who used the helmet. He engages,
through his imagination, in a shared activity. It is not easy to get
the full meaning of words. Most persons probably stop with the idea that
"helmet" denotes a queer kind of headgear a people called the Greeks
once wore. We conclude, accordingly, that the use of language to convey
and acquire ideas is an extension and refinement of the principle
that things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint
action; in no sense does it contravene that principle. When words do
not enter as factors into a shared situation, either overtly or
imaginatively, they operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having
a meaning or intellectual value. They set activity running in a given
groove, but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning.
Thus, for example, the plus sign may be a stimulus to perform the act of
writing one number under another and adding the numbers, but the person
performing the act will operate much as an automaton would unless he
realizes the meaning of what he does.

3. The Social Medium as Educative. Our net result thus far is that
social environment forms the mental and emotional disposition of
behavior in individuals by engaging them in activities that arouse
and strengthen certain impulses, that have certain purposes and entail
certain consequences. A child growing up in a family of musicians will
inevitably have whatever capacities he has in music stimulated, and,
relatively, stimulated more than other impulses which might have been
awakened in another environment. Save as he takes an interest in music
and gains a certain competency in it, he is "out of it";