First, to be sure what everyone means in this discussion, we'll review the discussion of "meaning" from the previous discussion, to make sure that we're all on the same page about foundational things:
Meaning has multiple aspects, including:
- the ideas we have about the universe around us, and the feelings and reactions those ideas draw out of us;
- the words, or terms, that we use to talk about those ideas; and
- the material physical things in the universe that those ideas and words refer to.
Since all of these aspects interact with and influence each other, we can model them as a triangle, with the three connected corners representing concepts/ideas, words/terms, and material physical referents.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Looking at the relationships among components of the Semantic Triangle, it is easy to see how referents can influence concepts: for example, Wilma--a sun bear at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, who no one suspected was positively riddled with tumors, but who held on just long enough to wean her twin cubs onto solid food before suddenly dying from the cancer--is a real-life referent whose fortitude while suffering reinforces the concept of "bear as good mother".
Sometimes the referent’s behavior, in addition to influencing concepts associated with a term, can actually influence the chosen or constructed term itself: the Russian for bear, медведь (pronounced "myed-vyed"), comes from the linguistic roots for "honey-eater" (our word "mead" for honey wine, comes from the same root as "мед").
And, like in the English term "bruin" ("the brown one"), it's also an example of intentional misdirection, and an indication of the beliefs behind it--bears can be scary, especially way back in history at the time when we were first deciding on words to describe the world around us.
To the people who came up with these terms, it may well have seemed safer to use taboo avoidance, just to be sure. Taboo avoidance means, in this case, a kind of magical thinking where it seems more prudent to refer to bears by euphemistic terms like "honey-eater (Russian)", "honey-paw (mesikämmen: Finnish)", or "the brown one (English)", rather than to get this scary animal's attention by outright saying "bear" in one of those languages, and running the risk of summoning angry supernatural bears down upon the speaker.
It’s not immediately obvious how influence flows the other way—that is, how concepts and terms can affect real-world referents—but a little thinking about it provides some examples. If someone thinks of bears as dangerous predators, they may lobby for laws allowing bear hunts, with real consequences to the referent bears themselves. However, assigning the term "endangered species" puts bears under particular legal protections, which could prevent their being hunted, saving the lives of actual bears.
So words, concepts, and real material physical referents all influence each other in the meaning we make of this universe around us.
And that meaning that we make, and decisions based on that meaning, influence where in massage practice space we find ourselves.
Now, with those aspects of meaning in mind, the question is:
Since we are using the same term--fascia--and since we have such different concepts around that term, what does the material physical referent tell us that may help clarify the confusion?
Hold that thought; we'll get right back to it...
Let's digress into intellectual property topics for a moment, in order to make sure that we are all crystal-clear on what I am doing here.
I would not want to give the appearance of impropriety by appearing to steal or plagiarize Gil Hedley's intellectual property, so I will explain why and how I am using it here, and how my usage falls under a recognized legal principle called "fair use".
Hedley has a number of photographs of his work on his Web site. As the owner of those photographs, he owns the "copyrights" to them--the rights to determine how those photographs can be used, and who can make use of them.
Wikipedia explains how, in the United States, the principle of copyright traces back to the Constitution of the United States:
The Copyright Clause of the United States Constitution (1787) authorized copyright legislation: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." That is, by guaranteeing them a period of time in which they alone could profit from their works, they would be enabled and encouraged to invest the time required to create them, and this would be good for society as a whole. A right to profit from the work has been the philosophical underpinning for much legislation extending the duration of copyright, to the life of the creator and beyond, to his heirs.--Wikipedia: "Copyright" accessed 11 August 2012
Although a large body of case law extending and refining the general principle has been built up over the centuries, the fundamental principle that Hedley owns the rights to his works and that he alone can decide who uses them and how they are used, almost without exception, goes back (in America, at least) to the US Constitution.
The major exception is called "fair use". As Wikipedia explains it,
Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship. It provides for the legal, unlicensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test.--Wikipedia: "Fair Use" accessed 11 August 2012
At his site, Hedley states his intellectual property stance and exercises his right to copyright over the images contained there:
All images from The Integral Anatomy Series are copyrighted by Gil Hedley, and may be used only with my expressed written permission.--Gil Hedley Gallery Anatomy Stock Cadaver Photos accessed 11 August 2012
To avoid the appearance of impropriety, and to avert any mistakes someone else might make in good faith--like assuming that, since I used this photo from Gil's site, that it's ok for you to do so to promote your practice or products as well--I'll state explicitly that my limited use of one photograph falls under the fair use exemption to copyright, and so I do not need to secure Hedley's position to use it.
I'm using one photo from his page here for the purposes of commentary, criticism, research, teaching, and scholarship, which makes it noncommercial and fair use.
By publishing his work in print, selling his classes as anatomical science, posting claims on the Internet, and otherwise participating in the marketplace of ideas, he has opened up those ideas to examination and review in the best academic tradition. This is my examination and review of those ideas he is asserting.
If, on the other hand, you want to use his photographs for marketing or other commercial purposes, you absolutely do need to get his express written permission to do so. He's made that perfectly clear on his website, and he has tons of case law on his side to reinforce his right.
Now that we're all clear on the IP issues involved here, let's get back to the main topic of meaning, and what it tells us in this discussion of superficial fascia.
We left off at the question:
Since we are using the same term--fascia--and since we have such different concepts around that term, what does the material physical referent tell us that may help clarify the confusion?
I think that Hedley and I are referring to the same thing when we say "superficial fascia", and that one of the problems in discussing this issue is that Jacobs means something entirely different by it.
According to Hedley's site, this is what he means by "superficial fascia":
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Source: http://www.gilhedley.com/ghgallery.php#1 accessed 11 August 2012
and that is consistent with what I am referring to as well.
Because Jacobs and I were both using the term "superficial fascia", I assumed we were referring to the same material physical referent, and because I assumed wrongly, I was kind of stuck on why the discussion had stalled at that point.
She resolves that problem, and gets us unstuck, when she notices:
I had noidea that "fascia" meant, or was synonymous with, anything other than some sort of gluey stuff extruded from sparsely located cells, barely metabolically active except for cranking out vast amounts of sticky molecules, a trick that comes in handy in a heterogenous organism which has some parts hugely expensive to maintain (e.g. nervous system, only 2% of the body but requiring 20% of all the fuel), important for keeping an organism from falling apart, and for giving its more active contractile elements a place to anchor.
My idea of superficial fascia was that it was that fine filamentous spider-webby areolar stuff adhering the hypodermis on to the outside of the body, and to the dense fascia that overlies it. I confess, it was my conjecture, based on what I think is logical.
Ok, one problem solved--we simply weren't talking about the same thing when we used the term "superficial fascia".
On that level, the communication problem's solved now.
But on another level, we've just opened a whole other major can of worms, one that will take a lot of time and patience to examine.
Why did we have such wildly different understandings of what the term meant? That is a HUGE question.
She writes:
Now here is Gray's, saying it means hypodermis. Something is definitely wrong on the internet. Something might be seriously wrong in anatomy!
It seems to me Gray's is calling all animals in this layer cows, instead of just some animals. I look at this with jaw resting on floor. I really do think it amounts to a taxonomic error on the part of anatomists. I'm calling them on it, right here.
...
The world of manual therapy is like a spaceship. And I feel like I just discovered the conceptual hole in the hull.
Because of this one single factual misnomer, countless generations of manual therapists have been sucked out into space, have had their minds snapped shut while simultaneously being made to contemplate the bogus idea that they have magical hands that can somehow overcome the logical purpose of fascia, which is to keep the body from coming apart, all because of a careless slip of taxonomic nomenclature stemming from the dissection habit anatomists have of slicing this blubber layer right off so as to get to viscera etc., useless and hindering as it is in a cadaver specimen, not investigating it from the perspective of how it might respond in a living human when touched from the outside, say by a manual therapist, who clearly cannot get his or her hands past the barrier of the heavily innervated outer dermis (not without introducing infection, at least), or past reflexive motor guarding by spinal cord function via autonomic and somatic motor efferent, and visceral afferent neurons. And it has been replicated, as a meme, as an error, by anatomists, apparently with high fidelity.So, based on this careless anatomical overlook, manual therapists have been taught, carefully, in a stepwise, apparently anatomically acceptable but logically impossible Argument from Authority, a tissue-based myth that they can manually impact "superficial fascia", from the outside in!
I do not disagree with her--in resolving why we could have such wildly different understandings, we are going to get at the heart of a major and thriving research problem, one that has not been solved, but is still ongoing.
We have a lot of work to do in upcoming posts, but I think you will find that work to be very rich, rewarding, and--no pun intended**--full of meaning.
** Oh, who do I think I'm kidding? I totally intended that pun.