Threshold values mark the emergence of new
sign processes. As we have seen, practical experiences through
which humans continuously ascertain their reality are affected by
the scale at which they take place. Immediate tasks, such as
those characteristic of direct forms of work, do not require a
division into smaller tasks, a decomposition into smaller
actions. The more complex the task, the more obvious the need to
divide it. But it is not until the scale characteristic of our
age is reached that decomposition becomes as critical as it now
is. In industrial society, and in every civilization prior to it,
the relation between the whole (task, goal, plan) and the parts
(subtasks, partial goals, successive plans) is within the range
of the human's ability to handle it. Labor division is a powerful
mechanism for a divide and conquer strategy applied to tasks of
growing complexity. The generation of choices, and the ability
to compensate for the limited nature of resources as these
affect the equation of population growth, integrate this rule of
decomposition.
Literacy, itself a practical experience of not negligible
complexity, helps as long as the depth of the division into
smaller parts, and the breadth of the integrative travail do not
go beyond litercy's own complexity. When this happens, it is
obvious that even if means belonging to literacy were effective
in managing very deep hierarchies in order to allow for
re-integration of the parts in the desired whole, the management
of such means would itself go beyond the complexity we are able
to cope with.
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