Bloomsbury Semiotics Volume 1: History and Semiosis 9781350139282, 9781350139312, 9781350139305

Citation preview

i

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS VOLUME 1

Bloomsbury Semiotics General Editor: Jamin Pelkey Volume 1: History and Semiosis Edited by Jamin Pelkey Volume 2: Semiotics in the Natural and Technical Sciences Edited by Jamin Pelkey and Stéphanie Walsh Matthews Volume 3: Semiotics in the Arts and Social Sciences Edited by Jamin Pelkey, Susan Petrilli and Sophia Melanson Ricciardone Volume 4: Semiotic Movements Edited by Jamin Pelkey and Paul Cobley

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS

HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS VOLUME 1

Edited by Jamin Pelkey

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2022 Jamin Pelkey has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Tjaša Krivec Cover illustration by Rebecca Heselton All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-3928-2 ePDF: 978-1-3501-3930-5 eBook: 978-1-3501-3929-9 Set: 978-1-3501-3944-2 Series: Bloomsbury Semiotics Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

L ist

of

F igures 

vii

L ist

of

T ables 

ix

L ist

of

C ontributors 

A cknowledgements  L ist

of

A bbreviations 

Introduction

x xv xvi 1

Jamin Pelkey

1 Global Semiotics

17

Paul Cobley 2 Premodern Semiotics Martin Švantner and Michal Karľa

39

3 Early Modern Semiotics Michal Karľa and Tuuli Pern

69

4 Pragmatist Semiotics Winfried Nöth

91

5 Post/structuralist Semiotics Massimo Leone

109

6 Reality and Semiosis Marc Champagne

129

7 Evolution and Semiosis Alexei A. Sharov and Kalevi Kull

149

8 Consciousness and Semiosis Jordan Zlatev and Piotr Konderak

169

9 Iconicity and Semiosis Göran Sonesson

193

10 Opposition and Semiosis Marcel Danesi

215

11 Habit and Semiosis Donna E. West

241

vi

CONTENTS

12 Ideology and Semiosis Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio

259

13 Classifying Signs Priscila Borges

285

14 Applying Signs W. John Coletta and Didier Tsala Effa

307

I ndex 

336

LIST OF FIGURES

  6.1 Visual stimulus

139

  7.1 Two channels of heredity in evolution: informational and agential. Information channel includes transfer of genes and some epigenetic units across generations

154

  7.2 Epigenetic landscape

155

  7.3 Sign relations that participate in evolutionary adaptations

157

  7.4 Formation of species boundaries as a result of constraints in biparental communication (in a population of biparental reproduction without additional factors)

162

  8.1 The reciprocal (though asymmetric) relation between subject and world, and the dual nature of this relation as consciousness/intentionality and semiosis

171

  8.2 The SH-framework as an evolutionary and implicational hierarchy

172

  8.3 The dialectics of spontaneity (S1) and sedimentation (S2), as orthogonal to the layers of the SH-framework

177

  9.1 A droodle and a picture which can be read as a droodle

203

10.1 The semiotic square

223

10.2 Peircean model of the sign

230

13.1 The Signtree model of the system of three classes of signs

288

13.2 The Signtree model of the system of six classes of signs

289

13.3 The Signtree model of the system of ten classes of signs

293

13.4 The Signtree model of the system of twenty-eight classes of signs

297

13.5 The Signtree model of the system of sixty-six classes of signs

302

14.1 Three-fold sign function

312

14.2 Understanding and naming Peircean sign types

322

viii

LIST OF FIGURES

14.3 Theoretical model of the generative approach

325

14.4 Fouquier’s model of the message

326

14.5 The marketing diagram of the narrative scheme

329

LIST OF TABLES

  8.1 Kinds of meaning, in correspondence with different kinds of subject and world

172

  8.2 The five levels of interlinked consciousness-semiosis in the (current version of the) Semiotic Hierarchy

178

  9.1 The cross-classification of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness

200

10.1 The polarity-gradience framework

219

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Priscila Borges is Full Professor in the Department of Audiovisual and Advertising and in the Postgraduate Programme in Metaphysics at the University of Brasília, Brazil. She has a PhD and an MA in Communication Studies and Semiotics at the Catholic University of Sao Paulo (PUC-SP). She is also researcher and executive director of the International Center for Peirce Studies at PUC-SP, researcher of the Brazilian Peircean Semiotics Research Network and board member of the Semiotic Society of America (SSA). Her research interests include Peirce’s semiotics, especially the system of sixtysix sign classes, and his philosophy, and its applications to visual language and models, diagrams and semiotics of the media. Marc Champagne is Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU), Canada. Before coming to KPU, he taught at Trent University and was an adjunct researcher for the Canada Research Chair in the Theory of Knowledge. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from York University and a PhD in Semiotics from the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) and did his post-doctoral work at the University of Helsinki. He is the author of Consciousness and the Philosophy of Signs (2018) and has published in major semiotics journals like The American Journal of Semiotics; Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici; Cognitive Semiotics; Chinese Semiotic Studies; Sign Systems Studies; Semiotica; and Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry. At the biannual Toward a Science of Consciousness conference, his work was the object of a symposium titled ‘Against Mindless Pragmatism’. Paul Cobley is Full Professor and Deputy Dean (Research & Knowledge Exchange) in the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries, Middlesex University, London, UK. He is the author of a number of books, including Cultural Implications of Biosemiotics (2016) and Narrative 2nd edn (2014). He is co-series editor (with Kalevi Kull) of Semiotics, Communication and Cognition (de Gruyter Mouton), co-editor (with Peter J. Schulz) of the multi-volume Handbooks of Communication Sciences (de Gruyter) and co-edits (with David Machin) the journal Social Semiotics. Among his edited volumes are The Routledge Companion to Semiotics (2009), Theories and Models of Communication (2013, with Peter J. Schulz), Semiotics and Its Masters Vol. 1 (2017, with Kristian Bankov), Realism for the 21st Century: A John Deely Reader (2009) and The Communication Theory Reader (1996). He is the 9th Thomas A. Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America, President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (elected 2014) and secretary (since 2012) of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies. W. John Coletta is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (UWSP). Coletta is a former Vice President (2009) and President (2010) of the Semiotic Society of America; he currently serves on the editorial board of The American

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

xi

Journal of Semiotics. In 2019 he was awarded the Eugene Katz Letters and Science Distinguished Faculty Award at UWSP. Coletta recently published the book Biosemiotic Literary Criticism: Genesis and Prospectus (Springer 2021, 271 pages), Volume 24 in Springer’s Biosemiotics series. Coletta publishes primarily at the intersection of Peircean semiotics and the fields of biology, physics (physiosemiotics) and linguistics. He is founder and CEO of INT3RP Inc, a consulting company specializing in marketing and branding semiotics, medical semiotics, forensic semiotics, gaming semiotics (for videogames and D&D), cognitive semiotics and AI (what Coletta calls EI, Evolutionary Intelligence. See his ‘Farming Intelligence’ initiative entitled EI-AI-O: Evolutionary Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, Online). Marcel Danesi is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology and ex-director of the Program in Semiotics at Victoria College, University of Toronto, Canada. He was editor of Semiotica from 2004 to 2019. Among his recent works are Semiotics of Emoji (2016), Memes and the Future of Popular Culture (2019), Semiotics of Love (2019) and Linguistic Relativity Today (2021). He is also a co-founder and currently co-director of the Cognitive Science Network of the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences. Michal Karl’a is Research Administrator, Researcher and Instructor at Charles University, Faculty of Humanities, in Prague, Czech Republic. His main research interests include history of semiotics (of mediaeval and early modern times) and philosophy of Charles S. Peirce (with a focus on the early development of Peirce’s metaphysics and theory of representation). Piotr Konderak is Assistant Professor in the Department of Logic and Cognitive Science at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland. His current research interests concern the role of multi-modal meaning-making in education, problems of philosophy of mind as well as cognitive semiotics. He is a co-editor (with Jordan Zlatev and Göran Sonesson) of the first anthology of papers in cognitive semiotics: Meaning, Mind and Communication: Explorations in Cognitive Semiotics (Frankfurt am Main 2016). He is the author of a monograph on cognitive semiotics: Mind, Cognition, Semiosis: Ways to Cognitive Semiotics (Lublin 2018). Kalevi Kull is Full Professor of Biosemiotics in the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu, Estonia. His research area includes biosemiotics, theoretical biology, semiotic ecology and general semiotics. He is co-series editor (with Paul Cobley) of Semiotics, Communication and Cognition (de Gruyter Mouton), Biosemiotics and Tartu Semiotics Library; he co-edits the journal Sign Systems Studies. He is the 5th Thomas A. Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America and President of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies. Massimo Leone is Full Professor (‘Professore Ordinario’) of Philosophy of Communication, Cultural Semiotics and Visual Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University of Turin, Italy, and part-time Professor of Semiotics in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Shanghai, China. He has been visiting professor at several universities in the five continents. He has single-

xii

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

authored fifteen books, edited more than fifty collective volumes and published more than 500 articles in semiotics, religious studies and visual studies. He is the winner of a 2018 ERC Consolidator Grant, the most prestigious research grant in Europe. He is editorin-chief of Lexia, the Semiotic Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Communication, University of Turin, Italy, co-editor-in-chief of Semiotica (De Gruyter) and co-editor of the book series I Saggi di Lexia (Rome: Aracne), Semiotics of Religion (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter) and Advances in Face Studies (London and New York: Routledge). Winfried Nöth, Professor of Linguistics and Semiotics as well as Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Cultural Studies, University of Kassel until 2009 and visiting professor of Humboldt University Berlin (2014–15), has been teaching Cognitive Semiotics at the Catholic University of São Paulo since 2010. His current research topics are general and applied semiotics, cognitive semiotics and Charles S. Peirce. Selected books: Handbook of Semiotics (1990, rev. German, 2000), Semiotic Theory of Learning (2018, with A. Stables, A. Olteanu, E. Pikkarainen and S. Pesce), Imagem: Comunicação, semiótica e mídia (2002) and Introdução à semiótica (2017) (with Lucia Santaella), and the editions: Origins of Semiosis (1994), Semiotics of the Media (1997) and Crisis of Representation (2003). Nöth is a former president of the German Association for Semiotics and editor of the journal TECCOGS – Revista Digital de Tecnologias Cognitivas. Jamin Pelkey is Associate Professor and Program Director in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Toronto Metropolitan University. He serves as coeditor of Semiotica, president of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics and executive board member of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association, the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies and the Semiotic Society of America. He has edited or co-edited fifteen collections in linguistics and semiotics. He is the 2017 recipient of the Mouton d’Or Award for best article in Semiotica, and his research explores semiotic dimensions of language evolution and embodied cognition, with publications in venues such as Cognitive Semiotics, Diachronica, The Journal of Literary Semantics, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, Reviews in Anthropology, Semiotica, Sign Systems Studies, Studies in Language and Symmetry. His authored books include Dialectology as Dialectic (De Gruyter, 2011) and The Semiotics of X (Bloomsbury, 2017). Tuuli Pern is a PhD researcher in the Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics at Tartu University, Estonia. Her doctoral research project ‘Giambattista Vico’s Term “Imaginative Universal” in Semiotic Theory’ focuses on the Vichian concept of imaginative thinking in relation to current semiotic understanding of the human mind. The latter is described in her writings based on Lotmanian semiotics and semiotic cultural psychology. Tuuli Pern’s publications include Raudla, T. (2008), ‘Vico and Lotman: Poetic Meaning Creation and Primary Modelling’, Sign Systems Studies, 36 (1); Pern, T. (2015), ‘Imagination in Vico and Hobbes: From Affective Sensemaking to Culture’, Culture & Psychology, 21 (2); and Pern, T. (2019), ‘Interpreting Giambattista Vico for a New Psychological Science: Towards a Semiotic Imaginative Approach’, Culture & Psychology, 25 (4). Susan Petrilli is Full Professor of Philosophy and Theory of Languages, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy, where she teaches Semiotics, Semiotics of Translation, Philosophy of Language, and Semiotics of Law and Intercultural Translation. She has authored, edited

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

xiii

and translated many books and articles, contributing to spreading the works of Thomas Sebeok, Victoria Welby, Charles Ogden, Giorgio Fano, among many others. Her recent books include Sign Studies and Semioethics (2014), The Global World and Its Manifold Faces (2016) and Signs, Language and Listening (2019). Among her edited volumes are Challenges to Living Together (2017), The Level-Headed Revolutionary (2021), Exploring the Translatability of Emotions (2022) and Intersemiotic Approaches to Emotions (2022). She is the 7th Thomas A. Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America, Fellow of the International Communicology Institute, past Vice-President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies and International Visiting Research Professor at Adelaide University, Australia. She and A. Ponzio have introduced the internationally acclaimed notion of semioethics. Augusto Ponzio is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Theory of Languages, Founder of the Doctoral Program in Teoria del linguaggio e scienze dei segni, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy. He directs the series Athanor. Semiotica, Filosofia, Arte, Letteratura (since 1990), Il segno e i suoi maestri (with C. Caputo and S. Petrilli since 2009) and Reflections on Signs and Language (with S. Petrilli since 2015). He has authored, edited and translated numerous books and articles, including by Peter of Spain, Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakhtin, Adam Schaff, Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes. His most recent works are Con Emmanuel Levinas (2019), Dizionario, Enciclopedia, Traduzione fra César Dumarsais e Umberto Eco (with S. Petrilli, 2019), Identità e alterità (with S. Petrilli, 2019), Encontros de Palavras (2019), A ligeireza da palavra (2019), Procurando uma palavra autra (2020) and Maestri di segni e costruttori di pace (with S. Petrilli, 2021). His recent festschrifts include Philosophy of Language as the Art of Listening (2007), Tutt’altro. Infunzionalità ed eccedenza (2008) and Writing, Voice, Undertaking (2013). Alexei Sharov is retired from the Staff Scientist position at the National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Health, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. He is currently employed by Elixirgen Scientific Inc. (Baltimore, USA). Since 2013 he has been serving as an editorin-chief for the journal Biosemiotics and from 2015 as an editor of the Book Series in Biosemiotics (Springer). His interests include theoretical and evolutionary biology and biosemiotics. Göran Sonesson is Professor Emeritus at the Division of cognitive semiotics, Lund University, Sweden. He holds doctorates in general linguistics from Lund and in semiotics from Paris. He has published numerous papers, both theoretical and experimental, on pictorial, cultural and cognitive semiotics, as well as on the semiotics of communication and translation and the evolutionary foundations of semiosis. Apart from anthologies, his papers have appeared in journals such as Semiotica, Cognitive Semiotics, Cognitive Development, Sign Systems Studies, Degrés, Signa, Signata, Sign and Society and Frontier of Psychology. His main book-length works are Pictorial Concepts (1989), which is a critique of the critique of iconicity, and Human Lifeworlds (2016), which is a study in cultural evolution. His new book, The Pictorial Extensions of Mind, will be published next year by de Gruyter. Martin Švantner is Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages and Literature, Faculty of Humanities, at Charles University in Prague (Programmes: Electronic Culture and Semiotics and Semiotics and Philosophy of Communication). He is also lecturer in the

xiv

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Department of Sociology (Faculty of Arts, West Bohemian University) and has worked as a researcher in the Centre for History and Philosophy of Science (Faculty of Arts, WBU) and in the Faculty of Social Sciences (Charles University). His main interests are general semiotics, history of semiotics, semiotically influenced rhetorical theory, semiotics of music, cognitive semiotics, contemporary social theory and philosophy of C. S. Peirce. Didier Tsala Effa is Full Professor of Semiotics and Communication at the Université de Limoges, France. He is the general secretary of FedRoS (Fédération Romane de Sémiotique). Consultant in strategic surveys for many brands in luxury, business and design, he taught in two great business schools in Paris, Essec Business School - ParisSingapore and ESCP Europe. His primary research focuses on everyday objects, going from domestic objects to smart ones. He published two books in customer relationship and strategic surveys with Christiane Legris-Desportes, Etudes sémios et enquêtes en entreprises (2008) and Optimiser la gestion de la relation-client (2014). His latest research on smart objects and artificial intelligence began in 2015 in cooperation with Stéphanie Walsh Matthews, with whom he co-edited a special journal issue in 2017, entitled Être avec les robots humanoïdes. From 2021, after twenty-one years as member of Centre de recherches sémiotiques, Didier Tsala Effa is a founding member of a new research centre in Université de Limoges, Laboratoire Vie-Santé, specialized on ageing and e-health. Donna West is Full Professor in the Modern Languages Department at the State University of New York, Cortland, US, and holds a PhD from Cornell University. For nearly forty years she has presented and published internationally (seventy plus articles/chapters) on Peirce’s semiotic. She currently serves on the Board of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics, as well as on several editorial boards. Her 2013 book Deictic Imaginings: Semiosis at Work and at Play investigates the ontogeny of indexical signs. Her 2016 edited volume on Peirce’s concept of habit offers a fresh, global perspective (scholars from twelve nations). She is likewise editing the ‘Mathematics and Cognition’ section for the Handbook on Cognitive Mathematics (2021) – her own contribution explores the formidable role of chunking in abductive rationality. Following the 2021 publication of two guest-edited journal issues on Peirce and consciousness (Cognitive Semiotics, Semiotica), her forthcoming book presents retrospective narratives as the scaffold towards Peirce’s retroductive logic. Jordan Zlatev is Full Professor of General Linguistics and Director of Research for the Division of Cognitive Semiotics at Lund University. He served as the first President for the Swedish Association of Language and Cognition (SALC), 2006–9, and for the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics (IACS), 2013–14. His current research focuses on polysemiotic communication and, more generally, on the nature of language in relation to other semiotic systems like gesture and depiction, as well as to consciousness. He is editor-in-chief of Public Journal of Semiotics.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Out of all the hundreds of individuals involved in this project, we owe a big thank you up front to Andrew Wardell, Senior Commissioning Editor of Linguistics at Bloomsbury from 2017–20. Without Andrew’s invitation and his ensuing vision, enthusiasm and patient support for this project, it would never have gotten off the ground; and it certainly wouldn’t have grown from a single volume ‘companion’ into a four-volume ‘major reference work’. Andrew issued the invitation for this project while still serving as Editorial Assistant to Gurdeep Mattu. Many thanks are also due to Becky Holland, Editorial Assistant to Andrew from 2018–21; to Morwenna Scott, Senior Commissioning Editor of Linguistics since 2020; and to Laura Gallon, Editorial Assistant to Morwenna since the end of 2021 – each of whom played key roles in shepherding the project along to publication against the bottomless backdrop of tragedy, uncertainty and delay that marked the Covid-19 pandemic. Additional vital support from Bloomsbury during the project’s final stages came from Production Editor, Elizabeth Holmes, and from Dharanivel Baskar, Team Lead for project management at Integra Software Services, both of whom engaged untold support from their own dedicated teams. It has been a pleasure to work with all of you: thank you once again. During the final two years of intensive work, this project benefitted financially from a number of research grants, including a 2020–21 collaborative publishing grant from the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries, Middlesex University, London (via Paul Cobley) and three grants from Toronto Metropolitan University – including a 2020–21 Faculty Research Grant from the Faculty of Arts (via Jamin Pelkey), a 2021 graduate research assistant grant from the TMU-York Graduate Program in Communication and Culture (via Stéphanie Walsh Matthews) and a 2021–22 Work Study Research Assistant Grant from the Office of the Vice President of Research and Innovation (via Jamin Pelkey). These funds paid for logistical and copy editing support involving seven student researchers: three PhD researchers (Sophia Melanson Ricciardone, Richard Rosenbaum and Jan Vykydal) and four undergraduate researchers (Sari Park, Irene Storozhuk, Leonard Pamulaklakin and Kai Maurin-Jones). Many thanks to all. Appreciation is also due to nine anonymous peer reviewers for their invaluable guidance and feedback, including a converging series of recommendations that ultimately led to the expansion of the project from one volume to four. The project also benefited from countless consultations, conversations and inspirations afforded by connections with semioticians around the world. Let us say thank you in this regard to colleagues in the Semiotic Society of America, the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics, the International Cognitive Linguistics Association, the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, and the International Association for Semiotic Studies, many of whom have played a formative role, suggesting in the process the need for additional complementary volumes of this nature to offer expanded scope, depth and range, in terms of topics, angles of coverage, and qualified participants. Semiotics, after all, is still only just getting started; and if these volumes serve the enterprise en route to its next milestone, it is thanks to everyone involved.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Guide to Critical Peirce Editions

Charles S. Peirce: Primary Sources

CD

CN

CP

EP 1

EP 2

LI

LoF

MS

Peirce, C. S. (1889–91), entries in The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, ed. W. D. Whitney, New York: Century Co. Cited as CD followed by page number. Peirce, C. S. ([1901–8] 1975–9), Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to ‘The Nation’, 3 vols, ed. K. L. Ketner and J.E. Cook, Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1979. Cited as CN followed by volume number and page number. Peirce, C. S. ([1866–1913] 1931–58), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols 1–6, C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds), vols 7–8, A. Burks (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cited as CP, followed by volume number and section number. Peirce, C. S. ([1867–93] 1992), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, ed. N. Houser and C. Kloesel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP 1, followed by page number. Peirce, C. S. ([1893–1913] 1998), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, ed. Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP 2, followed by page number. Peirce, C. S. ([1891–1910] 2009), The Logic of Interdisciplinarity: The Monist Series, ed. E. Bisanz, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Cited as LI followed by page number. Peirce, C. S. ([1895–1910] 2019–21), Logic of the Future: Writings on Existential Graphs, ed. A.-V. Pietarinen, vol. 1: History and Applications; vol. 2/1: The Logical Tracts; vol. 2/2: The 1903 Lowell Lectures; vol. 3/1: Pragmaticism; vol. 3/2: Correspondence, Berlin: De Gruyter. Cited as LoF followed by volume number and page number. Peirce, C. S. ([1857–1914] 1787–1951), The Charles S. Peirce Papers Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Am 1632. Individual papers are referenced by manuscript number in R. Robin (ed.), Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967, and in Robin (1971), ‘The Peirce Papers: A Supplementary Catalogue’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 7: 37–57. Cited as MS, followed by manuscript number and page number.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

xvii



 ote: Houghton Library catalog available online: https://hollisarchives.lib. N harvard.edu/repositories/24/resources/6437.



 any of Peirce’s papers and letters are available in the Microfilm Edition, M Harvard University Library, 38 Reels (1966–70). Digital images of the microfilm, in the Robin catalog number sequence, are also available online:



https://rs.cms.hu-berlin.de/peircearchive/pages/home.php.

NEM Peirce, C. S. ([1866–1913] 1976), The New Elements of Mathematics, 4 vols, ed. C. Eisele, The Hague: Mouton Press. Cited as NEM, followed by volume number and page number. PoM Peirce, C. S. ([1888–1908] 2010), Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Writings, ed. M. E. Moore, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as PoM. PPM Peirce, C. S. ([1903] 1997), Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard Lectures, ed. P. Turrisi, New York: SUNY Press. Cited as PPM, followed by page number. SS Peirce, C. S. and V. L. Welby ([1903–11] 1977), Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, ed. C. Hardwick and J. Cook, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as SS, followed by page number. SWS Peirce, C. S. ([1894–1912] 2020), Selected Writings on Semiotics, 1894–1912, ed. F. Bellucci, Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Cited as SWS followed by page number. W Peirce, C. S. ([1857–92] 1982–2010), Writings of Charles S. Peirce, 7 vols (1–6, 8), ed. Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as W, followed by volume number and page number.

xviii



1

Introduction Signs of Meaning in the Disciplines JAMIN PELKEY

We are immersed in signs. Semioticians suggest that a sign can be anything, however concrete or abstract, that evokes something else, whether virtual or actual, towards some end or purpose, however vivid or vague, immediate or distant. This four-volume set is itself a sign: a sign of the times, a sign of collaboration, maybe even a sign of hope. After all, as other semioticians suggest, a sign is also ‘anything that can be used to change the relevance of past to present via some prospective future’ (Deely 2009: 142). So, just like any other sign, from the taste of ginger to the sight of storm clouds to the sound of cathedral bells, this four-volume project is a tangle of things past, things present and things to come. It is an attempt to inspire broader and deeper engagement with semiotics – the systematic study of signs and meaning – by modelling the current state-of-the-art in semiotic thinking across the disciplines, developing the implications of historical work and recent advances, identifying open questions and defining ongoing research priorities in the process. All signs belong to sign systems that are involved in relationships of memory, experience and expectation; as a result, sign meanings, like sign relations, are always in process – always becoming or evolving. This process is known as ‘semiosis’ – a key theme in the first volume of this four-volume set. Entitled History and Semiosis, this volume offers a general and historical orientation to semiotic traditions and their methodologies, followed by an in-depth overview or sampling of critical issues in the study of sign systems and semiosis. First it will be helpful to situate the volume, along with its three sister volumes, in the broader context of the project itself.

PROJECT ORIGINS AND AIMS The Bloomsbury Semiotics project began as a vision for a new one-volume ‘Companion to Semiotics’ at the invitation of Bloomsbury Academic in 2017. The project progressed to formal proposal stage in the latter half of 2018, by which time its focus was already trained on the status and influence of semiotics in the disciplines. The full project proposal went out to Bloomsbury in February 2019 along with abstracts from fifty or so contributing authors. By spring 2019, the project was not only approved but upgraded to a four-volume major reference set following the unanimous recommendations of eight blind peer reviewers and the Bloomsbury board of directors, who also recommended that additional chapters be added and co-editors be signed on to support the endeavour.

2

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Susan Petrilli, Paul Cobley and Stéphanie Walsh Matthews kindly agreed to this end, and they were joined by Sophia Melanson Ricciardone some fifteen months later. Meanwhile, the publisher went on to issue contracts for the four-volume set in September 2019, six months prior to the beginning of the Covid-19 global pandemic. The seventy-six authors whose work now appears in these four volumes represent sixty-two institutions located in twenty-three countries around the world. These contributors also represent a wide array of discipline-specific methodology, knowledge and theory. Most are employed by academic institutions, but many project authors are also professional practitioners. Chapters are written, variously, by a licensed lawyer, a medical doctor, a clinical psychotherapist, an archaeologist, an architect, a neuroscientist, a computer scientist, a dance instructor, a marketing consultant, a font designer, a lab biologist, several field biologists, graphic designers, artists, poets, composers and musicians – all of whom are writing alongside linguists, historians, philosophers, literary theorists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, cognitive scientists and others. This is fertile ground for cross-disciplinary dialogue, which readers are encouraged to join and help cultivate. In a recent worldwide survey of semioticians, probing the main challenges facing the contemporary study of signs and meaning, Kalevi Kull and Ekaterina Velmezova (2014) identify the top three needs as follows: 1. A more adequate definition of goals and self-description. 2. A reorientation toward relationships with other disciplines. 3. A more adequate response to the pressing needs of the contemporary world. This project is designed to address each of these challenges, with an overt focus on the second. By reorienting semiotics towards its relationships with the disciplines in general (including traditional and emergent disciplines alike), we propose that semiotics will naturally find a more adequate definition of goals and self-description, along with a more adequate platform for responding to the pressing needs of the contemporary world. Arguably the most pressing need that semiotic thinking is poised to respond to can be summed up as the loss of meaning, due to the compounding effects of modernity: diversity loss, alienation, fragmentation, mechanization, instrumentalism, erosion of historical consciousness, devaluation of imagination, ideological entrenchment, systematic oppression of the disenfranchised and the like. Since these effects are at work not only in daily life but also throughout the academic disciplines, semiotic perspectives are needed within (and between) the disciplines. I return to this point below. For now, it will suffice to consider the broad outline of the project from this general perspective.

Project outline and niche Following fourteen chapters of critical and historical contextualization in Volume 1 (which I preview in more detail in the final section of this introductory chapter), Volume 2 presents Semiotics in the Natural and Technical Sciences to highlight semiotic perspectives that are emerging in a wide range of fields affiliated with the so-called ‘STEM’ disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) – from biology and ecology to neuroscience and computer science – as well as in related technical disciplines such as economics, legal studies, architecture and design. Volume 3 then shifts focus to Semiotics in the Arts and Social Sciences to identify semiotic contributions to disciplines much more deeply and self-consciously enmeshed in questions of human potential and human

INTRODUCTION

3

predicaments: from philosophy and anthropology to history and sociology, from poetics and literature to music and dance. Volume 4 then presents a wide range of contemporary Semiotic Movements, or approaches, that parallel the age-old semiotic enterprise in various ways – often without recognizing the relationship. Emergent movements ranging from cognitive science, systems theory and cognitive linguistics to media/culture studies, hermeneutics and translation studies share many aims in common with semiotics. This is especially notable in their domain-general applications of theory, their preference for mixed methodologies, their openness to blending insights across disciplines and their generally meaning-oriented approaches. These fields are identified as ‘movements’ in Volume 4 instead of ‘disciplines’ not only due to their inherently cross-disciplinary nature but also because of their often nascent or protean status – not having yet become deeply ensconced in the academy or long being housed within more traditional fields where they coexist as outliers in various degrees of tension with more established disciplinary perspectives. The point of the concluding volume is to better identify shared goals and complementary approaches that enable semiotics proper to learn from allied movements and vice versa. As cover art design elements suggest, in terms of both pattern and colour, the middle two volumes of the project form an embedded set of their own. These two volumes are the proverbial heart and soul of the collection since both are directly geared towards the exploration of the current semiotic state-of-the-art in an array of institutionalized disciplines themselves, with a focus on methodology, problems and progress – while also identifying current gaps and future research priorities. The ultimate goal is to demonstrate the overarching relevance of semiotic approaches to human inquiry in general and to issue a welcome for broad-scale participation in semiotic inquiry across the disciplines, whether academic or applied. The project endeavours to do so with broadness of scope, clarity of focus and systematic chapter-internal organization. Chapters in the central two volumes (Volumes 2 and 3) are structured to facilitate this task by working in tandem with each other structurally. Each chapter1 in these two volumes is designed to cover a parallel set of prescribed topics (though headings and ordering may vary): 1. Introduction: A brief orientation to the field and the chapter in question for the non-specialist. 2. History: A brief history of semiotics in the field, citing and synthesizing influential sources. 3. Methodologies: Semiotic methods relevant for the field citing resources to guide practitioners. 4. State-of-the-art: A summary of the current status of semiotic insight in the field. 5. Priorities: A description of major questions, gaps, problems and priorities for semiotics in the field. 6. Conclusion: A brief summary of main points and takeaways from the chapter. By focusing on the status and progress of semiotics in the established disciplines, and related movements, Bloomsbury Semiotics attempts to fill a unique niche in a broader ecosystem of reference resources on semiotics. In spite of pressures to the contrary, then, this reference set is not created in order to compete with related collections. Readers looking for a bigpicture, historical/philosophical survey of semiotics in a single volume should turn first to Paul Cobley’s (2010) excellent Routledge Companion to Semiotics. Readers looking for a

4

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

more eclectic, broad-ranging series of essays on semiotic applications and approaches may wish to turn to Peter Trifonas’s (2015) International Handbook of Semiotics for further context. Other related resources include the four-volume De Gruyter series Semiotik/ Semiotics (Posner et al. 1998), which catalogues wide-ranging applications of semiotic theory along with the emergence of semiotic research on the global stage across the latter half of the twentieth century. A range of encyclopaedic reference resources are also of note for those who wish to access quick reference definitions of key concepts in semiotics with recommended readings. Important resources in this vein include those produced by Winfried Nöth (1990), Paul Bouissac (1998) and Sebeok and Danesi (2010). To provide a better orientation to the unique niche that this project fills, I now turn to several additional layers of context to round out the project introduction: a brief discussion of key concepts and historical issues related to semiotics and the study of ‘meaning’; a historical discussion of semiotics’ supposed role relative to the sciences; a summary of standing challenges facing semiotics, many of which are identified by authors throughout this collection, along with an upper-level summary of advances and openings for fortifying and advancing semiotic research. The introduction then closes with an overview of chapters in the first volume: History and Semiosis.

SEMIOTICS AND THE STUDY OF ‘MEANING’ What would a meaning-centred approach to any given field look like? Many consider the study of meaning to be the narrow purview of linguistics and philosophy, where it is often discussed in terms of ‘semantics’ and ‘pragmatics’: i.e. the study of word meanings, sentence meanings and the contextual meanings that inform linguistic utterances and texts. To be sure, these are important aspects of the study of meaning that apply wherever linguistic communication is necessary, but issues of sense-making and meaning construal range far beyond the study of semantics and pragmatics. The nature of meaning is notoriously difficult to pin down. Some even argue that it is among the most difficult problems in the world (Brandt 2020). Ogden and Richards (1923) famously identify twenty-three senses of the term in English, many of which range far beyond the narrow interests of linguistic theory and language philosophy. In fact, most of what we associate with ‘meaning’ has little to do with truth conditional semantics or intellectual cogitation at all, as Nathan Houser (2020) demonstrates in a recent analysis of C. S. Peirce’s ‘non-intellectual signs’. Houser points out not only that such sign processes make up more than two-thirds of Peirce’s sixty-six classes of signs but also that signs in these classes ‘drive perception and dominate the often unconscious mental operations that support and enrich day-to-day life’ (2020: 95); moreover, this is also the realm of semiosis where memes flourish, where emoji function, and where propaganda first strikes a chord. This is the semiotic sphere where communal feeling can be engendered, but it is also the sphere of mob psychology. (Houser 2020: 95) In short, the broader palette of meaning-oriented issues includes many urgent aspects of daily life that tend to be neglected in approaches to meaning favoured by linguists and philosophers of language: aspects such as desire, purpose, attention, awareness, interpretation, understanding, empathy, imagination, movement, memory, bodily experience, feeling, aesthetics, mystery, wonder, awe, enchantment, resonance, harmony,

INTRODUCTION

5

wellbeing, belonging, integration, interconnectedness, cohesion, wholeness, growth, modelling, system building, illusion, ideology, despair, doubt, humour, the search, inquiry, humility, wisdom, self-control, caring, mattering, making a difference, freedom, justice and the like. All such phenomena would be involved in the study of meaning writ large, alongside more traditional pursuits familiar to the study of semantics and pragmatics. This requires a more comprehensive, domain-general approach focused on sign relations and semiosis, and that approach is semiotics. For these and related reasons, many contemporary approaches to semiotics, such as biosemiotics and cognitive semiotics, have begun to reclaim the study of ‘meaning’ as a modus operandi. Three titles that illustrate this well are Jesper Hoffmeyer’s (1996) Signs of Meaning in the Universe, Per Aage Brandt’s (2020) Cognitive Semiotics: Signs, Mind, and Meaning and Massimo Leone’s (2020) On Insignificance: The Loss of Meaning in the Post-material Age. As Leone makes clear, the overt return to issues of meaning in contemporary semiotics can also be understood as a response to socially and globally general issues that have precipitated the loss of meaning in contemporary life. Crises of meaning in modernity, and ‘postmodernity’ (or hyper-modernity), are no less complex than meaning itself. These crises are detailed across the literature, implicating factors as diverse as the numbing effects of rapid technological revolutions (McLuhan 1964), the deterioration of worldview leading to schismogenesis (Berman 1981), identity crises of narcissism and instrumentalism (Taylor 1991), alienation-induced proliferation of psychological maladies (Kristeva 1995), globalization of international politics (Laidi 2005), conceptual disparagement of bodily feeling and aesthetics (Johnson 2007), impoverished philosophies of education (Kronman 2007), the search for a moral compass (Gardner 2011), cultural disorientation (Blocker 2012), computerized lifestyles (Kockelman 2017), the rise of mass misinformation and fake news (Polidoro 2018), the loss of work that matters (Graeber 2018), socio-neurological shifts favouring manipulation over understanding (McGilchrist 2019), the consequences of postmateriality (Leone 2020), among many others. We need more careful attention to what has been lost, how it has happened and how it might be regained, but to understand the loss of meaning, it is necessary to understand the nature of meaning (see Polayni and Prosch 2008: 83). And the nature of meaning will not yield its secrets without the careful study of signs, sign systems and semiosis. Since signs and sign systems are always in process, semiosis ‘transpires at the boundary of what is and what might be or might have been, flourishing above all in the growth of inquiry as the food of human understanding’ (Deely 2001: 738). This is why a semiotic approach considers the virtual to be on equal footing with the actual. Virtual relations are recognized as necessary for making any progress towards understanding the truth about things. Semiotics is also undertaken as a kind of ‘metasemiosis’: i.e. human understanding in pursuit of understanding the nature of understanding. But, according to Deely, this pursuit is undertaken ‘neither simply to interpret the world nor simply to change it, but to change it on the basis of interpretations which find their measure in a constant and ongoing inquiry into “how things are” which is not systematically subordinated to ideology of any kind’ (Deely 2009: 119). A meaning-centred, semiotic approach to any given field, then, would relinquish illusions of certainty in favour of open inquiry; the desire for control over others or over the world would be replaced by a general desire to better understand relationships between things through self-controlled inquiry; and the impulse to follow fashionable trends would be replaced by a shared distant goal for the reintegration of all fragmented

6

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

domains and experiences of existence – from the arts and the sciences, to natural and cultural spheres, to individual and social existences – nurturing and enhancing diversity in the process.

A UNIFIED SCIENCE? CHALLENGES, ADVANCES, OPENINGS The drive to consolidate knowledge and unify understanding between fields and disciplines has been part of the broader semiotics enterprise since at least the 1930s as the ideas of Saussure and Peirce began to take root. Charles Morris (1938) was the first to follow up on Peirce’s attempts to cultivate a ‘science of signs’ (Peirce 1908: CP 8.343) by proposing an ambitious ‘meta-science’ project premised on the development and application of semiotics as ‘a step in the unification of science’ (Morris 1938: 2; see also Anderson et al. 1984). Roman Jakobson’s development of Saussure’s (1916 [1955]) structuralist linguistics during the same period led him to the pursuit of language universals, which played a decisive role in shifting Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology-oriented applications of structuralist semiology towards the parallel discovery of cultural universals from the 1940s onwards (e.g. 1955). Ensuing developments in the latter half of the twentieth century intensified these efforts, often problematizing them in the process, to create new generative approaches, critical approaches, interpretive approaches, cognitive approaches, biological approaches and others, with extensions and applications branching out to incorporate more and more disciplines and modalities of experience and inquiry. This led to a highly popular, optimistic period of development during the 1970s and 1980s, lasting well into the 1990s, that Thomas Sebeok summed up as ‘global semiotics’ (2001, see also Cobley, vol. 1). The development of semiotics in this period grew just as much from the ideas of Saussure (through the likes of Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes and A. J. Greimas) as from the ideas of Peirce (through the likes of Thomas Sebeok, John Deely and René Thom). Other thinkers, such as Roman Jakobson and Umberto Eco, managed to blend ideas from both Peircean and Saussurean streams to contribute to the development of a general semiotic. All such influences continue to motivate the worldwide semiotics enterprise, but ambitions have become more sober-minded since the turn of the twenty-first century. Grand visions and expectations have shifted to favour longer-term trajectories, and the very possibility of sustainable conditions for the ongoing development (much less flourishing) of semiotics remains an open question. The reasons for this are manifold, but no mystery. Some cite complex ideological and political resistance to semiotics (e.g. Houser 2013). Others wish to delegitimize the development of semiotics outside specific disciplines, such as philosophy (e.g. Short 2007: ix). Others cite a perceived lack of clarity in writings on semiotics (Black 1949: 203, Olds 2000: 499).2 Others note a sour taste left by decades of self-aggrandizement and excess that punctuated semiotics’ heyday (see Andersch in vol. 2; Leone in vol. 3). Still others suggest the need for patient cultivation behind the scenes regardless. In the last decade of his life, John Deely came to think of the coming century of semiotic development as an inevitable period of long gestation rather than rapid expansion. In dedicating one of his final books to ‘the semioticians of the 22nd century’ (Deely 2010), he signalled his growing conviction that three or more additional generations of scholars will pass before semiotics ‘catches on’ in university culture and public discourses.

INTRODUCTION

7

But perhaps the main sustainability challenge that semiotics faces in academic institutions is directly tied to its most promising potential. After all, how can an approach that is premised on bringing together diverse disciplines actually survive without a disciplinary home of its own? Although courses in semiotics have spread far and wide over the past fifty years, departments and programmes in semiotics are still rare indeed; and this is no surprise since semioticians have often presented semiotics as an umbrella domain or big tent for all disciplines. Some authors in this project (see esp. Kull and Favreau in vol. 2; Leone in vol. 3) suggest that semiotics might function better, in terms of institutional legitimacy and support, as a series of recognized sub-branches within specific disciplines instead. Semioticians in such positions would work to support and enrich the field in question with semiotic perspectives while simultaneously collaborating with semioticians from other fields around the world to continue developing semiotic theory and methodology broadly conceived (drawing on disciplinary expertise in the process). This more symbiotic approach would require a shift from marginalized critique of the disciplines to disciplinary service within the disciplines. And this four-volume collection is a promotion of that shift. Rethinking semiotics as a series of tightly knit, service-oriented sub-disciplines with a home in every field – instead of an over-mastering Ur-discipline that is estranged from any field – requires a fundamental reorientation, trading hubris for humility. And this is fitting since ‘humility is endless’, as T. S. Eliot puts it (1943), and meaning is endless too. A fallible, open approach is best suited for the study of infinite semiosis, as the authors of many chapters in these four volumes do well to illustrate. Leone insists, for example, in discussing the state-of-the-art in semiotic applications to religious studies (vol. 3), that ‘the semiotics of religion of the future will be, first of all, humble: the subject that it investigates is one of the most studied in the history of mankind’. As a result, he argues that any impulse to sweep ‘everything away (history, anthropology, psychology, theology, etc.) in order to start everything anew is presumptuous and foolish’. Instead, semioticians are first and foremost to be learners, devoted to in-depth understanding of semiotic relationships that already constitute the disciplines they serve. Elsewhere, Zlatev and Konderak model a falliblist approach to the daunting topic of semiosis and consciousness (vol. 1) by documenting various phases of the theoretical model they are proposing, clarifying ways in which earlier versions of the model have been revised, recognizing the model’s ongoing tentative status and welcoming future corrections – all of which indicate an long-term project in need of dialogue instead of an absolute dogma to be defended. Similarly, Coletta and Tsala Effa (vol. 1) work together to outline practical applications of semiotics from C. S. Peirce and A. J. Greimas – two divergent traditions  –  demonstrating in the process the importance of recognizing complementary approaches through complimentary dialogue (as discussed further in the next section). While it is often necessary for authors in this collection to select a given approach for purposes of suitability and focus, the aggregate attitude of openness and respect towards alternative perspectives that can be identified throughout this four-volume set is perhaps the clearest sign detectable that semiotics is reorienting to a more modest, service-oriented approach. The most prominent recurring example of this is the generous bridging work authors undertake to span the notorious Peircean (pragmatist) vs. Saussurean (post/ structuralist) divide between chapters. As a result, one of the clearest signals this project sends is that the days of the intractable Peirce vs. Saussure rift are over. In stark contrast to Parret’s observation during semiotics’ heyday that these two ‘orientations apparently ignore each other and manifest reciprocal distrust’ (1984: 220, quoted in Nöth, vol. 1),

8

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

most chapters in these four volumes assume instead that the two traditions need each other and then go on to traverse between them with ease, creating dialogues, blending insights and noting hopeful areas for further integration. The importance and promise of this shift would be difficult to overstate.3 To better appreciate this point, though, it is necessary to turn to issues in the history of semiotics and the study of semiosis, both of which are focal in Volume 1.

INTRODUCING VOLUME 1: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS This introductory volume attempts to lay contextual groundwork for the remaining three collections in this four-volume set. This is accomplished through three clusters of chapters devoted to introducing the history and contemporary status of semiotics, the nature of semiosis, and the classification and application of signs.

Approaches to semiotics: Past and present (Chps 1–5) In the opening chapter, ‘Global Semiotics’, Paul Cobley provides further context for the scope and approach of the project by paying extended attention to Thomas Sebeok’s identification of semiotics with the many senses of ‘globality’ (Sebeok 2001). By the turn of the twenty-first century, Sebeok had come to the conclusion that it is fruitless to ask whether semiotics is a science, a doctrine, a theory or an interdisciplinary approach. Rather, semiotics should be understood as the development of a comprehensive perspective for understanding the vast web of relations that connect any local object of study with the global whole, including the whole of the biosphere and beyond. Sebeok argued that the concerns of semiotics are planetary, international, comprehensive, limitless and allencompassing; that the aims of semiotics are ‘“unbounded”, “universal” and maybe “cosmic”’ (2001: 1). While semiotic inquiry is necessarily concerned with both local action and universal implication – with both the mundane and the all-encompassing – its ultimate aims are always general: working towards big picture connections and holistic frameworks for bringing things together or showing how they are already related. But this does not mean that the aspirations of semiotics are either ‘imperialistic or grandiose; rather, they are inherent in its mission’, and part of that mission is to do no harm, as Cobley puts it. And, while Cobley identifies this vision of semiotics as a utopian programme, he argues that it is, nonetheless, actionable, desirable and relevant – not only for working towards wholesome global living but also for facing contemporary global threats. Moving from a contemporary assessment of semiotics to an explication of its ancient roots in Chapter 2, Martin Švantner and Michal Karľa explore some of the most salient sources of ‘Pre-modern Semiotics’ with a focus on the Western tradition. The chapter surveys key distinctions from antiquity to the Middle Ages that influenced, and evolved into, the approaches to semiotics that inform the field today. Two key distinctions emerge from the chapter: (1) inference vs. representation and (2) natural vs. cultural approaches to the study of signs. While early thinkers such as Hippocrates, Aristotle and the Stoics regarded signs as inferential phenomena within the sphere of the natural world alone, later thinkers such as Augustine and Bacon expanded these accounts to include representation and the cultural/linguistic sphere. Bacon also introduced process thinking into the study of signs and included mental concepts within the sphere of signs. Moving beyond the Latin age into ‘Early Modern Semiotics’ in Chapter 3, Michal Karľa and Tuuli Pern provide an overview of additional influences that served to usher

INTRODUCTION

9

in the contemporary era of semiotic understanding. Although the early modern period of semiotic development ‘tends to be rather neglected by historians of semiotics’, the period was crucial for the development of semiotic theory. Port Royal Logic provided a foundation for the semiology of Saussure, whose ideas went on to influence structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to semiotics that rose to prominence in the twentieth century. Giambattista Vico also prefigured important concepts that are now being developed in biosemiotics and cognitive semiotics by providing a novel ‘account of how human beings model as meaningful the world in which they live, through semiotic processes of imagination’ that are themselves metaphorical and embodied. John Locke, in turn, proposed that a systematic study of signs, called semiotike, should be established in order to adequately inquire ‘into the nature, sources, and workings of human understanding’ (Karľa and Pern, this volume; Armstrong 1965). This proposal would be picked up some 200 years later by the Einstein4 of semiotics, C. S. Peirce. Winfried Nöth outlines the ‘Pragmatist Semiotics’ of C. S. Peirce in Chapter 4 by situating Peirce’s semiotic within the scope of his scientific research and his broader philosophical system and then unpacking crucial features of Peirce’s vast conceptual architecture related to semiotic – all premised on distinctions and interrelations between three fundamental categories: Firstness (qualities and possibilities), Secondness (facts and reactions) and Thirdness (mediation and generality). These three categories are just as important for understanding the nature of Peirce’s tripartite sign (involving Representamen, Object and Interpretant) as they are for understanding his famous Icon–Index-Symbol distinction, and many others besides. Taken together, such conceptual tools enable the self-controlled study of sign relations in any domain, and they provide a viable bridge for reuniting studies of cultural worlds with studies of natural worlds across the disciplines. Nöth’s chapter also provides helpful appraisals of the status of Peircean semiotics, including its sometimes embattled relationship with Sassurean semiotic, noting nonetheless that such schisms have now largely subsided in favour of fruitful dialogue. As Nöth notes, the earliest and most notable semiotician to lead the way in this regard was Umberto Eco. Massimo Leone takes up the dialogic mantel of Umberto Eco in Chapter 5. Entitled ‘Post/Structuralist Semiotics’, the chapter provides a sweeping overview of structuralist and poststructuralist developments in semiotic theory, along with helpful delineations of proto-poststructuralism, pseudo-poststructuralism and anti-structuralist currents, all of which ultimately trace back to (or take issue with) the influential ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure. Leone observes that the most fundamental differences in approach between Peircean pragmatist semiotics and Saussurean structuralist (and poststructuralist) semiotics are that the former pays attention to relationships of continuity while the latter attends to relationships of difference. In an attempt to situate language and the humanities among the sciences, Saussure defines structural systems as networks of differential relations that are constructed intersubjectively in language and culture. Later developments by Hjelmslev, Greimas, Barthes, Eco and others expand and revise these insights towards theories of social semiotics and cognitive semiotics that highlight critical dynamics of agency and power while also raising critical questions related to illusion and reality.

Basic issues of semiosis: A select orientation (Chps 6–12) The next suite of chapters provides orienting perspectives on select key issues related to sign system dynamics in action, otherwise known as ‘semiosis’. Once again, the issues highlighted in these chapters – including basic problems of ontology, evolution,

10

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

consciousness, iconicity, opposition, habit and ideology – are relevant context to bear in mind when approaching content in the remainder of the collection. In Chapter 6, Marc Champagne takes up related questions of ‘Reality and Semiosis’, clarifying upfront that to ask about the reality of semiosis is to ask about the relationship between mind-dependent and mind-independent reality. This is a fundamental question, but, in spite of the attention given to metaphysical realism in Peircean semiotics, discussions of lying and semiosis following Eco, and discussions of semiosis and illusion following Sebeok, ‘comparatively little work addresses whether semiosis exits in its own right’. Since semiosis is necessary for even the most basic acts of perception and comprehension, it must at least exist in a mind-dependent sense, but does it also exist in a mind-independent sense? Champagne argues that the problem is ultimately still unresolved and in need of further attention, but he also insists that the resolution of the problem will necessarily implicate our view of reality itself. Part of what is at stake in attempting to understand the relationship between reality and semiosis is deciding on the lowest (or earliest) threshold at which semiosis can be identified. In Chapter 7, ‘Evolution and Semiosis’, Alexei Sharov and Kalevi Kull identify this boundary with the biotic – i.e. the emergence of life – a position held by most theorists in biosemiotics. Sharov and Kull advance the biosemiotic position that ‘biological evolution is largely rooted in semiosis – a process of active interpretation by organisms of hereditary signs in the context of other transient signs that are related to the parts of the body and the environment’. They further specify that this approach to evolution is ‘agency-driven’ in contrast to passive, deterministic ‘gene-centred’ approaches to evolution that hold sway in mainstream biology. The implications of this approach include numerous layers of explanatory leverage, such as the ‘emergence of interpretation capacity’, the ‘integration of organisms into multilevel semiotic systems’ and the ‘formation of morphologically discrete species’. In Chapter 8, ‘Consciousness and Semiosis’, Jordan Zlatev and Piotr Konderak argue in contrast with the preceding chapter that the lower threshold at which semiosis can be identified is that of reflective consciousness, which is to be found only in the culturally situated human person. This position is held by many theorists in cognitive semiotics and is premised on a ‘Semiotic Hierarchy’ that moves from life to consciousness to sign use to language. From this perspective, the relationship between consciousness and semiosis can also be construed as the relationship between intentionality and meaning-making, respectively, involving five interacting levels: (1) the operative-sensorimotor level, (2) the perceptual-subjective level, (3) the shared-intersubjective level, (4) the signative-signbased level and (5) the symbolic-linguistic level. Consciousness is fundamentally experiential or ‘phenomenological’, and the most basic, or directly phenomenological, layer of consciousness from the perspective of Peircean semiotics is iconicity: the experience or awareness of resemblances. This level of semiosis is the focus of Chapter 9, ‘Iconicity and Semiosis’, by Göran Sonesson. The chapter provides an overview of recent debates on the nature of iconicity, providing clarifying perspectives drawn from theoretical advances, empirical methods and recent findings in experimental psychology. Sonesson unpacks Peirce’s theory of iconicity in detail to distinguish between various levels of semiosis or meaning-making involving iconicity. He then provides a review of the state-of-the-art in iconicity studies, paying special attention to pictorial consciousness and non-visual iconicity, arguing in the process that iconicity studies are in need of much more work.

INTRODUCTION

11

The biological vs cognitive debate on the threshold of semiosis introduced above evokes a wide range of related oppositions: nature vs culture, mind vs matter, reality vs illusion, human vs animal and many others besides. It also points to another basic feature of semiosis – one championed by structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to semiotics in particular: i.e. oppositional relations. Marcel Danesi provides an orientation to the relationship between ‘Opposition and Semiosis’ in Chapter 10, tracing the development of opposition theory from linguists of the Prague School beginning in the 1920s into cognitive linguistics as early as the 1980s, and beyond. Since ancient times, people around the world have constructed belief systems and cultural models around oppositional relations. These binary pairs are mutually defining but asymmetrical such that one member of any given binary pair tends to be privileged or ‘unmarked’ in contrast to the marked member of the pair, according to cultural habits. Donna West explores the dynamics of habit formation and habit breaking in Chapter 11, ‘Habit and Semiosis’, through the lens of C. S. Peirce’s categories, Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness (introduced above), noting that habit proper is ‘intrinsically a Third’, since ‘change in law-like relationship; and the factors that provoke the change – breaking the habit – themselves derive from an incessant need to avoid error and ignorance’. When habits give way to mechanical, unchanging regularity, both habit and semiosis cease; but the height of conscious awareness is the awareness of taking up a habit, which can become a ‘formidable instrument toward the process of sign growth’. This process will stagnate or mechanize unless it is maintained with a long-term perspective: ‘a spirit of service to the discipline, a sense of humility before its foregoing principles’. This is why ‘taking a habit is equivocal to carving out a place in a prescribed field, and, at the same time, a voyage of surrender, “tending [ideas] as I would the flowers in my garden”’ (Peirce 1893: CP 6.289). In Chapter 12, ‘Ideology and Semiosis’, Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio explore the stagnation of habituated belief systems towards social consensus according to the interests of hegemonic power structures that lead to linguistic and semiosic alienation due to closed reliance on ‘false, distorted, deceptive thought’ as absolute knowledge. Surveying a wide range of semiotic approaches to ideology, from Mannheim and Welby to Marx, Freud and Chomsky, the chapter is most clearly oriented to the work of semiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi who argues that ideology is a kind of social planning that may or may not be conscious. The least conscious mode of ideology is known as ‘false consciousness’. But many other modes, layers and gradients of ideology are active in a given social group or individual. While social and linguistic ideologies can be present in syntax, semantic and pragmatic relationships alike, they are most notable in the implicit, pragmatic dimensions of communicative thought and action. The chapter closes with a major distinction between official ideologies and literary ideologies, the former being already institutionalized and consolidated, the latter being still elusive and indeterminate.

Classifications and applications: Sign systems at work (Chps 13–14) The final suite of chapters introduces the classification and application of sign systems as a segue into the remaining three volumes of the collection, which are themselves concerned with applications of semiotics – theoretically, methodologically and practically – within traditional and emergent disciplines alike, from academia to domains of professional practice.

12

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

In Chapter 13, ‘Classifying Signs’, Priscila Borges selects the sign system inquiry of C. S. Peirce for discussion noting that ‘the idea of continuity that permeates the naturalist’s classification process is deeply imbricated in the development of Peirce’s sign classes’. From 1885, when he first proposed his now famous icon-index-symbol classification, through 1908, when he first proposed his little known system of sixty-six sign types, we find this same principle of continuity steadily at work, as successive systems ‘present further gradations between the classes, ever subtler, making the continuity between the classes increasingly evident’. Steadily explaining the logic and practical application of Peirce’s process of discovery from a system of three sign classes to a system of six, then ten, then twenty-eight and ultimately sixty-six classes of signs, Borges shows how each system describes the action of signs with increasing levels of detail, with a reminder that ‘Peirce’s definitions are based on the performances of the sign’, such that one sign generates another in processes of infinite semiosis. Peirce characterized his work in this capacity as that of a ‘backwoodsman’ clearing the way for others to build and develop (1907: EP 2.413). In Chapter 14, ‘Applying Signs’, W. John Coletta and Didier Tsala Effa team up to demonstrate practical ways in which the pragmatist semiotics of C. S. Peirce and the post/ structuralist semiotics of A. J. Greimas can be applied from the workplace to the research lab. Coletta builds on Borges’s work in the previous chapter to provide further discussion and examples of Peirce’s system of twenty-eight sign classes, followed by a presentation of thirteen principles for applying Peircean semiotics to any domain of inquiry. Tsala Effa then presents an overview of Greimassian semiotics with an emphasis on structural and generative principles before illustrating ways in which Greimas’s figure of the sender, figure of the receiver, figure of speech and figure of the world can be applied to marketing and communication contexts. The chapter closes with a combined conclusion to argue that ‘these twin modes of analysis may be understood as complementary functions as well as complimentary functions’, citing the importance of multiple approaches and mutual respect being equally important considerations for the advancement of semiotics and its ongoing applications to the disciplines.

CODA This four-volume set is focused on the development of semiotics in and through the disciplines. At its core there is a kind of stubborn counter-resistance best articulated by Per Aage Brandt, who observes that ‘the problem of understanding meaning may really be one of the hardest in the world. That is because in a sense, meaning, immaterial reality, is us, our precious selves, who do not necessarily wish to be known. We resist but need to resist that resistance’ (2020: 236). Observing that the fad of semiotics was beginning to fade even in the late 1980s, John Deely once suggested that another kind of collective resistance was already well underway: a semiotic revolution. Evidence compiled in this reference set suggests that the semiotic revolution is still advancing, as a kind of open secret, in the established academic disciplines themselves, where trained practitioners are applying semiotic insights (or developing tacitly semiotic approaches) to transform their respective fields. Much work remains, and progress will be incremental, but semiotics’ vibrant past has always been future-driven, so this collection affirms with Deely that ‘it is time to get on with the revolution’ (Deely et al. 1986: viii) – in service to the disciplines themselves.

INTRODUCTION

13

NOTES 1 Chapter titles are constrained or prescribed to maximize parallelism, cohesion and coverage. The predominant title structure ‘Semiotics in X and Y’ featured in volumes 2 and 3, is conceived such that one member of the pair is recognizable as an established discipline, while the other is an outcome or methodology strongly associated with that discipline. Exceptions include cases in which no elegant pairing emerged (e.g. Semiotics in General Biology) and cases in which two established disciplines needed to be grouped together for lack of space (e.g. Semiotics in History and Archaeology). 2 Max Black’s (1949: 203) colourful complaint against semiotics, i.e. that ‘too many addled eggs have been laid by the owl of Minerva’, is specifically levelled against Charles Morris’s ‘meta-science’ project discussed above. The Olds passage is quoted in Andersch (this project, vol. 2). 3 This ongoing shift towards integrative or hybridized semiotic theorizing is by no means limited to this four-volume set. Many others have paved the way, including Roman Jakobson and Umberto Eco, as noted above (see also Cobley and Jansz 1997). More recent publications in this bridging vein are also notable, such as Paul Bains’s (2006) Deely-Deleuze hybrid, Susan Petrilli's work on semioethics (e.g. 2014), and Tyler James Bennett’s (2021) groundbreaking upgrade of Eco’s (1976) ‘Peirce-Hjelmslev hybrid’. Elsewhere, smaller-scale dialogic treatments have also begun to proliferate, including discussions of fruitful relations between Greimas and Peirce (Broden 2000), Peirce and Saussure (Lee 2008), Peirce and Foucault (Švantner 2016), Peirce and Zhuangzi (Pelkey 2021), among others. 4 See Kilpinen (2008: 217, 230); Champagne (2018: 14).

REFERENCES Anderson, M., J. N. Deely, M. Krampen, J. Ransdell, T. A. Sebeok and T. von Uexküll (1984), ‘A Semiotic Perspective on the Sciences: Steps Towards a New Paradigm’, Semiotica, 52 (1–2): 7–47. Armstrong, R. L. (1965), ‘John Locke’s “Doctrine of Signs”: A New Metaphysics’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 26 (3): 369–82. Bains, P. (2006), The Primacy of Semiosis: An Ontology of Relations, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bennett, T. J. (2021), Detotalization and Retroactivity: Black Pyramid Semiotics, Tartu University PhD Thesis. Berman, M. (1981), The Reenchantment of the World, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Blocker, G. (2012), The Meaning of Meaninglessness, London: Springer. Black, M. (1949), Language and Philosophy: Studies in Method, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bouissac, P., ed. (1998), Encyclopedia of Semiotics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brandt, P. A. (2020), Cognitive Semiotics: Signs, Mind, and Meaning. Broden, T. F. (2000), ‘Greimas between France and Peirce’, The American Journal of Semiotics, 15 (1/4): 27–89. Champagne, M. (2018), Consciousness and the Philosophy of Signs: How Peircean Semiotics Combines Phenomenal Qualia and Practical Effects (Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind), Chams: Springer. Cobley, P., ed. (2010), The Routledge Companion to Semiotics, London: Routledge. Cobley, P. and L. Jansz (1997), Semiotics: A Graphic Guide, Icon Books: London.

14

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Deely, J. (2001), Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (Toronto Studies in Semiotics), Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Deely, J. (2009), Purely Objective Reality (Semiotics, Communication and Cognition), Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Deely, J. (2010), Semiotics Seen Synchronically: The View from 2010, Ottawa: Legas. Deely, J., B. Williams and F. Kruse, eds (1986), Frontiers in Semiotics (Advances in Semiotics), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eco, U. (1976), A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eliot, T. S. (1943), Four Quartets, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Gardner, H. (2011), Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues in the Twenty-first Century, New York: Basic Books. Graeber, D. (2018), Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, New York: Simon & Schuster. Hoffmeyer, J. (1996), Signs of Meaning in the Universe, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Houser, N. (2013), ‘Signs and Survival’, The American Journal of Semiotics, 29 (1): 1–16. Houser, N. (2020), ‘Thinking at the Edges’, The American Journal of Semiotics 36 (1–2): 95–116. Johnson, M. (2007), The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kilpinen, E. (2008), ‘Memes Versus Signs: On the Use of Meaning Concepts about Nature and Culture’, Semiotica, 171: 215–37. Kockelman, P. (2017), The Art of Interpretation in the Age of Computation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kristeva, J. (1995), New Maladies of the Soul, New York: Columbia University Press. Kronman, A. T. (2007), Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given up on the Meaning of Life, New Haven: Yale University Press. Kull, K. and E. Velmezova (2014), ‘What Is the Main Challenge for Contemporary Semiotics?’ Sign Systems Studies, 42 (4): 530–48. Laidi, Z. (2005), A World without Meaning: The Crisis of Meaning in International Politics, London: Routledge. Lee, Y. (2008), ‘Symbols in Dialogical Structure of Semiotics’, Semiotica, (171): 51–78. Leone, M. (2020), On Insignificance: The Loss of Meaning in the Post-Material Age, London: Routledge. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1955), ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, Journal of American Folklore, 68 (270): 428–44. McGilchrist, I. (2019), The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2nd edn, New Haven: Yale University Press. McLuhan, M. (1964), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw Hill. Morris, C. (1938), Foundations of the Theory of Signs (Encyclopedia of Unified Science 1.2), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nöth, W. (1990), Handbook of Semiotics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ogden, C. K. and I. A. Richards (1923), The Meaning of Meaning, New York: Harcourt, Brace. Olds, D. D. (2000), ‘A Semiotic Model of Mind’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 48 (2): 497–529. Parret, H. (1984), ‘Peirce and Hjelmslev: The Two Semiotics’, Language Sciences, 6 (2): 217–27.

INTRODUCTION

15

Peirce, C. S. ([1866–1913] 1931–58), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols 1–6, C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds), vols 7–8, A. Burks (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cited as CP. Peirce, C. S. ([1893–1913] 1998), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, ed. Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP 2. Pelkey, J. (2021), ‘Zhuangzi, Peirce, and the Butterfly Dreamscape: Concentric Meaning in the Qiwulun 齊物論’, Chinese Semiotic Studies, 17 (2): 255–87. Petrilli, S. (2014), Sign Studies and Semioethics, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Polanyi, M. and H. Prosch (2008), Meaning, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Polidoro, P. (2018), ‘Post-truth and Fake News: Preliminary Considerations’, Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici, 47 (2): 189–206. Posner, R., K. Robering and T. A. Sebeok, eds (1998), Semiotik/Semiotics: Ein Handbuch Zu Den Zeichentheoretischen Grundlagen Von Natur Und Kultur/a Handbook on the SignTheoretic Foundations of Nature and Culture, 4 vols. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Saussure, F. de ([1916] 1955), Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin, New York: Philosophical Library. Sebeok, T. A. (2001), Global Semiotics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sebeok, T. A. and M. Danesi, eds (2010), Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, 2 vols, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Short, T. L. (2007), Peirce’s Theory of Signs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Švantner, M. (2016), ‘De-subjectification in Semiotics: Argumentations, Self-defense and Signs of Opposing Forces’, Pragmatism Today, 7 (2): 95–109. Taylor, C. (1991), The Malaise of Modernity, Toronto: House of Anansi Press. Trifonas, P. P., ed. (2015), International Handbook of Semiotics, London: Springer.

16

CHAPTER ONE

Global Semiotics PAUL COBLEY

INTRODUCTION There has always been something of the global in semiotics, much in the same way as what is considered global is usually demonstrably semiotic in orientation.1 That is, semiotics is intrinsically and fundamentally orientated towards a generalist view of how semiosis takes place – how signs work – as opposed to how, say, literature occurs or how doctorpatient interactions proceed or how DNA functions. To be sure, semiotics is interested in all of these and much more, sometimes focusing on them in the most intricate fashion; however, it eschews specialism in favour of fostering, promoting and making integral the understanding that it is semiosis, the action of signs, that is taking place and is common to domains such as the literary, health care communication and molecular biology. As such, semiotics’ purview, even in instances where there is intense, specialized focus, is implicitly global rather than local. Similarly, what is considered to be global tends to be semiotic in its orientation. This observation includes the sense of a global view which takes in many elements (rather than a few) and ‘global’ in the sense of elements being dispersed across planet Earth. Globality, in contrast to a mere sum of local perspectives, implies that disparate elements are connected. In order to be connected, there must be some semiotic link, since objects which are physically or conceptually distant from each other can never be brought together unless there is a mediation which reduces or banishes that distance. It is for that reason, as will be seen, that communication has been the crucial component in the movement towards globalization in recent decades.

DEFINING GLOBALITY AND SEMIOTICS Firstly, though, it is important to elucidate these introductory points by defining precisely what semiotics and the global are. This is important for purposes of clarity but also because globality and semiotics are both susceptible of multiple definition as well as invoking and being subject to more than one narrative. Definitions of semiotics cast it as, among other things, ●●

the theory of the sign

●●

the theory of semiosis

●●

a ‘sign science’ that encompasses all modes of signification

18

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

●●

a concern with codes and decoding

●●

a branch of, or supplement to, linguistics

●●

synonymous with ‘semiology’

●●

the study of human signification

●●

the study of comparative Umwelten, comprising the signification of all living things

All of these might seem to be broadly synonymous – but they are not. These definitions often imply a practice that is much different from other definitions, both in terms of its method and even in its political bearing. Certainly, differences in definition impinge upon the globality of semiotics or the extent of its mediation. The theory of the individual sign, for example, suggests that semiotics identifies discrete, isolatable and definite entities that can be quantified; by contrast, the theory of semiosis indicates that signs are always connected, in flux, not isolatable and resistant to quantification. Semiotics as the study of human signification implies a lack of continuity between the world of humans and those of other living systems, perhaps entailing that the latter can be disregarded and sometimes implying human exceptionalism; semiotics as the study of all living things, by contrast, stresses the importance of continuity across living systems. Furthermore, semiotics is constituted – as global or sometimes not – in the narratives that traverse it. Narratives of semiotics depict it as ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

founded by the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) founded by Saussure and the American polymath, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) established by Saussure, Peirce and the Hungarian-American polymath, Thomas A. Sebeok (1920–2001) inaugurated as an enduring pre-Socratic practice by Hippocrates of Cos (460–377 BCE) and Galen of Pergamon (129–c.200), developed by St. Augustine (354–430) and John Locke (1632–1704) the means to perceive the gap between illusion and reality akin to and fashionable during the period of structuralism and poststructuralism largely dead because textual analysis has been superseded by the study of audience’s meanings very much alive because analysis of ‘codes’ and invariants will always be needed and semiotics does take account of the audience in any case synonymous with communication theory (and its concern with human signification) synonymous with the study of all living systems

As such, semiotics has undergone periods in its history when it has enjoyed centrality and marginality. Increasingly, however, semiotics has become recognized as the study of all

GLOBAL SEMIOTICS

19

signs, not just the linguistic ones that dominate the ‘semiology’ projected by Saussure and, later, Roland Barthes. In terms of globality, it is interesting that semiotics historically precedes the semiology focused on human sign systems. The term itself is derived from a Greek root, seme, and was taken up by Charles Sanders Peirce who sought to classify all types of signs in the universe. In this way, he continued the work of the ancient semioticians, particularly Hippocrates, who sought to explore the connections between phenomena that were proximate in semiotic terms but distant in physical ones (see Sebeok 2001). Famously, Hippocrates (1983: 185) observed that the configuration of semiosis that amounts to a symptom exists as such when it is found to be identical in Delos, Scythia and in Libya. Semiotics, in this pre-Socratic fashion exemplified by Hippocrates, has sought to unify science and philosophy by way of a concern with how the entire cosmos operates – the Earth, its inhabitants and the elements – rather than just the interactions that constitute the polis. Both Peirce and Thomas A. Sebeok, out of step with the intellectual fashions of their times, shared this outlook. For the later Peirce, especially, the entirety of logic, philosophy and science was only approachable through an expansive sign theory, as Poinsot had demonstrated in 1632 (see Poinsot 2013). Peirce envisaged a sign theory that would be comprehensive rather than localized, comprising ‘mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology’ (Hardwick 1977: 85–6). He wrote to Lady Welby in December 1908 revealing that he recognized ten basic types of signs and 59,049 different classes of signs in all (Hardwick 1977: 84–5). By contrast, the very localized study of the linguistic sign, a sign type used by humans alone, is only one component of the study of the sign in general. In reference to globality, then, the definition of semiotics and the narratives that constitute it are revealing. If semiotics is considered to be concerned with the human phenomenon of language, then this is a very different proposition to the more global outlook in which human signification is just one minuscule aspect of a broader semiosis, the action of signs throughout the universe no matter how they might be embodied. Nevertheless, human signification has been decisive in the development of globality. It is true that Sebeok (2001: 43) invokes 3.5 billion years of semiosis by stating that the global prokaryotic community inescapably perfuses the Earth. In a way that is literally mind-boggling, all of us eukaryotes are fashioned of bacteria; we are both their habitats and vehicles for further dispersal. In particular, our central nervous system may be characterized as a colony of interactive bacteria. Yet, he adds (2001: 43), tellingly, that ‘any biosemiotic theory failing to take into account the multiform data of bacterial semiosis is as flawed as would be one that ignored the complexities of the verbal code in its social ramifications’. So, although there is a semiotic globality which seems, in one sense at least, primary – because it is so old – even a biosemiotic theory should not ignore the more recent development of verbal semiosis which has had such a profound impact on recent globalization. Indeed, the definition and narratives of globality are very much bound up with the onward march and extensions of verbal semiosis, although qualification must be added to the latter in the ensuing discussion. Although there are arguments to be made for globalization having developed with mediations such as new forms of travelling between distant objects (the wheel, the railways, roadbound vehicles, etc.) which are definitely important, it is fair to say that

20

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

a sense of the global has developed most rapidly with humans’ implementation of electronic media. The mediation enacted by electronic media is often distinct from travelas-mediation because of the way the former dramatically shrinks the distance and time between objects and because of the way in which it diminishes or occludes the physical action involved in mediation – for example, the way that distant objects may appear on a digital television screen without seeming to have been physically transported. The electronic media, operating in this fashion, have facilitated messages in a way that has precipitated global communication, starting with the telegraph (1837) and continuing with the telephone (1876), radio (1901) and broadcast radio (1910), television (1926), satellite broadcasting (1967) and the networking of computers in the framework of a publicly available worldwide web (1991). All of these media, by eradicating travel in discrete acts of communication, reduced the time needed for messages to reach their destination and made global connection eminently accessible. In the 1960s, some decades before the acceleration of global communication attendant on the widespread adoption of the internet (c.1996 onwards), the media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) was confident enough in his observations of electronic media to posit the idea of a ‘global village’ (see McLuhan and Powers 1989). Indeed, his observations seem to have been chiefly on radio rather than the contemporary satellite broadcasting which might have prompted intimations of globality (McLuhan 1996). Nevertheless, the mildly paradoxical phrase, ‘global village’, sums up the way in which the flavour of immediate, face-to-face communication associated with small, local communities might suffuse human society sufficiently to render manageable the globe’s forbidding size, creating interactions which are not hampered by either time or space. Consequently, by the 1990s it was becoming clear to a widespread number of commentators (e.g. Giddens 1991a; Robertson 1992; the essays in Featherstone 1990 and in Featherstone, Lash and Robertson 1995) that the world was witnessing what the journalist Frances Cairncross (1997) called ‘the death of distance’. In truth, the phenomenon was not just a compression of space but also a compression of time as networked computers and, later, extensive adoption of broadband internet meant that online communication always carried the potential for instant feedback no matter what area of the globe was being engaged. In addition, analysts of globalization in the 1990s were noticing that although physical objects were being connected by seemingly immaterial means (the space in telephone and broadband cables, the bits of digital transmission), globalization was also proceeding according to physical movements. Not only were information, knowledge and images being exchanged globally, but there were unprecedented flows of people and goods (Featherstone 1990a) across what had hitherto been considered unmanageable distances. The importance of mediation afforded by travel was actually a key constituent of the global imperative. Indeed, one influential argument with regard to globality in this period was that it was characterized by global cultural flows which comprised not just ideas and information but also material entities such as people (in diaspora) and goods – for example, machinery and hardware. Appadurai suggests that this sets up a specific tension in which the global can be defined as a contest between players to hijack ‘the twin Enlightenment ideas of the triumphantly universal and the resiliently particular’ (1990: 308). In consonance with this, it is important to consider that the definition of ‘global’ that became established with globalization in the 1990s evinces a similarly uneasy tension in its relation with two other contemporary currents of thought: postmodernism and religious resurgence. Much of the early theorizing of late-twentieth-century globalization has its

GLOBAL SEMIOTICS

21

roots in the investigation of the latter (for example, Robertson and Chirico 1985) and it is illustrative for some of the questions arising in the current discussion’s concern with global semiotics. What unites the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, but especially Christianity and Islam) with globalization is their mission, in the name of a single God and therefore a single worldwide community, to spread and convert followers across the globe. Summarizing prescient scholarship prior to the consolidation of the ‘Bible belt’ in the United States and six years before the 9/11 attacks, Waters (1995: 129) pointed to a stabilization, or even a reverse, in the decline of religious belief and a wave of fundamentalist revitalization of the old universal religions. He notes the role of television and satellite broadcasting (prior to the spread of the internet, of course) as aspects of globalization that have been crucial to the universalist mission of fundamentalist Christianity; similarly, he (1995: 132) observes that ‘globalization has made a pan-Islamic movement possible in which transfers of money, military intervention, terrorism, mass-mediated messages and hadj pilgrims connect the world community’. Any definition of globality, then, is rather fraught because it might embody a universalism which, even with a most benign countenance, can be oppressive; plus, it harbours the threat of homogenization, particularly cultural homogenization, a common reaction to which is a retreat into localized, personal or fundamentalist forms. Sometimes these latter simultaneously eschew and utilize globality for their own purposes. In addition, the global and the local, or the ‘triumphantly universal and the resiliently particular’, featured in the postmodern theory which accompanied definitions of the global from the 1990s onwards. This theory was often antagonistic to globalization but, also, somewhat complementary in a number of ways. What postmodern theory and globalization theory certainly shared was a broadly semiotic perspective: both insisted on the centrality of signification, the flow and, especially for postmodernism, the tenor of communications. In the material conditions of postmodernism – sometimes called ‘modernity’ or ‘postmodernity’ and coterminous with globalization (Hutcheon 1989: 23–42; Jameson 1991) – new material conditions arise. In the face of a decline in mass production there is a turn to flexible specialization; there is a sovereignty of information and service industries over the traditional products of manufacture; this is accompanied by an emphasis on consumption rather than production; the dissolution of traditional, class-based politics into politics centred on ‘identities’; and all of these are pervaded by the development of communication technologies which have served to shrink distances between people across the globe and have made signification and representation much more accessible (Harvey 1988; Kaplan 1988; Connor 1989; Giddens 1991b; Bertens 1995). Perhaps most famously central to postmodernism is the idea that scientific knowledge has sought to legitimate itself not by validating its own internal procedures but by appealing to a narrative outside itself, a ‘grand narrative’ such as those driven by ‘the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth’ (Lyotard 1984: xxiii). The reliance of ‘modern’ science on ‘grand narratives’ or ‘metanarratives’, as Lyotard sometimes calls them, amounts to a general definition of ‘postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives’ (Lyotard 1984: xxiv). Postmodernism is important for the definition and consideration of what is global. This is partly the case because it developed alongside, overlapping, contemporaneous with and informing globalization theory; but it is also important because it carries with it, fundamentally, a critique of any tendency towards identifying universal principles or aspirations to globality. On the one hand, this critique involves scepticism in respect of declarations of universality – appeals to general concepts of humanity, for example – which

22

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

might obliterate the more localized truth of the material, psychological or political realities that obtain in concrete specific instances. On the other hand, it reduces the complexity of modern social formations and the forces within them to questions of identity in a manner that has been condemned as ridiculous and dogmatic by reactionary critics on the political right (Pluckrose and Lindsay 2020) and has equally been criticized as giving rise to the ‘identity capitalists’ (cf. Johnson 2020; Leong 2021) or deserving the label ‘neoliberal identitarianism’ from the political left (Reed 2015; Johnson 2019). Yet, as Klaus Bruhn Jensen, echoing Marshall McLuhan, puts it, ‘Postmodernism is itself a grand narrative, announcing the death of another grand narrative in its rearview mirror’ (Bruhn Jensen 1995: 11). Furthermore, with its insistence on thoroughly personal and moral essences in recent decades, postmodernism itself has resembled the globalizing tendencies of the universalizing religions. For semiotics, then, globality, inherent in semiotic endeavour from the outset, has been a double-edged sword. For semiotics’ proponents, sign study has freed research from its disciplinary straitjacket, allowing semiosic phenomena to be approached and understood without isolation from neighbouring phenomena and with the explanatory consequences of methodological freedom. An example of this is the way that semioticians threw off the shackles of ‘Literature’ with a capital ‘L’ in the 1960s, along with its baggage of value and valorization, to institute a field in which narrative in general is discussed, across different media and domains, involving the vicissitudes of semiosis. It is easy to forget that Lyotard’s ability to put so much stress on multi-domain narratives a decade or so later or a corporate manager’s ability to make reference to a ‘company narrative’ owes a massive amount to this pioneering work with global tendencies in semiotics. Nevertheless, there remain semiotics’ antagonists who denigrate the global tendency. They exist in the traditional disciplines where there might be a desire to turn back the clock and do things the way they used to be done. However, as has been seen, antagonists also hail from the hitherto allied enclaves of theory such as postmodernism and poststructuralism which were frequently offered a voice by early semiotics. From this perspective, regardless of its own globalizing tendencies, the wide purview of sign study amounts to an imperialist ‘grand narrative’ towards which there should be incredulity. Perhaps this is part and parcel of anything with global ambitions: ‘all-encompassing’, ‘comprehensive’, ‘international’, ‘limitless’, ‘pandemic’, ‘unbounded’, ‘universal’ – ‘and maybe “cosmic”’ – are some of the synonyms for ‘global’ that Sebeok (2001: 1) cites and it is easy to see how they might veer into the pejorative. In what follows, then, the discussion will turn to how semiotics has negotiated the perils of globality and what the future might hold for a semiotic perspective.

A GLOBAL ENTERPRISE Despite semiotics always having something of the global, it is interesting that this only started to become articulated at the time that globalization in the world was being more widely discussed and taken seriously. This is not to say that global semiotics, as an idea, is a product of globalization as a reality; however, it is possible that some of the vocabulary of the two currents was shared. Introducing a new edition of The Sign and Its Masters by Thomas A. Sebeok, John Deely’s Preface referred to Sebeok’s work as ‘A global enterprise’. From an interview with one of Sebeok’s Hungarian colleagues, Gyula Décsy, Deely (1989: viii) quotes:

GLOBAL SEMIOTICS

23

Sebeok moved somehow from a very small area to a very very huge, I would say global, consideration. He is not a linguist anymore. His basic principle is communication, and that is what the semiotic deals with, actually – all forms of communication: he started from Hungarian and he went to other languages, then to the global view of the structure of the languages, and he finishes with something huge – everything which is communication. Here, the idea of the ‘global’ refers to the whole of a field or subject area; nevertheless, it hints at the global in the more expansive sense that Sebeok would develop for semiotics. Later, Deely suggests that the globality of Sebeok’s work derives from his refusal of Peirce’s ‘sop to Cerberus’, the moment when Peirce’s definition of a sign refers to its determination of ‘an effect upon a person’ because Peirce despaired ‘of making my own broader conception understood’ without anthropomorphizing it (Hardwick 1977: 80–1), thus opening the door to a general anthropocentrism in semiotics. Deely (1989: xi) writes, At times seeming to stand alone among the giants of semiotics, Sebeok has steadfastly refused throughout his semiotic work to have any truck with Peirce’s ‘sop to Cerberus’, thrown in l908 in a moment of weakness and despair. On his own he has held firmly to the broader view entailed by the foundations of semiotic as subtending the work of speculative and practical understanding alike, according to which it will be semiotics that must assimilate our understanding of nature along with our understanding of discourse in its contrastive order as culture. In his assessment of the importance of Sebeok’s work here, Deely therefore moves from the idea of its comprehensive survey of the field to hint at its globality in addressing life beyond the human. Other, later assessments of Sebeok’s work also lay out the coordinates of its globality. Petrilli and Ponzio – whose own critique of the tyrannies of global communication and its inculcation in ‘“communication-production”’ is tempered by the insight from Sebeok regarding the importance of communication, on a dialogic basis, as the ‘“bond that links body, mind and culture”’ (Petrilli and Ponzio 2005: 230) – state (2011: 307), By virtue of his ‘global’ or ‘holistic’ approach, Sebeok’s research into the ‘life of signs’ can immediately be associated with his concern for the ‘signs of life’. Sebeok’s global approach to sign life presupposes his critique of anthropocentric and glottocentric semiotic theory and practice. The equation of ‘global’ with ‘holistic’ here moves towards some appreciation of Sebeok’s semiotics as being catholic in its embrace of phenomena pertinent to the field as well as its orientation to Planet Earth rather than just one small locality. On a relatively banal, but not unimportant, level, Sebeok’s practice as an academic addressed geographical globality; Block de Behar (2011: 421) notes that he anticipated – biographically, emblematically – the development of a world globalization which he theorized in different terms and practiced avant-la-lettre, turning ‘knowledge about’, without excluding it, into pure ‘direct acquaintance’, making of his fleeting presence his own adventure, of his displacements an event as fluent as the flow of time and the movement of the planets, which the Greeks were right in imagining as errant. Yet, it is in Sebeok’s conception of the domains of semiotics’ interest that the strongest clue to a global semiotics might be found. Kull (2011: 236) returns to Sebeok’s concern

24

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

with the primal, truly global, semiosis that is ‘the global communicative network in the biosphere, formed in its lowest level by bacteria’. Also, in terms of the semiotic enterprise, Brier (2011: 51) summarizes the holism of Sebeok’s contention that semiosis is coextensive with life, entailing that the object of semiotics must be global: ‘This global conception of semiotics – namely, biosemiotics – equates life with sign interpretation or mediation.’ Once more, though, it is Deely who best sums up briefly the components of Sebeok’s global semiotics when he writes (2011: 143), [I]t was to Sebeok above all that credit belonged for ‘global semiotics’ as a phenomenon of intellectual culture, the reality of an international community of scholars pursuing through a huge variety of methods and nascent academic programs the ‘way of signs’ From the global semiosis which brought about life more than four million years ago, to the global semiotics of the twenty-first century in which a consciousness of that process has begun to be embodied, is the very trajectory that Thomas A. Sebeok himself embodied in his work. On the basis of these indications, then, it is worth looking a little more closely at the work that Sebeok explicitly designated as ‘global’. Sebeok’s closing address at the 5th Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in Berkeley (1994) bore the simple title ‘Global semiotics’ and went on to form the opening chapter of Sebeok’s final book (2001) with the same name. Aware that the term ‘global’ has become ‘a cliché, a banal adjective currently polluting for example economic and political discourse’ (2001: xv), Sebeok reveals that the term first had impact on him not at the time of McLuhan’s 1960s fame but earlier, in the 1942 bestseller One World by the ex-Presidential candidate, Wendell Wilkie. Much later, in the 1980s, Sebeok (with Umiker-Sebeok) edited a number of books which tried to capture the holistic nature of semiotics’ ambition, in particular the ‘Web’ series of books (1987–93) and the encyclopaedic volume, The Semiotic Sphere (1986). Arising from this activity was an appreciation of a distinction which is important for understanding all disciplines but especially semiotics: that between domain and field as drawn by the psychologist, Csikszentmihalyi. Domain refers to ‘the symbolic rules and procedures’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1996: 27) which make up the scope of any endeavour; these are nested in culture or ‘the symbolic knowledge shared by a particular society, or humanity as a whole’ (1996: 28). The field includes all the ‘gatekeepers’ of a domain: ‘It is their job to decide whether a new idea or product should be included in the domain’ (1996: 28). Considering the domain and field of semiotics, Sebeok outlines some important parameters for the sense in which semiotics might be global. Among these are geopolitical and temporal parameters, academic traditions, tools and conceptual revolution. Starting with the geopolitical, Sebeok (2001: xvi) states, ‘In the most mundane sense, “global” refers to the accelerating spread of semiotics over an impressive number of terrestrial tracts.’ If, indeed, it is a mundane fact, it is not insignificant. Sebeok himself was tireless in spreading the word of semiotics during his extensive travels and the IASS has witnessed in its Congresses and other activities a successive proliferation of participation from across the globe, even without factoring in the ‘death of distance’. Considering the temporal parameter, Sebeok observes that ‘Chronological considerations are of capital importance as well’ (2001: xvi), laconically adducing the role of memory in a field and how it impacts upon the domain. One academic imperative in this respect is to attend to a historiographical dimension in semiotics: maintaining, excavating and recovering the works of semiotics that are important – tasks that are repeatedly exemplified

GLOBAL SEMIOTICS

25

in Sebeok’s own approach to identifying ‘neglected figures’, some of them originally not even considered as proto-semioticians, and assimilating their accomplishments and insights into semiotics. In addition to official historiography, Sebeok also includes anecdote as a means of realizing the temporal parameter in the field of semiotics. Frequently, Sebeok’s writings and presentations referred (without intrusion or rudeness) to personal aspects or dispositions of the field’s workers who are, after all, humans as well as intellectuals, with life experiences that may act as a spur or impediment to their contributions to knowledge. ‘I am not embarrassed’, writes Sebeok, ‘to liberally reminisce about colleagues I had happened upon in the course of my life’s vocation’ (2001: xvi). A further component of global semiotics, according to Sebeok, includes the tools of the field and domain. He suggests that ‘The multiplication of weighty, or even lesser, reference works for any domain and a field is, I think, one symptom of their salubrious condition’ (2001: xviii) although he pits this against Eco’s contention that the new technologies (especially the internet) will render encyclopaedias and manuals obsolete. The latter has not yet been borne out and, twenty years later, truly global endeavours such as Bloomsbury Semiotics (Pelkey 2022) exemplify thriving fields in addition to semiotics. However, to encourage and reflect global currents, Sebeok (2001: xix–xx) suggests such tools – and other activities or components in a domain – need to be part of a ‘conceptual revolution’ – that is, a paradigm shift in Kuhn’s (1962) sense. The bearing of a conceptual revolution on the globality of a field is also found to be dependent upon ‘academic traditions’. Sebeok occasionally noted a ‘minor’ and ‘major’ tradition in semiotics, referring not to relative importance or a hierarchy but, in a spirit of ecumenicalism (Sebeok 1977), to the scope of each tradition. As Lagopoulos (2000: 46) states with respect to his own argument about globality, ‘it is clear that the inclusiveness of the definition of semiotics we select implies what we include in the range of communication’. This will impinge on what is to be considered the field’s ‘greatest possible extension and the complexity of analysis one can reach by using it’ (2000: 46). As Lagopoulos points out, the extension that Sebeok envisages for semiotics includes the whole of the biosphere. In 2001, Sebeok described how he witnessed, and was instrumental in, a paradigm shift that can be summed up by the word ‘biosemiotics’. For many, this would seem to entail that semiotics has become ‘interdisciplinary’, now accommodating perspectives beyond semiotics’ original home in the humanities which semiotics occupied despite its early pretentions to ‘science’. Yet, such matters are never so simple. It seems easy to label semiotics a new discipline in considering its globality, or to assert, on the other hand, that it is not a discipline because it is interdisciplinary. Another alternative is to dub semiotics ‘transdisciplinary’. Sebeok (2001: 8) has a different view: Whether semiotics is a science (Saussure 1901 [see Sebeok 1974, 219 n. 21]; Morris 1946, 253; Jakobson 1983, 157), a theory (Saussure 1981 [see Godel 1957, 275]; Morris 1938 [e.g., title]; Eco 1976 [e.g., title]), a doctrine (Locke 1690; Berkeley 1732; Peirce ca. 1897; Sebeok 1974, 215; Deely 1982, 127–130), or something else entirely, seems nowadays of even less consequence than heretofore. The further question whether semiotics is ‘A discipline or an interdisciplinary method?’ was luminously discussed by Eco sixteen years ago; he concluded ‘that semiotics, more than a science, is an interdisciplinary approach’ (1978, 83). Today’s general opinion is often – indeed, often defensively – expressed by clichés like ‘interdisciplinary’ or ‘multidisciplinary’, or ‘transdisciplinary’ – ugly artifacts of modern academic cant.

26

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

It is difficult to disagree with Sebeok’s opinion on modern academic cant, particularly as the terms in question have been advanced so frequently in academia but practised so seldom in the interim. Furthermore, it is clear that biosemiotics, in extending the domain of semiotics yet further, making it co-extensive with life, has exemplified a paradigm shift and has moved semiotics towards a more global footing. However, Sebeok’s distinction in global semiotics between ‘Normal’ semiotics (an ‘essentially glottocentric enterprise’) and biosemiotics, treating the human ‘as a biological entity rather than as a cultural entity’ (2001: xxii), seems to have been superseded. In the twenty years since Sebeok was writing, there has been considerable development of both the field and the domain of semiotics in general. In addition to biosemiotics, there has been the flowering of cognitive semiotics, with its regular conferences, journal and professorial appointments that indicate its status as an established contributor to global semiotics.2 Where Sebeok (2001: xxii) held that the domain of ‘normal’ semiotics had been ‘Minds, Models, and Mediation’, he does not note – although he may have predicted it – that precisely that domain has become naturalized in biosemiotics, too, in the last couple of decades, through debates with cognitive semioticians and proponents of so-called 4-E cognition (Carney 2020). More important, still, perhaps, is that ‘normal’ semiotics was never quite as ‘normal’ as presumed and has started to meet its long-held ambitions to embrace a more global project. If the model of semiotics and ‘normality’ is the semiotics that emanated from Paris in the 1960s and focused on textuality, then there has been significant movement since that heyday. As early as 1971, Roland Barthes had called for a more expansive semiotics of domains outside the text in a bid for a general ‘semioclasm’ (1977). Barthes pursued this through an intensely personal approach to semiotics in the ensuing years; yet his work remained far-sighted and certainly not restricted to identitarianism. As is becoming clearer in the Anglophone world, too, the work of Greimas and his successors, so synonymous for many years with textuality and narrative, has been revealed to be rather global itself in its orientation. This has happened as narrative has been discovered to be so decisive in so many spheres of human life, well beyond literature and into the ambit of the social sciences (Maynes 2008) and the realm of the ‘meta’ as adumbrated by Lyotard. More important, though, is the trajectory by which, in recent decades, Greimassian semiotics has been so thoroughly, relentlessly and creditably concerned with semiotics in the sphere of everyday life (Fontanille and Zinna 2005; Marrone 2022). Arguably, the kinds of questions asked in this approach to semiotics have ultimately been addressed to a conception of the affective human not just at the level of social relations but also at the level of species. Fontanille (in Portela 2015: 597–8) argues: There remain praxis, practices, ethics and forms of life. This forms an inseparable whole for me, that of a semiotics ‘at the level of the human being’. For by dint of cultivating a ‘high regard’, which would place the semiotician beyond any grasp of reality, and all intervention in the facts of meaning themselves, semiotics is in great danger of becoming an inhuman science (without being either ‘hard’ or ‘exact’). Jean-Claude Coquet and Eric Landowski have always resisted, in their own way, this dehumanization of semiotics, the first in terms of epistemological and methodological ‘realism’, and the second in terms of sensory experience. Although the semiotics to which Fontanille refers actually eschews the Olympian or global perspective and seeks to re-install affect as the seat of analysis, it nevertheless has its own, productive take on universalism. Fontanille (in Portela 2015: 603) adds,

GLOBAL SEMIOTICS

27

But the immanence of life itself is nothing but an affect, a pure feeling of existing, whether joyful or painful. And this affect does not have an origin; it is itself the beginning, since the living flesh is not characterized by the fact that can ‘self-affect’. Both affecting and affected, the living flesh ‘feels’ life and living. Living and selfaffecting are the same thing. This argument about the bearing of affect, a quasi-universal without grandiose pretentions to the global, will re-emerge (below) as the concept of global semiotics negotiates the ‘allencompassing’ and the ‘cosmic’. For now, it is important to remember one tenet of global semiotics upon which Sebeok insists, despite his division of ‘normal’ (local) semiotics and biosemiotics (global): ‘I have always maintained that – at least within the frame of academic semiotics – it is wise to act locally, in specific terms, but to think by all means in a grand, holistic manner’ (2001: 1).

RE-DRAWING THE PARAMETERS OF THE HUMAN UMWELT If it is the ‘forms of life’ that animate various segmentations of culture, then these, with their cognitive-affective proclivity, would seem to have a claim to some kind of globality or universality at the level of the human, however local the investigations into them may be. For much of semiotics’ recent history, sign study has been localized in the humanities, including some early focus on linguistics, with relatively few forays into the social sciences, led by various incarnations of ‘sociosemiotics’ or ‘social semiotics’. Understandably, semiotics conceived its task in the last hundred years as looking closely at human products in order to address the question of what it is to be human. A more recent development – which, certainly when Sebeok was writing and, perhaps, also now must still be called ‘global semiotics’ rather than just plain ‘semiotics’ – has seen the sciences become important for semiotics. Effectively, in contemporary semiotics, the existing disciplines that are important for semiotics are … all of them. Semiotics’ domain has shifted to looking closely, also, at non-human products in order to address the question of what it is to be human. One key element of this new orientation has its origins in Sebeok’s year of study (1960–1) at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences where he developed zoosemiotics (Sebeok 2001: xx). This domain is particularly important because it deals with the semiosis of humans’ closest evolutionary neighbours. Obviously, too, it represents a move towards a more global semiotics in the sense of ‘global’ as synonymous with ‘all-encompassing’ or inclusive. From there, the shift to consideration of signs in biology in the ensuing decades gave rise to a developed domain and field of biosemiotics that Sebeok could confidently cite in positing a global semiotics at the beginning of this century. Yet this is not the final move in a global semiotics. What a biological orientation encourages, too, is the conceiving of signs in evolutionary terms rather than signs ‘just as they are at this moment’, incorporating Peirce’s fundamental observation in semiotics, summed up as ‘signs grow’ (Merrell 1996). Although biology allows for biosemiotics’ qualitative mode of inquiry, proceeding from what the organism ‘knows’ and how it knows rather than from what it definitively ‘is’ (Kull 2009), and although semiotics has moved away from its ‘euphoric dream of scientificity’ (Barthes 1998 [1971]: 257) and presumptive third-person perspective, physics is a discipline whose coldly scientific approach is not to be wholly dismissed in the making of global semiotics. One area concerns the mechanics and engineering of

28

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

semiosis, its enunciation. On the topic of visual semiotics, Fontanille (in Portela 2015: 606) argues, We must anchor the enunciation in a sensible, scientific, and technical experience and rethink the process of enunciation as one of the exploration of this experience. In the case of visual enunciation, the exploration sequence ‘tells’ in some way the stages of an interaction between the ‘energies’ and the ‘matter’. The energy can be that of photons, electrons, quanta, ultrasound, radio radiation, etc. And the phases are principally the excitation of the material, the response signal of this material, its transduction into other forms of energy, and into other materials, to the final stage of visualisation. What this argument illustrates is that while signs are the province of the living, the sources of signs are inorganic as well as organic and the channels for signs comprise matter as well as energy (Sebeok 1991: 26–7). Yet, more important still is the consideration that physics is not just Newtonian; there is also quantum physics where the relation between material entities is defined in a manner which differs from those of mechanical certainty. Even particles, the quintessential object of physics, cannot be guaranteed to act in the ways that engineering would predict. Indeed, entities in quantum physics are considered to exist not in pure mechanical relations but in a field (not in Csikszentmihalyi’s sense, but in the sense of a province of complex inter-relations) analogous to that of signs in the field of semiosis (Einstein 1949; Heisenberg 1949; Barrow and Tipler 1986; Cariani 1998). Semiotics, perforce, investigates this field insofar as it has a bearing on any aspect of semiosis. It is possible that a global semiotics may take this further in the near future. At present, semiotics’ most global reach seems to bear out Sebeok’s contention that semiosis is coextensive with life. The philosopher John Deely, however, strenuously put forth the possibility that there was semiosis beyond life which also reached into the deep past. Utilizing the term ‘physiosemiosis’, he posits that although the kinds of semiosis that are most familiar may not have existed in the past, nevertheless there were phenomena which did exist without life and which continue to exist in forms which have the trace of Peircean Thirdness and which have semiosis visited upon them from ‘the future’. This is because semiosis does not rely simply on the trafficking of signs themselves but upon the ontological relations which allow signs to subsist. One example Deely gives is a fossil whose semiosis depends on the future observer who might see in it a mere rock or might discover aspects of the world of the dinosaurs. If this hypothesis is correct, Deely (2001: 43) suggests [W]e should not only say, with Sebeok, that semiosis is criterial of life, but of the whole existence of as comprising interactive individuals changing over time and leading to a growth in which consciousness itself appears as an advanced expression, the universe’s way of coming to realize that its perfusion with signs may not be the whole of its being but is the whole of the reason its being grows over time. Any semiotics that comprised physiosemiosis could justifiably call itself global. Moreover, it would be evolutionary, providing a perspective on the development of cognition from matter. It could cast light on the role of observership and the workings of the Anthropic Principle in understanding the growth of the universe (Cobley 2018). Yet, the idea remains in development; as Deely (2001: 44) contends, in lieu of further research into the formation of non-living entities, it is necessary to

GLOBAL SEMIOTICS

29

leave our physiosemiosis suspended, as it were, between philosophical belief and scientific conviction, confident nonetheless that it will not turn out to be another case of phlogiston, but an essential ingredient or layer in explaining the perfusion of signs through which the universe comes to be as it is and to be known to us insofar as it does. Currently, global semiotics is in a stage of development where its concern with the dominion of life, especially cognition, is extremely consuming. Although semiotics is often considered to be preoccupied with defining signs – and, in fact, does, sometimes, define signs – biosemiotics, especially, has thrown into relief what semiotics’ task must be. In short, and in global fashion, semiotics is the study of comparative Umwelten. To clarify immediately, an Umwelt, derived from the work of the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944), is any organism’s ‘model’ of all that it can understand as existing, the way that it uses its senses to apprehend semiosis as well as the way that it produces its own semiosis. Uexküll (2001: 107) states that, for humans, ‘Around us is a protective wall of senses that gets denser and denser. Outward from the body, the senses of touch, smell, hearing and sight enfold man like four envelopes of an increasingly sheer garment’. Resting precisely on the undeniably bodily phenomena of species’ sensoria, any species member thus ‘inhabits’ their Umwelt and each Umwelt is difficult to quantify or assess in engineering terms: animals and humans cannot be defined as machines that are divorced from the configuration of their sensoria. The human Umwelt is particularly well equipped; as Hoffmeyer points out (1996: 58), one of its chief advantages, in consonance with semiotic freedom, is anticipation. Humans can imagine fictitious worlds and can also anticipate worlds in which, for example, different ethical standards might apply. Along with these attributes, the human Umwelt also harbours a staggering capacity to differentiate objects in the world, aligned with one of its main components: verbal language’s recursive potential. ‘Diversity’ is often configured in the present as ‘multiculturalism’, although ‘neurodiversity’ is also gaining ground as a concept for understanding that there are localized ways of conceiving the world. The diversity that semiotics, as the study of comparative Umwelten, entails is a matter of the multifarious ways in which modelling takes place. This will necessarily involve nonhuman animals and, feasibly, the realm of plants. However, what is decisive in respect of the human Umwelt is that, along with its burgeoning diversity, it features parameters that are expanding. In addition to posing the idea of the global that has now become quite familiar, McLuhan is also associated with the idea that all media are ‘extensions’ of the human sensorium (McLuhan 1964) or, as it might be phrased in the present context, extensions of the human Umwelt. Often, it takes a conceptual leap to understand modern electronic media in this way, but it should be remembered that new media embed old media (Bolter and Grusin 1999). Spectacles are an egregious example of an extension because they ameliorate failing sense of sight. A computer seems less of an extension of the senses until it is considered that it facilitates printing so amply, printing extends writing, writing is an extension of orality (speech) and orality is a medium which can convey feelings with/instead of non-verbal communication. In addition to the diversity of interactions that media, as extensions of the human sensorium, are able to facilitate, McLuhan held that those media heralded change – not in their messages or ‘content’, but in themselves. Consider the prevalence of myopia in middle age and the changes wrought by the invention of spectacles (often associated with the thirteenth-century polymath, Roger Bacon) during the mediaeval period in Europe. Spectacles allowed monks in monasteries to extend their career and continue

30

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

their reading and writing of manuscripts until a much later age, thus accelerating and diversifying the repository of knowledge available to European society. In the parlance of the ‘medium theory’ which developed in the wake of McLuhan’s teaching, this is an example of how ‘any major change in how information is encoded and transmitted brings about a concomitant major paradigm shift in cultural evolution’ (Danesi 2002: 15). Media have the potential to diversify experience; in a way, new media enable people to see the world differently, using new and extended forms of semiosis geared to new experience. Semiotics, effectively, attempts to draw cartographies of Umwelten. Where the human Umwelt is concerned, however, the capacity to stretch the parameters of an Umwelt by way of extensions of the sensorium is accompanied and enforced by knowing that that activity is taking place, by knowing – unlike non-human animals – that there is such a thing as semiosis. In one sense, then, semiotics goes beyond the global because it not only possesses a map that enables explorations of Umwelt territorial parameters and where they might have been susceptible of expansion, but it also knows of and conceptualizes those territorial parameters for humans not in possession of a suitable map, including some who have been instrumental in the expansion itself. To put it another way, semiotics’ global aspirations are neither imperialistic nor grandiose; rather, they are inherent in its mission, coinciding with that of humans, to know that semiosis exists (Deely 2010), to explore the human Umwelt and to expand it, true to the founder of semiotics, without doing any harm. To say that disciplines – or, better, modes of investigation with domains and fields which produce knowledge – are central to (future) human evolution may still sound ostentatious, an affectation of the academic class. However, this may seem less the case when one considers that knowledge and the aforementioned ‘forms of life’ spring from the same well of cognition. Recently, Brandt (2020: 19) has noted possible forms of knowledge available to humans, such as history, philosophy and science are ‘complementary to our forms of art and religion, whose structural origin must be sought in the psyche’ and that ‘instead of opposing psyche and world, i.e. life-world’ as is often the case in discussions of the fate of the globe, ‘psycho-semiotic study must directly relate to an eco-semiotic study; because the mind is itself shaped by the semiotic world that evolved with it during its 50,000 years of modernity’. So he considers the possibility of a ‘global citizen’, taking in along the way, such impediments to globality as borders, war, the resistance to merging of communities, including linguistic communities and those separated for political and symbolic reasons, as well as other fuel for pessimism. Yet he argues, from the position of cognitive semiotics, that there are opportunities for hope in shared cognitive processes – particularly the way that images stabilize human feelings and act as markers, as well as the way in which institutional, educational, commercial, technological and cultural imagination as well as planning demand inventiveness, dialogue and ‘epistemically oriented meaning production’ (2020: 22–4). Ultimately, however, he finds that the Enlightenment idea of a global citizen boils down to four possibilities: the jet set of global travellers (which actually ‘represents one of the most serious dangers to the material and immaterial ecology of our planet’ – 2020: 29); the political elite (who tend to serve very localized interests); the organic globalists and eco-militants (who face an uphill struggle to convert everyone); and the artists, who are stateless, unrecognized and are as used to travelling in the imagination as much as they do physically and globally. It should be added for the clarity of the present discussion that this last class are also key players in the expansion of the human Umwelt.

GLOBAL SEMIOTICS

31

Although somewhat sceptical of the general idea of a global citizen, Brandt nevertheless draws attention to the role of the artists as potentially pivotal for the future. This is not the place for an investigation of the psycho-social constitution and contribution of the arts and artists. However, at a time when the arts are being systematically neglected by social democratic governments in the West, especially, seeking also to balance their books through policies promoting austerity, it is important not to forget what the arts – and the humanities associated with the study of them – are for. That is, for Umwelt exploration, for expanding the imaginative possibilities and the understanding of that expansion for the future of humans (Cobley 2014). Brandt seems to spotlight the artists for broadly the same reason that Fontanille (2017) identifies the work of ‘forms of life’ in the segmentation of culture: they are the seed-beds for affect, desire for aesthetic satisfaction and narrative meaning which suffuse the most banal of quotidian interactions but are often given voice in artistry. Indeed, one could argue that this global tendency, distributed minutely across the spheres of human existence, with a forward-looking perspective should be called ‘utopian’. Such an appellation would come with the proviso that utopia is not the programmatic phenomenon which can so easily turn to dystopia. Rather, it is utopian in the sense promulgated by thinker insufficiently referenced in works on semiotics, Ernst Bloch. For Bloch, utopian impulses are organic or even autopoietic, the product of materially deprived humans under the yoke of labour, affective but secular in their source. If they are global in their impulse, it is certainly not the globality envisaged in the Abrahamic religions. Rather, Bloch’s description of the utopian impulse has more in common with global semiotics’ reaching into the nooks and crannies of everyday interactions and their future-orientated hopes – the ‘Not-Yet’ – as well as Peirce’s distinction of his own work from that of pragmatism with his deliberately ugly neologism ‘pragmaticism’ (1907: CP 5.505-25). Famously, in The Principle of Hope Volume 1, Bloch (1996 [1959]: 6) notes that forward dreaming was not reflected on until after Marx, such that ‘expectation and what is expected, the former in the subject, the latter in the object, the oncoming as a whole did not take on a global dimension, in which it could find a place, let alone a central one’. As he goes on to show, this was because the utopian impulse did not exist in a fully formed, ideal-state programme in the style of Thomas More. Bloch writes (1996 [1959]: 15), [T]he utopian coincides so little with the novel of an ideal state that the whole totality of philosophy becomes necessary (a sometimes almost forgotten totality) to do justice to the content of that designated by utopia. Hence the breadth of the anticipations, wishful images, hope-contents collected in the part called: construction. Hence – in front of as well as behind the fairytales of an ideal state – the aforementioned notation and interpretation of medical, technological, architectural, geographical utopias, also of the actual wishful landscapes in painting, opera, literature. Hence, finally, this is the place for the portrayal of the multifarious hope-landscape and the specific perspectives on it in the collective thinking of philosophical wisdom. Despite the predominant pathos of What Has Been in previous philosophies; – the almost continually intended direction: appearance – essence nevertheless clearly shows a utopian pole. The sequence of all these formations, socially, aesthetically, philosophically relevant to culture of ‘true being’, accordingly ends, coming down to always decisive earth, in questions of a life of fulfilling work free of exploitation, but also of a life beyond work, i.e. in the wishful problem of leisure.

32

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Indeed, Bloch not only sees the utopian impulse in leisure but also illustrates it with reference to ‘The fictional figures of human venturing beyond the limits’ (1996 [1959]: 16, emphasis in the original): Don Giovanni, Odysseus, Faust. Each might be Brandt’s global citizen, stateless and constantly travelling in their imaginations. Like these characters, semiosis is unruly. Signs refuse to be definitively packaged up into disciplines. Furthermore, semiotics is also a voyage – possibly a utopian one, reflecting that impulse in quotidian existence, towards globality. Returning to definitions, then, semiotics is global (and utopian) as ●●

●●

●●

●●

a transdisciplinary practice that seeks to reveal what it is, for all disciplines – those concerned with matter and those concerned with mind – acting complementarily, to be human the most likely candidate, since the Enlightenment, to reunite the spheres of knowledge and wisdom a conception of the academy, the act of knowing and the relation of both to the natural environment which provides a critical contrast with mainstream currents of ‘globalization’ as it is promoted by governments and transnational capital an understanding of how knowing may be networked beyond the boundaries of national enclaves

In a way, semiotics seeks to reconstruct Pangaea. Earlier in planet Earth’s lifetime, life had originally commenced at all points global, in bacteria. The history of impeding the reconstruction of Pangaea, of stymieing the Not-Yet, has proceeded through all manner of exigencies and necessarily local arrangements, among which in the academic sphere have been such common occurrences as institutionalization, sectarianism, overspecialization, and so forth. In fact, in this very localized area of human endeavour, it may even be the case that the domain and field will have become truly global not just when there is universally fulfilling work, but when ‘global semiotics’ is natural enough to just be called semiotics.

EPILOGUE Lest it be imagined that these reflections on the globality of semiotics might still be grandiose, given that the discussion has been frequently focused on that diminishing institution in human affairs, the academy, as well as a domain and field that seem relatively small from the vantage point of the major disciplines; and lest it should be considered that questions of globality and semiotics are divorced from the everyday life that has been invoked in the latter part of this discussion – a few extra words are in order. At the time of writing, it is commonly held that there are four major threats that humanity is facing. Each of them is demonstrably – and unsurprisingly, since they are a threat to all humanity – global. Each of them, implicitly but not always acknowledged, features a semiotic dimension that is determining. Of course, it could easily be protested that almost any – or, at least, very many – issues might be described thus; and such a protest, in fact, would not be very far removed from the argument of the current essay. Regardless, the four threats are identified in finance, in Covid, in cyber and in climate;

GLOBAL SEMIOTICS

33

and perspectives on, and extant responses to, each of them throw instructive light on what global semiotics is and might become. The financial threat, stemming from the global financial crisis of 2008 but renewed with the Covid pandemic of 2020–1, has obviously been global in its ramifications. Yet, as the Canadian banker Mark Carney (2021) eloquently argues (without explicitly referring to semiotics), it has been a crisis and threat revolving not so much about monetary value (singular – and involving a semiotic relation in any case) but values that suffuse the financial system. Sometimes he refers to financiers’ ‘ideology’. What is clearly invoked is the system of ideas that obtains among the banking community and the forms of communication which subtend that system, as well as the ways in which they spun out of the control of human agents. Social democratic governments’ response to the global financial crisis by way of national austerity policies rather than other forms of global action has been equally subject to ideology, this time conflating the idea of personal thrift and global economic management. There seems to be a high likelihood that the policy of austerity will be a resort again depending on the level of national debt that is identified in the years following the Covid pandemic. The Covid pandemic itself posed a global threat, of course, too. Its global semiotic dimensions occur at two levels. First, there is the biological level of transmission of the virus: many people have learned much more in this period about the semiotics of viruses and anti-bodies and their interface with the forms of sociality that create human vectors. It is with respect to the latter that the second semiotic level is located, involving all the monitoring of human communication, particularly in face-to-face mode or involving movement, that the pandemic has necessitated. A massive raft of other global semiotic phenomena associated with the pandemic might be considered, too, including health care and government communication and the proliferation of conspiracy theories and fake news on the same topic. One apparent feature of the semiotic response to the pandemic is that the level of global cooperation that has occurred has been restricted to national initiatives such as closing borders, curbing travel and shoring up health systems within national boundaries. Frontiers between territories, often theorized as ‘imaginary’ constructions, became ever more firm during the pandemic, reinforced by national and regional lockdowns. Arguably, distance was reanimated after its death in recent decades, with semiotic interactions that would usually take place in face-to-face mode, involving little or no travel, being conducted via video technologies that had more recently been reserved for long-distance communication. In some ways, the much-vaunted ‘fourth industrial revolution’ that has putatively been occurring with the development of Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things and new practices in work and industry may have been accelerated by humans’ reliance on new technologies during this period. However, this reliance has only increased the threat posed in the sphere of cyber. Private businesses as well as public services and government agencies in the early period of the fourth industrial revolution are precariously placed because of their heavy reliance on computer systems and their vulnerability to attack by national and extranational forces. Quite obviously, semiotics is central to this threat, both in respect of the coding and messages involved in computing (and how it differs from other semiosis) and in respect of the communication that is needed to inform stakeholders and users about protective measures such as two-factor authentication. What is notable about responses to the threat is that they involve the construction of electronic borders, ever-increasing firewalls with greater, more sophisticated encryption.

34

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Possibly the biggest threat of all is that posed by climate change in the era now known by many as the ‘Anthropocene’, featuring immense trafficking of signs and materials. In the Anthropocene, humanity’s manufacture of a threat to itself already proceeds from a destruction of other species in what is known as the Sixth Mass Extinction (Leakey and Lewin 1996). Humans’ recognition of their consanguinity with these species, a key plank of biosemiotics, is no guarantee against their destruction but it may help. There is an internationally coordinated race to get to net zero carbon emissions and head off disaster. Technocrats such as Bill Gates (2021) suggest that intense investment in technology is the most effective route to eliminating greenhouse gases. However, Carney (2021: 311) points out that technology adoption is a semiotic issue, with the predictable life cycle of research and development, mass adoption and maturity, the second phase taking up to forty-five years – far too slow for the global purposes required. Even the decisions on approaches, let alone specific initiatives, to climate change on a global basis require major semiotic interactions such as the COP discussions at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (number 26 in November 2021 being the next schedule at the time of writing). Beyond that, there is a need for even greater semiotic interactions more widely: in the face of his advocacy of technology, for example, Gates (2021: 216) insists that central to addressing climate change is a conversation featuring ‘our family members, friends, and leaders’. A general case for the semiotic nature of these global threats probably does not have to be made at any greater length. However, what is apparent is that semiotics has a role to play in making more lucid what globality is, whether it is to be embraced and what is considered to be an appropriate response to global challenges. In spite of diversity in the human population and the necessity of understanding specific political circumstances, any embrace of the global has to rely on universal humanity rather than a fetishizing of difference. Yet, as the aforementioned global threats and the piecemeal responses to them indicate, the global perspective is like the Flying Dutchman, only heaving into view with the ebbs and flows of the tide, vaguely visible in favourable atmospheric conditions but dispersed across everyday life in utopian fragments.

NOTES 1 In the words of Roman Jakobson, ‘As for the question of which genres of signs enter into the frame of semiotics, there can be only one answer: if semiotics is the science of signs […] then it does not exclude any sign […] [O]ne should reject all the unsuitable efforts of sectarians who seek to narrow this vast and varied work by introducing into it a parochial spirit’ (Jakobson and Pomorska 1983: 157–8, quoted in Sebeok 2001: 3–4). 2 https://www.iacs.dk

REFERENCES Appadurai, A. (1990), ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, in M. Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, 295–310, London: Sage. Barrow, J. D. and F. J. Tipler (1986), The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barthes, R. (1977), ‘Change the Object Itself: Mythology Today’, in S. Heath (ed. and trans.), Image-Music-Text, 165–9, London: Fontana.

GLOBAL SEMIOTICS

35

Barthes, R. (1998 [1971]), ‘Réponses: Interview with Tel Quel’, in P. Ffrench and R.-F. Lack (eds), The Tel Quel Reader, 170–81, New York: Routledge. Bertens, H. (1995), The Idea of the Postmodern: A History, London: Routledge. Bloch, E. (1996 [1959]), The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. N. Plaice et al, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Block de Behar, L. (2011), ‘When Anecdotes Are No Longer What They Used to Be’, in P. Cobley et al. (eds), ‘Semiotics Continues to Astonish’: Thomas A. Sebeok and the Doctrine of Signs, 31–40, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Bolter, J. D. and R. Grusin (1999), Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brandt, P. A. (2020), ‘What Is a Global Citizen? A Contribution from Cognitive Semiotics’, in M. Ellis (ed.), Critical Global Semiotics: Understanding Sustainable Transformational Citizenship, 19–31, London: Routledge. Brier, S. (2011), ‘Ethology and the Sebeokian Way from Zoosemiotics to Cyber(bio)semiotics’, in P. Cobley, J. Deely, K. Kull and S. Petrilli (eds), Semiotics Continues to Astonish: Thomas A. Sebeok and the Doctrine of Signs, 123–60, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Cairncross, F. (1997), The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives, London: Orion. Cariani, P. (1998), ‘Towards an Evolutionary Semiotics: The Emergence of New Sign-functions in Organisms and Devices’, in G. Vijver, S. N. Salthe and M. Delpos (eds), Evolutionary Systems, 359–76, Dordrecht: Springer, http://www.genlingnw.ru/Staff/Psycholinguistics/ Semiotics.pdf (accessed 3 April 2017). Carney, J. (2020), ‘Thinking avant la lettre: A Review of 4E Cognition’, Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 4 (1): 77–90, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC7250653/ (accessed 22 August 2021). Carney, M. (2021), Value(s): Building a Better World for All, London: Signal. Cobley, P. (2014), ‘What the Humanities Are for – A Semiotic Perspective’, The American Journal of Semiotics, 30 (3–4): 205–28. Cobley, P. (2018), ‘Observership, “Knowing” and Semiosis’, Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 25 (1): 23–47. Connor, S. (1989), Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, Oxford: Blackwell. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996), Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, New York: HarperCollins. Danesi, M. (2002), Understanding Media Semiotics, London: Arnold. Deely, J. (1989), ‘A Global Enterprise’, Preface to the corrected 2nd edition of Thomas A. Sebeok, The Sign and Its Masters, vii–xiv, Lanham: University Press of America. Deely, J. (2001), ‘Physiosemiosis in the Semiotic Spiral: A Play of Musement’, Sign Systems Studies, 29 (1): 27–48. Deely, J. (2010), Semiotic Animal: A Postmodern Definition of ‘Human Being’ Transcending Patriarchy and Feminism, South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press. Deely, J. (2011), ‘Thomas A. Sebeok and Semiotics of the 21st Century’, in P. Cobley et al. (eds), ‘Semiotics Continues to Astonish’: Thomas A. Sebeok and the Doctrine of Signs, 123–60, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Einstein, A. (1949), ‘Autobiographical Notes’, in P. A. Schilpp (ed.), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, 665–88, New York: Tudor Publishing Co. Gates, B. (2021), How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, London: Allen Lane.

36

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Heisenberg, W. (1949), The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory, New York: Dover Publications. Featherstone, M., ed. (1990a), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, London: Sage. Featherstone, M. (1990b), ‘Global Culture: An Introduction’, in Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, 1–14, London: Sage. Featherstone, M., S. Lash and R. Robertson (1995), Global Modernities, London: Sage. Fontanille, J. and A. Zinna, eds (2005), Les objets au quotidien, Liège: Presses Universitaires de Liège. Fontanille, J. (2017), Formes de vie, Limoges: Presses Universitaires de Limoges. Giddens, A. (1991a), The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Giddens, A. (1991b), Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hardwick, C., ed. (1977), Semiotics and Significs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. Harvey, D. (1988), The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell. Hippocrates (1983), Hippocratic Writings, ed. A. Lloyd, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hoffmeyer, J. (1996), Signs of Meaning in the Universe, trans. B. J. Haveland, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hutcheon, L. (1989), The Politics of Postmodernism, London: Routledge. Jakobson, R. and K. Pomorska (1983), Dialogues, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jameson, F. (1991), Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso. Jensen, K. B. (1995), The Social Semiotics of Mass Communication, London and New Delhi: Sage. Johnson, C. (2019), ‘What Black Life Actually Looks Like’, Jacobin, 29 April, https:// jacobinmag.com/2019/04/racism-black-lives-matter-inequality (accessed 22 August 2021). Johnson, C. (2020), ‘Don’t Let Blackwashing Save the Investor Class’, Jacobin, 24 June, https:// jacobinmag.com/2020/06/blackwashing-corporations-woke-capitalism-protests (accessed 22 August 2021). Kaplan, E. A., ed. (1988), Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices, London: Verso. Kuhn, T. A. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kull, K. (2009), ‘Biosemiotics: To Know, What Life Knows’, Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 16: 81–8. Kull, K. (2011), ‘The Architect of Biosemiotics: Thomas A. Sebeok and Biology’, in P. Cobley et al (eds), ‘Semiotics Continues to Astonish’: Thomas A. Sebeok and the Doctrine of Signs, 223–50, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Lagopoulos, A. (2000), ‘A Global Model of Communication’, Semiotica, 130 (1/2): 45–77. Leakey, R. and R. Lewin (1996), The Sixth Extinction: Biodiversity and Its Survival, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Leong, N. (2021), Identity Capitalists: The Powerful Insiders Who Exploit Diversity to Maintain Inequality, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marrone, G. (2022), Introduction to the Semiotics of the Text, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Maynes, M. J. (2008), Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

GLOBAL SEMIOTICS

37

McLuhan, M. (1964), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw-Hill. McLuhan, E. (1996), ‘The Source of the Term, “Global Village”’, McLuhan Studies, Issue 2, http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_2art2.htm (accessed 22 August 2021). McLuhan, M. and B. R. Powers (1989), The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merrell, F. (1996), Signs Grow: Semiosis and Life Processes, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Peirce, C. S. ([1866–1913] 1931–58), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols 1–6, C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds), vols 7–8, A. Burks (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pelkey, J., ed, (2022), Bloomsbury Semiotics, 4 vols., London: Bloomsbury. Petrilli, S. and A. Ponzio (2005), Semiotics Unbounded: Interpretive Routes through the Open Network of Signs, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Petrilli, S. and A. Ponzio (2011), ‘A Tribute to Thomas A. Sebeok’, in P. Cobley et al. (eds), ‘Semiotics Continues to Astonish’: Thomas A. Sebeok and the Doctrine of Signs, 307–30, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Pluckrose, H. and J. Lindsay (2020), Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity – And Why This Harms Everybody, Durham, NC: Pitchstone. Portela, J. C. (2015), ‘New Conversations with Jacques Fontanille’, ALFA, 59 (3): 591–617, https://www.scielo.br/j/alfa/a/w6YhCDQ44XFt44sd3Bnxz4f/?format=pdf&lang=en (accessed 22 August 2021). Poinsot, J. (2013), Tractatus de Signis: The Semiotic of John Poinsot, 2nd corrected edn, ed. John Deely, South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press. Reed, A. (2015), ‘From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much’, Common Dreams, 15 June, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/15/jennerdolezal-one-trans-good-other-not-so-much (accessed 22 August 2021). Robertson, R. (1992), Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, London: Sage. Robertson, R. and J. Chirico (1985), ‘Humanity, Globalization and Worldwide Religious Resurgence: A Theoretical Exploration’, Sociological Analysis, 46 (3): 219–42. Sebeok, T. A. (1977), ‘Ecumenicalism in Semiotics’, in Sebeok (ed.), A Perfusion of Signs, 180–206, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. Sebeok, T. A. (1991), A Sign is Just a Sign, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. Sebeok, T. A. (2001), Global Semiotics, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. Sebeok, T. A. and J. Umiker-Sebeok, eds (1986), The Semiotic Sphere, New York: Plenum. Sebeok, T. A. and J. Umiker-Sebeok, eds (1987), The Semiotic Web 1986, Berlin: de Gruyter. Sebeok, T. A. and J. Umiker-Sebeok, eds (1988), The Semiotic Web 1987, Berlin: de Gruyter. Sebeok, T. A. and J. Umiker-Sebeok, eds (1989), The Semiotic Web 1988, Berlin: de Gruyter. Sebeok, T. A. and J. Umiker-Sebeok, eds (1990), The Semiotic Web 1989, Berlin: de Gruyter. Sebeok, T. A. and J. Umiker-Sebeok, eds (1991), The Semiotic Web 1990: Recent Developments in History and Theory, Berlin: de Gruyter. Sebeok, T. A. and J. Umiker-Sebeok, eds (1992), The Semiotic Web 1991: Biosemiotics, Berlin: de Gruyter. Sebeok, T. A. and J. Umiker-Sebeok, eds (1994), The Semiotic Web 1992–93: Advances in Visual Semiotics, Berlin: de Gruyter. Uexküll, J. v. (2001), ‘An Introduction to Umwelt’, Semiotica, 134 (1/4): 107–10. Waters, M. (1995), Globalization, London: Routledge.

38

CHAPTER TWO

Premodern Semiotics MARTIN ŠVANTNER AND MICHAL KARĽA

INTRODUCTION In this chapter we undertake a brief survey of some of the Ancient and Medieval conceptions of sign.1 For the purposes of our inquiry, we delineate and arrange these two time periods according to two general ideas – that of inference and that of representation. Thus, the general model of sign utilized and theorized upon in the ancient world was that of inference. Various disciplines (and different schools of those disciplines) employed different ways of understanding based on their answers to the following three related lines of inquiry: 1. What is the formal model of sign inference? 2. What can be known by means of sign inference? Most importantly, is such knowledge certain, probable or both, depending on the conditions surrounding it? 3. The development of different terminological distinctions and classifications of signs based on answers to these two criteria. More concretely, a sign was conceived to be some manifest or observed fact or thing by means of which something else – some other, obscure or unobserved fact or thing – could be known. As such, a sign is the middle ground between two limits of knowledge, between the entirely manifest and the entirely obscure. This basic view of sign – as some manifest object, or fact, making some other, nonmanifest object, or fact, known – can be found in a plethora of ancient semiotic practices and theories. In the domain of divination, the sign is the omen (the divinatory sign) and what it signifies is the oracle (what will happen if the omen is observed). In medicine, the sign is the symptom (or, rather, the set of symptoms), whereas what it signifies is the prognosis (i.e. what will happen to the patient, as opposed to the diagnosis, or identification of the illness or condition). Other such domains where the inferential model of sign was used were, for instance, navigation or meteorology. This view of sign was later generalized and formalized (in different ways) by Aristotle’s logic and by that of the Stoics. The other crucial distinction of ancient semiotics concerned the very status of knowledge thus obtained by the sign – whether such knowledge is certain (or necessary) or only probable (conjectural). From here, various forms of ancient rationalism and empiricism can be distinguished. It might, however, come as a surprise to a contemporary reader that the rationalistic semiotic tradition did not exclusively conceive sign-knowledge as necessary; neither did ancient empiricists conceive that knowledge as exclusively

40

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

conjectural. What was in fact much more common was that both traditions recognized a certain class of sign-inferences as necessary, and the other as only probable. The question of the status of knowledge attainable by signs, of course, leads us to the domain of sign theory, rather than sign-practice. Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of ancient semiotics (both in its practices and theories), quite established in recent decades of historiographic inquiry, is that sign in the ancient world was exclusively a natural phenomenon – that is to say, that the theory of language was separated from the theory of sign, or that linguistic units (words, sentences) were not conceived as signs. And what is in this respect true of language might as well be extended to other social and cultural phenomena. In the words of John Deely (2001: 215), for instance, the sign in ancient Greece was understood as belonging exclusively to the domain of physis (or nature), while whatever belonged to the domain of nomos (or convention/culture) was not thought of as a sign. Thus, the Greek term semeion (together with the terms subsumed to or in any other way related to it) was the sign, while the term symbolon, used, for instance, by Aristotle for linguistic expressions (or, more properly speaking, to the relation these expressions have to that to which they refer, i.e. mental states, or ‘passions of the soul’) was neither understood as sign (semeion) nor in any way related to it. It is a rather difficult task to find one canonical expression of this situation in literature, mainly because all such expressions are partially (and knowingly) determined by the present definition of semiotics and sign from the perspective of the given writer. For instance, in Deely’s view (in which the conception of sign as transcending the distinction between nature and culture is the most fundamental) the stress is put on semeion as being an exclusively natural (in contradistinction to cultural) phenomenon (Deely 2001: 154–8). Writers more inspired by semiology, on the other hand, for whom the linguistic sign is the sign par excellence, prefer to speak of the theory of sign separated from the theory of language, or to point out that (unlike the semiological tradition) the ancient conception of sign in general was not modelled after the linguistic sign and that what we would today call the linguistic sign was by the Greeks modelled after a different theory (i.e. equivalence relation) than semeion, or sign proper in Ancient Greek sense (i.e. implicative relation – Eco et al. 1989: 4–5; Manetti 1993: xiii–xiv). In other words, one might be tempted to say that if we accept the conception of sign as a genus having both natural and cultural (or non-linguistic and linguistic) species, that the Greeks recognized only one such species (i.e. the natural, or non-linguistic, sign) which they identified with the whole genus, committing a pars pro toto fallacy from the contemporary perspective. But it needs to be said that the Greeks themselves did not see anything fallacious in their treatment of sign. For them, semeion – or natural, nonlinguistic sign – was all there was to sign, and all other domains (such as the theory of language, most notably) were outside the domain of a sign proper. However, as with any generalization, one might find exceptions or complications to it. For instance, in Plato’s Sophist, an expression ‘vocal sign’ (semeion tes phones) occurs – such vocal sign being called a ‘name’ (onoma) (c.359–347 BCE, Soph, 262a). The question of whether the above generalization is legitimate still needs, perhaps, to be addressed by in-depth study of the ancient sources by a future writer. Suffice it to say for the present study that the implicative, or inferential, model of sign was predominant in Ancient Greece (Marmo 1997), and that while there are some indications that this model was not the exclusive one, the first merging of the theories of non-linguistic and linguistic sign comes with the Stoics and is ultimately vindicated by Saint Augustine (who first

PRE-MODERN SEMIOTICS

41

explicitly formulated the sign as a genus with its natural and cultural, non-linguistic and linguistic, species) through whom such a view became commonplace in the Middle Ages and (at least in Anglo-Saxon circles) continues to do so to the present day. With these qualifications we may proceed to our account of ancient semiotics.

SEMIOTICS IN ANCIENT GREEK MEDICINE Overview Theoretical reflection on signs and sign processes dates back to the ancient Greek medicine of the fifth century BCE.2 In fact, the very term ‘semiotics’ (semeiotike) is of medical origin.3 The chief source of our knowledge of the Greek medical tradition is the Corpus Hippocraticum,4 a highly heterogeneous collection of about a hundred texts, written mostly between fifth and fourth century BCE,5 of various genres,6 styles, themes and doctrines. Although no common theme pertains to the corpus as a whole, we can detect in a number of Hippocratic texts a growing effort to establish medicine as a secular, rational, evidence-based science and art.7 It was advanced along two lines: (1) the defence of the rational method and (2) the actual development of the method. This twofold effort produced two conceptions of sign: tekmerion (‘proof’) and semeion (‘sign’, ‘symptom’), which mark the beginning of Greek semiotic theory, overlapping largely with the beginning of Greek scientific thought.

Scientific character of medicine The defence of the scientific character of medicine is mostly polemic in character, directed primarily against two rivals: 1. Philosophical speculation, which began with stating certain principles or postulates (hypotheseis) and attempted to account for all phenomena as instances of these principles 2. Religion, which offered supernatural explanations of sickness. Contrary to philosophical speculation, the author of Ancient Medicine (chps 1–2) argues on the ground of parsimony that the art of medicine can do without philosophical postulates. The postulates are untestable, but we are able to distinguish between good and bad medical practice, between health and sickness and to establish (empirical) criteria for such distinctions; therefore, there is no need for the postulates. Thus-conceived medical science is characterized as empirical, based on observation, and presenting testable findings – and as such, it is a communitarian as well as cumulative endeavour, because every practitioner needs to build upon the results of their colleagues, past and present. At the same time, this science does not aim at perfect, irrefutable knowledge, but only approximative: ‘[p]erfectly exact truth is rarely to be seen’ (Ancient Medicine, chp. 9). Contrary to religion, the author of The Sacred Disease (chp. 5) aims to offer a modus tollens proof (tekmerion)8 that this disease9 (presenting with symptoms such as screaming, uncontrollable shaking, foaming at the mouth and choking on one’s own saliva) does not have divine origin. For ‘it affects the naturally phlegmatic, but does not attack the bilious. Yet, if it were more divine than others, this disease ought to have attacked all equally’.

42

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Medicine as prognosis The primary task of the ancient physician was to read symptoms (semeia). But unlike today, when the goal of the study of symptoms is to infer a diagnosis, the Greeks used to take symptoms as signs of prognosis. In this sense, medicine was presented as a kind of ‘forecasting’ (pronoia).10 The present symptoms exhibited or described by the patient were thus signs indicating the future progress of the disease.11 The details of this procedure are captured in Prognostikon, a manual for physicians, which consists of lists of symptoms and instructions for how to read them, and prognoses based upon such readings. The manual directs the physician’s attention to various classes of phenomena to be examined, among which it selects these which should be taken as signs and what prognosis to be inferred from them. This collection of symptoms and their respective prognoses was largely the result of long observations, the inference being predominantly inductive. The view of medical science examined as empirical and conjectural is thus here put into practice.

Summary Throughout the Corpus Hippocraticum, two terms for sign are used: 1. Tekmerion, meaning ‘evidence’, ‘proof’ or ‘conjecture’,12 and employed most prominently in connection with rational, deductive (or necessary) argument 2. Semeion, meaning ‘symptom’, or ‘sign’,13 and employed in connection with empirical, probable inference. The distinction between tekmerion, which presents some fact as necessary, and semeion, which presents some fact as probable, later canonized by Aristotle,14 is beginning to emerge. On the other hand, tekmerion is also used for generic conjecture (without concern whether it is necessary or probable) and sometimes even interchangeably for semeion.15 This is not surprising at all, because exact terminology was only about to be established. One may, however, speculate that since it is tekmerion which is used generally for any sign-inference, and not semeion, there could have been among the Greek doctors at least the vague awareness of the generic character of the use of signs, sign-inference or (as later authors would put it) semiosis – i.e. awareness that a physician forecasting the prognosis upon examining the patient, and a theorist constructing a proof solely on the grounds that if so-and-so is the case, then this-or-that must be the case, follows generally the same procedure. If the Hippocratic doctors were not the first to realize this, they provided the grounds upon which the later thinkers were able to make such realization.

PLATO: THE COGNITIVE CHALLENGE OF WRITING AND READING Overview The first problem that every interpreter of the Platonic corpus must face comes from its very nature itself (cf. Griswold 1988). Plato’s dramatic composition (Cain 2007) is distinguished by a subversive work with the text, which is inseparable from the presented ideas ‘inside’ his texts.16 The dialogues are composed as a metaleptic figure (Lyotard 1988: 26–31; cf. c.399–390 BCE, Prot. 347–8) that provokes the constant questioning of the ‘roles of the reader’ (Eco 1979). Therefore, every attempt to reconstruct Plato’s presupposed proto-semiotic concepts will be highly selective.

PRE-MODERN SEMIOTICS

43

Plato was the true heir to the great cultural tradition which preceded him (Manetti 1993: 53). He was also the true explorer of a vast variety of modern semiological problems, such as the nature of writing or the problem of the conventional or natural sources of signification in general (Barney 2001) and also semiotic problems: Plato has opened the way to a more systematic understanding of the interconnection of the activity of the inferring mind and the aesthetic world (Woolf 2013), to the questions of the soundness of argumentation and judgement and to the way to question the nature of general terms. Furthermore, Plato was the inventor of the conceptual strategies on how to grasp them.17

True signs of dialectic knowledge The general assumption about Plato’s perspective can be portrayed as trying to meet the challenge that had been raised by the aforementioned rhetorical concept of speech (c.391–360 BCE, Phdr. 266–67d) and its epistemological (Hankinson 2001: 96), political and ethical relativism (cf. Dissoi logoi DK 90A, 3–5; cf. c.399–390 BCE, Euth. 271c–72a; c.391–360 BCE, Phdr. 273a–c; cf. Kennedy 1999: 50; Nussbaum 2001: 122–52), and which was represented by the ‘sophistic movement’ (Kerferd 1981).18 Plato’s perspective is fundamentally opposite (Hankinson 2001: 96): the task of the true dialectic knowledge (dialegesthai episteme, c.391–360 BCE, Rep. 511b–c) is to uncover the deception (apate) of doxastic, temporal persuasion (peitho) and to find a universal guiding method grounded in the unity of knowledge and virtuous (arete) morality (cf. c.399–390 BCE, Gorg. 489e; cf. Irwin 1977; Mittelstrass 1984; Allen 2011). The meaning (logos) of signs is treated from a dialectic perspective (c.399–390 BCE, Crat. 390c) which must uncover the immutable (McComiskey 2002: 21; cf. pistis alethes in Parmenides DK B 7–8) and reliable foundations (c.399–390 BCE, Gorg. 464e–65a) for any argumentatively mediated reasoning (c.391–360 BCE, Rep. 515c–d) that does not seek only the eristic refutation but also justifiable (logon didonai) understanding (c.391–360 BCE, Rep. 533b–c; cf. c.391–360 BCE, Theaet. 167d–e).

From the divine inspiration to the reasonable responsibility Plato often talks about semeia as (verbally or visually) ‘sending messages’ (Manetti 1993: 54; cf. c.359–347 BCE, Tim. 71e) in the contexts that set up communication ‘between gods and humankind’ (Manetti 1993: 53; c.359–347 BCE, Tim 71a–2b; c.391–360 BCE, Phdr. 244 b–c; c.359–347 BCE, Epin. 984e2; cf, Hollman 2011: 121–4). The gods are the most perfect (c.399–390 BCE, Apol. 31a6–7; 41d2; cf. c.391–360 BCE, Rep. 509b9) and truly creative entities (c.359–347 BCE, Tim. 68d) who – from their timeless omniscient perspective – can send to the time-limited human beings only confusing (atopoi) omens (hermeneia): the divine signs (c.391–360 BCE, Rep. 496c–97).19 Humans can come in contact with these ‘cognitive challenges’ (cf. Manetti 1993: 32) in specific states of consciousness, such as sleep, illness or trance or in religious situations (cf. Mylonopoulos 2010). But, according to Plato, investigating this truly ambiguous and unbalanced nature of the signs that are entities between divinity and human agency, between culture and nature (cf. c.399–390 BCE, Crat. 383b7–4a3; Manetti 1993: 56–7) demands not a priest, deceiving sophist or a quack rhetorician, but a rational (c.399–390 BCE, Crit. 46b), ‘infallible’ (to me anamarteton; c.391–360 BCE, Rep. 477e) specialist-philosopher, who

44

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

poses the true expertise in knowledge (sophia) and is possibly capable of justly examining (episkepsis, c.391–360 BCE, Rep. 524b1) them and via dialectic logos can overcome these ambiguities. The guiding metaphysical principle of the rational interpretation of signs is possible in general, because the general order of things is rational (c.391–360 BCE, Phaed. 97b–c; cf. Sandywell 1996: 375–6; Hankinson 2001: 122). Therefore, the probation of the ambiguity of signs in Plato’s philosophy inheres the grand unity of inferential (methods of judgement), political (care of the public affairs and proper action that stems from a valid inference), ethical (care of the soul that is mediated via proper logos) and also in general cosmological agency. Truthful meaning – mediated through the philosophical dialectic – interconnects the ‘objective knowledge’ and ‘subjective autonomy’ (Mittelstrass 1984: 145); it cannot be achieved from a ‘kairatic/inspirative’ situation, but must be ‘practically judged’ (phronesis) with a proper inferential technique (cf. McComiskey 2002: 33). This technique is based on the work with a specific sort of implicative ‘sufficient signs’ (hikanon semeion, c.391–360 BCE, Theaet. 152a6 ff.; Manetti 1993: 55) that can lead to the sufficient or stable proof (tekmerion, c.391–360 BCE, Phd. 70c–d; apodeixis, c.391–360 BCE, Phdr. 245c) and in a broader context to the truly moral life (c.399–390 BCE, Gorg. 520d–e). Dialectically/epistemologically considered signs are those that are imprinted (ensemenamene, c.391–360 BCE, Theaet. 209c8) on the mind – which distinguishes one particular thing from all other things – and can form a ‘type’ (typos) and a true opinion. ‘False opinion is created […] whenever an individual is incapable of assigning each thing to its own sign ([c.391–360 BCE, Theaet.] 195a), that is, of matching the sign printed on the mind with the new sensation, such that the relationship established in the process of renewed perception is identical to the relationship between copy and original […]’ (Manetti 1993: 54).

The importance of Socratic elenchus: From eristic to elenctic reasoning The Platonic figure of Socrates (and its later variation in the Athenian guest in the Sophist) in his elenctic (and dialectic) examinations of the interlocutors’ pre-accepted statements can be seen here as symptomatically representing all aforementioned dimensions. Socrates was often credited (c.348–347 BCE, Metaph. M 4, 1078b17–32; Ausland 2002: 38; cf. Peirce c.1902: CP 2.61, 1893: CP 2.680) as the inventor of epagoge, the proto-inductive method. But Socratic inductivism and the general aspects of Platonic philosophy, which are of quasi-abductive nature, cannot be separated. Socrates is often portrayed by Plato as a ‘true detective’ (cf. Hintikka 2007: 22), who stops (thanks to the manifestation of his own daimonic sign) at the place of ‘crime’ and must face the given circumstances of non-ordered traces (often represented by the interlocutor’s self-confident claims) with a nonconformist hypothesis. Thus, if we accept the inherently semiotic hypothesis that practical wisdom per se is derived from the old-fashioned interpretation of the divine signs, we can say that Socrates’s inductive activity leads to the falsification or acceptance of the hypothesis presented. This perspective then opens up further lines about the structure and function of the demonstration, evidence and explanation that is in many ways followed by Aristotle: dialectic usually deals in reasoning with rigorous philosophical or at least general questions, and rhetoric with concrete or practical ones, but both disciplines are based on reasoning from the signs.

PRE-MODERN SEMIOTICS

45

ARISTOTLE Overview Aristotle, who might be called the first systematic thinker, laid down the foundations of many sciences, established their technical vocabulary and presented a plethora of definitions – including the definition of ‘definition’ (c.353 BCE, Top. 101b39). He is the founder of logic, in which he drew from earlier sources, including Hippocratic medicine. It is within the domain of logic that he developed his theory of sign.

Aristotle’s logic – and semiotics within Aristotle’s theory of sign is an elaboration upon – and the specification of – the view common to Classical Antiquity,20 in which sign is something manifest by means of which something else, some otherwise obscure fact, can be known, i.e. inferred. If this is so, then sign qua inference should be properly dealt with by logic, because it is logic which studies inference as such. Logic, therefore, would be coextensive with the general theory of signs, treating that which belongs to sign generally and is common to its use across all discourses. In this sense, Aristotle might be said to be the first author to develop a general theory of sign – the first one to develop semiotics. However, while all signs are inferences (or grounds thereof), not all inferences are (by) signs, according to Aristotle. Aristotle’s semiotics is thus only a part – not the whole – of his logic. Moreover, his analysis of an argument from signs, in the end, results in a rather dismissive view, where sign is basically ‘a certain type of defective argument’ (De Lacy and De Lacy 1941d: 158). Nevertheless, Aristotle attempted to examine sign-inference in general, and for that reason his theory still might deserve the name of general semiotics, though only within the boundaries of the Greek semiotic discourse.

Theory of sign In the last section of Prior Analytics (c.348–347 BCE, bk. 2, chps 23–7) Aristotle analyses how any form of reasoning (conviction or belief, pistis)21 can be expressed by the syllogistic figures, and how their respective validity is influenced by such expression. Sign (semeion) is the last of the belief-formation processes so discussed: A sign [semeion], however, means a demonstrative premise22 [protasis apodeiktike] which is necessary [anankaia] or generally accepted [endoxos]. That which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being. (c.348–347 BCE, An. Pr., bk. ii, ch. 27, 70a1–10; trans. by H. Tredennick 1938) A sign is thus: 1. A premise, i.e. a proposition from which some other proposition (conclusion) can be inferred; and this premise is an expression of the interconnection between two facts, or events, in such a way that 2. One fact/event, a, is a sign of some other fact/event, b, by being either simultaneous with, or preceding, or succeeding, this other fact/event b.23

46

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

A sign as a premise is a subject-predicate proposition (e.g. ‘This woman has milk’), while the conclusion (the fact signified) is another (e.g. ‘This woman is pregnant’). The general form of any sign-inference is thus an enthymeme (c.348–347 BCE, An. Pr. 70a10) – a syllogism with one premise unstated. The validity of the argument form sign depends on the kind of premise to be added to the enthymeme to make it a complete syllogism. Such completion of an enthymeme to syllogism depends on the form of the premise to be added, where the resulting syllogism may be either in the first, second or third figure. And Aristotle discovers that only in the first figure is the argument necessarily valid,24 while in the other two it is only probable.25 So, while ‘truth can be found in all signs’ (c.348–347 BCE, An. Pr. 70a38–9), only in the first figure is such truth necessary. For this reason, Aristotle suggests that the first-figure syllogism should be called tekmerion, ‘proof’, while the other two figures are ‘signs’ (semeia) in this specific sense of probable arguments. And because of that Aristotle does not, in the end, put much weight on the arguments from signs (semeia).

Induction and abduction A sign (tekmerion as well as semeion) is not the only ground from which an argument might proceed for Aristotle. Besides other ‘forms of conviction’ he pays attention to ‘induction’ (epagoge) and ‘reduction’ (Tredennick 1938), or ‘leading away’ (Smith 1989)  – apagoge – a term Peirce would have translated as ‘hypothesis’ or ‘abduction’. Aristotle’s two figures of semeion26 correspond with these two other grounds of argument recognized by him earlier in the text. Apagoge, or hypothesis, which is essentially an inference of a minor premise of first-figure deductive syllogism,27 is in form identical with the second-figure argument from sign. Epagoge, or induction, an inference of a major premise of first-figure deductive syllogism,28 is in a similar fashion formally identical to the third-figure argument from sign (Smith 1989: 227). The first tekmeriotic figure and the two semeiotic figures are by result the ultimate forms upon which the analysis of reasoning in general rests.29 Ironically, then, Aristotle had all the means to develop a completely general theory of reasoning, both necessary and probable, and taking account of all grounds upon which premises can be accepted – and to do so on account of the argument from sign. But he did not do so, perhaps because of his focus on necessary reasoning.

THE NATURE OF SIGN-INFERENCE ACCORDING TO THE STOICS AND THE EPICUREANS Overview The most extensive account of signs which has been preserved from Classical Antiquity to this day is contained in the works of Sextus Empiricus (Allen 2001: 87), a secondcentury-CE sceptical philosopher. In his writings, Sextus presents a debate between the schools of thought prominent in the Hellenistic period, most notably the Stoics and the Epicureans.30 Ironically, then, our most important source for understanding how the later ancient Greeks understood the sign, and which place it occupied in their theory, came to us in a form that we would today call the secondary literature (Allen 2001: 8). Especially for the Stoics, not many other sources are available on their theory of sign (Allen 2001: 148). According to Sextus’s account, an inference from signs (unlike in

PRE-MODERN SEMIOTICS

47

Aristotle) occupied a prominent place in epistemology and logic of both schools. Our scarce sources, however, do not enable us to reconstruct their doctrines systematically.

Background For both the Stoics and the Epicureans, theory of sign was a part of logic31 – which in their conception included inquiries belonging, in today’s view, rather to epistemology than to logic proper. That is to say, the Stoic and Epicurean logic was propositional, with the conditional (if P, then Q) as its main form. The differences amounted to the questions of what conditionals should count as sign-inference and under what conditions should such inference be considered sound. In order to delineate the locus of the theory of sign, Sextus divides object matters (say, the sum total of the cognizable) into two highest classes: 1. The evident (phainomena, prodela), and 2. Non-evident (adela) matters. Consequently, there are two kinds of epistemic access to objects, which are known either directly (1) or indirectly (2), i.e. by transition (metabasis) from our knowledge of the evident. Accordingly, there are two epistemological theories: (1) the criterion of truth (kriterion alethes) which attempts to formulate conditions under which we know something evidently and (2) theory of sign (semeion) and demonstration (apodeixis).32

The sign We learn from Sextus that for the Stoics, ‘a sign is a pre-antecedent33 statement in a sound conditional revelatory of the consequent’ (b.235 CE, PH 2.104). And he adds: ‘They say that a statement is self-contained sayable [lekton] which is assertoric so far as it itself goes and that a sound conditional is one which does not begin from truth and end in falsity’ (b.235 CE, PH 2.104). Thus, in a conditional proposition (statement, axioma) P ⊃ Q, the sign is the antecedent proposition, P, granted that (i) the conditional is sound and (ii) its antecedent is revelatory of the consequent. While the condition (i) of soundness is purely logical, the other condition (ii) of revelation is clearly not. Therefore, while the conditional ‘if it is day, it is light’ is sound, its antecedent (it is day) is not a sign of the consequent (it is light) because the fact of there being light is not revealed by the antecedent (it is day) in any way – both facts, rather, are equally apparent on their own. The other peculiar feature of this definition is that the sign is a ‘sayable’ (lekton), a term which Sextus places to the Stoic theory of the truth. In asking what the locus of truth is, the Stoics postulate three interconnected things: ‘the thing signified [to semainomenon] and the signifier [to semainon] and the object [to tygchanon]’ (b.235 CE, Adv. Math. 8.11). The signifier (spoken utterance) and the object (some material thing to which the utterance refers) are bodies, while the signified is a non-corporeal state of affairs. So, since a state of affairs (auto to pragma) is that which can be signified by an utterance, and both antecedent and consequent of the conditional represent states of affairs (lekta, semainomena), a sign is, according to the Stoic definition, one apparent state of affairs, signifying another, not apparent, state of affairs. The Epicureans, on the other hand, deny the existence of lekton.

48

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Demonstration plus common and particular signs Demonstration (apodeixis) is therefore a species of sign. While sign in general is an antecedent in a sound conditional through which the consequent is revealed, a demonstration is a species of such conditional where the antecedent reveals the consequent as necessary.34 In order to distinguish demonstrations from other (probable) sign-inferences, the Stoics and Epicureans distinguished between ‘common’ (koina) and ‘particular’ (idia) signs. While a common sign (semeion koinon) is such that it may exist, or occur, without the existence of its object (which implies that such a sign may signify multiple things, for which reason it is called ‘common’ to them, and without support of other information/premise we have no way of telling which of these things is signified at the present instance), a particular sign (semeion idion) cannot occur, or exist, without its object (it is a sign which signifies only this particular object). Only particular signs, therefore, can be demonstrations.

Differences in method: Elimination and conceivability The main difference between the Stoics and the Epicureans lies in the question of what the ground of necessary (demonstrative) sign inference is, and how it should be tested whether the concrete inference in question is of such a kind or not. The Stoics applied the test of ‘elimination’ (anaskeue) to their inferences. An inference from some observed fact (expressed by the antecedent proposition) as a sign to the other, unobserved fact (signified by the antecedent and expressed in the consequent) is valid if and only if the denial of the consequent is incompatible with the affirmation of the antecedent.35 The metaphysical presupposition here is that events are interconnected by necessary causal links. Thus, we can prove that there are pores in the skin from the fact of perspiration (b.235 CE, Adv. Math. 8.154). The fact of perspiration is incompatible with the skin’s not being porous. The Epicureans, on the other hand, used the method of ‘inconceivability’ (adianoesia): a conditional is valid if the conjunction of the denial of the consequent together with the affirmation of the antecedent is inconceivable.36 The proof of the existence of the void from the existence of motion (if there is motion, there is void) is thus grounded in the inconceivability of there being motion and not being void. The Stoics would argue against the Epicureans that the method of inconceivability does not guarantee the necessary connection between the conditional propositions. But the Epicureans would point out that the Stoic method of elimination is in fact a special case of the method of inconceivability, which is designed to capture all inferences from the observable to the unobservable as instances of similarity between these two sets of facts. And obviously, the necessary connection postulated by the Stoics is itself based on assuming that the unobserved phenomena behave similarly and according to the same laws as the observed.

Summary Both the Stoics and the Epicureans developed theories of sign inference in their logics. They shared the view (common, more or less, to the whole of Classical Antiquity) of sign as something observed by means of which something not observed is inferred, and they formalized such inference as an implication. Moreover, they both distinguished particular signs (in contradistinction to common signs) as the proper locus of reliable inference. However, they differed in their conception of the method by which the reliability of these inferences should be tested. The difference in these methods reveals deep differences

PRE-MODERN SEMIOTICS

49

in their epistemologies. While the Stoics’s aim was to establish a deductive system of necessary sign-inferences, the Epicureans approached the matter from a more empirically oriented standpoint, putting stress on the experiential origin of all knowledge.

SIGN IN GREEK AND ROMAN RHETORIC Greek rhetoric: Persuasion and competition Rhetoric (techne logon, later techne rhetorike) was the civic art of public speaking as it developed under constitutional government, especially in Athenian democracy, but has strong historical roots in the tradition of Greek oratory and drama (Sanson 2012) and had served as a strong social (Pan-Hellenic) cement (Heilbrunn 1975). ‘Rhetoric’ is derived from the Greek word rhetorike, the art or technique of a rhetor – a public speaker, the ‘worker of persuasion’. The term first appears in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias (c.399–390 BCE, 453 a2), in the second decade of the fourth century BCE, but had been introduced a generation earlier (Kennedy 1999: 1). While rhetoric is considered as the general art of persuasive logos, dialectic represents a more specific kind of discourse, the ‘dichotomy between two opposing, mutually exclusive solutions’ (Manetti 1993: 33). Both disciplines are historically strongly interconnected through the spirit of competition that is imprinted in the juristic character of the classical societies.37 The essence of the rhetorical prism lies in the principle of kairos,38 the tactic, which is ‘seizing the opportune moment, choosing arguments depending on the demands of the situation’ (McComiskey 2002: 111). The main task for a rhetorician is to be persuasive and to win (cf. c.399–390 BCE, Euthyd. 302b–303; c.399–390 BCE, Charm. 166c3 ff.; cf. Lyotard 1988: 14–19). These topics constitute the background for the investigation of semiotic problems: the question of proper reasoning and ethical responsibility of the speaker (cf. Isocrates, Antid. §67) in a public sphere, and a specific notion of the particular semiotic devices (schemata) on which communication is based (cf. Kennedy 1999: 34; cf. c.75 BCE, Rhet. Ad Her. III, 19–27).

Roman ars rhetorica The Roman intellectual world is often characterized as a culture of eclectic preservation and progressive translation of Greek cultural heritage (Manetti 1993: 144; cf. Kennedy 1998: 211), but, in the theory of sign, we can observe a few subtle, but very important, paradigmatic shifts. The most important discursive regularity is the public speech (Cicero 44 BCE, De Off. I, 17) and its ‘social-symbolic’ aspect (cf. Kennedy 1999: 14). In the sphere of argumentatively mediated complex education (paidea) it is a shift from the Platonic ideal of philosopher-dialectician-ruler to the Ciceronian ideal of perfect-sociable orator, where philosophy is considered subordinate to the noblest art of rhetoric (Cicero, 55 BCE, De Orat. III, 59–61) that is at the core of an educational and juristic system. The semiotic paradigm itself moved away from the field of philosophy to the socialpragmatic field of ‘the area of juridical rhetoric, where it assumed central position’ (Manetti 1993: 139). This shift is recorded in broader and more detailed investigation of the grammar of the tropes (ars poetriae) and in general pragmatic aspects of enthymematic reasoning (cf. Cicero 44 BCE, Top. 56; Quintillianus c.95 CE, Ins. Orat. V. 14.33–4) in the sense of commonplaces (figurae; koinoi topoi; Rhet. 2.18–19); i.e. Ciceronian view subsumes both inventions, persuasion and judgement, under the art of rhetoric (cf. c.95 CE, Ins. Orat. II. XV., 34).

50

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Signs are in general considered as a propositional form – an antecedent which enables one to discover a consequent that mediates between probability and necessity – but also as phenomena that have an important social aspect: a sign can increase suspicion and mediates between physical-involuntary39 and socially intentional reality. Signs are ambiguous in the sense that they are parts of the Orator’s reasoning but also parts of the given material clues: [A] piece of bloodstained clothing, screams and cries […] are not produced by the skill of the orator, but are delivered to him as part of his brief. In addition, if signa refer to an incontestable meaning, then there is no possibility of reasoning through debate, whereas if they are ambiguous, they are not proofs, but they themselves require proofs. (Manetti 1993: 153; Ins. Or. V, 9, 1) The doctrine of rhetoric has offered two main planes of composition of discourse: (i) topical (type of the speech: juridical, political, etc. (cf. c.75 BCE, Rhet. ad Her. IV, 11–16)) and (ii) procedural.40 Where the procedure (ii) itself consists of: (ii.i) the abductive work (heuresis–inventio), which is the searching for the reasonable arguments (signs per se41) and also searching for the concrete material clues (signa) and possible various ontological (causal, temporal, etc.) interconnections of those traces; (ii. ii) arrangement of the research (dispositio); (ii. iii) style of rendering and decorating of the arguments (elocutio; cf. c.75 BCE, Rhet. Ad Her. IV, 19–68); (ii. iv) firm grasp of the subject in the memory-memoria (Rhet. ad Her. III, 28–40) and the (ii. v) actio – pronuntiatio, in other words the performance/delivery itself (c.75 BCE, Rhet. ad Her. III, 19–27; cf. Manetti 1993: 140; Kennedy 1999: 100–3). A rhetorician’s main task is to render ‘sign-proofs’ to ‘signs-arguments’, make them persuasive and trustworthy (endoxa-fidem facere; cf. Spranzi 2011: 89–90; cf. Campe 2013: 30–132) and deliver them to the public: ‘[t]he whole theory of speaking is dependent on three sources of persuasion: that we prove (probemus) our case to be true; that we win over (conciliemus) those who are listening; that we call their souls (animos) to what emotion the case demands’ (55 BCE, De Orat. II, 115). Latin rhetoricians have attempted to classify the degrees of probatory and argumentative force, i.e. how directly (necessary: necessarie demonstrans) or indirectly (probably: probabiliter ostendans) the proofs can lead to the confirmation of a hypothesis/ crime (84 BCE, De Inv., I, 44; cf. 46–7; Manetti 1993: 144; cf. c.75 BCE, Rhet. Ad Her. II, 8). The semiotic theory therefore lies in the investigation of the conjuncture of the purposes of verifying whether certain actions were performed by certain individuals and searching for signs that persuasively demonstrate guilt or innocence (Manetti 1993: 141). Conjecture consists of six parts: probability, comparison, evidential procedure (signum), sign (argumentum), consequence and confirmation. (Manetti 1993: 141). As Manetti (1993: 141) has emphasized, probabile is not a transcription of eikos and signum is not transposition of semeion. Probabile is here linked to the ‘psychological make-up of the individual under suspicion’ and signum stands for the series of procedures for gaining the evidence from the objects of investigation – e.g. the scene of crime, the time, the opportunity, etc. (Manetti 1993: 142; c.75 BCE, Rhet. ad Her. II, 6).

From the Latin rhetoric to the Latin age This old duty in new clothes – to prepare a ‘medicine’ (pharmakon) from signs (or arguments) of wisdom and persuasion – became an important concept for ‘Saint

PRE-MODERN SEMIOTICS

51

Augustine’s discussion of Christian eloquence in the fourth book of On Christian Learning’ (Kennedy 1999: 112). Christian rhetoric is in many ways the heir of its Latin and Greek predecessors (Kennedy 1999: 138–9). God’s authority can be seen as non-artistic analogy to rhetoric ethos; it claims to be the simple enunciation of truth, uncontaminated by sophistic argumentation. But the undeniable truth is at the end known from revelation or established by the religious character of sacred signs sent from God, and is not something that is discovered by dialectic through human effort. On the other hand, early Christians gradually adapted features of classical rhetoric and semiotics to their needs. The paradigmatic figure here is Christian bishop Augustine (354–430 CE), who made use of his training in rhetoric (therefore in semiotics) to interpret Scripture.

AUGUSTINE Augustine’s place in the history of semiotics Saint Augustine of Hippo is quite unanimously considered to have produced a novel conception of sign, which marks the beginning of a new era in the history of semiotics. This novelty is said to consist in making ‘for the first time an explicit fusion of the theory of the sign with the theory of language’ (Manetti 1993: 156), or proposing ‘for the first time the general idea of the sign as applicable equally to natural phenomena […] and cultural phenomena’ (Deely 2001: 215). However, for the very reason that Augustine is claimed to be novel compared to the background of the previous views on sign in Classical Antiquity, determining the precise nature of his novelty depends much on the way these previous views are interpreted. Cautiously put, Augustine seems to be the first to explicitly call words signs (De Mag. 2–3; cf. Jackson 1969: 49). To say that he made a synthesis of the two theories (that of signs, and that of language [Markus 1957: 65; Manetti 1993: 156]), however, would be an overstatement. Rather, Augustine treats words as signs without offering much theoretical justification (Deely 1982: 17; Eco et al. 1989: 4; Allen 2001: 4; Deely 2001: 218, 220). His conception of sign proposed a few challenging problems to be solved by posterity (Deely 2001: 222–3). At the same time, since Augustine, the treatment of language under the genus of sign became commonplace in medieval thought.

Semiotic point of view In the second chapter of the first book of De Doctrina Christiana [397–426, hereafter ‘DC’], Augustine introduces the distinction between signs (signa) and things (res). A thing is ‘that which is never employed as a sign of anything else’ (which can be used, enjoyed or both; 397–426: DC 1.3), while signs are ‘those things […] which are used to indicate something else’. Thus, ‘every sign is also a thing; for what is not a thing is nothing at all’. Any thing, therefore, can be considered from two points of view: (i) on its own, as a thing – such as ‘wood, stone, cattle’ or (ii) as signifying something else – as ‘the wood which we read Moses cast into the bitter waters to make them sweet [Ex 15: 25], […] the stone which Jacob used a pillow [Gen 28: 11], […] the ram which Abraham offered up instead of his son [Gen 22: 13]’. Thus, Augustine introduced ‘a semiotic point of view – the treatment of things purely in terms of their signifying function’ (Deely 1982: 17; see also Deely 2001: 221). Some things (as those in the above examples) fulfil this double consideration as both things and signs, while some other things are used

52

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

only as signs, namely, words – as well as some other things, perhaps, are never used as signs (Non autem omnis res etiam signum est), though, perhaps, they could have been or could be.

Definition of sign Augustine’s semiotic point of view in which a sign is a thing considered insofar as it signifies something else projects itself to his definition of sign: ‘A sign is a thing which, over and above the impression it makes on the senses, causes something else to come into the mind as a consequence of itself.’42 A sign, therefore, is a sensible thing which, besides presenting itself to the mind, presents something else to the mind as well, some other object, i.e. thing (res). And Augustine continues with a remarkable43 set of examples: [A]s when we see a footprint, we conclude that an animal whose footprint this is has passed by; and when we see smoke, we know that there is fire beneath; and when we hear the voice of a living man, we think of the feeling in his mind; and when the trumpet sounds, soldiers know that they are to advance or retreat, or do whatever else the state of the battle requires. (397–426: DC 2.1.1)

Classification of signs Following Augustine’s definition of sign as well as his initial semiotic point of view on things is his classification of signs into two species: natural signs (signa naturalia) and given signs (signa data) (397–426: DC 2.1.2). ‘Natural signs are those which, apart from any intention or desire of using them as signs, do yet lead to the knowledge of something else’ (397–426: DC 2.1.2), while given signs ‘are those which living beings mutually exchange for the purpose of showing, as well as they can, the feelings of their minds, or their perceptions, or their thoughts’ (397–426: DC 2.1.2). The specific difference between the natural and given signs thus consists in the absence (in case of natural signs) or presence (in case of given signs) of intention to communicate (Jackson 1969: 14; Manetti 1993: 166–7; cf. Markus 1957: 75). Signa data are often translated as ‘conventional’ (Markus 1957: 75), although conventional signs, if anything, are a subspecies of given signs. In Augustine’s initially established semiotic point of view, it was said that some things are used only for the purpose of signifying – such as words – which have no other use. These would perhaps be conventional signs, since, clearly, that which can be used only for the purpose of signification has to be somehow established as signifying (given as a sign, in Augustine’s terms). And that which was so established either has had some other use before or not. So, all conventional signs are given, though not all given signs are conventional. The chief examples of this class would be signs given by God and recorded by the writers of Scripture using conventionally established signs, words. Thus, ‘Jacob’s stone’ or ‘Abraham’s ram’ as words are conventional signs, but that which is signified by these words, i.e. Jacob’s stone or Abraham’s ram are (divinely) given signs which can hardly be called conventional. Signs of the Holy Scripture are at the same time Augustine’s main concern in De Doctrina Christiana, a work set to establish ways of interpreting the Holy Scripture. This task might at the same time have been the main motivation for Augustine’s general notion of signum, because it brings together the literal and figurative meaning of the Scripture under a single conception (Markus 1957: 65).

PRE-MODERN SEMIOTICS

53

Summary Augustine’s generic conception of sign is ‘wide enough to capture pretty much everything that can be regarded as a sign’ (Allen 2001: 3), perhaps unprecedentedly wide if compared with what we can safely claim about the theories of sign before Augustine. If it is true that classical Antiquity separated theory of sign and theory of language, Augustine is the first to bring these theories together. Likewise, if sign was for Classical Antiquity exclusively natural phenomenon, Augustine was the first to point out that sign is a cultural phenomenon as well. Most definitely, he was the first to make both points explicitly. At the same time, however, he exhibits little if any interest in theoretical ramifications of his discovery. In fact, Augustine’s conception of sign is gathered mostly from introducing remarks from the works dedicated to other topics. On the other hand, after Augustine and thanks to his authority as one of the Fathers of the Church, his generic conception of sign became commonplace among medieval writers.

ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL VIEW ON SIGN IN GENERAL On the matter of separation of the theory of sign and the theory of language, or of consideration of sign as exclusively natural phenomenon, which definitely ended with Augustine, we might add this last, admittedly speculative, remark. As we have seen, sign before Augustine was conceptualized, in one way or another, as a premise revealing the conclusion – through transition, or inference, from this premise to the conclusion. Such conception is most fit for natural, non-linguistic phenomena, or events, which are in whatever way closer to our cognitive grasp than that which we may come to know through them, and which is thus further from us epistemically. It is not so fit a description of language: we would not say that spoken words reveal the speaker’s thoughts or that which these words are about – the former simply stand for the latter, i.e. words represent what they are about, but are not epistemically closer (except perhaps in a logical order) than that which they signify. The difference in terminology – semeion for signs proper, symbolon, semainon (‘signifier’, ‘that which signifies’), semantikos (‘significative’) – might suggest that the Greeks were also aware that there is a similarity (all terms except symbolon having the same root; both sign and word being a topic of logic) between words and signs (both words and signs represent something) as much as there is a difference at least in degree (unlike words, signs represent in a much stronger sense – i.e. represent something otherwise obscure, epistemically further). While the Greek logicians could have considered language to be rather semiotically uninteresting (i.e. uninteresting as a subclass of sign, though definitely interesting on its own as a subject of logic), the Latin interpreter of the Scripture would consider words to be most important of divinely given signs – if only for the reason that all other given signs came to us through words of the Scripture as well (for which purpose natural signs are only to be recognized that they exist and then put aside as useless). This originally theological view of words as signs par excellence would hereafter be undertaken by other disciplines of medieval learning as well – most notably, logic and grammar. At the same time, the relation of representing (although not called by that name until thirteenth century) will become the leading conception of sign without making any distinction as to epistemic proximity, so prominent in Greek thought. For the same reason, the notion of sign as ground of inference and evidence (which is not the same as notion of inference) will be set aside to the background.

54

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

SIGN AND SIGNIFICATION IN LATE MEDIEVAL LOGIC: THEORY OF PROPERTIES OF TERMS Overview At the turn of the thirteenth century, a new line of logical inquiry – together with a new genre of logical writing presenting it – had begun to take prominence. It was the theory of the properties of terms (proprietates terminorum) contained in the Summulae (‘compendia’), short books giving, in condensed and systematic fashion, an instruction in the whole of logic flourishing in those days, especially to the students of the Faculties of Arts. Because of their focus on terms (logical semantics), the authors of these books are quite often referred to as ‘terminists’.44 Their theory of terms, which came to be called logica modernorum (‘the logic of the moderns’45), made an original medieval contribution to logical theory which (unlike, e.g., theory of argument) is unparalleled in Antiquity (Spade 2001: 39).

Classification of signs The introductory chapters of the Summulae and related logical treatises contain elaborate classifications of signs46 – presented in order to define the subject-matter of logical inquiry. Following Aristotle, medieval logicians agreed that logic is concerned with language (or speech) and its parts – most notably propositions (propositio) as that which is either true or false (Peter of Spain, Summulae Logicales, c.1245: SL 1.07). A logician, like Peter of Spain, would thus begin with the highest genus – sound (sonus) and proceed by the series of specific differences. Sound is either vocal (vox), or not; vocal sound is either literate (literate), which can be written down, or not; literate vocal sound is either significative (significativa), i.e. such that ‘it represents something when heard’ (c.1245: SL 1.03), or not; vocal sound is significative either naturally (naturaliter), representing the same thing to everyone, or conventionally established (secundum placitum), which represents something according to voluntary institution (ad voluntatem instituentis). Thus, a logician would arrive at the conception of vocal expression significant by convention (vox significativa secundum placitum) as that species of expression dealt with by logic.

‘Secundum placitum’ and signification Some expressions signify naturally (such as the moaning of the sick, gemitus infirmorum [c.1245: SL 1.3]), the others (most notably, linguistic expressions) signify secundum [or ad] placitum – a term most frequently translated as ‘by convention’, or ‘conventionally’, but its meaning involves more. For some (literate or articulate) vocal expression to signify (if it does not already signify something naturally), it needs first to become significative. And it becomes such through the act of imposition (impositio), a declaration through which the not yet significative vocal expression receives its signification – as if someone says: ‘Let [the expression] “tree” signify a tree.’ At the same time, this signification imposed on the expression is to be instituted (institutio) in the community. The term ad placitum involves both these dimensions – it refers both to the act of will (impositio) of some name-giver (impositor nominum) through which an expression was established as significative and to the community of language users in which it was established/instituted as significative. Likewise, signification (significatio) should not be equalled with the modern sense of ‘meaning’ (Spade 2001: 63). In fact, it varies from author to author even as to the question of whether it is an intensional or extensional notion (see Ashworth 1981: 309–11).

PRE-MODERN SEMIOTICS

55

Signification was intended to capture the essence/form of the word it retained across all instances of its use. The typical definition, coming from Buridan, is: ‘For “to signify” is described as being “to establish the understanding” of a thing. Hence a word is said to signify that the understanding of which it establishes in us’ (Buridan in Spade 2001: 63). But is that which we come to understand a concept (to signify a tree would be to establish a concept of a tree in our understanding) or a thing (to signify a tree would be to make a tree known as a thing by a concept)? There was an outgoing debate upon that, on the border of logical and cognitive theory which concerned whether words signify primarily things or concepts.47 But even when signification relates a word to a certain thing understood by a word, it is not (entirely) an extensional notion. Rather, it is a pre-condition of a term’s being used referentially. Signification is ‘psychologico-causal notion’ (Spade 2001: 65) in the sense that it causes (a psychological act of) understanding of something.

Supposition Theory of reference was presented under the rubric of supposition (suppositio – from ‘subpono’, to put something under, to stand for) by medieval logicians. The distinction between supposition and signification may be drawn thus. Signification is the first property of term, the very property which makes some vocal expression (vox) to be a term (c.1245: SL 6.01). However, supposition is an acceptance of this (substantive) term (i.e. of already significative vocal expression) to stand for or refer to something (c.1245: SL 6.03). Supposition, therefore, is a property of a term used in a proposition, because the determination of the reference of the term is dependent on the way the term is used in a proposition. The classification of suppositions differed from writer to writer, 48 but – although under different terminology with different loci in the respective classifications – at least three species are generally present. Ockham (Summa Logicae 1.67–9) called these the (i) material supposition (suppositio materialis); (ii) personal supposition (suppositio personalis) and (iii) simple supposition (suppositio simplex). Material supposition is an instance of a term’s reference to its matter, as in ‘“Tree” has one syllable’. Simple supposition concerns a term’s reference in the second intention, i.e. to the term itself, as in ‘“animal” is genus’. Personal supposition is a term’s reference to anything or something contained under it, as ‘man’ in ‘Man is running’ supposes for those men who are running.

Summary Medieval theory of supposition developed (under different terminological guises) many familiar logical distinctions such as between use and mention, connotation and denotation, etc. It attempted to produce an exhaustive and general account of how words (substantive and adjective names) refer. Alongside this logical semantics, the medieval writers presented diverse classifications of signs with the goal of isolating the subjectmatter of logic.

THEORY OF MODES OF SIGNIFYING IN THE SPECULATIVE GRAMMAR Overview In the grammar of the high middle ages (ca. 1250–1350), signification was investigated by the authors collectively referred to as modistae (‘the modists’), so-called for the development of the theory of the modes of signifying (modi significandi). Their grammar

56

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

was founded on the idea that the structure of language mirrors the structure of reality. Hence, the grammar of the modistae was also called ‘speculative grammar’ (grammatica speculativa; from the Latin speculum, ‘mirror’). Taking as a point of departure thenprominent philosophy and logic (with which they shared much of their terminology), their goal was to produce a universal grammar – a grammar which will be grounded in the very structure of reality and applicable to any language. That is to say, their grammar was conceived to be formal grammar. Following the idea that language is a mirror of reality, they hoped to isolate the universally valid forms of how reality can be expressed (or signified) by any language, the concrete languages being only a different material instance of the same formal structure.

Language, thought and reality Thinking about language in its relation to thought and reality is indeed as old as Aristotle’s On Interpretation. There, Aristotle conceives thoughts, mental states (‘passions of the soul’, pathemata en tei psychei, passiones animae) as likenesses (homoiomata) of real things, or facts. In their similarity to reality, thoughts are the same for everyone, and independent of language. Words, on the other hand, are conventional, and they primarily signify thoughts, rather than things. This common Aristotelian framework, in turn, led to two quite different projects with roughly the same goal – to account for how signs enable us to cognize reality. One project was nominalistic – in the most fundamental sense of denying that forms of language need to mirror reality – focusing on thought (and therefore mental signs and ‘grammar’ of mental language) as the mirror of reality. The other project was exactly the opposite – having the idea of forms of reality being mirrored by forms of language at its foundation. The latter was the project of the speculative grammarians.

Modes of signifying Taking Thomas of Erfurt, author of De modis significandi, sive Grammatica speculativa, as a typical example, modistic grammatical treatise would open with a meta-theoretical framework showing how the three domains of being (esse), understanding (intellectus) and sign (signum) are correlated. These three domains give rise to the three modes, or acts: mode of being (modus essendi), mode of understanding (modus intelligendi) and mode of signifying (modus significandi). The mode of being refers to the real thing and its properties, i.e. to the way the thing is. The mode of understanding is twofold: active (modus intelligendi activus), which refers to the very act of cognition in which some thing is understood – to how it is understood, and passive (modus intelligendi passivus), which refers to the thing as understood by the act – to what is thus understood. Likewise, the active mode of signifying (modus significandi activus) refers to how a thing is signified, whereas the passive mode (modus significandi passivus) refers to what is thus signified, i.e. the thing as signified. The modus essendi, modus intelligendi passivus and modus significandi passivus, says Thomas, are therefore materially the same. They refer to the same matter, to the same object – i.e. the thing as it is (m. essendi), the same thing as it is understood (m. intelligendi p.) and the same thing as it is signified (m. significandi p.). On the other hand, the active and passive modus intelligendi are formally the same as concerning understanding (either how or what of understanding), and the same holds for active and passive modus significandi. It is the active mode of signifying, which is the grammarian’s main concern – because grammar does not treat things, or mental acts,

PRE-MODERN SEMIOTICS

57

but the ways in which these things (understood by certain mental acts) are signified. Yet, perfect correspondence between the ways in which these things are signified and how they are is guaranteed by the material identity of the passive modes of signifying/ understanding and the mode of being.

Parts of speech To the question, ‘what is that which the modes of signifying are predicated of?’, a modist grammarian answers that these are parts of speech (partes orationis) or word-classes (Bursill-Hall 1972: 38). Medieval grammarians recognized eight such parts (nomen, pronomen, verbum, adverbium, participium, coniunctio, praepositio, interiectio), divided into two classes, declinables and indeclinables. The description of their respective modes of signifying was carried on in Etymologia, the most extensive part of the modist treatises. Working with the premise that ‘[e]very active mode of signifying comes from some property of the thing’ (c.1310: GS 2.3), the task of the grammarian was to correlate the modes of signifying with respective properties of the thing. In the framework of ontology of the times, the main distinction was between ens, what is, and esse, how it is – between being and becoming. This ontological distinction is reflected in language in such a way that name (nomen) and pronoun (pronomen) signified being (ens), while verb (verbum) and participle (participium) signified becoming (esse). Name and verb signify their matter (being and becoming) distinctly, while pronoun and participle signify the same matter (being and becoming) indistinctly. In this general way, the speculative grammar proceeded by correlating the grammatical categories with the categories of being.

Summary The central idea of speculative grammar was that language is modelled after being. For this fundamental assumption, it was also most criticized by their opponents (usually nominalists), who would happily point out that linguistic categories need not have counterparts in reality. However naively they may seem to have worked with the idea, they were among the first to systematically develop it – namely, that there are certain universal structures present in all languages, some deep structure below the surface structure of different languages. Their analysis might not have dug deep enough, but they were first to start digging. Last, but not least, the idea of a grammar of signs, the idea that languages with their differences represent only a matter for these signs (and, perhaps, that unlike a universal grammar of language, a universal grammar of signs to which all languages may be reduced) proved to be viable inspiration for the development of semiotics.

ROGER BACON’S DE SIGNIS Overview Of the late scholastic authors, few have paid as much attention to signs per se as Roger Bacon (1214/1220?–1292/1294?), a philosopher, scientist and author of numerous works including De Signis (‘On Signs’ c.1267; hereafter DS) – a treatise dedicated exclusively to signs and the ways they are used in our both theoretical and practical dealing with the world. In this unfinished work, Bacon approaches what could be seen as an attempt to develop a general semiotics in the sense that (although he does not assert it explicitly) sign is a fundamental notion – that is, he weighs different solutions

58

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

to traditional problems of meaning, reference, cognition or being, in terms of their (in)consistency with the proposed view of sign. In other words, with Bacon, sign ceases to be a subsidiary notion; rather, it becomes the basis of his philosophy, albeit oftentimes implicitly, and is used as an analytical tool through which he develops his stance on the then-current problems of logic, semantics, or cognitive theory – such as the questions of the significatum of words, equivocation, analogy or the question of a method of constructing a (scientific) language.

Definition of sign In the opening paragraph of his treatise, Bacon asserts that ‘[s]ign belongs to the category of relation and is principally said towards that to which it signifies’ (c.1267: DS 1.1). Something is a sign, therefore, primarily through its capacity of being understood as a sign, whereas its relation to that of which it is a sign (a thing) follows from this understanding. It is, in other words, only with reference to some possible interpretation of a sign, when we can say what it is the sign of. Another novelty is Bacon’s definition: ‘A sign is anything which attained through the senses or the intellect designates something to that intellect’ (c.1267: DS 1.2). Bacon is among the first (together with Thomas Aquinas, who is much more implicit) to include mental concepts as signs, without, unfortunately, elaborating much upon the point.

Classification of sign Bacon’s classification has been recognized as highly eclectic (Eco et al. 1989: 17–19). It combines the Aristotelian classification of vocal expressions (voces) with Stoic classification of signs (signa) introduced by Augustine. Moreover, it revives the other Aristotelian classification of inferential signs based on their probability or necessity and temporal dimensions. What is perhaps the most important outcome of this fusion of different traditions of thought on signs is that materially one and the same thing appears twice in the classification under different rubrics. Bacon’s point that a sign’s relation to an act of understanding is more fundamental than its relation to the signified thing is exhibited here. Depending on its different possible interpretations, this one and the same thing may be different signs. Thus, a word ‘tree’, for instance, signifies by convention (ad placitum) a tree, and naturally (naturaliter) a concept of a tree – moreover, by signifying a concept of a tree, it is capable of cosignifying (connotating) anything to which it stands in a relation, e.g. leaves, branches, and roots. It has been discussed whether Bacon’s classification and definition imply a view of sign as a (genuinely) triadic relation and whether his notion of understanding as that towards which a sign is principally said is an interpreter or interpretant (Deely 2001: 374–5). Concerning the first, it is the case, rather, that sign for Bacon (as well as for the majority of the scholastics) involves two dyadic relations – that to an act of understanding, or an interpreter, and that to the signified thing.49 Bacon’s having the (pre)conception of interpretant should also be handled with care.50 It is true, however, that Bacon’s conception of the act of understanding (intellectus) is abstract enough not to be identified with that of a mere empirical interpreter and has a crucial role in his theory, because it is

PRE-MODERN SEMIOTICS

59

only with reference to it that we are able to decide what is the object of sign in this or that particular possibility of its interpretation.

Semiosis Perhaps the most original feature of his theory, which makes Bacon stand out among the other scholastic sign conceptions, is his repeated stress on the ways through which we, in our use of signs, constantly shift from their once-fixed meaning. Bacon still works in the framework of the commonplace view of signification as established by imposition. However, unlike his peers, he insists that although a sign’s signification is fixed by imposition, it holds only until a new imposition is made. We can – and do – change the meanings of words we use, either by adding a new meaning to those already given, or by removing some meanings no longer current (c.1267: DS 4.2.144). Moreover, because a sign is a categorical relation, it ceases to be the sign when its significate ceases to be, in accordance with the common scholastic view of relations. This is so because of Bacon’s extensionalist view of signification – words (and other conventionally established signs) signify things precisely in the respect in which they were imposed to signify them: we can impose a word to signify an existing thing as well as a non-existent or imaginary thing. And when the up-until-now existing thing ceases to exist, or the non-existent thing becomes existent, its sign – because it was imposed on something which is no longer the case – ceases to be as well. Its matter becomes ‘free’ for a new imposition, which ‘we very often do make’ (c.1267: DS 4.3.161). For instance, a vine circle (circulus vini) was commonly used as a sign that the place is a tavern and serves wine. It was imposed, Bacon says, to signify real wine which one can get in the tavern. In a situation when the tavern is out of wine, the circle is no longer a sign. But someone passing by and unaware of the situation may enter the tavern and ask for wine anyway. In such a situation, this person would, without being aware of it, make a new imposition on the same matter (the vine circle) to signify imaginary wine (c.1267: DS 4.2.147). However, this new imposition is obviously made on the grounds of knowing the previous imposition.

Summary Bacon’s descriptions of the ways by which signs change their meaning put stress on the pragmatic and processual dimension of language. Moreover, though Bacon does not elaborate upon it, it is obvious from the examples he uses that the changes of meaning do not happen in a vacuum; rather, they reflect the previous use of the same signs or changes in reality to the reflection of which these signs were imposed in the first place. Such a process we would today call semiosis, of which Bacon can be seen to be the pioneer. Bacon’s work also introduced two improvements over the Augustinian conception of sign – first, an inclusion of mental concepts as signs (extending Augustine’s definition of signs as sensible to the whole range of signifying phenomena); second, a synthesis of an inferential conception of sign prevalent in Antiquity, with the representational conception of the Middle Ages. These were the achievements of the very first semiotic treatise in history.

60

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

CONCLUSION In this brief survey of premodern semiotics, we introduced some of the conceptions of sign in Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages. These two periods of intellectual history may be very roughly delineated thus. For Classical Antiquity – ancient Greek as well as Roman – a sign was most prominently thought of as inference. More exactly, a sign was considered to be some apparent, or observed, fact or event by means of which some other, non-apparent or unobserved fact may be inferred. Though the two disciplines in which the sign was mostly reflected were logic and rhetoric, its use as well as the theory reflecting this use were much broader. Beginning with the theory of Hippocratic medicine, two species of sign were distinguished – the necessary and the probable – and since then, the efforts of theoreticians were concentrated largely on distinguishing the two, to find the grounds which make inferences from signs to be of one or other kind. Language, on the other hand, was not at the centre of semiotic reflection in ancient times. Although Aristotle as well as the Stoics developed theories of language in terms (at least from the etymological point of view) very similar to signs (with occurrences of expressions such as semantikos – meaningful – or semainon/semainomenon – signifier and signified), the primary aim of these conceptions of language was to delineate the subject matter of logic (logical forms need to be expressed in some matter, which is language) rather than to develop the theory of language per se. Besides that, there is not much evidence that the theory of sign and the theory of language were connected in any substantial way. The conception of sign of Saint Augustine is, in this respect, definitely the first to explicitly include words among signs. At the same time, Augustine’s definition of sign as something which, besides the impression it makes on the senses, makes something else to cognition, marks the shift from the inferential view predominant in Antiquity towards the representational view prominent in the Middle Ages. In this view, sign is no more seen as the ground of inference, but rather as something standing for something else, i.e. representing. The most frequent semiotic conception in the Middle Ages was the conception of signification as the sign’s primary and most fundamental function, examined across disciplines like logic, grammar and cognition theory. What is to a certain extent true for both the conceptions of sign of Antiquity and those of the Middle Ages is the fact that theory of sign was in one way or another part of a different theory. Even Roger Bacon’s De Signis, though perhaps the first treatise dedicated explicitly to signs, cannot be said to present a full-fledged semiotic theory. On the other hand, it was the closest to such theory that the medievals51 were able to get.

NOTES 1 In this chapter, we focus exclusively on giving account of the most important Western traditions and conceptions. Such narrow focus does not by any means imply that the tradition of Western philosophy, medicine, rhetoric and related disciplines is the only one there is. Quite the contrary. So-called ‘Western’ semiotics has its origins in the divinatory practices and theories of the ancient Middle East (Mesopotamia and Babylonia). Works from ancient China, such as Yijing [The Book of Changes], also contain much semiotically interesting material. The same could be said about, for instance, Buddhist logic of ancient India, besides other Eastern traditions. To this day, Eastern semiotics is explored very little, compared

PRE-MODERN SEMIOTICS

2

3

4

5 6

7 8

9 10

11

12 13

14 15 16 17 18

61

to the relatively rich research which concerns its Western counterparts. While we cannot possibly write a history of Eastern semiotics in this chapter – not only because of spatial limitations, but even more so due to our limited expertise – we hope that we may see more research dedicated to the semiotic traditions of the East in the near future. As generally acknowledged by semioticians (e.g. Deely 1982: 8; Eco et al. 1989: 4; Nöth 1990: 1.2.2; Manetti 1993: 36; Sebeok 2001: xii). Outside of the ancient Greek world, the divination of ancient Mesopotamia is also of semiotic interest (see Manetti 1993: 1–13). The term semeiotike is of later origin than Corpus Hippocraticum (Nöth 1990: 1.2.2). Baer (1983: 41) implies that techne semeiotike was a term for ‘symptomatology’ used already by Hipporatic authors; however, this term occurs nowhere in the Corpus. Known occurrences of semeiotike and its derivatives come from Plutarch and Galen. Despite designing various groups of treatises of the corpus as ‘Hippocratic’, it is impossible to determine which were written by the historical Hippocrates of Cos (c.470/460–370? BCE), if any (see, e.g., Jones 1923a: xliv; Edelstein 1967: 133–44; Manetti 1993: 171n3). Some text may be even as young as the second century BCE (Jones 1923a: xxviii). For example, textbooks, research treatises, practical manuals, lectures and essays, philosophical works, notebooks, scrapbooks and fragments (Jones 1923a: xxii). Jones (1923a: xxix) thus calls the corpus ‘remains of a library’. Jones (1923a: xxi, xxiii); Edelstein (1967: 205ff.); Manetti (1993: 38–9); Longrigg (1993: 82ff.). Another modus tollens argument also called tekmerion is in ‘The Nature of Man’ (ch. 2), against the philosophical view that man is a unity: ‘[I]f a man were a unity, he would never feel pain, as there would be nothing from which a unity could suffer pain.’ But man feels pain; therefore, he is not a unity. Most prominently epilepsy, but ‘sacred disease’ (hieres nosos) was broader than that. See Jones (1923b: ix–xi); Edelstein (1967: 66ff); Manetti (1993: 37; 2010: 15–16). The focus on prognosis does not imply that names for diseases did not exist. For instance, Prognostikon 4.2–4 lists acute fevers, pneumonia, phrenitis and headache. We might say of the future ‘symptoms’ – in a sense that the events forecasted were of the same kind as the events upon which the forecast was made. This model of inference, when the sign is some (preselected, see below) present event indicating some other, future event, medical prognosis shares with divination. Sacred Disease, ch. 5; The Nature of Man, ch. 2; Prorrhetic, ch. 2. One cannot say that ‘sign’ is a generic meaning, while ‘symptom’ is a specific meaning of semeion. Rather, symptom (in the sense of something apparent making known something non-apparent) for the Greeks was a general model of all signs. That is to say, a medical symptom was a special subclass of all (including non-medical) symptoms. An. Pr. II.27, 70b1-5. For example, Prognostikon, ch. 17. A special problem is the intertextuality of the texts (cf. Nightingale 2000; Zuckert 2009) and the problem of dating of the dialogues (Brandwood 1990). Plato was the inventor of terms such as ‘rhetoric’, ‘dialectic’ and ‘anti-logic’ (Shiappa and Timmermann 2010; cf. Schiappa 1990). The general philosophical method can be seen as a true competitor (antistrophos) to the ‘shadow art of rhetoric’ (c.399–390 BCE, Gorg. 465c1–2) and its conception of paidea (cf. Kennedy 2007: 30). Sophists were supposedly the first scholars who set up the problem of difference of mind-dependent (nomos) and mind-independent (physis) being (Gagarin 2002).

62

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

19 As is the famous Pythian prophecy to Socrates and his daimonion (c.391–360 BCE, Phdr. 242b-c; c.399–390 BCE, Apol. 31d). 20 And shared by all disciplines and various discourses, such as medicine, navigation, divination and history. 21 These forms of conviction make up the collection of all the ways in which anyone might possibly argue; this collection, though, is not derived a priori (from formal considerations) but, rather, seems to represent the different grounds, or ‘styles’ of argumentation, which were in vogue in Aristotle’s day – reader’s familiarity with these forms of conviction is obviously presupposed (see Smith 1989: 219). Among the examples of these, we find: ‘induction’ (epagoge; 68a15ff.), ‘example’ (paradeigma; 68b38ff.), ‘reduction’ (apagoge; 69a20ff.) or ‘objection’ (enstasis; 68b38ff.). 22 ‘Demonstrative premise’ concerns facts and is distinguished from the ‘generally accepted premise’ (protasis endoxos) which concerns opinions. 23 There thus seems to be certain ambiguity in Aristotle’s treatment of sign which, on the one hand, is a proposition (an expression or representation of fact), and, on the other hand, that very fact itself (see Manetti 1993: 78). However, Aristotle’s primary concern with sign is logical (i.e. as a proposition), and when he refers to it as a fact, he probably does mean nothing else than that the logical interconnection between propositions (a premise-sign, and a signified conclusion) reflects the real interconnection between facts (one of which might be called the sign of the other), with the point being that the nature of this real interconnection can be discovered only by means of the logical one, as is sufficiently manifest in the remainder of his account (see below). For this reason, it would be a mistake to treat the said interconnection as an implication (p ⊃ q), because if this were so, the sign would in some instances be an antecedent, while in others a consequent, of the implication – and whatever circumstances might distinguish one instance from the other, this can only be discovered; it cannot be assumed beforehand. 24 Because only in the first figure the inference from sign as a premise to conclusion proceeds by instantiating a general rule which is the representation of a necessary interconnection between two facts/propositions (one being the sign and the other signified). 25 That is, the conclusion may still be false though both premises be true. 26 Strictly speaking, two figures of a syllogism with a semeiotic premise, i.e. a premise which is a semeion. 27 We have apagoge ‘when it is obvious that the first term applies to the middle, but that the middle applies to the last term is not obvious, yet nevertheless is more probable or not less probable than the conclusion’ (69a20-22). Thus, if we know that BC, we may, under the stated conditions, infer that AB is the case by means of (assuming) AC, which is a secondfigure sign-argument formally identical to the description of the second-figure semeion in 70a18-20. 28 In Aristotle’s words, induction ‘consists in establishing a relation between one extreme term and the middle term by means of other extreme’ (68a15-17). Thus, we infer that BA from CA and CB, which is the third-figure syllogism. See Tredennick (1938: 515[note]f.). 29 All deductive syllogisms can be in Aristotle’s theory reduced to first figure, and (as they are necessary), all arguments capable of such reduction could have been called tekmeria, ‘proofs’. The other, irreducible arguments, then, are probable, proceed from signs (semeia) which can occur without their objects, and are either abductive or inductive. Later, the Stoics would capture the same distinction in terms of ‘common sign’ (semeion koinon), which is a ground of probable reasoning [inference from the consequent] because it is common to more objects (like wet ground is a sign of previous rain, but also of plants-watering event), and

PRE-MODERN SEMIOTICS

30 31 32

33 34

35 36 37

38 39

40 41 42 43

44

63

‘particular sign’ (semeion idion) which cannot be without the object (like having milk as a sign of pregnancy) and is thus necessary [inference from the antecedent]. But also empirical and rationalist medicine (Allen 2001: 9). Stoic Chrysippus even defined logic as the science of the signifier [to semainon] and signified [to semainomenon] (Diogenes Laertius, Vitae, 7.62). See Allen (2001: 87ff., 194). For Sextus, the theory of the criterion is the subject of the Book 1 of his Against the Logicians, while the theory of sign and demonstration is treated in Book 2. ‘They call pre-antecedent the antecedent in a conditional which begins from truth and ends with truth’ (PH 2.105). Thus, the highest genus of valid inference is a sound conditional, which has a species of inference from apparent to apparent, and inference from sign (from apparent to not apparent), and that inference from sign is either necessary, which is demonstration, or probable. That is, P ⊃ Q iff ∼Q is incompatible with P (Allen 2001: 214). That is, P ⊃ Q iff (P ∧ ∼Q) is inconceivable (Allen 2001: 214). As (Kennedy 1999: 20) pointed out: ‘If for any reason, such as illness, a man could not speak on his own behalf, a relative or friend could speak for him. It became possible to buy a speech from a logographer, or speechwriter, which the party involved would try to memorize, but there were no lawyers or others with a special knowledge of law and procedure. Furthermore, there was no public prosecutor; criminal prosecutions had to be conducted by the injured party or a relative or some interested person.’ Cf. Manetti (1993: 32) and Habinek (2005: vii–viii). For the usage of the term kairos in Greek political discourse in non-Platonic corpuses, see Democritus DK B87; Anaxarchus DK B1; cf. Dissoi logoi (Robinson 1984: 2.19–2.20). According to Manneti (1993: 146), the ‘category of signum appears as a subdivision of non-necessary or weak signs, along with the credibility, judgement and comparability. The examples of signa are “blood”, “pallor”, “flight” and “dust”, the clues, understood as perceptible, barely codified, generally involuntary, phenomena that can be developed into propositions (“If there is a great deal of dust on a person’s shoes, then that person must have been on a journey”).’ Cf. Isocrates Against the Sophists 16–18, who was supposedly the first to distinguish these fundamental parts of rhetoric (Kennedy 1999: 42). The sign in the strict sense (argumentum) is the single perceptible phenomenon, which refers to the fact that is not directly knowable (cf. Cicero 84 BCE, De Inv. I, 48). ‘Signum est enim res, praeter speciem quam ingerit sensibus, aliud aliquid ex se faciens in cogitationem venire,’ 397–426 CE, DC, II.1 Remarkable, when viewed from the perspective of the preceding sing-conceptions. The different grounds of signifying relation (inferential – implicative/equivalent), as well as different according to which signs were classified (e.g. indicative/commemorative signs), not to mention natural and cultural phenomena, are here all brought together under the genus of relation of causing something else to come into the mind (cogitatio). Augustine’s definition, clearly, is not entirely original. Quintillian, for instance, speaks of a sign as making one understand (intelligitur) another thing (c.95 CE, Inst. Or. V.IX.9), Cicero about signifying ‘something that is seen to follow from it’ (c.91–88 BCE, De inv. I.XXX.48; my emphasis). See Jackson (1969: 11–12). What is original is the range of phenomena Augustine applies his definition to Allen (2001: 3). Or ‘summulists’ because of the genre (and the most common title) of their writings.

64

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

45 While the previous periods of the development of medieval logic are referred to as logica vetus (‘old logic’) and logica nova (‘new logic’). 46 Studied thoroughly, e.g., by Eco et al. (1989) and Marmo (2010: 71–92). 47 We might summarize this debate by saying that in terms of cognitive order, one needs to have a concept through which one is able to refer to the thing signified by the concept. But in terms of the logical order, it is rather the thing – or some form, or essence of the words meaning – which is signified, though such signification cannot take place without the concept. 48 See Spade (2001: 272–5) for a diagrammatic overview of various classifications of supposition. 49 The scholastics were generally suspicious towards polyadic relations (see Peter Aurieol, Scriptum Super Primum Sententiarum in: Henninger 1989: 153–4). Also, Bacon’s own definition suggests that view: a sign is a relation principally towards the understanding, enabling that understanding to relate to an object signified. 50 Especially if, by ‘interpretant’, we mean Peirce’s conception of it. 51 Excluding the later, early modern scholasticism, with which we do not concern ourselves here.

REFERENCES Primary Literature Aristotle ([c.360–330 BCE] 1938), Categories. On Interpretation. Prior Analytics, Ancient Greek, English edn, trans. H. P. Cooke and H. Tredennick, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Aristotle ([c.348–347 BCE] 1989), Prior Analytics, trans. R. Smith, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Aristotle ([c.348–347 BCE] 2016), Metaphysics, trans. C. D. C. Reeve, Indianapolis: Hackett. Augustine [397–426], De Doctrina Christiana Libri Quattuor, in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, vol. 34, ed. J. P. Migne, cols. 15–122. [Cited as ‘DC’ in the text, followed by the book number and chapter number. ‘DC II.2’ thus refers to Book II, chapter 2.] Bacon, R. ([c.1267] 1978), De Signis, ed. K. M. Fredborg, L. Nielsen and J. Pinborg, Traditio, 34: 81–136. Cited as DS followed by part number (and eventually section number, if the given part is composed of more sections) and paragraph number. Cicero ([84–44 BCE] 1959), De Inventione, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, Topica, trans. H. M. Hubbell, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cicero ([55 BCE] 1969), M. Tulli Ciceronis scripta quae manserunt omnia. Fasc. 3: De Oratore, ed. K. F. Kumaniecki, Leipzig: Teubner. Dieles, H. and W. Kranz (1951–2), Die Fragmente Der Vorsokratiker, 3 vols, Berlin: Wiedman. Diogenes L. ([c.220] 1959), Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2 vols, trans. R. D. Hicks, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hippocrates ([470/460?–370? BCE] 1923), Works, vols 1–3, trans. W. H. S. Jones, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Peter of Spain ([c.1245] 1972), Tractatus Called afterward Summulae Logicales, ed. L. M. de Rijk, Assen: Van Gorcum & Comp. Plato ([427–347 BCE] 1905), Platonis Opera, ed. J. Burnet, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Plato (c.399–390 BCE), Apology [Apol.], Crito [Crit.], Gorgias [Gorg.], Protagoras [Prot.], Euthydemus [Euth.], Cratylus [Crat.], Charmides [Charm.]. Plato (c.391–360 BCE), Republic [Rep.], Phaedo [Phd.], Phaedrus [Phdr.], Theaetetus [Theaet.].

PRE-MODERN SEMIOTICS

65

Plato (c.359–347 BCE), Sophist [Soph.], Timaeus [Tim.], Epinomis [Epin.]. Philodemus [54/40 BCE], Peri semeioseon [De signis], ed. and trans. P. H. De Lacy and E. A. De Lacy (1941), Philodemus: On Methods of Inference. A Study in Ancient Empiricism, Philadelphia: American Philological Association. Quintilian ([c.95] 1920), Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Quintilian ([c.95] 2001), The Orator’s Education, vols 1–5, trans. D. A. Russell, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rhetorica ad Herennium ([c.75 BCE] 1954), trans. H. Caplan, London: William Heinemann. [Cited as ‘Rhet ad Her.’ in the text.] Robinson, T. M. (1984), Contrasting Arguments: An Edition of Dissoi Logoi, Salem: Ayer. Sextus Empiricus ([before 235] 2005), Against the Logicians, trans. R. Bett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Cited as ‘Adv. Math.’ in the text (Against the Logicians being a part of the larger work Adversus Mathematicos) followed by book number and paragraph number.] Sextus Empiricus ([before 235] 2007), Outlines of Skepticism, ed. J. Annas and J. Barnes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Cited as ‘PH’ in the text followed by book number and paragraph number.] Thomas of Erfurt [c.1310], De Modis Significandi sive Grammatica Speculativa, ed. and trans. Bursill-Hall, G. L. (1972), Grammatica speculativa of Thomas of Erfurt, London: Longman. [Cited in the text as ‘GS’ followed by part number and chapter number.]

Secondary Literature Allen, J. (2001), Inference from Signs. Ancient Debates on the Nature of Evidence, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Allen, D. (2011), Why Plato Wrote, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Ashworth, E. J. (1981), ‘“Do Words Signify Ideas or Things?” The Scholastic Sources of Locke’s Theory of Language’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 19 (3): 299–326. Ausland, H. (2002), ‘Forensic Characteristics of Socratic Argumentation’, in G. A. Scott (ed.), Does Socrates Have a Method: Rethinking the Elenchus in Plato’s Dialogues and Beyond, 36–60, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Baer, E. (1983), ‘A Semiotic History of Symptomatology’, in A. Eschbach and J. Trabant (eds), History of Semiotics, 41–66, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Barney, R. (2001), Names and Nature in Plato’s Cratylus, London: Routledge. Brandwood, L. (1990), The Chronology of Plato’s Dialogues, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cain, R. B. (2007), The Socratic Method: Plato’s Use of Philosophical Drama, London: Continuum. Campe, R. (2013), The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist, trans. E. Wiggins, Stanford: Stanford University Press. De Lacy, P. H. and E. A. De Lacy (1941), ‘The Logical Controversies of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics’, in Philodemus: On Methods of Inference, 157–78, Philadelphia: American Philological Association. Deely, J. (1982), Introducing Semiotic: Its History and Doctrine, Bloomington: Indianapolis. Deely, J. (2001), Four Ages of Understanding, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Eco, U. (1979), The Role of the Reader, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eco, U., R. Lambertini, C. Marmo and A. Tabarroni (1989), ‘On Animal Language in the Medieval Classification of Signs’, in U. Eco and C. Marmo (eds), On the Medieval Theory of Signs, 3–42, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

66

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Edelstein, L. (1967), Ancient Medicine: Selected Papers of Ludwig Edelstein, ed. Owsei Temkin and C. Lilian Temkin, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. Gagarin, M. (2002), Antiphon the Athenian, Austin: University of Texas Press. Griswold, C. L., ed. (1988), Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings, New York: Routledge. Habinek, T. (2005), Ancient Rhetoric and Oratory, Oxford: Blackwell. Hankinson, R. J. (2001), Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heilbrunn, G. (1975), ‘Isocrates on Rhetoric and Power’, Hermes, 103 (2): 154–78. Henninger, M. G. (1989), Relations. Medieval Theories 1250–1325, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hintikka, J. (2007), Socratic Epistemology: Explorations of Knowledge-Seeking by Questioning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hollmann, A. (2011), The Master of Signs: Signs and the Interpretation of Signs in Herodotus’ Histories, Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. Irwin, T. (1977), Plato’s Moral Theory: The Early and Middle Dialogues, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackson, D. B. (1962), ‘The Theory of Signs in Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana’, in R. A. Markus (ed.), Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, 97–147, Garden City: Doubleday & Co. Jones, W. H. S. (1923a), ‘General Introduction’, in Works of Hippocrates, vol. 1, vii–lxix, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Jones, W. H. S. (1923b), ‘Introductory Essays’, in Works of Hippocrates, vol. 2, ix–lxvi, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kennedy, G. A. (1998), Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-cultural Introduction, New York: Oxford University Press. Kennedy, G. A. (1999), Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Kennedy, G. A. (2007), Aristotle: On Rhetoric. Theory of Civic Discourse, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kerferd, G. B. (1981), The Sophistic Movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Longrigg, J. (1993), Greek Rational Medicine. Philosophy and Medicine from Alcmaeon to the Alexandrians, London: Routledge. Lyotard, J. F. (1988), The Differend, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Manetti, G. (1993), Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Manetti, G. (2010), ‘Ancient Semiotics’, in P. Cobley (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Semiotics, 13–28, London: Routledge. Markus, R. A. (1957), ‘St. Augustine on Signs’, Phronesis, 2 (1): 60–83. Marmo, C. (1997), ‘Bacon, Aristotle (and all the others) on Natural Inferential Signs’, Vivarium, 35: 135–54. Marmo, C. (2010), La semiotica del xiii secolo tra arti liberali e teologia, Milano: Bompiani. McComiskey, B. (2002), Gorgias and New Sophistic Rhetoric, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Mittelstrass, J. (1984), Wissenschaft als Lebensform, Fankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Mylonopoulos, J., ed. (2010), Divine Images and Human Imaginations in Ancient Greece and Rome, Leiden: Brill. Nightingale, A. W. (2000), Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PRE-MODERN SEMIOTICS

67

Nussbaum, M. C. (2001), The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nöth, W. (1990), Handbook of Semiotics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Peirce, C. S. ([1866–1913] 1931–58), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols 1–6, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, vols 7–8, ed. A. Burks, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cited as CP. Sandywell, B. (1996), Presocratic Reflexivity: The Construction of Philosophical Discourse C. 600–450 BC, London: Routledge. Sanson, D. (2012), Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric, Oxford: Blackwell. Schiappa, E. (1990), ‘Did Plato Coin Rhetorike?’, American Journal of Philology, 111 (4): 457–90. Schiappa, E. and D. M. Timmerman (2010), Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sebeok, T. A. (2001), Signs. An Introduction to Semiotics, 2nd edn, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Smith, R. (1989), Introduction, notes and commentary for Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, Hackett, Indianapolis. Spade, P. V. (2001), Thoughts, Words and Things: An Introduction to Late Medieval Logic and Semantic Theory, https://pvspade.com/Logic/docs/thoughts.pdf Spranzi, M. (2011), The Art of Dialectic between Dialogue and Rhetoric: The Aristotelian Tradition, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Woolf, R. (2013), ‘Plato and the Norms of Thought’, Mind, 122 (485): 171–216. Zuckert, C. H. (2009), Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

68

CHAPTER THREE

Early Modern Semiotics MICHAL KARĽA AND TUULI PERN

INTRODUCTION The early modern period seems to be rather neglected by historians of semiotics1 – to the extent that the question of whether something such as ‘early modern semiotics’ even exists may be legitimately raised.2 Our aim in this chapter is to give an affirmative answer to the question; there indeed was an early modern semiotics. Such an answer, however, could be presented on two levels, depending on what one understands by ‘semiotics’. Accordingly, we may distinguish between, say, the surface notion of semiotics, and the deep notion. On the surface, any theory dealing in one way or another with signs can be called ‘semiotics’. And in this sense, there is no doubt that there was semiotics in the early modern times – as witnessed by the conceptions of sign presented in this chapter. The other, deep, notion of semiotics is not so easily found in the times that we are concerned with in this chapter. Neither is it easy to define what counts as this ‘deep notion’ – which poses a challenge not just to historians of semiotics of the early modern period, but of any period. According to one influential conception, a theory has to account for sign in general in order for it to be considered semiotics proper (Deely 2001: xxx, 1982). Not only that, but it should employ the thesis that all knowledge is in signs as its fundamental point of departure. And upon that ground it should be able to produce a theory of both what knowledge is and what can be known – both epistemology and ontology. In other words, one possible direction in which this deep notion of semiotics can be developed is as a theory elaborating upon the epistemic conception of reality in terms of sign. It is difficult to say whether any early modern writer presented such a deep conception of semiotics.3 But that the early moderns indeed came up with at least certain important innovations in the field of semiotics (conceived through its ‘deep’ notion) is, we believe, a fact – as shown in the sections in this chapter on John Locke and Giambattista Vico. Neither should the other conceptions, which on the contrary made the sign to be more or less redundant (as witnessed by the conception of sign in Port-Royal Logic), be simply disregarded on that ground. For even these negations of semiotics originated as outcomes of the even earlier discussions on the nature and general notion of sign – that is to say, the semiotic considerations led to the eventual abandonment of semiotics by some of the early moderns. There is at least one other possible direction in which this chapter might go, that of giving account of early modern scholasticism – of writers such as Pedro de Fonseca, the Conimbricenses,4 Domingo de Soto and John Poinsot.5 One such influential account can

70

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

be found in John Deely’s Four Ages of Understanding (Deely 2001: 411–84). Deely’s exploration of early modern scholasticism is focused on answering how different authors treated the definition of sign from the perspective of Augustine’s original definition (Augustine 397–426: 2.1). That is to say, what is a sign in its proper being such that it transcends the divisions between nature and culture, between mind-independent (ens reale) and mind-dependent (ens rationis) being (Deely 2001: 430ff.). Deely answers that it was John Poinsot (Deely 2001: 430–84) who was the first one successfully to define sign as a genus. A sign, according to Poinsot in Deely’s view, is a relatio secundum esse – and ‘ontological relation’ – something is a sign insofar as it brings some object into an organism’s awareness indifferently to the ontological status of the object.6 We ultimately decided to give an account of three early modern semiotic conceptions – that of Arnauld and Nicole’s Port-Royal Logic, of Locke’s project of Semiotic in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and of Vico’s semiotic conception of the human world in The New Science. These three are conceived in a synecdochical way to represent the broader currents and positions of the early modern thought on signs. So-conceived, our chapter lands somewhat mid-way. On the one hand, we see no reason to neglect the existence of early modern semiotics in any substantial sense. On the other hand, the desired systematic positive affirmation of early modern semiotic achievements – accounted for with respect to later developments – is a history yet to be written.

THE CONCEPTION OF SIGN IN PORT-ROYAL LOGIC Overview The Logic, or the Art of Thinking, hereafter called Port-Royal Logic, was written by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole and first published in 1662.7 It presents a sort of culmination point in the history of logic with respect to the question of logic’s subject-matter. While the medieval authors (at least up to Ockham) considered logic to deal with language as a species of sign, Port-Royal Logic vindicates the psychological view8 according to which the subject-matter of logic is thought. Consequently, the forms of traditional Aristotelian logic (term, proposition and argument) are re-interpreted in terms of mental operations, or faculties. Along with this theory goes the re-introduction of the concept of sign as a special kind of idea – namely the idea of an object representing another object. Thus, in contrast with the medieval view in which logic dealt with a species of sign exclusively, the Port-Royal Logic presents a sign as being only a species of logic’s subject-matter. Combined with the epistemology of ideas upon which the Logic relies, a sign is turned into a subsidiary, and ultimately redundant, notion. If all objects are cognizable through their ideas, there is no need for an idea of an idea of an object, i.e. a sign.

Re-conceptualization of the subject-matter of logic The introduction of the Port-Royal Logic opens with the following passage: Logic is the art of directing reason well in known things, as much to instruct ourselves about them as to instruct others. This art consists in the reflections which have been made on the four principal operations of the mind: conceiving [concevoir], judging, reasoning, and ordering [ordonner]. (Arnauld and Nicole 1683, Second Discourse: 21[37].37)

EARLY MODERN SEMIOTICS

71

Thus, conception, as the product of the conceiving operation of the mind, is the most elementary logical form, being ‘the simple view we have of things that present themselves to the mind’ (Arnauld and Nicole 1683, Second Discourse: 21[37]). A conception is the way in which things become cognizable to us. And that through which they are cognized (i.e. the conception) Arnauld and Nicole call an idea. Judgment consists in the combination of ideas where one is either affirmed or denied of the other. And reasoning is the operation through which the mind forms a judgement out of other judgements. (Ordering is the other word for method.) Let us compare this way in which the Port-Royalians frame their logic with the usual way that logic’s subject-matter was treated in scholasticism. A scholastic logician, writing an introductory logical text, usually in the genre of the Summulae, would typically begin with the classification of signs in order to isolate that species of sign with which logic deals – i.e. those signs which take the logical form of terms, propositions and arguments. Such a class of sign was vox significativa ad placitum – a vocal expression signifying conventionally, or according to voluntary imposition.9 Logic and the theory of signs were, therefore, not only intimately interconnected, but the former was defined in terms of the latter. Unlike their scholastic predecessors, the early modern Port-Royalians begin their treatment of the logical subject-matter with the classification of mental operations – of conceiving, judging, reasoning and so forth – i.e. mental operations which produce certain cognitive acts bearing the logical forms of term, proposition and argument. Their logic is consequently organized into respective parts dedicated to these operations and their products. On the one hand, this can be viewed as a mere surface difference, because although the fundamental logical forms are introduced in a new framework, the traditional content of describing these forms retains more or less the same structure. 10 On the other hand, however, the choice to reframe traditional logic in terms of mental operations leads to sometimes confounding the purely logical with epistemological matters and introduces conceptions which – both on the medieval and late modern/contemporary view – should stay outside of it.11 For the purposes of this inquiry, perhaps the most important consequence of this reframing of logic in mentalistic terms was the impact it had on the view of sign. Since sign is no longer the genus of which logic is said to treat a species (being either a part of semiotics, or coexistent with semiotics in general), but it is a genus of mental operations of which logic deals with a particular subclass, the sign becomes, at best, a subsidiary notion – in fact, a subclass of a class of conceiving mental operations, in other words, a particular kind of idea. This is exactly where the sign belongs according to the Port-Royalians.

Theory of sign Such account of sign appears in the fourth chapter of the first part of Arnauld and Nicole’s work, where they write: When we consider an object in itself and in its own being, without carrying the view of the mind to what it can represent, our idea of it is an idea of a thing, such as the idea of the earth or the sun. But when we view a certain object merely as representing another, our idea of it is an idea of a sign, and the first object is called a sign. […] Consequently the sign includes two ideas, one of the thing which represents, the other of the thing represented. Its nature consists in prompting the second by the first. (Arnauld and Nicole 1683: 1.4.35[52–3])

72

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

This view is at first glance practically identical with that of Saint Augustine,12 as asserting the two ways in which any object may be considered – either as such, on its own, or as representing another, i.e. as a sign. However, there is a crucial difference to be pointed out. Unlike Augustine’s view, the distinction made here is not between the two ways in which an object may be considered, but between the two ways in which we may have an idea of an object – to wit, we may have an idea of an object as such, or an idea of an object as a sign. Thus, a sign is a twofold idea,13 containing the idea ‘of the thing which represents’ and that ‘of the thing represented’ (Arnauld and Nicole 1683: 1.4.35[53]), where the latter idea is ‘prompted’ (1683: 1.4.35[53]) by means of the former. This re-conceptualization of a sign as an idea enabled the Port-Royalians to overcome one traditional problem which the medieval authors had to solve in different ways. Namely, if a sign is considered in its relation to the thing it represents, the relation of representing ceases to be when the thing represented ceases to be such as it is represented by the sign.14 But when the sign is viewed as consisting of the two ideas, one representing the other, its signhood (and thus the relation between the two ideas) holds so far as the two ideas remain, no matter whether the object signified by that idea continues to exist, or not.15 Port-Royal Logic is therefore able to present a theory of a sign in which the sign is indifferent to the ontological state of its object – in a very specific sense, however; namely, that strictly speaking a sign does not represent an object per se, but an idea, which, subsequently, is a representation of an object. There is, thus, a difference between a sign and a representation. Representation is the way in which objects are cognized by the mind: ‘Everything we conceive is represented to the mind either as a thing, a manner of a thing, or a modified thing’ (Arnauld and Nicole 1683: 1.2.30[47]). A sign is a representation of a thing as modified – of ‘the substance, as determined in a certain manner or mode’ (1683: 1.2.30[48]), i.e. as a relation. It is, therefore, a species of the Aristotelian category of relation. Thus, while all signs are representations, not all representations are signs – that is to say, of all our ideas, some are ideas of objects and others are ideas of other ideas, and only these latter (or even, perhaps, a specific class of these latter) are signs. Authors of the Logic subsequently consider three classifications of signs (Arnauld and Nicole 1683: 1.4.35–6[53]), neither of which is original, but all come from the earlier, ancient and medieval, sources: 1. necessary and probable, corresponding to the Aristotelian distinction between tekmeria and semeia; 2. connected with the thing(s) represented or disconnected from them, which might correspond to the Stoic and Epicurean distinction between particular (idia) and common (koina) signs and 3. between natural and instituted, or established, which corresponds to the commonplace medieval distinction between signa naturalia and signa ad placitum.16

Consequences of the presented theory of sign On the one hand, thus, a sign ceases to play the foundational role in Port-Royal Logic, becoming only a subsidiary notion. For, since a sign is a twofold idea (combining the idea of a representing thing and the idea of a represented thing), it is reduced to one particular manner of conceiving things by means of ideas. A thing is conceived either through its idea, or through a sign, that is, through an idea of some other thing. And for this reason, a

EARLY MODERN SEMIOTICS

73

sign becomes pretty much epistemically redundant. Why conceive of something through an idea of another thing, instead of through the idea of that very thing we are conceiving in the first place? This is especially true given the view of relation between perception and understanding presented by the Port-Royal logic (and taken from Descartes). For one of the traditional ways in which a sign was conceived was that of something perceptible representing some other thing which either was not perceptible at the moment when the sign was perceived, or not perceptible at all.17 But when the view in which perception is conceived only as a confused understanding (or intellection) or as an occasion in which some idea of a thing is produced in our mind – an idea which would not be present in the mind had we not perceived the thing, but which nevertheless could be produced even in the absence of anything perceptible – a sign becomes almost irrelevant for any serious epistemological consideration framed in this manner. Because there is nothing conceivable through a sign which could not be conceived without a sign.18 On the other hand, however, the view presented by the Port-Royal logic was – after semiotics’ ‘historical awakening’ – immediately recognized as a predecessor of the semiological paradigm. Indeed, one can easily recognize that Saussure’s twofold conception of sign (Saussure 1916: 65ff.) bears a striking resemblance to that of the Port-Royal Logic, being almost (if not completely) identical in form. Saussure’s sign is a unity of the two ideas – that of the signifier (which is a concept, i.e. idea, of a signifying sound – an ‘acoustic image’) and of the signified (which is a concept, i.e. idea, of a signified thing, simply a concept of something – of which Saussure does not care much what it is). Likewise, the Port-Royalians present a sign as a unity of the two ideas – the idea of the signifying thing and of the thing signified.

The origins of the Early Modern conception of sign One particularly interesting question is: how did this (in certain respects radically different) view of sign originate? Given that in the scholastic period, the sign was a fundamental logical notion, one might ask what happened (in terms of newly formulated theses and conceptions) such that subsequently, a sign was reduced practically to a footnote in a logical textbook? We have already hinted at the answer when giving account of the new epistemological paradigm in the framework of which the PortRoyalists developed their logic. But one might insist to ask, from where did that paradigm originate in the first place? More concretely, how, from the scholastic view of the fundamentality of sign, was the early modern view of the fundamentality of ideas forged? The almost certainly striking answer is that the very (late scholastic) theory of sign is to be blamed. Since Augustine’s definition, a sign was thought of as some sensible (i.e. perceptible) thing – which ‘over and above the impression it makes on the senses, causes something else to come into the mind as a consequence of itself’ (397–426 CE, De doctrina christiana, 2.1). Beginning with the thirteenth century (and authors such as Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon), this view was gradually abandoned as being too narrow, and concepts were also recognized as being signs (Deely 2001: 223, 405–7, 456). At the same time, the conception of representation enters scholastic philosophy. A term repraesentatio becomes more frequent in the discussions of cognition, being used originally as a Latin translation of (perhaps a dozen) different Arabic terms in Avicenna’s works.19 From the middle of the thirteenth century onwards, representation appears quite often in the definitions of sign (a sign is something which represents something else20). The said recognition of mental

74

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

concepts as signs (besides perceptible things already recognized as signs in the original definition of Augustine) was later vindicated in the distinction between instrumental and formal signs (Deely 2001: 390, 400). A sign is instrumental if, in order for it to function as a sign, it needs first to be itself recognized as an object, which applies to the perceptible objects functioning as signs. Formal signs, on the other hand, do not need themselves to be recognized as such; they are, we might say, self-presentations of an object, without requiring us to be aware of them as such, and are transparent in this sense. But, as Fonseca pointed out, instrumental signs are thus dependent on formal signs.21 For an instrumental sign is an object representing something else – to function as a sign, it needs first to be recognized as an object. And such recognition cannot proceed by any other way than by a formal sign – we must have, first, a representation of an object which is logically prior to this object’s functioning as a sign. That is to say, we must first have a formal sign which represents something which we might then, logically subsequently, regard as an instrumental sign of something else. In other words, all objects are cognizable through formal signs, and when so cognized, these objects can be then regarded as instrumental signs. This, in the interpretation of John Deely, led to the reduction of signification to the domain of instrumental signs. While instrumental signs signify, i.e. represent something else, formal signs only represent, i.e. are themselves the cognitions of an object (Deely 2001: 416).22

Summary The Port-Royal Logic introduced a psychological paradigm in which logic is seen no longer as treating with a species of signs, but with mental operations. The resulting view treats sign as a way in which an idea of an object can be considered, namely, as an idea of an object representing another object. The notion of sign thus becomes only subsidiary and ultimately redundant: since all objects are cognized through the ideas (representations) we have of them, there is no special reason for why we would cognize an object through an idea of another object (as a sign of the former) and not through its own idea. Therefore, at least regarding explicit semiotic theory, Port-Royal Logic marks a decline in the interest in sign per se.23 However, it can at the same time be seen as a predecessor of the semiological model of sign (whether Saussure was aware of it or not). Moreover, although the development of the late scholastic sign theory (hinted at in the last paragraphs of this section) led to the abandonment of the theory of sign in favour of the theory of ideas/representations (through the dependence of instrumental signs upon formal ones), it put to the centre a question of the cognizability of objects – a question which is of genuine semiotic interest, as long as the thesis that ‘a sign is what every object presupposes’24 is accepted. Thus, although not all representations are signs in the meaning of terms accepted by the Port-Royalians (or early modern rationalists in general), a theory of representation is relevant to the archaeology of sign nevertheless – precisely in this sense of representation’s being the way through which any object is cognized. And that which the early moderns called an idea or representation in their terminology will be ultimately recognized as sign in the terminology of Peirce, who introduced his Semiotic (as he preferred to call it in the early period of his thought) as a ‘general science of representations’ (1865: W 1.172) with the aim to solve precisely the question with which the early modern thought on representation had opened – what makes an object cognizable?

EARLY MODERN SEMIOTICS

75

JOHN LOCKE’S THEORY OF IDEAS AND SIGNS Overview John Locke famously coined the term ‘semiotics’ (semiotike) as a designation of ‘the Doctrine of Signs’ (Locke [1690] 1975: 4.21.3).25 It is due to Locke that we call the study of signs ‘semiotics’ today – Peirce took the term directly (and explicitly) from Locke (Peirce 1865: W 1.172). However, Locke’s proposal of semiotics appears in the very last chapter of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and one may ask whether the project of semiotics (definitely only proposed and not realized by Locke himself) is not just a sort of afterthought. That is to say, is Locke’s proposal of semiotics a synthetic culmination of the whole project of inquiring into the nature, sources and workings of the human understanding, or can such a project do well without any semiotic framework? In the following exposition we would like to argue for the former option.

Locke’s theory of ideas In a manner similar to many other early modern writers, Locke opens his inquiry into human cognition with the discussion of its sources – i.e. with the question of what is that through which all cognition proceeds. As is the case with most early modern philosophers, this means of knowledge is an idea for Locke, defined as ‘the object of thinking’ (Locke [1690] 1975: 2.1.1). Unlike the continental early moderns, for whom the clear and distinct (that is to say, epistemically reliable) ideas have their source in the intellect and are innate to it, for Locke (as for other British early moderns), the origin of all our ideas is in experience, this experience being either (1) of outward things, things outside the mind, ‘external sensible objects’ (Locke [1690] 1975: 2.1.2), which give rise to our ideas of sensation, or (2) of ‘the operations of our own minds within us’ (Locke [1690] 1975: 2.1.4), which give rise to our ideas of reflection. Both these species of ideas are perceptual – we perceive either that which goes on in the outer world or that which goes on in our minds. Alongside this distinction of ideas into ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection, Locke draws a parallel distinction between simple and complex ideas based on whether a given idea can be broken down to some constituents (in which case it is complex) or not (in which case it is simple). Simple ideas, therefore, are basic building blocks of all our knowledge, for all complex ideas are built from those which are simple. The first distinction, between ideas of sensation and of reflection, is according to the ideas’ source, while the latter distinction between simple and complex ideas might be called formal, between the forms which our ideas may have. The third distinction Locke introduces, between ideas of primary qualities – like ‘solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number’ (Locke [1690] 1975: 2.8.9) – and ideas of secondary qualities – such as ‘colours, sounds, tastes &c’ (Locke [1690] 1975: 2.8.10) – is genuinely epistemic. At its core, it is a distinction between the ways in which ideas represent their objects (secondary qualities) and the ways in which these objects are (secondary qualities). Or, which is the same thing between two sets of properties – properties belonging properly to ideas themselves as representations of objects (secondary qualities) and properties belonging to the objects represented by these ideas (primary qualities).26 Locke does not elaborate much on the relation that bodies (external objects) have to our ideas – except the relation of exciting ideas of secondary qualities in us and

76

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

ideas of primary qualities through the former. Nor is he concerned with the sceptical question  –  if all our knowledge of bodies is mediated by ideas, how can we be sure that such knowledge is true given that we can never compare our ideas with the original bodies?27 Locke’s position towards the issue of relation of ideas and bodies is a combination of formistic and mechanistic epistemology (Armstrong 1965: 375). Primary qualities detectable in our representations/ideas present the same forms which belong properly to bodies, while secondary qualities are caused by powers in bodies (the effect of which is this or that idea of secondary quality) but are unlike the properties of bodies (Armstrong 1965: 375).

Words and signification What came to be known as Locke’s ‘linguistic thesis’ (Ott 2004: 3) is the thesis that ‘[w]ords in their primary or immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him who uses them’ (Locke [1690] 1975: 3.2.2). There have been several attempts at explaining this thesis favourably as to save Locke from the obvious objection (first stated by Mill) – ‘[w]hen I say, “the sun is the cause of the day”, I do not mean that my idea of the sun causes or excites in me the idea of the day’ (Mill 1867: 15)28 – i.e. the objection that words refer to our ideas. Norman Kretzmann (1968) thus reads Locke’s thesis through the distinction between sense and reference – Locke’s conception of signification (of words) purports to their sense, or meaning – the ideas are meanings of words, but such statement does not prevent words to be used referentially. E. J. Ashworth (1981) tends to interpret Locke’s statement in the light of early modern scholasticism, where the thesis that words signify concepts was commonplace. Signification of a word means making something understood by a word, and that which we understand in words are their meanings – concepts. Locke’s arguments offered in favour of the thesis are perhaps more interesting than the thesis itself, at least from the perspective of the history of semiotics. According to Kretzmann’s (1968) analysis, Locke presents two distinct arguments, which he calls ‘an argument from the use of words’ (Kretzmann 1968: 181) and ‘argument from the doctrine of representative ideas’ (Kretzmann 1968: 185). The argument from the use of words is quite unremarkable.29 In order to communicate our ideas, we need to make use of some ‘sensible external signs’ (Locke [1690] 1975: 3.2.1), and these are words. Words, therefore, must signify ideas, because it is ideas which we communicate through words. The second argument (from the doctrine of representative ideas) Kretzmann (1968) extracts from the distant passages from Locke’s Essay. Its first part, a premise, runs as follows: [S]ince the things the mind contemplates are none of them, besides itself, present to the understanding, it is necessary that something else, as a sign or representation of the thing it considers, should be present in it: and these are ideas. (Locke [1690] 1975: 4.21.4) That is to say, we do not have the things we cognize in our minds, but only their signs or representations, which are ideas.30 When we understand something by a word, therefore, that which is understood cannot be the thing, because understanding does not contain things, but only ideas. It, therefore, must be an idea.

EARLY MODERN SEMIOTICS

77

From the premise that we cannot cognize things in any other way than through ideas we have of them, Locke derives the following reductio ad absurdum argument: [N]or can anyone apply them [words] as marks, immediately, to anything else but the ideas that he himself hath: for this would be to make them signs of his own conceptions and yet apply them to other ideas; which would be to make them signs and not signs of his ideas at the same time; and so in effect to have no signification at all. (Locke [1690] 1975: 3.2.2) Suppose, thus, contrary to the ‘linguistic thesis’, that words signify things (directly), and not ideas, i.e. that words made things being understood, and not ideas. Then, as understanding operates only through ideas, we would need to have an idea through which we would be able to understand a thing directly signified by the word – an idea which would tell us that this word signifies that thing. But then such idea would be signified by the word – for it would enable us to understand the thing. Therefore, the word would signify an idea (as the analysis shows) and would not signify an idea (as the initial supposition asserts), which is a contradiction. Therefore, words signify ideas. Although Locke’s text is far from being clear, what he might have in mind is a preconception of a representation Peirce used to call an equivalent representation, or (a little later) an interpretant. Equivalent representation performs, in Peirce’s theory, the same function Locke seems to be alluding to here – a representation which enables one to understand that this or that sign is a sign of this thing (Peirce 1865: W 1.303). What is obviously missing from Locke’s account is a distinction between the different functions a representation (or idea) may have. True, we need an idea enabling us to understand that the given sign (word) signifies the given object (whether it is a thing or an idea). But why would such representation need to be signified by the word the same way the object is signified by it? Why not say that words signify things through ideas which enable us to understand the things signified? But this seems to be exactly Locke’s position – only he would say that these ideas enabling us to understand things signified by words are themselves primarily and immediately signified by these words, whereas the thing is, in this sense, signified only secondarily and mediately.31 And this position is pretty much identical with the commonplace theory of signification the Scholastics had.32 What makes Locke stand out in his discussion of language is the thesis that ‘there comes, by constant use, to be such a connexion between certain sounds and the ideas they stand for, that the names heard, almost as readily excite certain ideas as if the objects themselves, which are apt to produce them, did actually affect the senses’ (Locke [1690] 1975: 3.2.6). Thus although words signify ideas, and not things, on Locke’s account, through use, words become so habitually associated with certain ideas that they are used as if the very objects the ideas of which are signified by these words were present. That is to say, in the actual practice of using language, it is almost as if words signified things – or, that the fact that words signified ideas was epistemically redundant in the actual attainment of cognition through words.33

Locke’s semiotic In the very last chapter of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding ‘On the Division of the Sciences’, Locke introduces the project of Semiotics. The chapter discusses the division of the sciences into three kinds. The first kind concerns ‘the Nature of Things,

78

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

as they are in themselves, their Relations, and their manner of Operations’ (Locke [1690] 1975: 4.21.1) and is called physike by Locke (Locke [1690] 1975: 4.21.2). The second concerns ‘that which Man himself ought to do, as a rational and voluntary Agent, for the attainment of any Ends, especially Happiness’ (Locke [1690] 1975: 4.21.1) and is called praktike by Locke. These two sciences, rather the two branches of a science, thus treat the whole of reality in its either mind-independent or mind-dependent respect – theoretical science (physike) studying reality as it is, and practical science (praktike) studying reality as a means to an end (Deely 2001: 598). The third branch of science may be called semiotike, or the Doctrine of Signs, the most usual whereof being Words, it is aptly enough termed logike, Logick; the business whereof, is to consider the Nature of Signs, the Mind makes use of for the Understanding of Things, or conveying its Knowledge to others. For since the Things the Mind contemplates, are none of them, besides it self, present to the Understanding, ‘tis necessary that something else, as a Sign or Representation of the thing it considers, should be present to it: And these are Ideas. And because the Ideas of one Man’s Mind cannot immediately be laid open to the view of another; nor be themselves laid up any where, but in the Memory, which is apt to let them go and lose them: Therefore to communicate our Ideas one to another, as well as record them for our own use, Signs of our Ideas are also necessary. Those which Men have found most convenient, and therefore generally make use of, are articulate Sounds. The Consideration then of Ideas and Words, as the great Instruments of Knowledge, makes no despicable Part of their Contemplation, who would take a view of humane Knowledge in the whole Extent of it. And, perhaps, if they were distinctly weighed, and duly considered, they would afford us another sort of Logick and Critick, than what we have been hitherto acquainted with. (Locke [1690] 1975: 4.21.4) Semiotics, then, is a science which considers the means of cognition – both theoretical (physike) and practical (praktike) – in general. These means of cognition in general Locke calls signs, which are of two kinds: ideas and words (one might say that ideas are inward signs and words are outward signs). Also, for Locke, semiotics is equivalent to logic. Unlike the Port-Royalians (for whom the theory of signs is only a part of logic and ideas are not treated as signs, but signs are species of ideas), Locke’s theory of signs, semiotics, is co-extensive with the general theory of knowledge and with logic. According to the interpretation of John Deely (2001: 590–607), Locke’s project of semiotics transcends the so-far presented doctrine of the Essay. That is to say, if Locke’s intent is to inquire into the nature of human understanding, and the sole means by which this understanding is acquired are signs, then the whole project of the Essay should begin with the discussion of semiotics and signs – while in fact, the semiotic project is only an addition at the very conclusion of the Essay. On the other hand, Locke gives a thorough discussion of ideas and words in the respective books of the Essay with all that is central in their account as means of cognition, and the project of semiotics may be seen as simply concluding with the description of the framework in which these analyses were carried on. According to Armstrong (1965) and Pititto (1998), Locke’s intention with the introduction of semiotics was to present a new approach to metaphysics. The seventeenthcentury writers such as Hobbes displayed a distaste for traditional metaphysics, but at the same time remained aware that philosophy cannot entirely throw away the study

EARLY MODERN SEMIOTICS

79

of fundamental issues. Usually, they tried to reframe metaphysics in a new way and under a new name, such as Hobbes’ philosophia prima or Locke’s semiotike (Armstrong 1965: 369). This new metaphysics should be considered as semiotics, in Locke’s view (Armstrong 1965: 375), by studying the sole instruments of knowledge – signs, i.e. ideas and words. More particularly, it should consider the relation between words and ideas. Since the rejected metaphysics of earlier authors consisted mainly in ‘the abuse of words’ (Locke [1690] 1975: 3.10–11), it is not surprising that the new metaphysics should be semiotics – in its study of the ways how words are used and coming up with guidelines for the proper use of words as signs.

Summary John Locke occupies a prominent place in the history of semiotics if only for the reason that he coined the term. Working pretty much with the same presuppositions as the authors of Port-Royal Logic (that all cognition of things is through the ideas we have of them, that linguistic signs are necessary for communication and that metaphysical errors may be avoided if one studies the relation between our ideas and words which express them more carefully), he developed these presuppositions into the project of a new science, semiotics, which would replace the former metaphysics. On the one hand, Locke realized that if all knowledge is mediated by signs, the study of signs should be the first in order. On the other hand, this realization remained more or less only a proposal. It is true that in the light of this proposal, much of Locke’s theory may be re-read as being semiotically grounded. If ideas and words are two main species of signs, then Locke gives account of both in the respective books of the Essaiy, which in this way turns out to be (albeit implicitly) an essay on how knowledge is acquired through signs. But missing from Locke’s account is any explanation of what sign is as such – including an explanation of what ideas and words have in common qua signs (except the very fact that they both function as representing something else). That is to say, Locke’s work is not so much about signs, as subject-matter of semiotic inquiry, as it is about semiotics as a mode of inquiry. And even though he left the project to rest in this form without developing it any further, after Locke, semiotics as a science lay waiting and ready for a thinker like Peirce to pick it up.

VICO – AN ACCIDENTAL EARLY MODERN SEMIOTICIAN? Introduction Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) is best known for his magnum opus, The New Science (La Scienza Nuova, 1744). Vico was rediscovered in the twentieth century – among other scholars and also by semioticians – as a highly original thinker whose ideas do not fit neatly into the paradigm of Western philosophy: Vico diverges into his own concept of knowledge, scienza, with his own methodology. Vico has been described as anti-modern (Lilla 1994), anti-Cartesian (on Vico’s polemic with Descartes, see Mazzotta 1999: 18–32) and a critic of his own time (Berlin, Hardy, and Israel 2016). It could be argued that what sets Vico apart from many philosophers of his time is his attention to the semiotic aspects of human culture and history. The New Science is essentially an attempt to formulate a semiotic understanding of the human world. Marcel Danesi claims (1990: 90) that Vico’s New Science should be considered the first handbook of semiotic theory.

80

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Vico in semiotic research – short bibliography Vico’s methodology is essentially an attempt to approach and explain the human mind through the analysis of the meaningful or semiotic world created by this same mind. Therefore Vico has inspired many semioticians to interpret and develop his ideas and define his role in the history of semiotics (see Sebeok 2001). Vico’s role in semiotics has changed over the years. In the 1990s Marcel Danesi actively promoted Vico’s ideas (especially the concept of imagination) (see Danesi 1986, 1993, 1995, 2000; Nuessel 1995) and collective volumes edited by him offered an integrated view of Vichian semiotics. However, over the last twenty years, publications on Vico in semiotics have been more scattered and have tended to offer a plethora of different interpretations, rather than a unified view. This falls in line with a general tendency in Vico studies: there is a myriad of works on Vico in humanities and social sciences, and many of them interpret Vico’s ideas in widely diverse ways. Around sixty publications per annum are published on Vico in different languages (Scognamiglio 2012). In his overview ‘The Current State of Vico Scholarship’, David L. Marshall concedes: ‘The only way to deal with Vico is to dive into the multiplicity of plausible interpretations and find in them the makings of a new line of inquiry’ (2011: 141). In semiotics, more extensive recent publications on Vico are Amadeu Viana’s article (2017) ‘Vico, Peirce, and the Issue of Complexity in Human Sciences’, based on his monograph in Spanish (Viana 2015); Jürgen Tarbant’s monograph ‘Poetische Charaktere’ (Trabant 2019) – a cultural semiotic interpretation of Vico’s idea of imaginative universals (also termed poetic characters). Recently Vico’s understanding of imagination has also been analysed within semiotic cultural psychology (Tateo 2017, 2018; Pern 2019).

Vichian semiotics: The verum-factum principle Vico’s conception of knowledge is mainly oriented towards the explanation of history. He seeks to understand consciousness in order to reconstruct history and find its characteristic patterns. The fourth and fifth parts of the New Science are thus dedicated to the elucidation of the laws of history, the course of nations through time. While passages dedicated to the functioning of human consciousness are scattered throughout the New Science, the treatise as a whole is built upon Vico’s distinctive conception of knowledge. Scienza means for Vico science as creation of the human world – every branch of science recreates the world by formulating certain principles or regularities it observes (Vico 1744: para. 349). According to Vico, the basis for any kind of science is ‘metaphysics, which seeks its proof not in the external world but within the modifications of the mind of him who meditates it. For since this world of nations has certainly been made by men, it is within these modifications that its principles should have been sought’ (Vico 1744: 374).34 This thesis, known as the ‘verum-factum’ principle (see Danesi 1990: 96), brings Vico into the paradigm of semiotics. The New Science tries by the interpretation of myths and etymology of ancient phrases to explain the origins of human language, or more precisely the origins of specifically human sign use. Vico’s methodology and his theoretical model as well are firmly based on the verum-factum principle. Vico first mentions this principle in one of his earlier works ‘De antiquissima Italorum sapientia’ as the Latin phrase ‘Verum et factum […]convertuntur’ – ‘the true and the made are interchangeable (Vico 1710: para. 1.1). There are of course various interpretations of this formula, but within the semiotic framework, Vico’s verum-factum principle can

EARLY MODERN SEMIOTICS

81

be understood via the concept of semiotic modelling. According to the Tartu-Moscow School conception of semiotic modelling activity, the meaningful or semiotic human world is actively created by the human mind – by forming semiotic models or images. Therefore, to understand this world, it is essential to pay attention to the processes of this image formation or modelling – or look at the modifications of the mind that mediates, as Vico said. Vico’s conception of knowledge is clearly anchored in human senses and acting in the world (compare Uexküllian Wirkzeichen). In comparison to Locke (see above), who drew a distinction between sensation and reflection, Vico describes a sphere of semiotic activity that falls between those two modes. In Vico’s conception, sensory input (a clash of thunder) inevitably brings with it a (bodily) affective response (fear: see Vico 1744: para. 382) and imaginative processes that enable the human to make sense of the situation (the sky is an angry god). Affective responses are inextricably tied to distinguishing what is meaningful in the environment. As humans we try to make sense of what affects us, brings pain, pleasure, fear, comfort (see also hedonistic connotations in Salvatore and Freda) – and thus form a meaningful image of the human world. Vico called the units of this archaic semiotic system created mainly by sense and imagination: universali fantastici, ‘imaginative universals’.

Imaginative universals and semiotics of the archaic mind Imaginative universals form a class of concept specific to the archaic mind where imagination functions as the power that enables humans to create a semiotic world: the ‘made’ (factum). [The first people] not being able to form intelligible class concepts of things, had a natural need to create poetic characters; that is, imaginative class concepts or universals, to which, as to certain models or ideal portraits, to reduce all the particular species which resembled them. (Vico 1744: 209) Vico describes generi intelligibili and generi fantastici as two separate types of class concepts (1744: para. 934) – so the archaic mind has a type of class concept that is specific to it; it does not operate with a rudimentary form of the rational class concept. Philosopher Donald P. Verene explains Vico’s idea of imaginative universal as ‘a theory of image’ to distinguish it from the theory of concept (Verene 1991: 68). Noticing, quite ahead of his time, the semiotic diversity of the human mind, Vico described the ‘archaic mind’ as something we, as modern humans, are incapable of understanding fully. He claims that in order to reach some insight of it ‘we had to descend from these human and refined natures of ours to those quite wild and savage natures, which we cannot at all imagine and can comprehend only with great effort’ (Vico 1744: 338). ‘It is beyond our power to enter into the vast imagination of those first men’ (Vico 1744: 378).35 In semiotic terms, this means that we as humans, endowed with rational thought as one of our primary semiotics systems, cannot fully comprehend a mind that mostly lacks this system. Vico points out repeatedly that the archaic imaginative reasoning never completely leaves us – in fact it is an essential part of human semiotic abilities. Our mind is semiotically heterogeneous and able to operate with different semiotic systems, therefore still able to grasp the archaic mode of thought to some extent – and translate it

82

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

partially to our terms. On the other hand, the cultural texts we consider products of archaic or mythological reasoning are themselves already somewhat semiotically heterogeneous and therefore accessible to our interpretation. Tartu-Moscow semioticians Lotman and Uspenskij state that a ‘consistently mythological stage’ of a culture is out of our reach and ‘mythological consciousness’ – if it were to exist in isolation from other forms of human sensemaking – ‘in principle cannot be translated into the level of a different description, is in itself closed’ (Lotman and Uspensky 1978: 218–9). To accept the concept of a consistently mythological phase in human cultures or the Vichian archaic mind is to accept a concept of a type of human thought where there is no pure reflection. The sensory and affective experiences are always present in the sensemaking process. The universals involved in such sensemaking are inescapably metaphorical. One experience is grouped with another as a whole (world is a stallion; sky is a god). The signs have a definitive iconic component; they carry with them the nature of the thing represented. The imaginative mode of thought therefore does not operate with distinguished properties of objects or abstract categories that are available for reflection without involving the experience as a whole. Imagination is tied to memory; Vico even suggests that memory is the same as imagination: ‘Imagination, however, is nothing but the springing up again of reminiscences’ (1744: para. 699). When thinking in the imaginative mode, we involve our previous experience, use imagination to draw it up again and integrate the images in the generalizations we are able to make: the imaginative universals. This kind of imaginative reasoning has not been well accepted in the philosophical systems of Vico’s contemporaries. Descartes famously aspired to pure thought; Hobbes was, similarly, mainly interested in how humans arrive from sense experience to rational thought – the imaginative stage was seen rather as an impediment to that (Hobbes [1651] 2008: 14–15). As already mentioned, Locke’s classification of cognitive activities – sensation and reflection – also leaves little room for it. If we were to accept that imaginative processes are in fact an important part of human semiosis, we would probably have to accept that our ability to describe them in rational philosophical terms is limited. Just as is limited our ability to describe the Umwelt of other species. But we can translate, make sense in our own terms and relate.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have explored three accounts, which might serve as illustrations of the three different tendencies of early modern semiotic thought. Port-Royal Logic thus represents that kind of an early modern semiotic thought, where the conception of sign is severely limited and, ultimately, redundant in the framework of epistemology and logic developed by Arnauld and Nicole, authors of the Port-Royal Logic. Unlike the scholastic view, which presents logic as dealing with a species of signs, the Port-Royalians’ view of logic is concerned with mental operations, where one of these operations – conceiving – produces ideas, and sign is only one kind of idea, namely an idea of an object as representing another (in contradistinction to an idea of an object as such). On the other hand, Arnauld and Nicole’s view of sign as a twofold idea (of the signifying thing and of the thing signified) enables them to avoid the scholastic problem one faces when sign is conceived as being grounded in its relation to an object in a concrete ontological state. The problem disappears when sign is no longer conceived in its relation to a (non)existent object, but to the idea of an object, no matter whether existent or not. And the twofold

EARLY MODERN SEMIOTICS

83

idea view of sign foreshadows Saussure’s semiology. If sign plays any substantial role for the Port-Royalians, it is specifically within the context of linguistic sign in its relation to ideas. This, however, ultimately reduces to a set of regulative remarks on the use of words and definitions, where the appeal to sign is rather nominal than real. If, thus, Port-Royal Logic represents a negative account of sign in early modern thought, John Locke might be said to be the one who presents a positive account. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke coined the term ‘semiotics’ (semiotike) for ‘the doctrine of signs’ and made it coextensive with logic (Locke [1690] 1975:: 4.21.4). Unlike the Port-Royalians, Locke recognizes not only words but also ideas to be signs. And since all we can know comes to be known by words or ideas, Locke’s semiotics embraces his whole epistemology. There are indications that Locke’s intention might have been to make semiotics a new metaphysics, establishing fundamental facts concerning knowledge and reality through the consideration of signs, most importantly through a critique of ways in which one kind of signs – words – is employed in relation to other kind of signs – ideas – in cognition. Nevertheless, Locke’s project ended up only as a proposal which the author never developed further. Though the theory presented in the Essay can be partially re-framed in accordance with the semiotic project, the fact that many pieces are missing prevents one from pronouncing Locke’s theory ‘semiotic’. The key missing element is an explanation of what makes ideas and words signs, what are their generic nature and their specific differences. Still, Locke presents at least some important fragments, of which two most worthy of attention are his (though not original, but taken up from late scholastic sources) foreshadowing of the conception of interpretant and the habitual conception of the relation between words and ideas. In this context, Giambattista Vico stands out as a highly original thinker, who is much closer to his postmodern successors than to his early modern contemporaries. Unlike the Port-Royalians, Locke and many other early moderns (both of rationalist and empiricist bent), Vico’s epistemology deliberately ignores the then-prominent framework of ideas. Instead, he puts stress on the productive, historical and cultural dimension of knowledge. What distinguishes Vico from his contemporaries is, most notably, his account of imagination and the imaginative universal. Human knowledge, as seen through this conception, is not something immutable; it is a product of history. Not only that, but it is itself productive, or creative, rather than merely reflective. Vico’s account of knowledge is an account of how human beings model as meaningful the world in which they live, through semiotic processes of imagination – a faculty almost unanimously neglected in other early modern theories of knowledge. From the above-sketched deep account of semiotics, according to which semiotics needs to be a theory of what a sign is as such, early modern scholasticism may seem to be more viable than early modern epistemology in terms of developing the field. This account, at least, is suggested by the amount of literature devoted to the topic as well as the appreciation it received from the semioticians of the twentieth century, after being forgotten by the majority of scholars for more than two centuries prior. The early modern epistemologists, on the other hand, continued to influence subsequent authors such as Hume and Kant. Moreover, although it is true that Peirce later in his career came to know the modern scholastics, it is also true that initially he came to semiotics through the early modern epistemologists – starting with the conception of logic inherited from Kant, who inherited it in turn from the Port-Royalians. And even though Peirce immediately began to make advances over the traditional logic, criticizing it severely, he also picked up a key notion from Locke along the way, namely ‘semiotics’ itself.

84

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

NOTES 1 There are, indeed, notable exceptions such as Marin (1983), Dascal (1983, 1987) and Trabant (2004). 2 As, most notably, John Deely (2001: 483–607) does at length. 3 Although John Locke would definitely be a candidate, John Deely claims that John Poinsot has primacy in this matter, being ‘the author of the first successful attempt theoretically to unify the subject-matter of semiotic inquiry’ (Deely 2001: 449; see also Deely 2001: 433ff.). If this is doubted, then no one other than Charles S. Peirce is to be credited as being the first. In more than one important respect Immanuel Kant can be credited at least with the said epistemic notion of reality developed in terms of representations – all that would be needed, then, is to argue that Kantian representations do not differ from semiotic signs in any important respect, but that matter is indeed controversial. 4 For the works of the Conimbricenses in the English translation see Doyle 2001. For the influence of Conimbricenses on Peirce see Martins Junqueira 2020. 5 John Deely’s edition and translation of the selected parts of Poinsot’s Artis Logicae Prima et Secunda Pars (1631–32) was published as Tractatus de Signis (Deely 1985). 6 While Deely’s interpretation of Poinsot as the first who successfully defined the sign as the subject-matter of semiotic is certainly influential, it has also been challenged. Ashworth (1988) in her review of Deely’s edition of Poinsot points out several historical inaccuracies, claiming that Poinsot was in fact not as original as Deely claims but that his classification of relations comes from Domingo de Soto (Ashworth 1988: 129). Furton 1997 on the other hand, views Poinsot’s ideas rather in their affinity to the theory of object and representation of Immanuel Kant, than that of the other early modern scholastics. The influence of John Poinsot on Deely’s (or Deelyan) semiotic is undeniable as is the value of John Deely’s work on Poinsot. At the same time and for the same reason, it is difficult to attempt reading Poinsot unbiased by Deely’s interpretation of him. 7 With another four editions in the following years (1664, 1668, 1671, 1683) with the fifth (1683) being the standard reprinted hereafter. 8 Port-Royal Logic (and the so-called ‘classical logic’, of which that of Port-Royal is a ‘typical example’ [Bochenski 1961: 254], in general) has been criticized for its psychologism by later logicians and historians of logic. Bochenski, for instance, writes: ‘Poor in content, devoid of all deep problems, permeated with a whole lot of non-logical philosophical ideas, psychologist in the worst sense – that is how we have to sum up the “classical” logic’ (Bochenski 1961: 258). And Peirce considers Port-Royal Logic to be ‘a shameful exhibit of what the two and a half centuries of man’s greatest achievements could consider as a good account of how to think.’ (Peirce 1903, CP 5.84) 9 See, e.g., Peter of Spain’s Summulae Logicales ([c.1245] 1972: 1). 10 E.g., the classification of terms (into, for instance, categorematical and syncategorematical) and an account of their properties, classification of propositions according to their quantity and quality, and their relations (contradiction, contrareity, subcontrareity, subalternation), classification of syllogisms into figures and moods, rules for immediate inference, transposition, and validity conditions, etc. 11 As Bochenski, among other historians of logic, complains (Bochenski 1961: 258). 12 See the respective section on ‘Pre-Modern Semiotics’ in this volume. 13 See also Anderson (1982: 60). 14 See the discussion of Roger Bacon in the previous chapter.

EARLY MODERN SEMIOTICS

85

15 ‘Since the nature of the sign consists in prompting in the senses the idea of the thing symbolized by means of the idea of the symbol, we can conclude that the sign lasts as long as its effect lasts. That is, it lasts as long as this double idea is prompted, even if the thing in its own nature is destroyed’ (Arnauld and Nicole 1683: 1.4.36[54]). 16 Foucault in The Order of Things ascribes, quite erroneously, these three classifications to the foundations of the classical (sic) episteme (Foucault [1966] 2002: 64ff.). 17 A typical example would be Sextus Empiricus: ‘[T]he plain things because they strike us by themselves […] do not need anything else for their disclosure […] quite generally do not allow of apprehension through a sign. But those [things] that are unclear by nature and those that are unclear for the moment do have need of the observation that comes from a sign’ ([before 235] 2005: Adv. Math. 8.149–60). 18 The exception would be Arnauld’s and Nicole’s consideration of the linguistic sign. In order to communicate, we need to use words, which are signs of our ideas Arnauld and Nicole 1683: 1.11.58[83]). And since different people may use the same word to stand for different ideas, this use of words as signs is the great source of confusion in our discourse. As a remedy, the authors propose ‘to create a new language and new words that are connected only to the ideas we want them to represent’ (1683: 1.12.60[86]). 19 See Lagerlund (2007: 24) for a complete list. 20 For example, Pierre of Ailly (ca. 1350–1420) in his Concepts and Insolubles [c.1372] 1980 defines signification thus: ‘Now to “signify” is to represent something, or some things or somehow to a cognitive power […]’ ([c.1372] 1980: §2), where ‘to “signify” is the same as to be a sign of something.’ ([c.1372] 1980: §8) See also Ashworth (1981: 310). 21 See the discussion in Deely (2001: 415ff.). 22 Deely puts stress on the fact that sign was reduced to an instrumental sign in the epistemological framework of ideas. While this is certainly true, the second consequence of the discussion of instrumental and formal signs, seems to be even of greater importance for the early modern paradigm, namely – the recognition of the dependence of all instrumental signs on formal signs, and consequent reinterpretation of formal signs as ideas. Indeed, this reinterpretation is possible especially in the epistemological view of the rationalists, according to which perception is only a confused and obscure way of how ideas are present in the mind, while their clear and distinct presence is only achieved by the intellect. 23 The notable exception is the treatment of language (and thus linguistic signs) with respect to the ‘cause of confusion in our thoughts and discourse, which is that we connect our thoughts to words’ (Arnauld and Nicole 1683: 1.11.58[83]; 1683: 1.11–12.58–63[83–90]; see also above, n14). 24 As argued by John Deely (2001: xxx). 25 Locke did not invent the term, but borrowed it, most probably from a medical dictionary of the time. In the medieval period, the doctrine of signs was not called semiotica but doctrina signorum. The term semiotica and its derivations existed, but belonged more properly to medicine, respectively to its sub-branch, symptomatology (the Greek techne semeiotike). However, Locke did not use ‘semiotics’, which is the most common spelling as of today, but semiotike – and Peirce’s initial formulation of ‘Semiotic, or the general science of signs’ (Peirce 1865: W 1.172) follows Locke in this respect. 26 Secondary qualities, however, though being properties of our representations of objects, Locke says, belong to bodies (Locke [1690] 1975: 1.8.10) in the sense that they are produced by powers in bodies through which our senses are affected.

86

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

27 Locke argues in the Essay (Locke [1690] 1975: 2.32.14) that the relation between our simple ideas and things is established and fixed by God. See also Ott (2004: 23). 28 See Ott (2004: 8ff.) for further discussion. 29 Similar version of this argument can be also found in Port-Royal Logic (1.11, 83), with which Locke was familiar (Bolton 1992: 410; Ott 2004: 9, 13). 30 According to Ott (2004: 22) Locke’s ideas are indicative instrumental signs. If this is affirmed, then Deely’s thesis, according to which early moderns neglected the notion of formal sign (which is other-representing) by assimilating it into their conception of an idea as a self-representing object (e.g. Deely 2001: 520), fails. It is also worth mentioning that Locke came to the positive appreciation of semiotics – making it into the new metaphysics, ultimately – pretty much on the same grounds on which the Port-Royalians neglected the notion of sign reducing it to almost a redundancy. What is the reason behind this? Most probably Locke’s empiricist standpoint, which prevents him to reduce perception to the second-hand, or confused, intellection. 31 Kretzmann (1968: 188). 32 As Ashworth writes, ‘[i]t is legitimate to say that concepts are signified, since it is by means of concepts that things are signified, and the means of signifying must also be signified. Words are used to signify what concept themselves signify’ (Ashworth 1981: 324). In Ott’s words, ‘words immediately signify ideas because it is only in virtue of this connection that they are able to signify things in the world’ (Ott 2004: 9). 33 This thesis of Locke’s became important for Peirce in his initial introduction of ‘Semiotic’ (Peirce 1865: W 1.174). Peirce used the just quoted passage from Locke’s Essay (Locke [1690] 1975: 3.2.4–7) as an ‘authority’ (Peirce 1865: W 1.172) supporting his own ‘thoroughly unpsychological view of logic’ (Peirce 1865: W 1.164). In his description of the habitual functioning of words, Locke, on Peirce’s interpretation, points towards the redundancy of reference to mental states (ideas) in developing a theory of knowledge through signs: ‘Now this readiness of excitation obviously consists in this; namely, that we do not have to reflect upon the word the word as a sign but that it comes to affect the intellect as though it had the quality it connotes’ (Peirce 1865: W 1.172) – that is, as if the object signified by the word’s idea was itself present. 34 ‘E dovevano cominciarla dalla metafisica, siccome quella che va a prendere le sue pruove non già da fuori ma da dentro le modificazioni della propria mente di chi la medita’ (Vico 1744: 261) 35 “dovevammo discendere da queste nostre umane ingentilite nature e quelle affatto fiere ed immani, le qualici è affatto niegato d’immaginare e solamente a gran pena ci è permesse d’intendere.” (Vico 1744: 239). “Ciè naturalmente niegato di poter entrare nella vasta immaginativa di que’ primi uomini.” (Vico 1744: 265).

REFERENCES Anderson, L. (1982), Charles Bonnet and the Order of the Known, Dordrecht: Reidel. Armstrong, R. L. (1965), ‘John Locke’s “Doctrine of Signs”: A New Metaphysics’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 26 (3): 369–82. Arnauld, A. and P. Nicole ([1683] 1996), Logic or the Art of Thinking, trans. J. V. Buroker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Original French edition Clair, P. – Girbal, F., La Logique ou l’art de penser, Paris: Vrin, 1981. References indicate part and chapter, followed by page number in the translation and page number of the original edition in square brackets.]

EARLY MODERN SEMIOTICS

87

Ashworth, E. J. (1981), ‘“Do Words Signify Ideas or Things?” The Scholastic Sources of Locke’s Theory of Language’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 19 (3): 299–326. Ashworth, E. J. (1988), ‘The Historical Origins of John Poinsot’s Treatise on Signs’, Semiotica, 69 (1–2): 129–47. Augustine ([397–426] 1855), De Doctrina Christiana Libri Quattuor, in J. P. Migne (ed.), Patrologiae Cursus Completus, vol. 34, cols. 15–122, Paris: Imprimerie Catholique. Berlin, I., H. Hardy and J. Israel (2016), Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400848522. Bochenski, I. M. (1961), A History of Formal Logic, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Bolton, M. B. (1992), ‘The Epistemological Status of Ideas: Locke Compared to Arnauld’, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 9 (4): 409–24. Danesi, M. (1986), ‘Language and the Origin of the Human Imagination: A Vichian Perspective’, New Vico Studies, 4: 45–56. Danesi, M. (1990), ‘Giambattista Vico and semiotics’, in Sebeok, T. A. (ed.), The Semiotic Web 1990: Recent Developments in Theory and History, 89–110, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Danesi, M. (1993), Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language (Advances in Semiotics), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Danesi, M. (1995), Giambattista Vico and the Cognitive Science Enterprise, New York: Peter Lang. Danesi, M. (2000), ‘A Note on Vico and Lotman: Semiotics as a “Science of the Imagination”’, Sign Systems Studies, 28: 99–114. Dascal, M. (1983), ‘Signs and Cognitive Processes: Notes for a Chapter in the History of Semiotics’, in A. Eschbach and J. Trabant (eds), History of Semiotics, 169–190, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Dascal, M. (1987), Leibniz: Language, Signs and Thought. A Collection of Essays, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Deely, J. N. (1982), Introducing Semiotic: Its History and Doctrine, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Deely, J. N. (1985), Tractatus de Signis: The Semiotic of John Poinsot, Berkeley: University of California Press. Deely, J. N. (2001), Four Ages of Understanding, Toronto: Toronto University Press. Doyle, J. P. (2001), The Conimbricenses: Some Questions on Signs, Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press. Foucault, M. ([1966] 2002), The Order of Things, London: Routledge. Furton, E. J. (1997), ‘The Constitution of the Object in Immanuel Kant and John Poinsot’, The Review of Metaphysics, 51 (1): 55–75. Hobbes, T. ([1651] 2008), Leviathan, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kretzmann, N. (1968), ‘The Main Thesis of Locke’s Semantic Theory’, The Philosophical Review, 77 (2): 175–96. Lagerlund, H. (2007), ‘The Terminological and Conceptual Roots of Representation in the Soul in Late Ancient and Medieval Philosophy’, in H. Lagerlund (ed.), Representation and Objects of Thought in Medieval Philosophy, 11–32, Aldershot: Ashgate. Lilla, M. (1994), G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-modern, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Locke, J. ([1690] 1975), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Oxford: Clarendon Press. [References indicate the book number, chapter number and section. Thus, e.g., 4.21.4 refers to Book 4, Chapter 21, section 4.]

88

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Lotman, J. M. and B. A. Uspensky (1978), ‘Myth – Name – Culture’, Semiotica, 22 (3–4): 211–34. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1978.22.3-4.211. Marin, L. (1983), ‘Un Chapitre dans L’Histoire de la Théorie Sémiotique: La Théologie Eucharistique dans la “Logique de Port Royal” (1683)’, in A. Eschbach and J. Trabant (eds), History of Semiotics, 127–45, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Marshall, D. L. (2011), ‘The Current State of Vico Scholarship’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 72 (1): 141–60. Martins Junqueira, R. (2020), ‘Charles Sanders Peirce and Coimbra’, in M. S. de Carvalho and S. Guidi (eds), Conimbricenses.org Encyclopedia, DOI=‘10.5281/zenodo.3620732’, http:// www.conimbricenses.org/encyclopedia/charles-sanders-peirce-and-coimbra. Mazzotta, G. (1999), The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mill, J. S. (1867), A System of Logic, New York: Harper. Nuessel, F. (1995), ‘Vico and Current Work in Cognitive Linguistics’, in M. Danesi (ed.), Giambattista Vico and Anglo-American Science: Philosophy and Writing, 127–46, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ott, W. R. (2004), Locke’s Philosophy of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peirce, C. S. ([1865] 1982), ‘On the Logic of Science [Harvard Lectures of 1865]’, in Peirce Edition Project (eds), Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, vol. 1, 162– 302, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as W1. Peirce, C. S. ([1866–1913] 1931–58), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols 1–6, C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds), vols 7–8, A. Burks (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cited as CP, followed by volume number and section number. Pern, T. (2019), ‘Interpreting Giambattista Vico for a New Psychological Science: Towards a Semiotic Imaginative Approach’, Culture & Psychology, 25 (4): 470–83. Peter of Spain ([c.1245] 1972), Tractatus Called afterward Summulae Logicales, in L. M. de Rijk (ed.), Assen: Van Gorcum & Comp. Pierre of Ailly ([c.1372] 1980), Concepts and Insolubles, ed. and trans. P. V. Spade, Dordrecht: Reidel. [References give the paragraph number of the cited part of the work.] Pititto, R. (1998), ‘Semiotics as Methodology of Sign and/or New Metaphysics’, Metalogicon, 11 (1): 49–58. Saussure, F. M. de ([1916] 2011), Course in General Linguistics, New York: Columbia University Press. Scognamiglio, A. (2012), Ottavo Contributo Alla Bibliografia Vichiana, 2006–2010, Bologna: Edizioni di Storia E Letteratura. Sebeok, T. A. (2001), ‘Some Reflections on Vico in Semiotics’, in Global Semiotics, 135–44, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sextus Empiricus ([before 235] 2005), Against the Logicians, trans. and ed. R. Bett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Cited as ‘Adv. Math.’ in the text (Against the Logicians being a part of the larger work Adversus Mathematicos) followed by book number and paragraph number.] Tateo, L. (2017), Giambattista Vico and the New Psychological Science, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Tateo, L. (2018), ‘Affective Semiosis and Affective Logic’, New Ideas in Psychology, 48: 1–11. Trabant, J. (2004), Vico’s New Science of Ancient Signs: A Study of Sematology, London: Routledge. Trabant, J. (2019), Giambattista Vico-Poetische Charaktere, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.

EARLY MODERN SEMIOTICS

89

Verene, D. P. (1991), Vico’s Science of Imagination, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Viana, A. (2015), Tempesta de Signes. Giambattista Vico i Charles S. Peirce, Lleida: Pagès Editors. Viana, A. (2017), ‘Vico, Peirce, and the Issue of Complexity in Human Sciences: The naturaartificium Question’. Cognitive Semiotics, 10 (1): 1–18. Vico, G. (1710), De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, Neapoli: Mosca. Vico, G. (1744), Principj di Scienza Nuova di Giambattista Vico d'Intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni, Naples: Stamperia Muziana. Vico, G. ([1744] 1984), The New Science, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

90

CHAPTER FOUR

Pragmatist Semiotics WINFRIED NÖTH

INTRODUCTION Pragmatic semiotics Under the heading of ‘Pragmatist semiotics’, this chapter presents a general overview of the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), also referred to as ‘Peircean semiotics’. The adjective ‘pragmatist’ localizes Peirce’s semiotics within the context of Pragmatism, the influential school of philosophical thought that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century and whose most prominent members in North America, besides Peirce, were William James (1842–1910) and John Dewey (1859–1952) (cf. Rosenthal 1986). The term has its roots in the Greek words prássein, ‘to do’, pragma, ‘the thing regularly done’, and pragmaticos, ‘engaged in some practice’ (cf. Fisch 1986: 291). A philosophical pragmatist is one who studies signs, in particular propositions, in view of the practical effects of their use, utterance and interpretation. The pragmatic maxim. The core idea of pragmatism lies in the ‘pragmatic maxim’ first formulated by Peirce in his two papers ‘The Fixation of Belief’ of 1877 (CP 5.358–87) and ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ of 1878 (CP 5.388–410), which William James later recognized as the ‘the founding documents of pragmatism’ (cf. Fisch 1986: 284–5). Roughly, the maxim states that the meaning of a concept is to be found in the practical consequences of uttering and accepting it. More precisely, ‘To ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception, one should consider what practical consequences might result from the truth of that conception – and the sum of these consequences constitute the entire meaning of the conception’ (Peirce c.1906: CP 5.9). Pragmatic semiotics and linguistic pragmatics. Pragmatism, and in particular Peirce’s semiotic pragmaticism (Eisele 1987), has had some influence on the origins and development of twentieth-century linguistic pragmatics, as is well known (Nöth 2011), although not always fully acknowledged. Under the influence of ordinary language philosophy, linguists, since the 1970s, are known to have extended their scope, hitherto largely restricted to syntax (including morphology) and semantics, to (linguistic) pragmatics, whose purpose it is to investigate verbal signs not only as elements of a system but also with respect to their contexts, the speakers’ intentions and the hearers’ knowledge horizons. However, it would be wrong to equate the scope of Peirce’s pragmaticism in semiotics with the one of pragmatics in linguistics. Instead of a field of research in speech acts, speakers’ intentions and utterances, and hearers’ ways of understanding them, Peirce was concerned with a much broader field of research.

92

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Three branches of semiotics. Inspired by the medieval division of the liberal arts into grammar, logic and rhetoric, Peirce postulated a semiotics that should comprise three branches: first, Speculative Grammar, the study of ‘the general conditions of signs being signs’ (1896: CP 1.444) in the sense of a ‘general theory of the nature and meanings of signs, whether they be icons, indices, or symbols’ (1903: CP 1.191; cf. Bellucci 2018); second, ‘Logic Proper’, dealing with the relation of signs to the objects they represent and the conditions under which signs may be true (1897: CP 2.229); third, ‘Speculative Rhetoric’, ‘the study of the necessary conditions of the transmission of meaning by signs from mind to mind, and from one state of mind to another’ (c.1896: CP 1.444). With the third branch of semiotics, Peirce extended the theory of signs both to a theory of communication (Pietarinen 2003; Bergman 2009; Nöth 2013) and to a theory of argumentation (Houser 2016). Communication. Peirce’s theory of communication is broader in its scope than the ones of standard communication studies. It does not only deal with humans who send messages to receivers but includes also interactions between nonhuman beings. It even considers the inanimate nature as a sender of signs interpreted by living beings: The action of a sign generally takes place between two parties, the utterer and the interpreter. They need not be persons; for a chameleon and many kinds of insects and even plants make their livings by uttering signs, and lying signs at that. Who is the utterer of signs of weather, which are not remarkably veracious, always? However, every sign certainly conveys something of the general nature of thought, if not from a mind, yet from some repository of ideas, or significant forms, and if not to a person, yet to something capable of somehow “catching on.” (c. 1907: MS 318: 17, variant. Microfilm frame no. 0697) Furthermore, communication also takes place in the form of thinking, in the inner dialogue of an individual. For, ‘Thinking always proceeds in the form of a dialogue – a dialogue between different phases of the ego – so that, being dialogical, it is essentially composed of signs, as its matter, in the same sense in which a game of chess has the chessmen for its matter’ (Peirce 1905: CP 4.6). Argumentation and inferencing. Peirce’s theory of argumentation is an offspring of his logic of reasoning. While ‘Reasoning is the process by which we attain a belief which we regard as the result of previous knowledge, […] Argumentation is the expression of a reasoning’ (Peirce 1895: EP 2.11–12). Peirce’s main contribution in this context is his theory of abductive reasoning. In contrast to traditional logical doctrines, which accept only deduction and induction as two main modes of reasoning, Peirce postulates abduction as a third valid mode. Abductive reasoning derives conclusions not from general rules, but from hypotheses. It is ‘the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis’ (Peirce 1903: CP 5.171). It is of great importance in creative thinking since ‘Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis’ and ‘the only logical operation which introduces any new idea; for induction does nothing but determine a value, and deduction merely evolves the necessary consequences of a pure hypothesis. Deduction proves that something must be; Induction shows that something actually is operative; Abduction merely suggests that something may be’ (1903: CP 5.171). Abduction. Although based on guessing, the hypothesis by which we form abductive judgements is not formed by random guesses. Instead, abductive guessing follows an instinct that makes humans postulate valid hypotheses and arrive at correct conclusions

PRAGMATIST SEMIOTICS

93

more frequently than they pursue invalid hypotheses. This characteristic of abductive reasoning has an evolutionary explanation. The hypotheses by which humans arrive at new insights through abductive reasoning are guided by a power of intuition shaped in the course of their evolutionary history. As Houser summarizes, ‘Our powers of abduction, given our attunement to nature through centuries of evolutionary development and selection, endow us with a natural inclination for guessing correctly – for forming true hypotheses, at least when vital concerns are at issue’ (Houser 2010: 92). Syntactics–semantics–pragmatics. The triad of Speculative Grammar, Logic Proper and Speculative Rhetoric introduced above as the three branches of semiotics was clearly the model from which Charles Morris, decades later, derived his subdivision of semiotics into Syntactics, Semantics and Pragmatics. Peirce’s pragmatic semiotics is hence not only a precursor of Linguistic Pragmatics. Like linguistics, it also comprises a branch of Syntax and one of Semantics. Of the three branches, Peirce had a particularly ambitious vision of the one of Speculative Rhetoric, the precursor of Pragmatics. The aim of this field of semiotic study, to study how signs are transmitted ‘from one state of mind to another’, includes not only the study of speech acts and communication in general but also the study of how we think. Not only uttering words, but also thinking has a semiotic dimension. Thinking is dialogical and hence communicative since it ‘always proceeds in the form of a dialogue – a dialogue between different phases of the ego’ (1906: CP 4.6). Furthermore, Peirce also conceived of Speculative Rhetoric as a rhetoric of fine art, a rhetoric of ‘practical persuasion’ and a rhetoric of science (1903: EP 2.329). He had the vision of a rhetoric of science ‘destined to grow into a colossal doctrine which may be expected to lead to most important philosophical conclusions’ (Peirce 1896: CP 3.454). Semiotics, a normative science. While the scope of pragmatic semiotics is in its triadic division similar to the one of general linguistics, it is nevertheless broader in other respects. First, of course, semiotics is not only the study of verbal, but also of all kinds of non-verbal signs, human or non-human. For Peirce, the study of signs deals with human and non-human, verbal and non-verbal, visual, auditory, gustatory and tactile signs as well as with ‘thought signs’, such as thoughts in general or mental images in particular. Second, Peirce’s semiotics differs from the standard approaches to the study of languages in Modern Linguistics insofar as linguists traditionally conceive their research as a descriptive one. Peirce, by contrast, classifies his semiotics as a ‘normative science’ (see Potter 1997; de Waal and Skowroński, eds. 2012), whose task should be to study ‘what must be the character of all signs’ and ‘what would be true of signs in all cases’ (Peirce 1897: CP 2.227). The normative character of semiotics is evident in logic proper, which Peirce conceived of as another name for semiotics (1897: CP 2.227), since to decide whether a statement or conclusion is true or false is a normative decision.

HISTORICAL CONTEXTS Behaviourism, structuralism and the Medievals Peirce, pragmatism and Charles Morris. Although the pragmatist philosophers of his time gave due tribute to Peirce as the founding father of pragmatism, Peirce later distanced himself from the ways in which William James and other pragmatist philosophers of his time taught and interpreted pragmatism (cf. Rosenthal 1986; Burke 2013). From 1905 on, he began to use the term pragmaticism to characterize his own version of pragmatism in contrast to the ones of most of his contemporaries (e.g. in Peirce 1906). The distance

94

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

between Peirce’s approach and later trends of American pragmatism reached its peak in the first half of the twentieth century, when Charles W. Morris (1901–79), in Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938) and Signs Language and Behavior (1946), devised a semiotics in the guise of a new pragmatism that had mutated into social behaviourism. In Morris’s behaviouristic interpretation, a sign was no longer conceived of as something ‘capable of determining in a mind a cognition of an object’, as Peirce had defined it in 1903 (MS 792: 2). In the jargon of behaviourism, a sign had become ‘something that directs behavior with respect to something that is not at the moment a stimulus’ (Morris 1946: 354). Semiotics and semiology. In the course of the second half of the twentieth century, Peirce’s approach to the study of signs became a leading paradigm of modern semiotics besides another major paradigm rooted in the tradition of the structuralists Ferdinand de Saussure (1859–1913) and his follower Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965) (cf. Nöth 1990). The two schools of modern semiotics differ in their premises to the degree that Herman Parret (1984: 220) confronted them as ‘two semiotics’ that ‘seem to have developed separately and without interpenetration’. The author concluded, ‘Anglo-Saxon semioticians consider the Peircean framework to provide the adequate conceptual apparatus for their empirical research, whereas so-called Continental semioticians refer to the sign theory in Saussure and in its interpretation by Hjelmslev (for instance, the Ecole sémiotique of Paris: A.J. Greimas and followers). Both orientations apparently ignore each other and manifest reciprocal distrust’ (Parret 1984: 220). While this assessment may have been true in the 1980s, half a century later, the two mainstream trends of semiotics, while still not compatible in their fundamental premises, have nevertheless had fruitful dialogues, in particular in the semiotic writings of Umberto Eco (cf. Nöth 2017). Peirce and de Saussure. Although Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) were contemporaries, they had no knowledge of each other’s writings, particularly since Saussure’s seminal Course was only published posthumously. The historical roots and philosophical premises of the two founding fathers of modern semiotics differ greatly, except for the project to overcome the prevailing logocentric tendencies in their respective fields by means of a truly general theory of signs, which they had in common. Saussure’s model of the sign is the one of verbal signs, for example, the word tree. Its premises lie in the tradition of linguistics as well as in the philosophy of French Rationalism, in particular in the Grammar and Logic of Port-Royal, a rationalist philosophy of mental representation whose influence prevailed until Saussure’s times in France. Quite in the rationalist tradition of Arnauld and Nicole’s Logic of 1662, which had defined a sign as comprising ‘two ideas – one of the thing that represents, the other of the thing represented’ (chap. I.4), Saussure postulated a dyadic model. The sign is a ‘two-sided psychological entity consisting of a concept and a [mental] sound-image’ (Saussure [1916] 1967: 113). For Saussure, the sign has nothing to do with the thing (‘chose’) (alias object or referent) to which a name is associated ([1916] 1967: 98) since its value is exclusively determined by the semiotic system of which the sign is a constitutive element. In contrast to Saussure, Peirce postulates a triadic model of the sign. A sign must be understood as ‘a triple connection’, whose constituents are the ‘sign, [the] thing signified, [and the] cognition produced in the mind’ (1885: CP 1.372) or, in in his more technical terminology, between the sign, its object and its interpretant (see below). The decisive difference between the dyadic and the triadic models lies in the recognition, resp. rejection, of the object of the sign as a real factor of influence in a sign process (called semiosis, by Peirce). Realism and nominalism. Deep in the history of semiotics, this difference between Peirce’s and de Saussure’s sign models has its roots in a dispute concerning the nature

PRAGMATIST SEMIOTICS

95

of cognition that divided the Nominalists from the Realists in medieval philosophical Scholasticism. An eminently semiotic question was at stake. What is the nature of names (mainly nouns and adjectives) in relation to the objects they denote? Do general names and general notions, such as tree or green, correspond to anything existing in a reality independent of human cognition, or are they mere creations of human minds, who conceive of them in the way they show in their verbal signs? Does the greenness of a green leaf have a real counterpart outside of the minds that interpret it as a quality of a leaf, or is the reality of greenness restricted to its occurrence in individual green objects as well as in the minds (and by extension the individual languages) that perceive and interpret it as green? Saussure’s nominalism. While the Realists, among them Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) and Duns Scotus (c.1266–1308), argued that general qualities (the so-called universals) really exist or correspond to a reality independent of how human cognition interprets it, the Nominalists, most prominently among them William Ockham (c.1287–1347), denied an extramental reality of universals. They argued that universals are only ‘thought objects’ to which nothing extramental corresponds. The difference between Saussure’s dyadic and Peirce’s triadic models of the sign is more than only reminiscent of the two rivalling positions concerning the nature of cognition in medieval Scholasticism. The two main models of the sign within modern semiotics actually epitomize this difference. Saussure’s position is clearly nominalist in its foundation, while Peirce’s model is definitely realist. Saussure’s nominalism is apparent in his banishment of the object of the sign as a factor of influence in semiosis. There are no real objects associated with the sign since verbal signs are mere names whose value is exclusively determined by other signs of the same sign system, not by any extra semiotic reality. Peirce’s realism. Peirce, by contrast, took sides with the realists (cf. Skagestad 1981; Oleksy 2015; Lane 2018). ‘There are Real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those Reals affect our senses according to regular laws’ (Peirce 1877: CP 5.384). In 1903, he postulates that the real ‘is as it is, independently of how we may think it to be’ (Peirce 1903: CP 7.659). The real is not only ‘as it is’; it is an active agent in the process of semiosis (cf. Nöth 2009) since it acts on our senses in a way to which we cannot resist. As such, the real ‘is active; we acknowledge it, in calling it the actual’ (Peirce n.d.: CP 1.325). However, the real must not be confounded with the existent, a thing or being that really exists. The reality of the phenomena consists in the real influences on those who experience them, and this reality is one of general laws (Thirdnesses) and existents (Secondnesses). Even mere possibilities (Firstnesses) are real insofar as they really influence the life and future actions for whom they apply.

METHODOLOGY Phenomenology and the sign Methodology. Peirce described the methodological roots of pragmatist semiotics in his paper ‘The Fixation of Belief’ as a method of ‘fixing belief’, that is, a method of knowledge acquisition or simply learning, since knowledge is the belief that what we know is true (1877: CP 5.358–87). Pragmatism is also a method of reflection insofar as it ‘is guided by constantly holding in view its purpose and the purpose of the ideas it analyses, whether these ends be of the nature and uses of action or of thought’ (Peirce 1907: CP 5.13, n. 1). When Peirce says that ideas, which are a type of sign, have purposes, he does not

96

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

refer himself to the ideas of those who express them in words or images. Signs, and in particular symbols, have purposes of their own (Nöth 2014) because the ‘purpose of a sign is that it shall be interpreted in another sign’ (Peirce 1904: CP 8.191). Signs, their effects and their purposes. When he describes the effects of signs, Peirce thinks it important to call these effects ‘external’ and even ‘physical’ (1904: CP 8.191) instead of calling them ‘mental’. A sign produces physical effects insofar as it ultimately results in action. Even when this action is not physical action proper, i.e. ‘open to outward inspection’, but mental action, the effects are open to inspection insofar as mental action shows in outward signs. The effects of signs are hence outwardly ‘knowable by others […] through outward symptoms or indirect effects’ (Peirce 1913: EP 2.464). To understand the somewhat enigmatic affirmation that signs have purposes, it is necessary to consider that Peirce does not restrict the notion of sign to mere words. Words are symbols, but propositions and arguments are, too, and even a whole book is a symbol (Peirce 1903: CP 4.447). In the latter case, it is more evident that a symbol may pursue a purpose of its own, for its effects may last beyond its author’s lifetime. Symbols are signs, but what is a sign, and what other kinds of signs are there? Sign as a First. Above, we introduced the triad of sign, object and interpretant. The sign in the sense of the ‘thing signified’ is the first element of this triad. As such, it must have certain ‘material qualities’. For example, ‘a printed word is black, has a certain number of letters and those letters have certain shapes’ (1873: W3.66–8). Such qualities are necessary because they make the sign ‘distinguishable from other signs’, but a sign must not necessarily have the peculiar qualities it happens to have; other qualities may serve the same purpose of making it distinguishable. A word may be written in black or red. A spoken word ‘must have a peculiar sound different from the sound of another word, but it makes no difference what the sound is, so long as it is something distinguishable’ (Peirce 1873: CP 7.355). Sign as token and type. The material quality constitutes the sign only in one sense, in which Peirce calls the sign a token. In another sense, a sign, in particular a symbol, is a type. As such, it has no materiality, but is only a possible form. Peirce illustrates this difference with the example of the word the in English: There will ordinarily be about twenty the’s on a page, and of course they count as twenty words. In another sense of the word “word,” however, there is but one word “the” in the English language; and it is impossible that this word should lie visibly on a page or be heard in any voice, for the reason that it is not a Single thing or Single event. It does not exist; it only determines things that do exist. Such a definitely significant Form, I propose to term a Type. (1905: CP 4.537) To exemplify the difference between the sign in its materiality (a token) and as a possible form (a type) otherwise: when erased on the teacher’s blackboard, the word the will disappear as a token, but as a type, a possible form to be used again, the word continues to exist. The object as a Second. The object of the sign, as introduced above as the second correlate of a sign, is that which a sign denotes or represents. It may be something material or something merely imaginable. A sign represents its object only incompletely, and it cannot represent an object of which the interpreter has no collateral experience, i.e. one that the interpreter does not already know independently of the sign. The necessity

PRAGMATIST SEMIOTICS

97

of the interpreter’s collateral acquaintance with the object of the sign can be illustrated with the example of a tropical fruit never tasted, say the sugar-apple, the fruit of the Annona squamosa, largely unknown in the northern hemisphere. Its description is a sign of it, but as long as its interpreters have not really experienced its taste, the sign cannot convey information on the taste of its object, which is essential for knowing what the sign represents. This is what Peirce means when he writes, ‘The Sign can only represent the Object and tell about it. It cannot furnish acquaintance with or recognition of that Object; for that is what is meant in this volume by the Object of a Sign; namely, that with which it presupposes an acquaintance in order to convey some further information concerning it’ (1903: CP 2.231). Object and reality. The object of the sign, which Peirce also calls the real or dynamical object, is not necessarily an existent object. It may be idea, a thought, an image, another sign or a mere fiction. Furthermore, the sign does not ‘refer’ to its object; it represents it. An example of a sign whose object is fictitious is the picture of a phoenix. This sign has an object, says Peirce in 1910, ‘for although no phoenix really exists, real descriptions of the phoenix are well known’ (1903: CP 2.261), and since the object of the sign is that which is known about it, a sign of a phoenix does have a dynamical object. The interpretant as a Third. The third correlate of a sign, its interpretant, must not be confounded with the interpreter of the sign. Instead, the interpretant is the ‘significate effect a sign produces’ (Peirce 1907: CP 5.475). This effect may be a mere feeling, as when the performance of a piece of music evokes certain feelings, an action in response to a command, or it may be an idea to which the sign gives rise. These three examples also exemplify three types of interpretant, which Peirce distinguishes as the emotional, the energetic and the logical interpretant (1907: CP 5.475–6). Phenomenology. The sequence of the three correlates of the sign in their order from the first to the third reflects an order derived from a branch of Peirce’s philosophical system that is not semiotics itself, but phenomenology. As Peirce conceives it, phenomenology is the first branch of philosophy, concerned with the nature of the multiplicity of phenomena that present themselves to the human mind. The second is formed by the three normative sciences – esthetics, ethics and logic (or semeiotic) – while the third is metaphysics, the study of the real and of reality. It is in the framework of phenomenology that Peirce formulates his three categories, Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, which underlie all his classifications of signs as well as his definitions of the sign itself. Firstness is the category of a phenomenon in itself, considered independently of anything else. It is ‘the mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively and without reference to anything else’ (Peirce 1904: CP 8.328). Without any determination by, or relation to, anything else, a phenomenon of Firstness is a mere possibility, not something that actually exists because whatever exists has a real relation to other things that exist at the same time and in the same space. Qualities as such (for example, redness, bitterness, hardness, the sound of a trumpet) are phenomena of Firstness as long as they are merely imagined or thought of without actually being experienced, in which case they become facts. Firstness is the category of the unreflected, of freedom, spontaneity and originality. The original belongs to Firstness since it is simply new and as such still unrelated to anything known before. ‘Imagine me to make and in a slumberous condition to have a vague […] sense of redness, or of salt taste, or of an ache, or of grief or joy, or of a prolonged musical note. That would be, as nearly as possible, a purely monadic state of feeling’ (Peirce 1894: CP 1.303). Secondness is the characteristic of a phenomenon in relation to a second. Dualisms and dyads, actions followed by reactions, or efforts that meet resistance are typical phenomena

98

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

of Secondness, but all facts and experiences of everyday life exemplify phenomena of Secondness insofar as they confront the one who experiences them with the reality that they experience. This is why Secondness ‘meets us in such facts as another, relation, compulsion, effect, dependence, independence, negation, occurrence, reality, result’ (Peirce 1890: CP 1.358). Thirdness is the category of generality, continuity or mediation between two other elements, a First and a Second. When mediation between a First and a Second occurs, the mediator acts as a Third. The general exemplifies Thirdness because it implies continuity. Continuity means Thirdness because it mediates between a beginning and an end or also between something that precedes and something that follows. Thirdness is the category of communication, the message being a Third between a sender (the First) and a receiver (the Second). Thirdness is the category of laws, rules, habit, synthesis and of signs. A sign is a triadic relation between a First (the sign), a Second (its object) and a Third (its interpretant).

Elements of Peirce’s system of signs Three trichotomies. No survey of Peirce’s semiotics is complete that does not present the essentials of Peirce’s classification of signs, which pertain to the branch of semiotics defined as Speculative Grammar, the ‘general theory of the nature and meanings of signs, whether they be icons, indices, or symbols’ (1903: CP 1.191). The distinction between the three is only one of several subdivisions of Peirce’s system of classification (Jappy 2017; Borges 2019), but Peirce calls it ‘most fundamental’ (1893: CP 2.275), and it has been widely adopted in Applied Semiotics. The criterion of distinction between the three is the relationship between the sign and its real or dynamic object, the ‘thing signified’. Icon. In many definitions, the icon is defined in terms of the similarity of the sign with the object it represents. A picture of an apple that represents its colour and shape as faithfully as possible is an icon. It ‘resembles’ its object (Peirce 1885: CP 3.362). Other definitions state that the icon ‘partakes in the characters of the object’ (Peirce 1905: CP 4.531) and that ‘its qualities resemble those of that object, and excite analogous sensations in the mind for which it is a likeness’ (Peirce 1893: CP 2.299). Since it is thus ‘a Sign whose significant virtue is due simply to its Quality’ (Peirce 1903: CP 2.292), a sign ‘by virtue of its own internal nature’ (Peirce 1904: CP 8.335), the icon is a phenomenon of the category of Firstness. However, being a phenomenon of Firstness is in a way in conflict with the nature of representation since a sign that represents something is in a dyadic relation to it. Peirce resolves this contradiction by distinguishing between the pure icon and hypoicons. Pure icons do not exist in reality since icons can only be approximatively pure. Instead, a sign of material existence that resembles its object is a hypoicon, that is, a hybrid between pure Firstness and real Secondness. Image, diagram, metaphor are three subtypes of iconicity in whose characterization Peirce’s three categories appear again as criteria of distinction. An image, in its technical Peircean sense, is a sign only because of the qualities it has by itself. The idea of representing something else, an object, is not predominant. Some paintings come close to being an image in this sense. When we look at Botticelli’s painting Birth of Venus, we do not really believe that it represents something real, except itself. In a diagram, such as an architect’s floor plan or the map of an urban subway system, the dyadic correspondence is predominant. The plan must correspond to the local facts, although only in a schematic way. Metaphors, by contrast, are based on similarities that require the intervention of a

PRAGMATIST SEMIOTICS

99

third sign, an idea. To understand that a fox (as a First) represents ‘cleverness’ (a Second), the mediation of a Third is necessary, in this case, the knowledge of the cultural convention that this animal is associated with cleverness. Index. A sign is an index when it has some physical or existential connection with its object. A symptom of a disease is an index of its causes. Natural signs are indices of what they indicate. Heavy clouds indicate rain, and a flash of lightning is an index of the ensuing thunder. Peirce summarizes the multifarious ways in which signs may take the shape of an index as follows: Indices may be distinguished from other signs, or representations, by three characteristic marks: first, that they have no significant resemblance to their objects; second, that they refer to individuals, single units, single collections of units, or single continua; third, that they direct the attention to their objects by blind compulsion. But it would be difficult if not impossible, to instance an absolutely pure index, or to find any sign absolutely devoid of the indexical quality. Psychologically, the action of indices depends upon association by contiguity, and not upon association by resemblance or upon intellectual operations. (1901: CP 2.306) Symbol. A symbol is a genuinely triadic sign, ‘a sign [1] which refers to the Object [2] that it denotes by virtue of a law [3], usually an association of general ideas’ (Peirce 1903: CP 2.249; numbers added to mark the triad). All words are symbols with the exception of deictic expressions, which are indices, and onomatopoeic words, which are icons. Symbols represent their objects due to a habit or convention, in the case of verbal symbols, the rules of the language in which they are used. Peirce’s characterization of the symbol comes close to Saussure’s definition of the verbal sign as arbitrary in relation to the object it represents. An ox might be called otherwise, for example, bœf, as in French. There is no reason not to call it otherwise. This characterizes the word as a symbol. It is ‘a sign merely or mainly by the fact that it is used and understood as such, whether the habit is natural or conventional, and without regard to the motives which originally governed its selection’ (Peirce 1901: CP 2.307). Three trichotomies. The threefold classification of the sign into icon, index and symbol is one of three trichotomies by which Peirce subdivides the sign into nine subclasses. Because of its association with the second correlate of the sign, the object, it is the second of the three. Of the other two trichotomies, one is associated with the sign itself, the other with its interpretant. The former is the first; the latter is the third trichotomy. Qualisign, sinsign, legisign are the three classes forming the first trichotomy, which Peirce also calls the one of its ground (1897: CP 2.229; Houser 2010: 92). The criterion of its triadic subdivision is the sign in itself, wherefore these distinctions pertain to the sign in its Firstness. The order of the three members is obtained from reapplying the three categories within this trichotomy. The first is the qualisign, which is ‘quality in so far as it is a sign’ (Peirce 1903: EP 2.291), such as the quality of greenness or the shape of a form, such as a circle or a globe. A qualisign is always an icon, which makes the qualisign an iconic qualisign. However, the idea of a pure qualisign is a mere abstraction, just as the notion of a pure quality is an abstraction. A qualisign has no embodiment because an embodied sign is a singular material object, which makes it a sinsign. Tokens of symbols are sinsigns, too, but a better example of a sinsign is the fingerprint on a glass by which Sherlock Holmes identifies the person who used it. In this example, the causal

100

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

relation of the sign to its object makes the sinsign an indexical one. The third member of the first trichotomy is the legisign or type, as defined above in contrast to a token. ‘Every conventional sign is a legisign. It is not a single object, but a general type which, it has been agreed, shall be significant’ (Peirce 1903: CP 2.246). All symbols are legisigns, but there are also indexical and iconic legisigns. The traffic sign ‘pedestrians only’ that depicts a walking person is an iconic legisign. A car driver who honks her horn to warn a pedestrian makes use of an indexical legisign. Rheme, dicent, argument. The third trichotomy classifies signs with respect to their interpretant. The sign is a rheme when it is of the nature of a word, especially an adjective, noun, verb or a proper name. It is a dicent or a dicisign when it is of the nature of a proposition. It is an argument when it consists of propositions that are causally connected. Peirce explains that his third trichotomy ‘corresponds to the old division, Term, Proposition, and Argument [of logic], modified so as to be applicable to signs generally’ (Peirce 1908: CP 8.337). The three signs differ with respect to their capacity to convey information or to convey a truth. A rheme, such as the mere word ‘cat’, affirms nothing and hence conveys no information. ‘The cat is on the mat’, by contrast, is informative. It may be true or false. A standard example of an argument is a syllogism, such as ‘All cats are mammals. Mammals die. [Hence,] cats die’, but Peirce had a much broader conception of the nature of the argument, for which see below. Ten classes of signs. To determine the class of a given sign more in detail, it is now necessary to examine it with respect to the nature of its ground, its object and its interpretant. The possibility of combining the 3 × 9 subclasses are 27, but not all of them result in logically possible signs. For example, an icon cannot be an argument, and a qualisign can only be an icon, not an index or a symbol. Altogether seventeen possibilities of combination have to be excluded, so that Peirce’s system for the classification of signs results in ten main classes of sign. 1. Qualisigns, which are necessarily icons with respect to their object and rhemes with respect to their interpretant, form a rather abstract or even vague class since no concrete example of a qualisign can be given. The qualisign ‘has no identity’, wrote Peirce in a letter to Lady Welby (Peirce 1904: CP 8.334). Embodied in a material sign, a qualisign is already a sinsign. Among Peirce’s few examples of qualisigns are ‘a feeling of “red”’ (1903: CP 2.254) or one that is ‘like a vision, – or the sentiment excited by a piece of music considered as representing what the composer intended’ (1904: CP 8.335). However, qualisigns are more common if we consider that a sign of this class may be ‘embodied’ or included in a sinsign. For example, the character of blackness of the letters in which this chapter is printed is a qualisign embodied in the sinsigns or tokens of its words (cf. Peirce 1903: CP 2.255). Of course, being a qualisign in this sense is a somewhat trivial characteristic of this sign, but it may be less trivial when we consider that the same text, or parts of it, could also be printed in red. 2. Iconic (rhematic) sinsigns. This is a sign of a singular nature, similar to its object, for example the individual copy of a map or a drawing that represents an unidentifiable person. Actually most works of art in a museum are iconic sinsigns of which the warning not to touch them always reminds us. 3. Rhematic indexical sinsign. A sign of this class ‘is any object of direct experience so far as it directs attention to an Object by which its presence is caused’, e.g. ‘a spontaneous cry’ (Peirce 1903: CP 2.256), or a ‘blinding flash of lightning [that]

PRAGMATIST SEMIOTICS

101

forces my attention and directs it to a certain moment of time with an emphatic “Now!”’ (Peirce 1885: CP 8.41). Insofar as it is a rheme, it remains vague and cannot assert anything as long as its real cause remains indistinct. Hence, it is an ‘index, which in point of fact alone can designate the subject of a proposition, [and] designates it without implying any characters at all’ (1885: CP 8.41). 4. Dicent indexical sinsign. In contrast to the third class, a sign of the fourth class asserts a fact. Examples: a rap on the door that informs us that someone want to enter, a weather cock as long as it actually shows the direction of the wind or the fingerprint on the glass that identifies the person who drank from it. 5. Iconic (rhematic) legisigns, e.g. the above-mentioned pedestrians-only sign with the silhouette of a person in white against the background in blue. A map of the United States is a sign of this class and so is the onomatopoeic word ‘cock-a-doodledoo’, which is a legisign determined by the rules of English, whereas the German language determines that the rooster’s cry must be referred to as ‘kikeriki’. 6. Rhematic indexical legisign. Example: proper names, insofar as they legally identify an individual or the demonstrative ‘this’ in the exclamation ‘This is great!’ The demonstrative only indicates the subject to which the predicate ‘is great’ is attributed. Being rhemes, such indices cannot convey information by themselves. 7. Dicent indexical legisign. Peirce defines a sign of this class as ‘any general type or law […], which requires each instance of it to be really affected by its Object in such a manner as to furnish definite information concerning that Object’ (1903: CP 2.259). Examples are street cries of the type ‘Chestnuts all hot!’ or ‘Fine ripe strawberries!’ which are elliptical expressions for the more informative assertion, ‘Here I am selling hot chestnuts!’ etc. 8. Rhematic symbols. A Sign of this class is ‘connected with its Object by an association of general ideas. […] It either is, or is very like, what the logicians call a General Term’ (Peirce 1903: CP 2.261). Common nouns, such as ‘cat’, ‘dog’ or ‘camel’, are rhematic symbols, but so is the word ‘phoenix’. ‘For although no phoenix really exists, real descriptions of the phoenix are well known to the speaker and his auditor; and thus the word is really affected by the Object denoted’ (Peirce 1903: CP 2.261). 9. Dicent symbols. The prototype of a dicent symbol is an ‘ordinary proposition’ (Peirce 1903: CP 2.262). It is ‘a sign capable of being asserted’ (Peirce 1908: CP 8.337), that is, a sign that may be true or false. Peirce also defines it as ‘a Sign which is equivalent to a grammatical sentence, whether it be Interrogative, Imperative, or Assertory’ (1905: CP 4.538). There are particular and universal dicent symbols. ‘A Particular Dicent Symbol is represented by its Interpretant to indicate fact of existence; as, “Some swan is black,” i.e., there exists a black swan. A Universal Dicent Symbol is represented by its Interpretant to indicate a real law; as “No swan is black,” i.e., no amount of research will ever discover a black individual among swans’ (Peirce 1903: CP 2.271). Dicent symbols, or symbolic dicents, can also be found in formal languages and in mathematics. Mathematical formula such as ‘8 –5=3’ or ‘x+y=z’ are among them (Merrell 1995: 135). The question whether a dicent symbol must be a verbal symbol or a symbol of some formal language or whether there are propositionlike symbols, signs that convey general information, of a nonverbal kind, is one of the topics of Stjernfelt’s study of Natural Propositions

102

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

(Stjernfelt 2014: 94–5). Peirce suggests that this may be so, when he describes the evidence found by a palaeontologist in the study of a fossil fish as an argument contained in the very data, even before the information it contains is discovered by the scientist. If the evidence found in the course of this research will one day furnish that paleontologist the keystone of an argumentative arch upon which he will securely erect a solid proof of a conclusion of great importance, then, in my view, in the true logical sense, that thought has already all the reality it ever will have […]. For the fish is there, and the actual composition of the stone already in fact determines what the chemist and the paleontologists will one day read in them: and they will not read into them anything that is not there already recorded, although nobody has yet been in condition to translate it. It is, therefore, true, in the logician’s sense of the words, although not in that of the psychologists, that the thought is already expressed there. (Peirce 1911: EP 2.455) 10. Arguments are signs because of a law or general rule that determines their interpretation. The law that does so ‘is the law that the passage from all such premises to such conclusions tends to the truth. Manifestly, then, its object must be general; that is, the Argument must be a Symbol. As a Symbol it must, further, be a Legisign’ (Peirce 1903: CP 2.263). Among the arguments, as Peirce defined them, are not only figures of reasoning from premises to conclusions (see below). In terms of his Speculative Rhetoric, Peirce defines an argument as ‘any process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definite belief’ (1908: CP 6.456).

State-of-the-art in Peirce studies Although his pragmatism found some contemporary acknowledgement in his own country and worldwide (see Fisch 1986: 283–320), Peirce’s outstanding contributions to the history of philosophy in general and to semiotics in particular did not receive the academic recognition they deserved during his lifetime, not least because of biographical reasons (Brent 1993). The fate of Peirce’s semiotics in the twentieth century has been well summarized by Nathan Houser: At the opening of the 20th century, Josiah Royce at Harvard, and a few philosophers in Europe, gave some attention to Peirce’s theory of signs, but it was in the 1930’s and 40’s that the Unity of Science philosophers, largely at the urging of Charles Morris, recognized the importance of the systematic study of signs and of sign relations and, through Morris’s influence on Carnap, incorporated a limited form of Peirce’s tripartite science into philosophy with their famous trilogy: syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. But semiotics, as a complete science, soon became marginalized and largely abandoned by philosophy and it survived by finding refuge in linguistics and in the interdisciplinary research program founded by Morris’s student, Thomas A. Sebeok. During the last generation, with the weakening of the hegemony of analytic philosophy, semiotics has shown evidence of returning to philosophy and other established disciplines; this is especially true in Europe and South America. (Houser 2010: 89)

PRAGMATIST SEMIOTICS

103

Peirce’s writings Far beyond his death in 1914, Peirce’s writings remained dispersed in published and unpublished papers that became accessible more easily only after the eight-volume edition (in four) of his Collected Papers (CP) was published between 1931 and 1958 and the microfilm edition of his manuscripts, catalogued by Richard Robin (1967), became available in 1979. Only during the second half of the twentieth century did the outstanding significance of Peirce’s contribution to philosophy and to semiotics in particular find more general acknowledgement. The systematic chronological edition of his writings (W) began in 1982, but it has reached only its seventh volume (of more than twenty) by 2020. The most important selection of his papers is the one edited in two volumes under the title Essential Peirce (EP 1 and EP 2). Introductions to Peirce’s writings in semiotics began to become available during the last decades of the twentieth century. Of those published as books in English, the ones by Savan (1976), Johansen (1993), Merrell (1995) and Liszka (1996) deserve special mention. Excellent English-language overviews of Peirce’s semiotics in the form of articles or book chapters are Ransdell (1977, 1986), Fisch (1986: 321–62), Eisele (1987), Savan (1994) and Houser (1998, 2010). A comprehensive compendium to Peirce’s semiotics in its philosophical context is Short (2007). Colapietro and Olshewsky (eds) (1996), Thellefsen and Sørensen (eds) (2014), as well as the special issue on Peirce’s Extended Theory and Classification of Signs of the journal Semiotica (228, 2019) offer useful anthologies with studies of many aspects of Peirce’s semiotics. For the state of the art in contemporary Peirce studies, see also Misak (ed.) (2004) and Jappy (ed.) (2019). Several studies have brought into focus the utility of applying Peirce’s semiotics in diverse individual sciences. The fields of research include Linguistics (Nöth, 2002, 2011; Rellstab 2008; Pelkey 2019), Visual Communication (Jappy 2013; cf. Nöth and Jungk 2015), the Philosophy of Education (Stables et al. 2018) and other research field in the Arts, Social, Natural, and Technical Sciences, as in the volumes of the Bloomsbury Companion to Semiotics. An invaluable tool of research in Peircean semiotics is the Helsinki Digital Companion to C. S. Peirce entitled Commens (http://www.commens.org/), created and maintained by Mats Bergman, Sami Paavola and João Queiroz.

CONCLUSION Recapitulation and prospects A glance at the models that have been proposed to represent Peirce’s triadic model sign–object–interpretant (S–O–I) diagrammatically may serve as a point of departure for a recapitulation. Peirce has never drawn such a diagram himself. Since Ogden and Richards (1923) first introduced some of Peirce’s basic concepts to a larger public (cf. Fisch 1986: 344–5), Peirce’s sign has been recurrently modelled in the form of an equilateral triangle, △, whose vertices serve to represent the Peircean triad with S at its top, O at its the left and I at its right vertex. However, as Merrell (1995: 41) has cogently argued, this model is misleading ‘since it is not genuinely triadic, but consists of a set of three binary relations’, S–O, S–I and O–I. Merrell’s proposal to amend the deficiency of this diagram was a diagram in the form of a lambda-shaped equiangular fork graph ‘⅄’ (1995: 42), with S at the top, O to the left and I to the right. This diagram does away with the three misleading dyads and is indeed a better model of a triad.

104

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

The lambda-shaped graph ⅄ is also one for which Peirce had expressed some sympathy, when he wrote, ‘So prolific is the triad in forms that one may easily conceive that all the variety and multiplicity of the universe springs from it. […] All that springs from the ⅄ – an emblem of fertility in comparison to which the holy phallus of religion’s youth is a poor stick indeed’ (Peirce 1902: CP 4.310). Nevertheless, the fork graph is still not an entirely satisfactory model since the radial symmetry of this diagram hides several differences between its constituents. A first asymmetry concerns the three constituents of the triad. In its Firstness, the sign forms a monad as long as the focus is on itself, on its ‘suchness’, which occurs when the first trichotomy is set up. In its Secondness, the sign forms a dyad when the focus is on the relationship to its object, which is the focus that creates the second trichotomy. Only the interpretant is genuinely triadic in its role of the mediator between the sign and its object. A second asymmetry concealed by the symmetry of the fork diagram is the one between the object of the sign in its role of determining the sign to represent it, whereas the sign’s role is to represent its object. Parmentier has recognized this asymmetry clearly, which he described as follows: ‘The sign relation is constituted by the interlocking of a vector of representation pointing from the sign and interpretant toward the object and a vector of determination pointing from the object toward both sign and interpretant. […] Determination and representation are the opposing vectors in any sign relation’ (Parmentier 1985: 27). These may be reasons why Peirce himself never adopted any diagrammatic model of his sign. A two-dimensional diagrammatic model might have represented his conception of the sign in the form of a genuine triad but concealed the semiotic asymmetries underlying its constitution. Let us conclude with a remark on the growth of Peirce’s semiotics in the decades ahead. Semiotics has often been conceived of as an approach to Cultural Studies. Peirce’s pragmatic semiotics, by contrast, is, truly, a study of signs in culture and nature. As Colapietro (1989: 21) once put it, ‘To understand the nature of signs ultimately ought to lead us to see the signs of nature.’ The future of semiotics lies in the bridges it offers to cross the frontiers still separating the domains of culture from the ones of nature. Peirce’s semiotics is one that has constructed such bridges.

REFERENCES Arnauld, A. and P. Nicole ([1662] 1996), Logic or the Art of Thinking, trans. J. V. Buroker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bellucci, F. (2018), Peirce’s Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics, New York: Routledge. Bergman, M. (2009), Peirce’s Philosophy of Communication: The Rhetorical Underpinnings of the Theory of Signs, New York: Continuum. Borges, P. (2019), ‘A Complex System of Sign Classes for Complex Sign Systems’, in T. Jappy (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Peircean Semiotics, 133–53, London: Bloomsbury. Brent, J. (1993), Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Burke, F. T. (2013), What Pragmatism Was, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Colapietro, V. M. (1989), Peirce’s Approach to the Self, Albany: State University of New York. Colapietro, V. M. and T. M. Olshewsky, eds (1996), Peirce’s Doctrine of Signs, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. De Waal, C. and K. P. Skowroński, eds (2012), The Normative Thought of Charles S. Peirce, New York: Fordham University Press.

PRAGMATIST SEMIOTICS

105

Eisele, C. (1987), ‘Peirce’s Pragmatics’, in H. Stachowiak (ed.), Der Aufstieg des pragmatischen Denkens im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, 83–97, Hamburg: Meiner. Fisch, M. H. (1986), Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism: Essays by Max H. Fisch, ed. K. L. Ketner and C. J. W. Kloesel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Houser, N. (1998), ‘Introduction’, in Peirce, C. S. The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, Peirce Edition Project (eds), xvii–xxxviii, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Houser, N. (2010), ‘Peirce, Phenomenology, and Semiotics’, in P. Cobley (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Semiotics, 89–100, Abingdon: Routledge. Houser, N. (2016), ‘Peirce on Practical Reasoning’, in A. Tashev, E. Traykova, M. Yanakieva, P. Cobley and R. Kuncheva (eds), The Statues of Thought: In Honorem Professor Ivan Mladenov, 25–39, Sofia: Prof. Marin Drinov Academic Publishing House. Jappy, T. (2013), Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics, London: Bloomsbury. Jappy, T. (2017), Peirce’s Twenty-eight Classes of Signs and the Philosophy of Representation, London: Bloomsbury. Jappy, T., ed. (2019), The Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Peircean Semiotics, London: Bloomsbury. Johansen, J. D. (1993), Dialogic Semiosis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lane, R. (2018), Peirce on Realism and Idealism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liszka, J. J. (1996), A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles S. Peirce, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Merrell, F. (1995), Peirce’s Semiotics Now: A Primer, Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press. Misak, C., ed. (2004), The Cambridge Companion to Peirce, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morris, C. W. (1938), Foundations of the Theory of Signs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morris, C. W. (1946), Signs, Language, and Behavior, New York: Braziller. Nöth, W. (1990), Handbook of Semiotics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nöth, W. (2002), ‘Charles Sanders Peirce: Pathfinder in Linguistics’, Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis, 7 (1): 1–14. Nöth, W. (2009), ‘On the Instrumentality and Semiotic Agency of Signs, Tools, and Intelligent Machines’, Cybernetics & Human Knowing, 16 (3–4): 11–36. Nöth. W. (2011), ‘Semiotic Foundations of Pragmatics’, in W. Bublitz and N. R. Norrick (eds), Foundations of Pragmatics, 167–202, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Nöth, W. (2013), ‘Human Communication from the Semiotic Perspective’, in F. Ibekwesanjuan and T. M. Dousa (eds), Theories of Information, Communication, and Knowledge: A Multidisciplinary Approach, 97–119, Heidelberg: Springer. Nöth, W. (2014), ‘The Life of Symbols and Other Legisigns: More Than a Mere Metaphor?’ in V. Romanini and E. Fernández (eds), Peirce and Biosemiotics: A Guess at the Riddle of Life, 171–82, Heidelberg: Springer. Nöth, W. (2017), ‘Umberto Eco: Structuralist and Poststructuralist at Once’, in T. Thellefsen and B. Sørensen (eds), Umberto Eco in his Own Words, 111–18, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Nöth, W. and I. Jungk (2015), ‘Peircean Visual Semiotics: Unexplored Potentials’, Semiotica, 207: 657–73. Ogden, C. K. and I. A. Richards (1923), The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Oleksy, M. W. (2015), Realism and Individualism: Charles S. Peirce and the Threat of Modern Nominalism, Amsterdam: Benjamins.

106

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Parmentier, R. J. (1985), ‘Signs’ Place in Medias Res: Peirce’s Concept of Semiotic Mediation’, in E. Mertz and R. J. Parmentier (eds), Semiotic Mediation, 23–48, Orlando: Academic Press. Parret, H. (1984), ‘Peirce and Hjelmslev: The Two Semiotics’, Language Sciences, 6 (2): 217–27. Peirce, C. S. (1906), ‘Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism’, The Monist, 16 (4): 492–546. Also in CP 4.530–72. Peirce, C. S. ([1857–92] 1982–2010), Writings of Charles S. Peirce, 7 vols (1–6, 8), ed. Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as W, followed by volume number. Peirce, C. S. ([1867–93] 1992), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, ed. N. Houser and C. Kloesel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP 1. Peirce, C. S. ([1857–1914] 1787–1951), The Charles S. Peirce Papers Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Am 1632. Individual papers are referenced by manuscript number in R. Robin (ed.), Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967, and in Robin, ‘The Peirce Papers: A Supplementary Catalogue’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 7, 1971: 37–57. Cited as MS. Peirce, C. S. ([1866–1913] 1931–58), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols 1–6, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss; vols 7–8, ed. A. Burks, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cited as CP. Peirce, C. S. ([1893–1913] 1998), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, ed. Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP 2. Pelkey, J. (2019), ‘Peircean Semiotic for Language and Linguistics’, in T. Jappy (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Peircean Semiotics, 391–418, London: Bloomsbury. Pietarinen, A. V. (2003), ‘Peirce’s Theory of Communication and Its Contemporary Relevance’, in K. Nyíri (ed.), Mobile Learning, 81–98, Wien: Passagen. Potter, V. G. (1997), Charles S. Peirce: On Norms and Ideals, New York: Fordham University Press. Ransdell, J. (1977), ‘Some Leading Ideas of Peirce’s Semiotic’, Semiotica, 19 (3–4): 157–78. Ransdell, J. (1986), ‘Charles S. Peirce’, in T. A. Sebeok (ed.), Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, 3 vols, 135–85, The Hague: Mouton. Rellstab, D. (2008), ‘Peirce for Linguistic Pragmatics’, Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, 44 (2): 312–45. Robin, R. S. (1967), Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Rosenthal, S. (1986), Speculative Pragmatism, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Saussure, F. de ([1916] 1967), Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin, New York: McGraw-Hill. Savan, D. (1976), An Introduction to C. S. Peirce’s Complete System of Semiotics, Toronto: Toronto Semiotic Circle. Savan, D. (1994), ‘Peirce and American Semiotics’, in M. Shapiro and M. Haley (eds), The Peirce Seminar Papers 2, 179–208, Providence: Berghahn. Short, T. L. (2007), Peirce’s Theory of Signs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skagestad, P. (1981), The Road of Inquiry: Charles Peirce’s Pragmatic Realism, New York: Columbia University Press. Stables, A., W. Nöth, A. Olteanu, S. Pesce and E. Pikkarainen (2018), Semiotic Theory of Learning: New Perspectives in the Philosophy of Education, Abingdon: Routledge.

PRAGMATIST SEMIOTICS

107

Stjernfelt, F. (2014), Natural Propositions: The Actuality of Peirce’s Doctrine of Dicisigns, Boston: Docent Press. Thellefsen, T. and B. Sørensen, eds (2014), Charles S. Peirce in His Own Words: 100 Years of Semiotics, Communication and Cognition, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.

108

CHAPTER FIVE

Post/structuralist Semiotics MASSIMO LEONE

INTRODUCTION: CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY IN SEMIOTICS Structuralism can be variously characterized. Epistemologically, it mainly entailed a move from essence to relation, from identity to difference and from continuity to discontinuity. Historically, Saussure’s linguistic structuralism (1916) sought to understand language as network of relations, as system of differences and as articulation of discontinuities. A legacy of Saussure’s linguistic structuralism, structural semiotics, posited that meaning stems from difference (Greimas 1966). Structuralist semiotics did not focus on the full ontology that underlies the elements of a difference but, rather, on the empty phenomenology that characterizes their relation (Eco 1968). This focus on absence more than on presence, on phenomenology more than on ontology and on relation more than on elements has constituted the strength of structural semiotics, but also its weakness. On the one hand, this approach was able to overcome both the impressionism of subjective approaches to meaning and the positivism of objective perspectives on it, stressing the importance of inter-subjectivity in language and cultures (Greimas and Courtès 1979). On the other hand, such focus prevented structural semiotics from effectively connecting the sphere of language with that of the body, with that of society and with the concepts that these last two spheres inevitably entail: agency and power. In the sphere of semiotics, therefore, poststructuralism consisted, first, in an attempt at reconnecting structures (that is, the outcome of relations, differences and discontinuities) with an external dimension that different branches of this trend have variously identified in society (socio- and social semiotics), in culture (anthropological semiotics and semiotic anthropology, ethno-semiotics, cultural semiotics), in history (mainly Yury M. Lotman and the semiotic school of Moscow/Tartu), in phenomenology (tensive semiotics, the semiotics of practices and forms of life), in economics (mainly by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi), in cognitive sciences – a trend that originated in Eco’s work (especially Kant and the Platypus 1997) but then expanded in the specialized branch of cognitive semiotics – and also in natural sciences (with bio-semiotics and etho-semiotics). That is not to say that all these branches of semiotics are poststructuralist, but rather to suggest that, in dialogue with them, structuralist semiotics that was conceived in the wake of Saussure’s linguistic structuralism and Greimas’s structural semiotics nuanced its tenets, even at the fundamental level of epistemology, and became poststructuralist in anchoring the relational, differential, and discontinuous concept of structure into a more substantial ground.

110

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

On the one hand, and depending on the adopted perspective, these transitions were seen as ‘fertilizations’: structural semiotics was finally relinquishing the ivory tower of its pure abstraction and was delving into the life of meaning, wherein texts do not mean in isolation, like animals in a zoo or like plants in a greenhouse, but in the meshes of their complex connections with their contexts, meshes that are sometimes so thick that it is hard to distinguish texts and contexts, discourse and co-discourse, semantic features and pragmatic conditions. On the other hand, and from an opposite perspective, these transitions were seen as ‘contaminations’: substantiating structures through the various poststructuralist approaches meant marring the purity of the structuralist view, whose rationale precisely consisted in overcoming the presumptuous subjectivity or the illusory objectivity of previous approaches. In the end, reaching an equilibrium between these two extreme poles, on the one hand, abstract structuralism without connection to phenomena and, on the other hand, concrete poststructuralism disintegrating the heuristic potential of structuralism, has proved a matter of personal moderation and style. The best poststructuralist voices, at least according to the present author, were those who did not diminish the heuristic power of thinking reality and language through structural articulations but were nonetheless able to extend this articulatory approach to non-immediately linguistic and semiotic areas, such as social patterns, anthropological settings, material conditions, economic dynamics, political frames, biological characteristics, mind functions and even brain features. From within structural semiotics, therefore, several authors could become poststructuralist without becoming anti-structuralist. Mostly Francophone structural semiotics and mostly Anglophone Peircean semiotics evolved for the most part independently, especially in the first and most important stages of their elaborations. Nevertheless, it is worthy noticing that, as structuralist semiotics – or at least some of its authors – evolved towards some kind of poststructuralist semiotics, they also implicitly and increasingly blurred one of the most important epistemological and even ontological frontiers between the two semiotic schools, that is, the frontier between a conception of meaning ultimately based on discontinuity (Saussure, linguistic and semiotic structuralism) and a conception of meaning ultimately based on continuity (Peirce). Indeed, as structuralist semioticians embraced more and more continuity in their philosophies and analyses of meaning, many of them naturally yielded towards Peirce and his semiotics. It is not evident that a symmetrical movement of ‘continuity semioticians’ towards structuralist semiotics has also taken place, but, as it shall be seen in the subsequent sections, that must be explained not as a result of a supposed superiority of ‘continuity semiotics’ over its discontinuous counterpart, but as a consequence of the disequilibria in the linguistics and geography of academic semiotics: structuralism reached Anglophone North America when it had already been challenged, and in many cases academically superseded, not by poststructuralism but by anti-structuralism (and mainly deconstructionism).

MAPPING THE GENESIS OF POSTSTRUCTURALISMS The Franco-Lithuanian semiotician Algirdas J. Greimas, as it is well known, had combined Saussure’s linguistic structuralism – read through the glossematics of Danish linguist and semiotician Louis T. Hjelmslev – with some elements of Noam Chomsky’s theory of language, Vladimir Propp’s survey of narrative structures in Russian folktales, George Dumézil’s inquiry about the Indo-European civilization and some tenets of Claude

POST/STRUCTURALIST SEMIOTICS

111

Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology in order to elaborate first a new structuralist comprehension of meaning, then a complex method meant to analyse narrative texts as structural machines where sense is produced through the articulation of patterns of differences among opposite elements (mainly at the semantic level). Greimas’s method is too complex and elaborate to be effectively summarized here. In this context suffice it to say that, for Greimas and his school, a narrative text (but also any kind of signifying object, narrativity being for Greimas the general dynamics through which meaning is created and shared) can be decomposed through an inverted pyramidal structure known as the ‘semiotic path’, where the patterns of meaning that characterize the text are arranged and analysed from the most abstract and deep to the most concrete and superficial, each layer in the pyramid being both a ‘conversion’ (according to the semantic meaning of the term) and an enrichment of the previous layer. The deepest and most abstract layer in the semiotic path is, according to the Greimasian method, that in which an abstract value becomes meaningful (i.e., it becomes matter for signification and communication) through its difference with an opposite value. The so-called ‘semiotic square’, a logic diagram elaborated by Aristotle and other ancient philosophers, was adapted by Greimas and his school in order to articulate and visualize the possible semantic relations between a value and its counterparts. Such a static arrangement of semantic relations starts to become a dynamic narrative when it is ‘converted’ into a more superficial, and more concrete, layer of the semiotic path, denominated by Greimas and his school ‘the fundamental narrative grammar’. This section of the pyramid seeks to account for a common characteristic of narrative texts; although what they ultimately signify and communicate is the triumph of a value over its counterparts, such signification can take place only insofar as values are embodied in a story. Greimas and his school interpret this narrative embodiment as a tension between a subject, which is deprived of a value, and an object, which embodies that same value. The Greimasian method is a rich repository of semio-linguistic tools that can be used to analyse how different ‘morphologies of meaning’ take shape, are signified and are communicated. Over the last three decades, however, this method has been shown to have many limits. These are the most relevant: 1. a certain inefficacy in dealing with the philosophical problem of time1; 2. a certain inefficacy in dealing with the materiality of signification, paramount for the study of the ‘semiotic ideologies’ and the ‘economies of representation’ that underlie most language phenomena (Keane 2007)2; 3. a certain inefficacy in dealing with meanings that do not emerge from patterns of binary differences (e.g. black vs white) but from positions within a continuum; the need to develop a method to account for non-discrete3 forms of meaning is primarily in relation to narratives that do not embody an opposition between opposite values but rather signify a movement between two positions within a continuum4; 4. a certain inefficacy in tackling the problem of how the Greimasian method might be inaccurate and, therefore, need reformulation, when applied to ‘non-Western’ cultures; the analysis of ‘non-Western’ narratives could therefore require extensive re-elaboration of the whole project of structuralist semiotics.5 Genuine poststructuralist semiotics sought to cope with these difficulties without turning into anti-structuralist semiotics, according to an understanding of the prefix ‘post’ that is going to be explained below.

112

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

CHRONOLOGICAL VERSUS LOGICAL POSTSTRUCTURALISMS Dealing with poststructuralism implies the same difficulties entailed by dealing with any intellectual trend denominated through the usage of the prefix ‘post-’.6 It is not immediately clear, indeed, and it should, therefore, be specified, whether this prefix means ‘after’ in temporal or in conceptual terms. The first choice gives rise to a chronological definition, whereas the second one brings about a logical understanding of the word and its meaning. The first acceptance implies that there was a certain phenomenon – in this case, an intellectual trend – and that, at a certain stage, after a certain watershed, this trend was replaced by a new course that, while based on the first one, was distinctively different from it. The second acceptance implies that there was such a phenomenon – an intellectual trend – whose features nevertheless proved inadequate under certain respects, so that it was necessary to develop a new, characteristically different version of the same intellectual stance, which nevertheless was superseded not in temporal but in conceptual terms. Both angles of definition, moreover, present a common difficulty, which consists in a consubstantial lack of autonomy. No matter how a ‘post-’ movement is determined, indeed, either chronologically or logically, such determination cannot be intrinsic but must be, to some extent, extrinsic, that is, dependent on a previous definition of the term to which the suffix ‘post-’ is added; that is the case for one of the latest arrivals in the family of such word, ‘post-truth’: first, it is not clear whether ‘post’ indicates ‘after’ (chronological definition) or ‘beyond’ (logical definition); second, it is impossible to define ‘post-truth’ without actually giving a definition of what ‘truth’ is. Here a problematic divergence arises between, on the one hand, the intellectual need of determining the meaning of words and the articulation of concepts and, on the other hand, the way in which ‘buzz words’ circulate in society: lay people and sometimes even academics speaking of ‘post-truth’ do not feel the urge of precisely defining this expression but use it exactly because of its imprecision, because of its fuzzy semantic boundaries. This has happened and continues to happen with all ‘post-’ denominations, including ‘post-structuralism’, begetting three main effects: (1) an aura of ‘newness’ is bestowed on the ‘post-’ phenomenon, whereas the ‘pre- “post-”’ phenomenon is given one of obsolescence; (2) an aura of ‘definiteness’ is attributed to the latter term, whereas one of ‘indefiniteness’ is given to the former; this second dialectics is intertwined with the fact that a ‘post-’ phenomenon is always vicariously defined; (3) depending on the axiological value that is cast onto the ‘pre“post-”’ phenomenon, its ‘post-’ version is connoted with an opposite axiological flavor. In cases like that of ‘post-truth’, such last dialectics is clearly defined: no ideological trend openly despises truth (although some philosophical movements, like sophism, casuistry or deconstructionism, tend to relativize its value), so that ‘post-truth’ is inevitably connoted and talked about with a negative taint, although with characteristic vagueness, in academic and intellectual circles as well as in media and digital social networks. The axiological dialectics between ‘structuralism’ and ‘post-structuralism’ is not as clear. On the one hand, some intellectuals and scholars have positively connoted the ‘post-’ in order to welcome a new intellectual trend that would have logically superseded ‘structuralism’, overcoming or, at least, problematizing those aspects of it that were seen as undesirable. Such intellectually undesirable dimension of structuralism (at least, from a poststructuralist perspective) deserves an in-depth analysis; yet, it can already be concisely evoked as involving what was considered an excessive theoretical rigidity in

POST/STRUCTURALIST SEMIOTICS

113

its attempt at grasping the meaning of reality, wherever this meaning might be found: in the mythological analyses of structural anthropology; in the textual interpretations of structural semiotics; in the socioeconomic readings of structural Marxism. On the other hand, however, some other intellectuals, and mostly those who had endorsed structuralism, would continue to support it or, later on, were nostalgic about it and negatively connoted the ‘-post’ in ‘poststructuralism’, lamenting exactly what others were praising, that is, a perceived blurring and consequent weakening of the theoretical framework that structuralism was credited to be able to project around the phenomena of reality; poststructuralism, it was claimed from this perspective, came after structuralism but was able to supersede it only chronologically and, worse, only rhetorically, as a new ‘ugly’ fashion supplants a previous one.

THE PARADOXES OF POSTSTRUCTURALISMS The field of research, scholarship and publications covered by structuralism, from Ferdinand de Saussure on, has been so wide and multifarious that poststructuralism too has inherited it; in a way, all aspects of reality that had been considered from a structural point of view could now be seen from a poststructural one. Surveying the entirety of this cultural production exceeds the limit of a book chapter and would not be completely pertinent in a handbook devoted to semiotics. There is, indeed, a lot of structuralism in semiotics, as there is a lot of semiotics in structuralism; yet, these two intellectual trajectories do not entirely coincide. Although a branch of semiotics, mostly the Francophone one, stemmed from linguistic structuralism and, later on, from anthropological structuralism, and although the School of Moscow and Tartu was also essentially a derivation of such trend, semiotics as it was conceived mostly in the Anglophone world, stemming from the thoughts and works of Charles S. Peirce, not only was not historically structuralist, but was also, from a certain point of view that will be specified later, anti-structuralist, so that it could not give rise to a proper poststructuralist version of it either. That did not rule out, however, that certain trends of poststructuralism also influenced a development of semiotics in branches of it that were not originally influenced by structuralism. The present chapter will limit itself to dealing with poststructuralism in the semiotic field; yet, it must start from the consideration that, in semiotics as in other disciplines, the paradoxical situation often took place in which poststructuralism developed chronologically after structuralism, but could not logically supersede it, because this latter had not actually been fully developed beforehand. That happened not only in those semiotic areas that were not primarily based on structuralism, but also in those developments of semiotics that claimed to have overcome all the shortcomings of old-style structuralism. The editorial history of structuralist semiotics throughout the world offers a good example of such dynamic. The publication, in 1966, of Algirdas J. Greimas’s Sémantique structurale [structural semantics] marked a breakthrough in the history of semiotics as the most ambitious attempt at capturing the laws that organize meaning in view of its expression from a structural point of view. Other previous works had tried to develop a structural understanding of semantics and to establish semiotics as a distinctively structural endeavour; yet, it was exactly with the publication of this work that, also in hindsight, the foundations of structural semiotics were laid. When prestigious French publisher Larousse first published Sémantique structurale: Recherche et méthode in 1966, an audience for this theoretical proposal already existed, and was powerfully seduced by it, despite the undeniable difficulty of its metalanguage. Thanks to Paolo Fabbri and Pino Paioni, the core

114

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

of Greimas’s theoretical perspective was made available to the Italian audience already in 1967, through the booklet Modelli semiologici [semiological models], published by Argalìa, Urbino, in 1967. The first full translation of Sémantique structurale was Italian too: Semantica strutturale: Ricerca di metodo, translated by Italo Sordi, published by another prestigious publisher, Rizzoli, in Milan, in 1969. In the same way, throughout the 1970s, Greimas’s work was translated by several European prime publishers. In 1971, Gredos, one of the most credited Spanish publishers, published Alfredo de la Fuente’s translation of Greimas’s Sémantique structurale: Semántica estructural: Investigación metodológica. The same year, in 1971, Jens Ihwe published a German translation: Strukturale Semantik: Methodologische Untersuchungen; the translation appeared by Vieweg Verlag in Braunschweig, an old and prestigious publisher specialized in the publication of the writings of great scientists like Albert Einstein and Max Planck. That is revealing of how Greimas’s proposal presented itself and was received in continental Europe: as a scientific method for the analysis of meaning. In 1973, Haquira Osakabe and Izidoro Blikstein published a Portuguese translation, Semântica estrutural, in São Paulo, by Cultrix and Edusp. The chronology and geography of these publications reconstitute a map of how the Parisian school of structural semiotics was about to spread in the following years, with strong concentrations in Italy, Brazil, Spain, but also Denmark and Finland. Gudrun Hartvigson translated Sémantique structurale in Danish in 1974; it was published by Borgen, in Copenaghen, under the title Strukturel Semantik. In 1979, Eero Tarasti published a Finnish translation, Strukturaalista semantiikkaa, by a publisher called ‘Gadeamus’. Between the second half of the 1960s and the late 1970s, the intellectual society of continental Europe, and especially that of Latin and Scandinavian countries, was already dominated by structuralism, and Greimas’s methodological proposal succeeded to gain its core. Examining this list of translations, though, one is prompted to ask: what about English? What about the language that, already in the mid-1960s, was becoming the vehicular language of the world, first in mass culture, then also in the scientific discourse? The first English translation of Sémantique structurale was published in 1983, by the time Greimas’s Du Sens (1970), Maupassant (1975), Sémiotique et sciences sociales (1976), the Dictionnaire (1979) and Du Sens II (1983) had already been published in France and translated into several languages – mostly Italian, Spanish and Portuguese – each of these works progressively refining and redefining the theoretical perspective of Greimas and that of his school. The English translation appeared in Lincoln by the University of Nebraska Press, a fine publisher that nevertheless does not compare with the giants of US academic publishing. The main translator and author of the introduction, Ronald Schleifer, was then a Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. How to explain such delay and somewhat peripheral publication? Greimas’s metalanguage was hard but not impossible to translate, as it is demonstrated by the rapidness and quality of translations in other languages. The book mainly bears on a corpus of French examples, Bernanos’s novels, but that was not a problem in English either. Bernanos’s Le journal d’un curé de campagne [‘The Diary of a Country Priest’], published in French in 1936, had been translated into English immediately, in 1937, and soon became a classic. In order to find an answer, it is interesting to analyse how translations rendered the title of Sémantique structurale. Indeed, this first title is followed by a secondary title that in French reads: ‘recherche et méthode’ [‘research and method’]. The Italian translation of it had already downplayed its assertiveness: ‘research and method’ became ‘ricerca di metodo’ [‘research of a method’]. The ambitiousness

POST/STRUCTURALIST SEMIOTICS

115

of Greimas’s title, however, was toned down especially in the English translation: ‘An Attempt at a Method’. In December 1984, the journal Modern Languages Notes published a lucid review of this English translation. Robert Con Davis, also Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, convincingly explained why Sémantique structurale was translated so late into English, so peripherally, and so timidly. Already in 1975, Jonathan D. Culler had published Structuralist Poetics, appeared by one of the most central US academic publishers, Cornell University Press. In 1976, one year later, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak had translated, also for a major US academic publisher – Johns Hopkins University Press – Derrida’s De la grammatologie, which was originally published, nevertheless, in 1967, one year after Sémantique structurale. The geography of the US translation of French scholarship therefore inverted its chronology: whereas Derrida’s deconstructionism was meant as a post-structuralist reaction to structuralism, in the United States, the chronology of such dialectics was reversed: Greimas, who was the founder of structural semantics, was presented to the English readership as a somewhat vintage neo-structuralist reaction to deconstructionism. Paradoxically, the US audience became familiar with deconstructionism before knowing structuralism, and knew structuralism only as a post-deconstructionist, neo-structuralist wave. In dealing with poststructuralism in semiotics, therefore, one should distinguish at least between three different cases: first, intellectual works that, while placing themselves firmly at the core of semiotic structuralism and actually contributing to its development, construction and expansion, somehow anticipated a critique to some of its features and the possible solutions to be envisaged; these works can be defined as proto-poststructuralist; second, proper poststructuralist works that chronologically came after that structural semiotics and, more generally, semiotic structuralism had been developed; works in this second category conducted a systematic analysis and critique of structural semiotics, and explicitly sought to turn the theoretical page, abandoning the foundational concept of structure in favour of less rigid heuristic concepts; third, poststructuralist works that, although adopting the label of ‘poststructuralism’, or being categorized as poststructuralist works by their readers, were actually produced in intellectual and scholarly contexts that were ignorant of structuralism, and where poststructuralism was received as a fashionable buzz word more than a term indicating a response to a previous and now undesirable philosophical and theoretical stance; works in this category, some of which nevertheless acquired intellectual dignity despite their evident anachronism, could be defined as pseudo-poststructuralist.

PROTO-POSTSTRUCTURALISMS As regards the first category of works, which have been tentatively defined as protopoststructuralist, a curious but central phenomenon should be observed. Many trends in human thought and scholarship often develop organically, or at least in a way that resembles that of living organisms; new original ideas are first ventured by visionary pioneers, receive a cold reception in the beginning – or are even ostracized – until they gain momentum, conquer an increasingly wider audience and – either by their own force or because they are pushed by mysteriously complex agencies – become the mainstream. At this stage, they start to inspire new creations, but also imitations by epigones that blindly adhere to the new trend as if it were a religious creed. Such automatic adhesion characteristically also involves the radicalization of some of the tenets of the original trend, an extremization that, in some circumstances, reaches such a level of paroxysm

116

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

that ends up transforming the initial proposal into its own caricature, and leaves even its initiators quite sceptical about the outcomes of the trend that they themselves had inaugurated. It is from this point of view that Marx’s famous sentence, ‘Je ne suis pas marxiste’ [‘I’m not a Marxist’] can be interpreted. In hindsight, Ferdinand de Saussure too, had he had a chance to read the structuralist works that were written in his wake, could have affirmed ‘je ne suis pas structuraliste’ [‘I’m not a structuralist’]. Indeed, the publication, in 1916, of the first version of the Cours de linguistique générale gave rise to the diffusion of a vulgate on Saussure’s linguistics and semiology, which would often exaggerate some of their theoretical principles, such as the necessity to develop a completely intrinsic analysis of language, focusing exclusively on the synchronic dimension and excluding the study of the diachronic one. A corollary of this extremization also consisted in the emphasis, within such vulgate, on the absolute arbitrariness of the sign as a relation between signifier and signified in language. From this point of view, then, the Thèses that Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy presented in 1929 at the famous congress of the Hague (Durnovo et al. 1929) can already be considered as ‘proto-poststructuralist’, in the sense that precociously pointed at the necessity of recuperating the idea of the importance of time in relation to that of structure. Simultaneously, however, the Thèses can also be considered as ‘pseudo-poststructuralist’, since they reacted not as much to Saussure’s thought, and maybe not even as much to his writings, as to the vulgate that had stemmed from them and that was already championed by several enthusiastic followers in Europe and in the United States. In the following years, indeed, and especially between the 1930s and the 1940s, several scholars, including Émile Benveniste in France, Mario Lucidi in Italy, Henri Frei in Switzerland and Luis T. Hjelmslev in Denmark, contributed to a new and more balanced interpretation of Saussure’s structuralism, with greater consideration for the value of time and history in the structuralist understanding of language and meaning. Such interpretive work was also complemented, in the 1950s, by Robert Godel, who philologically reconstructed Saussure’s thought through a systematic study of his manuscripts and of those of his pupils (Sources manuscrites du Cours de linquistique générale [manuscript sources of the Course of General Linguistics, 1957), an effort that was later expanded and further specified in the 1960s by Rudolf Engler. Similarly, la Struttura assente [the absent structure], published by Umberto Eco in 1968, was already eloquent in its very title about the ontological angle from which the author intended to look at the concept of structure and, as a consequence, at structuralism itself. In 1962, the same author had famously published Opera aperta [open work] (Eco [1962] 1976), in which he had dwelled, in particular, on the aesthetics of artworks and, more generally, of those texts whose interpretative structure authors programmatically leave open to several interpretations, thus invoking the crucial hermeneutic intervention of readers as key agents in meaning-making. Eco’s Opera aperta already had a protopoststructuralist flavour, which curiously but not surprisingly became a poststructuralist one in the English reception of this aesthetic proposal, for, again, it was translated into English by Harvard University Press as The Open Work only years later, in 1989, when poststructuralism was already rampant in the United States (although the publishing of the original Italian work found ample space in Anglophone intellectual debates through multiple reviews and the publication, already in 1962, of an article on ‘The Analysis of Structure’ by Umberto Eco himself for the Times Literary Supplement). Chronologically, Umberto Eco had reformulated with original consequences the aesthetic ‘theory of formativity’ of his mentor at the University of Turin, the aesthetician Luigi Pareyson,

POST/STRUCTURALIST SEMIOTICS

117

stressing the problematic character of the form in the aesthetic creations of twentiethcentury European avantgardes; the stress of Opera aperta, then, fell more on the dissolution – or at least on the openness – of aesthetic structures, as the title pointed out. Such attitude, concentrating on the multidimensionality of the structure more than on its linearity, was predominant also in the already-mentioned Struttura assente, which enlarged the focus to signification as a whole. Since the very first lines of crucial section ‘D’ of the book – a section which bears the same title as the entire volume (but also bears the subtitle ‘Epistemology of Structural Models’) – Umberto Eco seems to follow Roman Jakobson in his cautionary definition of the structure in relation to time and history; the first sentence of such section indeed reads: ‘Una ricerca sui modelli della comunicazione ci porta a usare griglie strutturali per definire sia la forma dei messaggi che la natura sistematica dei codici’ [‘research on the models of communication leads us to use structural grids to define both the shape of messages and the systematic nature of codes’] (italics in the original); that sounds like a traditional structuralist statement, for the idea and heuristic concept of structure are posited as the one that intrinsically best captures the nature of both the signifier and the signified of a message; it should be noted, however, that the expression ‘structural grids’ is carefully used instead of ‘structures’; as it will be clearer infra, Eco’s intention is to affirm a semiological understanding of structuralism, not an ontological one: structures are found in texts so that meaning might emerge from them, but the former are not ontologically present in the latter (Eco will then partially change this view through his approach to and interaction with cognitive sciences and, in particular, in the book Kant and the Platypus, which appeared thirty years later). But then Eco in the same paragraph feels obliged to add, within parentheses: senza che l’assunzione sincronica, utile per ‘mettere in forma’ il codice considerato e rapportarlo ad altri codici opposti o complementari, escluda una successiva indagine diacronica, capace di render conto della evoluzione dei codici sotto l’influenza dei messaggi e dei processi di decodifica che se ne danno nel corso della storia. [‘the synchronic assumption, however, useful to “put into shape” the considered code and to refer it to other opposed and complementary codes, does not rule out an ensuing diachronic investigation, capable of accounting for the evolution of the codes under the influence of messages and of the processes of decoding that interpret them throughout history.’] (Eco 1968) From this and following statements, it appears that, already in 1968, Eco had adopted a nuanced conception of structuralism, in which the synchronic reading was considered ‘an assumption’, and not a necessity; where ‘structural grids’ (and not ‘structures’ tout court) were ‘useful’ but, again, not cogent; and where, moreover, a more traditional historical reading of codes and messages was not ruled out; although temporal priority was given to the synchronic reading, indeed, that would not exclude that history might come back into the picture so as to explain the evolution of codes, whose nature Eco somewhat tautologically referred to the interaction between codes and messages, and between systems of decoding and acts of decoding, with an epistemological stance that seemed to echo Ferdinand de Saussure’s dialectics between langue and parole. Indeed, in these as in other instances of ‘proto-poststructuralism’ (in Émile Benveniste, for instance), the rigidity of the idea of structure was nuanced through rebalancing the distribution of

118

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

emphasis on the two poles of Saussure’s original dialectics between langue and parole: whereas initial structuralism had enthusiastically focused on the former, neglecting the latter, other scholars, some of which were mentioned above, reintroduced a temporal dimension in the structural understanding of meaning exactly through a consideration of the ‘parole’ dimension, a consideration that ultimately consisted in paying attention to the ways in which a system of language is modified by its own productions. Chronologically, Eco first ‘opened’ his mentor Pareyson’s theory of formativity, then ‘opened’ with an analogous move the structuralism of Saussure’s vulgate to a more relativistic approach (semiology rather than ontology of structures, synchrony before, not without diachrony), but afterwards somehow returned in both fields (aesthetics; communication studies) to more rigid positions exactly in order to dialectically react to the extremes of deconstructionism and poststructuralism7; such reaction took place, on the one hand, through the series of works on the ‘limits of interpretation’; on the other hand, through the works inspired by either ontological (cognitive sciences) or historical conceptions of meaning. As it was pointed out earlier, however, in the US reception of Eco, the translation of his Opera aperta arrived when the US academe had already fully embraced not only and not as much Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism but the US poststructuralist reception of it. The same ‘academic lag’ between diffusion of proto-poststructuralist ideas (that were in many cases closer to the original conception of structuralism in Ferdinand de Saussure than to that of his early epigones) and diffusion of poststructuralist trends affected also the diffusion of Greimas’s structuralist semiotics in the Anglophone world, and especially in the United States. The reception of post-Greimassian works in English was, as a consequence, even more complicated. By the time some of the most brilliant disciples of Greimas were refashioning his theory in a sort of poststructuralist way (soon to be specified in this chapter), Greimas had just been translated and published in the United States, although often only in specialistic academic circles.

POSTSTRUCTURALISMS FROM WITHIN STRUCTURALISM Re-reading and re-assessing the bibliography of Greimas, from Structural Semantics on, a sort of ‘structural parable’ can be detected, going from the initial idea of approaching semantics in the framework of structuralism to the full development of a structural variety of semiotics until the application of this variety to different objects and as many fields of investigation. For most of this parable, Greimas’s adhesion to a tetragon understanding of structure seems unflinching. Greimas and his school characteristically fled from any ontological perspective on meaning, missing no occasion to stress that meaning actually emerges from the analyst’s decision to cast a structural framework on a portion of reality, thus turning it into a text; from this point of view, structural semiotics seems to join Eco’s caution in talking about ‘structural grids’ more than about ‘structures’ tout court. Greimas and his initial followers, however, did not share with Eco the prudential albeit only hypothetical opening to a diachronic understanding of meaning; in Greimas, time is mostly understood as temporality, history as historical discourse, and no attention seems to be paid to how the dialectics between langue and parole might affect the decoding of a text, which in structural semiotics is thought of, instead, in purely immanent terms. That constitutes at the same time the rhetorical strength of this method (its promised ability to decipher any text, independently from its conditions of enunciation) and its

POST/STRUCTURALIST SEMIOTICS

119

epistemological weakness: if structures are not in the ontology of meaning but only in the apperception of it, how can they not be affected by the diachronic evolution of cultures? Yet, poststructuralist trends, if they might be called so, entered the structural palace of Greimas’s semiotics not as much in order to satisfy the theoretical needs of the cultural and historical relativization of structural grids as in order to improve their ability at decoding meaning within the same immanent framework that structural semiotics had championed in relation to its privileged objects, that is, texts. In particular, as Greimas had posited narrativity – that is, a very abstract conception of storytelling – at the core of its philosophy of meaning (a meaning which, in this view, basically arises from the anthropological need to turn structural oppositions of values into narrative tensions), it soon emerged that a rigidly structural reading of textual features, mainly projecting rigorously binary grids on them, was unable to satisfactorily cope with those of such features that, instead, seemed to escape a purely dichotomic nature; these problematic features would essentially fall into two categories: on the one hand, passions; on the other hand, sensations. With characteristic systematicity, however, methodological adjustments introduced so as to deal with these two textual and narrative dimensions soon give rise to a rethinking of the entire theoretical and even epistemological framework of structural semiotics, with results that might well be classified as ‘poststructuralist’. Indeed, if passions were not aptly captured by Greimas’s traditional structural semiotics that was the case because, as it was founded out, the theoretical and ideological conception at the basis of structural semiotics itself was not conducive to such efficacy. In a nutshell, Greimas’s traditional structural semiotics would understand meaning as an outcome of narrativity, and this as a result of oppositions and tensions among values. Such oppositions, however, and even more the tensions that they would generate, were impossible to account for in Greimas’s original terms, those that were essentially in line with the structural idea as formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure and then adopted by his followers. In order to understand passions in texts, one should understand passions in values, but that required to move away from a narrowly discrete and binary understanding of meaning. This analytical necessity gave rise to two complementary poststructuralist trends: on the one hand, the structural semiotics of passions as initiated by Greimas himself together with his disciple Jacques Fontanille, mainly through the publication, in 1991, of the now classic study Sémiotique des passions: Des états de choses aux états d’âme, soon translated in English in 1993 as The Semiotics of Passions: From States of Affairs to States of Feeling; on the other hand, the genesis of the so-called ‘tensive semiotics’, in which discrete and binary oppositions of value giving rise to meaning through narrativity were now considered as nothing but a particular case within a much wider and various range of oppositional situations, in many of which value would actually emerge out of a continuous tension more than out of a discontinuous opposition (a trend initiated by Claude Zilberberg’s Essai sur les modalités tensives, [Essay on Tensive Modalities] 1981). Despite the several attempts at conciliating this tensive understanding of meaning with the structural one inaugurated by Greimas after Saussure, one is nevertheless left with the impression that these two versions of generative semiotics, the structural one by Greimas and the (somehow poststructuralist) tensive one by Zilberberg and others, were as irreconcilable as general relativity and quantum mechanics in theoretical physics. Greimas himself, however, was not at all a passive spectator of this poststructuralist evolution of his own theory but he somehow favoured it, through co-authoring, with Jacques Fontanille, Semiotics of Passion, but also through hinting at a poststructuralist

120

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

understanding of the sublime and, more generally, of the aesthetic dimension of texts in Greimas’s last and most poetic book, De l’imperfection (1987) [On Imperfection]. The switching of focus from a conception of meaning based on discontinuity and discrete oppositions among values to one based on continuity and nuanced tensions among valorization poles in the long term did more than simply changing the methodological and analytical framework through which structural and generative semiotics looked at texts and their interpretation; it actually altered the same conception of structure indepth. The purely discrete and oppositional version of it would still maintain a pristine epistemological status, in line with that which both Umberto Eco and Algirdas J. Greimas had underlined, that is, its functioning as a grid (or, in Greimas, its functioning as the product of an operation, that is, the enunciation of the textual frame by the analyst), as a scheme that would not be found in the ontology of phenomena but, instead, would be superimposed on them in order to find, therein, relations whose observation and description could better explain the emerging of meaning. As the notion and the theoretical instrument of structure became less rigid and more malleable – more permeable to the nuances of the subjacent reality – its epistemological status too, however, became more uncertain, more fluctuating and fuzzier. The conundrum of structuralism seems to consist in the fact that, the more the conception of structure is maintained as arbitrary and, therefore, detached from the actual ontology of its objects, the more it is capable to claim objectiveness and universality, but the less, on the contrary, it is apt to explain the relation between the internal nature of the phenomenon – whose shape is artificially created by the superimposition of the structure itself – and the external agencies that have ultimately given rise to its determination. Vice versa, the more one yields to the temptation of actually motivating structures – so that they might be seen as emerging, within the text, from forces that are actually outside of it – the more the structuralist and semiotic gesture loses its magnificent autonomy and becomes, from a certain point of view, ancillary to other epistemological operations that mainly happen outside of the structuralist focus, beyond the limits of the text. Paraphrasing a famous Christian theological statement attributed to Saint Cyprian of Carthage, ‘Extra ecclesiam nulla salus’ [‘out of the church there is no salvation’], Greimas used to repeat to his disciples that ‘hors du texte, point de salut’ [‘out of the text there is no salvation’], so as to stress the necessity to keep the immanentist approach of generative semiotics in order to preserve its epistemological purity, despite the inevitable restrictions that this could entail in terms of knowledge of the inner secrets of the origin of meaning. With understandable dialectics, nevertheless, all second-generation Greimassian semioticians did exactly the opposite, that is, questioned the intrinsic nature of the structure with reference to its external world. Depending on which dimension of this ‘outside of the text’ was made reference to in order to motivate the inner nature of the structure, a different version of ‘poststructuralist’ semiotics was envisaged. The reader should be reminded at this stage that this particular label, ‘poststructuralist’, is justified in relation to the way it altered and, in certain cases, also unhinged the previous, traditionally structural understanding of meaning; that does not imply, however, that such attempts discarded structuralism or discredited Greimas’s attempts at structurally understanding meaning; they were and they still are thought of as intellectual operations in continuity with (albeit in variation with) rather than in rupture with structural and generative orthodoxy. Indeed, as it was stated in the introduction, the author of the present chapter chose to deal not with poststructuralism tout court, but with poststructuralism in relation to semiotics and, mostly, within semiotics. It would not make too much sense, indeed, to consider, in the frame of a companion of semiotics,

POST/STRUCTURALIST SEMIOTICS

121

intellectual trends whose ‘poststructuralism’ was actually so extreme as to turn them into ‘anti-structuralist’, and to deny, thus, the epistemological dignity of semiotics itself. Giving them space in a companion of semiotics would be like expounding on flat earth theories in a treatise of mainstream geography. Disciples of Greimas, on the opposite, did not destroy the theoretical palace erected by their master but rather restyled it, opening gates and doors and windows where Greimas had left only solid walls (but with the risk, already mentioned above, to fragilize the building). Thus, Jacques Fontanille delved more and more on the prominent role of the body in co-determining the tensions of values that are then apprehended in texts and cultures, recuperating and reinvigorating a dialogue with phenomenology that Greimas had already engaged, mainly with the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty; later on, the same Jacques Fontanille opened the palace of semiotics not only to the internal patterning of the body but also to the external patterning of culture, through an original reinterpretation of Lotman’s semiotics in the light of the concept, already championed by Wittgenstein, of ‘forms of life’; other members of Greimas’s circle, like Éric Landowski, also problematized the relation between the inside and the outside of the structure, between the text and the context, but mostly in dialogue with social and political theory; a new sub-branch of semiotics resulted from it, socio-semiotics, which had several propagations in Europe and Latin America and developed some parallel lines with the social semiotics already autonomously developed by Michael Halliday. It should be underlined once more, however, that all these attempts considered themselves and were presented to the external intellectual world as in continuity rather than in discontinuity with Greimas’s original project; that is witnessed by the numerous inter-theoretical references that such new trends would weave with the previous theory as well as by the fact that many authors of the post-Greimassian era actually worked precisely on refining the internal coherence of the system in relation to the new attempts; thus, Claude Zilberberg worked on bridging the new epistemological model of tensive semiotics with the theoretical framework of structural and generative semiotics; Denis Bertrand focused on the heritage of textual semiotics and its contributions in terms of textual analyses at the same time treasuring the epistemological framework inherited from Greimas and blending some of its aspects with the new theoretical insights of the new school. The orthodoxy of traditional structuralism was defended along stricter lines in those linguistic and cultural areas where Greimas’s semiotics was adopted more than created, for instance in Italy or Latin America, giving rise to a crystallization of the theory that, with the passing of time, tended to acquire vintage undertones. On the contrary, Eco’s call for an equilibrium between the opening and the closing of the text, between the adoption of a conventional understanding of the structure as grid and the rethinking of it in relation to external ontologies gave rise to several hybridizations, such as the one between semiotics and cognitive sciences, for instance, explored by Umberto Eco himself in one of his last theoretical contributions, Kant and the Platypus ([1997]1999). In all these developments, the alternative ways of understanding the meaningfulness of images were constantly a litmus test of structural semiotics, for determining the relation between the meaning of an image and the ontology that gives rise to it is always an operation that reveals its presuppositions in terms of semiotic ideology: either one stresses the conventional nature of images (like Greimas’s orthodoxy did, sometimes with theoretically challenging results) or one admits that, after all, images mean what they mean also because they are in some sort of connection with ontology, either that of ‘reality’ or that of the biological

122

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

and cognitive physiology that apprehends it. The later Umberto Eco, for instance, conceded that patterns in the structure of being could indeed be at the origin of patterns in the structure of meaning, an admission that sounded much less recalcitrant than those appearing in previous, properly structuralist writings. Similarly, whereas Italian followers of Greimas became mostly heralds of his orthodoxy, other schools developed, either in conjunction with Eco’s own formulation of semiotics or through opening to other more ‘socio-cultural’ understandings of the discipline (Lotman, socio-semiotics, ethnosemiotics), which took a more poststructuralist direction. To a bird’s-eye view, Jakobson’s already-mentioned urge not to turn Saussure’s structuralism into a synchronic cage was at the origin of Eco’s lifelong intent to reconciliate structuralism with the common sense of non-structural disciplines, including the philosophy of mind and history (in Eco, historical curiosity developed not only parallel to its semiotic work – through medieval investigations and novel-writing – but also intersected it as a complex meta-discourse, in terms of philology of proto-semiotics but also as metaphorical comment on the unperceived biases of semiotics itself). Jakobson’s approach, moreover, was also at the origin of that Chicago school of structural linguistics and semiotics that, mainly through Michael Silverstein’s meta-pragmatics, gave rise to an independent attempt at combining structural theory and contextual knowledge, recuperating also the entire tradition of dialogue between semiotics and cultural anthropology in the form of a new, typically US, ‘semiotic anthropology’. It is worthwhile noticing that, whereas post-Greimassian semioticians sought the resources to reformulate the initial project of structural semiotics either within some unexplored areas of the so-called ‘generative path’ itself (that is, the logically ordered sequence of analytical frames through which structural and generative semiotics diagrammatizes the genesis of meaning in its immanent development) and, secondarily, also in the cautious dialogues with other disciplines (phenomenology, sociology, cognitive sciences, cultural theory), the Chicago school of semiotic anthropology rather opted for using ‘Peirce against Saussure’, as it could be said with a quick and imprecise, yet effective formula. In hindsight, that was partially the case also in Umberto Eco, whose strategy of dynamizing the understanding of semiosis crucially involved an essentially Jakobsoninspired reformulation of Peirce’s thought. In Eco, however, philological awareness of the parallel but fundamentally independent genesis and unfolding of Saussure’s thought in Europe on the one hand, and of Peirce’s thought on the other, prevented the Italian semiotician to ‘play the latter against the former’. On the contrary, Eco’s philosophical and semiotic stance against Derrida’s deconstructionism precisely stemmed from a philological and, in a certain sense, anti-deconstructionist reading of Peirce’s conception of ‘unlimited semiosis’. One of the fundamental sources of Derrida’s semiotic deconstructionism, Eco contended, exactly consisted in the French philosopher’s wrong interpretation of Peirce: unlimited semiosis exists and is actually consubstantial to the human way of processing signs and meanings; yet, Peirce formulated not only this idea, but also the somewhat complementary notion of ‘final interpretive habit’, which works as a dam to unlimited semiosis, stemming its tide and allowing the constitution of interpretive common sense in a hermeneutic community. Derrida, Eco then claimed, had actually deconstructed Peirce himself in order to construct deconstructionism, yet with a theoretical move that was deeply at odds with the ethics of philology, an ethics whose central relevance Eco constantly stressed not only in his scholarly works but also and perhaps even more in his literary but still deeply philosophical works (for instance, the series of novels on conspiracy theories and esoteric thought, that is, social interpretive discourses that,

POST/STRUCTURALIST SEMIOTICS

123

ignoring the dialectics between unlimited semiosis and interpretive habits, and espousing, instead, only the former against the latter, often lead to a pernicious disintegration of common sense and the fundaments themselves of a ‘community of interpreters’). Less attached to a philological reading of the sources of the history of semiotics, instead, several poststructuralist trends, notably in the United States, actually indulged in championing Peirce as a sort of anti-Saussure. Such trends had historical reasons, which have been partially exposed, that is, the tortuous affirmation of original structuralism in the Anglophone academe, but brought about an approach to Peirce’s semiotics that seemed to use him rather than to interpret him (for instance, in the semiotic anthropology of Webb Keane). Is Peirce’s semiotics, indeed, intrinsically poststructuralist because it is intrinsically anti-structuralist? At the very origin of the tendency of adopting Peirce as a poststructuralist resource lies the widespread attitude of interpreting his model of the sign, signification and semiosis as an intrinsically dynamic one, but also and above all the complementary attitude of conceiving of this dynamism in temporal terms. In Peirce, as it is well known, semiosis coincides with the process emerging from the interaction among three conceptual elements, that is, an object that, in line with Kant’s gnoseology, is never knowable in itself, but nevertheless prompts its own knowability through its yet always unfathomable ontology; an interpretant that captures this prompt but notwithstanding does so always under a specific angle or respect, which is ultimately given by the way in which semiosis has given shape to previous interpretive patterns or habits; and a representamen, which is the most immediately accessible result of this conceptual interaction, that which stands for something else. Peirce’s manuscripts and thoughts require keen philological meticulousness in order to be interpreted correctly; yet, it might be argued that this model of semiosis is more logical than chronological, more diagrammatical than diachronic. What matters in it, indeed, is not the temporal order in the sequence of theoretical operations involving the object, the interpretant and the representamen, but the diagrammatical logic according to which Peirce sought to distinguish between an immediately unknowable ontology, language as a deposit of biological and cultural forms through the mediation of which such unknowable ontology is approached, and signs as the material interface of this interaction among reality and minds. On the one hand, then, the adoption of Peirce’s semiotics as a poststructuralist antidote to Saussure is oblivious of the role that time and diachronicity play in the thought of the Swiss linguist and semiologist; in a way, those semiotic anthropologists who, today, quote Peirce as an anti-Saussure thinker reproduce a stereotypical reception of the latter’s thought that is in keeping with that which would already circulate in the United States in the 1930s, but without taking into account all the reconsideration and dismantling of such stereotypes that has taken place in Europe and elsewhere in the following decades, and at least from Jakobson on. On the other hand, such interpretations of Peirce ad usum Delphini somehow also betray the US philosopher and semiotician’s thought itself, for they project on it a temporal and diachronic dimension that was not so primarily essential in his conception of meaning, signification and semiosis. Hence, whereas in Europe Peirce was poststructurally misinterpreted by Derrida so as to establish deconstructionist semiotics as an oppositional and poststructuralist alternative to structural semiotics (whereas Greimas would warn his disciples that ‘there is no salvation outside of the text’, Derrida would incite his own followers to maintain that ‘there is no outside of the text’), in the Anglophone academe, Peirce was also poststructurally misinterpreted as a diachronic, temporal and material alternative to Saussure’s supposedly synchronic,

124

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

atemporal and formal understanding of language. In both cases, however, only one aspect of Peirce’s complex model of signification was emphasized for the rhetorical purposes of begetting an almost caricatural opposition with continental French-speaking semiology.

POSTSTRUCTURALISMS FROM WITHOUT STRUCTURALISM Whereas post-Greimassian semioticians, Eco, some members of the European schools of semiotics and also the Chicago school of semiotic anthropology developed their poststructuralist approach essentially from within the semiotic tradition (although often ‘playing Peirce against Saussure’, as it was pointed out supra), other poststructuralist trends clearly unfolded from without the semiotic canon. They will be mentioned here only because they engaged a critical dialogue with semiotics, without nevertheless completely discarding the entire structuralist project (as it was specified earlier, it would be unreasonable to mention, in a companion of semiotics, philosophical trends that overtly misconstrued this discipline; in other words, the adversaries of semiotics will find their place in this chapter, but not its enemies). The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, for instance, evidently took many of his concepts from the linguistics and the semiotics that were popular at his time, but then twisted their theoretical shape according to a personal direction of thinking, where the structural methodology tends to fade away and remains as pale grid in the background of a superimposed structure, that is, the personal philosophical pattern devised by Deleuze himself. Such essentially poststructuralist relation with semiotics is already evident in Deleuze’s Proust et les signes (1964, third edn. 1976; Engl. trans. Proust and Signs, 1973, second edn. 2000): on the one hand, La recherche is read through a semiotic framework, not only because of the attention to the signs left and found by the characters, but also because of the systematic and methodic way in which Deleuze collects and analyses them; on the other hand, however, this systematic semiotic analysis yields to the idiosyncrasy of philosophical interpretation, and in particular to the hypothesis that Proust’s narrator might be a ‘universal schizophrenic’, whose logic would underpin the webbing of semiotic references throughout the narration. Similarly, in Différence et répétition (1968; Engl. trans. Difference and Repetition, 1994), the constellation of concepts that Deleuze shapes or reshapes is undoubtedly tributary to the episteme of structural linguistics and semiotics; the very opposition between a philosophical principle of difference and one of repetition seems to stem from an essentially semiotic understanding of both; that is even more evident in the third chapter of the work, dedicated to the ‘Image of Thought’, which reads as an attempt at semiotically re-establishing the entire demeanour of philosophy, displacing it from a truth-seeking endeavour to the strategy of creating a web of meaning between the subject and reality. Regarding these as well as many other aspects, Différence et repetition is a work that constantly dances with structuralism; yet more often than not, it also imposes its own steps, taking semiotics through philosophical and especially political pirouettes which the discipline of signs would not normally engage in (for instance the many hints that, in Deleuze’s work, seem to endorse the extolling of difference as a dimension of political, ethical and even anthropological liberation, whereas for prepoststructuralist semioticians, as well as for the post-poststructuralist ones, it is clear that difference and repetition are just two poles in the dialectics of meaning and cannot be turned into the values of a political manifesto – a semiotic system without repetition would be impossible).

POST/STRUCTURALIST SEMIOTICS

125

CONCLUSIONS: A CRUCIAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN STRUCTURALISMS AND POSTSTRUCTURALISMS The analysis, sub specie semioticae, of the many works by Gilles Deleuze that, although inspired by structuralism, structural linguistics and structural semiotics, actually diverged from their epistemology, using more than adopting it in order to pursue independent philosophical or social goals, could be extended much more: involving, for instance, a systematic analysis of the French philosopher’s production, of his immense influence, as well as a survey of all those intellectual productions that, from the end of the 1960s until nowadays, have been characterized by a similar theoretical and writing style, that of a philosophical or socio-political thought that takes some analytical hints from semiotics but then tends to turn them into metaphors, into structural excuses for poststructural discourses. Given the limits imposed on the present chapter, such an analysis cannot be carried on in an exhaustive way. Yet, Deleuze – who actually objected that his own philosophy might be labelled as ‘poststructuralist’ (although that is a common trend in the reception of his thought) – might be presented here as an example of what ultimately constitutes a fundamental but often neglected difference between the epistemology of structuralism and that of poststructuralism. Overall, structuralism was born as an attempt at including language – and, therefore, the humanities whose discourse is built through language – in the epistemological sphere of the sciences; focusing on structures – that is, on differences and relations among differences – more than on the elements involved was the genial idea through which Ferdinand de Saussure sought to subtract the study of language and the humanities to the field of subjective impressions. Individual elements are singular and idiosyncratically appraised, whereas differences, relations and structures can give rise to an intersubjective observation, analysis and, hopefully, understanding. Exactly because it is centred on the appraisal of relations, the epistemological framework of structuralism does not exclude time, temporality, agency and causality, but necessarily puts them all into brackets in order to crystallize them and, therefore, analyse the structure of relations that emerges from such freezing; unnatural and arbitrary as it might seem, indeed, such freezing of time is inevitable if the analyst wants to turn the unseizable flowing of reality into a graspable phenomenology, which is enunciated by the epistemological gaze of the analyst and nevertheless shows itself intersubjectively beyond and in contrast with the grid of such structural projection. An unavoidable consequence of this freezing is, however, the exclusion of any deontic horizon from structural investigation. Structuralism does not ask how reality came about, nor does it suggest what it should bring about. This is a stance that preserves the epistemological and, therefore, the methodological purity of structuralism (Greimas’s immanentism) but, at the same time, it inevitably hampers its ability to immediately talk to the anxious social demand of knowledge, which is increasingly not about ‘what’ or ‘how’ (two questions semiotics is perfectly capable to cope with) but about ‘why?’ and ‘for what?’ (two questions that structuralism and semiotics systematically and deliberately avoid). Poststructuralism can therefore be defined as an attempt at reintroducing these two questions within the scope of attention and the field of activity of structuralism. When this attempt is extreme, however, it shakes the very epistemological foundations of structuralism, with the paradoxical result of a poststructuralism without structures, of an anti-structuralism. From the point of view of semiotics, attempts at introducing a greater and fertile tension between epistemological purity and ethical access to the world are certainly welcome, as long as their excessive

126

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

deontic approach does not turn them into anti-structuralist ideologies, at odds with the original project of impartial humanities expressed by Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics.

NOTES 1 In Greimas’s approach to semiotics, time is less a philosophical problem than a textual effect; Paul Ricoeur, who maintained an intense, critical and fecund dialogue with Greimas, was the one who most effectively pointed out this shortcoming of his method (a shortcoming that, to a certain extent, affects the whole structuralist project: see Greimas and Ricoeur 2000). 2 A lack of attention to the materiality of the signifier is evident in Saussure, whose definition of sign tends to deprive it of its relation with the referent and its materiality; it is even more evident in Hjelmslev, whose glossematics tends to transform language dynamics into purely formal mechanisms; and it is certainly evident in Greimas, whose semiotic method exclusively deals with the immanence of texts, putting the problem of their material manifestation into brackets. The last works of Greimas and the subsequent trends in his school try to remedy this difficulty by intensifying an already fertile dialogue with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology (Greimas 1987; Fontanille 2004). 3 This is according to the mathematical meaning of the term ‘discrete’. 4 Greimas sought to tackle the problem of meaning as a non-discrete phenomenon in his last works, which gave rise to two of the most interesting trends in contemporary structuralist (or post-structuralist) semiotics: the semiotics of passions and the semiotics of tensions. The semiotics of passions tries to explain the emotional dimension of narratives, which had been neglected in previous works of Greimas and his school, and admits the possibility of conceiving meaning as emerging from a tension between values rather than from an opposition between them (Greimas and Fontanille, 1991; Pezzini 1991, 1998, 2000; see also Volli 2002). The semiotics of tensions pushes this theoretical intuition to the greatest extent, claiming that all semantic phenomena actually stem from a tension between two opposite forces (Zilberberg 1998, 2006). 5 Contemporary semioticians seek to face this challenge by blending the semiotic method with qualitative sociology, ethnology, or anthropology (Landowski 1989; Miceli 2005; Del Ninno 2007; Marsciani 2007). 6 The bibliography on poststructuralism is very abundant; just to quote the most important monographs published in the last ten years (and considering mainly works in English), see Münker, Roesler and Meunker (2012); Braidotti (2010); Dillet, MacKenzie and Porter (2013); Howarth (2013); Williams (2014); Angermuller (2015); Woermann (2016); Ganglbauer (2017); Smith (2017); Moxey (2018); Harari (2019); Poster (2019); Ingala and Rae (2020); for a quick introduction, see Belsey (2002). 7 That distinguishes Umberto Eco’s intellectual trajectory from that of Roland Barthes, whose ‘proto-post-structuralist’ work par excellence, that is, S/Z, was never followed by a return on more rigid and structuralist positions.

REFERENCES Angermuller, J. (2015), Why There Is No Poststructuralism in France: The Making of an Intellectual Generation, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Belsey, C. (2002), Post-Structuralism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

POST/STRUCTURALIST SEMIOTICS

127

Braidotti, R. (2010), After Poststructuralism: Transitions and Transformations, London: Taylor & Francis. Del Ninno, M., ed. (2007), Etnosemiotica, Rome: Meltemi. Deleuze, G. ([1964] 1976), Proust et les signes, 3rd edn, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Deleuze, G. (1968), Différence et répétition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Dillet, B., I. MacKenzie and R. Porter, eds (2013), The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Durnovo, N., B. Havránek, R. Jakobson, V. Mathesius, J. Mukařovský, N. Trubetzkoy and B. Trnka (1929), ‘Thèses présentées au Premier Congrès des philologues slaves’, in Mélanges linguistiques dédiés au Premier Congrès des Philologues Slaves, 5–29. Prague: Jednota. Eco, U. (1962), ‘The Analysis of Structure’, Times Literary Supplement, 27 September 1962: 755–6. Eco, U. ([1962] 1976), Opera aperta: Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee, 2nd edn, Milan: Bompiani. Eco, U. (1968), La struttura assente, Milan: Tascabili Bompiani. Eco, U. (1997), Kant e l’ornitorinco, Milan: Bompiani. English trans. A. McEwen, Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, 1999, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. Fontanille, J. (2004), Soma et Séma: Figures du corps, Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose. Fontanille, J. and C. Zilberberg (1998), Tension et signification, Sprimont: Mardaga. Ganglbauer, K. (2017), Logik des Signifikanten : Poststrukturalismus, Psychoanalyse und Dialektik: Saussure, Lacan, Kant und Hegel, Vienna: Ferstl & Perz Verlag. Greimas, A. J. (1966), Sémantique structurale, Paris: Larousse. Greimas, A. J. and J. Courtès (1979), Sémiotique : Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage, Paris: Hachette. Greimas, A. J. (1987), De l’imperfection, Périguex: P. Fanlac. Greimas, A. J. and J. Fontanille (1991), Sémiotique des passions : Des états de choses aux états d’âme, Paris: Seuil. Greimas, A. J. and P. Ricoeur (2000), Tra semiotica ed ermeneutica, ed. F. Marsciani, Rome: Meltemi. Harari, J. V. (2019), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, Ithaca, NJ: Cornell University Press. Howarth, D. R. (2013), Poststructuralism and after: Structure, Subjectivity and Power, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ingala, E. and G. Rae, eds (2020), Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics, London: Taylor and Francis. Keane, W. (2007), Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Landowski, E. (1989), La société réfléchie : Essais de socio-sémiotique, Paris: Seuil. Marsciani, F. (2007), Tracciati di etnosemiotica, Milan: Franco Angeli. Miceli, S. (2005), In nome del segno: Introduzione alla semiotica della cultura, Palermo: Sellerio. Moxey, K. (2018), The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Münker, S., A. Roesler and S. Meunker, eds (2012), Poststrukturalismus, Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung & Carl Ernst Poeschel. Pezzini, I., ed. (1991), Semiotica delle passioni: Saggi di analisi semantica e testuale, Bologna: Esculapio.

128

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Pezzini, I. (1998), Le passioni del lettore: Saggi di semiotica del testo, Milan: Bompiani. Pezzini, I., ed. (2000), Semiotic Efficacity and the Effectiveness of the Text: From Effects to Affects, Turnhout: Brepols. Poster, M. (2019), Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search of a Context, Ithaca, NJ: Cornell University Press. Saussure, F. de (1916), Cours de linguistique générale, ed. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, Paris: Payot. Smith, C. (2017), Déplacements post-structuraux : Deleuze, Derrrida, Lyotard. Paris: L’Harmattan. Volli, U. (2002), Figure del desiderio: Corpo, testo, mancanza, Milan: Raffaele Cortina. Williams, J. (2014), Understanding Poststructuralism, London and New York: Taylor and Francis. Woermann, M. (2016), Bridging Complexity and Post-Structuralism: Insights and Implications, Cham: Springer International Publishing. Zilberberg, C. (2006), Éléments de grammaire tensive, Limoges: PULIM.

CHAPTER SIX

Reality and Semiosis MARC CHAMPAGNE

A REAL PROBLEM What is a sign? A starting point does not have to be perfect, so let us start where we all normally start, namely common sense: [S]ome object sensed that brings into awareness something other or more than itself alone, such as that red octagon most everyone operating motor vehicles today recognizes as a “stop sign”. The driver, upon seeing the octagon, realizes that he is supposed to bring his vehicle to a halt. The red octagon occupies the foreground position of representing to or for the driver something that the driver is supposed to do. There is an object signifying an action for the driver to perform. The action to be performed is the object signified; the red octagon is the sign; the driver is the interpreter of the sign. (Deely 2014: 389–90) So far, so good. However, ‘[n]otice that what makes the red octagon a sign is the relation it establishes between action to be performed and driver. Take away the relation and the octagon remains as a sensible object, but no longer functions as a sign’ (Deely 2014: 390). As a result, the ordinary identification of the ‘sign with some particular sensible object turns out to be seriously deficient when we begin to reflect on the way in which sensible objects happen to become signs’ (Deely 2014: 390). One way of rectifying this deficiency is by conceiving the red octagon as a sign-vehicle and defining the whole sign more rigorously as any sign-vehicle that stands for something to something, where this ‘cooperation of three subjects’ is not ‘in any way resolvable into actions between pairs’ (Peirce 1907: CP 2.411). This definition, while better, generates a problem. Since the action of signs or semiosis is essentially relational, can it still be considered real? Signs are triadic, but there is a longstanding tradition that thinks ‘polyadic properties are metaphysically dubious’ (Marmodoro and Yates 2016: vii). No one denies that we can make true statements involving relations, but the idea that those relations exist in the world meets with resistance. Certainly, in conventional symbols like stop signs, we arbitrarily relate things. However, not all signs are conventional. Moreover, as we shall see in the penultimate section, there is a sense in which even conventional relations have some claim to being real.

130

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Metaphysics is like semiotics: you either do it well or do it badly, but avoiding commitments in that domain is not an option (Brunson 2006). However, when we engage explicitly in metaphysical reflection, we quickly realize that semiosis enjoys a double standing. On the one hand, the action of signs must be relied on to even raise the question of what is real and what is not. Yet, even if one is willing to accept that the conveyance of meaning currently under way (as you read these words) is as real as the ink and/or photons which support it, signs – as relations – are not mentioned in the official vocabulary of science. In a way, this absence is understandable. After all, ‘[w]hat a sentence means […] has no mass, no momentum, no electric charge, no solidity, and no clear extension in the space within you, around you, or anywhere’ (Deacon 2012: 1–2). It’s not that signs are denied by scientists. The situation is more pernicious; signs don’t even show up on their radar. So, while it is customary to turn to natural scientific theories for a description of what is real, we gather from those sources that electrons are real but signs are not – at least not in the same way. The task, then, is to clarify the difference. Outside Peirce scholarship, where we find an (over?)abundance of work on realism versus idealism (e.g. Champagne 2006; Lane 2018) and realism versus nominalism (e.g. Mayorga 2007; Forster 2011), semioticians usually take on their metaphysical outlooks uncritically. This does not mean, however, that metaphysical issues fail to preoccupy semioticians. On the contrary, from the moment the word ‘semiotics’ first appeared in the work of John Locke, semiotic inquiry has been bound up with metaphysical concerns (Armstrong 1965: 379). Since ‘[e]very time there is possibility of lying, there is a signfunction’ (Eco 1976: 58), we find a recurring preoccupation with whether the action of signs blocks (Hart 2000) or enables (Fairclough et al. 2002) genuine knowledge of reality. In fact, Thomas Sebeok went so far as to make it semiotics’ ‘main mission to mediate between reality and illusion […] and to search for the reality that may, after all, lurk behind that illusion’ (1986: 77–8; cf. Cobley 2010: 3). Yet, despite the prominence of these concerns, comparatively little work addresses whether semiosis exits in its own right. I have elsewhere toyed with the idea that semiosis is reality (Champagne 2015b). My verdict is that, when such a worldview makes ample room for potentially interpreted phenomena (Pihlström 2010), it is not nearly as implausible as it seems. Clearly though, the question of semiosis’ reality cannot be skipped. After all, if there is no such thing as the action of signs, the essays in this collection are essentially pointless. It therefore makes sense, as a metaphysical preamble, to inquire into the reality of semiosis itself.

SURVEYING SOME POSSIBLE STANCES Inquiring into the reality of semiosis requires us to specify what we mean by ‘real’. Let us therefore define reality as ‘that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be’ (Peirce 1878: CP 5.405). This is sensible enough. Yet, as long as reality is deemed mind-independent and semiosis is deemed mind-dependent, semiosis will be excluded from reality. So far as I can see – and this chapter does not pretend to have the final say on these matters – there are three basic ways to respond to this exclusion: 1. One can bite the bullet and accept that semiosis is not real in the mind-independent sense. 2. One can retain the view that to be real is to be mind-independent yet show that semiosis is indeed mind-independent, thereby securing its status as real. 3. One can reject the view that to be real is to be mind-independent.

REALITY AND SEMIOSIS

131

Stances in semiotics can be fruitfully classified according to which of these responses they favour. It is not, however, a matter of personal preference. Far from it, in order to be justified, each stance has distinctive work to do: 1ʹ. Since the action of signs must be relied on in order to adjudicate debates about what is real and what is not, one must show how denying the reality of semiosis is not self-defeating. 2ʹ. One must show how, exactly, semiosis is mind-independent. 3ʹ. One must show how the mind-independent construal of reality can be rejected without lapsing into an implausible view of reality as wholly fabricated. I propose to look at each of these argumentative trajectories in turn. My conclusions will be that 1ʹ cannot be shown whereas 2ʹ and 3ʹ could, with some work, be rendered tenable. I want to make a brief methodological remark before I proceed. Reflections on reality are as old as the written record, so there is a vast array of terms to choose from. For instance, Peirce (c.1902: CP 6.349) thought he could draw a distinction between ‘existence’ and ‘reality’. However, this idiosyncratic twist is found nowhere in mainstream metaphysics, where assigning different meanings to those terms is actually seen as a source of philosophical confusion (Ney 2014: 34). A metaphysical inquiry can thus be hindered when it tries to upend, not only the premises, but also the terms that govern conversations on these matters (for a case study in this, cf. Champagne 2008). Jargon does not always help and naming is not arguing. So, whenever possible, this chapter will opt for simple words to express its ideas and arguments. Given that questions about reality – and this book – concern scholars from many different disciplines, a policy of skipping needless terminology seems especially fitting.

ARGUMENT 1: SEMIOSIS MUST BE REAL, BECAUSE ITS DENIAL IS SELF-DEFEATING As Rossella Fabbrichesi explains, when we talk about reality, we refer to it either as a whole or as the part ‘that is before me while I examine it’ (2018: 5). As finite creatures with finite means, we are often wrong in our attempts to correctly classify/identify a local region of reality. I may, for instance, think that a distant animal is a cat when in fact it is a dog. In Peircean parlance, the cat wrongly envisioned would be an ‘immediate’ object of my visual signs, whereas the dog ‘whose characters are true of it independently of whether you or I, or any man, or any number of men think them as being characters of it, or not’ (Peirce 1907: EP 2.409) would be the ‘dynamic’ object (Pape 2015). Although the possibility of error requires us to justify why we think we know a subset of what is real, our recognition of reality’s presence as a whole does not stand in need of justification. Whatever mistakes one may make, something is out there. We may thus take as our point of departure the recognition that ‘there is being because we can pose the question of being, and this being comes before every question, and therefore before any answer and every definition’ (Eco 2000: 19; cf. Corrington 1987: 389). This recognition of reality writ large nevertheless leaves many specific questions unanswered. An ‘ontology’ is ‘an inventory […] of what genuinely exists without

132

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

redundancy – for example, what objects, properties and kinds there really are’ (Baker 2019: 4). As Willard V. O. Quine put it: A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: “What is there?” It can be answered, moreover, in a word – “Everything” – and everyone will accept this answer as true. However, this is merely to say that there is what there is. There remains room for disagreement over cases; and so the issue has stayed alive down the centuries. (Quine 1948: 21) So, looking at our particular case, does semiosis exist? In his concluding remarks to the very first world congress in semiotics, Eco cut the Gordian knot of ontology with a blunt inference: ‘During these six days we have spoken about semiotics. Therefore, semiotics exists’ (1979: 246). As Eco correctly noted, this terse argument relies on an implicit premise, which we might reconstruct as ‘Whatever people talk about (for a sustained duration) exists’. So stated, this premise is hardly acceptable, since counter-examples abound. We cannot, for instance, conjure the Loch Ness monster into existence simply by holding a colloquium on that cryptid. Eco was therefore careful to talk about the existence of semiotics (the discipline) not semiosis (the activity). It may be plausible to infer that a discipline exists simply by having adherents (Searle 1997), but this social existence does nothing to assure that what the discipline is about also exists. There is nonetheless a kernel of wisdom in Eco’s remark. Humans may have held their first concerted academic reflections on signs in the twentieth century, but humans have been using signs long before that. Insofar as semioticians generate signs about signs, their work counts as an instance of semiosis – albeit a two-ply action of signs (Deely 2015: 32fn3). This very act of questioning the reality of semiosis thus seems to provide the answer it seeks. How could semiosis fail to be real, if one must depend on the action of signs in order to render doubts about its presence intelligible? Consider, by analogy, the question ‘Is speech possible?’ Clearly, one cannot utter this concern without answering it in the affirmative. A ‘speech-skeptic’ could perhaps stay silent and retreat to a written medium in order to express her doubts about the existence of voices. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1974: sect. 7) famously explored the (‘quietist’) possibility of alluding to showing what one cannot say (Legg 2008). Contrary to the received narrative (e.g. Lee 2011), when Wittgenstein did this, he ceased being a philosopher of language, insofar as philosophy of signs is distinguished from philosophy of language precisely by admitting non-verbal (iconic and indexical) acts in its repertoire (Champagne 2014). However, for that very reason, the sweeping question ‘Do signs exist?’ leaves no room for any retreat. Doubt signs – and you can no longer express your doubts, even to yourself (Colapietro 1989; Raggatt 2010). A more promising formulation of Eco’s remark, then, might be to say that ‘one must defend the reality, not just of an ontology, but of whatever the defence of that ontology presupposes/utilizes’ (Champagne 2015b: 532). The central argument of this first section can thus be put like this: 1. Premise: The denial of signs is a stance that must be defended. 2. Premise: No defence (of anything) can take place without involving signs. Therefore, 3. Conclusion: The action of signs can only be denied by being confirmed.

REALITY AND SEMIOSIS

133

The attempt to drop signs from our considered picture of reality thus seems impossible to defend. While a reductive account might be feasible, eliminativism about signs is a nonstarter. Indeed, [s]ome theses are in conflict with their own presuppositions, so that the implications of their truth for the sort of theorizing being done by their advocates is epistemically disastrous. The argument that eliminative materialism is self-refuting is one argument in this vein that has frequently been made. […] The truth of the eliminativist thesis would, according to this argument, make nonsense out of the activity of articulating, asserting, or defending the thesis of eliminative materialism. (Reppert 1992: 379; cf. Baker 1987) So long as a scientifically informed view of reality depends on the action of signs in order to be discovered, conceptualized, communicated, tested and consensually accepted, that scientifically informed view will have to countenance the action of signs in some fashion. Translated into the only terms that it officially accepts, a matter-only worldview would amount to – not arguments and rational appeals to evidence – but rather clashes of matter, followed by more clashes of matter and so on. Eliminative materialists who gather in a conference room to ‘defend’ their view produce only wind, not signs. Surprisingly, then, we can argue that ‘We have spoken about our preferred subject. Therefore, semiosis exists’ (to paraphrase Eco 1979: 246). This self-confirming status is nevertheless muddled by the fact that, traditionally, the hallmark of the real is mind-independence. This is the construal that, in ordinary language, makes the adjective ‘real’ an antonym to, say, ‘imagined’. So, if semiosis involves your mind – and a great many minds besides, given the shared code needed to decipher these symbols – then semiosis does not seem to exist as bluntly as things like rocks and chairs. How could signs figure alongside electrons? This tension will arguably be felt less forcefully when one endorses an ontology, not of matter, but of processes (Whitehead [1929] 1978), patterns (Ross 2004), structures (Ladyman et al. 2007) or relations (Dipert 1997; Ladyman 2016). But, if one has already settled the question of what is real with some version of materialism, a sign-inclusive ontology can be hard to envision. It was not always so. The ancient conception of symptoms, for example, did not make signs and electrons such strange bedfellows. While it makes sense to turn to wellconfirmed science for reliable insights about what is real, we should recall that ‘inference by signs […] was a topic of great concern among the post-Aristotelian philosophical schools, in that semiotic inference constituted one of the cardinal elements of scientific procedure’ (Manetti 2002: 283). So, if we look carefully at what it means to be a sign, we see that the various things that specific sciences countenance are discovered and confirmed via signs. This is the case when small things are detected via their impact on measuring instruments or when large populations are known via samples. Despite variations in these cases, ‘what is essential to the sign is not how it is experienced […] but that it make present something more than itself’ (Deely 2001: 406). The readings on an instrument dial stand for something more than those readings, as do samples collected. For example, [a]natomists may have to decide whether a dark spot in a micrograph was caused by a staining artifact or by light reflected from an anatomically significant structure. Physicists may wonder whether a blip in a Geiger counter record reflects the causal

134

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

influence of the radiation they wanted to monitor, or a surge in ambient radiation. Chemists may worry about the purity of samples used to obtain data. (Bogen 2017: sect. 6) Instruments and organs can malfunction, but since a faculty is not its exercises, this possibility of error is insufficient to bar the possibility of success. Consider, for instance, that I am an imperfect dart thrower. Hence, on the whole, I only sometimes hit the bull’s eye. But, in any given shot, it is clear-cut whether I have or have not landed in that inner zone. Likewise, […] we can acknowledge the fallibility of a capacity like perception while recognizing that, in the good instances, our perceptual organs reveal how things really are. (Champagne 2015a: 157) Sceptical exaggerations may be the norm in some circles, but in thinkers like Aristotle we find ‘a path-breaking recognition that an argument may lack deductive validity without thereby relinquishing all claim to persuade rational beings’ (Allen 2001: 8; cf. Twomey 2019). We can reduce our ignorance by sharing our best findings, but such a gradual approximation of reality would not even be attemptable unless the signs it employs are also real. Most of the signs prized by natural scientists exploit a causal link between sign-vehicle and object(s), but if what was involved was only a causal link, the possibility of erring (which pervades actual scientific inquiry) would make no sense. Hence, in order to be informative, the causal links that crisscross the world must be interpreted. This need for interpretation generates the following worry: If sign-vehicles need to be interpreted in order for them to render the distinctive semiosic service of revealing something more, and if such interpretation is something minds do, doesn’t this expel signs from the mindindependently real? It is to this question that I now turn.

ARGUMENT 2: SEMIOSIS IS REAL, BECAUSE IT TAKES PLACE APART FROM HUMAN MINDS A useful way to introduce this second family of arguments is historical time. The French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, for instance, makes much of the fact that ‘empirical science is today capable of producing statements about events anterior to the advent of life as well as consciousness’ (2008: 9). We know, for instance, that life originated on Earth 3.5 billion years ago. Humans appeared about 2 million years ago. Even if those numbers are not exact, they clearly leave a large span of time when no activity (semiosic or otherwise) depended on any mind. Meillassoux thus wonders: ‘How are we to grasp the meaning of scientific statements bearing explicitly upon a manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life – posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world?’ (2008: 9–10). Looking closely at Meillassoux’s question, something can be prior to any human relation to the world without being prior to the emergence of life. This is the case, for example, with dinosaurs. As the fossil record attests, humans and dinosaurs never walked the Earth at the same time. Now imagine that, in a bid to protect her hatchlings, a dinosaur

REALITY AND SEMIOSIS

135

roared loudly and a potential predator fled, on account of that sound. Surely such events happened, even though humans weren’t around to witness them – much less interpret them in any way. Do we really want to say that, owing to our absence, this event was semiosically ‘silent’, so to speak? Our current knowledge is enabled by the confrontation between the two dinosaurs that took place long ago, so there is a sense in which this past event had, at the time of its occurrence, a potential to be interpreted by future creatures (not yet born). Thus, were we to flirt with contentious language, we might say that ‘signs work as an influence of the future upon the present, and the meaning of the past is shaped by that influence of the future’ (Deely 2009a: 207). Such a reversal may be easier to defend when it comes to the physics of photons (Merrell 1995: 229). Still, it seems rather self-aggrandizing to hold that the sound emitted by the dinosaur only became ‘menacing’ millions of years after the fact, when we humans used our alleged monopoly on signcreation to imbue this past occurrence with significance. Ostensibly, life and signs go hand in hand (Sebeok 1988: 1089), so the question of whether semiosis can occur without life is vexed (Higuera 2012; Champagne 2013b). Luckily, the argument considered in this section does not require us to find an instance of abiotic sign-action. It only requires one to find an instance of semiosis that does not involve any human mind. This idea that semiosis is not the sole preserve of humans is gaining mainstream traction (e.g. Skyrms 2010), but it is still best exemplified in the work of Jakob von Uexküll. Putting into practice the warning that ‘[w]e are always on the wrong track when we try to judge the world of animals by the standards of our own world’ (Uexküll [1940] 1982: 72), the biologist deployed a battery of observations to vindicate the view that ‘everything in nature is created by its meaning’ ([1940] 1982: 72). Importantly, nothing in Uexküll’s account requires a thing or event to be meaningful in a way that humans could recognize and/or care about. The question of what counts as a ‘meaning-carrier’ is instead indexed to a creature’s circumstances, plus whatever species this creature belongs to. Uexküll calls the sum of these species-specific experiential affordances a ‘surroundingworld’ or Umwelt. Hence, in a typical environment like a forest, [t]he meaning of the forest is multiplied a thousandfold if its relationships are extended to animals, and not only limited to human beings […]. Let us consider, for example, the stem of a blooming meadow-flower and ask ourselves which roles are assigned to it in the following four Umwelts: 1. In the Umwelt of a girl picking flowers, who gathers herself a bunch of colourful flowers that she uses to adorn her bodice; 2. In the Umwelt of an ant, which uses the regular design of the stem-surface as the ideal path in order to reach its food-area in the flower-petals; 3. In the Umwelt of a cicada-larva, which bores into the sap-paths of the stem and uses it to extract the sap in order to construct the liquid walls of its airy house; 4. In the Umwelt of a cow, which grasps the stems and the flowers in order to push them into its wide mouth and utilizes them as fodder. According to the Umwelt-stage on which it appears, the identical flower stem at times plays the role of an ornament, sometimes the role of a path, sometimes the role of an extraction-point, and finally the role of a morsel of food. (Uexküll [1940] 1982: 29–30)

136

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

In the examples just given, the flower stem is a brute thing in the world. But, despite remaining constant, that flower ‘stands for’ different objects. These different ‘standing for’ relations are made manifest by the various interpretive effects they engender. The fact that the girl deems the flower beautiful is not merely some private mental image (though it may include that). Rather, the girl’s assessment is made manifest by the public action(s) that it prompts, such as decorating her body with the flower. Similarly, the fact that the ant deems the flower stem sturdy enough to climb is revealed by its decision to climb atop that flower stem without hesitation. Of course, such actions are themselves liable of being taken as signs and interpreted. Semiosic relations thus bind perception and action in an unending loop (Uexküll [1940] 1982: 32). This view of life and meaning suggests a promising research programme (Anderson et al. 1984) that is markedly different from Ferdinand de Saussure’s view of ‘semiology’ as part of social psychology (Saussure [1916] 2011: 16). Yet, despite its attractiveness, a paradigm that studies non-human signs must contend with genuine limitations. Imaginative empathy to the side, no human can truly see a flower as a ladder, just as no ant can truly see a flower as an ornament. It is not just a matter of having the right perspective or the right background knowledge; it is also a matter of having the right organs. For instance, to know what it’s like to be a bat, one would need a body capable of echo-locating (Nagel 1974). The embodied properties of an organism thus constrain what meaning(s) a thing or event can carry. Because the limits at hand are constitutive of all experience, ‘[n]o animal will ever leave its Umwelt space, the center of which is the animal itself’ (Uexküll [1936] 2001: 109). Since the individual surrounded by an environment stands to gain or lose from the various actions and occurrences it is embroiled in, that living centre determines, not only what is meaningful, but also what is valuable (Champagne 2011). Among humans for instance, labyrinths provide diversion and/or logical exercise (e.g. Peirce 1908). However, a rat will experience a labyrinth quite differently. Since that environment is foreign to its innate and acquired expectations, being placed in a labyrinth prompts fear and heightened attention (Peterson 1999: 58–61; Champagne 2020: 34–6). Laboratory experiments that employ labyrinths to measure animal behaviour are thus ‘based on the false assumption that an animal can at any time enter into a relationship with a neutral object’ (Uexküll [1940]1982: 27). Do these scenarios about dinosaurs, ants, bats and rats suffice to show that sign-action does not depend on human minds and is thereby real? Nothing in the contemporary semiotic notion of ‘interpretant’ requires it to be mental or human (Champagne 2009). Still, what makes the second family of arguments philosophically tricky is the fact that, in the various descriptions of animal behaviour given, humans are always the ones doing the last round of interpreting. John Deely generalizes the conundrum as follows: We know for sure only that the world continues, as long as we are not the one who dies. And we are pretty sure that, were we the one to die, the world would continue anyway, and that others, whether witnesses to our death or not, or even aware of our death, would find that the world continues, just as we find that it continues when others die. So what is the world? Something at least in many respects, if not in all, independent of our consciousness. And yet this consciousness of which so much of the world appears to be independent is essential to there being a world at all from our point of view. (Deely 2004b: 2)

REALITY AND SEMIOSIS

137

It is useful to classify metaphysicians into those who conceive the world as a bowl of jelly and those who conceive it as a bucket of pellets (Danto 1989: xvii; cf. Russell 1956: 39). If, like jelly, ‘all that exists is continuous’ (Peirce 1897: CP 1.172), then some minimal mind-world and mind-mind connection is guaranteed. Peirce called this ‘synechism’ (Esposito 2005), but we have to guard against defining a metaphysical view into rectitude simply by introducing a term. Assuming that genuine reasons for synechism are given, an uninterrupted reality would entail that humans striving to understand sign-use outside their species necessarily contaminate every observation they make. The primatologist Shirley Strum (1990: 15), for instance, recounts how she had to study the social behaviour of animals from the vantage (and safety) of a white Volkswagen van. After a few years, a troop of monkeys had gotten used to the van – though not to the people. The behaviour that the primatologists observed thus bore a trace of this habituation to a human artefact. Naturally, the shortcoming described by Strum could be remedied by switching to, say, a camouflaged hide-out or hidden cameras. Such devices, however, would never alter the fact that the chain of signs about signs always ends with humans grasping what the monkeys do. So, while it is tempting to think that advances in biosemiotics can somehow solve age-old metaphysical concerns, ‘[t]he trail of the human serpent is […] over everything’ (James [1907] 1922: 64). The observations offered earlier by Uexküll are thus correct but incomplete. Strictly speaking, those observations would have to be reworded as ‘In the Umwelt of a human we see that in the Umwelt of a cicada-larva, which bores into the sap-paths of the stem of a blooming meadow-flower and uses it to extract the sap in order to construct the liquid walls of its airy house’, and so on. Deely decried philosophies that are ‘unable to conceive’ how the mind could have before it ‘something that the mind did not make’ (2004b: 4). Although Deely boasted that ‘semiotics in principle does not have this problem’ (2004b: 4), his positive account never achieved a degree of concision, clarity and persuasiveness commensurate with his advertisements. Deely’s mentor, Thomas Sebeok, had a more prosaic outlook on the problem: [S]upposing that a behavioral segment, say, in a chimpanzee, is registered by the observing psychologist as a sequence of signing gestures to humans or other chimpanzees, and is interpreted by her as a string of communicational sign-vehicles, then that behavioral segment has to be, in the first instance, a product of that observer’s subjective Umwelt. In fact, what may constitute a “sign” in the Umwelt of the observed organism is inaccessible to the observer. The solution to this seemingly intractable dilemma, according to Uexküll, presupposes that the would-be observer of the behavior of another organism begin by analyzing her own Umwelt before she can undertake productive observations of the behavior of speechless creatures. It is by way of such a comparative analysis that we are led straight back into the heart of semiosis in our human world. (Sebeok 1991: 104) A view that foregrounds the action of signs throughout the living world (e.g. Hoffmeyer 1996) is quite attractive. But, to secure the ambitious metaphysical claim that semiosis is human-mind-independent, we need to suppose that our participation is absent when in point of fact our participation is present. I believe that semiotics has tools to render this combination stable (Champagne 2018). There is, however, a tremendous difference between forgetting that we are always there and remembering that we have to forget that we are always there. Only the latter stance is viable.

138

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

There is thus a genuine tension here that cannot be stipulated away. Indeed, how can we hold fast to the recognition that ‘[a]nything, to be an object, must exist in awareness’  –  while at the same time acknowledging that ‘not everything needs to be known […] in order to be at all’ (Deely 2009b: 8)? Some theorists like Walker Percy (1989) see the triadic nature of sign-relations as a key to understanding the human condition (Perkins 2011). However, ‘Thirdness’ in Peircean semiotics is whatever comes third – nothing more, nothing less. Hence, ‘Percy seems to have thought Peirce’s triadic theory somehow said more than Peirce ever aspired to say […]’ (Utz 2018: 30–1). Still, ‘[i]t seems a strange thing, when one comes to ponder over it, that a sign should leave its interpreter to supply a part of its meaning […]’ (Peirce 1906: EP 2.394). Does this necessary contribution of an interpreter mean that signs are not ‘real’ in the traditional mind-independent sense? This is what I now want to explore.

ARGUMENT 3: SEMIOSIS DEPENDS ON MINDS BUT IS NEVERTHELESS REAL, BECAUSE REALITY IS NOT ALWAYS MIND-INDEPENDENT Reality clearly demonstrates a (more or less stable) structure amenable to our (again, more or less stable) understanding. Some patterns are patterns that we find in the world while others are patterns that we put in the world. For example, we discover and then detect diabetics, but we have to invent hipsters before we can detect them. In his seminal paper ‘Real Patterns’, Daniel Dennett proposed a criterion for determining when a pattern is truly real and not just made up. A pattern, he argues, is real when it allows for informational compressibility. To better understand this criterion, we need to recall the circumstances that motivate it. Dennett’s goal was to demystify the predictive power of folk psychology. Predictions made using predicates like ‘is angry’ or ‘believes that x’ are remarkably successful, despite the fact that they do not rely on brain scans, blood flow rates, palm moisture levels and other material indicators. Instead, ‘[w]e use folk psychology – interpretation of each other as believers, wanters, intenders, and the like – to predict what people will do next’ (Dennett 1991: 29). We interpret others well enough that we know in advance how they will interpret the signs we emit. We do this mostly intuitively. However, one (if not the most important) of the semiotic endeavors is to explain why something looks intuitive, in order to discover under the felicity of the so-called intuition a complex cognitive process. It is intuitive that I can seduce a lady, a potential partner in an important business, or a corrupt politician, either by saying that I am rich and generous or by offering her or him a titillating dinner in the most luxurious restaurant of the city […]. It is equally intuitive that probably the dinner would be more convincing than a crude verbal statement. It is not intuitive why all this is intuitive. (Eco 1984: 9) Attitudes and beliefs are not material things, so how can a materialist explain the staggering utility of those concepts? ‘The success of folk-psychological prediction, like the success of any prediction, depends on there being some order or pattern in the world to exploit. […] When are the elements of a pattern real and not merely apparent?’ (Dennett 1991: 30). In order to render this question tractable, Dennett turns to information theory. In information theory, an object is said to be compressible when it can be represented by

REALITY AND SEMIOSIS

139

a representation that is smaller (in informational size) than that object. The following experiment illustrates how informational compressibility relates to debates about reality. A class of university students is shown three empty grids comprised of two rows and thirteen columns. They are told that the grids will soon be filled with letters. Students are then divided into groups. One person from each group is asked to exit the classroom. However, before those chosen students leave, they exchange contact details with their teammates and are told to expect three text messages on their Smartphones. Each message will convey succinct instructions on how to accurately fill the grids with lowercase letters. The first text message will tell them which letters to write in the first grid, and so on. Everyone is reminded that, to keep things manageable, the exercise will involve lower-case letters only. Once the selected students from each group leave the room, those who remain are shown the filled grids (Figure 6.1). Groups are instructed to craft messages that comply with the following constraints: (1) the messages must allow the receiving student to reproduce the letters with complete accuracy and (2) the messages must have the smallest informational size possible. The notion of informational size admits of a robust mathematical treatment (Shannon 1948; Dretske 1981: 1–62), but for our purposes we can rephrase the second constraint by saying that the text messages must contain the fewest typographical characters possible. Groups compete to make the shortest message possible. Students are nudged with questions like: ‘Is this really the lowest number of typographical characters that you can use?’ Teammates are encouraged to pool their ideas and carefully edit each text

FIGURE 6.1  Visual stimulus.

140

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

message before sending them. In so doing, students are collectively testing the limits of informational compression. Since the absent teammate will have to reproduce the full grids of letters perfectly, students are striving to achieve ‘lossless’ compression (Sayood 2003). So, under these conditions, how low can we go? Not every string of letters can be compressed. The first object, for example, must invariably be conveyed by a text message of twenty-six letters. No pattern(s) can be discerned, so students eventually conclude that they must reproduce the random series of letters seriatim: ‘gakdihtd … ’ Some letters (like ‘d’) occur more than once, but instructions on where these letters reappear would take up more space than they would save. The content of the first grid is just too disorderly to be compressed. The second grid (‘abbbbb …’) is different. Although decompressing the message as intended by the senders requires mobilizing tacit knowledge, groups are usually able to correctly instruct their missing teammate with the following message: ‘a24bc’ (the string ‘a,24b,c’ is a little longer, with the trade-off that it makes errors less likely). The content of the third grid (‘abcdef …’) can be compressed to an even greater degree, since students with their Smartphones are usually able to correctly reproduce the full string of letters after receiving a message of only three characters: ‘a–z’ or ‘a2z’ (slightly longer successful variants include ‘a … z’). In sum, the first object cannot be compressed, whereas the second and third object can. Rephrasing this result in terms of the quantity of characters used, the first object can do no better than a 26:26 (or 1:1) vehicle-to-object size ratio, the second object allows for a ratio of 26:5 and the third object can allow a ratio as low as 26:3. Sign-vehicles comprised of fewer characters can still be emitted, but those sign-vehicles would no longer allow a receiving student to reproduce the full grids of letters with total accuracy (this would then count as ‘lossy’ compression). Character strings like ‘a24bc’ and ‘a–z’ stand for a greater number of characters. Such messages therefore exemplify ‘what is essential to the sign’, namely ‘that it make present something more than itself, something other’ (Deely 2001: 406). Even the full repetition of the first object’s random letters is a sign, since it indicates outside the classroom what is inside the classroom. In all instances, something (a text message) stands for something (a full grid of letters) to something (a student). Grasping this ‘standing for’ relation generates interpretants – in this case the ability to correctly (re)produce the object of the sign on the blackboard without loss. This ‘tri-relative influence’ between the text message, the blackboard and the person is not ‘in any way resolvable into actions between pairs’ (Peirce 1907: CP 2.411). The fact that interpretation seals the deal (or is a ‘Third’) can make it seem as if interpretation has free reign. Nothing could be farther from the truth (Eco 1990). Groups are free to send whatever they want to their absent classmates, but not all signs will succeed in conveying correct instructions. Indeed, the merit of the various message designs transmitted via the Smartphones is revealed for all to see once the classmates return to the room and fill the empty grids with lower-case letters. As they perform this task, we can verify whether the initial objects were successfully conveyed. Needless to say, the odds of correctly filling each ice cube tray purely by luck would be astronomical. The lesson to be learned from this experiment is twofold. First, semiosis works. Second, it is the world, not our minds, which determines what is or isn’t a pattern. Minds may (contingently) be responsible for carrying out the compression/decompression, but the property of compressibility that renders this manipulation possible is outside anyone’s control. Dennett thus holds that a pattern is real if there is ‘a description of the data that is more efficient’ than a detail-by-detail duplication, irrespective of ‘whether or not anyone

REALITY AND SEMIOSIS

141

can concoct’ this more efficient description (Dennett 1991: 34). His master argument, then, might be stated like this: 1. Premise: Reality is mind-independent. 2. Premise: The ability of some patterns to be compressed is independent of any mind. Therefore, 3. Conclusion: Some patterns are real. Since the experiment that I have outlined yields results open to falsification, it can serve as empirical support for this argument’s second premise. Sign-vehicles can represent their objects despite being smaller than those objects. This ability to cut corners explains the continued utility of folk psychological predicates (Champagne 2013a). Just as ‘a24bc’ gives an interpreter semiosic access to a larger object, a description like ‘She is angry’ stands for a host of physical symptoms like higher heart rate, flushed cheeks, lower disposition to comply with requests, etc. Although Dennett (1993: 212) was reluctant to engage in metaphysical debates, his compressibility criterion has inspired promising views of reality (Ross 2004). I want to argue, though, that Dennett’s principled division of real and unreal patterns needs to be finessed or at least qualified. This is because the experimental setup I have described problematizes the boundary between the mind-independent and the mind-dependent that is taken for granted in the first premise of Dennett’s master argument. To see how that boundary can be blurred, consider the third object, which consisted of the standard alphabetical sequence. As mentioned, students usually have no trouble conveying these twenty-six letters with only three characters (‘a–z’ or ‘a2z’). Even so, the alphabet must first be memorized in order to be compressed. Now, memorization is a mind-dependent act, if anything is. Apart from convention, there is no reason why this string of (otherwise random) letters should be privileged over others. After all, I could teach my children an alternative alphabet and even compose a memorable melody for that invented sequence of letters. Yet, because the familiar alphabetical sequence ‘abcde … ’ is demonstrably compressible, it fully satisfies Dennett’s definition of a real pattern. What are we to make of this? The alphabet is, we might say, familiar gibberish. Far from being an oxymoron or category mistake, familiar gibberish is a pervasive part of our experiential lives. For example, my partner and I named our second son Louis-Cyr, after the famous Québecois strongman. Using that name in context originally sounded strange, but now the strangeness runs in the opposite direction: I am surprised that the strongman bore my child’s name. Names are arbitrary conventions, but habits can make the arbitrary appear non-arbitrary. This phenomenon explains why it does not require much effort for a suitably educated adult to recall the alphabet (in the standard order, at least). Likewise, a stranger will think that my son is called Louis-Cyr, whereas my partner and I cannot help but think that he is Louis-Cyr. This sort of reification may look misplaced, but from a cognitive and evolutionary standpoint it is tremendously useful, since it allows for informational compressibility when there is no pattern to be compressed. The importance of this phenomenon cannot be overstated. It may, for example, be at the root of the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, according to which the categories of one’s natural language condition what one can and cannot detect in the world (Sapir 1929: 209). Even if we reject the strong version of this hypothesis, we still have to explain puzzling bodies of cross-cultural data (e.g. Everett 2009). Like it or not, there is some wisdom in the claim that ‘[t]he categories and types

142

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

that we isolate from the world’ do not ‘stare every observer in the face’ but must instead ‘be organized by our minds’ in a way that is reflective of ‘an agreement […] codified in the patterns of our language’ (Whorf 1940: 213–14; cf. Champagne 2020: 78–9). While critics who think the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is ‘wrong, all wrong’ (Pinker 1994: 57) recoil from the suggestion that conventions render some worldviews incommensurate, it might be more productive to focus on the real culprit, namely habituation (the Peircean distinction between legisigns and symbols, though often conflated – e.g. Danesi 2007: 176 – has the merit of recognizing that all conventions involve habits but not all habits involve conventions). When students outside the classroom receive the text message ‘a–z’, they are triggered to recall a piece of knowledge that was committed to memory in long form. The problem, however, is that this prior learning and recollection play no part in their conscious awareness. That is the whole point of habituation, which reduces what we must consciously attend to (Prinz 2012). So, while we are adept at unpacking signs like ‘a24bc’ and ‘a–z’ into strings of twenty-six tokens, our success at both tasks occludes rather than reveals the genuine ontological difference between these two objects. For ‘a24bc’, grasping the type ‘b’ along with the multiplication hint ‘24’ suffices to generate all the tokens required (‘b, b, b, b, b, b, …’) between the stand-alone ‘a’ and the standalone ‘c’. A sequence of repeated tokens is as orderly as it gets. By contrast, not only is the sequence of letters between the bookends of ‘a’ and ‘z’ completely random, its twenty-six distinct tokens are of twenty-six different types. Hence, in theory, the third object should be the least compressible. But, in practice, it proves to be the most compressible. This is a reproducible result that anyone who runs the classroom experiment can confirm. How should we gloss this surprising result? Lynne Rudder Baker provides a helpful diagnosis of what is going on: [M]ind-dependent phenomena may be just as genuine or as ‘real’ as mind-independent phenomena. Many (perhaps all) physicalists take mind-independent phenomena to be ontologically superior to mind-dependent phenomena. I disagree: Temporally prior, yes; but we should not confuse temporal with ontological priority. An entity x is ontologically prior to y only if x has greater ontological significance than y. Mindindependence does not confer ontological significance. (This seems obvious if you think of the time right after the Big Bang: the entities and properties that existed then presumably were mind-independent, but not more ontologically significant than artworks and artefacts that exist today. Artefacts – say, robots – could not exist in a world without minds, but they have no less ontological significance than the atoms and gases that existed in the first minute after the Big Bang.) (Baker 2019: 6–7) To be clear, one cannot squeeze the alphabet into three characters or unpack the resulting abbreviation without learning. Such compression and decompression thus depend on temporally prior events. Still, the fact that mind-dependent patterns can experientially masquerade as – and provide the same informational benefits as – mind-independent patterns shows that ‘the sorting out of which-is-which is a problem rather than a given’ (Deely 2004a: 35; cf. Champagne 2020: 159). This difficulty in telling apart the conventional and non-conventional confirms our starting realization that hand-waving allusions to reality’s reality, while true, offer little guidance when it comes to local ontological claims.

REALITY AND SEMIOSIS

143

REAL WORK TO BE DONE Let us recap the problem that set our inquiry into motion. Given our routine reliance on signs, it would be bizarre if the action of signs turned out to be unreal. Yet, once we ask in a deliberate way whether semiosis is real, we find ourselves having to define what ‘being real’ consists in. One plausible definition is that reality is whatever does not depend on any mind. However, despite (or rather because of) its pervasive role in our lives, semiosis seems to get excluded from the sphere of the mind-independently real. I have catalogued three possible responses to this exclusion. The first response consisted in holding that semiosis must be real, because denying the reality of signs is self-defeating. This self-confirming status seems to imply that semiosis is the very means by which we partition the mind-independent and mind-dependent. Further work would need to clarify this ontological neutrality (Deely 2009b) or priority (Bains 2006). The second response consisted in identifying an instance of sign-action that is mindindependent. Instead of searching for abiotic semiosis, a more parsimonious approach is to ask whether we want reality to be what exists apart from minds in general or apart from human minds specifically. If we adopt the latter view, and if the action of signs can be shown to take place in the non-human realm, this would show that semiosis does not depend on us. Further work would need to explain how humans can interpret all this while putting themselves out of the equation, so to speak (Champagne 2019). The third response consisted in saying that, despite its initial plausibility, the minddependent and mind-independent division is not clear-cut. This is because some conventional patterns can be informationally compressed in ways that are practically indistinguishable from genuinely mind-independent patterns. Further work would need to clarify how the mind-dependent/mind-independent divide can admit of such hybrid cases (Khalidi 2016). I have deliberately stayed silent on which of these responses is best. This is because, whatever argument one favours, more needs to be done. In addition to the specific tasks listed in this conclusion, we would have to ascertain in what respects the three families of arguments surveyed are compatible or incompatible. Since, as warned at the outset, this chapter did not exhaust all that could be said, we would also need to identify arguments that do not fall neatly within those families. Hopefully, the present contribution has cleared the way for such future work.

REFERENCES Allen, J. (2001), Inference from Signs: Ancient Debates about the Nature of Evidence, Oxford: Clarendon. Anderson, M., N. Deely, M. Krampen, J. Ransdell, T. A. Sebeok and T. von Uexküll (1984), ‘A Semiotic Perspective on the Sciences: Steps towards a New Paradigm’, Semiotica, 52 (1–2): 7–47. Armstrong, R. L. (1965), ‘John Locke’s “Doctrine of Signs”: A New Metaphysics’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 26 (3): 369–82. Bains, P. (2006), The Primacy of Semiosis: An Ontology of Relations, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Baker, L. R. (1987), Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

144

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Baker, L. R. (2019), ‘Just What Is Social Ontology?’ Journal of Social Ontology, 5 (1): 1–12. Bogen, J. (2017), ‘Theory and Observation in Science’, in E. N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford: Stanford University Metaphysics Research Lab, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/science-theory-observation/. Brunson, D. J. (2006), ‘Peircean Semiotics and the Need for Metaphysics’, in T. J. Prewitt and B. Smith (eds), Semiotics, 37–46, Toronto: Legas Press. Champagne, M. (2006), ‘Some Convergences and Divergences in the Realism of Charles Peirce and Ayn Rand’, The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, 8 (1): 19–39. Champagne, M. (2008), ‘What Anchors Semiosis: How Descartes Changed the Subject’, Semiotic Inquiry, 28–9 (1–3): 183–97. Champagne, M. (2009), ‘A Note on M. Barbieri’s “Scientific Biosemiotics”’, The American Journal of Semiotics, 25 (1–2): 155–61. Champagne, M. (2011), ‘Axiomatizing Umwelt Normativity’, Sign Systems Studies, 39 (1): 9–59. Champagne, M. (2013a), ‘Choosing between the Long and Short Informational Routes to Psychological Explanation’, Philosophical Psychology, 26 (1): 129–38. Champagne, M. (2013b), ‘A Necessary Condition for Proof of Abiotic Semiosis’, Semiotica, 197: 283–7. Champagne, M. (2014), ‘Semiotics’, in D. Pritchard (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0179. Champagne, M. (2015a), ‘Disjunctivism and the Ethics of Disbelief’, Philosophical Papers, 44 (2): 139–63. Champagne, M. (2015b), ‘A Less Simplistic Metaphysics: Peirce’s Layered Theory of Meaning as a Layered Theory of Being’, Sign Systems Studies, 43 (4): 523–52. Champagne, M. (2018), Consciousness and the Philosophy of Signs, Dordrecht: Springer. Champagne, M. (2019), ‘Consciousness and the Philosophy of Signs: A New Précis’, The American Journal of Semiotics, 35 (2): 443–62. Champagne, M. (2020), Myth, Meaning, and Antifragile Individualism, Exeter: Imprint Academic. Cobley, P. (2010), The Routledge Companion to Semiotics, London: Routledge. Colapietro, V. M. (1989), Peirce’s Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity, Albany: State University of New York Press. Corrington, R. S. (1987), ‘Semiosis and the Phenomenon of Worldhood’, in J. N. Deely (ed.), Semiotics, 383–93, Lanham: University Press of America. Danesi, M. (2007), The Quest for Meaning: A Guide to Semiotic Theory and Practice, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Danto, A. C. (1989), Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy, New York: Harper and Row. Deacon, T. W. (2012), Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, New York: W. W. Norton. Deely, J. N. (2001), Four Ages of Understanding, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Deely, J. N. (2004a), ‘A Sign Is What?: A Dialogue between a Semiotist and a Would-be Realist’, The American Journal of Semiotics, 20 (1–4): 1–66. Deely, J. N. (2004b), ‘Tom Sebeok and the External World’, Semiotica, 150 (1–4): 1–21. Deely, J. N. (2009a), ‘The Full Vista of the Action of Signs – From Semiosis to Semioethics’, Chinese Semiotic Studies, 1 (1): 171–222. Deely, J. N. (2009b), Purely Objective Reality, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

REALITY AND SEMIOSIS

145

Deely, J. N. (2014), ‘Physiosemiosis as an Influence of Signs: How Would Semiosis Precede Life?’ Chinese Semiotic Studies, 10 (3): 375–407. Deely, J. N. (2015), ‘Semiotics “Today”: The Twentieth-century Founding and Twenty-firstcentury Prospects’, in P. P. Trifonas (ed.), International Handbook of Semiotics, 29–113, Dordrecht: Springer. Dennett, D. C. (1991), ‘Real Patterns’, The Journal of Philosophy, 88 (1): 27–51. Dennett, D. C. (1993), ‘Back from the Drawing Board’, in B. Dahlbom (ed.), Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind, 203–35, Cambridge: Blackwell. Dipert, R. R. (1997), ‘The Mathematical Structure of the World: The World as Graph’, The Journal of Philosophy, 94 (7): 329–58. Dretske, F. I. (1981), Knowledge and the Flow of Information, Chicago: CSLI Publications. Eco, U. (1976), A Theory of Semiotics, trans. D. Osmond-Smith, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eco, U. (1979), ‘Concluding Remarks’, in S. Chatman, U. Eco and J.-M. Klinkenberg (eds), A Semiotic Landscape: Proceedings of the First Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, 246–51, The Hague: Mouton. Eco, U. (1984), Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, London: Macmillan. Eco, U. (1990), The Limits of Interpretation, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eco, U. (2000), Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, trans. A. McEwen, New York: Harcourt. Esposito, J. (2005), ‘Synechism: The Keystone of Peirce’s Metaphysics’, in M. Bergman and J. Queiroz (eds), The Commens Encyclopedia: The Digital Encyclopedia of Peirce Studies, 130510–1417a www.commens.org/encyclopedia/article/esposito-joseph-synechismkeystone-peirce%E2%80%99s-metaphysics. Everett, D. (2009), Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, New York: Random House. Fabbrichesi, R. (2018), ‘Semiotics and the Something: A Pragmatist Perspective on the Debate on Realism’, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 10 (1): 1–17. Fairclough, N., B. Jessop and A. Sayer (2002), ‘Critical Realism and Semiosis’, Alethia, 5 (1): 2–10. Forster, P. (2011), Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hart, K. (2000), The Trespass of the Sign, New York: Fordham University Press. Higuera, C. J. R. (2012), ‘A Typology of Arguments for the Existence of Physiosemiosis’, MA diss., University of Tartu, Estonia. Hoffmeyer, J. (1996), Signs of Meaning in the Universe, trans. B. J. Haveland, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. James, W. ([1907] 1922), Pragmatism, New York: Green and Co. Khalidi, M. A. (2016), ‘Mind-dependent Kinds’, Journal of Social Ontology, 2 (2): 223–46. Ladyman, J. (2016), ‘The Foundations of Structuralism and the Metaphysics of Relations’, in A. Marmodoro and D. Yates (eds), The Metaphysics of Relations, 177–97, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ladyman, J., D. Ross, D. Spurrett and J. Collier (2007), Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lane, R. (2018), Peirce on Realism and Idealism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, B. (2011), Philosophy of Language: The Key Thinkers, London: Continuum. Legg, C. (2008), ‘The Problem of the Essential Icon’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 45 (3): 207–32.

146

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Manetti, G. (2002), ‘Philodemus “De Signis”: An Important Ancient Semiotic Debate’, Semiotica, 138 (1–4): 279–97. Marmodoro, A. and D. Yates (2016), The Metaphysics of Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mayorga, R. M. P. T. (2007), From Realism to ‘Realicism’: The Metaphysics of Charles Sanders Peirce, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Meillassoux, Q. (2008), After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. R. Brassier, London: Continuum. Merrell, F. (1995), Semiosis in the Postmodern Age, West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Nagel, T. (1974), ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, The Philosophical Review, 83 (4): 435–50. Ney, A. (2014), Metaphysics: An Introduction, New York: Routledge. Pape, H. (2015), ‘C. S. Peirce on the Dynamic Object of a Sign: From Ontology to Semiotics and Back’, Sign Systems Studies, 43 (4): 419–37. Peirce, C. S. (1908), ‘Some Amazing Mazes’, The Monist, 18 (2): 227–41. Peirce, C. S. ([1866–1913] 1931–58), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols 1–6, C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds), vols 7–8, A. Burks (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cited as CP. Peirce, C. S. ([1893–1913] 1998) , The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, Peirce Edition Project (ed.), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP 2. Percy, W. (1989), The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Perkins, K. L. (2011), ‘Walker Percy and the Magic of Naming: The Semeiotic Fabric of Life’, Ph.D. diss., Georgia State University, Atlanta. Peterson, J. B. (1999), Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, New York: Routledge. Pihlström, S. (2010), ‘Peircean Modal Realism?’, in M. Bergman, S. Paavola, A.-V. Pietarinen and H. Rydenfelt (eds), Ideas in Action: Proceedings of the Applying Peirce Conference, 48–61, Helsinki: Nordic Pragmatism Network. Pinker, S. (1994), The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, New York: HarperCollins. Prinz, J. (2012), The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quine, W. V. O. (1948), ‘On What There Is’, The Review of Metaphysics, 2 (5): 21–38. Raggatt, P. T. F. (2010), ‘The Dialogical Self and Thirdness’, Theory & Psychology, 20 (3): 400–19. Reppert, V. (1992), ‘Eliminative Materialism, Cognitive Suicide, and Begging the Question’, Metaphilosophy, 23 (4): 378–92. Ross, D. (2004), ‘Rainforest Realism: A Dennettian Theory of Existence’, in D. Ross, A. Brook and D. Thompson (eds), Dennett’s Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment, 147–68, Cambridge: MIT Press. Russell, B. (1956), Portraits from Memory and Other Essays, New York: Simon and Schuster. Sapir, E. (1929), ‘The Status of Linguistics as a Science’, Language, 5 (4): 207–14. Saussure, F. de ([1916] 2011), Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin, New York: Columbia University Press. Sayood, K., ed. (2003), Lossless Compression Handbook, Amsterdam: Elsevier Science. Sebeok, T. A. (1986), I Think I Am a Verb: More Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs, New York: Plenum.

REALITY AND SEMIOSIS

147

Sebeok, T. A. ([1984] 1988), ‘Communication, Language and Speech: Evolutionary Considerations’, in M. Herzfeld and L. Melazzo (eds), Semiotic Theory and Practice: Proceedings of the Third International Congress of the IASS Palermo, 1083–91, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Sebeok, T. A. (1991), Semiotics in the United States, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Searle, J. R. (1997), The Construction of Social Reality, New York: Free Press. Shannon, C. E. (1948), ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, The Bell System Technical Journal, 27 (3): 379–423, 623–56. Skyrms, B. (2010), Signals: Evolution, Learning, and Communication, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strum, S. C. (1990), Almost Human: A Journey into the World of Baboons, New York: W. W. Norton. Twomey, R. (2019), ‘Aristotle’s Disjunctivism’, in S. Hetherington and N. D. Smith (eds), What the Ancients Offer to Contemporary Epistemology, 140–56, New York: Routledge. Uexküll, J. v. ([1936] 2001), ‘An Introduction to Umwelt’, Semiotica, 134 (1–4): 107–10. Uexküll, J. v. ([1940] 1982), Bedeutungslehre, Leipzig: Barth, ed. and trans. B. Stone and H. Weiner, ‘The Theory of Meaning’, Semiotica, 42 (1): 25–82. Utz, S. (2018), ‘Percy, Peirce, and Parsifal: Intuition’s Farther Shore’, in L. Marsh (ed.), Walker Percy, Philosopher, 21–40, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Whitehead, A. N. ([1929] 1978) , Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, New York: Free Press. Whorf, B. L. (1940), ‘Science and Linguistics’, Technology Review, 42 (6): 229–31, 247–8. Wittgenstein, L. (1974), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, London: Routledge.

148

CHAPTER SEVEN

Evolution and Semiosis ALEXEI A. SHAROV AND KALEVI KULL

INTRODUCTION Biosemiotic analysis argues that semiosis is a core property of life, rather than an advanced type of activity which appears at later stages of evolution when organisms became sufficiently complex. The origin of life was associated with the emergence of the most primitive hereditary signs capable of carrying functions to descendant primordial agents. Accordingly, the evolution of life is rooted in semiosis – a process of active interpretation of hereditary signs (both genetic and epigenetic) in the context of other signs that come from the parts of the body and the environment. The biosemiotic concept of agencydriven evolution is opposed to neo-Darwinism, which views evolution as a passive change of gene frequencies via natural selection, drift and other processes. The latter gene-centred approach is usually combined with genetic determinism and the assumption that innovations are based solely on mutations. In contrast, we consider mutations as disturbances that are creatively interpreted by intracellular subagents based on their experience, encoded genetically and epigenetically. Thus, mutations are not primary causes of adaptations, but being interpreted by subagents, they indirectly facilitate robustness, adaptive plasticity and genetic assimilation. This reasoning resembles components of a Lamarckian theory. The genome may change passively and randomly, but its interpretation is active and guided by the logic of agent functions and embryo development. Emergence of new functions, when old tools, resources and control systems are adopted for novel purposes, goes hand in hand with the reinterpretation of the genome. This chapter interconnects evolutionary biology and semiotics (the science of interpretation and meaning making). Such an interdisciplinary bridge requires an enhanced foundation at each side, and thus we start with a short overview of each term: evolution and semiosis. We prefer to keep an empirical and open-ended approach to both terms, without constraining them by specific theories or models. We do not reduce evolution to the changes of allele frequencies. Instead, we see evolution as life of biological lineages. Evolution is grounded in the capacity of organisms to self-reproduce and preserve most of their identity in the progeny, which makes multi-generational lineages possible. Lineages survive much longer than individual organisms. Every organism is linked via its parents along the continuous living succession to the first cells in the history of life. If confined to genetic inheritance, then in the case of uniparental organisms, the lineage consists of one individual at each moment of time, while in the case of biparental organisms the whole population (or even a species) can be one lineage. If we take into account also other forms of inheritance (epigenetic, ecological, social),1 then the lineages as hereditary collectives

150

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

even of asexual organisms will consist of several individuals. Accordingly, lineages may include a holobiont, a consortium or a whole community. In this sense, evolutionary biology is different from those areas of biology which are centred on (genetically defined) organisms. On the earlier studies that connect evolutionary biology and semiotics, two special issues of the journal Biosemiotics should be mentioned: Semiosis of Evolution – vol. 9 (1), 2016 (see Sharov et al. 2016) and Semiotic Aspects of Extended Synthesis – vol. 11 (2), 2018 (see Winters 2018). Besides these, the topic of evolution of semiosis in living systems is explicitly addressed in several works (Florkin 1974; Barbieri 1985; Kull 1992; Bouissac 1993; Witzany 1993; Nöth 1994; Deacon 1997; Sebeok 1997; Cariani 1998; Markoš et al. 2009; Schilhab et al. 2012; Sharov 2016a; Hoffmeyer and Stjernfelt 2016; Maran 2017; etc.). The concept of evolution (as well as some of its mechanisms) extends also to human and cultural evolution; thus, there exist series of studies about semiotics of cultural evolution (e.g. Lock and Peters 1996; Bax, Heusden, and Wildgen 2004; Queiroz et al. 2012; Dunér and Sonesson 2016; the series entitled ‘Bochum publications in evolutionary cultural semiotics’, edited by Walter Koch; special issues of Zeitschrift für Semiotik: Kodewande, Evolution, etc. 1–2, 1983; Kultur und Evolution 4, 1990; etc.); however, we limit our review to pre-linguistic evolution and will not address the problems specific to cultural evolution and evolution of human language here. We also exclude from our analysis the ontogeny of semiosis (e.g. Bentele 1984; Linask 2019); i.e. our focus here is in phylogenesis and not in developmental semiotics. Semiotics originated as a study of signs and their interpretation in human language and logic and, naturally, it has been attributed to the humanities. However, there has always been a group of researchers who have attempted to naturalize meaning-making and argue for its existence in non-human organisms (Sebeok 1976, 1986; Uexküll 1928, [1940] 1982), or exceptionally even in the pre-living world (Deely 2014; Peirce 1906: EP 2.394). The latter approaches, as much as these accept pansemiosis or physiosemiosis, are controversial because of grounding in transcendental properties of the world. Thus, we do not discuss these topics here, and instead focus on biosemiotics – a synthesis of semiotics with biology that explores sign processes (i.e. semiosis) in all organisms (Hoffmeyer 1996; Sebeok 2001). Biosemiotics applies semiotic terms also to those organisms that lack neural systems and brains (Krampen 1981; Hoffmeyer and Stjernfelt 2016). Even bacteria can interpret their environment and generate adaptive responses by integrating environmental signs with hereditary signs. In this chapter we explore the relation between evolution and semiosis using a biosemiotic approach. The rise of biosemiotics can be explained by the dissatisfaction of biologists with mechanistic explanations of evolution, development and behaviour, and by the logical necessity of accepting that humans are not the only organisms having agential powers and freedoms. Biology has been monopolized by mechanistic thinking for more than half a century. However, the revolt against the mechanistic tradition is growing in many biological disciplines. The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis has rejected the dogma of neo-Darwinism that growth, development and reproduction are passive mechanical processes (Pigliucci and Müller 2010). Evidence from epigenetics contradicts the belief that the genome is a blueprint of an organism that determines the phenotype (Jablonka, Lamb 2010; Sharov 2014). Cognitive science no longer accepts the idea that human and animal behaviour is fully explained in terms of reflex and conditioning, as it was assumed in behaviourism. Ethologist Jakob von Uexküll, one of the predecessors of

EVOLUTION AND SEMIOSIS

151

biosemiotics, suggested that animals and other organisms develop a meaningful model of their environment (umwelt), where objects are associated with living functions, and thus become functional tokens such as food, shelter, partner or enemy (Uexküll [1940] 1982). Different species interpret the same environment differently, and thus they have distinct umwelten tailored to their living needs and affordances. Uexküll viewed organisms as subjects competent to interpret their sensorial inputs and choose appropriate actions. Meaningful activities (habits) are thus organized via choice-dependent (i.e. nonmechanistic) regulatory feedback that connect sensors and effectors into closed ‘functional circles’ (Uexküll 1928, [1934] 1992). Charles Peirce was mostly studying human cognitive signs, analysing signs as propositions. He defined a sign as a triadic relation between a representamen (sign vehicle), object and interpretant, where the representamen directs an interpreting agent towards the object and the interpretant is a result of interpretation (Peirce c.1897: CP 2.228). The interpretant may function as a sign in the next round of interpretation. Charles Morris modified Peirce’s sign model by adding ‘interpreter’ as an additional component (Morris 1971, 1977). Also, he distinguished between an object as a physical thing and designatum, which is an idea or meaning. In this chapter we argue that biological evolution is largely rooted in semiosis – a process of active interpretation by organisms of hereditary signs2 in the context of other transient signs that are related to the parts of the body and the environment (Hoffmeyer 2008; Sharov 2014). The biosemiotic concept of agency-driven evolution is opposed to the viewpoint that evolution is a passive change of allele frequencies via natural selection, drift, and some other processes (Dawkins 1976). The latter gene-centred approach is usually combined with genetic determinism and an assumption that innovations are based solely on mutations. In contrast, we view mutations as disturbances that are often creatively interpreted by cell subagents based on their evolutionary experience, encoded genetically and epigenetically (Hoffmeyer 2008; Sharov 2014). Thus, mutations are not primary causes of adaptations, but being interpreted by subagents, they indirectly facilitate adaptive evolution.

BIOLOGICAL LINEAGES Life is often confused with self-organization or autocatalysis, which also take place in crystal growth or various dissipative structures (e.g. hurricanes, tornados and geysers) (Kauffman 1986; Egel 2012). Self-organization resembles life because of its spontaneity and capacity to persist despite damaging environmental factors via stabilizing feedback driven by dissipating energy. As Jesper Hoffmeyer (2008: 62) notes, ‘Peirce considered “the tendency [of things] to take habits” ([c.1890:] CP 1.409) – or, in more modern parlance, self-organization (the tendency for ever new regularities to arise in natural systems) – as the most fundamental characteristic of nature’. But neither self-organization nor auto-catalysis is sufficient for life. The main difference is that non-living self-organized systems dissipate without affecting future self-organizing events through memory.3 In contrast, living systems produce daughter systems of the same kind4 to which hereditary information is transferred, which enables them to perform living functions including selfreproduction (Deacon et al. 2014). Thus, the key feature that distinguishes life from nonlife is heredity or memory. Heredity is a capacity to make specific conditions5 (including resources, tools, scaffolds and signs) that are sufficient for both self-maintenance and production of progeny systems that, in turn, carry the same capacity. Life creates unique

152

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

self-supporting artificial6 structures and conditions that did not exist before and makes them recurrent via heredity. Heredity of living systems is implemented as a network of biochemical and physiological (informational) mechanisms. These mechanisms are diverse and not limited to the processing of DNA and RNA. What is common to all these mechanisms is that heredity is represented by a set of hereditary signs interpreted by organisms and their subagents, such as organs, tissues, cells, intracellular organelles, functional protein complexes, etc. Examples of hereditary signs include genes, DNA methylation patterns and chromatin modifications. Marcel Danesi characterized signs as semiotic tools: ‘In effect, signs are tools – things (real or imaginary) that extend some sensory, physical, or intellectual capacity’ (Danesi 2010: 138). A sign in this sense is similar to what Eva Jablonka called a source of biological information that is characterized by causing a specific reaction of the receiver, which is mostly functional and beneficial (i.e. selected in evolution or learned) (Jablonka 2002: 582). Jablonka also noted that this reaction depends on the organization of the source rather than energy content or raw chemical composition, and the variation of the source (if present) causes consistent variation in the corresponding changes of the receiver. Many signs are short-lived and used for adjusting activities to the ever-changing current needs and conditions. In contrast, hereditary signs are very stable and persist beyond the lifetime of individual organisms. For example, genes are extraordinarily stable units that persist for millions of generations. The importance of gene stability in evolution was demonstrated by Eigen and Schuster (1979). If the mutation rates in organisms were higher, then the lineages would not be able to preserve the reproducibility of their DNA sequences. As a result, a lineage would disappear via ‘error catastrophe’. Jesper Hoffmeyer (1996: 24) wrote, ‘heredity is semiotic survival’. Stability of hereditary signs is different from the stability of solid rocks; it is not static but dynamic. Most hereditary signs (e.g. genes) need to be replicated, and new copies are then transferred to progeny during reproduction (e.g. at cell division). Dynamic stability of DNA sequences is based not only on the strength of the covalent bonds between nucleotides, but also on the high fidelity of DNA copying by DNA polymerase enzymes. In addition, long genomes are often damaged by free radicals and other factors. Thus, their stability and functionality heavily depend on DNA-management, protection and repair mechanisms that include unwinding, removing knots, connecting broken ends of DNA and sequence error correction (Lodish et al. 2000). The information capacity of hereditary signs can be measured by the number of stable variations they can support. Nucleic acids (e.g. DNA or RNA) have extremely high potential information capacity because each position of the polymer chain can hold one of the four possible nucleotides: A, T, C or G. DNA methylation and histone modifications also have high potential information capacity. In contrast, other hereditary signs have either limited variations or no variations at all. In the latter case, the hereditary sign is either absent or present (although some additional information can be carried out by the abundance of signs). For example, the presence of RNA polymerase enzyme is necessary for gene expression and therefore it is a hereditary sign. If this enzyme is not present in a cell, then it cannot be recovered from the POLII gene (which encodes its synthesis) because the gene is not expressed, and to become expressed it needs a functional RNA polymerase enzyme. Interestingly, not all hereditary signs are carried by organisms. Some of them are provided by the environment and niche, such as the signs of gravity, temperature, presence of water and abundance of resources (sunlight for plants and food for animals).

EVOLUTION AND SEMIOSIS

153

Because these signs are external and regular, there is no need to replicate them during reproduction – only to re-recognize. Progeny organisms inherit the habitat of their parents simply because they are born into it. The dependency on the niche limits the autonomy, while organisms developed various means to reduce such dependency. Animals developed locomotion mechanisms together with a capacity to find a suitable habitat. Many organisms use niche construction for their immature progeny: vivipary, milk feeding, egg protection and so on. Most environmental hereditary signs have low information capacity, but they are still important for preserving the existence and identity of lineages. An exception is the human species, which inundated the environment with highly informative cultural signs, such as books, videos, computers and internet (Hoffmeyer and Emmeche 1991). Hereditary signs are replicated together with reproducing organisms capable of interpreting these signs, and thus, descendent organisms are linked with their parents into potentially immortal phylogenetic lineages. Organisms and lineages are two inseparable aspects of life. Primordial systems at the origin of life were too simple to be called ‘organisms’, but these pre-organisms (or proto-agents) already had hereditary signs and were organized into lineages (Sharov 2016b).

SEMIOTICS OF GENES The concept of sign relation can be applied to biological signs, such as genes. Genes are interpreted in cells via two main processes: 1. template-based copying of a gene sequence into a free-floating mRNA molecule, and 2. polypeptide7 synthesis on a ribosome that uses mRNA and genetic code for the order of amino acids. These processes are called ‘transcription’ and ‘translation’, respectively, following linguistic metaphors that were popular in molecular biology in the 1960s. One can say, for instance, that in the first process, a gene is a sign vehicle, biological function of the encoded protein is an object, mRNA is interpretant and RNA-polymerase protein complex is the interpreter; in the second process, mRNA is a sign vehicle, biological function of the protein is the object, polypeptide is the interpretant and a ribosome together with aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase molecules comprises the interpreter. In contrast to a human interpreter who associates a sign with an object (or class of objects) and retrieves a mental representation of that object, molecular-level subagents are not capable of associating a sign with an object (e.g. biological function of the protein) in this sense, which is typical for all cases of protosemiosis8 (Sharov and Vehkavaara 2015). Protosemiosis is the most primitive type of sign interpretation, where agents are not capable of perceiving and tracking objects (Sharov and Vehkavaara 2015). An object is still present in a sign relation in the form of an evolutionary imprint of protein function on the genome of the cell, but it is not accessed by the interpreter. An interpretant in protosemiosis is not a mental idea (as assumed by Peirce), but rather an action and a product of that action. This product can be a resource, sign or agent. For example, a synthesized polypeptide becomes a functional protein (after folding and processing), and this protein functions as an agent that interprets signs and performs various functions within the cell. Presumably, protosemiosis emerged with the origin of life together with the first hereditary signs (Sharov 2016b).

154

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

In neo-Darwinism, genes are seen as passive material carriers that encode variations of phenotypic traits, and, in particular, it is assumed that genes determine the phenotype of organisms. However, this interpretation is not true because it ignores the role of cell as agency. The sequence of nucleotides in a gene is a string of abstract coding units – triplets of nucleotides – which needs to be interpreted. There is no physical law that associates these units with amino acids, and such association is not encoded in the genome. Thus, although it is sometimes said so, genes do not determine the sequence of amino acids. Instead, it is the job of intra-cellular agents (including ribosomes) to interpret each kind of triplet as a command to add a specific amino acid to the elongating polypeptide chain. Even if a polypeptide is synthesized, genes would not be able to convert it into a functional protein. Genes determine neither the three-dimensional folding of a polypeptide nor the function of the protein. These features are established by a collective action of many subagents within a cell. Although the construction of these subagents is encoded in the genome in an abstract way, the cell needs actual physical sub-agents to interpret genomic signs and perform cellular functions. Thus, the transfer of adaptive traits between generations requires an interaction between two hereditary channels: informational and agential (see Figure 7.1). This concept of two-channel heredity explains how organisms preserve their morphology and functions across generations despite the fact that genes do not determine the phenotype. It has been envisioned by Hoffmeyer and Emmeche (1991: 127) in their paper on code duality, where they claim that life ‘needs at least two codes: one code for action (behaviour) and one code for memory – the first of these codes necessarily must be analog, and the second very probably must be digital’ (emphasis in original).

FIGURE 7.1  Two channels of heredity in evolution: informational and agential. Information channel includes transfer of genes and some epigenetic units across generations (modified from Sharov 2014).

EVOLUTION AND SEMIOSIS

155

Besides assisting in protein synthesis, genes are necessary for regulating activities of other genes. Many proteins synthesized with the help of genes function as molecular regulators. For example, transcription factors bind to genomic DNA in specific locations and regulate the expression of genes in their vicinity. The expression of particular transcription factors is induced (or repressed) only in those cells of a developing embryo, where they are used for certain morphogenic activities (Gilbert 2019). For example, expression of gene PAX6 is necessary for eye development. Conrad Waddington assumed close interaction of genes with epigenetic factors, such as gene expression and chromatin remodelling. According to Waddington (1957), the fate of a cell (or tissue, organ) emerges as a trajectory of a ball that rolls along the valleys separated by ridges in a ragged landscape (called epigenetic landscape) (Figure 7.2). When genes are interpreted by cell subagents, these subagents modify the local topology of valleys and ridges of the epigenetic landscape and, in this indirect way, change the phenotypic outcome of the developing organism. In other words, genes guide trajectories of cell development via epigenetic control. Epigenetic capacities of cells and organs provide opportunities for populations to adapt to changing environments and develop novel functions (Sharov 2014). Because cells in different parts of the body, while taking different routes, follow the same epigenetic landscape, the action of genes is not necessarily restricted to specific organs. Thus, novel morphologies can emerge due to expression of regulatory genes in unusual body locations. Such changes may be induced by environmental factors or homeotic mutations, and in the latter case, the changes may be heritable. The outcome of a homeotic mutation depends mostly on the epigenetic landscape, whereas the role of mutation is limited to be a releasing signal.

FIGURE 7.2  A scheme of epigenetic landscape (modified from Wikimedia Commons).

156

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

ADAPTATION AND NATURAL SELECTION Adaptation is one of the central notions in evolutionary theory as well as in other fields of biology such as physiology, molecular biology, behavioural science and ecology. In neo-Darwinism, an adaptive trait is defined as a phenotypic trait, including structural and dynamic features (e.g. physiology, behaviour or development), that increases the rates of survival and/or reproduction of organisms, which can be combined into the net reproduction rate (r0). The difference in the net reproduction rate between mutated and wild-type organisms is called relative fitness. Although this approach is useful for quantifying the rate of replacement in genotypes that affect adaptive traits, it is focused on the consequences of adaptation (survival and reproduction) rather than on the adaptation itself. In contrast, biosemiotics sees adaptation as a semiotic phenomenon – a functional relation between features of organisms and specific components of their environment. For example, eyes have emerged in animal evolution because the environment on Earth is illuminated by the Sun (or reflection of sunlight from the Moon). In full darkness, eyes would never appear. Thus, adaptation is not fitness but fittedness – a semiotic relation between an organism and its environment. Hoffmeyer called it semiotic fitness: ‘The evolutionarily relevant fitness concept, semiotic fitness, should ideally measure the semiotic competence or success of natural systems in managing the genotype-envirotype translation processes’ (Hoffmeyer 1997: 370). Kull (2020) has suggested the term semiotic fitting, as an extension of the term ecological fitting introduced by Daniel Janzen (1985), which has a similar meaning. Because organisms are hierarchically organized agents, the notion of adaptation is applicable to subagents, such as organs, tissues, cells and cell components, where it denotes functional relations between subagents or relations between a subagent and the whole organism. In semiotic terms, adaptation is both a process and a result of biological interpretation, where organisms create bodily structures or processes that allow them to meaningfully interact with the outside world and with other bodily structures and processes. To achieve adaptation (i.e. increase functionality), organisms and their parts need to monitor the results of living functions, as is assumed in a Uexküllian functional circle (1928, [1934] 1992). In the case of a problem, the adaptive response includes the control of damage, and attempts to restore the functions of an organism or cell by sending relevant regulatory signals. Accordingly, J. H. van Hateren proposed a model of evolution where, in addition to the objective fitness, there is also subjective fitness as it is perceived by organisms (van Hateren 2015). Even simple organisms can take advantage of evaluating their subjective fitness by increasing their functional and behavioural variability if their subjective fitness is low. In this perspective, the process of adaptation resembles chemotaxis of bacteria: starving bacteria (with low subjective fitness) initiate rapid movements in various directions, and this helps them to find new sources of nutrients. After arriving to a nutrient-rich area, bacteria switch back to local slow movements. The model of van Hateren shows clearly that adaptation (and adaptive evolution) is semiotically driven, because it is mediated by perception of one’s own fitting and subsequent selection of behaviour. Semiotic terminology has originated from the analysis of human thinking, and thus it has strong anthropocentric connotations. To neutralize them, we need to keep in mind the differences between evolutionary interpretations performed by lineages (such as adaptations) and mental interpretations. Mental interpretations are usually fast and almost immediately result in some representation of the world that helps organisms to

EVOLUTION AND SEMIOSIS

157

change their behaviour in a meaningful way. In contrast, evolutionary adaptations do not happen fast and become detectable only in a long series of generations. Also, they are not representational in the usual sense because hereditary signs are not designed to depict external objects. Organisms or their parts do not persist through multiple generations, except for singlecelled organisms that temporarily keep a few maternal components. Thus, adaptations develop anew in the ontogeny of every generation via context-dependent interpretation of hereditary signs. This means that evolutionary adaptations are second-order interpretations built upon repeated interpretation of hereditary signs in every generation. As a result, evolutionary adaptation emerges from changes at two interdependent levels: fast adaptations of organisms and slow adaptation of a lineage. Organisms interpret hereditary signs for guiding their development, physiology and behaviour (Figure 7.3, A, B). Then, surviving organisms reproduce and supply their progeny with copies of their hereditary signs including genes, and the survival and reproduction depends on the first-order adaptations of organisms (i.e. phenotype and responses), which is semiotic survival. Thus, the progeny of survived organisms have, on average, somewhat greater adaptation capacities than their parental generation (including those that did not survive and reproduce). Changes of hereditary signs driven by semiotic survival accumulate over a sequence of generations, and eventually may result in a substantial evolutionary adaptation (see Figure 7.3).

FIGURE 7.3  Sign relations that participate in evolutionary adaptations (modified from Sharov and Tønnessen 2021): (A) a developing organism interprets hereditary signs in the context of the environment and generating adaptive phenotype; (B) an organism interprets the environment and hereditary signs by generating adaptive responses (physiology and behaviour); (C) a lineage converts the results of organism’s survival and reproduction (which depends on the phenotype and responses) into hereditary changes via semiotic survival.

158

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Hoffmeyer (Hoffmeyer 1996: 22) describes the process of adaptation at the level of lineages: [T]he lineage interprets the niche conditions as a sign of the demands that will be made on future generations. Using the reproductive pattern as its tool the lineage alters the DNA text, which is then passed on. Thus it is the lineage rather than Nature as such that carries out the selective process on which organic evolution is built. The term “natural selection” is in fact confusing and misleading. Obviously, a lineage has no mental capacities to ‘understand’ that current niche conditions will persist long enough and affect future generations accordingly. Also, it does not ‘know’ that the replicated DNA text may help future generations to cope with the environment. Only humans can fully appreciate the importance of hereditary signs in developing and preserving adaptations by evolving lineages. Nevertheless, the sophisticated processes of DNA replication, editing, repair and protection in cells indicate that hereditary signs are of high value for organisms, and that biological lineages follow normativity constraints.

STABILIZATION OF ADAPTATIONS The neo-Darwinian idea that mutations of genes are the primary causes of evolutionary change is rejected by leading scholars in biosemiotics (Hoffmeyer 1996, 2008) and extended evolutionary synthesis (Pigliucci and Müller 2010). Adaptive mutation is a myth, since even a single specific nucleotide substitution would require thousands of years to appear in a population because the rate of mutations is very low – as an average in mammals only 2.2 × 10–9 per base per year (Kumar and Subramanian 2002). Time to adaptation arrival is critical for populations because they are always in a condition of struggling for existence, emphasized by Darwin. It is too late if an adaptive mutation arrives only after a thousand years of waiting; by that time either the population will have gone extinct or conditions will have changed, and the arrived trait would no longer be adaptive. Of course, random mutations are necessary for adaptive evolution, but such a mutation cannot be the primary source of adaptation. Here we argue that evolutionary adaptations are rooted in a creative and contextdependent interpretation of hereditary signs which empowers adaptive plasticity of organisms and their parts. This has dramatic implications to the methodology of theorizing about evolution. An organism is not a zombie driven by genes, as in neo-Darwinism, but a master agent that interprets genes and other hereditary signs in application to various functional tasks. The genome may change passively and randomly, but its interpretation is active and guided by the logic of agent functions and embryo development. The possibility of phenotypic novelty follows from multi-functionality of organism parts. Each part (e.g. organ, tissue, cell, protein complex) has many potential functions (or affordances), including those that have never been used before. It is well known that human artefacts can perform functions they were not designed for. A screwdriver, designed to rotate a screw, can also be used as a measuring device, ruler, lever or weapon. Thus, it is conceivable that organisms too use their parts in unusual ways. For example, animals use legs for swimming, object picking and gliding in the air or water. Insect ancestors used their paranatal appendages for gliding in the air, and these appendages later transformed into wings. Animals can change their habits without mutations – via learning or imitating parents and peers. New habits, in turn, can modify the direction of natural selection, a phenomenon known as the Baldwin effect. Although the Baldwin

EVOLUTION AND SEMIOSIS

159

effect is difficult to validate, it has been supported as a viable hypothesis by several evolutionary biologists (Depew and Weber 1995; Dennett 2003). Dennett (2003) argued that learned behaviours can become stable in lineages by either genetic accommodation or selection for increased ‘intelligence’. There are also several other explanations for learning to influence evolution. The Baldwin effect is an attractive hypothesis because it can explain high rates of evolution in birds and mammals, two of the most ‘intelligent’ classes of animals (Hoffmeyer and Kull 2003). Indeed, behaviours can change very rapidly due to learning, even within one generation. Thus, they can boost evolutionary rates by guiding the direction of evolutionary change. Such a mechanism can well explain the rapid morphological changes observed in the paleontological record. N. Eldredge and S. J. Gould (1972) developed from these observations the evolutionary view called ‘punctuated equilibrium’. This is quite conceivable with the understanding described here, because it indeed includes the possibility that was not seen in classical population genetics: the evolution of ‘morphology first, genetics follows’. New adaptive physiological, developmental and behavioural changes can be initially supported by epigenetic heredity. It can be argued that adaptations controlled by epigenetic processes occur at the physiological time scale, and thus should not be confused with the evolutionary process. But this argument is the major weakness of neoDarwinism, which attempts to resolve the problem of evolutionary adaptations separately from embryo development, physiological and behavioural plasticity. Thus, it failed to reveal that evolutionary adaptations are long-term consequences of short-term adaptive changes (Figure 7.3). Therefore, organisms don’t need to wait for the appearance of a certain mutation in order to adapt. This notion was clearly formulated by Eva Jablonka (Jablonka 2017: 2), who wrote: ‘When the conditions of life change, organisms do not wait passively for a liberating mutation – they do what they can to cope, including changing where and how they live.’ One of the remarkable evolutionary changes that can be initiated by organisms’ semiotic activity is the change of some organs’ function (see above). This was termed ‘exaptation’ by S. J. Gould and E. Vrba (1982), and attracted semioticians’ attention soon after (see a review in Weible 2013). Although mutations are not the primary causes of adaptation, they have other important functions in adaptive evolution. In particular, they are needed for stabilizing adaptive traits in evolving lineages, an effect known as genetic assimilation (Waddington 1953) or genetic accommodation (West-Eberhard 2003). If new adaptations are not reinforced genetically, they are rather fragile due to low heritability which is supported only by epigenetic and ecological mechanisms. Also, these emerging adaptations can suffer from weak coordination and poor support from other adaptive systems available in the organism. Thus, genetic change via natural selection or drift is needed to increase the heritability and improve the performance of emerging adaptations. This requires non-specific random mutations, which occur every generation and thus there is no long waiting time. Because of a high level of interdependency within gene regulatory networks, the same epigenetic state of a cell (i.e. a gene expression profile) can be achieved in many different ways. For example, the amount of protein produced by a gene can be changed by modifying the strength of transcription factor binding, by various chromatin modifications, DNA methylation, alternative splicing, alternative polyadenylation of mRNA, mRNA degradation rates, alternative protein folding, and interference through protein-protein interactions, squelching, protein modifications, selective protein degradation and so on. As a result, there are thousands of genome locations where a mutation may change the

160

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

expression of a gene. This idea was formulated as ‘genes are followers not leaders in evolution’ (West-Eberhard 2003: 20), and also as ‘phenotype first’ in evolution (Palmer 2004). Presented here the epigenetic model of adaptation resembles Lamarck’s theory because it assumes a substantial role of acquired adaptations in evolution. But it is also compatible with Darwin’s idea of natural selection and does not contradict the facts of molecular biology and genetics. A semiotic theory of evolution is thus more general and capable of including several existing models as its special cases.

OTHER FORMS OF SELECTION In the Origin of Species, Darwin discussed three forms of selection: artificial, natural and sexual. Artificial selection is guided by human goals and applied to cultivated and domesticated species, whereas natural selection is assumed to be guided by Nature itself and applied to wild species. As we already discussed above, the term ‘natural selection’ is misleading because ‘it is the lineage rather than Nature as such that carries out the selective process on which organic evolution is built’ (Hoffmeyer 1996: 22). In other words, natural selection is directed by living activities of wild organisms and applied to their own evolution, as well as to the evolution of ecologically related species (e.g. prey, predators, parasites and host species). When Darwin turned to the problem of sexual dimorphism and especially to the descent of man he realized that some evolutionary changes may have been caused by sexual selection, which is the selection of opposite-sex organisms for breeding purposes. He wrote that ‘it was a well recognised principle with the Greeks, that men ought to select their wives with a view to the health and vigour of their children’ (Darwin 1889: 29). Other forms of selection include competition of sperm cells in reaching the egg and selective juvenile cannibalism by older cohorts, for example in a fish Gadus morhua (Folkvord 1997) and a crab Callinectes sapidus (Moir and Weissburg 2009). In fact, the forms of selection that affect the evolution of lineages are endless. Every action of an organism, such as feeding, hiding or courting, may change the probability of survival and reproduction of the agent itself and other organisms that are involved in the action directly or indirectly. Thus, the term ‘selection’ has two meanings. At the organism level, it means selection of activities based on needs, goals, habits and accessible signs in the environment. And at the lineage level, it is a phenotype-dependent propagation of lineages and sub-lineages in a sequence of generations. Lineage-specific phenotypes are constructed by organisms via their activities (e.g. development, growth, behaviour), which are supported by hereditary signs, including genes. The choice of behaviour of organisms often depends on signs displayed by other organisms of the same species or other species, a phenomenon called ‘semiotic selection’ by Maran and Kleisner (2010). They wrote: ‘The effect of semiotic selection can be suspected, for instance, in cases where there is a specific one-to-one correspondence between the perceptible characteristics of one animal and the perceptual organs of the other’ (Maran and Kleisner 2010: 191). All kinds of selection9 represent semiosis, which is expected to support adaptation. Here ‘expectation’ (or evolutionary anticipation) means that interpretation processes in organisms have been useful in the past conditions, and thus organisms rely on these processes as if ‘assuming’ that they have not lost their value. Indeed, most interpretation

EVOLUTION AND SEMIOSIS

161

processes are sufficiently robust and can be modified on the fly in changing environments. But there is no guarantee that they will not fail in some unexpected context.

SPECIES AS A SELF-CATEGORIZING COMMUNICATIVE SYSTEM In most cases where we can observe the existence of clearly separated distinct species in living nature, these organisms are biparental. According to the biological species concept (Mayr 1942), species is even defined on the basis of crossing ability between individuals. However, the understanding that crossing itself is the main factor that creates species became clear somewhat later. Crossing means biparental reproduction. Consider a population of uniparental organisms. In reproduction, the offspring is slightly different from the parent due to mutational noise. As a result, the variability of a population has a tendency to slowly increase. The growth of variability can be of course limited by some external, environmental factors; however, the population of uniparentally reproducing organisms does not have a general mechanism that would keep its variability in strict limits. Then consider a population of biparental organisms. Mutational noise exists similarly to uniparentals, while due to recombination between the genomes of two parents the appearance of new genetic variants is even higher. But an important additional factor comes to work. Namely, some kind of communication between parental organisms is obligatory in order to make crossing possible. The parent should recognize the potential partner and fit with it. That means even more than communication: the partners should mutually fit to each other’s recognition window. We define the recognition window as the maximum difference between parents to ensure crossing; this includes all features required for fruitful fitting to each other. Hugh Paterson called the set of these features ‘specific mate recognition system’. Since the recognition window has a limited scope, it also limits the increase of variability in a population (Paterson 1993; Lambert 1995; Kull 2016). Communication and interaction being pairwise, this seems to imply that if, for each individual, there is someone in the population with whom the crossing is possible, the range of variability of the whole population may not be affected. However, due to autocatalytic kinetics of population growth, it occurs that the range of variability of population, which is much larger than the average recognition window, is not stable (Kull 2016).10 This means that the variability of populations of biparental species tends to match the range in which most individuals would fit to most other individuals (see Figure 7.4). What is described here is a fundamental mechanism of categorization (differentiation) and stabilization of the range of intraspecific variability, based on assortative mating. It is semiotic because assortativity is based on the recognition window, often including communication. That a species holds together due to fittedness in reproductive communication was clearly described by the recognition concept of species by Hugh Paterson. As he himself mentioned (pers. comm.), this mechanism is of course semiotic. His explanation via the conditions and limitations for parental communication has been opposed to isolationconcept, according to which the division of organisms into species is primarily caused by and dependent on isolation barriers.

162

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

FIGURE 7.4  Formation of species boundaries as a result of constraints in biparental communication (in a population of biparental reproduction without additional factors). wa – the width of recognition window of the specimen a (from the boundary region of the species A). Two specimens can interbreed if their distance on the trait axis G is less than w. Accordingly, a can interbreed with b and c, but not with d. Thus, species A and B become communicatively separated, except some edge specimens. The dotted line presents an unstable population density; the solid line presents a quasi-stable density; arrows show the direction of changes as a result of recognition processes (adapted from Kull 2016).

A general feature of classes, which are created by pairwise communication constraints, is that there may not exist a list of individual features that would characterize the entire class as distinct from any other. Werner Kunz (2012: 60) observes: [B]iological species do not possess a single trait that is present in all members of the species. […] There is always some trait that individual organisms of a species lack, and in spite of this, these organisms still belong to the species. This is one of the arguments for the conclusion that the biological species as a class of organisms cannot be defined by essential traits and, therefore, cannot be a natural kind. He adds: ‘A class like this is a polythetic class as opposed to a monothetic class, in which a single factor determines whether a particular organism belongs to this and no other class […]. Wittgenstein ([1951] 1953) called this phenomenon “family resemblance”’ (Kunz 2012: 61). Thus, family resemblance is a fundamental feature of the biparental organism’s species themselves. What is remarkable and worth stressing is that family resemblance characterizes all classes that are created by distributed communication. Recognition windows can explain the ranges of variability of species, but not the population numbers. While the range of variability can be regulated intraspecifically, the population numbers are commonly regulated by interspecies relationships. The latter means the mechanisms of ecological communication and species coexistence which we have not described in this chapter.

EVOLUTION AND SEMIOSIS

163

It is important that a recognition window includes both genetic and phenetic traits; it is also context-dependent. This has remarkable implications. Namely, plastic phenotypic changes that affect a recognition window will also influence the range of variability of the species. This is an evolutionary change. Such evolutionary change can thus also be directed as much as the phenotypic change can be directed (as, for instance, exaptations). For instance, if organisms start to explore a new habitat, or a new food source, they may adapt to it via a plastic phenotypic change, that further shifts the range of variability of the species. In case of organisms’ activity, the habitat choice and diet choice are functional changes that are available in the realm of plasticity without preliminary genetic changes. Both habitat choice and diet choice mean a shift in niche. Therefore, a most usual scenario for coexistence after differentiation can be related to niche differences.

DISCUSSION In this chapter we argue that neo-Darwinean explanation of evolution by natural selection is incomplete and covers only the mechanistic part of the process, namely the differential survival and reproduction of organisms with given phenotypes. It does not account for many important components of adaptation such as phenotypic plasticity, stress response, self-repair processes, epigenetic memory and niche construction. Simplified assumptions of population genetics are not sufficient to explain how organisms produce new phenotypes and why some of these new phenotypes appear adaptive despite being caused by disruptive effects of mutations. The gene-centric approach of neo-Darwinism has to be replaced with the concept of evolution driven by semiosis. Organisms and their parts (organs, tissues, cells and cell components) construct components of phenotype by interpreting genes and  epigenetic signs in the context of other signs that come from the parts of the body and the environment. The interpretation process is based on infrastructures designed by longterm evolution (semiotic survival at the level of lineages; see Figure 7.3), which has a tendency to diversify and elaborate living functions. Organisms and their parts are creative agents endowed with problem-solving competence, which has a tendency to increase in macroevolution. Thus, advanced groups of organisms (e.g. mammals and birds) generally have more powerful problem-solving capacities than bacteria, protists and fungi. Mutations are not the primary causes of adaptation (as assumed in neo-Darwinism), but, being creatively interpreted by cells and their subagents, they indirectly facilitate living functions via genetic assimilation. The concept of evolution driven by semiotic agency can explain other phenomena besides adaptation of organisms to their environment. It explains the emergence of interpretation capacity in primordial systems at the origin of life (Sharov 2016), integration of organisms into multilevel semiotic systems (e.g. multicellular organisms, flocks, holobionts and societies) (Sharov and Tønnessen 2021) and formation of morphologically discrete species (Kull 2016). Another domain where the concept of semiotic agency may appear productive is the problem of language origin and evolution. In his review of congruence between linguistic and biotic evolution, Jamin Pelkey (2015: 97) wrote: Although many recent attempts have been made to reunite biotic and linguistic evolution, contemporary treatments are mired in unexamined presuppositions inherited from

164

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

twentieth century biological theory. Chief among these is the denial of implicit enddirected processes, that which biosemiotics finds to be the necessary condition of living systems – thereby providing semiotic foundations for human inquiry. Pelkey notes the deficiency of goal-directedness (as a normative blindness) in descriptions of biotic ontogeny and linguistic diagrammatization. We anticipate that comparison of biotic and linguistic evolution deserves further analysis with a focus on semiotic agency.

Acknowledgements We are thankful to colleagues for discussions on problems of evolution, to the late Hugh Paterson for providing insights on semiotic speciation and to the grant PRG314 for supporting the second author. We declare no conflict of interest.

NOTES 1 On ecological inheritance, see e.g. Odling-Smee (1988); on other forms of inheritance, see Jablonka, Lamb (2014). 2 It is important to specify that there exist two rather different usages of the term ‘sign’ (also in Peirce himself) in semiotics – one as a synonym for representamen, and the other for the whole relational triad including representamen, object and interpretant. In this chapter the former is used if not explicitly said otherwise. 3 Both Peirce and Hoffmeyer assume that habit-making exists in non-living systems in the form of ordered structures that ‘emerge out of unordered chaotic diversity’ (Hoffmeyer 2008: 63). Hoffmeyer tends to agree with the position of Peirce who ‘sees the human mind as a special instantiation of a general principle in the universe, the law of mind’ (Hoffmeyer 2008: 63). 4 The notion of ‘sameness’ is not defined here as including all features; instead, it expands in content as we learn more about living organisms. For example, when biologists did not believe in epigenetic heredity, then the notion of ‘sameness’ was restricted to genotypes (or haplotypes). 5 Howard Pattee (1967) called them ‘non-holonomic constraints’. 6 Structures created by life can be called ‘artificial’, in contrast to the structures which are not created by somebody, i.e. by any agent. 7 An ‘immature’ protein, which requires folding and processing for maturation. 8 It is also known as vegetative semiosis (Kull 2009). 9 Notice that we do not define selection here as just ’differential reproduction of genotypes’ (the definition that is central in neo-Darwinian population genetics), but consider each act of selection being connected with organisms’ activity in searching the ways to fulfil their needs (which is also closer to the original Darwinian understanding). 10 A more detailed model, based on a polyallelic trait and assortative mating, is described in Kull (1988).

REFERENCES Bax, M., B. Heusden and W. Wildgen (2004), Semiotic Evolution and the Dynamics of Culture (European Semiotics / Sémiotiques Européennes 5), Bern: Peter Lang. Barbieri, M. (1985), The Semantic Theory of Evolution, Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers.

EVOLUTION AND SEMIOSIS

165

Bentele, G. (1984), Zeichen und Entwicklung: Vorüberlegungen zu einer genetischen Semiotik, Kodikas/Code suppl. 15, Tübingen: G.Narr. Bouissac, P. (1993), ‘Semiotisches Wettrüsten: zur Evolution Artübergreifender Kommunikation’, Zeitschrift für Semiotik, 15 (1–2): 3–21. Cariani, P. (1998), ‘Towards an Evolutionary Semiotics: The Emergence of New Sign-Functions in Organisms and Devices’, in G. V. Vijver, S. N. Salthe and M. Delpos (eds), Evolutionary Systems, 359–76, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Danesi, M. (2010), ‘Semiotics of Media and Culture’, in P. Cobley (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Semiotics, 133–49, London: Routledge. Darwin, C. (1889), The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, New York: D. Appleton and Company. Dawkins, R. (1976), The Selfish Gene, New York: Oxford University Press. Deacon, T. (1997), The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain, New York: Norton. Deacon, T. W., A. Srivastava and J. A. Bacigalupi (2014), ‘The Transition from Constraint to Regulation at the Origin of Life’, Front Biosci (Landmark Ed), 19: 945–57. Deely, J. (2014), ‘Physiosemiosis as an Influence of Signs: How Would Semiosis Precede Life?’ Chinese Semiotic Studies, 10 (3): 375–407. Dennett, D. C. (2003), ‘The Baldwin Effect: A Crane, Not a Skyhook’, in B. H. Weber and D. J. Depew (eds), Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered, 69–106, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Depew, D. J. and B. H. Weber (1995), Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dunér, D. and G. Sonesson, eds (2016), Human Lifeworlds: The Cognitive Semiotics of Cultural Evolution, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Egel, R. (2012), ‘Primal Eukaryogenesis: on the Communal Nature of Precellular States, Ancestral to Modern Life’, Life (Basel), 2 (1): 170–212. Eigen, M. and P. Schuster (1979), The Hypercycle: a Principle of Natural Self-organization, Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Eldredge, N. and S. J. Gould (1972), ‘Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism’, in T. J. M. Schopf (ed.), Models in Paleobiology, 82–115, San Francisco: Freeman Cooper. Florkin, M. (1974), ‘Concepts of Molecular Biosemiotics and of Molecular Evolution’, Comprehensive Biochemistry, 29A: 1–124. Folkvord, A. (1997), ‘Ontogeny of Cannibalism in Larval and Juvenile Fishes with Special Emphasis on Atlantic Cod’, in R. Chambers and E. A. Trippel (eds), Early Life History and Recruitment in Fish Populations, 251–78, Dordrecht: Springer. Gilbert, S. F. (2019), Developmental Biology, 12th edn, Sunderland: Sinauer Associates. Gould, S. J. and E. S. Vrba (1982), ‘Exaptation – A Missing Term in the Science of Form’, Paleobiology, 8 (1): 4–15. Hoffmeyer, J. (1996), Signs of Meaning in the Universe. The Natural History of Signification, Blomington: Indiana University Press. Hoffmeyer, J. (1997), ‘Biosemiotics: Towards a New Synthesis in Biology’, European Journal for Semiotic Studies, 9 (2): 355–76. Hoffmeyer, J. (2008), Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs, Scranton: University of Scranton Press. Hoffmeyer, J. and C. Emmeche (1991), ‘Code-duality and the Semiotics of Nature’, in M. Anderson and F. Merrell (eds), On Semiotic Modeling, 117–66, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

166

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Hoffmeyer, J. and F. Stjernfelt (2016), ‘The Great Chain of Semiosis: Investigating the Steps in the Evolution of Semiotic Competence’, Biosemiotics, 9 (1): 7–29. Hoffmeyer, J. and K. Kull (2003), ‘Baldwin and Biosemiotics: What Intelligence Is for’, in B. H. Weber and D. J. Depew (eds), Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered, 253–72, Cambridge: MIT Press. Jablonka, E. (2002), ‘Information: Its Interpretation, Its Inheritance, and Its Sharing’, Philosophy of Science, 69: 578–605. Jablonka, E. (2017), ‘The Evolutionary Implications of Epigenetic Inheritance’, Interface Focus, 7: 20160135. Jablonka, E. and M. J. Lamb (2010), ‘Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance’, in M. Pigliucci and G. Müller (eds), Evolution: The Extended Synthesis, 137–74, Cambridge: The MIT Press. Jablonka, E. and M. J. Lamb ([2005] 2014), Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life, Cambridge: The MIT Press. Janzen, D. H. (1985), ‘On Ecological Fitting’, Oikos, 45 (3): 308–10. Kauffman, S. A. (1986), ‘Autocatalytic Sets of Proteins’, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 119 (1): 1–24. Krampen, M. (1981), ‘Phytosemiotics’, Semiotica, 36 (3–4): 187–209. Kull, K. (1988), ‘Vidovaya Differentsiatsiya kak Rezul’tat Biparental’nogo Razmnozheniya (Species Differentiation as a Result of Biparental Reproduction)’, in T. Sutt (ed.), Aktual’nye Voprosy Evolyutsionnoj Biologii (Current Problems in Evolutionary Biology), 35–45, Tartu: Academy of Sciences Press. Kull, K. (1992), ‘Evolution and Semiotics’, in T. A. Sebeok and J. Umiker-Sebeok (eds), Biosemiotics: Semiotic Web 1991, (Approaches to Semiotics, 106), 221–33, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kull, K. (2009), ‘Vegetative, Animal, and Cultural Semiosis: The Semiotic Threshold Zones’, Cognitive Semiotics, 4: 8–27. Kull, K. (2016), ‘The Biosemiotic Concept of the Species’, Biosemiotics, 9 (1): 61–71. Kull, K. (2020), ‘Semiotic Fitting and the Nativeness of Community’, Biosemiotics, 13 (1): 9–19. Kumar, S. and S. Subramanian (2002), ‘Mutation Rates in Mammalian Genomes’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 99 (2): 803–8. Kunz, W. (2012), Do Species Exist?: Principles of Taxonomic Classification, Weinheim: WileyBlackwell. Lambert, D. M. and H. G. Spencer, eds (1995), Speciation and the Recognition Concept: Theory and Application, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Linask, L. (2019), ‘Vygotsky’s Natural History of Signs’, Sign Systems Studies, 47 (1−2): 257–304. Lock, A. and C. Peters, eds (1996), Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, Oxford: Oxford Science Publications. Lodish, H., A. Berk, S. L. Zipursky, P. Matsudaira and J. Darnell (2000), Molecular Cell Biology, 4th edn, New York: W. H. Freeman and Co. Maran, T. (2017), Mimicry and Meaning: Structure and Semiotics of Biological Mimicry (Biosemiotics 16), Berlin: Springer. Maran, T. and K. Kleisner (2010), ‘Towards an Evolutionary Biosemiotics: Semiotic Selection and Semiotic Cooption’, Biosemiotics, 3 (2): 189–200. Markoš, A., F. Grygar, L. Hajnal, K. Kleisner, Z. Kratochvíl and Z. Neubauer (2009), Life as Its Own Designer: Darwin’s Origin and Western Thought, Dordrecht: Springer.

EVOLUTION AND SEMIOSIS

167

Mayr, E. (1942), Systematics and the Origin of Species: From the Viewpoint of a Zoologist, New York: Columbia University Press. Moir, M. and M. J. Weissburg (2009), ‘Cautious Cannibals: Behavioral Responses of Juvenile and Adult Blue Crabs to the Odor of Injured Conspecifics’, Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 369 (2): 87–92. Morris, C. W. (1971), Writings on the General Theory of Signs, The Hague: Mouton. Morris, C. W. (1977), Foundations of the Theory of Signs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nöth, W., ed. (1994), ‘Origins of Semiosis: Sign Evolution in Nature and Culture’, Approaches to Semiotics 116, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Odling-Smee, F. J. (1988), ‘Nich-constructing Phenotypes’, in H. C. Plotkin (ed.), The Role of Behavior in Evolution, 73–132, Cambridge: MIT Press. Palmer, A. R. (2004), ‘Symmetry Breaking and the Evolution of Development’, Science, 306: 828–33. Paterson, Hugh E. H. (1993), Evolution and the Recognition Concept of Species, in S. F. McEvey (ed.), Baltimore: The J. Hopkins University Press. Pattee, H. H. (1967), ‘Quantum Mechanics, Heredity and the Origin of Life’, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 17 (3): 410–20. Pelkey, J. (2015), ‘Deep Congruence between Linguistic and Biotic Growth: Evidence for Semiotic Foundations’, in E. Velmezova, K. Kull and S. J. Cowley (eds), Biosemiotic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics, 97–119, Dordrecht: Springer. Peirce, Charles Sanders ([1866–1913] 1931–58) The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols 1–6, C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds), vols 7–8, A. Burks (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders ([1893–1913] 1998), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, Peirce Edition Project (eds), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pigliucci, M. and G. B. Müller (2010), ‘Elements of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis’, in M. Pigliucci and G. B. Müller (eds), Evolution–the Extended Synthesis, 3–17, Cambridge: MIT Press. Queiroz, J., L. Rodrigues and S. Ribeiro (2012), ‘Semiotic Evolution of Toolmaking: The Role of Symbols for Work towards Delayed Reward’, Intellectica, 58: 197–206. Schilhab, T., F. Stjernfelt and T. Deacon, eds (2012), The Symbolic Species Evolved (Biosemiotics 6), Berlin: Springer. Sebeok, T. A. (1976), Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs (Studies in Semiotics 5), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sebeok, T. A. (1986), More Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs, New York: Springer. Sebeok, T. A. (1997), ‘The Evolution of Semiosis’, in R. Posner, K. Robering and T. A. Sebeok (eds), Semiotics: A Handbook on the Sign-theoretic Foundations of Nature and Culture, vol. 1, 436–46, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Sebeok, T. A. (2001), ‘Biosemiotics: Its Roots, Proliferation and Prospects’, Semiotica, 134 (1–4): 61–78. Sharov, A. A. (2014), ‘Evolutionary Constraints or Opportunities?’ BioSystems, 123: 9–18. Sharov, A. A. (2016a), ‘Evolution of Natural Agents: Preservation, Advance, and Emergence of Functional Information’, Biosemiotics, 9: 103–20. Sharov, A. A. (2016b), ‘Coenzyme World Model of the Origin of Life’, BioSystems, 144: 8–17. Sharov, A. A., T. Maran and M. Tønnessen (2016), ‘Comprehending the Semiosis of Evolution’, Biosemiotics, 9 (1): 1–6. Sharov, A. and M. Tønnessen (2021), Semiotic Agency: Science beyond Mechanism, Dordrecht: Springer.

168

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Sharov, A. A. and T. Vehkavaara (2015), ‘Protosemiosis: Agency with Reduced Representation Capacity’, Biosemiotics, 8 (1): 103–23. Uexküll, J. von (1928), Theoretische Biologie, 2nd edn, Berlin: Springer. Uexküll, J. von ([1940] 1982), ‘The Theory of Meaning’, Semiotica, 42 (1): 25–82. Uexküll, J. von ([1934] 1992), ‘A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds’, Semiotica, 89 (4): 319–91. Van Hateren, J. H. (2015), ‘The Natural Emergence of (Bio)Semiotic Phenomena’, Biosemiotics, 8 (3): 403–19. Waddington, C. H. (1953), ‘Genetic Assimilation of an Acquired Character’, Evolution, 7 (2): 118–26. Waddington, C. H. (1957), The Strategy of the Genes; a Discussion of Some Aspects of Theoretical Biology, London: Allen & Unwin. Weible, D. (2013), ‘Approaching a Semiotics of Exaptation: At the Intersection between Biological Evolution and Technological Development’, Sign Systems Studies, 41 (4): 504–27. West-Eberhard, M. J. (2003), Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Winters, A. M. (2018), ‘Introduction: A Structural and Historical Approach to Understanding Advancements in Evolutionary Theory’, Biosemiotics, 11 (2): 167–80. Wittgenstein, L. ([1951] 1953), Philosophical Investigations, New York: Macmillan. Witzany, G. (1993), ‘Zeichenprozesse als Bedingungen der Möglichkeit von Leben und Evolution: zur Notwendigkeit einer Molekularpragmatik’, Zeitschrift für Semiotik, 15 (1–2): 107–25.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Consciousness and Semiosis JORDAN ZLATEV AND PIOTR KONDERAK

INTRODUCTION The relation between semiosis and consciousness – and in particular the issue of primacy of one or the other, in a temporal or even ontological sense – is rife with controversies. For most proponents of Peircian semiotics (e.g. Deely 2001) semiosis is fundamental, and consciousness, in any of its forms, is a consequence of semiosis (Champagne 2018).1 Or perhaps consciousness is not even needed for semiosis, given that (a) semiosis has been argued to take place in plants (e.g. Krampen 1981) and even the ‘pre-biological world’ (e.g. Koch 1987) and (b) few would be prepared to argue for consciousness in plants and inanimate matter. On the other side stand approaches where a conscious mind is a precondition for sign use. We can find this assumption more or less explicitly underlying ‘interpretative semiotics’ (e.g. Eco 1976) or ‘phenomenological semiotics’ (e.g. Sonesson 2007). Despite the major differences between these approaches, for example concerning iconicity, they both presuppose the existence of a conscious subject for the ‘sign function’ to be realized. This is the case since it is, on such accounts, a conscious interpreter and not just a Peircean Interpretant (i.e. the effect of semiosis, often a new sign) is required to be able to both link and differentiate expressions and meanings. Such fundamental differences imply not only theoretically but conceptually distinct positions on the complex notions of consciousness and semiosis. This is hardly surprising since it is not only the terms themselves that are ambiguous as, for example, stated by Chalmers (1995: 200): ‘Consciousness is an ambiguous term referring to many different phenomena.’ In addition, the phenomena themselves are complex, and as we discuss in this chapter, fundamentally non-unitary and consisting of a number of interrelated but distinct layers. We do so with the help of a cognitive-semiotic framework that was developed during the past two decades: The Semiotic Hierarchy (Konderak 2018; Zlatev 2003, 2009a, 2009b, 2018), which we refer to as the SH-framework in what follows. Following the methodology and principles of cognitive semiotics – a new transdisciplinary field combining concepts and methods from semiotics, cognitive science and (cognitive) linguistics (Zlatev 2012, 2015; Zlatev, Sonesson and Konderak 2016; Stampoulidis, Bolognesi, and Zlatev 2019) – the SH-framework has been developed on the basis of ideas from phenomenology, and especially the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1964a, 1964b), and empirical research, above all from developmental and animal psychology (e.g. Stern 2000; Tomasello 2008). Applied to the issue concerning the relation between

170

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

consciousness and semiosis, the SH-framework, in its current formulation, implies the following four theses: ●●

●●

●●

●●

Thesis 1. The core phenomenon of consciousness is intentionality, the directedness of experience beyond itself; this is more so than the ‘aboutness’ of representations in analytical philosophy (Searle 1983), an understanding derived from the use of the term by Brentano ([1874] 1995). Most generally, intentionality is the ‘openness to the world’ (l’ouverture au monde) of subjectivity, in the words of Merleau-Ponty. This generalization is motivated by the fact that many experiences that are not directed towards specific intentional objects (be they in perception, memory, imagination, etc.), like for example moods, nevertheless ‘colour’ how the world appears for us. In sum, intentionality is to be understood as the ‘openness to the world or what is “other” (“alterity”)’ (Thompson 2007: 22). Thesis 2. Semiosis is likewise a complex phenomenon, to be understood in general as meaning making, rather than as ‘sign use’ or ‘sign operations’, as is more customary (Zlatev 2015). Thus ‘semiosis itself must be manifold and hierarchically structured, in ways not yet dreamt of in our philosophy’ (Sonesson 2012: 81). Correspondingly, semiotics is the study of meaning (making) and not only of signs (Sonesson 1989). Thesis 3. Neither semiosis nor consciousness is primary, as these terms refer to two dependent parts, or moments, of (animate) existence, or being-in-theworld, where subject and world stand in a reciprocal but asymmetric relation. In the formulation of (Koo 2015: 97), ‘subject and object, or mind and world, are not already self-contained relata, … but rather dynamic poles of one unitary experiential system that permeates our being in and toward the world’. Within this unity, we can understand consciousness (intentionality) as the more world-directed aspect of existence, while semiosis as the more subject-directed (‘inward’) side of the same subject-world relationship, as illustrated in Figure 8.1. Thesis 4. There are (at least) five different layers of existence (the consciousness-semiosis nexus), and these stand in a particular relationship, with ‘lower’ layers serving as foundations, background and preconditions for ‘higher’ ones. This is what makes the SH-framework, even in the present phenomenologically informed version, a hierarchy of semiosis and consciousness

In this chapter we explain and substantiate these four theses. In the next section, we present the background to the SH-framework, along with some of the problems of its initial formulations, and how they have been addressed with the help of phenomenology. The third section presents each of the five layers of meaning-making and consciousness, with brief descriptions of structures and processes that are typical for each layer. While the borders between layers may be blurry, higher layers are shown to be crucially founded on lower ones. In the fourth section, we conclude by suggesting how the SH-framework can be used to help clarify and possibly resolve some of debates on the primacy of one kind of semiosis/consciousness with respect to another kind.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND SEMIOSIS

171

FIGURE 8.1  The reciprocal (though asymmetric) relation between subject and world, and the dual nature of this relation as consciousness/intentionality and semiosis.

DEVELOPING THE SH-FRAMEWORK Early versions The original, and still relevant, motivation for the development of the SH-framework was a general dissatisfaction with the incoherence in how the concept of meaning was treated both across and within disciplines. As stated by Zlatev (2003: 253) at the onset an article called laconically (and ambitiously) ‘Meaning = Life (+ Culture): An outline of a unified biocultural theory of meaning’: Our conception of meaning has become increasingly fragmented, along with much else in the increasing ‘postmodernization’ of our worldview. The trenches run deep between different kinds of meaning theories: mentalist, behaviorist, (neural) reductionist, (social) constructivist, functionalist, formalist, computationalist, deflationist … And they are so deep that a rational debate between the different camps seems impossible. The concept is treated not only differently, but incommensurably within the different disciplines. Apart from terminological and contextual issues – which are inevitable given the different epistemological positions of the various ‘meaning theories’ mentioned – the problem was proposed to lie in the inherently layered (or stratified) nature of the phenomenon of meaning itself. Thus, the first attempt of ‘defragmentation’ consisted of both (a) defining meaning in sufficiently general terms as ‘the relation between an organism O, and its physical and cultural environment E, determined by the value V of E for O’ (Zlatev 2003: 258) and (b) allowing for different types of meaning, depending on different kinds of value systems – biological, phenomenal, cultural but not linguistic, and language-based – to form a hierarchy. This basic idea was eventually formulated in the first explicit formulation of a framework that was called ‘the Semiotic Hierarchy’ (Zlatev 2009b), where the two interacting relata necessary for meaning were generalized to subject and world, respectively. This analysis resulted in the levels of meaning-subjectworld shown in Table 8.1. Further, the framework suggested the evolutionary and implicational hierarchy shown in Figure 8.2. In agreement with biosemiotics (e.g. Kull 2009), this version of the SH-framework located the basic ‘semiotic threshold’ – the border between semiotic and non-semiotic phenomena – at the level of life. In other words, the claim was that all and only living creatures are capable of intrinsic meaning (while all automata and computer systems

172

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

TABLE 8.1  Kinds of meaning, in correspondence with different kinds of subject and world (adapted from Zlatev 2009b). Level

Meaning

Subject

World

1

Biological

Organism

Umwelt

2

Phenomenal

Minimal self

Lebenswelt (natural)

3

Signitive

Enculturated self

Lebenswelt (cultural)

4

Normative

Linguistic self

Universe of discourse

FIGURE 8.2  The SH-framework as an evolutionary and implicational hierarchy (adapted from Zlatev 2009b).

have, at best, ‘derived’ or attributed meaning). The value system at this level is based on biological mechanisms responsible for the preservation and reproduction of life. The world that the subject interacts with is an Umwelt, von Uexküll’s concept of a relational structure that emerges on the basis of the organism’s interaction with the environment (Thompson 2007). Zlatev (2009b: 181) proposed that this amounts to a kind of ‘protointentionality’, but not yet to consciousness. The latter was claimed to emerge on Level 2 and to provide the basis for ‘phenomenal meaning’, including experiences like pleasure and pain. Hence, the world that the subject interacts with becomes a Lebenswelt or life world, using Husserl’s famous term denoting the world-as-experienced, which is, according to phenomenology, epistemologically (and ontologically) primary (Sokolowski 2000; Zlatev 2010). The subject on this level is a ‘minimal self’, not only sensing and acting, but consciously experiencing its life world. A bat, for instance, not only avoids obstacles detected by means of echolocation, but also experiences these obstacles in some qualitative way, a way that ‘feels like’ something (Nagel 1974).

CONSCIOUSNESS AND SEMIOSIS

173

As shown in Figure 8.2, in this version of the SH-framework consciousness was understood as a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for the ‘sign function’, which emerges first on Level 3. The sign concept that underlies this claim was adopted from the semiotics of Sonesson (2007, 2009, 2010), who himself derived it from the work of Husserl and Piaget (1962). In short, for a subject to be able to comprehend or produce a sign, they must both link and differentiate between the expression of the sign (in any form: a gesture, a picture or a word) and what it represents: its content. Non-human animals have been shown to be capable of this (Savage-Rumbaugh and Lewin 1994), but only when enculturated in a sharing environment where mutual trust can develop (Dor, Knight and Lewis 2014). Hence, Zlatev (2009b) proposed that a sign-based (signitive) value-system presupposes not only consciousness, but a (human-like) culture, making the world on Level 3 a cultural life world, and the subject an ‘enculturated self’ (see Table 8.1). Beyond this, Level 4 requires a subject who is capable of using conventional signs correctly and systematically, or in other words to be a language user, a ‘linguistic self’. Thus, the Umwelt and the life world(s) become complemented by a ‘universe of discourse’: the world of everyday conversations, novels, poems, myths, scientific theories and other spoken or written texts. The two key emergent properties at this level were thus proposed to be normativity and systematicity. In other words, language is necessarily characterized by grammar, understood as a system of semiotic norms (e.g. Itkonen 2003). As suggested by this short summary, it is essential for the SH-framework that higher levels do not replace lower ones, but build upon and complement them. Human beings can thus be understood as a combination of the different kinds of meanings and selves, from biological to linguistic. The framework was meant to be not only theoretical but both consistent with, and guiding further empirical work in areas like comparative (animal) and developmental psychology. It was used productively in questions concerning the emergence of the ‘sign function’ and language in evolution and child development (Gómez-Moreno 2019; Zlatev 2009a), but much less so concerning the issue currently in focus: the relation between semiosis and consciousness.

Problems with the early versions In many ways, the early versions of the SH-framework were preliminary, practically asking for extensions and revisions. One problem was the seeming equation between enculturation and signification on Level 3 (see Table 8.1). On the one hand, if culture is understood as something unique to human beings (e.g. Tomasello 2008), this equation appears to constrain semiosis (if understood as ‘sign use’) to humanly enculturated agents. This would then make the SH-framework ‘anthropo-semiotic’ by definition, which would defeat its original purpose. On the other hand, Sonesson (2015) pointed out that, broadly understood, culture requires social transmission and (degrees of) conventionalization, but not necessarily signs, especially if the latter are defined on the basis of ‘double asymmetry’, with the expression being more directly perceived, and the content more thematic, as per his semiotic theory (see above). On this basis, Sonesson proposed dividing Level 3 into a lower level of Culture, and higher one of Signs. However, given the highly polysemous and controversial nature of the term ‘culture’ (no less than ‘semiosis’ and ‘consciousness’) such an extension of the SH-framework is unlikely to serve its intended function of providing a ‘unified theory’ of meaning.2 In another development, Konderak (2018) made extensive and productive use of the SH-framework in a book-length overview of the field of cognitive semiotics, in particular

174

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

with respect to its relation to cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Konderak was, however, critical towards the central role of the notion of value for defining different levels of meaning: ‘the term “value” has a different meaning at different levels in the Semiotic Hierarchy: biological, phenomenal, significational and linguistic values differ significantly’ (Konderak 2018: 56). This can be responded to by stating that such values must differ so as to clearly differentiate the levels of meaning. However, Konderak’s critique is valid to the extent that it points to a lack in the system: wherein lies the common, unifying aspect, given that biological values have to do with survival, phenomenal with ‘feels’ and signitive with linguistic with communication? There were other and no less pressing problems with the early versions of the SHframework. One concerns the nature of the different ‘levels’ of meaning. If they are to be regarded as ontologically distinct – as implied by the comparison with Popper’s three-part ontology (Popper 1979), which famously distinguishes between the physical, mental and cultural ‘worlds’ – then how are these ontological borders to be breached? In fact, the SH-framework was somewhat surprisingly criticized in public presentations for being a modern version of the medieval Scala Naturae – the ‘Ladder’ or ‘Great Chain’ of Being – where Man, as an image of God, was at top, while more lowly creatures occupied one or another stratum below. Of course, this interpretation was far from intended, since it would have defeated the purpose of the SH-framework to serve as an evolutionary model (Zlatev 2009b; Konderak 2018). The problem is that it is easy to write ‘emerge’ between the levels (see Figure 8.2), but much harder to explain how ontologically novel properties could indeed do so ex nihili. Particularly difficult issues are raised by the need to explain the emergence of ‘phenomenal’ consciousness (or ‘qualia’) on Level 2, and normativity in Level 4, if these are indeed fully lacking on lower levels. The first of these problems coincides with the so-called ‘hard problem’ in consciousness studies (Chalmers 1995), and the latter with ‘Hume’s guillotine’, according to which norms (‘ought’) can never be reduced to facts (‘is’) (Itkonen 2003). This leads naturally to the second problem, which is placing normativity as an exclusive and definitional property of language. While it is hard to disagree with the strong arguments marshalled in favour of linguistic normativity by Itkonen (2003, 2008), there are also clearly norms in non-linguistic sign use, for example in many if not most gestures (Kendon 2004). But, of course, norms not only concern communication, but behaviour in general (Zlatev and Blomberg 2019), and arguably, not only human behaviour (Lorini 2018). A third problem is the ambiguity with which the notion of meaning itself was treated in the early versions of the SH-framework: either as more or less static structures (such as norms), or as more dynamic processes of meaning-making. It is not unusual to find semioticians who would not only give precedence to the latter, but completely deny the reality of the former (Cowley 2011; Kravchenko 2017), apart from that of a ‘second-order construct’. Cognitive semiotics also tends to privilege meaning dynamism (Zlatev 2015), but appreciates dialectical analyses in which this needs to be constrained by sedimented structures (e.g. Stampoulidis et al. 2019; Zlatev and Blomberg 2016). Yet, how is the interrelation between meaning-as-structure and meaning-as-process to be understood, in more general terms, and not confined to language? Finally, we arrive at the problem that is most pertinent for the present chapter: what kind of consciousness was implied in the 2009 version of the framework, and can consciousness as such really be placed at a particular ‘level’ in the system? As stated in the introduction, it is generally conceded that not only the term ‘consciousness’ is ambiguous, but the phenomenon behind this term is inherently complex and needs to

CONSCIOUSNESS AND SEMIOSIS

175

be analysed in terms of different ‘kinds’, or perhaps layers. In the review in the previous sub-section, it was mentioned that consciousness was deemed to be a prerequisite for sign use since without its both linking and differentiating (and more generally: interpreting) function, there could be no pairings of expressions and contents. But this may seem to be both a rather advanced type of reflective consciousness, and at the same time, not a very representative kind, given that the ‘hard problem’ is said to concern explaining the ‘what’s-it-like’ type of phenomenal consciousness.

Addressing the problems through phenomenology Most of these issues were acknowledged by Zlatev (2018) and addressed by attempting to ground the SH-framework firmly in the philosophy of phenomenology, especially as expressed in the later work of Husserl (2001, [1936] 1970), as elaborated and further developed by Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 1964a, 1964b; Hass 2008), as well as more recently (Sokolowski 2000; Thompson 2007; Zahavi 2010, 2014; Gallagher 2012). As these writings make clear, the ontology of phenomenology is resolutely nondualist, and not concerned only with ‘description’ but with explaining the facts of (human) existence, using a pluralistic methodology: from phenomenological reduction to developmental and atypical psychology (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991; Gallagher 2005). Merleau-Ponty is probably best known among the phenomenologists for consistently emphasizing the fundamental unity of subject and world, where both stand in a reciprocal, co-constituting relationship: The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects. The subject is a being-in-the-world [être au monde]. (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 499–500) It is this ‘flesh’ of self and world, sprit and matter, mind and body that is the irreducible whole. While we could focus on one or another side, this is only a ‘moment’ (in the phenomenological sense) of the unified whole, a dependent part that could not exist on its own. In line with Thesis 4, Merleau-Ponty presented various layer-based analyses of this whole (existence), but always emphasized that these should not be seen as ‘orders of reality or three sorts of beings, but as three planes of signification or three forms of unity’ (Merleau-Ponty 1963: 201), our emphasis. This shows the way to dispel the problem with understanding the strata of the SH-framework as ontological levels discussed above. The point is to consistently see them as forming a unity, and to treat the vertical relation not in terms of ‘ontological emergence’, but as … the two-way relationship that phenomenology has called Fundierung: the founding term, or originator … is primary in the sense that the originated is presented as a determinate or explicit form of the originator, … and yet the originator is not primary in the empiricist sense and the originated is not simply derived from it, since it is through the originated that the originator is made manifest. (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 458) As we show below (see ‘The Five Layers of the SH-framework’), this notion can be applied to all the different ‘planes’ in the SH-framework, with properties on the higher

176

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

layers appearing as pre-figured on the lower ones. For example, the ‘unconscious’ forms of intentionality on the lowest layer are not devoid of (phenomenal) consciousness, but rather serve as a background to or a horizon for it. For this reason, and since tight borders between the planes cannot be maintained, we consistently refer to the different strata of the SH-framework as layers in what follows. This approach also promises to resolve the problem of normativity in an analogous manner. While linguistic normativity on the highest layer(s) may come in the most ‘determinate explicit and form’ (see the quotation above), it is not to be regarded as a property that is restricted to language, or to human being, or even to social creatures. Rather, norms are part of the fabric of existence, emerging as structures sedimented from successful interactions with the world: ‘each organism, in the presence of a given milieu, has its optimal conditions of activity and its proper manner of realizing equilibrium’ (Merleau-Ponty 1963: 148). But since the organism-subject is not a machine, but an active participant in this milieu, it can also modify it ‘according to the internal norms of its activity’ (1963: 153). Beavers’ building of dams springs naturally to mind, but this applies to most if not all animals. This generalized concept of norm (Thompson 2007) allows us also to address the problem concerning the ambiguity of the notion of ‘value’ in the original framework (see above). It is precisely these sedimented structures that become realized differently on each layer of meaning, since what counts as ‘proper manner’ of acting differs from layer to layer: of proper movement (Sheets-Johnstone 2011), proper perception, proper communication and language eventually. Furthermore, both the question of what unites these various norms and the question concerning where they derive from link to the issue concerning the duality of meaning as structure and process. The two are namely dialectically interlinked by what Merleau-Ponty (1962: 150) referred to as the ‘the worldstructure, with its two stages of sedimentation and spontaneity’. From one perspective, actual, situated action has priority. At the same time, there is a difference between acts that have found fulfilment and those that have failed to do so, with the world providing, in the broadest sense of the term, negative feedback. It is the first kind of acts that lead to the sedimentation of norms. Such norms can at every moment be broken, given that ‘my habitual being in the world is at each moment equally precarious’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 513).3 Note also that understood in this way, sedimentation is not the reverse relation to Fundierung, despite some suggestions, including our own (Zlatev and Blomberg 2016) to treat it this way. Rather than stating that higher levels of meaning are ‘sedimented upon’ lower ones, we can state, in accordance with Zlatev (2018), that there are two aspects of meaning on every layer: one as relatively stable structures (norms) and one as processes that are both constrained by and with time changing these norms (acts of meaning-making), as shown in Figure 8.3. This leads us to the fourth and most relevant for the present discussion issue. As can be noted, the term ‘consciousness’ does not appear in Figure 8.3, and the reason for this is that consciousness, understood broadly in accordance with phenomenology, is present on all layers, albeit in different forms and degrees of explicitness. We can now explicate and interlink the four theses stated in the introduction. As stated in Thesis 1, above, the central feature of consciousness is intentionality, ‘the pointingbeyond itself proper of consciousness’ (Thompson 2007: 22). This very broad notion can be subdivided into different kinds of ‘intentionalities’, as performed in meticulous analyses by Husserl and other phenomenologists: perception, memory, imagination, judgement, etc. Some of these are more basic than others, which implies that consciousness/

CONSCIOUSNESS AND SEMIOSIS

177

FIGURE 8.3  The dialectics of spontaneity (S1) and sedimentation (S2), as orthogonal to the layers of the SH-framework (adapted from Zlatev 2018).

intentionality has a hierarchical, Fundierung-based structure (Thesis 4). Once again, the most basic layers were sought by Merleau-Ponty (1962: 140), who emphasized ‘the discovery, beneath the intentionality of representations, of a deeper intentionality, which others have called existence’, which, as pointed out, he characterized most generally as ‘openness to the world’ (l’ouverture au monde). At the same time, in accordance with the Fundierung principle, higher, ‘originated’ forms are not to be reduced to this, but only to become more ‘determinate’. Unlike in the original formulation of the SH-framework (see Table 8.1), it now follows that the subject and the world are ontologically the same on all layers, but differ in the respect to which their semiotic potential has been realized. Thus, higher layers may elaborate (develop) properties on lower layers, but not introduce radically new ‘ontological properties’. This concerns both normativity, as discussed above, and consciousness. Analogously, it concerns also semiosis, which in accordance with Thesis 2 is to be understood as meaning making in general, with sign use (signification) being a developed and ‘determinate’ form of semiosis. Thus, we agree with Sonesson (2012: 81) that ‘a useful concept of sign designates a kind of meaning, but it does not cover all meanings’. This may be hard to accept for many semioticians, but Peirce himself was open to such an idea: ‘Possibly there may be Representamens that are not Signs’ (1903: CP 2.274). In his analysis of perceptual meaning-making in terms of Peircean semiotics mentioned in the introduction, Champagne (2018) attempts to provide a bridge between pre-signitive and signitive semiosis, pointing out that ‘the Peircean category of Firstness is meant to remind us that, with one sign-vehicle in complete isolation, there can be no sign-action’ (2018: 85). Thus, ‘pure’ Firstness (and thus consciousness) is not sufficient for sign use, but is still a necessary precondition for the emergence of signs. We do not attempt to elaborate on this here, but simply point out that Thesis 2, and the SH-framework in general, is not necessarily incompatible with Peircean theory. To these we add the (somewhat) novel idea expressed in Thesis 3 and Figure 8.1: that intentionality/consciousness and semiosis are intimately related, but not fully equivalent notions, as the former profiles the world-directed aspect of the reciprocal subjectworld nexus (existence), while semiosis profiles the subject-directed aspect. This is both

178

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

TABLE 8.2  The five levels of interlinked consciousness-semiosis in the (current version of the) Semiotic Hierarchy, with concepts explained in the section ‘The Five Layers of the SH-framework’. Layer and label

Consciousness

Structures of semiosis

5. Language

Linguistic intentionality

Predication, syntax

4. Sign Use

Signitive intentionality

Signs

3. Intersubjectivity

Shared intentionality

Mimetic schemas, conventions, rituals

2. Subjectivity

Perceptual intentionality

Noemata, Leib/Körper duality

1. Animation

Operative intentionality, drive intentionality

Schemas, goals, emotions

consistent with the ‘openness to the world’ essence of intentionality and of the basic semiotic principle that meaning is always meaning for someone. Finally, we can reconnect this with the original claim of the SH-framework that meaning is layered, but generalizing this as layers of consciousness-semiosis, as expressed in Thesis 4, and shown in Table 8.2. The labels for the five layers are nearly the same as those proposed by Zlatev (2018), but we use ‘Animation’ rather than ‘Life’ for the lowest, in accordance with the phenomenology of the primacy of movement: ‘Originally, the “I move,” “I do,” precedes the “I can do”’ (Husserl 1989: 17), an aspect that has been extensively investigated by Sheets-Johnstone (2011). Thus, we (for the time being) bypass the ‘hard’ question on the possible presence of any kind of consciousness in simple organisms like plants, bacteria and insects, and rather start from the kind of primordial intentionality that we ourselves possess as animals (Abram 2010).

THE FIVE LAYERS OF THE SH-FRAMEWORK In this central section, we describe the five layers of the (current) SH-framework shown in Figure 8.3, starting, as usual, from ‘below’, and pointing out both the continuity between levels and the Fundierung relation, with higher levels elaborating, and in a sense ‘sublimating’ the types of consciousness and semiosis on lower layers. In each case, we provide examples from both the phenomenological and psychological literatures, in the spirit of cognitive semiotics and its ‘conceptual-empirical loop’. Further, we attempt to illustrate the dialectics between the sedimented semiotic structures (see Figure 8.3) and the corresponding processes which they both ‘control’, and from which they emerge, on each layer.

Animation and operative intentionality Perhaps the strongest difference between early and later work in phenomenology, represented also in the writings of Husserl, is the quest for ‘deeper’ meaning and intentionality than what is given in focal consciousness and clear intuitions, as these themselves require a Fundierung relation to a layer of pre-conscious (or even unconscious) experience. At the same time, with the help of phenomenology we can understand this

CONSCIOUSNESS AND SEMIOSIS

179

layer differently from either psychoanalysis or the ‘cognitive unconscious’ of cognitive science (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). In particular, unconscious experience is not to be understood in analogy with an act of focal consciousness, say a perception or a mental image, but simply lacking (self) awareness, confined to a purely ‘functional’, or else ‘repressed’ level of the mind. Rather, as argued by Kozyreva (2018), the unconscious serves as a non-representational background of subjectivity, as illustrated by the following metaphor, in the posthumously published ‘working notes’ of Merleau-Ponty (1968: 180): This unconscious is to be sought not at the bottom of ourselves, behind the back of our ‘consciousness,’ but in front of us, as articulations of our field. It is ‘unconscious’ by the fact that it is not an object, but it is that through which objects are possible, it is the constellation wherein our future is read – It is between them as the interval of the trees between the trees, or as their common level. Another way to express this is that there are always ‘margins’ to consciousness, which constitute a grey area, and this area constantly changes its borders, depending on what is focused on. Memory provides another example, as ‘[w]hat is forgotten does not disappear but becomes a part of the implicit background of subjective experience’ (Kozyreva 2018: 221). Husserl’s notions of drive (Trieb) and operative (fungierende) intentionality can in fact be said to broaden the concept of consciousness itself, so as to include this background, in an analogous way to how visual perception is not just a matter of the sides of the things that we see in front of us, but also includes sides that are currently not visible. For example, attempting to understand sexuality as either conscious or unconscious ‘representations’ distorts its continuous presence ‘in human life as an atmosphere’ (Merleau-Ponty [1962] 2012: 171). Operative, animate intentionality includes a constant ‘affective tone’ accompanying all acts of movement and perception, even before they become explicitly evaluated (Thompson 2007). Given this layer of intentionality and semiosis, ‘in the movement, in the action, in the environmentally attuned responses’ (Gallagher 2012: 78) that serves as a background for subjectivity, how are we to characterize the subject? Merleau-Ponty provides the following answer: There is, therefore, another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it. This captive or natural spirit is my body, … the system of anonymous ‘functions’ which draw every particular focus into a general project. (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 296) This quotation does not contradict the previous one, since ‘autonomy’ and ‘function’ are not to be understood as devoid of qualitative experience, in contrast to research in computational cognitive science. Gallagher (2005: 24) has proposed to define this body schema (schéma corporel), as a ‘system of sensorimotor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of [explicit] perceptual monitoring’, but it is important to note that this does not imply lack of (marginal) consciousness and semiosis. Such capacities (e.g. walking, sitting up, running, drinking from a cup) are not to be understood as inbuilt ‘abilities’, as they develop on the basis of bodily movements, at the same time as these movements are guided by emerging ‘action schemas’ and the body schema as a whole.

180

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

In other words, this is a clear case of process/structure or spontaneity/sedimentation dialectics. The developmental psychology of Piaget (1962) provides a number of theoretical concepts and empirical evidence for such dialectics. For example, in the first months of life, children appear to lack clear understandings of what their movements are aimed to achieve, i.e. goals. But on the basis of many pairings of ‘context’ and ‘movements’, initially as simple as bodily sensations and sucking, they learn to anticipate (or rather ‘protend’, since this is not yet an act of explicit anticipation) the results of their actions, which can in the future become goals. Once established, these can then serve as ‘norms’ to evaluate the effectiveness of the said movements, which now deserve to be called actions due to their goal-directedness. Another (neuro-)psychological theory that seems to be consistent with the pre/unconscious intentionality on this layer is that of Damasio (1994), and in particular his notion of somatic markers, which are ‘intimately connected to emotions and feelings. A somatic marker works as automatic alarm; it warns against possible negative consequences of the choice made. The warning is based on our previous experiences, encoding association between objects and events, and some states of the body’ (Konderak 2018: 47). As this description implies, there is clearly bodily normativity on this level, and like the case with the body schema, there is an inherently blurry area between emotions (which Damasio describes in purely biological and functional terms) and feelings, which on the other hand are said to be at the centre of ‘core consciousness’. It is important to highlight this inherent ‘blurriness’ between the layers of the SH-framework, as we transit to the higher layer of existence.

Subjectivity and perceptual intentionality Emerging from the ‘interval … between the trees’ (see the quotation above) is the kind of intentionality that is clearly directed to an intentional object, in perception, memory or imagination. Husserl and other phenomenologists analyse such consciousness (and consequently semiosis) in terms of its noetic-noematic structure. The act of consciousness is called noesis, and it is dynamic, particular and subjective (immanent). But given that intentionality is always outwardly directed, the intentional object itself constrains how it is to be approached. Thus when we see (remember, anticipate, imagine) and object, we always do so from a given perspective as ‘something’ as opposed to something other: the noema. As pointed out by Gallagher (2012: 70–1): the noema is to be understood neither as an ideal meaning, nor as a concept, nor a proposition; it is not an intermediary between subject and object; rather, it is the object precisely as it is experienced. … The noema, as the sense or meaning of the object – the object as it is known-is neither fully immanent nor fully transcendent to the act of consciousness. Thus, the noema is not a (mental) ‘representation’ of the object, but the object itself, under a given perspective. It is hence clearly a relational structure, fitting nicely one of our main points (Thesis 3, Figure 8.1) about the inherently relational and reciprocal (subjectworld) nature of consciousness and semiosis. The noema is a ‘sense or meaning’, but not in a representational and even less a linguistic sense of these terms,4 since it is essentially perceptual (or quasi-perceptual, as in imagination). Further, the noetic-noematic structure of (perceptual) consciousness could be seen in terms of the emphasized process-structure

CONSCIOUSNESS AND SEMIOSIS

181

dialectic, since specific noemata can, at least to some extent, arise as sedimentations of previous acts of noesis, or in psychological terms, as perceptual categories (cf. Gurwitsch 1966). Importantly, there is an inherently qualitative (as opposed to just ‘functional’) dimension to perceptual intentionality. One of the fundamental insights of phenomenology, on which all phenomenologists agree even while they may debate much else, is that consciousness is pre-reflectively self-conscious. In other words, the claim is that every conscious act is reflexive, or ‘self-perceiving’. Perceiving a tree, remembering a friend, imagining a pink elephant, etc. are not only intentionalities directed outward, but simultaneously, before any explicit act of reflection, felt as ‘belonging’ to a particular subject of experience. It is this that gives the qualitative ‘feel’ of any experience, which is the hallmark of subjectivity. Husserl’s argument, presented persuasively by Zahavi (2003a, 2003b), is that this ‘selfperceiving’ nature of all acts of consciousness is grounded in the nature of temporality, and specifically in inner time consciousness, where the past-presence-future continuity of the ‘stream of consciousness’ concerns not only the ‘outer’ intentional object, or even towards the noema, but also the ‘inner’ noesis itself. In the (metaphorical) words of Husserl (2001: 320), ‘this is not merely a continuously streaming lived-experiencing [Erleben], rather when it streams there is always simultaneously consciousness of this streaming’. One more structure of consciousness-semiosis on this layer needs to be pointed, especially given its key Fundierung role: the dual experience of our bodies as sensing and experiencing subjects (Leib), on the one hand, and as possible objects of perception (Körper) on the other.5 This duality of the body shows itself, according to phenomenological analysis, through so-called ‘double sensations’ (Doppelempfindungen), which characteristically often concern the sense of touch: [W]hen I touch my right hand with my left, my right hand, as an object, has the strange property of being able to feel too. […] When I press my two hands together, it is not a matter of two sensations felt together as one perceives two objects placed side by side, but of an ambiguous set-up in which both hands can alternate the rôles of ‘touching’ and being ‘touched.’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 131) This apparently simple insight has long-going consequences. First, it can be used to support the thesis of the unity of the embodied subject, as Leib and Körper are not two different ontological kinds, but two perspectives on the same body, even when this body is our own. Second, the fluid changes in perspective concerning our own body, showing us clearly that we are part of the world, rather than disembodied spirits or angels, apply just as well to other bodies, and hence serve to ground intersubjectivity, as described below.

Intersubjectivity and shared intentionality The general definition of intersubjectivity characterizing it as ‘the sharing of experiential content (e.g., feelings, perceptions, thoughts, linguistic meanings) among a plurality of subjects’ (Zlatev et al. 2008: 1) implies two things: (a) it presupposes at least some prior existence of subjectivity and (b) it concerns different kinds of acts of semiosis, some of which are clearly more basic than others. According to Husserl, and as elaborated by

182

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

other phenomenological analyses, it is in particular the experience of Leib-Körper duality, where we experience both likeness and otherness in relation to other embodied subjects, that serves as a key foundation for intersubjectivity: Thus, it is exactly the unique subject-object status of the body, the remarkable interplay between ipseity and alterity characterizing double-sensation, which permits me to recognize and experience other embodied subjects. I am experiencing myself in a manner that anticipates both the way in which an Other would experience me and the way in which I would experience an Other … The possibility of sociality presupposes a certain intersubjectivity of the body. (Zahavi 2003a: 104) In other words, if we were not the kind of animals we are, we would only be capable of ‘solving the problem of other minds’, either on the basis of inference of ‘simulation’, while such a problem never even appears to (at least most of) us, due to the direct bodily coupling in perception and interaction with others. In a next step, our ‘experience of the transcendence of foreign subjectivity’ (Zahavi 2003a: 115) makes possible the constitution of a fully objective world, since beyond our own motility, what makes us certain of the existence of external objects is the fact that they can be equally well experienced by others. In other words, perceptual intentionality has become sublimated to shared intentionality. But what about other kind of intentional acts like remembering and imagining? Sharing their content is considerably harder than that of perception, and is arguably only made possible by ‘man’s natural propensity, from childhood onwards, to engage in mimetic activity (and this distinguishes man from other creatures, that he is thoroughly mimetic, and through mimesis takes his first steps in understanding’ (Aristotle 1987: 34). While the concept of mimesis has been considerably discussed in aesthetics, and to some extent in semiotics, it has been especially insightfully developed by the psychologist Donald (1991, 2001). According to his elaborate cognitive-semiotic theory, it was the evolution of (bodily) mimesis over 2 million years ago that marked a key watershed in our existence (Sonesson 2010; Zlatev 2014a). In particular, mimesis allows us to externalize our imagination through bodily acts (long before the onset of language), for such acts to be rehearsed in self-learning, and imitated in pedagogy. Complex action sequences can be broken up in sequences of mimetic schemas (Zlatev 2014b), which can be internalized, and thus serve as pre-linguistic concepts, in accordance with Piaget’s theory of the emergence of ‘symbols in childhood’. Mimesis is arguably what also bridges the gap to the next layer of meaning, based on sign use. When what is learned through mimesis are practical actions, the function of mimesis is typification and conventionalization. But when a mimer re-enacts some salient object or event in the environment, where it is not the bodily acts but what they signify that is in focus, then the transition to sign use has taken place (Sonesson 2010; Zlatev, Zywiczynski and Wacewicz 2020). For example, learning to eat with fork and spoon is learning a cultural convention (schema), but when pretending to eat, to be someone else, etc., one engages in sign use. On a more global level, rituals that are either nonsignitive (e.g. a communal dance) or signitive (e.g. hunting pantomimes) are clearly based on bodily mimesis, which thus considerably extends the scope of shared intentionality beyond that of perception.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND SEMIOSIS

183

Sign use and signitive intentionality As pointed out above,6 the SH-framework is in agreement with the proposal of Sonesson (2012: 181) that ‘a useful concept of sign designates a kind of meaning, but it does not cover all meanings’. We also agree with his general phenomenological definition of sign use (proper): The sign as such is thus a whole made up of two parts, expression and content, and there is a double asymmetric relationship between them. First, from the point of view of immediacy, expression is more accessible to consciousness than content. In the second place, content is more in focus (more prominent, more important) than expression. (Sonesson 2012: 85) However, we contend that it is possible to see this ‘double asymmetry’ as a consequence of something more general: the existence not only of perceptual consciousness, but a particular kind of reflective, signitive consciousness, as specified by Zlatev et al. (2020: 160): DEF. A sign is used (produced or understood) by a subject S, if and only if: (a) S is made aware of an intentional object O by means of expression E, which can be perceived by the senses. S is (or at least can be) aware of (a). The second condition (b) implies that E is not just associated with O, as a stimulus is to a response, but the subject is, or at least can become, (focally) aware of this directional relation. This helps to differentiate signs from other semiotic vehicles like animal signals, where, for example, an emotion-provoked cry draws the attention of other animals to a predator. Such signals may very well fulfil condition (a), but hardly (b). It is precisely the reflective awareness of the directed relation between E and O in (b) that distinguishes associative signals from signs proper and provides the ‘double asymmetry’ in question as a by-product. On the other hand, it is hard to see why there would be no double asymmetry between the cry and the predator, implying that it is not a sufficient condition of sign use. At the same time, we may follow Sonesson’s interpretation of Peircean semiotics (e.g. Sonesson 2010) and refer to the E-O relation as the semiotic ground, distinguishing between three different kinds: indexical (contiguity in space/time between E and O), iconic (based on the E-O resemblance) and symbolic (based on convention, that is: common knowledge that E denotes O). The three often coexist in a single act of sign use, but typically one of these predominates (Jakobson 1965). For example, a pointing gesture typically involves deixis (a special kind of indexicality) with respect to its object, resemblance (i.e. iconicity) with the intended gaze alternation or motion of the addressee, and conventionality (i.e. symbolicity), since there are different norms for pointing in different cultures. Yet, pointing is generally considered an indexical sign, as the first kind of ground is most essential for establishing the E-O relation. In line with our argument for the parallel nature of consciousness/intentionality and semiosis, we find an analogous analysis of sign use from the standpoint of phenomenology (Sokolowski 2000). First of all, Sokolowski highlights the non-mediated nature of perceptual intentionality. Even when consciousness is directed to what is absent in the here-and-now, as in remembering or imagining, it still targets its intentional object

184

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

directly, and not via a sign. Rather, this takes place only the case in different kinds of signitive intentions, using this term more generally than Sokolowski to cover all signs. The simplest kind of signitive intention is indication (e.g. a pile of stones as the indicator of the right road), which simply ‘points’ to the object intended without any further qualification. On the other hand, it is obvious that the expression itself would never have been recognized as such if it were not for perceptual intentionality, so there is Fundierung with respect to the latter. Another kind of signitive intention is the pictorial one. Again, first it is necessary to be able to recognize what has been depicted, and to distinguish this from the materiality of the expression. While there is similarity/resemblance between the two planes, as Sokolowski (2000: 82) states: ‘the object intended is brought toward me, into my own proximity; the presence of the object is embodied before me on a panel of wood or a piece of paper’, the materiality of which fades away in a kind of ‘double asymmetry’ sensu Sonesson. In one way, this resembles perception by showing the object from a particular point of view. However, one cannot overcome this perspective and expect to see other, currently invisible details, as one always can in perception. In the case of a symbolic intention, as in the case of words or other conventional signs, the situation is quite different. First, the object is intended as a whole, rather like indication. Unlike it, however, the object is not given with all its details as in perception, and can be much more abstract, including whole categories and relations. At the same time, the object is still given in one way or another, depending on the sense (Sinn) of the sign, as in the famous example of the Morning Star and Evening Star, which construe the same object differently (Zlatev 2016). Further, symbols necessarily presuppose a strong form of conventional, shared meaning, of the kind that is grounded in the third layer: intersubjectivity. Further, signitive intentions and in particular symbolic intentions are a prerequisite for the possibility of language on the following layer. This is because symbols are, so to speak, ‘prepared for predication’ as they most clearly match so-called categorial objects, where one or another feature of the object has been highlighted: BROKEN car, BROWN bear, JOHN’s wife, etc. Neither indications nor pictures are as well suited for such ‘syntactic’ representations of objects and situations, which is the hallmark of language, as we state below. Before we proceed, we should note that this brief description of the emergence of sign use, including the proposed sequence of sign complexity, seems to be mirrored in the semiotic development of children. The first year of life is for the most part pre-signitive, while rich in other kinds of semiosis (Piaget 1962; McCune 2008; Zlatev and McCune 2014). Pointing and other indexical signs are acquired by the second year (Bates et al. 1979), while understanding pictures as such (as opposed to as perceptual illusions) continues to develop and does not stabilize until the beginning of the third year (Lenninger 2012; Zlatev et al. 2013). The ontogeny of language is less clear, since while the first ‘words’ may emerge early, their use seems more association-based (i.e. the second clause in the definition of sign use above is not fulfilled) from the start, and it is only towards the end of the second year that a ‘spurt’ can be seen, which is arguably when symbolic intentions come into their own, along with inter-sign relations. Characteristically, combinations of words and sentences follow shortly after this (McCune 2008; Zlatev 2013).

Language and symbolic intentionality What defines true ‘symbolic reference’ (Deacon 1997) and hence language, from other kinds of semiosis is not just the conventionality of the E-O bond, given that we have many

CONSCIOUSNESS AND SEMIOSIS

185

other kinds of conventional signs, like ‘emblematic’ gestures. It is further not ‘arbitrariness’ as both individual words and composite linguistic constructions are strongly motivated by pre-linguistic experience, thus including various degrees of iconicity (Jakobson 1965; see Zlatev and Möttönen (vol. 4 of this collection). It is further not only the fact that linguistic signs are differentially interrelated, as emphasized by (Saussure [1916] 1960). What is most spectacular about linguistic symbols is that they are ‘designed’ to combine in articulated structures, with the help of ‘syncategorematic’ (i.e. grammatical) elements to form linguistic constructions such as predication, modification, conjunction and subordination. These can be used to represent or construe complex situations, and express corresponding thoughts. Sokolowski (2000) refers to this as ‘syntax’, but this has nothing to do with Chomskyan or other purely formal understanding of this notion, since at issue here is the semantic structure of linguist representations: [T]he syntax of language is related to the way things can present themselves to us, to the way we can intend and articulate them. Syntactic parts of language serve to express the combinatorics of presentation, the way things can be presented to us in various part-whole relations. (Sokolowski 2000: 109) Further, (a particular) language as an articulated semiotic system for communication and thinking is in no way ‘innate’, as it emerges from specific and always more or less creative acts of speaking: ‘the speaking language’ (le langage parlant) in the words of Merleau-Ponty. In other words, it is the result of historical and individual sedimentation of such acts, which create, maintain and constantly change it, in the familiar dialectic of spontaneity and sedimentation. There are numerous kinds of normativity that characterize this system, including those of linguistic correctness, social appropriateness and situational congruence (Zlatev and Blomberg 2019). Some of these may indeed be specific for linguistic semiosis, but the general principle that norms are the products of the sedimentation of acts of semiosis hold for language as for all the previous layers that we have discussed. There is much more to be said about language and symbolic intentionality, but we must leave it incomplete for reasons of space. The most important thing in the present context is, on the one hand, to emphasize that linguistic semiosis would be impossible without all the other layers that we have discussed: the operative intentionality of habits, the perceptual intentionality of noetic-noematic structure, the shared intentionality of convention and the signitive intentionality of sign use. On the other hand, in accordance with the Fundierung relation, is it is important to acknowledge that language goes ‘back dialectically over what preceded it and transforms the purely carnal and vital coexistence with the world and bodies into a coexistence of language’ (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 20).

CONCLUSIONS As made clear in this chapter, the SH-framework is an ongoing project that has developed over the past two decades, along with the development of the field of cognitive semiotics itself, and an increasingly stronger influence from phenomenology. Its purpose continues to be the dual aim to provide unity in the quest for understanding meaning, on the one hand, and to shield this project from reductionism, on the other. Despite reformulations – such as that from ontologically distinct levels to permeable layers – the basic principle remains

186

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

the same: to show that a number of distinct kinds of semiosis stand in a hierarchical relationship, with lower ones providing the foundations, and higher ones elaborating and ‘sublimating’ them. In the preceding section we illustrated how this operates, and how each layer should be regarded a dialectical synthesis of spontaneous meaning-making and sedimented normativity. What we have added compared to earlier formulations is the emphasis on the overlapping but distinct-in-focus nature of semiosis and consciousness, understanding the latter in terms of different kinds of intentionality with the help of phenomenology. Thus, we have addressed the central question of this chapter – the relationship between consciousness and semiosis – with a non-reductionist explication. By this, we mean not only that the SHframework precludes the possibility of reducing consciousness to semiosis, or vice versa, but also that it blocks the way to reducing the consciousness-semiosis nexus  –  which, following Merleau-Ponty, we may equate with existence itself – to one particular kind of meaning-making. Starting now from ‘the top’, we can reject claims that consciousness, or even the world, is constituted through language (e.g., Gasparian 2020), since linguistic semiosis is only one particular kind, building on all the layers preceding it. At the same time, we may still affirm that linguistic consciousness is indeed distinct from that on the lower layers. Likewise, we can readily agree with semiotic theories claiming that ‘human civilization is dependent upon signs and systems of signs, and the human mind is inseparable from functioning of signs’ (Morris 1938: 17), but we would need to qualify the sense of the ambiguous terms ‘sign’ and ‘mind’, and require not only for consciousness, but for reflective consciousness to have at least some priority, allowing the existence of differentiated, asymmetrical Expression-Object pairings. Further, we may accept with many (e.g. Zlatev et al. 2008) that intersubjectivity, positioned in the middle of the SH-framework, is pivotal for both human consciousness and world-constitution. But this should not be taken as implying that there can be no subjectivity prior to it, especially since subjective experience of the pre-reflective kind underlies all intersubjectivity, including that of ‘double sensations’. Finally, in contrast to both early phenomenology and some of our own work, we had to conclude that there is both consciousness and semiosis prior to subjectivity, in a layer of unconscious intentionality, understood as an operative background of movement and receptiveness of animate ‘openness to the world’. We may conclude by emphasizing once more that this vertical Fundierung between the layers of the Semiotic Hierarchy precludes reductionism ‘from below’ as well, as higher layers are ‘not simply derived from it, since it is through the originated that the originator is made [more fully] manifest’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 458).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We wish to thank colleagues and students participating in the Cognitive Semiotics Seminar at Lund University for feedback, and Jamin Pelkey for helpful editorial comments.

NOTES 1 Pelkey (2019) provides a very informative review of the complex argument in this recent attempt to reconcile semiotics and analytic philosophy of mind. 2 This ‘extended version’ was used by the first author in a few presentations, including a plenary lecture given at the 9th conference of the Nordic Association of Semiotic Studies

CONSCIOUSNESS AND SEMIOSIS

3

4 5

6

187

(NASS), in Tartu Estonia on 17 August 2015. But eventually it was abandoned in favour of the phenomenological re-evaluation of the SH-framework described in the following sections. This dialectical relation between spontaneity and sedimentation can be interpreted in a number of different ways (see Blomberg 2019), one of which is the recent cognitive-semiotic theory known as the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM). This has been applied to the analysis of language norms (Zlatev and Blomberg 2019) and metaphors (Stampoulidis et al. 2019; Devylder and Zlatev 2020). See the section ‘Sign Use and Signitive Intentionality’. We do not pursue here the epigenetic origin of the Leib-Körper structure, but as with the body schema, this can hardly be assumed as given (or ‘innate’). There are links here to the developmental literature on the development of the Self (Stern 2000), but they would take us to far aside. See the section ‘Developing the SH-framework’.

REFERENCES Abram, D. (2010), Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, New York: Pantheon. Aristotle (1987), The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. S. Halliwell, Chapel Hill: The University of North Caroline Press. Bates, E., L. Benigni, I. Bretherton, L. Camioni and V. Volterra (1979), The Emergence of Symbols: Cognition and Communication in Infancy, New York: Academic Press. Blomberg, J. (2019), ‘On the Concept of “Sedimentation” in Husserl and beyond’, Public Journal of Semiotics, 9 (1): 78–94. Brentano, F. ([1874] 1995), Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, in L. L. McAlister (ed.), London: Routledge. Chalmers, D. J. (1995), ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2 (3): 200–19. Champagne, M. (2018), Consciousness and the Philosophy of Signs, Bern: Springer. Cowley, S. J. (2011), Distributed Language, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Damasio, A. R. (1994), Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Rationality and the Human Brain, New York: Putnam. Deacon, T. (1997), The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain, New York: Norton. Deely, J. N. (2001), Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Devylder, S. and J. Zlatev (2020), ‘Cutting and Breaking Metaphors of the Self and the Motivation and Sedimentation Model’, in A. Baicchi and G. Radden (eds), Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language, 253–82, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Donald, M. (1991), Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Human Culture, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Donald, M. (2001), A Mind so Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness, New York: Norton. Dor, D., C. Knight and J. Lewis (2014), The Social Origins of Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eco, U. (1976), A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gallagher, S. (2005), How the Body Shapes the Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

188

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Gallagher, S. (2012), Phenomenology, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Gasparyan, D. (2020), ‘Semiosis as Eigenform and Observation as Recursive Interpretation’, Constructivist Foundations, 15 (3): 271–9. Gómez-Moreno, J. M. U. (2019), ‘The “Mimic”or “Mimetic” Octopus? A Cognitive-semiotic Study of Mimicry and Deception in Thaumoctopus Mimicus’, Biosemiotics, 12 (3): 441–67. Gurwitsch, A. (1966), Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Hass, L. (2008), Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Husserl, E. (1989), Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, Dorchrecht: Klewer. Husserl, E. (2001), Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcedental Logic, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Husserl, E. ([1936] 1970), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Itkonen, E. (2003), What Is Language? A Study in the Philosophy of Linguistics, Turku: Turku University Press. Itkonen, E. (2008), ‘The Central Role of Normativity in Language and Linguistics’, in J. Zlatev, T. P. Racine, C. Sinha and E. Itoken (eds), The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity, 279–306, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Jakobson, R. (1965), ‘Quest for the Essence of Language’, Diogenes, 13: 21–38. Kendon, A. (2004), Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koch, W. A. (1987), ‘A Plea for Evolutionary Cultural Semiotics’, in A. Escbach and W. A. Koch (eds), A Plea for Cultural Semiotics, 53–131, Bochum: Brockmeyer. Konderak, P. (2018), Mind, Cognition, Semiosis: Ways to Cognitive Semiotics, Lublin: UMCS Press. Koo, J. J. (2015), ‘Concrete Interpersonal Encounters or Sharing a Common World’, in T. Szanto and D. Moran (eds), Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’, 93–106, London: Routledge. Kozyreva, A. (2018), ‘Non-representational Approaches to the Unconscious in the Phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 17 (1): 199–224. Krampen, M. (1981), ‘Phytosemiotics’, Semiotica, 36 (3–4): 187–209. Kravchenko, A. (2017), ‘Making Sense of Languaging as a Consensual Domain of Interactions: Didactic Implications’, Intellectica, 2 (68): 175–91. Kull, K. (2009), ‘Vegetative, Animal, and Cultural Semiosis: The Semiotic Threshold Zones’, Cognitive Semiotics, 4: 8–27. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson (1999), Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic books. Lenninger, S. (2012), When Similarity Qualifies as a Sign: A Study in Picture Understanding and Semiotic Development in Young Children, Lund: Lund University. Lorini, G. (2018), ‘Animal Norms: An Investigation of Normativity in the Non-human Social World’, Law, Culture and the Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872118800008. McCune, L. (2008), How Children Learn how to Learn Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND SEMIOSIS

189

Merleau-Ponty, M. ([1962] 2005), Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith, New York: Taylor & Francis. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1963), The Structure of Behavior, trans. A. Fisher, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964a), The Primacy of Perception, Evanstone: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964b), Signs, Evertone: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968), The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1973), The Prose of the World, ed. C. Lefort, trans. J. O'Neill, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Morris, C. W. (1938), Foundations of the Theory of Signs, vol. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nagel, T. (1974), ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, The Philosophical Review, 83 (4): 435–50. Pelkey, J. (2019), ‘A Watershed for Qualia: Marc Champagne’s Unified Theory of Consciousness’, The American Journal of Semiotics, 35 (3–4): 431–42. Piaget, J. (1962), Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood, New York: Norton. Popper, K. (1979), Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Saussure, F. de ([1916] 1960), Cours de Linguistique Générale/ Course in General Linguistics, Paris: Payot/Duckworth. Savage-Rumbaugh, E. S. and R. Lewin (1994), Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind, New York: John Wiley & Sons. Searle, J. R. (1983), Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2011), The Primacy of Movement, 2nd edn, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Sokolowski, R. (2000), Introduction to Phenomenology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sonesson, G. (1989), Pictorial Concepts: Inquiries into the Semiotic Heritage and Its Relevance for the Analysis of the Visual World, Lund: Lund University Press. Sonesson, G. (2007), ‘From the Meaning of Embodiment to the Embodiment of Meaning: A study in Phenomenological Semiotics’, in T. Ziemke, J. Zlatev and R. Frank (eds), Body, Language and Mind. Vol 1: Embodiment, 85–128, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Sonesson, G. (2009), ‘View from Husserl’s Lectern’, Cybernetics & Human Knowing, 16 (3–4): 107–48. Sonesson, G. (2010), ‘From Mimicry to Mime by Way of Mimesis: Reflections on a General Theory of Iconicity’, Sign Systems Studies, 38 (1–4): 18–65. Sonesson, G. (2012), ‘Semiosis beyond Signs: On Two or Three Missing Links on the Way to Human Beings’, in T. Schilhab, F. Stjernfelt and T. Deacon (eds), The Symbolic Species Evolved, 81–93, Dordrecht: Springer. Sonesson, G. (2015), ‘Le jeu de la valeur et du sens’, in A. Biglari (ed.), Valeurs: Aux fondements de la sémiotique, 85–101, Paris: L’Harmattian. Stampoulidis, G., M. Bolognesi and J. Zlatev (2019), ‘A Cognitive Semiotic Exploration of Metaphors in Greek Street Art’, Cognitive Semiotics, 12 (1): 1–20. Stern, D. (2000 [1985]), The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology, New York: Basic Books. Thompson, E. (2007), Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

190

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Tomasello, M. (2008), The Origins of Human Communication, Cambridge: MIT Press. Varela, F. J., E. Thompson and E. Rosch (1991), The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge: MIT Press. Zahavi, D. (2003a), Husserl’s Phenomenology, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zahavi, D. (2003b), ‘Inner Time-consciousness and Pre-reflective Self-awareness’, in D. Welton (ed.), The New Husserl: A Critical Reader, 157–80, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Zahavi, D. (2010), ‘Naturalized Phenomenology’, in S. Gallagher and D. Schmicking (eds), Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, 2–19, Berlin: Springer. Zahavi, D. (2014), Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zlatev, J. (2003), ‘Meaning = Life (+ Culture): An Outline of a Unified Biocultural Theory of Meaning’, Evolution of Communication, 4 (2): 253–96. Zlatev, J. (2009a), ‘Levels of Meaning, Embodiment, and Communication’, Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 16: 149–74. Zlatev, J. (2009b), ‘The Semiotic Hierarchy: Life, Consciousness, Signs and Language’, Cognitive Semiotics, 4 (Supplement): 169–200. Zlatev, J. (2010), ‘Phenomenology and Cognitive Linguistics’, in D. Schmicking and S. Gallagher (eds), Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, 415–43, Berlin: Springer. Zlatev, J. (2012), ‘Cognitive Semiotics: An Emerging Field for the Transdisciplinary Study of Meaning’, Public Journal of Semiotics, 4 (1): 2–24. Zlatev, J. (2013), ‘The Mimesis Hierarchy of Semiotic Development: Five Stages of Intersubjectivity in Children’, Public Journal of Semiotics, 4 (2): 47–70. Zlatev, J. (2014a), ‘Human Uniqueness, Bodily Mimesis and the Evolution of Language’, Humana. Mente Journal of Philosophical Studies, 7 (27): 197–219. Zlatev, J. (2014b), ‘Image Schemas, Mimetic Schemas, and Children’s Gestures’, Cognitive Semiotics, 7: 3–30. Zlatev, J. (2015), ‘Cognitive Semiotics’, in P. Trifonas (ed.), International Handbook of Semiotics, 1043–67, Dordrecht: Springer. Zlatev, J. (2016), ‘Turning Back to Experience in Cognitive Linguistics via Phenomenology’, Cognitive Linguistics, 27 (4): 559–72. Zlatev, J. (2018), ‘Meaning Making from Life to Language: The Semiotic Hierarchy and Phenomenology’, Cognitive Semiotics, 11 (1): 1–18. Zlatev, J. and J. Blomberg (2016), ‘Embodied Intersubjectivity, Sedimentation and Non-actual Motion Expressions’, Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 39 (2): 185–208. Zlatev, J. and J. Blomberg (2019), ‘Norms of Language: What Kinds and Where from? Insights from Phenomenology’, in A. Mäkilähde, V. Leppänen and E. Itkonen (eds), Normativity in Language and Linguistics, 69–101, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Zlatev, J. and L. McCune (2014), ‘Towards an Integrated Model of Semiotic Development’, in R. Chen (ed.), Cognitive Development: Theories, Stages, Processes and Challenges, 59–76, New York: Nova Publishers. Zlatev, J., T. Racine, C. Sinha and E. Itkonen (2008), The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Zlatev, J., E. Madsen, S. Lenninger, T. Persson, S. Sayehli, G. Sonesson and J. v. d. Weijer (2013), ‘Understanding Communicative Intentions and Semiotic Vehicles by Children and Chimpanzees’, Cognitive Development, 28: 312–29.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND SEMIOSIS

191

Zlatev, J., G. Sonesson and P. Konderak (2016), ‘Introduction: Cognitive Semiotics comes of Age’, in J. Zlatev, G. Sonesson and P. Konderak (eds), Meaning, Mind and Communication, 9–28, Frankfur am Main: Peter Lang. Zlatev, J., P. Zywiczynski and S. Wacewicz (2020), ‘Pantomime as the Original Human-specific Communicative System’, Journal of Language Evolution, 1–19. Online: doi:10.1093/jole/ lzaa006

192

CHAPTER NINE

Iconicity and Semiosis GÖRAN SONESSON

The term ‘iconicity’ is often taken to be simply a synonym of resemblance, usually as applied specifically to the relation between the expression and the content in the sign. Moreover, pictures are generally, as a matter of course, supposed to form the prototypical case of iconic signs. In this chapter, we will attend to this understanding of the term, but we will also be concerned with some intricacies of the underlying notion as it has developed within semiotics on the basis of the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. Accordingly, we will dedicate the first section to the critique of iconicity, in the sense of the similarity between expression and content, which loomed large in both philosophy and semiotics at the last mid-century, while trying to spell out its misconceptions on the basis of both psychological studies and theoretical arguments. In the second section, we will be involved with the specific features of iconicity as characterized by Peirce and with some ways in which his inspiration may be taken further, relying not only on internal cues, as tend to be the case in Peircean exegesis, but on several other sources. The third section is dedicated to the particular case of pictures, with the aim of showing that their specificity cannot be fully characterized by the notion of iconicity, even in the more precise Peircean sense. Indeed, very little scrutiny has been applied to visual iconicity other than pictures, and non-visual iconicity has also largely been neglected. The term iconicity has quite often been mentioned in relation to language and gesture, but there is still a scarcity of theoretical approaches, even though this kind of inquiry has been much boosted recently, as we will see in the fourth section below. We will then round out the chapter with a short notice on the methods used so far in the investigation of iconicity and an appraisal of the state of the art with ensuing priorities for research. In semiotics, we owe the notion of iconicity to Peirce; and yet, most of the discussion of iconicity has not involved what is specific to Peirce’s notion. Peirce’s originality does not reside in him having attributed ‘iconicity’ to one species of sign, nor in opposing the former to two other kinds of semiosis, indexicality and symbolicity. Saussure, it is true, only recognizes a distinction between two kinds of signs, natural and arbitrary ones, as did Plato and Aristotle, and, closer in time, Dubos and Lessing. Theodore Jouffrey, in 1842, spelled out the difficulty posed by this distinction, pointing out that some signs are natural in their characteristics, i.e. similar, but not in their origin, such as pictures, and others are natural in their origin, but not in their characteristics, such as cries being caused by pain. This sounds very much like Peirce’s trichotomy, in particular if we take indexicality to be defined by causality, as Peirce often suggests. Long before that, in fact, Leibniz distinguished signs based on arbitrary coexistence, similarity, simple conjunction (such as part and whole, i.e. synecdoche) and connexion (such as cause and effect, i.e.

194

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

metonymy). Similar distinctions are also found in the work of Lambert, Bolzano and Husserl and, together with many more categories, in Degérando’s book on signs. In a similar vein, Thomas Sebeok and René Thom more recently presented elaborate lists of sign types, which include, but extend, Peirce’s by now familiar trichotomy (for references, see Sonesson 1989: 200f.). The first originality of Peirce’s notion of iconicity consists in postulating a triadic structuralism. Whether Peirce was justified in defending himself against being the victim of ‘trichomania’ is not at issue. Triadic structuralism means something more: on the analogy of binary structuralism, it has to posit a structure within which the members serve to mutually define each other. In more concrete terms, this means that the whole domain of possible semiotic facts should be exhausted by the three kinds of semiosis. It does not follow, of course, that any specific concrete item must pertain to just one of these kinds, only that there can be no other ways than these three in which meaning is produced (see Sonesson 2017). If so, everybody from Leibniz and Degérando to Sebeok and Thom are wrong in proposing further categories. Peirce is also original in defining iconicity as something more intricate than similarity, that is, as a manifestation of Firstness, which, again, can only be understood in relation to Secondness and Thirdness. This becomes particularly pertinent once we take into account Peirce’s late insight that he had been wrong all along in applying his distinctions to such a narrow category as sign, when he should really have been talking about mediation. Nevertheless, many consequences of Peirce’s category distinction pertain, in particular ways, to signs, in the narrow sense, to be specified, and thus to iconic signs (see the section ‘The specificity of Peircean Iconicity’ below). But we do not need to enter this discussion to account for the original iconicity debate in semiotics. We will approach the nature of iconicity by first looking at its critics, both those whose inspiration was basically cultural and those who relied on logical arguments.

THE CRITIQUE OF ICONICITY AS RESEMBLANCE Much of the critique of iconicity that raged through large parts of the second half of the last century was involved with questions not specific to the Peircean construal of iconicity: i.e. it was concerned with denying that similarity could constitute a motivation for signs and/or that similarity could exist, without first being hedged in by some kind of conventional framework. This basically applies not only to the arguments advanced by Umberto Eco (1968, 1976, 1999), but also, fundamentally, to the line of reasoning in the work of Nelson Goodman (1968) and Arthur Bierman (1963). They also share a tendency to search for iconicity (or similarity) largely in pictures.

Eco’s first and second critique of iconicity No other semiotician has manifested more dedication than Eco to the study of iconicity, which he, most of the time, identifies with pictures. In so doing, he has formulated most of the fundamental questions which have to be resolved by a theory of iconicity. The different versions of Eco’s critique of iconicity are too numerous ever to be fully assessed, but we can distinguish three essential periods. At the first stage, Eco (1968, etc.) is basically concerned with showing that iconic signs (mostly exemplified by pictures), just as linguistic signs, are conventional and divisible into features, which themselves are meaningless, that is, they are based on a double coding: pictures, like language, can be

ICONICITY AND SEMIOSIS

195

separated into signs, which have parallel expressions and contents, each one of which can be further analysed into smaller parts, comparable to phonemes, which themselves carry no meaning.1 At the second stage, Eco (1976, etc.) abandons the idea of double iconic coding while keeping the idea of conventionality, while at the same time dislocating the required similarity sideward into some kind of proportionality. In the third stage, however (1999), he seems to give up almost everything he has so far believed in, and, while retaining a tiny part for convention, basically goes to the other extreme, making all icons into mirrors affording a direct view onto reality (see below: ‘Barthes’ tautological signs and Eco’s third critique of iconicity’). Or this is at least how Eco’s iconicity critique has been presented in several writing by Göran Sonesson (1989, etc.). According to Piero Polidoro (2012: 29 ff.), Eco never says that iconic signs are conventional, in the sense of being arbitrary, except in some marginal passages; rather, his argument is that they are necessarily influenced by the culture in which they are experienced, and indeed that this is the only aspect which is relevant to semiotics, as opposed to psychology. If anything, then, Eco is only guilty of being ambiguous. Polidoro’s testimony must be taken seriously, because he has the advantage of having read Eco’s works in the original language in which most of them were written, Italian.2 Nevertheless, one may doubt that such an ambiguity existed, at the apogee of French structuralism, which was concerned to show, in accordance with their interpretation of Saussure, that all semiosis was of the same kind as the one already discovered in language. Suffice it to say that all Eco’s readers at the time, whether they accepted his arguments (such as Lindekens and Groupe µ) or not (such as Maldonado, Gombrich, Bouissac and Sonesson), have understood him to claim that iconic signs (identified with pictures) were basically constituted in the same way as linguistic signs. At least the first version, according to which iconic signs manifest double articulation, seems incompatible with any other interpretation. Interestingly, E. H. Gombrich, whose support is repeatedly invoked by Eco, in a later book (Gombrich 1982) explicitly rejects what he took to be Eco’s erroneous conventionalist interpretation of his conception of pictures. It might be argued, however, that Gombrich is here actually combating his own earlier view, which he recognized in Eco’s work, from the point of view of his own later position, largely inspired in the perceptual psychology of James Gibson (as discussed further below). Two particulars, pointing in different directions, are worth retaining from Eco’s work. First, with regard to naïve claims, such as that of Roland Barthes, according to whom pictures, or at least photographs, are ‘tautologous’ in relation to their referents, Eco’s argument is amply justified. In the particular case of the photograph, René Lindekens (1971) took on the task of demonstrating that, to the same degree as it approaches the referent in terms of contrast, it distances itself from the same in terms of nuance. It is a pity, nevertheless, that, at least as he was read at the times, Eco appears to attribute the conventionality of pictures to the pictures themselves, instead of what he sometimes called the ‘perceptual model’, or, more generally, culture as a general ambience in which human beings are embedded, and which influences both their creation and their reception of iconic signs. The conventionality of icons is best considered to be a kind of filter applied to reality. Thus, to take an example not involving pictures, ‘tree’ in Danish sign language is produced by having two hands symmetrically outlining, first, the shape of the crown, and then the trunk. In American sign language, however, the forearm is held upright, figuring the trunk, while the hand is stretched out wide, to represent the branches, and twisted, to indicate the wind moving them. In Chinese sign language,

196

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

finally, two hands are moved symmetrically upwards to indicate the shape of the trunk. These are all iconically motivated, but they pick out different properties of the referent. The other passage worth retaining concerns the example of Annigoni’s highly realistic portrait of Queen Elizabeth. As Eco (1968: 188, 1976: 327 ff.) points out, the nose of the real queen has three dimensions, and that of her portrait only has two; the surface of the real nose is full of pores and other irregularities, but that of the painting is smooth; and corresponding to the nostrils of the queenly nose, there are no apertures in the canvas, but only two black dots. And we could certainly go on comparing further details with similar results. Thus, it can hardly be denied that a painting of the queen is profoundly different from the queen herself. But it is also different from an actor impersonating her at the theatre, or even a statue, which are more comparable to the example of the signed languages referred to above. What this example really goes to show is that the iconicity of the picture is of a particularly complex kind (see below: ‘Iconicity and Pictorial Consciousness’).

Counterarguments from psychological research For those of us who cannot read Eco in Italian, it becomes clear, from Eco’s responses in his different works, that there was an extensive discussion of iconicity in Italy, but its scope remains difficult to grasp. In spite of its title, Polidoro’s (2012) book is mainly about Eco’s different publications, if we except Ugo Volli’s suggestion to conceive iconicity in terms of geometrical transformations, which Eco willingly incorporated in later texts, and Tomás Maldonado’s (whose writings were also more widely accessible in Spanish) reproach of idealism, motivated by the foreclosure of indexicality, and thus of the referent. While the label ‘idealism’ may not be a relevant criticism, the exclusion of indexicality and the referent, while characteristic of structuralist semiotics, is a serious shortcoming, from the point of view of Peircean semiotics, but also, more generally, from that of more recent semiotic theory. Apart from Eco’s position jarring with phenomenological experience, the real challenge posed to it, at the time, came from the psychology of perception. When Eco (quoted in Polidoro 2012: 12) claimed in 2012 that the iconicity debate was possible, because of the non-existence at the time of cognitive studies, he was wrong if he wanted to say that there were then no empirical facts contradicting his position. He was right, however, if he intended to refer to cognitive science as having, since then, made different traditional disciplines, and thus their findings, more mutually accessible. The psychologists referred to by Eco in his works all represent the constructivist tradition, which postulates that the information conveyed by the senses is too poor to explain what we actually perceive, but which, unlike Gestalt psychology, opts for a nativist solution, conceives perception to be the result of conventionally grounded hypotheses. The constructivists do not study pictures specifically, but they often use pictorial examples in their argument for the constructive character of perception generally. From the middle of the last century, however, another current, mainly inspired in the work of James Gibson, has come to predominate discussion of perception in psychology. Gibsoneans argue that all the information needed is really present in the environment once we take into account the capacity for movement of the perceiving subject. This conception is strangely reminiscent of Edmund Husserl’s analysis of perception, although Husserl is never mentioned in Gibson’s works. Gibson also maintains that pictures are special artefacts, which do not work like ordinary perception, but which still make sense because

ICONICITY AND SEMIOSIS

197

they somehow manage to reproduce ‘the formless invariants’ of real-world perception (for details see Sonesson 1989). At least in this general sense, the work of John M. Kennedy must be situated in the Gibsonean tradition. It is, however, to Kennedy (1974a, 1974b; 1993) that credit is due for having proved the untenability of the constructivist position in the case of pictures, first by investigating picture perception in pre-modern societies, and then by showing it to be accessible also to blind people. In his literature review, Kennedy (1974a) attends both to the anecdotes told by sundry anthropologists, according to which ‘primitive peoples’ are unable to interpret pictures, either because they do not see the resemblance, or because they cannot tell them apart from the real thing, and to the more systematic studies realized in South Africa purporting to show the same thing. The anecdotes can be easily rejected, and the result of the South African studies cannot be taken very seriously, if you bear in mind the precarious situation of Black subjects being interviewed by white psychologists in the middle of the apartheid period. As evidence against this, Kennedy and Ross (1975) found that the Songe of Papua, who have no pictures, could identify well-known objects on outline drawings in 90 per cent of the cases, while less well-known objects were identified 97 per cent of the time by ten-to-twenty-year-olds, and 68 per cent by those older than forty years of age. Kennedy (1974b: 231 ff.) also showed that children are able to interpret lines standing for uneven surfaces as in a landscape layout, uneven illumination as in shadows, uneven texture as in the hems and cuffs of knitted garments, and uneven pigmentation as in the hide of a zebra. Here then, contours, not coloured surfaces, are used, which can be taken to show that any discontinuities that are sources of optical structures may be rendered by lines. Later on, Kennedy (1993) went on to demonstrate that if, instead of ordinary lines, raised dots are employed, even congenitally blind people can recognize well-known objects. In his first critique, Eco, it will be remembered, claimed that pictures were conventional and divisible into features, giving up the second, but not the first, requirement in his second critique. Kennedy (1974a: 106 ff.; 1974b: 231), on the other hand, while clearly not thinking that pictures are conventional, maintains that they are divisible into features. These features, however, are certainly not meaningless. They bear such names as occluding bounds, occluding edges, convex corners, concave corners, cracks and wires. No doubt they can be given a geometrical definition, but only in relation to a larger whole. Moreover, if Kennedy is right to think that interpretation may start from any point in the picture, unlike other psychologists who claim it must be top-down or bottom-up, the relation between the features and the whole they form together is much more unstable than suggested by a linguistic model. Nevertheless, no matter where we initiate the process of interpretation, picture perception requires us to refer the parts to the whole, and the whole to the parts. It might be said that features such as cracks and the like are meaningless, in relation to such a whole as (a picture of) a house, but once the house is recognized, these features will become bearers of some of the particular content of the house, such as walls, windows and doors. This process, which might be called resemanticization, is particularly interesting when applied to ambiguous pictures, such as the famous duck-rabbit (see Sonesson 1989: 151 ff., 260 ff., 270 ff., 299 ff.). The recognition of pictures poses in fact two problems: first, to see the resemblance and then to discover the difference. Traditionally, the first problem has been taken to be the difficult one, but everything seems to indicate that the real issue consists in discovering the difference. Hochberg showed that a child who had never seen any picture

198

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

before nineteen months could still recognize well-known objects in line drawings as well as photographs. The work of DeLoache (2004), pursued in more semiotic terms by Lenninger (2012) and Zlatev et al. (2013), has shown that children have to reach 2.5 years before they can find an object in the real world corresponding to a depiction. In fact, the same studies also showed that scale models could only further the realization of the same task at three years. Even when conceived as mere resemblance, iconicity is, of course, a much wider domain than pictures, but the critique of the iconicity has almost exclusively been concerned with pictures. This is also true of the logical critique discussed in the next sub-section.

Bierman’s and Goodman’s logical critique Unlike Eco’s critique of iconicity, the one formulated by Nelson Goodman (1968) proceeds in terms of logic, and it is not explicitly concerned with iconicity, but with the more familiar term resemblance, and yet he too seems to be thinking mainly about pictures (in addition to metaphors). A more full-scale critique of iconicity, specifically addressed to Peirce, but including Goodman’s argument, was formulated earlier by Arthur Bierman (1963). We will here attend to two arguments, later baptized as the arguments of 'regression' and of 'symmetry', respectively, by Thomas Sebeok (1976: 128). According to the argument of regression, all things in the world can be classified into a number of very general categories, such as ‘thing’, ‘animal’ and ‘human being’, and therefore everything in the universe can refer to, and be referred to, everything else. Thus, if iconicity is at the origin of signs, all things in the world will be signs. This would probably not trouble Peirce, before his late insight that the notion of ‘sign’ was too narrow for his purpose (see below: ‘Iconicity, Iconic Ground, and the Icon’). Bierman clearly entertains a more specific notion of sign, which is why he thinks the only possible remedy would be to introduce the provision that no icon should contain universal characteristics as part of its meaning. Apart from this being a very artificial limitation, it is unclear at what point categories start to be too generic. In fact, the argument of regression is only a problem, if we take Peirce to claim that there are three properties – iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity – which, by themselves and without any further requirement, trigger the recognition of something as a sign. If, on the other hand, as suggested at least by some passages (e.g. Peirce 1903: CP 2.247; also below), he considered that something being recognized on other cues as a sign will be an iconic sign, rather than an indexical or symbolic one, when it can be traced back to the iconic ground, the argument of regression will have no bearing on the issue (see Sonesson 1998a, 1998b). According to the symmetry argument, iconicity cannot motivate a sign, for while similarity is symmetrical and reflexive, the sign is not. Like the regression argument, this argument can be rejected, if we choose the second interpretation of Peirce delineated above, according to which iconicity and sign character are recognized by different cues. There is more to it, however. Bierman and Goodman take for granted that similarity is the same thing as what is termed the equivalence relation in logic. Numerous experiments have shown, however, that this is not how similarity is experienced in the real human Lifeworld. Here, it will be enough to consider one such experiment: in a task involving comparisons between countries, Tversky (1977: 333 ff.) found that the statement ‘North Korea is similar to Red China’ was chosen in preference to its inversion in sixty-six out of sixty-nine instances; it was also located higher on a perceptual scale. To generalize, in any comparison, the item that is most prominent becomes the reference point, where

ICONICITY AND SEMIOSIS

199

prominence may depend on factors such as familiarity, the extent of information held, frequency, intensity, celebrity and so on (see Sonesson 1998a, 1998b).

THE SPECIFICITY OF PEIRCEAN ICONICITY There are, at present, a lot of scholars whose self-imposed assignment consists in trying to find out what Peirce really meant, which, given the state of the posthumous papers, is not very different from the task set by Biblical hermeneutics before the Enlightenment. There is no denying the usefulness of their toil, but it seems to contradict the spirit of Peirce’s work, at least as it can be gathered from sundry paragraphs, where he claims that inquiry always has to proceed. It is in this spirit that, in the following, we will look at some passages involving iconicity, which have been the subject of discussion, and which may be further examined. In so doing, we will find that iconicity, in several respects, is a much more complex, and interesting, notion than ever dreamt of, not only by Eco, but also by Bierman and Goodman.

Iconicity, iconic ground and the icon In some late texts, Peirce observes that to use the term sign for such a broad notion as the one he had tried to describe was ‘injurious’; instead, he goes on to say, he should have talked about ‘mediation’ (1898: CP 4.3) or ‘branching’ (1909: MS 339, quoted in Parmentier 1985: 23). It is easy to grasp the cause of Peirce’s late misgivings, once you start pondering his characterization of something being an icon ‘by virtue of its being an immediate image, that is to say by virtue of characters which belong to it in itself as a sensible object, and which it would possess just the same were there no object in nature that it resembled’ (1903: CP 4.447). This is clearly very far from what is nowadays ordinarily understood by iconic signs. Indeed, as we will see, iconicity is not meant to account for the sign character of the iconic sign. To make sense of the Peircean notion of iconicity, we will start by using ‘semiosis’ as the general term for meaning-making (used by Peirce, e.g. 1907: CP 5.484; 1907: EP 2.411), reserving ‘mediation’ for the third instantiation of semiosis (see Table 9.1). In fact, it may be more fecund to understand the relation between representamen, object and interpretant (and indeed the two objects and the three interpretants) as a process of creating meaning, or perhaps, more broadly, of experiencing meaning. Indeed, such an interpretation is borne out by Peirce’s own suggestion (e.g. 1905: CP 4.536) that the object is an experience preceding and giving rise to the representamen, whereas the interpretant is an experience which results from it.3 To understand what iconicity is, in this context, we have to grasp the notion of Firstness, of which it is an instantiation, and, according to the principle of Triadic structuralism, we can only understand it in relation to Secondness and Thirdness. This is not to say that any of the categories are empty in themselves, only resulting from their interrelations, as has been suggested in the case of binary structuralism. Firstness is ‘the idea of that which is such as it is regardless of anything else’ (1903: CP 5.66). In one of his most comprehensive passages, Peirce (n.d.: CP 7.524–38) claims that there are three kinds of experiences: monadic experiences, which are unique, dyadic experiences, which involve an opposing pair of objects, and triadic experiences, which connect other possible experiences. This is only one of Peirce’s many attempts to characterize his three categories. If we try to pool all these characterizations together, we may end up with something like this (as suggested

200

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

in Sonesson 2013): Firstness is ‘something appearing’, that is, something grasping our attention and/or filling up the field of experience. Secondness is something appearing as a reaction, or, more generally, as being related to the first experience. Thirdness is an experience which includes the experiences of Firstness and Secondness and, perhaps, adds something more. It will not be necessary to discuss, in the following, whether this is the most adequate analysis of what happens in the field of consciousness. In the present context, this taxonomy is only needed to circumscribe the notion of iconicity. On the whole, this analysis seems to coincide with the one offered by Marc Champagne (2018), which is centred on another instantiation of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, the distinction between ‘tone’, ‘token’ and ‘type’, respectively – while generalizing tone, in the end, to iconicity. Interestingly, Champagne uses his interpretation of Peirce to resolve a number of paradoxes engendered within recent debates in analytical philosophy of consciousness, specifically with reference to the notion of ‘qualia’, which, apart from being a contentious issue of contemporary philosophy of consciousness, was a term already used by Peirce as equivalent to ‘tone’. Using the Peircean notion of prescission, which allows for something being segregated in thought, though not so being in experience (equivalent, it would seem, to Husserl’s dependent parts), Champagne (2018: 36 ff.) maintains that qualia do not form part of the stream of consciousness, which already supposes a relation to specific things in the here-and-now, but are only obtained in a later abstractive (‘prescissional’) process. When Peirce (1885: CP 3.362) suggests that ‘in contemplating a painting, there is a moment when we lose the consciousness that it is not the thing’, and that this is when ‘we are contemplating an icon’, he seems to suggest another, more immediate, but also more elusive, way of having access to Firstness. But nothing hinges, in the present context, on the mode of access to Firstness. It will be readily appreciated that, as conceived by Peirce, iconicity as such is very far from being a sign, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, such as that pertaining to the linguistic sign or even to the picture. Iconicity as such corresponds to a percept, more specifically to the precise moment in the field of consciousness when it is completely filled up with an impression (like the case of Condillac’s statue) or, more realistically, when something becomes the particular subject of attention. This is not the notion of iconicity managed by most semioticians, but it will be necessary to accept it as such to proceed with our analysis.

TABLE 9.1  The cross-classification of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness (using terms from Peirce 1898: CP 4.3), as interpreted in Sonesson (2013, adapted) Firstness Quality

Secondness Reaction

Thirdness Mediation

Firstness Quality

Iconicity

—

—

Secondness Reaction (ground)

Iconic ground

Indexicality = indexical ground

—

Thirdness Mediation (Sign)

Iconic sign (icon)

Indexical sign (index)

Symbolicity = symbolic ground = symbolic sign (symbol)

ICONICITY AND SEMIOSIS

201

Well before he despaired of the notion of ‘sign’, Peirce (1897: CP 2.228) describes it in one passage as something which ‘stands for that object not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen’. Peirce here seems to claim that the ground only involves an abstraction from the expression (‘representamen’), but if we take his argument seriously that the concept of ground is indispensable, ‘because we cannot comprehend an agreement of two things, except as an agreement in some respect’ (1867: CP 1.551), it must be understood to operate a modification on both items involved. Elsewhere, indeed, he says that the ground is ‘abstraction’, exemplifying it with ‘the blackness of two black things’ (1894: CP 1.293). In other words, the ground involves an abstraction applied to the content with respect to the expression, while it is at the same time an abstraction applied to the expression with respect to the content. It is something like a principle of relevance, corresponding to the distinction between form and substance in structuralist linguistics (see Sonesson 2016). If the ground involves the agreement between two things, it must certainly be an instance of Secondness. There are some passages (quoted by Eco 1999: 59 ff.) where Peirce says that the ground is Firstness, but he must then consider it as a potential ground, that is, apart from its application to the two instances involved in the agreement. In any case, considering the ground as Secondness makes more sense, in particular in relation to the constraints imposed on iconicity and indexicality (as I discuss further below). According to these principles, it seems fair to say that iconicity exists on its own, but it needs a ground to be related to a second iconicity. Indexicality, however, is already a relation, i.e. a ground, and thus is Secondness from the start. The sign in a more ordinary sense only exists as Thirdness (though it cannot be the only instance of this) because there is no elementary experience, as in the case of iconicity, and not even a pre-existing ground, as in the case of indexicality, but it has to be created from scratch (see Table 9.1).

The constraints on Peircean iconicity Even though Bierman expressly addresses his critique to Peirce’s notion of iconicity, he doesn’t take into account the intricacies of Peirce’s notion (Sonesson 2017). Thus, most notably, Peirce (e.g. 1903: CP 2.247–48; 1903: CP 4.447) stipulates that the experience of motivation in both iconic and indexical signs must be independent of their sign character, and, in addition, that, in the case of the iconic signs, iconicity must be independent of the objects serving as expression and content. In other words, an icon is a sign, in which the ‘thing’ serving as expression is similar in one respect or another to (or has properties in common with) the ‘thing’ that serves as its content, only if the similarity between these relata (the elements which are related) obtains independently of the sign relation and independently of possible relations between the relata as such. There are two constraints here: the relationship between items forming the sign must not by itself decide the sign relation (which is the same requirement as imposed on indices) and, in addition, the intrinsic properties of these items must not determine the sign relation. By elucidating the possible intersections of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness with themselves and with each other, Table 9.1 throws some light on these restrictions. Iconicity, in Peirce’s sense, is not really similarity, but only a list of properties which may subsequently be related. An iconic ground serves to relate two iconicities (which do not necessarily form a sign). Both iconicity and indexicality are said to be independent of the sign relation. That is, the similarity is not created or apprehended only because the relata are part of the sign relation. We shall see that this is not always true (only in primary

202

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

iconicity). The ground is a relation (as we have seen above), which is why it coincides with the indexicality of the index but is something added to the iconicity of the icon. Nevertheless, if we retain the principle of Triadic structuralism, according to which not only iconicity, indexicality and symbolicity, but also the corresponding grounds and signs should exhaust the possibilities of the respective experiences, it seems that the constraints here imposed on signs based on iconicity cannot be endorsed. It may be shown that, from a phenomenological point of view, none of these restrictions apply to all kinds of iconic (and indexical) signs (Sonesson 2016). Therefore, the phenomenological analysis of iconicity has to be pursued much further, leading to the distinction between primary and secondary iconic signs – or, perhaps, better, the distinction between primary and secondary iconization.

Primary and secondary iconicity Primary and secondary iconic signs may be distinguished depending on the way iconicity accrues to the signs (see Sonesson 1994). A primary iconic sign is a sign in which the perception of a similarity between an expression E and a content C is at least a partial reason for E being taken to be the expression of a sign the content of which is C. That is, iconicity is really the motivation (the ground), or rather, one of the motivations, for positing the sign function. A secondary iconic sign, on the other hand, is a sign in which our knowledge that E is the expression of a sign the content of which is C, in some particular system of interpretation, is at least a partial reason for perceiving the similarity of E and C. Here, then, it is the sign relation that in part motivates the relationship of iconicity. Secondary iconic signs would not be iconic signs to Peirce, because of the constraint he imposes on the latter, since iconicity is here clearly dependent, at least for its recognition, on the sign character (see above). Indeed, it may be suggested that the iconicity in question is really there beforehand, but confounded with a lot of other potential iconicities, and what the sign function does in reality is to pick out one of many such possible iconicities. Pictures are, of course, primary iconic signs in this sense; and they may well be the only kind there is. In the case of secondary iconic signs, however, there are two different ways for the sign function to precede and determine iconicity (something which Polidoro 2012: 66 ff. clearly has missed). In the case of an identity sign, such as the car at the car dealership or the displayed object in the shop window, the problem does not consist in discovering the shared properties but in seeing that one item is a sign for another, rather than both just being other members of the same category. When both similarity and dissimilarity are prominent, as in the case of the tailor’s dummy and artificial food made out of plastic or wax, as seen in Japanese restaurants, a more or less well-known convention may serve to attribute the sign character. In other cases, the sign function must precede the perception of iconicity because there is too little resemblance beforehand. In Arnheim’s terms (1969: 92 ff.), a ‘droodle’ is different from a picture in requiring a ‘key’, as in ‘Olive dropping into martini glass or close-up of a girl in a scanty bathing suit’ (cf. Figure 9.1a). While both scenes are possible to discover in the drawings, both are clearly underdetermined by it. The sign function, often manifested by a label, is necessary to pick up one of an indefinite set of interpretations. According to Göran Hermerén (1983: 101), it is only because of ‘the limitations of human imagination’ that we see Figure 9.1b as a human face, for it can equally well be perceived as ‘a jar from above, with some pebbles and broken matches on the bottom,

ICONICITY AND SEMIOSIS

203

and a stick placed across the opening’. The accuracy of this observation depends on what is meant by ‘the limits of human imagination’. Gestalt principles, the face as a privileged perceptual object, and so on, all conspire to make one of the readings determinate. While it is possible to find the elements Hermerén suggests in the picture, it is impossible to see them without the primary interpretation of the figure as a face disturbing this interpretation. Thus, it seems that when an expression presents similarities to different contents or referents, one of these may be favoured because of properties of the expression itself and is not overridden by convention. This is not the same distinction as the one Eco (1999: 382 ff.) makes between mode Alpha and Beta, as was convincingly argued by Polidoro (2012: 72).4 A fundamental passage in Eco’s (1999: 383) book runs as follows: ‘It is through alpha mode that we perceive pictures (or photos, or a film image: note the reaction of the first spectators at the Lumière brothers’ projection of a train arriving at the station) as if they were the “scene” itself. It is only on subsequent reflection that we establish the fact that we are confronted with a sign function’. Although Eco’s distinction is meant to be general, when applied to iconicity it opposes iconicity as such to both the iconic ground and the iconic sign. It precedes, by far, any distinction between primary and secondary iconicity. One may get the impression that Alpha mode for Eco is the ‘fleeting instant’ of iconicity which Peirce says disappears when you try to catch it (1885: CP 3.362). According to Polidoro’s (2012: 69 ff.) intricate analysis, however, certain signs can be discovered already in Alpha mode, while others only appear ‘on subsequent reflection’, i.e. in Beta mode. On this interpretation, the modes do not seem to distinguish different kinds of semiosis, but two possible perceptual attitudes taken by a subject. Dingemanse et al. (2020: 4) classify this distinction, along with Peirce’s division of hypo-icons (see below) and several others, as one of three possible approaches to the

FIGURE 9.1  A droodle and a picture which can be read as a droodle: (a) Olive dropping into Martini glass or close-up of a girl in a scanty bathing suit (inspired from Arnheim 1969, as adapted in Sonesson 1992a); (b) face or jar (inspired by Hermerén 1983: 101); original composition by the author.

204

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

notion of iconicity, the one involving semiotic relations which are divided into kinds, as opposed to those which treat it as a discrete property that is either present or absent, or as a gradient substance that comes in degrees. Since the authors have no idea about the conceptional history of iconicity within semiotics, even in the limited sense discussed above, their division is not very enlightening, though it may, of course, be useful for experimental practice. Peirce’s and Sonesson’s divisions pinpoint on quite different properties of iconicity. As Lenninger (2019: 10) writes, ‘both divisions (at least) are needed to capture the diversity of iconic signs’, for instance to make sense of the pictorial metaphor. Moreover, Sonesson (2022, in press) has recently suggested that his division is better understood as gradients.

ICONICITY AND PICTORIAL CONSCIOUSNESS The early Barthes and the late Eco both seem to be trying to get rid of iconicity by postulating that some artefacts customarily taken to be iconic signs in fact are part of reality itself. Peirce famously distinguished three kinds of (hypo-)icons, images, diagrams and metaphors, divided, of course, in accordance with Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. However, if images, as in ordinary language, are the same as pictures, then Firstness cannot account for them (see above). In fact, the best account of iconicity, without, however, using this term, notably as instantiated by the picture, may well turn out to be Husserl’s elucubrations about pictorial consciousness.

Barthes’s tautological signs and Eco’s third critique of iconicity In the first approach to the semiotics of the picture, Roland Barthes (1964) claimed that, if not all pictures, then at least photographs, were ‘tautological’ in relation to their referents, which seem to imply they are not signs, but, for all practical purposes, identical to their referents. Curiously, this is the same conclusion reached in explicit terms by Eco (1999) in his third critique, but with reference to the mirror image. While maintaining, as in the two earlier versions of his iconicity critique, that pictures generally are conventional, he claims that the television image should be considered to be an electronic chain of mirrors, going on to suggest, without being specific, that many other signs reputed to be iconic are really of this kind. Both the original claim about mirror images and the generalization to television may be contested on many counts. Suffice it to say that, in order to make or break such claims, a more precise notion of sign is needed than those formulated by Barthes, Eco and even Peirce. Taking his cues from Jean Piaget and Edmund Husserl, Sonesson (1989, 1992, 2010, 2016) has suggested that the narrow sign concept from which Peirce distanced himself could be formulated in the following way: any sign contains (a least) two parts (expression and content) and is as a whole relatively independent of that for which it stands (the referent); these parts are differentiated, from the point of view of the subjects involved in the semiotic process, even though they may not be so objectively: i.e. in the common sense Lifeworld (except as signs forming part of that Lifeworld); this differentiation may be understood as a discontinuity in time and/or space (it is not part of the continuous perceptual experience in which what is expected occurs or does not occur), and/or as a perceived difference of categories (the expression is more ‘material’ and the content more ‘mental’ in Lifeworld ontology); there is a double asymmetry between the two parts, because one part, expression, is more directly experienced than the other; and because the

ICONICITY AND SEMIOSIS

205

other part, content, is more in focus than the other; the sign as a whole is, in its normal use, subjectively differentiated from the referent, and the referent is more indirectly known than any part of the sign. Applying this phenomenological analysis of the sign to the case of the mirror image, it seems to fulfil all the requirements for being a sign: something that is comparatively more direct and less thematic, the mirror image, stands for something that is less direct and more thematic, the object in front of the mirror; and the person or thing in front of the mirror is clearly differentiated from the image in the mirror. Of course, animals and small children may have difficulty making this differentiation, but that is exactly what happens in the case of signs, as Piaget has indicated. The kind of differentiation that does not obtain for animals and children is apparently not the one involving a discontinuity in time and/or space (they do not think the mirror image is part of themselves) but rather that concerned with the different nature of the two correlates (the cat takes the image of a cat to be another cat). On the basis of this analysis, an experimental study was designed that showed that, to small children, the mirror image is as difficult to understand as a prerecorded video, while direct video-images are more or less as easy to interpret as direct perception (see Sonesson and Lenninger 2015; Lenninger et al., 2020). The results of this study do not only speak against the identification of mirror images with perceptual reality, since the former are clearly more akin to pre-recorded video; they do not even confirm Eco’s idea of television, conceived as relying on direct video footage, because the experimental layout supposes a passage from the image to directly perceived reality, which does not occur in television. That said, experiments always depend on the mapping from one specific situation to another, where certain parameters are held constant, and real experience in the Lifeworld contains an indefinite number of situations, all characterized by numerous parameters, which is why, in the end, experiments are useful indicators, but they can never supersede phenomenology.

The Peircean hypo-icons According to Peirce (1903: CP 2.277), there are three kinds of hypo-icons: images, for which the similarity between expression and content is one of ‘simple qualities’; diagrams, for which the similarity is one of ‘analogous relations in their parts’; and metaphors, which, in Peirce’s rather mysterious terms, ‘represent the representative character of a representamen by representing parallelism in something else’. In the following, we will not broach the difficult task of interpreting the Peircean notion of metaphors (but see Sonesson 2019). Instead, we will be concerned with the distinction, and the relations, between images and diagrams. Diagrams in the sense of ordinary language are also diagrams in the Peircean sense, e.g. the population curve that rises to the extent that the population increases. Nevertheless, the Peircean concept is much broader. Contrary to the way in which icons have been conceived in the later semiotic tradition, diagrams, rather than pictures, are at the core of Peircean iconicity; at least, they are of most interest to Peirce himself. Indeed, mathematical formulae and deductive schemes, which are based on conventional signs, are those most often discussed in his work. Moreover, no matter how we choose to understand the simplicity of ‘simple qualities’, the Peircean category of images cannot include ordinary pictures: if anything, a Peircean image might be a colour sample used when picking out the paint to employ in repainting the kitchen wall, or for choosing the furnishing fabric. Indeed, not only is it true that any picture involves the representation of numerous relationships obtaining in the perceptual

206

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

world reproduced, as Frederik Stjernfelt (2007: 343 ff.) judiciously observed. More fundamentally, it is only at this level that there is a real similarity between the picture and the world, as James Gibson (1982) has shown. Indeed, it was on the basis of Gibson’s demonstration that Sonesson (1989: 260 ff.) suggested that pictures should really be seen as diagrams of diagram, or perhaps even metaphors of metaphors, if we take the Peircean definitions at heart. Long before any of these scholars, Degérando (1800: 1.153 ff., 2.302 ff.) observed that pictures, at least in their best instances, required both ‘sensuous analogy’ and ‘logical analogy’, corresponding to Peirce’s images and diagrams. This is also the conclusion to which the Annegoni example (see above) should have brought Eco. What exactly does it mean for this division to apply to ‘hypo-icons’ rather than ‘icons’? The context of the quotation favours the interpretation than none of these instances can be purely iconic but must also involve indexical and/symbolic features. At the same time, the examples seem to be signs in a narrow sense (such as the one suggested above). Nöth’s (2008) interpretation according to which language always harbours diagrammatic iconicity (see the section ‘Non-visual Iconicity’ below for further discussion) seems to be in accordance with our interpretation of iconicity above (see ‘Iconicity, Iconic Ground and the Icon’ and Table 9.1). Perhaps it is a reflection of the unsatisfactory characterization of the picture as a semiotic artefact, to the extent that it is identified with the Peircean notion of image, that the very few current attempts to present a Peircean-inspired approach to pictorial semiotics, notably those of Jappy (2013) and Nöth (2003; Nöth and Jungk 2015), have been unsuccessful in telling us anything about the specificity of picture sign, in spite of being very good at presenting Peircean semiotics generally, and, more specifically, Peirce’s notion of iconicity. The categories delineated by Peirce simply turn out to be too general. This may be the right moment to remember that the Peircean categories are supposed to be the result of phenomenology, and although Peirce later on renamed this ‘doctrine of categories’ phaneroscopy, his description of what it is concerned about is practically identical to that given by Husserl: it is that discipline that ‘ascertains and studies the kinds of elements universally present in the phaneron, meaning by the phaneron whatever is present at any time to the mind in any way’ (1903: EP 2.259; see, for more details, Sonesson 2016). No matter that the recognition of similarity in a picture can only be understood diagrammatically, our immediate experience of the picture is no doubt much more vivid5 than the cognizance we normally take of a diagram, also in Peirce’s extended sense. We may, of course, employ a picture to try to measure the distance, or at least to fix the topology, between different depicted objects (such as availing ourselves of photographs for spying purposes), but that is not the ordinary use of pictures. To get a better sense of at least pictorial iconicity, it is in fact useful to turn to the work of Husserl and what he calls ‘pictorial consciousness’, in spite of his never using the term iconicity.

Pictorial consciousness Husserl’s study of ‘pictorial consciousness’, like many of his works, consists of posthumously published manuscripts, which contain various, and somewhat contradictory, versions of his tentative attempts to elucidate the phenomenon under study. In this respect, Husserl’s work is similar to that of Peirce, but while the latter only noted down some preliminary results which were subsequently revised, Husserl laboriously accounted for every detail of his different approaches to the phenomenon. This is why we may be on somewhat safer ground when interpreting Husserl.

ICONICITY AND SEMIOSIS

207

According to Husserl (1904/05: PBE 16–17; 1898: PBE 135, 138 ff.) pictorial consciousness puts three instances into relation: the picture thing (originally the ‘physical picture’), the ‘picture object’ and the ‘picture subject’ (Bildding, Bildobjekt and Bildsujet, respectively). When the picture is said to be lopsided, this concerns the picture thing; but when we complain about the failure of the photograph to resemble the person photographed, it is the picture object that is incriminated. The latter is the perceptual scene which we seem to ‘see in’ the pictorial surface. In Husserl’s example, the miniature child in a greyish violet is not the child that is ‘intended’: i.e. conceived. The real child, the picture subject, is red-cheeked, has blond hair and so on, but the picture object can only show ‘photographic colours’. Although the term ‘photographic colours’ does not mean the same thing to us as to Husserl, the distinction is still valid, because even highquality colour photographs, as well as paintings, are unable to render the full scale of colours present in the real world of perception. According to Husserl (1904/05: PBE 18), however, there is also another kind of difference between the picture object and the picture subject, for while, in his example, the Berlin castle which we see is here, where the picture is, the Berlin castle itself, as a thing, remains in Berlin. The picture thing and the picture object are directly perceived, but the picture subject, which is what is intended (‘gemeint’; Husserl 1904/05: PBE 23 ff., 30, passim), is only indirectly given; therefore, although Husserl does not say so, it would seem to be an appresentation (see Husserl 1939: 174 ff.), in other words, a sign. The picture subject is here clearly made to accomplish a double task, which it cannot really sustain, that of content type and referent. Husserl maintains that there must always be a difference, however small, between picture object and picture subject, in terms of their respective properties. If so, it should be sufficient to attenuate the differences between them, in order to have them approach gradually, and then in the end coincide, at least as a thought experiment. But this could never happen, not even in thought, because the picture object is here, where the picture thing is, but the picture subject is somewhere else, in the place assigned to it in the Lifeworld (Husserl 1904/05: PBE 18, 79): indeed, as we have heard, the Berlin castle, no matter where the picture is moved, will remain in Berlin. Therefore, it seems to be necessary to introduce a distinction between the picture subject, in the sense of the information we may possess of the type of object depicted, which supplies the meaning lacking in what is ‘seen into’ the pictorial surface, and the picture referent as the possibly existing object in the Lifeworld. While Husserl couldn’t have known it, the Berlin castle has turned out to be a ‘fleeting referent’: it was destroyed during the Second World War, it remained a ruin during the DDR period and it was reconstructed after reunification, in the postmodernist way, partly identical to the castle of Husserl’s time, and partly a more traditional twentieth-century building. All the while, the picture subject didn’t have to change. Unicorns do not exist, and yet, if we see a picture showing a blue unicorn, we can add to what is perceived that it should really be white. Marco Polo’s discovery of the unicorn is retold by Eco (1999: 57 ff.), but he doesn’t consider the preconditions of that story. Marco Polo idea of how the unicorn looks may have been derived from reading, but most probably he had also seen pictures, which would allow him to have a more complete idea of a unicorn’s appearance. He might have seen paintings, tapestries, illuminated manuscripts, but perhaps also reliefs or even statues. He had certainly not been made to think that unicorns are beings of paint, woven tissue, ink or stone, nor that they are flat as they appear in the first series of representations. So, apart from what he had been able to ‘see into’ the surface of the pictures and the reliefs (and what is already there in

208

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

the statues), that is, apart from the picture object, which emerges directly, but already transformed, from the different picture things encountered, he must have had recourse to a number of typifications, such as the notions of concrete object, living being, horse-like creatures and so on, which helps in constituting the picture subject. As we know, this did not impede him from finding, at the end of his search, the referent we now know must have been a rhinoceros. This suggests that there are least four obligatory resting places in the process of interpretation concerning a picture, whereas two or three have been considered necessary in the interpretation of language. On the other hand, if we conceive what Peirce termed the sign as being more properly the process of interpretation, the latter would contain, in both cases, one representamen or expression, two objects, that is, the immediate and the dynamic ones, and three interpretants, the immediate, dynamic and final ones. This means that there should be six stations in the process of interpretation. But, if interpretation is really an unfolding process, the number of stops required depends on what turns out to be necessary in the study of different kinds of meanings.

NON-VISUAL ICONICITY The term icon, and thus iconicity, is multiply ambiguous. We can discard right away the use of the term for Orthodox religious paintings, as well as ‘computer icons’ and ‘cultural icons’. More disturbing is the employment of the term to refer to visual, or visual-like information, as epitomized by the psychological term ‘iconic memory’. Iconicity, both in the general sense of resemblance, and in the more specific Peircean sense, is certainly not limited to the visual sense modality, even if this is an impression easily gained, not only from the iconicity critique of Eco and Goodman, but also largely from the critique of the iconicity critique formulated by Sonesson, who at least repeatedly noted that Peirce’s favoured example of iconicity involves mathematical formulae, including, but not being restricted to, graphs (see also Stjernfelt 2007). By bringing together passages where Peirce characterizes the parts of the sign, and those where he muses on iconicity, Winfried Nöth (2008: 77 ff.) has shown very clearly that to Peirce, the latter is not even restricted to sense modalities, but may also involve semantics: thus, in this sense, a word and its antonym may be said to be partially iconic. Although, from this point of view, Pamela Perniss and colleagues’ (2010: 3) characterization of the state of the art may seem a forgone conclusion, it is worthwhile to quote, in the case of language: ‘properties of experiences – including visual, tactile, as well as mental and emotional experiences – may systematically correspond to properties of vowels and consonants, and their patterns of combination (e.g., reduplication)’. There is in fact a long tradition for investigating iconicity in language, though usually under other names, such as ‘sound symbolism’, ‘synaesthesia’ or as the opposite of linguistic relativity (Imai and Mazuka 2003; Ahlner and Zlatev 2010). When the term is used, it rarely serves as more than a synonym for resemblance, which is also, most of time, the case with studies of iconicity in literature, gesture, signed languages and music. At the time of writing, seventeen volumes have been published in a book series dedicated to the study of iconicity in language and literature (Fischer and Ljungberg, eds 1999–2020), but, with several important exceptions (some of which are quoted here), most papers published in these volumes have more contributed to the traditional task of the humanities of exemplifying, in this case, iconicity, rather than elucidating the specific kind of iconicity involved.

ICONICITY AND SEMIOSIS

209

The real pioneer in the study of linguistic iconicity, having the presumption to explore it in semiotic terms, is no doubt Roman Jakobson (1965: 26 ff.), who famously offered the example (apart from many poems) of Caesar reporting the success of his campaign in the laconic terms, ‘Veni, vidi, vici’, reproducing in the phrase the order in which the events took place. This is, of course, a case of diagrammatic iconicity (apart from containing, because of the similar sound shapes of the words, also more elementary kinds of iconicity). It must also be an example of what Winfried Nöth (1999) has termed endophoric iconicity, i.e. the relation between different linguistic expressions, as opposed to exophoric iconicity, i.e. the relation between expression and content (or referent), which has more recently been at the centre of the preoccupations of linguists. Curiously, Nöth does not observe that the other kind of endophoric iconicity which he defines, the one involving relations of expressions within the system, rather than the text, was the only kind of iconicity, termed ‘relative motivation’, which was also recognized in Saussure-inspired linguistics. Not content to merely repeat once again Jakobson’s famous example, Nöth (2008: 90f.) observes that this is a case of hypo-iconic diagrammaticy, whereas any phrase as such, including this one, is already diagrammatic, because it realizes the syntactic schemes of the (specific) language. Once we remember that iconicity pertains to semiosis generally, and not only to signs in the narrow interpretation of the term, this makes sense (see above). Nevertheless, this insight is difficult to grasp in context, since Nöth does not take into account Peirce’s later repudiation of the term ‘sign’ as being too narrow for describing semiosis. Even so, Nöth’s (1999: 615) earlier description is more helpful here: ‘If the language system constitutes a diagrammatic icon, a system of structural patterns and relationships between form [or expression] and content, the mapping of the structures of this diagrammatically iconic system in actual speech behaviour, the way in which the speakers produce utterances in conformity with the structures of the system, is iconic, too.’ Still, this characterization would need to be generalized from all kinds of structures, habits and the like, including those of perception, to their particular instantiations. Mark Dingemanse is no doubt at present one of the leading, and most productive, exponents of an experimental approach to iconicity. Summarizing a series of experimental studies, Dingemanse et al. (2015) shows, for instance, that language needs the somewhat contradictory properties of iconicity and systematicity, the former category favouring learnability and communicability, and the latter favouring learning and categorization. It is unfortunate, nevertheless, that the study of non-visual iconicity has occasioned very little comparison with pictorial iconicity, which is certainly the kind most fully analysed from a conceptual point of view so far. There are, of course, a few exceptions. Ludovic de Cuypere (2008: 48 ff., 108), harnessing the distinction introduced by Sonesson, claims that linguistic iconicity is essentially of the secondary kind, no doubt because he considers onomatopoetic expressions to be marginal facts of language. Recently, however, it has been shown that onomatopes are very common in some languages, not only in Japanese, where they form an essential part of the grammatical apparatus (as ‘ideophones’), and that generally they play a larger part in linguistic meaning than meets the ear (see Kita 1997; Ikegama and Zlatev 2007; Perniss et al. 2010; Dingemanse 2011; 2018). That iconicity plays a very important role in the way meaning is conveyed in signed languages is hardly surprising, because this was a well-known fact before the initiation of the (very justified) attempt to show that signed languages are still languages. The demonstration of the pervasiveness of iconicity also in spoken languages, both as systems available to the adult, and as stages in the process of children’s development, is much more momentous

210

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

(and it should give pause to those trying to curtail the iconicity of signed languages to make them more similar to spoken ones). Nevertheless, iconicity remains a blanket term, as long as no serious comparison has been made with the notion of iconicity as it has emerged from semiotic inquiry. Taking up Köhler’s classical Maluma-Takete-paradigm, recently revived by Ramachandran, which consists of opposing two geometrical drawings to a pair of linguistic sequences, Felix Ahlner and Jordan Zlatev (2010) systematically varied twosyllable combinations of vowels and consonants, demonstrating that both were of importance to the choice of geometrical figures. Their interpretation is that this requires a combination of primary and secondary iconicity, which seems to be a contradiction, given the definition of these terms. If we consider these two kinds of iconicity as different procedures of interpretation, this conundrum may be laid at rest. Still, this case seems more similar to the droodles considered above (see discussion of Figure 9.1). In the case of the droodles, nevertheless, the drawings carry indeterminate meanings that have a lot of potential, while the labels applied to them are as clear as language can be, whereas, in the case of Maluma-Takete and the like, both the sound sequences and the geometrical figures are basically unfathomable on their own, but rich in potential. Other semiotic resources where iconicity no doubt plays an important part are music and dance, but there have been few studies with any theoretical and/or empirical ambitions. Recently, Verónica Giraldo (2018) showed that both Swedish and Chinese subjects most of the time correctly identified the musical fragments ascribed to the different persons in Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’. Again, this is clearly a case of secondary iconicity. By comparing different choreographies supposed to identify the narrative in the ballet ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Sonesson (2009) demonstrated that most of the story line in the ballet can only be grasped thanks to secondary iconicity, the primary kind only being responsible for some kind of dynamic topology, that is, movements of approach and distancing, of moving upwards or downwards, of entering and exiting some domain and the like.

METHODS Most of the study of iconicity has so far been phenomenological in the sense of elucidating invariants of human experience by having recourse to human consciousness. This is true of the work of Peirce, Husserl and their followers, but also a lot of the contributions by psychologists such as Gibson and Kennedy. As we have noted above, some experimental studies have been important for the study of iconicity, including some by scholars who do not explicitly refer to the notion, such as Kennedy, Hochberg, Tversky and DeLoache, but also those initiated in an explicitly semiotic framework, by Lenninger, Sonesson and Zlatev. Without denying the important contributions of experimental studies, which have turned out to be decisive in showing that certain ideas were unfeasible, positive contributions to the study of iconicity may have to remain fundamentally phenomenological, since iconicity, after all, is a label for a particular kind of human experience.

STATE OF THE ART AND PRIORITIES With few exceptions, which have reached a more restricted audience, there doesn’t seem to have been any essential contributions to the study of iconicity since the end of the twentieth century. It is perhaps unfortunate that scholarly interest in the notion

ICONICITY AND SEMIOSIS

211

of iconicity was very much a result of reactions to Eco’s first two critiques of iconicity, and thus it subsided, not because Eco’s arguments were recognized to be mistaken, but because the focus of semiotics shifted to other issues. Eco’s third critique did never instil the same interest. Goodman’s critique from the start attracted a much more special audience, and the work of Bierman is basically unknown. All along, there have been many experimental studies relevant to the study of iconicity, but, most of the time, they have not been reviewed within the frames of semiotic theory. Nevertheless, as this review shows, we have advanced in our understanding of a particular instance of iconicity, the picture sign, which most scholars seem to have thought of as the prototype of the iconic sign, if not iconicity tout court. In the Peircean sense of pure iconicity, which would seem to correspond to perception and/or attention (or perhaps an abstraction from this experience), much work has been done, both in psychology and in Husserl-inspired phenomenology. But, in between iconicity and the picture sign, there remains a lot of ground to explore, which has hardly been initiated, involving not only other kinds of iconic signs than the picture, but also iconic grounds that have not made it into signs. It is to be hoped that, in the future, the study of iconicity may steer free of fashionable debates, and yet not be absorbed into the traditional ideographic approach to the humanities, in which case these compelling issues may be elucidated, both experimentally and phenomenologically. Another priority is clearly to extend the study of iconicity further into other sensory domains and semiotic resources than pictures.

CONCLUSION Within semiotics, iconicity has often simply been taken to be a synonym for resemblance, which is basically true of all critical approaches, from Eco to Bierman. Since the term ‘iconicity’ is part of our Peircean heritage, it is worthwhile attending to the more complex conception delineated by Peirce himself, but also this idea of iconicity needs to be subjected to a critical reception, which has hardly been done. Peirce has had little to say about specific instances of iconicity such as pictures, but his work can here be supplemented with both Husserl’s investigations of pictorial consciousness and many psychological studies. Even so, very little work has been dedicated to the manifestations of iconicity that are visually based, except pictures, and even less to those strands of iconicity that address sense modalities other than vision.

Acknowledgements The author wants to acknowledge the useful comments on an earlier version of this chapter made by the editor of this volume, as well as by Piero Polidoro. I remain, of course, the sole person responsible for the present content of the present chapter.

NOTES 1 In fact, Eco already hedges this claim abundantly in this book; it is ‘a week code’, which he translates as a division being made with difficulty; it is hard to distinguish distinctive features from optional ones; and there may be an infinite number of features. Nevertheless, the idea according to which the cinema sports a triple code, which presupposes the double coding of the picture is present even in Eco (1976).

212

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

2 However, as Eco (1976: vii) himself observes, he worked closely during two years with the translators of Eco (1968) into French, German, Spanish and Swedish, making these translations into something in between these two books. It therefore is an exhausting task to find out what Eco has explicitly said in all these different versions. For my part, the first work of Eco I read was the Swedish ‘translation’ of Eco (1968). 3 For a delineation of a narrow notion of sign, which does not constitute the whole domain for which iconicity is relevant, see the section entitled ‘Barthes’ Tautological Signs and Eco’s Third Critique of Iconicity’ below. 4 Lopes (1996) would however appear to make a similar distinction. 5 In the sense of German ‘anschaulich’, as used by Husserl (1898: PBE 135): a term which Nöth (2008: 95) also uses to qualify the icon generally.

REFERENCES Ahlner, F. and Zlatev, J. (2010), ‘Cross-modal Iconicity: A Cognitive Semiotic Approach to Sound Symbolism’, Sign Systems Studies, 38 (1–4): 298–348. Arnheim, R. (1969), Visual Thinking, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Barthes, R. (1964), ‘Rhétorique de l’Image’, Communications, 4: 40–51. Bierman, A. (1963), ‘That There Are No Iconic Signs’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XXI, 11 (2): 243–9. Champagne, M. (2018), Consciousness and the Philosophy of Signs: How Peircean Semiotics Combines Phenomenal Qualia and Practical Effects, Cham: Springer International Publishing. de Cuypere, L. (2008), Limiting the Iconic: From the Metatheoretical Foundations to the Creative Possibilities of Iconicity in Language, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Degerando, J. M. (1800), Des Signes et de l’Art de Penser Considerés Dans Leurs Rapports Mutuels, vols I–IV, Paris: Goujon fils. DeLoache, J. (2004), ‘Becoming Symbol-minded’, Trends in Cognitive Science, 8 (2): 66–70. Dingemanse, M. (2011), ‘Ezra Pound among the Mawu: Ideophones and Iconicity in Siwu’, in P. Michelucci, O. Fischer and C. Ljungberg (eds), Semblance and Signification, 39–54, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Dingemanse, M. (2018), ‘Redrawing the Margins of Language: Lessons from Research on Ideophones’, Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 3 (1): 4, 1–30. Dingemanse, M., D. E. Blasi, G. Lupyan, M. H. Christiansen and P. Monaghan (2015), ‘Arbitrariness, Iconicity and Systematicity in Language’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (10): 603–15. Dingemanse, M., M. Perlman and P. Perniss (2020), ‘Construals of Iconicity: Experimental Approaches to Form-Meaning Resemblances in Language’, Language and Cognition, 12 (1): 1–14. Eco, U. (1968), La Struttura Assente, Milan: Bompiani. Eco, U. (1976), A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eco, U. (1999), Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, London: Secker & Warburg. Fischer, O. and C. Ljungberg, eds (1999–2020), Iconicity in Language and Literature (book series: 17 vols), Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gibson, J. (1982), Reasons for Realism, in E. Reed and R. Jones (eds), Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Eearlbaum Ass. Giraldo, V. (2018), ‘Referential Iconicity in Music and Speech within and across Sensory Modalities’, MA thesis, Lund University, Sweden.

ICONICITY AND SEMIOSIS

213

Gombrich, E. H. (1982), The Image and the Eye, Oxford: Phaidon Press. Goodman, N. (1968), Languages of Art, London: Oxford University Press. Hermerén, G. (1983), Aspects of Aesthetics, Lund: CWK Gleerups. Husserl, E. (1939), Erfahrung und Urteil, Hamburg: Claassen Verlag. Husserl, E. ([1898–1925] 1980), Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung: Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925), Cham: Springer. Cited as PBE. Ikegami, T. and J. Zlatev (2007), ‘From Pre-Representational Cognition to Language’, in T. Ziemke, J. Zlatev and J. Frank (eds), Body, Language and Mind Vol 1. Embodiment, 197–240, Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Imai, N. and R. Mazuka (2003), ‘Reevaluating Linguistic Relativity: Language-specific Categories and the Role of Universal Ontological Knowledge in the Construal of Individuation’, in D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow (eds), Language in Mind, Advances in the Study of Language and Thought, 429–64, Cambridge: MIT Press. Jakobson, R. (1965), ‘Quest for the Essence of Language’, Diogenes, 13 (51): 21–37. Jappy, A. (2013), Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics, New York and London: Bloomsbury. Kennedy, J. (1974a), A Psychology of Picture Perception, San Francisco: Jossey-Bas, Inc. Kennedy, J. (1974b), ‘Icons and Information’, in D. Olsen (ed.), Media and Symbols, 211–40, Chicago: National Society for the Study of Education. Kennedy, J. (1993), Drawing & the Blind, New Haven: Yale University Press. Kennedy, J. and A. Ross (1975), ‘Outline Picture Perception by the Songe of Papua’, Perception, 4 (4): 391–406. Kita, S. (1997), ‘Two-dimensional Semantic Analysis of Japanese Mimetics’, Linguistics, 35: 379–415. Lenninger, S. (2012), ‘When Similarity Qualifies as a Sign: A Study in Picture Understanding and Semiotic Development in Young Children’, PhD diss., Lund University, Sweden. Lenninger, S. (2019), ‘The Metaphor and the Iconic Attitude’, Cognitive Semiotics, 12 (1): 1–11. Lenninger, S., T. Persson, J. van de Weijer and G. Sonesson (2020), ‘Mirror, Peephole and Video – The Role of Contiguity in Children’s Perception of Reference in Iconic Signs’, Frontiers in Psychology, 11: 1622. Lindekens, R. (1971), Éléments Pour une Sémiotique de la Photographie, Brussels: AIMAV. Lopes, D. (1996), Understanding Pictures, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nöth, W. (1999), ‘Peircean Semiotics in the Study of Iconicity in Language’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 35 (3): 613–19. Nöth, W. (2003), ‘Semiotic Foundations of the Study of Pictures’, Sign Systems Studies, 31 (2): 377–93. Nöth, W. (2008), ‘Semiotic Foundations of Natural Linguistics and Diagrammatic Iconicity’, in K. Willems and L. De Cuypere (eds), Naturalness and Iconicity in Language, 73–100, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nöth, W. and I. Jungk (2015), ‘Peircean Visual Semiotics: Potentials to be Explored’, Semiotica, 207: 657–73. Parmentier, R. (1985), ‘“Signs” Place in Medias Res: Peirce’s Concept of Semiotic Mediation’, in E. Mertz and R. Parmentier (eds), Semiotic Mediation, 23–48, Orlando: Academic Press. Peirce, C. S. ([1866–1913] 1931–58), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols 1–6, C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds), vols 7–8, A. Burks (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cited as CP.

214

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Peirce, C. S. (1867–1913), Unpublished manuscripts are dated according to the Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce, Richard Robin (ed.), Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967. Cited as MS. Peirce, C. S. ([1893–1913] 1998), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, Peirce Edition Project (eds), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP 2. Perniss, P., R. Thompson and G. Vigliocco (2010), ‘Iconicity as a General Property of Language: Evidence from Spoken and Signed Languages’, Frontiers in Psychology, 1: 227. Polidoro, P. (2012), Umberto Eco e il dibattito sull’iconismo, Rome: Aracne. Sebeok, T. (1976), Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs, Bloomington and Lisse: Indiana University Press/Peter de Ridder Press. Stjernfelt, F. (2007), Diagrammatology: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology, and Semiotics, Dordrecht: Springer. Sonesson, G. (1989), Pictorial Concepts, Lund: Lund University Press. Sonesson, G. (1992), ‘The Semiotic Function and the Genesis of Pictorial Meaning’, in E. Tarasti (ed.), Center/Periphery in Representations and Institutions, 211–56, Imatra: Acta Semiotica Fennica. Sonesson, G. (1994), ‘Prolegomena to the Semiotic Analysis of Prehistoric Visual Displays’, Semiotica, 100 (3): 267–332, 47–64. Sonesson, G. (1995), ‘On Pictorality’, in T. Sebeok and J. Umiker-Sebeok (eds), Advances in Visual Semiotics, 67–108, Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Sonesson, G. (1998a), ‘That There Are Many Kinds of Iconical Signs’, VISIO, 1, 1: 33–54. Sonesson, G. (1998b), ‘Prolegomena to a General Theory of Iconicity’, in K. Willems and L. De Cuypere (eds), Considerations on Language, Gesture, and Pictures: Naturalness and Iconicity in Language, 47–72, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Sonesson, G. (2009), ‘Au-délà du Language de la Dance: Les Significations du Corps’, Degrés, 139–40:C1–C25. Sonesson, G. (2010), ‘Semiosis and the Elusive Final Interpretant of Understanding’, Semiotica, 179: 145–258. Sonesson, G. (2013), ‘The Natural History of Branching: Approaches to the Phenomenology of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness’, Signs and Society, 1 (2): 297–326. Sonesson, G. (2016), ‘The Phenomenological Semiotics of Iconicity and Pictoriality – Including Some Replies to my Critics’, Languages and Semiotic Studies, 2 (2): 1–73. Sonesson, G. (2017), ‘Mastering Phenomenological Semiotics with Husserl and Peirce’, in K. Bankov and P. Cobley (eds), Semiotics and Its Masters, vol. 1, 83–104, Berlin: de Gruyter. Sonesson, G. (2019), ‘Two Models of Metaphoricity and Three Dilemmas of Metaphor Research’, Cognitive Semiotics, 12 (1): 1–17. Sonesson, G. (2022, in press), 'The Intricate Dialectics of Iconization and Structuration’, in S. Lenninger, O. Fischer, C. Ljungberg and E. Tabakowska (eds), Iconicity in Cognition and across Semiotic Systems (Iconicity in Language and Literature 18), Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sonesson, G. and S. Lenninger (2015), ‘The Psychological Development of Semiotic Competence: From the Window to the Movie by Way of the Mirror’, Cognitive Development, 36: 191–201. Tversky, A. (1977), ‘Features of Similarity’, Psychological Review, 84 (4): 327–52. Zlatev, J., E. Alenkaer Madsen, S. Lenninger, T. Persson, S. Sayehli, G. Sonesson and J. Van de Weijer (2013), ‘Understanding Communicative Intentions and Semiotic Vehicles by Children and Chimpanzees’, Cognitive Development, 28: 312–29.

CHAPTER TEN

Opposition and Semiosis MARCEL DANESI

INTRODUCTION The intrinsic relationship that inheres among signs, their meanings and their social functions has led to two fundamental psychological constructs within theoretical semiotics – opposition and semiosis. The former aims to explain how we differentiate signs structurally and referentially and the latter how we produce and understand them. They are associated respectively with two major traditions in semiotics – Saussurean structuralism, also called semiology (Saussure 1916), and Peircean semiotics, spelled originally semeiotics (Peirce [1866–1913] 1931–58). With some exceptions (Nöth 1994), it is often assumed that the two are incompatible theoretically, given that the former appears to reflect a rationalist view of the sign, and the latter an experiential one. But their epistemological separation is arguably an artificial one, as will be discussed in this chapter. Starting in the late 1970s, research on figurative cognition in linguistics – known as the cognitive linguistic movement (Ortony 1979; Honeck and Hoffman 1980; Lakoff and Johnson 1980) – has brought forth indirect evidence that the underlying premises related to opposition and semiosis are actually compatible ones, even though the researchers themselves did not employ these specific terms overtly, as will be discussed below. The notion of opposition implies essentially that we do not grasp the meanings of signs in themselves, but in relation to other signs. The ideological roots of this theory may actually be ancient, going back to the notion of logical dualism (Hjelmslev 1939, 1959; Benveniste 1946). But the two – dualism and opposition – are not identical or even isomorphic. The differences between them have been discussed at length, and some of these will be iterated below. Opposition became a central principle in early semiotics, linguistics, psychology and anthropology after Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1916) formulation of the notion of différence – or the idea that we perceive signs such as words as distinctive units not in themselves, but through differential phonological cues in their structural makeup. The Saussurean notion was expanded to include other levels of language and renamed opposition in the 1920s and 1930s by the Prague School of Linguistics (Prague Linguistic Circle) (Trubetzkoy 1936, 1939; Jakobson 1939) and by Gestalt psychology (Ogden 1932). The construct was marginalized somewhat with the advent of two movements in the middle part of the twentieth century – generativism in linguistics (Chomsky 1957) and poststructuralism in semiotics (Derrida 1967) – both of which caught on broadly within their respective disciplines. But at the start of the 1990s several strong defences of opposition theory by Andrews (1990), Andrews and

216

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Tobin (1996) and Battistella (1990, 1996) came forward to revive broad interest in it, dovetailing with the rise of research on metaphor in linguistics, which indirectly validated it (as will be discussed). Today, applications of opposition theory to such fields as computer science and artificial intelligence (Tanaka-Ishii 2010; Danesi and Walsh-Matthews 2019) suggest that it is a practicable one as a modelling device of how information is processed. The notion of semiosis was put forth by Charles Peirce to designate how the perception of signs involved not just a differentiation function, but also a creative experientially based process of transforming sensory information into conceptual models – a view that some have traced back to Saint Augustine (Markus 1957; Deely 2001), who saw signs as converting impressions into thoughts. As he put it in his De Doctrina Christiana (see Augustine [397–426] 1887): ‘A sign is a thing which causes us to think of something beyond the impression the thing itself makes upon the senses’ (in Vance 2010: 65). A correlative view to semiosis today is the so-called embodied cognition one, which started concretely with Maturana and Varela’s 1973 book Autopoiesis and Cognition, in which they claimed that an organism participates in its own future development, since it can influence its various biochemical agents and internal perceptual structures. Arguably, this concept can be traced back to biologist-semiotician Jakob von Uexküll’s (1909) idea that we transform our perceptions of the world (the Umwelt) into specific models of it (the Innenwelt), which then shape how we act and evolve in the world. However, we view each one theoretically; there is little doubt that the notions of opposition and semiosis are fundamental ones in semiotics. In this chapter, relevant aspects of the former are discussed first, after which semiosis is examined comparatively. Finally, the ongoing work in cognitive linguistics is discussed in light of the premises that have led to the establishment of both two constructs within semiotics.

BACKGROUND As mentioned, some trace the construct of opposition to dualistic philosophies such as Aristotle’s logical dualism and Descartes’s separation of domain reality into mind and matter (Ogden 1932; Babin 1940; Bochénski 1961; Deely 2001; Anfindsen 2006). In his book, De Homine (1633), Descartes claimed that the body worked like a machine that was animated by ‘animal spirits’ flowing through the nervous system and that the pineal gland was the ‘seat of thought’ and thus the location of the mind. When the gland became aware of the animal spirits, it stimulated conscious sensations. The mind could thus double back on the body by instigating the flow of the animal spirits to a particular part, activating it as the case may require. Contemporary neuroscience has dismissed Descartes’s ‘error’, as psychologist Antonio Damasio (1994) termed it, showing that the body and the mind are interactive agents in generating consciousness. Unlike dualistic philosophies, Saussure’s notion of différence had a specific intent to explicate how minimal phonic cues in the chain of speech allowed us to identify meaningful units (words) in that chain. This led subsequently to the theory of the phoneme as a principle of language structure. Verbal sounds in themselves (vowels, consonants, tones, etc.) have no conceptual value. They accrue it in minimal differential relation to other sounds in the same system (consonants, vowels, etc.). For instance, in the word pair pinversus-bin, the sounds /p/ and /b/ differ minimally – that is, both are stop consonants (produced by an obstruction of the airstream emanating from the lungs and expelled

OPPOSITION AND SEMIOSIS

217

like a small plosion), but they differ in the fact that /p/ is voiceless (produced without the vibration of the vocal cords, which are kept taut) while /b/ is voiced (produced with the vibration of the vocal cords). Since the two other sounds in the word pairs (pin and bin) are identical, we can conclude that the voiced-versus-voiceless différence is what allows us to perceive the two words as meaning-bearing structures (as speakers of English), not as random agglomerations of sounds. Saussure (1916: 251–8) named the perception of the phonemic difference, valeur (value) (Malmberg 1974). The Prague School adopted the Saussurean notion of différence in the 1920s, but expanded it considerably as a model for viewing language structure in general, not just the phonemic system. The Gestalt psychologists, too, applied it to distinguish between universal and culture-specific concepts, discovering that some semantic-level oppositions are cross-cultural (right-versus-left, day-versus-night); while others, like town-versus-country, are culture-specific (Ogden 1932). Opposition theory crystallized at first from the work of these two movements, forming the blueprint for the spread of structuralism in semiotics, defined as the study of meaningful contrasts among the units in a conceptual system that reflect underlying patterns, no matter how diverse they may appear on the surface. The implicit idea was that the human mind is inclined by its nature to perceive the world in terms of complementary differentiations and that these are based on how we actually experience and understand the world, physically and mentally. Structuralism thus theoretically reflected the observation that much of human anatomy is structured in a binary (oppositional) way – a left and right hand, eye, ear, foot, etc. – as can also be deduced indirectly from the work of the early founders of psychology, such as Wilhelm Wundt (1880) and Edward B. Titchener (1910). The Prague School saw opposition as the underlying principle of language structure itself (Jakobson, Karcevski, and Trubetzkoy 1928; Jakobson 1932, 1936, 1939; Trubetzkoy 1936, 1939, 1968; Pos 1938, 1964). From their work, opposition became a working epistemological and methodological construct in linguistics, anthropology and psychology from the 1930s onwards (Wallon 1945; Parsons and Bales 1955; Godel 1957; Lévi-Strauss 1958, 1962, 1971; Blanché 1966; Belardi 1970; Needham 1973; Fox 1974, 1975; Ivanov 1974; Lorrain 1975; Jakobson and Waugh 1979). Today, opposition has been adopted implicitly as a modelling device or principle in such domains as computer science, communication studies and even in how we design alerting systems in our buildings – in a building that has an alarm system, the state off bears virtually no information content, whereas the state on (a sounding alarm) has maximum information value for that system. As we shall see, in opposition theory the former state is called the unmarked or default state and the latter the marked one. A comparison of mechanical and biological systems in terms of opposition theory is beyond the scope of the present discussion. Suffice it to say that we may be inclined to fashion the former (our machines) to reflect the structure of the latter (ourselves). This was, actually, the premise on which mathematician Norbert Wiener founded the science of cybernetics in his 1948 book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine, in which he viewed communication in all self-contained complex systems as analogous. Wiener developed his theory from observing that people and machines carried out their functions in comparable ways. One of the most important characteristics shared by humans and machines was feedback, which involves the circling back of information to a control device (an alarm device or a human brain) so that it can adjust the functioning of the system or interpret the information and react accordingly.

218

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

POLARITY AND GRADIENCE Opposition, as distinct from dualism, is itself implicit in ancient philosophy. It can be seen, for instance, in Heraclitus’s theory that opposites exist because they are necessary for life, unified in a system of balanced exchanges (Kahn 1979). Poet Ralph Waldo Emerson also envisioned opposition as a principle of existence, calling it rather insightfully, polarity, as can be seen in the following observation he made in 1841 (Emerson [1841] 1940: 286-7): Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the animal body; in the systole and diastole of the heart; in the undulations of fluids and of sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity; in electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce magnetism at one end of a needle, the opposite magnetism takes place at the other end. If the south attracts. the north repels. To empty here, you must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole; as, spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out; upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay. The first in-depth psychological study of polarity was Charles Ogden’s 1932 treatise, Opposition: A Linguistic and Psychological Analysis, where he refined and elaborated several key ideas he had put forth in 1923 with I. A. Richards in The Meaning of Meaning. Ogden claimed that a small set of semantic-conceptual oppositions, such as right-versusleft and yes-versus-no, appeared to be intrinsically binary in nature and that these were found across cultures. Such oppositions were called, as Emerson anticipated, polar, since they could be envisioned as two poles on a semantic scale on which related concepts, called gradient, could be placed between them. For example, in a polar opposition, such as white-versus-black, related colour concepts such as gray, red, etc. can be located between the poles, a fact that clearly has both referential and conceptual resonance, since such gradient colours are distributed physically on the light spectrum, while white and black ones are not, forming instead endpoints on the spectrum. Gradient concepts show connective structure, since they are linked to the polar concepts in distributed ways. All languages of the world (as far as can be told) have terms for the white-versus-black opposition, whereas other colour terms are found distributed in specific ways between these two conceptual poles according to language. Similarly, gradient concepts between the polar opposition day-versus-night include twilight, dawn, noon and afternoon. In other words, polar concepts form a binary opposition, called paradigmatic, whereas gradient concepts form a syntagmatic (connective) relation to the polar ones. Of course, one can always put a gradient concept, such as red, into an opposition with another gradient colour, red-versus-yellow, but this is likely to be a situation-specific opposition, rather than a cross-cultural (polar) one. So too, we could put noon into an opposition with morning, if we desire to do so. Ogden gave the example of townversus-country as a situation-specific opposition. This suggests that we can always create oppositions as the situation may require, but that we intuitively accept some oppositions as universal. The foregoing discussion can be summarized in chart form (as illustrated in Table 10.1): The polarity-gradience framework has been found to have broad applicability to the study of sign systems across codes and representational practices, as research starting

OPPOSITION AND SEMIOSIS

219

TABLE 10.1  The polarity-gradience framework Concept

Type

Examples

Polar

Binary oppositional concepts that are likely to be perceived as inherently cross-cultural

White-versus-black, dayversus-night, right-versusleft, etc.

Situational

Binary oppositional concepts Red-versus-yellow, townversus-country, etc. that are created for specific purposes (cultural or subjective)

Gradient

Non-oppositional concepts that exist between polar oppositions and are thus part of a culture-specific distributional code

Morning, noon, evening, etc. are located on the dayversus-night polar scale. They can however be put in situational oppositions if need be

in the late 1980s made evident (Andersen 1989, 2001, 2008; Tomic 1989; Andrews 1990; Battistella 1990, 1996; Mettinger 1994; Elc’ík and Matras 2006). The work of the Tartu School of semiotics (Lotman 1991) has been especially significant in showing how these codes overlap with biological codes (Andrews 2003; Lepik 2008), thus implying the presence of a kind of meta-opposition across all human systems – namely the biosphereversus-semiosphere one, implying that our construct of opposition may be motivated by our need to connect the two spheres cognitively. So, if there is a north then there must be a south; if there is peace then there must be war and so on. This has suggested an ‘anthropic principle’ to some, which states that we are part of the world in which we live and are thus privileged to understand it best. Al-Khalili (2012: 218) puts it as follows: The anthropic principle seems to be saying that our very existence determines certain properties of the Universe, because if they were any different we would not be here to question them. Opposition can be said to be one of many anthropic strategies we create to understand the world on our own terms. It is likely based on what the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico called the human fantasia (in Bergin and Fisch 1984), or our capacity to imagine the world on our own terms and then act creatively and purposefully on it. But this is not purely fanciful. Vico claimed, in fact, that although human beings may have created history and knowledge themselves, they were guided unwittingly in their efforts by a higher form of consciousness (Bergin and Fisch 1984: 1108): It is true that men have themselves made this world of nations … but this world without doubt has issued from a kind often diverse, at times contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves; which narrow ends, made means to serve wider ends, it has always employed to preserve the human race upon this earth. As Fletcher (1991: 149) has observed, Vico’s philosophy prefigures several modernday schools of cognitive science and anthropology, such as the embodied cognition and

220

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

autopoiesis ones, because ‘it identifies homo sapiens with homo faber – cultural thinking with cultural making’. As Donald Verene (1981: 101) has aptly observed, the fantasia allows humans ‘to know from the inside’ by extending ‘what is made to appear from sensation beyond the unit of its appearance and to have it enter into connection with all else that is made by the mind from sensation’. In this framework, it can be argued that the fantasia is the source of semiosis and autopoiesis, guiding human evolution by shaping biological forces (il certo or ‘certainty’) through the forces of history (il vero ‘our truth’) (Danesi 1993). Opposition makes sense because it allows us to imagine relations in the world as interconnected to each other in specific complementary ways. It can be seen even in how we conceive semantic relations such as synonymy (big-versus-large), antonymy (big-versus-little), taxonomy (rose-versus-flower), part-whole relations (handleversus-cup) and so on. In effect, the construct of opposition has actually provided a useful format for establishing the basic differential meanings of the forms and structures we have invented and how we perceive them.

TYPES OF OPPOSITION The Prague School devised a simple method, called the commutation test, for identifying oppositions at different levels of language, from the phonemic to the semantic. It was used extensively at first to identify phonemes, as discussed above, with word pairs such as pin-versus-bin – that is, by changing the initial /p/ sound in the word pin to /b/ to produce bin, keeping the remaining sounds the same, we can establish the phonemic status of /p/ and /b/. Such pairs were called minimal by Trubetzkoy (1939). With the commutation test, the Prague School found, for instance, that some phonemes occurred in many minimal pairs, while others did not. They called this the ‘functional yield’ of a phoneme. The phoneme /p/ in English has a high functional yield since it is distinctive in word-initial (/p/-versus-/b/ in pin-versus-bin), word-internal (/p/-versus-/m/ in openversus-omen) and word-final (/p/-versus-/t/ in sap-versus-sat) position, and it can be found in opposition with virtually every other consonant phoneme of that language. The commutation test also revealed that phonemes could be classified into natural sets (Pos 1938; Jakobson 1939; Trubetzkoy 1939; Martinet 1960). For example, the voiceless stop consonants /p/, /t/ and /k/ formed such a set. Within that set, each consonant can be put in a binary opposition to each other: /p/-versus-/t/ (pin-versus-tin), /p/-versus-/k/ (pin-versus-kin/), etc. Similarly, the voiced counterparts (produced with the vibration of the vocal cords), /b/, /d/ and /g/, also constituted a natural set with similar set-internal oppositional structure: /b/-versus-/d/ (bin-versus-din), /b/-versus-/g/ (bet-versus-get), etc. Now, the consonants in the two sets can be put in opposition to each other: /p/-versus/b/ (pin-versus-bin), /p/-versus-/d/ (pen-versus-den), etc., indicating that the two sets had a high functional yield. Experimentation with the commutation test led to two other key notions: 1. oppositions are triggered by specific distinctive features, such as the presence or absence of the feature [±voice] and 2. natural sets possessed symmetry, since they could be put into oppositions within and without the sets. However, the linguists also found that asymmetries or gaps sometimes emerged – in English, the voiceless dental and palatal sibilants, /s/-versus-/∫/, can be put into a minimal

OPPOSITION AND SEMIOSIS

221

pair (sip-versus-ship), but since there is no voiced palatal consonant in that language, which exists in some languages, there is no corresponding oppositional partner to the voiced dental sibilant /z/ (as in zip) – only a voiceless-versus-voiced opposition between dental sibilants, /s/ and /z/ (sip-versus-zip). Distinctive feature analysis became a mainstay in structuralism and was adopted even by generative linguistics later, under the influence of Jakobson (Jakobson, Fant, and Halle 1952; Jakobson and Halle 1956; Jakobson 1968). It continues to be used under different rubrics, such as optimality theory (McCarthy 2001). Distinctive features are distinguished from redundant features, such as the aspirated [ph] in English, which occurs in word-initial position only before a vowel: pat, pot, pill, pin, etc. If /s/ is put before the consonant in this position, the aspiration is blocked: spit, spill, spunk, spat. The aspiration of /p/ is thus a predictable feature of English phonology – when /p/ occurs in word-initial position followed by a vowel it is aspirated. It is a redundant, not distinctive, feature. Since the two sounds, [p] and [ph], are connected to each other in the way just described, they are said to be allophones that complement each other where one occurs the other does not. The rule that specifies the way in which allophones complement each other came to be called a rule of complementary distribution. The use of the commutation test also led to a typology of phonemic oppositions (Trubetzkoy 1939): 1. Multidimensional/multilateral: oppositions that involve the sharing of distinctive features: for example, /p/, /t/, and /k/ share the features [+stop] and [-voice] that keep them distinct in oppositions with other natural sets. These have a high functional yield. 2. One-dimensional/bilateral: oppositions in which the distinctive features are constrained structurally, and thus have a low functional yield. In French, the /t/-versus-/d/ opposition is one dimensional because this is the only one where [+dental] and [+stop] features are not nasalized (pronounced through the nose). 3. Isolated: oppositions that occur uniquely. In English the /s/-versus-/∫/ opposition, mentioned above, shows a unique contrast between [+dental] and [+palatal] among sibilants. 4. Proportional: oppositions that correspond across sets: for example, [±voice] is distinctive between the two sets of stop consonants, /p/, /t/, /k/-versus-/b/, /d/, /g/ and others. 5. Privative: oppositions distinguished by one feature: for example, /p/-versus-/k/ = [±bilabial]. 6. Gradual: oppositions that involve varying degrees of a single feature: for example, [±open] is found among vowels in varied ways. 7. Equipollent; oppositions entailing several features: /p/-versus-/b/ involves [±voiced] and [±stop], so does /p/-versus-/s/ but with different values of the features; so, /p/-versus-/b/ = [+stop, -voice]-versus-[+stop, -voice] and /p/-versus-/s/ = [+stop, -voice]-versus-[-stop, -voice]. The Prague School linguists also discovered that the oppositional system was not rigid or impervious to extralinguistic factors. In American English, for example, the vowels /i/ and /ε/ are phonemic, as can be seen in minimal pairs such as beet-versus-bet. However, some speakers pronounce the word economics with an initial /i/, others with an

222

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

initial /ε/ instead. When this occurs, the two vowels are said to be in free variation. This implies that the actual pronunciation of a phoneme can vary from speaker to speaker, in terms of geographic, social or other extralinguistic factors. All this suggested to the Prague School linguists, before the advent of sociolinguistics as a branch of general linguistics, that différences in structure were not just system-internal, but also reflected social variation. They also applied the commutation test to all levels of language, not just the phonological. Polar oppositions such as day-versus-night, white-versus-black and rightversus-left occur, as discussed, at the semantic-conceptual level (Mettinger 1994). Later structuralists, such as those of the so-called Copenhagen School (Hjelmslev 1939), aimed to develop a system of semantic distinctive features to explain how we might psychologically differentiate the concepts in pairs such as father-versus-son and motherversus-daughter. They called these features semes (Hjelmslev 1959; Coseriu 1973; Pottier 1974). To keep concepts such as father, mother, son and daughter distinct features such as [±gender] and [±adulthood] could, for example, be used. However, this approach often produces unrealistic results. For example, what is the distinctive feature in an opposition between dog and cat? Is it [±canine] or [±feline]? There really is no way to establish which one is, conceptually, the relevant seme in this opposition. Moreover, if a high number of semes is needed at this level, it would make the whole analytical exercise somewhat trivial (Schooneveld 1978). The notion of lexical field was devised a little later to handle some of these theoretical issues. For example, items marked by the feature [+seat], such as chair, sofa, desk, bench, can be assigned to a specific lexical field. Within that field, items can be further distinguished from one another according to how many people are accommodated, whether a back support is included, what relative size each one is and so on. But difficulties still persist even with this useful notion, perhaps because phonological systems are closed (with a delimitable number of elements), whereas semantic systems are open-ended and, thus, constantly changing to meet new social needs. The work of Anne Wierzbicka (1996, 1997, 1999, 2003) is of relevance here. Although somewhat different from structuralist distinctive feature theory, her work aims to identify a core of features that she calls semantic primitives which, individually or in combination, can be applied to all languages. Abstract concepts, such as fatherhood, femininity, hope and justice, are high in connotative content, and although they can be put on binary polar scales – fatherhoodversus-motherhood, femininity-versus-masculinity, etc. – those scales show considerable gradience, making it difficult to actually carry out any effective oppositional analysis (Bolinger 1968). Moreover, it may well be that not all oppositions are binary. For example, the tense system of English has a ternary oppositional structure – presentversus-past-versus-future. Oppositions can, in fact, be binary, ternary, four-part, etc. The type of opposition that applies to some sign system depends on the system itself. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958), for example, showed that pairs of oppositions often cohered into sets forming recognizable units within specific cultural codes or systems. In analysing kinship systems, Lévi-Strauss found that the elementary unit of kinship was made up of a set of four binary oppositions, interrelated to each other like the vertices on a square. A little after Lévi-Strauss’s observations, the concept of the semiotic square was put forward by Algirdas J. Greimas (1966, 1970, 1987). This is a model of opposition involving two sets of paired concepts forming a square arrangement (see Figure 10.1). Given a word such as rich (S1), Greimas posited that the overall meaning of the sign

OPPOSITION AND SEMIOSIS

223

FIGURE 10.1  The semiotic square.

unfolds in terms of its contradictory, not rich (~S1), its contrary, poor (S2), and its own contradictory, not poor (~S2) in tandem as illustrated in Figure 10.1. The original concept of a ‘square of opposition’ is traced to Aristotle as part of his system of syllogistic logic (see Aristotle [c.330 BCE] 1984), and has been used in logic and mathematics ever since (for example, Frege 1879: 24). It is beyond the purpose here to delve into the history of this notion. Suffice it to say that Greimas’s model is a semiotic adaptation that has had many applications to the study of sign systems. Above all else, it suggests that binarism is not the only type of oppositional structure that should be considered by semioticians. Roland Barthes (1967) showed that ternary and four-pole and five-pole oppositional structures surfaced in specific domains of social activity. In the fashion code, for instance, these included tight fitting-versus-closely-fitting-versusloose-fitting-versus-puffed-out and open-versus-side-by-side-versus-closed-versus-crossedversus-rolled-up. The expansion of opposition theory to include multi-polar models did not, however, impugn the use or validity of the original notion of binary polarity, perhaps because very few oppositions such as the ones indicated by Barthes have ever emerged as widespread structures and also because it seems that the polarity-gradience modality occurs across cultural landscapes manifesting itself in specific ways. Multi-polar structures, on the other hand, are constrained to specific situations, needs, and domains, such as the fashion industry.

224

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

MARKEDNESS THEORY As the commutation test was being used extensively to analyse various languages, the Prague School linguists started noticing the importance and role of certain distinctive features in oppositions in terms of the relative degree of information each one carried. The notion of functional load was eventually developed in the broader structuralist context to explicate this phenomenon (Hockett 1955). Essentially, it implies that the information carried by the two phonemes in an opposition is different – higher or lower. The higher the load, the more marked psychologically was the phoneme, the lesser the load, the less marked. This led to the question of which distinctive feature in an opposition, such as the [±voice] feature in the /p/-versus-/b/ minimal pair, is the marked one. Is it [-voice] or [+voice]? It is the same kind of question that was asked with regard to an alarm system (above), in which, obviously, the on state carries more information than the expected off state, and is therefore the one that is marked psychologically. This type of question led to a derivative theory emanating from opposition – called markedness theory. The essence of the theory is that in a binary opposition, one of the poles is unconsciously assumed to imply a normal or default state (with a lower functional load), and the other an exceptional or derived state (with a higher functional load). So, in an opposition such as the health-versus-disease one, it is assumed that health is the normal state and that disease is the state that stands out contrastively – that is, disease is marked conceptually, while health is unmarked. Work on markedness started revealing many aspects of language structure and how it encodes meanings differentially. For instance, it suggested the operation of a meta-opposition that might underlie many kinds of oppositions, namely presence-versus-absence. For instance, in the day-versus-night polar opposition it is the pole night that, typically, we conceive as implying ‘absence of daylight’, while the pole day is rarely conceived as being ‘absence of night time’, but rather as ‘presence of a natural light’. In other words, night is marked conceptually with respect to day, in terms of the meta-opposition. The question of which pole in any opposition is the unmarked one turns out to be problematic, since it might involve cultural factors. For example, in the giveversus-accept opposition, either pole could be assigned unmarked status, depending on the situation or viewpoint of the users of the opposition. In a situation where giving is the objective of some agency, such as a charity organization, then give is the unmarked pole; vice versa, among people who survive through alms, accept is the unmarked concept. The foregoing discussion indicates that contextual criteria cannot be eliminated in determining markedness relations; these include frequency, cultural codes, contextualized situations and so on. In phonological systems, the marked phoneme is the one that is generally more constrained than the unmarked one in the type and number of wordmaking combinations it may enter into, in the type and range of changes it may undergo, in the frequency with which it occurs and so on (Tiersma 1982; Eckman 1983). This is why Trubetzkoy (1975: 362) defined markedness as the asymmetrical relation whereby one pole is more constrained than the other pole on a particular level (Hertz 1973; Jakobson and Waugh 1979; Waugh 1979, 1982). For example, in the indefinite article system of English grammar, a is the unmarked form, since it occurs before all consonants in the chain of speech (a boy), while an is the marked one, because it occurs before vowels (an apple). The markedness criterion in this case is frequency, since there are more words beginning with consonants than vowels. However, frequency does not always play a role in assigning markedness status. For example, in the grape-versus-grapes opposition, the singular form is the expected unmarked one, because that is the usual markedness pattern

OPPOSITION AND SEMIOSIS

225

for nouns – in cat-versus-cats the plural form is marked because it is a derivative of the singular form via the addition of a suffix. However, in the grape-versus-grapes opposition the singular form is the marked one, since the plural form, grapes, is referentially more common and thus unmarked – ‘We love grapes’; ‘The grapes are ripe’; etc. A single grape stands out from a bunch of grapes. In other words, determining markedness is a complex procedure that entails knowledge of extralinguistic factors. As Battistella (1990: 2) observes, the principle of markedness comes from the fact that ‘the terms of polar oppositions at any level of language are not mere opposites, but rather that they show an evaluative nonequivalence that is imposed on all oppositions’. As markedness was investigated across several disciplines, it became obvious that it provided insights into the interconnectedness of linguistic structure to social structure. In Italian, for example, the masculine plural form of nouns referring to people is the unmarked one, since it is used to indicate any person, male or female, whereas the feminine plural form is marked, referring only to females. For instance, i bambini (which is grammatically masculine) can refer to all children, whereas le bambine (which is grammatically feminine) refers specifically to female children. The fact that the unmarked grammatical gender in Italian is the masculine one is a clue that Italian society is historically patrilineal. This simple example raises a key question: Does grammar reflect social structure? Anthropological and linguistic research has actually shown that in societies (or communities) where the masculine gender of nouns is the unmarked form, it is the men who tend to be in charge, while in societies (or communities) where the feminine gender is the unmarked form, the women are the ones who are typically in charge (see Aikhenvald 2016 for an overview). In other words, the markedness of grammatical structure mirrors social structure (Alpher 1987; King 1991). Markedness theory can thus be seen to be a diagnostic tool for unravelling social relations and codes of power. Terms like chairman, spokesman, etc. are examples of how the English language predisposed its users to view certain social roles in masculine terms in the past. Their replacements (chair, spokesperson, etc.) show how the oppositional poles can be neutralized to attenuate the unconscious imbalances. Indeed, markedness theory suggests that we can potentially change social structure by changing linguistic structure. Consider job designations as a case-in-point. When women entered into traditionally male-based occupations in the previous century, their presence was perceived to be a break from gender-based traditions. So, their job titles were marked linguistically by adding suffixes such as -ess to the relevant jobs (waitress, actress, etc.). This has changed today, where forms such as waiter and actor are used in reference to both males and females – that is, they are unmarked for gender. So, when the suffix -ess is used, it is not to allude to the entrance of females into specific job categories, but rather to distinguish the sex of the server or actor if the need arises. Markedness theory has, in effect, provided a useful framework for studying of interconnectedness between signs, cognition and culture (Schuster 2001; Hatten 2004; Vijayakrishnan 2007). It has also suggested that we perceive certain concepts and tasks through the lens of marked structures. A fascinating study by van der Schoot, Bakker Arkema, Horsley and van Lieshout (2009) examined the effects of the opposition more than (unmarked)-versus-less than (marked) on word problem-solving skills in a sample of ten- to twelve-year-old children. The researchers found that less-skilled problem solvers had difficulties deciphering the meaning of the marked form, whereas all subjects were equally successful in solving those problems where the wording involved the unmarked form. This suggests that polarity does indeed bear psychological consequences. In another significant study, Cho and Proctor (2007) found that when classifying numbers as odd

226

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

(marked) or even (unmarked) with left and right keypresses on a device, performance among learners was better with the unmarked form of the opposition even-right (unmarked)-versus-odd-left (marked). The researchers called this effect a markedness association of response codes (MARC). Markedness has also been found to play a role in language learning (Collins 1969; Park 2000; Mansouri 2000; Arranz 2005), discourse structure (Merlini Barbaresi 1988) and in other areas of human cognitive, communicative and representational activities. In effect, it has been a useful tool in the general study of the relation between cognition and context (see Andrews 2012), despite current dismissals of this framework within linguistics (for example, Haspelmath 2006). Markedness theory actually became a target of serious criticism during the so-called poststructuralist movement in semiotics, which gained momentum at first in the mid1960s and early 1970s (Derrida 1967, 1976; Foucault 1972). Poststructuralists did not view markedness as a scientific tool for investigating language or any other code; they saw it, instead, as an artificial logocentric concoction. Derrida claimed that it was ultimately useless, since in a binary opposition such as day-versus-night, accepting day as the unmarked form and night as its marked counterpart is meaningless in itself. It simply indicates a bias towards one of the poles that is steeped in cultural history (Belsey 2002; Mitchell and Davidson 2007). Derrida (1977: 237) claimed that marked oppositions actually deconstructed themselves when analysed critically to reveal a tacit (idealistic) assumption that one of the poles is the norm: In idealization, to an origin or to a “priority” seen as simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order then to conceive of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc. All metaphysicians have proceeded thus: good before evil, the positive before the negative, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. This is not just one metaphysical gesture among others; it is the metaphysical exigency. But Derrida seems to have missed the fact that markedness may have an embedded psycho-biological source. Consider the right-versus-left opposition (Needham 1973). It is highly plausible that this is based on the fact that we have a right and left hand (foot, leg, ear and eye). Moreover, we perceive the right pole as the unmarked one because of frequency factors, since more people are right-handed than left-handed. If the reverse applies, whereby left-handedness is the norm among a group for some genetic or social reason, then the markedness relation would be reversed. Moreover, the markedness relation allows us to examine any derived symbolism in semiotic terms – right is associated with good, light, and left with evil, dark. This means that the right-versus-left opposition has become marked culturally.

THE SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL The last assertion led to the consideration of another problematic aspect of opposition theory – namely, the fact that the meaning differential, or valeur, was typically at the denotative (or strictly referential) level. The connotative (or associative) level was rarely mentioned, initially. But this problem was not ignored by the structuralists who developed various models of the denotation-versus-connotation dichotomy (for example, Hjelmslev 1959; Barthes 1964). It was actually the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield, who gave us the first in-depth treatment of this dichotomy in his influential 1933 book

OPPOSITION AND SEMIOSIS

227

called Language, a treatment that cross-fertilized semiotic theory. An initial response of semioticians to the problem of connotation was that the denotative or connotative value of the polar concepts was an interpretive feature, and could be determined by the gradience distribution given to concepts such as motherhood, masculinity, friendship and justice, which invariably involve connotation. Among the first to examine this phenomenon in a systematic fashion were the psychologists Osgood, Suci and Tannenbaum, in 1957, who introduced the concept of semantic differential to do so. They argued that connotative (culture-specific) evaluations could be measured by using such polar oppositions as young-versus-old, good-versus-bad, etc. with respect to a specific concept and then asking subjects to rate it on seven-point scales, with the oppositions constituting the end-points of those scales. The ratings were then collected and analysed statistically. The number 7 was chosen, incidentally, because the year before (1956) linguist George Miller had shown, in a study titled ‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information’, that the ability to process information meaningfully was limited to between five and nine equally weighted errorless choices. To grasp how the semantic differential works, suppose hypothetically that subjects are asked to rate the concept of fatherhood in terms of oppositional scales such as practical-versus-idealistic, flexible-versus-stern, etc. The outcome would yield a connotative profile of fatherhood in a specific sample of subjects, and the experiment can then be repeated with larger samples for determining statistical relevance vis-à-vis the larger culture. Results near the end of the scales (say, 1.4 or 6.4) would indicate high connotative content; results near the middle of the scales would indicate neutrality and, thus, equipollence in the oppositions. Research utilizing the semantic differential has shown, in fact, that the range of connotative evaluation is not a matter of pure subjectivity, but forms a socially based pattern. Younger people may tend to rate the ideal father as being flexible, older ones as stern and so on. In other words, the connotative indices of abstract concepts are constrained by psychological and cultural variables. A derivative of this approach is to ask subjects to fill in the scales with gradient concepts on their own. So, subjects might be asked which words would characterize a flexible father, and which ones a stern one. These would then constitute gradient concepts that would show connotative variability. This can be called a thesaurus model of the semantic differential. This term is used in the sense of ‘connotations and varying shades of meaning’, rather than approximate synonyms (AHD 2011: xxvii). A common critique of the semantic differential technique is that the poles used (practical-versus-idealistic, flexible-versus-stern, etc.) are themselves artefacts, utilized by the researchers to unconsciously guide subject choices along a certain path that is itself culture-specific. In other words, they show what analysts want to show. But even if the scales are determined in advance, the results obtained may be unexpected ones and thus the whole technique would be legitimate as a form of randomized experimentation. For this reason, the semantic differential remains a valid investigative tool into the nature of connotation, since it allows us to flesh out what something means in psychological and cultural terms (Olmsted and Durham 1976). It has also shown how gradience works at the subjective and cultural levels in terms of three factors – evaluation, potency and activity. Evaluation implies that we will think either positively or negatively about the two poles – dirty-versus-clean, ugly-versus-beautiful, etc. Potency refers to how powerful the topic is for a person – cruel-versus-kind, strong-versus-weak. Activity is concerned with whether the topic is seen as active or passive – industrious-versus-lazy.

228

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS The cognitive linguistics (CL) movement came to the forefront in the 1980s, after the publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s ground-breaking book, Metaphors We Live by (1980). Since then, CL has become a widely used framework in semiotics and linguistics (Langacker 1987, 1990, 1999; Gibbs 1994; Sebeok and Danesi 2000; Dirven and Vespoor 2004; Geeraerts 2006; Jabarouti 2016; Danesi 2020; Pelkey 2020). Research within CL has documented that connotative meanings emerge from associations, or blends, among concepts, called conceptual metaphors (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). The premise is that the human mind seeks to understand reality by linking domains of reference and meaning through bodily, historical, inferential and affective processes. For example, by linking animals to human personality, we are seeking arguably to understand the latter in terms of the former. This is why we interpret sentences such as He’s a fox, She’s an eagle and so on, as personality constructs, not as literal utterances. Upon closer reflection, this whole process can be viewed in terms of a polar opposition: humans-versus-animals, with animals being the marked pole. This suggests that oppositions may be operative in the production of figurative meaning. Gradience in this case would be the actual allocation of specific animal vehicles onto the oppositional scale – John is a gorilla, Mary is a snail, etc. Lakoff and Johnson trace the psychological source of such conceptual metaphors to mental image schemata that are produced by our sensory experiences of locations, movements, shapes, substances, etc. as well as our experiences of social events and of cultural life in general (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987). Upon closer analysis, these too turn out to be oppositions: up-versus-down, backversus-front, near-versus-far, full-versus-empty, balance-versus-unbalance, etc. Their manifestations occur in language (I’m feeling up today; Inflation is going down at last; I’m full of memories; My sense of timing is out of synch; etc.) and in other codes. For example, in music the up-versus-down opposition is expressed by the fact that the higher tones typically evoke happiness and the lower ones sadness. Consider again the humanversus-animal opposition. In Anglo-American culture, it surfaces not only in discourse about human personality, but also in the naming of sports teams (Denver Broncos, Chicago Bears, Detroit Tigers, etc.), which imparts a certain character to the team in terms of perceived animal qualities, in fictional or cartoon characters (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, etc.) to represent human personality types, in assigning surnames and nicknames (John Fox, Mary Wolf, etc.), and so on and so forth. Depicting people as animals in the artistic and narrative domains is a product of the same form of metaphorical thinking. This is why stories for children focusing on human personality often involve animal characters or why mythic stories of creatures that are half human and half animal are understandable in metaphorical ways. In CL, there are two figures of speech that are treated differently from metaphor – metonymy and irony. Without delving into this aspect of the theory here, suffice it to say that metonymy and its counterpart synecdoche are viewed as revealing a pars pro toto reasoning: She loves Hemingway (= the writings of Hemingway). In parallel with the notion of conceptual metaphor, the term conceptual metonym can be adopted to refer to generalized metonymic concepts. Conceptual metonyms are distributed in non-verbal domains as well. For example, the face is a common metonym for personality (There are many faces in the audience; His face tells it all). The same metonym surfaces in the use of masks, in portraits that focus on the face and so on. Irony is a cognitive strategy whereby words are used to convey a meaning contrary to their literal sense – for example,

OPPOSITION AND SEMIOSIS

229

I love being tortured would be interpreted as ironic if it is uttered by someone experiencing unwelcome pain. The intent of the speakers, including their mode of delivery (tone of voice, accent, etc.), their relation to listeners, and the physical and social context are all factors that establish the ironic meaning of an utterance. The blend in this case consists of true opposites in semantic tension with each other to produce an ironic meaning. Overall, the CL movement has given substance to the validity of the construct of opposition, since it appears to have explicated indirectly how it works to produce conceptual metaphors, given that the notion of image schema is analogous, if not identical, to that of polar opposition (as discussed above). CL also might explain how an opposition crystallizes in the mind via blending theory. Without going into details here, suffice it to say that a blend is formed when the brain identifies distinct entities in different neural regions or maps as the same entity in another neural map (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). In the statement fighting a war on cancer, the two distinct entities are cancer and fighting. The blending process is guided by the inference that disease is a war, constituting the final touch to the blend – a touch that keeps the two entities distinct in different neural maps, while identifying them simultaneously as a single entity in the third map.

OPPOSITION AND SEMIOSIS The term semiosis, as discussed briefly above, was introduced by Peirce in a manuscript of c.1907 to describe the process of sign production and comprehension. He defined it as follows: It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamical action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects [whether they react equally upon each other, or one is agent and the other patient, entirely or partially] or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by ‘semiosis’ I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a coöperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs. (Peirce c.1907: CP 5.484, cited in Jappy 2020: 113) Connecting the constructs of semiosis and opposition can perhaps be best construed as a difference between the origination of signs in experiential modalities (semiosis) and how they then reflect classificatory and representational systems of thought and expression (opposition). The latter implies that by naming a certain animal as a cat we have necessarily differentiated it conceptually from other animals. At the initial point of naming this animal, we have divided the domain of animals into cats and all the other animals, perceived provisionally as non-cats. By having the word cat in our lexicon we are predisposed to attend to the presence of this creature in the world as unique. Armed with that word, we now turn our attention to the world of non-cats. Within that larger domain, we start to perceive the existence of creatures that have physical affinities to cats, by mapping onto them features such as whiskers, tails and retractile claws, for instance, which seem to associate the cat conceptually to other animals. This suggests a larger category. In English, the name for that category is feline. The world of animals can now be divided oppositionally again into felines and non-felines. In the feline part, we can now devise further differentiations of cat-like creatures, naming them lions, tigers, cougars, jaguars, etc. These are concepts that fall somewhere on the feline-versus-non-feline scale.

230

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

We might then consider further gradient distinctions as being useful. The words Siamese and Persian (indicating the origin of the cat) are two such distinctions. At that point, we stop classifying the feline world and consider the non-feline one. And the whole differentiation process starts over. Cultures stop their classificatory decision-making when they no longer see differentiations as useful or necessary. Now, this whole chain of oppositional thinking could never have been possible without semiosis – namely a triadic connection between the sign (cat), its object (the animal world) and how we interpret the sign in specific ways. This reasoning is the likely reason why many semioticians locate semiosis within Peirce’s triadic model of the sign, consisting of the physical sign itself (the representamen), the referent that it encodes (the object) and the interpretation that the sign elicits or reveals (the interpretant), as illustrated in Figure 10.2, which can be called, more precisely, an atomic tripod version of semiosis. Semiosis is a trait of all life forms; opposition is likely to be specific to humans (Sebeok and Danesi 2000), and it may show more precisely how we perceive and construct things. The binary structure of digital systems is a case-in-point. The theory behind them is traced to several sources, of which a primary one is Alan Turing’s brilliant work on the concept of machine (Turing 1936, 1950). Turing showed that four simple operations represented on a tape – move to the right, move to the left, erase the slash, print the slash – allowed a computer to execute any kind of program that could be expressed in a binary code (as for example a code of blanks and slashes). So long as one could specify the steps involved in carrying out a task and translating them into the binary code, the Turing machine – now called a computer program – would be able to scan the tape containing the code and carry out the instructions. Although Turing himself was well aware of the limitations of his notion, openly admitting that it could never come close to emulating the more spiritual aspects of human consciousness, it nevertheless does represent, on the surface, the process of binary oppositional differentiations and how they underlie cognitive

FIGURE 10.2  Peircean model of the sign.

OPPOSITION AND SEMIOSIS

231

tasks of various kinds. Turing described his machine as an ‘automatic typewriter’ that used symbols instead of letters. It could in theory carry out any recursive function – the repeated application of a rule or procedure to successive results or executions. Recursion became, and still is, a guiding principle underlying computer design. However, Turing himself was sceptical about comparing his machine to human cognition because of the nature of logical rules themselves as human constructs and thus subject to incompleteness and undecidability. The main psychological difference between opposition and semiosis may lie in the difference between the origination of sign forms in abduction and their representational utilization in opposition schemes. The notion of abduction was put forth by Peirce to characterize semiosis as a form of creative inference. Peirce defined it as follows: The abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an act of insight, although of extremely fallible insight. It is true that the different elements of the hypothesis were in our minds before; but it is the idea of putting together what we had never before dreamed of putting together which flashes the new suggestion before our contemplation. (1903: CP 5.181) The American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf suggested that the function of language was to allow people to classify experience according to their needs and, thus, that it was an organizing grid through which humans come to perceive and understand the world around them. The language with which he became fascinated was Hopi, an American aboriginal language spoken in the southwest region of the United States (Whorf 1956). Today there are only about 11,000 Hopi people, half of whom live on the Hopi reservation in Arizona. They live in eleven villages on or near three high mesas (tablelands). One village, Oraibi, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited villages in America. It was founded about 800 years ago. The relevant finding that concerns us here is that the Hopi language classifies the world differentially from standard European languages, seeing elements in the world as connected to the environment and thus impelling Hopi speakers to conceive of health, not as a separate sign system, but as a result of a body-mind-environment nexus, which is inextricable – one affecting the other symptomatically. Whorf claimed that this mode of classification mirrored the Hopi philosophy of the world and, more generally, how they organized their lives. By not seeing disease as an objectifiable phenomenon, Hopi people are less dependent on artificial substances for promoting wellbeing. Clearly, semiosis and representational practices overlap considerably. The two are dynamically intertwined, doubling back on each other.

CONCLUDING REMARKS As the first psychological model of the sign of early structuralist (Saussurean) semiotics, opposition theory has been adopted, explicitly or implicitly, by various disciplines to investigate structural-conceptual relationships between language and other codes. As Nöth (1994) discussed a while back, this model is actually compatible with the Peircean construct of semiosis – an assertion supported indirectly by the work in CL, whose main claim is that abstract concepts are transformations of concrete concepts based on embodied experience, thus establishing the concrete-versus-abstract opposition as a meta-cognitive one, with gradations in between consisting of various degrees of blending

232

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

processes, such as conceptual metaphors. The transformation is called blending – a notion that corresponds to the Peircean view of semiosis as originating in such experience. So, while opposition theory emerges in the context of Saussurean structuralism, over time it has been applied to identify processes that may complement the operation of semiosis itself across codes. Markedness theory in particular has had concrete implications for understanding the relation between bodily symptomatology and the effectiveness of medical practices, since symptoms of particular diseases are essentially marked signs (see, for an overview of the relevant research, Danesi and Zukowski 2019). It has been especially useful in the area of mental illness. Ratings using the semantic differential of notions such as anxiety have provided valuable information to practitioners on how the connotative (gradient) range of this state of mind might affect its etiology and actual manifestations, as a 1976 study by Donald W. Olmsted and Katherine Durham demonstrated. The researchers found that the semantic differential technique was effective in fleshing out misconceptions about mental illnesses and how these actually affected the outcome of such illnesses. One of the most comprehensive early studies using the semantic differential goes back to 1965, when Greenbaum and Wang used twentyone polar scales to measure the connotations of common therapeutic terms describing mental illness, which they administered to 346 adult respondents selected from the following populations: 1. parents with mentally challenged children, 2. professional experts, 3. potential employers and 4. paraprofessionals. Their findings indicated that the paraprofessionals and parents had more favourable views of mentally challenged individuals than did the professional and employer groups, but the general polar structure of the conceptions was the same across the groups. As the two main constructs of theoretical semiotics, opposition and semiosis, provide complementary perspectives on how we process information and transform it into forms of meaning. Opposition theory remains rich with possibilities today, eliciting a set of questions that are truly relevant to the study of sign systems, such as which kinds of concepts are polar and which are gradient. It would seem that some emotion concepts (love-versus-hate, happiness-versus-sadness), metaphysical concepts (existence-versusnothingness, unity-versus-multiplicity), mathematical concepts (even-versus-odd, primeversus-composite), etc., are likely to be polar. Other concepts (red, blue, noon, afternoon, etc.) are arguably more likely to be gradient and thus locatable between polar concepts. The theory can be used in cultural analysis to guide anthropologists in identifying differences as based on historical rather than evolutionary factors. Another main question is: Which polar concepts are universal and which are not? It would seem that some (right-versus-left) cut across cultures. However, this would have to be investigated and examined more empirically, and include the investigation of questions such as the following: 1. How is markedness assigned in a polar opposition? 2. What kind of criteria apply to the establishment of markedness? 3. What kinds of oppositions are non-binary, and how do these fit into an overarching theory of opposition and markedness?

OPPOSITION AND SEMIOSIS

233

4. How can the seemingly intrinsic relation between opposition theory, semiosis and conceptual blending be investigated more concretely within psychology, linguistics, anthropology and semiotics? 5. To what extent are codes oppositional in structure and how is the evaluative superstructure of codes utilized to create texts of all kinds, from narratives to scientific theories? 6. Is oppositional structure specific to human sign systems or does it cut across different species? Perhaps the most important question of all is the following one: Do we understand the world in oppositional terms because our brain is structured that way or is the world itself oppositional in structure and all we are doing is discovering how this is so? The raison d’être of semiotics is, arguably, to investigate whether or not reality can exist independently of the signs that we create to represent and think about it. Theories such as those of semiosis and opposition fit in nicely with the work of both current cognitive linguistics and early structuralist linguists, such as Edward Sapir, who were fascinated by the fact that every culture developed its own particular lexical and grammatical categories that largely determined the ways in which individuals reared in the culture came subsequently to view the world (Sapir 1921: 75): Human beings do not live in the object world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language system which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. Searching for the motivation behind our creation of codes such as language and their connection to the ‘real world’ shapes the research agenda in semiotics. On this agenda are two key constructs – opposition and semiosis.

REFERENCES Aikenvald, A. Y. (2016), How Gender Shapes the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Al-Khalili, J. (2012), Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics, New York: Broadway. Alpher, B. (1987), ‘Feminine as the Unmarked Grammatical Gender: Buffalo Girls Are No Fools’, Australian Journal of Linguistics, 7: 169–87. AHD (2011), American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edn, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Andersen, H. (1989), ‘Markedness Theory: The First 150 Years’, in O. M. Tomic (ed.), Markedness in Synchrony and Diachrony, 11–16, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Andersen, H. (2001), ‘Markedness and the Theory of Linguistic Change’, in H. Andersen (ed.), Actualization, 19–57, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Andersen, H. (2008), ‘Naturalness and Markedness’, in K. Wellems and L. De Cuypere (eds), Naturalness and Iconicity in Language, 101–19, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Andrews, E. (1990), Markedness Theory, Durham: Duke University Press. Andrews, E. (2003), Conversations with Lotman: Cultural Semiotics in Language, Literature, and Cognition, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

234

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Andrews, E. (2012), ‘Markedness’, in R. I. Binnick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Andrews, E. and Y. Tobin, eds (1996), Toward a Calculus of Meaning: Studies in Markedness, Distinctive Features and Deixis, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Anfindsen, J. (2006), Aristotle on Contrariety as a Principle of First Philosophy, PhD thesis, Uppsala University, Sweden. Aristotle ([c.330BCE] 1984), De Interpretatione, ed. J. Barnes (The Complete Works of Aristotle 1), Princeton: Princeton University Press. Arranz, J. I. P. (2005), ‘Towards a Global View of the Transfer Phenomenon’, The Reading Matrix: An International Online Journal, 5 (2): 116–28. Augustine, St. ([397–426] 1887), De doctrina christiana. Patrologia latina, migne tomus XXXIV, Paris: Hachette. Babin, A. E. (1940), The Theory of Opposition in Aristotle, PhD thesis, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame. Barthes, R. (1964), Éléments de semiologie, Paris: Persée. Barthes, R. (1967), Système de la mode, Paris: Seuil. Battistella, E. L. (1990), Markedness: The Evaluative Superstructure of Language, Albany: State University of New York Press. Battistella, E. L. (1996), The Logic of Markedness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Belardi, W. (1970), L’opposizione privativa, Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli. Belsey, C. (2002), Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benveniste, E. (1946), ‘Structure des relations de personne dans le verbe’, Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, 43: 225–36. Bergin, T. G. and M. Fisch, eds and trans. (1984), The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Blanché, R. (1966), Structures intellectuelles, Paris: Vrin. Bloomfield, L. (1933), Language, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Bochénski, I. M. J. (1961), A History of Formal Logic, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Bolinger, D. (1968), Aspects of Language, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Cho, Y. S. and R. W. Proctor (2007), ‘When Is an Odd Number Not Odd? Influence of Task Rule on the MARC Effect for Numeric Classification’, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33: 832–42. Chomsky, N. (1957), Syntactic Structures, The Hague: Mouton. Collins, J. M. (1969), An Exploration of the Role of Opposition in Cognitive Processes of Kindergarten Children, Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Theory. Coseriu, E. (1973), Probleme der strukturellen Semantik, Tuebingen: Tuebinger Beitraege zur Linguistik 40. Damasio, A. R. (1994), Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, New York: G. P. Putnam’s. Danesi, M. (1993), Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Danesi, M. (2020), The Quest for Meaning: A Guide to Semiotic Theory and Practice, 2nd edn, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Danesi, M. and N. Zukowski (2019), Medical Semiotics: Medicine and Cultural Meaning, Munich: Lincom Europa. Danesi, M. and S. Walsh-Matthews (2019), ‘AI: A Semiotic Perspective’, Chinese Semiotic Studies, 15 (2): 199–216.

OPPOSITION AND SEMIOSIS

235

Deely, J. (2001), Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Derrida, J. (1967), De la grammatologie, Paris: Minuit. Derrida, J. (1976), Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Derrida, J. (1977), ‘Limited Ink’, Glyph, 2: 162–254. Descartes, R. (1633), De Homine, Amsterdam: Elsevier. Dirven, R. and M. Verspoor (2004), Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Eckman, F. R., E. A. Moravcsik and J. R. Wirth, eds (1983), Markedness, New York: Plenum. Elc’ík, V. and Y. Matras (2006), Markedness and Language Change: The Romani Sample, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Emerson, R. Waldo ([1841] 1983), ‘Compensation’, in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. J. Porte, 283–302, New York: Library of America. Fauconnier, G. and M. Turner (2002), The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities, New York: Basic. Fletcher, A. (1991), Colors of the Mind: Connections on Thinking in Literature, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Foucault, M. (1972), The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Pantheon. Fox, J. J. (1974), ‘Our Ancestors Spoke in Pairs: Rotinese Views of Language, Dialect and Code’, in R. Bauman and J. Scherzer (eds), Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, 65–88, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fox, J. J. (1975), ‘On Binary Categories and Primary Symbols’, in R. Willis (ed.), The Interpretation of Symbolism, 99–132, London: Malaby. Frege, G. (1879), Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens, [Concept Notation: A formula language of pure thought, modelled upon that of arithmetic], Halle a. S.: Louis Nebert. Geeraerts, D., ed. (2006). Cognitive Linguistics, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Gibbs, R. W., Jr. (1994), The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Godel, R. (1957), Les sources manuscrites du ‘Cours de linguistique générale’ de F. de Saussure, Paris: Minard. Greenbaum, J. J. and D. D. Wang (1965), ‘A Semantic Differential Study of the Concepts of Mental Retardation’, Journal of General Psychology, 73: 257–72. Greimas, A. J. (1966), Sémantique structurale, Paris: Larousse. Greimas, A. J. (1970), Du sens, Paris: Seuil. Greimas, A. J. (1987), On Meaning: Selected Essays in Semiotic Theory, trans. P. Perron and F. Collins, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haspelmath, M. (2006), ‘Against Markedness (and What to Replace It with)’, Journal of Linguistics, 42: 25–70. Hatten, R. S. (2004), Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation and Interpretation, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hertz, R. (1973), ‘The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Religious Polarity’, in R. Needham (ed.), Right and Left, Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification, 3–31, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hjelmslev, L. (1939), ‘Note sur les oppositions supprimables’, Travaux de Cercle Linguistique de Prague, 8: 51–7. Hjelmslev, L. (1959), Essais linguistique, Copenhagen: Munksgaard.

236

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Hockett, C. F. (1955), A Manual of Phonology, Baltimore: Waverly Press. Honeck, R. P. and R. R. Hoffman, eds (1980), Cognition and Figurative Language, Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Ivanov, V. V. (1974), ‘On Antisymmetrical and Asymmetrical Relations in Natural Languages and Other Semiotic Systems’, Linguistics, 119: 35–40. Jabarouti, R. (2016), ‘A Semiotic Framework for the Translation of Conceptual Metaphors’, Signata, 7: 85–106. Jakobson, R. (1932), ‘Zur Struktur des russischen Verbum’, in Charisteria Guilelma Mathesio Quinquagenario a Discipulis et Circuli Linguistici Pragensis Sodalibus Oblata, 74–84, Prague: Prazsky lingvistick. Jakobson, R. (1936), ‘Beitrag zur allgemeinen Kasuslehre: Gesamtbedeutungen der russischen Kasus’, Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague, 6: 244–88. Jakobson, R. (1939), ‘Observations sur le classement phonologique des consonnes,’ Proceedings of the Third International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Ghent, 1938, ed. E. Blancquaert and W. Pée, 34–41. Ghent: Laboratory of Phonetics of the University. Jakobson, R. (1942), Kindersprache, Aphasie und algemeine Lautgesetze, Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell. Jakobson, R. (1968), ‘The Role of Phonic Elements in Speech Perception’, Zeitschrift fuer Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung, 21: 9–20. Jakobson, R. and R. W. Halle (1956), Fundamentals of Language, The Hague: Mouton. Jakobson, R. and L. Waugh (1979), Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, Cambridge: MIT Press. Jakobson, R., G. Fant and M. Halle (1952), Preliminaries to Speech Analysis, Cambridge: MIT Press. Jakobson, R., S. Karcevskij and N. Trubetzkoy (1928), ‘Proposition au premier congrès international des linguistes: Quelles sont les méthodes les mieux appropriées à un exposé complet et pratique de la phonologie d’une langue quelconque?’ Premier Congrès International des Linguistes, Propositions, The Hague, 10–15 April 1928, Summary of Closing Session, 36–9. Jappy, T. (2020), ‘Peirce’s Conception of Semiosis’, in T. Jappy (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Peircean Semiotics, London: Bloomsbury. Jespersen, O. (1922), Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin, London: Allen and Unwin. Johnson, M. (1987), The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kahn, C. H. (1979), The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. King, R. (1991), Talking Gender: A Nonsexist Guide to Communication, Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman Ltd. Lakoff, G. (1987), Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson (1980), Metaphors We Live by, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson (1999), Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic. Lakoff, G. and R. Núñez (2000), Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being, New York: Basic Books. Langacker, R. W. (1987), Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Langacker, R. W. (1990), Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

OPPOSITION AND SEMIOSIS

237

Langacker, R. W. (1999), Grammar and Conceptualization, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Lepik, P. (2008), Universals in the Context of Juri Lotman’s Semiotics, Tartu: Tartu University Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1958), Anthropologie structurale, Paris: Plon. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1962), La pensée sauvage, Paris: Plon. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1971), L’Homme nu, Paris: Plon. Lorrain, F. (1975), Réseaux sociaux et classifications sociales, Paris: Hermann. Lotman, Y. (1991), Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Malmberg, B. (1974), ‘Langue – forme – valeur: Reflexion sur trois concepts saussurienes’, Semiotica, 18: 195–200. Mansouri, F. (2000), Grammatical Markedness and Information Processing in the Acquisition of Arabic [as] a Second Language, Munich: Lincom Europa. Markus, R. A. (1957), St. Augustine on Signs, Phronesis, 2: 60–83. Martinet, A. (1960), Éléments de linguistique générale, Paris: Colin. Maturana, H. and F. Varela (1973), Autopoiesis and Cognition, Dordrecht: Reidel. McCarthy, J. (2001), A Thematic Guide to Optimality Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merlini Barbaresi, L. (1988), Markedness in English Discourse, Parma: Zara. Mettinger, A. (1994), Aspects of Semantic Opposition in English, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, G. A. (1956), ‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information’, Psychological Review, 63: 81–97. Mitchell, W. J. T. and A. I. Davidson, eds (2007), The Late Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morris, C. W. (1938), Foundations of the Theory of Signs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morris, C. W. (1946), Signs, Language and Behavior, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Needham, R., ed. (1973), Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nöth, W. (1994), ‘Opposition at the Roots of Semiosis’, in W. Nöth (ed.), Origins of Semiosis, 37–60, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ogden, C. K. (1932), Opposition: A Linguistic and Psychological Analysis, London: Paul, Trench, and Trubner. Ogden, C. K. and I. A. Richards (1923), The Meaning of Meaning, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Olmsted, D. W. and K. Durham (1976), ‘Stability of Mental Health Attitudes: A Semantic Differential Study’, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 17: 35–44. Ortony, A., ed. (1979), Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Osgood, C. E., G. J. Suci and P. H. Tannenbaum (1957), The Measurement of Meaning, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Park, H.-S. (2000), ‘Markedness and Learning Principles in SLA: Centering on Acquisition of Relative Clauses’, Journal of Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics, 4: 87–114. Parsons, T. and R. Bales (1955), Family, Socialization, and Interaction Process, Glencoe: Free Press. Peirce, C. S. ([1866–1913] 1931–58), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols 1–6, C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds), vols 7–8, A. Burks (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cited as CP. Pelkey, J. (2020), ‘Peircean Semiotic for Language and Linguistics’, in T. Jappy (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Peircean Semiotics, 391–418. London: Bloomsbury.

238

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Plato ([402 BCE] 2013), Cratylus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Project Gutenberg, http://www. gutenberg.org/files/1616/1616-h/1616-h.htm. Pos, H. J. (1938), ‘La notion d’opposition en linguistique’, Xle Congrès International de Psychologie, 246–7. Pos, H. J. (1964), ‘Perspectives du structuralisme’, in Études phonologiques dediées à la mémoire de M. le Prince K. S. Trubetzkoy, 71–8, Prague: Jednota Ceskych Mathematiku Fysiku. Pottier, B. (1974), Linguistique générale, Paris: Klincksieck. Sapir, E. (1921), Language, New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World. Saussure, F. de (1916), Cours de linguistique générale, ed. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, Paris: Payot. Schooneveld. (1978), Semantic Transmutations, Bloomington: Physsardt. Schuster, P. (2001), Relevance Theory Meets Markedness: Considerations on Cognitive Effort as a Criterion for Markedness in Pragmatics, New York: Peter Lang. Sebeok, T. A. and M. Danesi (2000), The Forms of Meaning: Modelling Systems Theory and Semiotics, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Tanaka-Ishii, K. (2010), Semiotics of Programming, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tiersma, P. M. (1982), ‘Local and General Markedness’, Language, 58: 832–49. Titchener, E. B. (1910), A Textbook of Psychology, Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimile Reprints. Tomic, O. M., ed. (1989), Markedness in Synchrony and Diachrony, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Trubetzkoy, N. S. (1936), ‘Essaie d’une théorie des oppositions phonologiques’, Journal de Psychologie, 33: 5–18. Trubetzkoy, N. S. (1939), ‘Grundzüge der Phonologie’, Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 7 (entire issue). Trubetzkoy, N. S. (1968), Introduction to the Principles of Phonological Description, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Trubetzkoy, N. S. (I975), N. S. Trubetzkoy’s Letters and Notes, ed. R. Jakobson. Hague: Mouton. Turing, A. (1936), ‘On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungs Problem’, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 41: 230–65. Turing, A. (1950), ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, in E. A. Feigenbaum and J. Feldman (eds), Computers and Thought, 123–34, New York: McGraw-Hill. Uexküll, J. von (1909), Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tierre, Berlin: Springer. Van der Schoot, M., A. H. Bakker Arkema, T. M. Horsley and E. C. D. M. van Lieshout (2009), ‘The Consistency Effect Depends on Markedness in Less Successful But Not Successful Problem Solvers: An Eye Movement Study in Primary School Children’, Contemporary Educational Psychology, 34: 58–66. Vance, E. (2010), ‘Augustine (Aurelius Augustinus), Bishop of Hippo (354–430)’, in T. A. Sebeok and M. Danesi (eds), Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, 65–7, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Verene, D. P. (1981), Vico’s Science of Imagination, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Vijayakrishnan, K. J. (2007), The Grammar of Carnatic Music, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Wallon, H. (1945), Les origines de la pensée chez l’enfant, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Waugh, L. (1979), ‘Markedness and Phonological Systems’, LACUS (Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States Proceedings), 5: 155–65.

OPPOSITION AND SEMIOSIS

239

Waugh, L. (1982), ‘Marked and Unmarked: A Choice between Unequals in Semiotic Structure’, Semiotica, 39: 211–16. Whorf, B. L. (1956), Language, Thought, and Reality, in J. B. Carroll (ed.), Cambridge: MIT Press. Wiener, N. (1948), Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Cambridge: MIT Press. Wierzbicka, A. (1996), Semantics: Primes and Universals, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (1997), Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (1999), Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (2003), Cross-cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Wundt, W. (1880), Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, Leipzig: Englemann.

240

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Habit and Semiosis DONNA E. WEST

INTRODUCTION C. S. Peirce’s semiotic demonstrates a dogged tendency to divide by threes – Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness; Term, Proposition, Argument; Ideas of Feeling, Acts of Reaction and Habits. While Peirce defines habit as ‘[readiness] to act in a certain way under given circumstances and when actuated by a given motive’ (1907: CP 5.480), his thoughts on the nature of habit evolved from ‘a belief in a rule’ (1878: W3.337) to how a person ‘would behave (or usually behave) in a certain way whenever a certain occasion should arise’ (1913: CP 8.380). It is in habit that Peirce’s categories gain their fullest expression. This chapter will illustrate how habit is mirrored in each of the three categories: a forum for feelings in Firstness supplies an impetus to be recognized and to take flight, and brute facts in Secondness acquire new associations when performed in novel episodes and when informed by discoveries and motivated by affect. In fact, the change of regularities constitutes habits which insinuate novel law-based Thirdnesses to previous perceptual judgements, renovating regularities in Firstness and Secondness. Habit constitutes a reinterpretive tool for previous Firstnesses and Secondnesses – inscribing itself upon raw feelings and experiences (indirect and direct). These raw feelings and experiences in Firstness and Secondness then manifest themselves as behaviours and hypotheses to be tested by means of conscious dialogic processes. Thus, for sentient beings, consciousness serves as a gatekeeper to discern the desirability of behaviour schemas and/or the plausibility of hypotheses and remedial courses of action – a use of habit which Peirce considered to be central (1909: MS 637.12). In short, the presence of consciousness in habit-taking is paramount, particularly when constructing principles to govern the recommendation of viable courses of action. The chapter will address how this incessant seeking to better understand how entities and organisms function is ultimately achieved through nothing short of a two-sided conscious process rooted in dialogue, deontic conflict and epistemic disruption (Peirce 1903: CP 5.53) in which abductive rationality governs.

Habit across the categories It is in the categories (Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness) that C. S. Peirce’s concept of habit is most clearly illustrated. In the process of percolating novel interpretations of feelings (convictions regarding event ‘episodicity’) (cf. West 2018) and/or the nature of

242

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

event-motives, the three categories germinate different deontic and epistemic dispositions. Since habit is ‘a tendency toward a disposition’ (Peirce 1907: CP 5.476, 1907: MS 318.265), it applies squarely to each of Peirce’s ‘three universes’ (1908: EP2.440–1). His use of ‘universes’ emphasizes the relevance of the categories to every experience, albeit phenomenological, empirical or logical.1 Moreover, the fact that the categories are irreducible and elemental (cf. Short 2007: 74–84) supplies their potency to serve as a lens to scrutinize the nature of the regularity and its modifications. Hence, this phaneroscopic mode for interpretation of sign actions provides the catalyst to exercise lines of inquiry, in view of its validating schemata, e.g. prescissive, attentional and analytical advances. Firstness is irreducible, since it is ‘such as it is, positively and without reference to anything else’ (Peirce 1904: CP 8.328). Its wholeness within itself facilitates habit, in that examining a single feature enhances attentional precision. Attentional precision can operate more effectively absent complications from contrasts with other properties (although contrasts, in some cases, can highlight the features which define one class of objects, when placed against another). Despite the dyadic nature of Secondness (object and representamen), it, nonetheless, consists in ‘a single fact about two objects’ (Peirce 1903: CP 1.526). In fact, Peirce characterizes this unity as ‘the junction of two consciousnesses’ (1903: CP 1.526), demonstrating that dyadic relations do not exemplify separateness; instead, they ‘illustrate a single fact’ (1903: 1.526). The irreducible nature of the categories affords them a special place in inaugurating habit, since highlighting the foundational features destined for scrutiny, the importance of Peirce’s semiotic is made obvious. As such, determining habit’s influence upon signs (establishing when a sign becomes a sign) is revealed. The categories provide a snapshot of how and when certain signs become attributed to particular mental effects. By identifying the mode of experience (phenomenological, empirical, logical), and by highlighting responses to those experiences, the categories frame the teleology (however latent) of the experience in question, thereby distinguishing the kinds of interpretants which issue – Emotional, Energetic and Logical (Peirce 1906: MS 295, 1907: CP 5.475, 1907: MS 318).2 They do so when they classify the operation of the object upon the participants – conflicting feelings, disparate ontological forces or opposing cognitions. Attending to and framing these distinct kinds of conflicts constitute a critical function of the categories. By framing comparisons and conflicts through precision and analysis, the categories separate out the factors influencing changes in established regularities. Hence, the categories demonstrate whether and to what degree consciousness (by virtue of its dialogic nature) facilitates rule alteration.

Habit as Firstness Peirce’s category of Firstness captures both ‘quality’ and ‘feeling’; but, it is the latter that is fortified by epistemic concerns. Firstness (by way of Peirce’s use of ‘feeling’) incorporates conviction. ‘Feeling’ for Peirce constitutes more than a fleeting emotion; rather, it makes itself known as a tendency towards something, giving rise to preferences. Despite the internal nature of the preferences, Firstness nonetheless accounts for alterations in meaning-making, and hence habit-change (cf. Bergman 2016; West 2016a). Furthermore, because Firstness incorporates not merely quality, but feeling and possibility, it necessarily gives rise to the element of consciousness (Peirce 1905: CP 1.306), despite its elemental nature as apprehension/passive awareness. Peirce’s concepts of quality and

HABIT AND SEMIOSIS

243

feeling radically diverge, given the presence of an elementary form of consciousness in the latter (1905: CP 1.306, 1903: PPM 141, infra).3 Quality (although it is a feature of Firstness) does not insinuate habit-change, because, as Peirce explicitly mentions, it is passive; whereas feelings are active, in the business of settling upon more fitting convictions – the business of habit-change. In short, grappling with which aspect of the world will occupy the focus (which deserves examination) stages the contents of one’s considerations and hence determines what meanings will be settled upon when taking up new terms, propositions and ultimately conduct. Moreover, selecting internal foci necessarily excludes qualities not occupying one’s attention (Peirce 1867: W2.50; cf. Ibri 2017 and Atkins 2018: 124 for elaboration). This process (settling upon the attribute under scrutiny) highlights Peirce’s characterization of Firstness, in that it illustrates a ‘war between feelings’ (1904: CP 8.330). Unlike quality (which is a characteristic of object features), feeling, for Peirce, resides in the mind and is more ‘complex’ (1903: PPM 141). It draws upon at least an awareness of and perhaps a selection of particular properties. As such, feelings require scrutiny of properties, while the reverse is not the case. The distinction resides not in whether the mind is implicated in the operation of attention to the minutia of a feature, but in the wish to do so – the attention must be governed by the will. For Peirce, the will is equivocal to motivation, to notice and consider a property, requiring some more advanced degree of mental commitment. This commitment, if engaged in with some regularity, becomes habit; and a level of consciousness, however limited, is born. The mental commitment (now habit) which governs feelings can be expressed in preferences towards foci, which account for the kind of scrutiny which Peirce describes. Minds select one feature to attend to over others, and feelings determine the quality that will be scrutinized. The reverse is not the case – qualities have no control over feelings. For this reason, feelings require conscious adherence, while qualities do not. Peirce’s concept of hypostatic abstraction (compared to precisive abstraction)4 further illustrates how close attention to a particular attribute can reveal novel qualities about particular objects, paving the way for new associations and transassociations (cf. 1907: MS 318.43–5). The attention afforded by hypostatic abstraction is phenomenal and gives rise to more prolonged deontic or epistemic orientations beyond mere qualities, encompassing preferences for objects (things) and the events/episodes within which they are situated. Peirce is clear that these attentional preferences comprise the aspirations for taking up certain modes of perspective/behaviour. It is just this motivational disposition that characterizes Peirce’s notion of feeling. Habit enters into feelings, not only consequent to commitment/preference, but as an outgrowth of mental comparison, however implicit. The presence of comparison demonstrates that habit is alive and well, given simultaneous consideration of two objects in the stream of consciousness. Here habit impinges upon consciousness, as the following example illustrates: the classification of a single experience of the colour red as ‘red’ or a sound as ‘loud’ requires access to long-term memory to access other experiences of similar phenomenon. Hence habit is born either in forging a new conceptual regularity, or in maintaining previous ones by the addition of new exemplars. Although not obvious, comparison materializes as an operation of Firstness when it is additive in nature based upon similarity alone; comparison pertains, despite the lack of contrast. In fact, the operation of adding experiences of the same general kind (redness) in the mind exemplifies habit, in that it reifies (strengthening) subsequent identification of the colour property.

244

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Conversely, when contrast within a property is at issue, it is Secondness, not Firstness which operates, because duality (a primary mark of Secondness) is present in the differentness which contrasts imposes. In fact, at the very foundation of the contrast between feelings is an element of Secondness – the element of vividness – insinuating itself upon the mind as an external, novel force. The force creates the mental effect of vividness, consequent to the fact that something different was expected, especially in the face of the passive (unawakened) state of the experiencer. According to Atkins (2018: 195), because it constitutes a force, vividness (for Peirce) derives from factors outside of the mind, apart from internal, Firstness-based factors. The conflicts of feeling which vividness engenders, although partially rooted in Firstness, are informed by previously recognized features (physical and functional) of the object itself in Secondness. The effect of the feeling conflict is at first a single ‘experience’ or shock to earlier beliefs/action templates. The resultant mental state can be characterized as a habit disturbance or ‘commotion’, which lifts the mind from passivity, slumber or pure ‘inertness’: [N]or could I call my Quality a Feeling, since the simplest feeling is more complex. My quality is an element of feeling. Every feeling has a greater or less degree of vividness; but vividness results from a comparison of feelings. It is the contrast between one’s general state of feeling before a given sensation and during that sensation. This [is] the sense of commotion. Now every feeling appears to be accompanied by this sense of commotion which is reckoned a part of it. […] Besides, there is a much greater objection to calling my Quality of feeling. Namely, by a Feeling we mean something that arises in a mind. It is essentially something which exists only as a state of something else, namely, a mind. But, my Quality is whatever it is of itself. And it would occasion frightful misconception to call it a Feeling. (Peirce 1903: PPM 141) The feelings which enter into commotion are two-sided, juxtaposed external, versus internal propositions/assertions. As such, in spite of his reference to ‘feelings’ (ordinarily framed in Firstness), Peirce’s use of ‘commotion’ constitutes a dyad and hence brute contrast in Secondness (cf. 1905: MS 339). In short, contrast in feeling is not, as per commotion, consonant with slippery appetites of ungoverned affect (emotion); rather it is subject to examining qualities of sensation in Secondness to resolve conflicting convictions. The war between feelings supplies the forum to realize novel possibilities, and to fashion alternative habits of belief/action.

Transition into habit in Secondness Peirce characterizes Secondness in several ways: struggle (1903: CP 1.322), fact (1890: CP 1.376), dyadic (cf. West 2015); it is likewise arguably described as experience (cf. 1904: CP 8.330; Ake 2018: 65). In later manuscripts, Peirce augments attributes of Secondness upon integration of features which bear upon the relevance of consciousness, namely, vividness. Although vividness is not an internal process, its force, nonetheless, must recognize the intrinsic value of mental conflict – the battle against feelings. Despite this recognition, he explicitly argues that vividness is no part of feeling, neither is it a feature of quality (Peirce 1909: MS 645.9). As such, vividness is not a feature of Firstness; rather it is an element of Secondness (cf. Peirce 1906: LI 364), primarily as a consequence

HABIT AND SEMIOSIS

245

of its inherent force. The element of force is so foundational to vividness for two reasons: its necessity in the struggle between effort and resistance and its attentional foundation for incorporation of a ‘prebit’.5 Peirce further differentiates the source (Secondness, not Firstness) of vividness from that of feelings/qualities when he classifies it as a ‘quantity’, not even a ‘quantity of a quality’ (1909: MS 645); its quantifiable nature (although non-predicative/nonrelative) emphasizes physical externality embodied within it. In fact, Peirce’s use of ‘non-predicative’, harkens back to its qualification as ‘quantity’, because without a predicate, vividness cannot give rise to propositions/assertions; it merely exists as a force, or attentional device to change the focus from the outside-in. Even though vividness does not squarely exemplify Secondness (in that the quantity is not easily measurable); its characterization as external, and non-ego (newly observed fact) convinces us of the efficacy of Secondness as the best fit. As to Feeling, by which I mean Qualities of Sensation and other Passions, I remark that most persons, David Hume, for example, reckon as one kind of ingredient of it a certain Prebit which seems to me to form no part of Feeling. I mean the Vividness of a Feeling. For Feeling is a Quality and though it certainly has to Qualities connected with it, its total intensity and the relative intensity of its leading ingredient, both being Quantities of Quality, I do not recognize Vividness as the Quantity of any Quality or predicate at all, but simply as a non-relative or non-predicative Quantity. Now, what is non-predicative Quantity that is a Prebit? It is a force. On the other hand, Quality is entirely passive, and is no force. Vividness, therefore, is no part or essential attribute of a Feeling: it is something of an utterly different nature. (Peirce 1909: MS 645: 9) Peirce appears to advocate that a ‘prebit’ consists in a sort of inner ‘datum’ of what is likely to be instantiated – a shadow of a fact to come, hence an element of Secondness. As such, it qualifies as ‘pre-habit’ (cf. Atkins 2018: 104). As pre-habit, Prebits force attention to qualities prior to their actualization in Secondness. Accordingly, prebits are scraps of elemental consciousness to be realized subsequently (straddling between Firstness and Secondness). They pre-direct the mind towards objects which are later converted into sense experiences. Hence, prebits prepare and actively force the mind to expect the instantiation of objects, orchestrating a proto-predicative awareness of the object’s situatedness. In this capacity, prebits constitute a form of virtual habit (cf. Bergman 2016; West 2016a, 2016b, 2017, 2018), but they may not predispose the mind to objects/ properties altogether, especially not so much that they diminish the riveting function of vividness. Because the glimpse which prebits afford in consciousness is sense-based and momentary, their benefit is early access to critical spatial and temporal features of objects, which, in turn, enhances their attentional force, as well as that of vividness. This deictic, pre-emptive knowledge that prebits afford hints at objects’ purposes with its provision of specific places and times. In pre-envisioning data, prebits suggest the tenor of subsequent habit for object motion, causation and the like. Nonetheless, Peirce would not advocate that prebits diminish the effects of vividness upon the mind, because they do not extinguish the element of surprise; rather they enhance the function of surprise by not allowing the experience to be incidental – hidden in the fabric of episodes, but highlighting notable features. Accordingly, the situational data afforded by prebits hastens the formation of action schema in the mind, an exemplar

246

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

of virtual habit (cf. Bergman 2016: 180; West 2016b, West 2017). In this way, prebits provide a telescope into virtual habits, revealing embryonic indexical facts. They orchestrate this with their means to make events feel near at hand, and hence relevant. Furthermore, as prehabits, prebits establish event slots (locative, index files) in the imagination within which subsequent facts can be inserted. This function is bolstered by the fact that virtual habits must rise to the level of determinations (not resolutions, cf. Peirce 1909: MS 620; Peirce 1911: MS 674). To ultimately qualify as habit, virtual habits must be specific, identifiable and must be implementable. They must be so authentic that their phenomenal effect is virtually indiscernible from actual happenings (Peirce 1909: MS 620). These imaginal habits are neither iconic, nor indexical, but qualify as Dicisigns, whose internal glimpses constitute pre-enacted episodes, anticipated actionhabits (Stjernfelt 2014: 61). Although they do not qualify as Secondness proper, in that they are merely precursors of performance, for Peirce, they are often equally effective, if not more so, than are habits proper: The effectiveness of the virtual habit relatively to that of a real habit, is, I say unquestionably far greater than in proportion to the vividness of the imaginations that induce the former [virtual habit] relatively to the vividness of the perceptions … when we strain, in some obscure way, to influence our future behaviour. (1909: MS 620: 26) An unexpected (surprising) touch from on high, may be so potent (as in Milton’s Adam) that it is presumed to have taken place. It is the presumption of fact status which places virtual habits in the realm of Secondness. Although Peirce claims that habits must be actualized and must be iterative, in 1909 he reforms both of these requirements as follows: Despite the lack of explicit dyadic, and dialogic character of virtual habit in Peirce’s exemplar of Milton’s Adam, it possesses an implicit dyadicity, in conceptualizing a sign relation: i.e. that the ‘touch’ which Adam ‘felt’ was associated with an agent and a purpose, namely, the divine (Peirce 1909: MS 620). Conversely, Secondness is clearly featured in the habit that is permeated in double consciousness, whether virtual or actual; it exemplifies a dyadic and dialogical character, in which effort and resistance are prominent. Secondness reigns, in that double consciousness is a two-sided communicative exchange, either within the same mind or between minds. It is two-sided in that old information (already implicitly/explicitly asserted in a mind) is contrasted with new information conflicting with earlier propositions/assertions (West 2020). Secondness operates such that the former (old information, ego) constitutes effort, and the latter (new information, non-ego) resists effort (Peirce 1903: CP 5.53, EP2.195): Examine the Percept in the particularly marked case in which it comes as a surprise. At the moment when it was expected the vividness of the representation is exalted … something quite different comes instead. I ask you whether at that instant of surprise that there is not a double consciousness, on the one hand of an ego, which is simply the expected idea suddenly broken off, on the other hand of the non-ego, which is the strange intruder, in his abrupt entrance. The element of surprise is paramount in its spontaneity as a component of Firstness, but without Secondness surprise would be truncated, and, the two-sided conflict which it affords would not advance into the level of consciousness required for the Thirdness of habit. The presence of Secondness insinuates that a former habit of belief or action is in need of reform.

HABIT AND SEMIOSIS

247

Nonetheless, it is Secondness that supplies the platform for the struggle between former and present conflictual paradigms. In its resistance against effort (an unexpected quality/ event) Secondness becomes the agent to abduce – to create a change in habit (in Thirdness), thus resolving the opposition of forces. It does so at the moment when the old habit and new habit clash, and the ‘vividness of the representation is exalted’. The ‘exaltation’ drives the interpreter to examine the non-ego-based fact over and against already-held mental/ physical practices. The examination requires a close comparison – plunging the mind into increasingly more profound depths of consciousness as to whether a habit-change is recommended. To encapsulate, Firstness in surprise (unexpected mind-set), together with Secondness (managing the effect of the unexpected fact on established habits), elevate interpreters’ minds to increased degrees of consciousness  – necessary to arbitrate the decision of which habit to choose. It is evident that each of the categories is influential in bringing to fruition Peirce’s clash between feelings. Firstness does not operate alone to promote opposition between feelings; rather Peirce emphasizes the essential role of Secondness to access modes of consciousness which may not otherwise be ascertainable. The rationale is based upon the premise that once contrasts surface in the mind; Firstness is no longer primary. Instead, Secondness energizes the clash between feelings which results in more obvious, action-based habit-changes. Peirce describes the role of Secondness in habit-change as the process of resolving the conflict between effort and resistance: ‘The existence of the word effort is sufficient proof that people think they have such an idea; and that is enough. The experience of effort cannot exist without the experience of resistance’ (Peirce 1904: CP 8.330). Peirce contends that effort is part of a duality, that of effort and resistance; it is not comprehensible alone. This duality is the essence of Secondness and validates how real habit-change transpires – the mind pushing against an intruding and distinct pattern of operation. In other words, a war between feelings (Peirce 1904: CP 8.330) sets the stage for a struggle to resolve the conflict – hence Secondness governs. In these conflictual scenarios, Emotional and Energetic Interpretants define the event’s purpose (Peirce 1907: MS 318.16–17), and finally habit-change inhabits the Logical Interpretants – resulting in a struggle in which habits may well be altered. The war between feelings results in a struggle, given reaction changes, e.g. new preferences and/ or new action schemas. If the clash between feelings results in an Energetic Interpretant, a distinction in conduct/state of affairs will follow (cf. Peirce 1907: CP 5.475, 1906: MS 295; West 2021), such that the effect is not internal only. If the effect were internal only (feeling-based changes), habit extinction, alteration or habit modification from some dialogical communication is more likely to be the case (dyadic) by means of feelingclashes. Hence the realm of Secondness prevails. Although feeling clashes qualify as an Emotional Interpretant, they still underscore the issue of struggle. In fact, if the effect were of such magnitude that an established feeling were shelved, in favour of taking up the new feeling, the effect is termed ‘an experience’: The breaking of the silence by the noise was an experience. The person in his inertness identifies himself with the precedent state of feeling, and the new feeling which comes in spite of him is the non-ego. He has a two-sided consciousness of an ego and a nonego. That consciousness of the action of a new feeling in destroying the old feeling is what I call an experience. (Peirce 1904: CP 8.330)

248

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

It is not merely the destruction of the old feeling that is an ‘experience’ for Peirce, but the ‘consciousness’, the palpable suspense of the new feeling in shocking the mind such that the old feeling is shattered. It is this elemental consciousness rooted in Firstness and in Secondness, which may be nothing beyond a palpable awareness that interrupts and vitiates the established convictions. Peirce is explicit regarding the agency for the destruction associated with the former feeling (habit of belief), namely, the new feeling, not the experiencer or the established feeling. Here, the experiencer (together with the old feeling) is ‘inert’; and the new feeling, presumably from an external source, is victorious, as a compulsive, active agent. This active battle to replace the ‘old feeling’ is made evident in upsetting the status quo, or in ‘shoving’ the old feeling ‘to the background’ (Peirce 1903: CP 8.266).6 In the above passage the new feeling is described as ‘breaking’ the ‘silence’ by the ‘noise’ – a rather poignant auditory analogy for breaking a habit. In any case, it is often the external (‘non-ego’) which effects change as an active, forceful agent. Peirce’s Energetic Interpretant is cited as offering the most clear illustration for effecting this kind of alteration (cf. 1907: MS 318.16–17).7 Nonetheless, Emotional Interpretants, as spontaneous convictions for happenings, are necessary and foundational to the emergence of Energetic Interpretants (Peirce 1907: MS 318.16–17), and as a consequence they constitute the very purposes of Secondness-based instantiations of habit, e.g. episodes in the ‘hereness and nowness’ of the moment (Peirce 1903: CP 8.266). Peirce further demonstrates the contrast between external forces (possible new habits) and longstanding ones (ego-based internal habits). He illustrates the see-saw effects of privileging either of the two habit regimes. In 1905 (MS 339), Peirce outlines the direction intrinsic to habit-change, namely, that the influence of outside (non-ego-based) factors ordinarily engender so strong an effect, that the effort of the interpreter to maintain established habits remains an arduous task. Interpreters must preclude unwarranted and destructive influences from outside factors. In this, Peirce recognizes a more privileged position for the interpreter, since the stability of reasonable internal feelings should not be absolved. Their effort in ‘resisting’ the wiles of external, still unproven, inferences is formidable. Weighing which factor (the new or the old) results in the better practice is critical, but, to qualify as habit, the feeling/action must exhibit convincing explanatory power. Both of these attributes are exercised in a dialogic scenario, in which the same mind engages in an internal discussion to determine whether prior facts have efficacy in the face of newly conceived ones – either the former assertions are confirmed (which Peirce refers to as ‘effort’), or external facts (‘perceptuations’) take precedence: Volitionally internal is that which one seems to have more or less power to annul if one wishes. Volitionally external is any content or element of consciousness which seems to be present in spite of all one can directly do. An externisensation is a two-sided state of determination of consciousness … in which a volitionally external and a volitionally internal power seem to be opposed, the one furthering the other resisting the change. An effort is an externisensation in which the active element (that furthering the change) is volitionally internal, the resistance, volitionally external. A perceptuation is an externisensation in which the active element is volitionally external while the passive element is volitionally internal. (1905: MS 339.245) Double consciousness paradigms consist in encapsulated practice sessions, which Peirce refers to as ‘externisensations’ (1905: MS 339; cf. 1904: CP 8.282). These

HABIT AND SEMIOSIS

249

externisensations may privilege either the external factor or the internal. In the event that the external element is favoured, the process is referred to as ‘perceptuations’. External factors (as perceptuations) are favoured when they are ‘irresistible’ as in a force majeure – a ‘surrender at discretion’, such that the external element becomes an ‘imperative’ (Peirce 1903: CP 5.181). Their force is more formidable when they impose the greater control over what the mind ultimately asserts. This is so, when the external is the ‘active element in producing change’ (Peirce 1905: MS 339: 245r). Because the collapse of internal element is an easier prospect, it is more difficult to maintain its validity in the face of a new, external factor which contains vivid prebits. Privileging the external, as the factor most influential in habit-change (if Peirce intends to posit this in 1905: MS 339), demonstrates a shift from Secondness as passive and without purpose to Secondness energized by an interpretant, most often of the Energetic kind.

Thirdness as an element of habit Peirce defines Thirdness as mediation (Ake 2018: 65), objectivity and settled belief. Habit can approximate sign status when the Thirdness that governs it has a pregenerative character – when meaning ‘provenates’ or ‘comes before’ (cf. Deely 2009: 29, 2012: 156). Pregenerative forms of Thirdness (reserved in abeyance) predetermine meanings, which insinuate future interpretations, and the influence of possibility in Firstness rears its head. As such, Deely’s (2015: 780) characterization of Peirce’s pregenerative Thirdness constitutes a pillar for Peirce’s vision of possibility and modal logic – perfusing all three universes (1908: CP 6.455). Deely’s use of ‘pregenerative’ conveys the genesis of meaning for signs; it creates a carrier or reservoir (so to speak) for Thirdness at a stage prior to its utilization before minds capture it in flight. This possibility of accessing these alreadystored Thirdnesses constitutes a potent force for utilizing the tools of Firstness and Secondness to take up new habits. The opportunity to take up new habits is, to a substantial degree, predetermined – that minds will encounter such meanings in the Firstness and Secondness of their experience. Here, the categories of Firstness and Secondness serve as necessary affordances (Gibson 1979: Chapter 8) to the recognition of new Thirdnesses. ‘Pregenerative Thirdnesses’ make their way into consciousness eventually to be considered for habit-change in both Firstness and Secondness regimes. By way of possibility in Firstness, diagrams emerge in the mind as visual, not verbal, rhemata (cf. Colapietro 2001: 211–12; Peirce 1894–1900: CN 3.58–9, 3.422). These unbidden diagrams can serve as insights, out of which pregenerative Thirdnesses beckon to inform previous habits of mind. The imaginary diagrams afford ‘definite conscious’ consideration for implementing new habits of interpretation (Peirce 1907: CP 5.477). Accordingly, iterations in the ontological world which conflict with already-established conduct (derived observationally or through direct involvement) likewise allow the mind to weigh in – whether to maintain or to alter habits of action. In short, the potency of embryonic forms of Thirdness is formidable, but without the affordances of emerging images in Firstness, and observations and participatory episodes in Secondness, the operation of Thirdness would be defused, cutting off access to new meanings (habit-change). Exercising the realms of Firstness and Secondness is indispensable for receipt of embryonic Thirdnesses and to the advancement of habits more attuned to objective and forward-thinking knowledge. As such, habit acquires its modal8 character, beckoning the mind to consciously reform meanings with new facts.

250

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Thus, habit is intrinsically a Third: change in law-like relationship; and the factors that provoke the change – breaking the habit – themselves derive from an incessant need to avoid error and ignorance: We separate the element under control from the element we cannot help, – although in this mode of consciousness there is no inseparable reflection that is done. We separate the past and the present. The past is the inner world, the present the outer world. Now, this joined with feeling (which it involves or requires) might be called consciousness and would be the world, were it not for the phenomena of error and ignorance, which forces us to reflect that there were two worlds in that two-sided consciousness. (Peirce 1904: CP 8.282) Here, Peirce advocates that humans would remain in the past (old memories) and present (what is before the senses), were it not for some recognition that additional facts exist which help to reveal a more accurate, more complete perspective. As such, it is the correction of currently held assertions, and the pursuit of future facts which drive habit to treat held feeling, and facts as but a threshold (sign reservoir) from which to interpret subsequent facts and social encounters. Peirce’s use of ‘ignorance’ (cf. Magnani et al. 2016) reminds us that current habits are subject to modification/dissolution, especially in the face of hasty inferencing actuated from a surprising circumstance. Ake (2018: 67) describes the emergence of surprise within a single mind as interobjective rather than intersubjective: ‘In other words, Peirce’s semiotics and phenomenology depend on intersubjectivity, and the best he will do is articulate an interobjectivity.’ Ake’s line of reasoning follows Peirce’s principle that double consciousness is nothing short of the introduction of objectivity into the subjective mind, such that a clash is felt between ideas. The effort to extract more absolute truths is the objective of double consciousness regimes, and the clash between feelings brings about surprise and activation of inferences. Cooke characterizes surprise ‘as a form of error recognition’ (2012: 179). In this capacity surprise serves as an irritant for change of habits within logical interpretants: ‘surprise disrupts a habit and shows a belief to be wrong, and thereby initiates inquiry’ (Cooke 2012: 186). Surprise, however, may not always dissolve beliefs altogether; instead, it often calls for some less severe alteration, e.g. assimilation (additive operation) to previous schemas. Surprise opens the road to inquiry, and hence operates as an agent of Firstness and Secondness to usher in new Logical Interpretants in Thirdness. Its purpose is to mark the dawning of belief conflicts in the wake of a decision of how much weight to ascribe to the unexpected, non-ego element. Accordingly, surprise promotes semiosis – in harkening to the vividness of objects in Secondness and converting them into potential facts with meanings which vie for authentication. Surprise in Firstness and Secondness ignites at least some basic awareness of whether to further examine and embrace novel Interpretants. This process of verifying newly found principles underscores how habit and signs meet, in the installation of novel forms of consciousness. Yet, because habit does not always actively do so, when it merely houses potential meanings in natural happenings (per Deely’s notion of ‘provenation’) it is distinguishable from sign. The distinction between habit and sign resides in the degree to which Thirdness is explicit. The mere promise of Thirdness (later application of conscious meanings), however, may fall short of the triadicity necessary for signhood. In guarding against homeostasis of meaning/purpose, Thirdness highlights new phenomena which offer novel explanations of how objects (things) and events hold together; consequently, its embodiment in

HABIT AND SEMIOSIS

251

cementing future triads and in securing viable change is essential. This gives rise to the fact that while Thirdnesses are implicit in habit, they are explicit in signs; but, for either, were regularity to stand absent change (mechanistically),9 neither habit nor signs could withstand its absence.

The relationship of habit to sign growth Although the presence of Thirdness is absolutely necessary for habit, its tenor need not ground the relationship between object and sign. Peirce explicitly draws upon Thirdness as the most influential of his categories to qualify as habit, but its role as a catalyst for meaning change can be affirmative or destructive; it may either destabilize the signobject relation or clarify it. In attending to an unexpected and vivid feature, Secondness interrupts previous habits; in this way, it can displace/expel the validity of earlier signs. Despite violation of previous habits, this intrusion can awaken the mind to indispensable chunks of information (prebits, cf. Peirce 1909: MS 645), which can, in turn, be useful in proposing plausible data for novel inferences for new habits. The role of vividness as a feature of Secondness, and surprise, its correlate in Firstness, is the turbulent visitation upon the status quo. Peirce describes the initial effect of vividness in breaking habits as follows: [W]hat is the distinguishing mark of the vivid cases of obtrusion, apart from the vividness itself? It is that when the reoccurring idea is vivid it riles the limpidity of our thoughts and so interferes with our business, but when it is not vivid it produces no such inconvenience. (1906: MS 298) This process of perpetual inquiry would be in jeopardy absent habit, since neither the active practice of settling upon objectively fitting courses of action, nor to implement more viable remedies would be silenced, together with the growth of signification. In short, the vividness of the external, non-ego, element and the internal reaction of surprise invites the advancement of reconstructions of established beliefs and actions. Absent the elements of vividness and surprise, habit would have little chance of turning the mind to recognize and embrace discrete courses of belief and conduct to overt negative consequences. Together, vividness and surprise constitute additional factors which tease out the role of habit from that of sign; they hasten the mind to fasten upon new interpretants: Emotional, Energetic and Logical (Peirce 1907: MS 318). In the end, the work of these two catalysts activates inquiry, whereupon habit reconstructs novel Thirdnesses for signs. Accordingly, the exercise of habit thereby increases reflective sensitivity for new Thirdnesses (meanings accorded to the same sign). Hence, habit supplies signs with greater precision – amplifying or narrowing meanings/effects. In affording signs a prospective and reformative character, habit insures that the ‘limpidity of our thoughts’ does not persist, causing thoughts to fossilize and to become sedentary; instead, the openness of the mind to being ‘riled’ is buttressed. In this state of reform, consciousness (even to the point of reflection) is hastened, driving the implementation of more successful courses of action to resolve problems – an advance necessary for abductive inferencing (1909: MS 637.12), As an agent of openness, habit informs the sign – certifying that minds not take for granted meanings and effects, and that they not resist the reformative advantages of change. It is evident then that mechanistic iterations of beliefs or behaviour do not, in themselves,

252

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

qualify as habit, since they fail to ever bring about reflective intimacy between thought and action. Furthermore, Peirce is convinced that repetition which does not provoke ‘definite consciousness’ (1907: MS 318.43–4) fails to qualify as habit. It does not qualify for two reasons: (1) its automaticity precludes speculation and (2) it remains closed to considerations of purpose, and hence to meaning alterations. The fact that it is restricted to more unlearned conditions contributes to its resistance to change. Natural dispositions (emerging from biological instincts or from flashes of insight) often preclude outside factors, such as changing physical/social conditions; consequently, they remain consigned to narrow functions/purposes. This state of affairs (relative non-involvement of mental processes short of apprehension) keeps the conduct/belief automatic and unanalysed. This mechanistic performance (whether mental or action-based) can never qualify as habit, because the automatic character subjects these reactions to a kind of doing without thinking. As such, the doer is largely unaware that the object/sign in question actuates the particular effect. By ‘natural’ Peirce emphasizes the unlearned (a biologically predetermined instinctual character) or some form of imitation/mimicry (for which selection of a model from a host of models never materializes). Peirce’s notion of habit obviously supersedes natural dispositions; it is the absence of recognition that new associations can permeate relations (and hence purposes) between objects and effects. A natural disposition often fails to qualify as sign or habit, when it actualizes without a purpose, and/or absent active notice of, or conscious awareness of the association between the effect and the object(s). Peirce’s further characterization – that ‘transassociations’ unequivocally qualify as habit (not as sign) – is significant, despite its single mention: It can be proved that the only mental effect that can be so produced and that is not a sign but is of a general application is a habit-change; meaning by a habit-change a modification of a person’s tendencies toward action, resulting from previous experiences or from previous exertions of his will or acts, or from a complexus of both kinds of cause. It excludes natural dispositions, as the term “habit” does, when it is accurately used; but it includes beside associations, what may be called “transassociations,” or alterations of association, and even includes dissociation, which has usually been looked upon by psychologists (I believe mistakenly), as of deeply contrary nature to association. (1907: CP 5.476) For Peirce, dissociations constitute habit (but not sign) when a relation between an action/state of affairs and the expected effects is determined (unconsciously) or might be determined (in the future) to be untenable. Moreover, habit materializes in transassociations, such that the original association between object and interpretant (as effect only) is severed or ‘altered’ (Peirce 1907: CP 5.476). Peirce’s use of transassociations to characterize habit, not sign, illustrates his adherence to habit’s place as a highlighter – that an inference (with its implicit hunches) brings different propositions to assertion status; as such, overt conduct and mental orientations towards contextual features are altered. In fact, habit can never surface absent at least, the possibility of a modification in previously held assumptions between particular effects and particular objects. Peirce’s deliberate use of ‘transassociation’ and ‘dissociation’ underscores the change element of habit. The meaning of ‘trans-’ (‘across’) requires change across semiotic genres.

HABIT AND SEMIOSIS

253

Both processes redistribute governance between reactions to objects and the affordances that such objects actually supply. The resultant alterations range from Piaget’s notion of ‘assimilation’ and ‘accommodation’ (Piaget and Inhelder 1966/1969: 6)10 to complete dissociation (Peirce 1907: CP 5.476). Accommodation might consist in a change in expectations for the object, while assimilation is equivocal to an additive process in which objects are added to (or which apply to) an already-constructed principle. Dissociation consists in total diminution of the principal which originally held objects and effects together. Whether transassociations or dissociations, a change in mental and corporal regularities surfaces. This change in behaviour or belief evidences the fact that the mind is operating with different underlying inferences (cf. Peirce 1877: CP 5.370–6). Total destruction of the feeling/conviction that once held those objects and interpretants together constitutes Peirce’s quintessential exemplar of habit; it is likewise a forum in which consciousness eventually materializes to convert habit to sign (cf. 1904: CP 8.330). Consequent to transassociations objects can become less exemplary of a class or process; then newly conceived explanations therefrom establish changes in habits by defusing the earlier connection between effect and object. Hence, the hunches which propose new explanations and different associations between objects and their effects usher in habitchanges – revised belief and action templates. Peirce’s use of transassociation highlights his conviction that not all habits are signs. Habits reach sign status only when some semblance of active recognition of the meaning-object association is held. An event may provoke ‘an effort of the mind, and not a mere reflex response of the body, without being thereby a sign; but if one becomes definitely conscious, in the provoked effort, of acting against a resistance, or of resisting a force, then the notion of such resistance or such active force is conveyed; and there is a sign’ (Peirce 1907: MS 318.43–5). Although Peirce is explicit that the presence of consciousness differentiates sign from habit, and that the consciousness must be definite (or unquestionably present), he would not deny that habits may pre-empt the existence of signs if they possess potency for minds to convert mere effects into dialogic conjectural internal forums in which effect begets meaning. In short, without habit, whose repetitions force interlocutors’ attention to and seeking after meanings, the process of semiosis would be deflated altogether, and the possibility of future inquiry would be cut off (Peirce 1899: EP 2.48).

Consciousness in taking a habit The role of habit in semiosis is formidable; its marked instability over stability gives us pause to attend to the change in belief/action in the first place en route to more advanced forms of consciousness. As such, emerging or extinguishing habits captures notice (initially in Secondness) for minds to examine and to propose rationale for the repeated performance. These unprecedented regularities, in turn, heighten consciousness, because minds are forced to evaluate why and how objects and their purposes are being treated differently. The insistence of the effort and resistance against it (the change in habit) arrives at its ultimate course – to prevail in the face of struggle (Peirce 1877: CP 5.376, 1903: CP 1.322). Peirce indicates that habits can ‘provoke efforts of mind without being signs’ (1907: MS 318.45). While both provoke efforts of the mind, habits do so as mere ‘events’ (Peirce 1907: MS 318.45). The effect of iterations of the same event, heightened by its earlier modification, serves as an observational catalyst provoking the mind to attend to the event’s features, and to disassemble and assemble them into a purposeful episode.

254

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

In the same passage (Peirce 1907: MS 318.45), Peirce explicitly determines that ‘acting against a resistance’ must be ‘definitely conscious’. Consequently, the mental involvement for signhood to which habits as events aspire supersedes knowledge of facts themselves; if events aspire to habit, they must intimate novel purposes for objects and their effects. Ultimately, habit must give rise to mental processes which are reflective in nature. Peirce’s characterization of the work of habit is to eventually make minds ‘definitely conscious’ of undiscovered meanings. His use of ‘definitely’ in this context supersedes memory of past/present events or their purposes, but puts us in mind of how such events will operate in future scenarios. In short, habit constitutes the trigger by which consciousness begets signs. By exposing minds to repeated responses (actions) to particular contextual features, habit causes the mind not merely to associate spatial and temporal events with actions, but provokes it to find explanations for the existence of the associations. Habit unequivocally awakens the mind to reflect upon why events and reactions coincide. For Peirce, ‘taking a habit’ requires a ‘peculiar kind of consciousness’, not present in intellectual habits alone, but in two other, quite distinct skills: ‘acquiring any difficult dexterity’ or ‘mastery of any art or language’: [The] Third mode of consciousness may be briefly denominated ‘The consciousness of taking a habit,’ or in one word, ‘habituescence.’ This, of course, will not in the least imply that we are conscious of the formation of every acquired habit. Some undisciplined young persons may have come to think of acquired human habits chiefly as constraints; and undoubtedly they all are so in a measure. But good habits are in much higher measure powers than they are limitations, and the greater number even of acquired habits are good, like almost all those that can properly be called natural. What, for example, is any skill but a narrowed natural habit? [sic] of another: mode of consciousness of taking a habit. But certainly, in the sense of the above definitions, every belief and every inclination toward belief is a Habit; and I put to any body who has ever been led by reasoning to admit a truth that was new to him, to say whether there was not, in coming to that conviction, something altogether different and disparate from either volition or sensation. And not merely in acquiring a purely intellectual habit, but, as I have convinced myself by a long experimental inquiry, is there the same peculiar kind of consciousness in acquiring any difficult dexterity, or the mastery of any art or language. It is essentially the same interpretive consciousness in every case. It is the ‘twigging’ of a new idea, and neither the ‘I will’ of Volition nor mere feeling of pure sensation. (c.1913: MS 930.31–2, fragmentary draft of n.d.: MS 680–686, according to Robin) Peirce’s point here is well taken, in that acquiring a dexterity requires some degree of consciousness, however subtle, because mastering dexterity entails making a decision, if perhaps falling short of planned, contemplative or reflective processes. A further issue to which Peirce turns in the same manuscript is his use of the phrase ‘peculiar kind of consciousness’; it implies a unique kind of consciousness necessary for success in acquiring the three distinct competencies to which he refers (dexterity, art, language). Although these three skills are acquired, Peirce does not discount natural dispositions/ tendencies as rightful habits. Nonetheless, it is the acquired kind that Peirce appears to privilege, in view of his description of the former as more often resulting in control on the part of an agent to engage in successful courses of action with affirmative ‘powers’ (habits

HABIT AND SEMIOSIS

255

distinguished from ‘limitations’). He emphasizes the need to implement a consciousness which entails more than attention (to master the skill); rather, basic attention must be driven by a degree of intentionality. This intentionality constitutes supreme effort, requiring prolonged dedication, which Peirce refers to as ‘coming to [a new] conviction’. For Peirce, the consciousness necessary to create and work comfortably in craftsmanship, the arts and in language is comparable across all three despite their different semiotic complexions. While dexterity depends upon more indexical competencies, and the arts more iconic ones, language expertise relies chiefly upon logic within an argumentative and symbolic system. In spite of these distinctions, Peirce recognizes the embryonic Thirdness waiting to be crafted in all three, namely ‘the twigging of a new idea’, which he sharply differentiates from the drive of volition, or the ‘feeling of pure sensation’. Both feelings of pure sensation and the ‘will of volition’ are fleeting, uncommitted, and the perseverance to patiently and affectionately complete them is not clearly in view. The result, then, would hold habit hostage – without the drive afforded by intentionality. In short, the ‘twigging of ideas’ or ‘taking a habit’ (habituescence) is no simple or short-term attentional focus; its essence requires a spirit of service to the discipline, a sense of humility before its foregoing principles. Taking a habit is equivocal to carving out a place in a prescribed field, and, at the same time, a voyage of surrender, ‘tending [ideas] as I would the flowers in my garden’ (Peirce 1893: CP 6.289).

CONCLUSION The dynamic nature and irreducible character of the categories rescue habit from servitude to mechanistic conduct. In the conviction of feeling to replace another (Firstness), in the struggle of effort against resistance to ascertain facts (Secondness), and especially in the consciousness as habituescence in Thirdness, signs are inaugurated. In essence, habit meets sign in conscious awareness – advancing the latter to its height, the consciousness of taking a habit. When automatic, mechanical iterations advance to determining the validity of novel overtures of conduct or thought, habit becomes a formidable instrument towards the process of sign growth. The ‘consciousness of taking a habit’ (especially operational in hosting both inner and outer perspectives) transitions unconscious, less organized, thought to conscious decision-making – delivering habit from hollow mimesis. The categories constitute the most influential and overriding influence in exercising our ‘powers’, as opposed to our ‘limitations’. The three categories intensify and perpetuate the examination and re-examination (‘twigging’) of ideas, which arise outside the self. The consideration of alternative properties and reactions via the categories is the essence of habit. With openness to novel purposes for feelings and actions, habit incorporates ever-expanding interpretants through increasingly honed speculation. In short, the categories guard against stagnation, by supplying the tools to leave aside mechanistic processes and to alight upon new phenomena which can explain how objects (things) and events hold together. Habit activates semiosis by virtue of its overtures towards objective truth-seeking; it renovates feelings, facts and principles. At the same time, its commitment never to violate objective truth does not dismiss subjective avenues of investigation which grant some likelihood of legitimacy – those supplied by imaginations/ feelings in Firstness, or attention to the vividness of objects/interactions in Secondness, or misinformed and later reformed assertions in Thirdness. Accordingly, habit maintains

256

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

periodic equilibrium  –  effort to pursue facts/explanations and resistance against unfounded inferences. Each category is in service (as a scaffold) to promote deformation and reformation of tendencies to feel, act and to govern our own and other’s inferences through self-criticism and heterocriticism (Peirce 1906: EP 2.378).

NOTES 1 Cf. Colapietro (2001: 201–2) for further explication of the derivation of Peircean categories from Kant’s categories: quantity, quality, relation and modality, in which Peirce already emphasizes his semiotic (cf. 1992: EP 1.6–7, 24). 2 Cf. West (2021) for further discussion of Peirce’s Energetic Interpretant. 3 ‘By a Feeling, I mean an instance of the kind of consciousness which involves no thought, analysis, comparison or any process whatsoever, nor consists in whole or in part of any act by which one stretch of consciousness in distinguished from another, which has its own positive quality which consists in nothing else, and which is of itself all that it is, however it may have been brought about; so that if this Feeling is present during a lapse of time, it is wholly and equally present at every moment of that time. To reduce this description to a simple definition, I will say that by a Feeling I mean an instance of that sort of element of consciousness which is all that it is positively, in itself, regardless of anything else’ (Peirce 1905: CP 1.306). 4 Peirce also refers to hypostatic abstraction as ‘subjectual abstraction’: ‘… Thus predication involves precisive abstraction. Precisive abstraction creates predicates. Subjectual abstraction creates subjects’ (1905: CP 4.332; 1904: NEM III.2: 917; cf. Atkins 2018: 125). Hypostatic abstraction and precisive abstraction are necessary in habit formation and habit-change, especially the latter, which requires explicit predicates. 5 ‘… the vividness of a Feeling … is independent of every component of the Quality of that consciousness, and consequently is independent of the resultant of those components.’ 6 ‘[Secondness] is an experience. It comes out most fully in the shock of reaction between ego and non-ego. It is there the double consciousness of effort and resistance. That is something which cannot properly be conceived. For to conceive it is to generalize it; and to generalize it is to miss altogether the hereness and nowness which is its essence’ (1903: 8.266, Letter to W. James). 7 ‘many signs bring about actual events. The infantry officer’s word of command “Ground arms!” produces as its existential interpretant, (the sign having been first apprehended in an “emotional interpretant,”) the slamming down of the musket-butts. The less thought intervenes [sic] between the apprehension and this act, the better the sign fulfills its function. All signs that are not to evaporate in mere feelings must have such an existential interpretant, or I might better have called it, such an energetic interpretant’ (Peirce 1907: MS 318: 16–17). 8 The modal character which Peirce affords to habit instils within it a primary function, namely, its dialogic reach. The reach surfaces within the same mind to hasten the emergence of consciousness, more exacting, double consciousness (Peirce 1903: 5.53, 1903: 8.266, Letter to W. James). It is the role of habit as an ‘imperative command addressed to the future self’ (Peirce 1907: CP 5.477) which reaches into the mind of the self to enliven conscious interpretive competencies so necessary to sign creation and recreation. 9 ‘This is the central principle of habit: and the striking contrast of its modality to that of any mechanical law is most significant. The laws of physics know nothing of tendencies or probabilities: whatever they require at all they require absolutely and without fail, and they

HABIT AND SEMIOSIS

257

are never disobeyed. Were the tendency to take habits replaced by an absolute requirement that the cell should discharge itself always in the same way, or according to any rigidly fixed condition whatever, all possibility of habit developing into intelligence would be cut off at the outset; the virtue of Thirdness would be absent. It is essential that there should be an element of chance in some sense as to how the cell shall discharge itself; and then that this chance or uncertainty shall not be entirely obliterated by the principle of habit, but only somewhat affected’ (Peirce c.1890: CP 1.390). 10 ‘The filtering or modification of the input is assimilation; the modification of internal schemes to fit reality is called accommodation’ (Piaget and Inhelder 1966/1969: 6).

REFERENCES Ake, S. (2018), ‘That Mystery Category “Fourthness” and Its Relationship to the Work of C. S. Peirce’, in L. Marsh (ed.), Walker Percy, Philosopher, 63–87, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Atkins, R. K. (2018), Charles S. Peirce’s Phenomenology: Analysis and Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bergman, M. (2016), ‘Beyond Explication: Meaning and Habit-change in Peirce’s Pragmatism’, in D. West and M. Anderson (eds), Consensus on Peirce’s Concept of Habit, 171–97, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. Cooke, E. F. (2012), ‘Peirce on Wonder, Inquiry, and the Ubiquity of Surprise’, Chinese Semiotic Studies, 8: 178–200. Colapietro, V. (2001), ‘A Lantern for the Feet of Inquirers: The Heuristic Function of the Peircean Categories’, Semiotica, 136 (1–4): 201–16. Deely, J. (2009), Purely Objective Reality, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Deely, J. (2012), ‘Toward a Postmodern Recovery of “Person”’, Espiritu, 61 (143): 147–65. Deely, J. (2015), ‘From Semiosis to Semioethics’, in P. P. Trifonas (ed.), The International Handbook of Semiotics, 771–89, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. Gibson, J. J. (1979), The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Ibri, I. (2017), Kósmos Noetós: The Metaphysical Architecture of Charles S. Peirce, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. Magnani, L., S. Arfini and T. Bertolotti (2016), ‘Of Habit and Abduction: Preserving Ignorance or Attaining Knowledge?’ in D. West and M. Anderson (eds), Consensus on Peirce’s Concept of Habit, 361–77, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. Peirce, C. S. ([1857–92] 1982–2010), Writings of Charles S. Peirce, 7 vols (1–6, 8), ed. Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as W. Peirce, C. S. ([1866–1913] 1976), The New Elements of Mathematics, 4 vols, ed. C. Eisele, The Hague: Mouton Press. Cited as NEM. Peirce, C. S. ([1866–1913] 1931–58), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols 1–6, C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds), vols 7–8, A. Burks (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cited as CP. Peirce, C. S. ([1867–93] 1992), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, ed. N. Houser and C. Kloesel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP 1. Peirce, C. S. (1867–1913), Unpublished manuscripts, dated according to the Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce, ed. R. Robin, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967; accessible via The Charles S. Peirce Papers, 30 reels, 3rd microfilm edn, Cambridge: Houghton Library, Harvard University, 1979. Cited as MS.

258

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Peirce, C. S. ([1891–1910] 2009), The Logic of Interdisciplinarity: The Monist Series, E. Bisanz (ed.), Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Cited as LI. Peirce, C. S. ([1893–1913] 1998), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, ed. Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP 2. Peirce, C. S. ([1901–8] 1975–9), Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to ‘The Nation’, 3 vols, eds K. L. Ketner and J. E. Cook, Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1979. Cited as CN. Peirce, C. S. ([1903] 1997), Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard Lectures, ed. P. Turrisi, New York: SUNY Press. Cited as PPM. Piaget, J. and Inhelder, B. (1966/1969), Psychology of the Child, trans. H. Weaver, New York: Basic Books. Short, T. L. (2007), Peirce’s Theory of Signs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stjernfelt, F. (2014), Natural Propositions: The Actuality of Peirce’s Doctrine of Dicisigns, Boston: Docent Press. West, D. (2014), ‘From Habit to Habituescence: Peirce’s Continuum of Ideas’, in J. Pelkey (ed.), Semiotics 2013: Why Semiotics?, 117–26, Toronto: Legas. West, D. (2015), ‘The Work of Secondness as Habit in the Development of Early Schemes’, Public Journal of Semiotics, 6 (2): 1–13. West, D. (2016a), ‘Indexical Scaffolds to Habit-formation’, in D. West and M. Anderson (eds), Consensus on Peirce’s Concept of Habit, 215–40, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. West, D. (2016b), ‘Reflections on Complexions of Habit’, in D. West and M. Anderson (eds), Consensus on Peirce’s Concept of Habit, 421–32, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. West, D. (2017), ‘Virtual Habit as Episode-builder in the Inferencing Process’, Cognitive Semiotics, 10 (1): 55–75. West, D. (2018), ‘Fashioning Episodes through Virtual Habit: The Efficacy of Pre-lived Experience’, Studia Gilsoniana, 7 (1): 81–99. West, D. (2019), ‘Thirdness along the Intuitional Path: Reflections on Maritain and Peirce’, Studia Gilsoniana, 8 (2): 431–75. West, D. (2020), ‘Auditory Hallucinations as Internal Discourse: The Intersection between Peirce’s Endoporeusis and Double Consciousness’, in G. Owens and D. West (eds), Semiotics 2019: New Frontiers in Semiotics, 129–45, Charlottesville: Philosophy Documentation. West, D. (2021), ‘Between Two Minds: The Work of Peirce’s Energetic Interpretant’, Contemporary Pragmatism 18 (2): 187–221. Wilson, A. (2016), Peirce’s Empiricism: Its Roots and Its Originality, Lanham: Lexington Press.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Ideology and Semiosis SUSAN PETRILLI AND AUGUSTO PONZIO

IDEOLOGY AND REALITY ALIAS SEMIOSIS Based on the criterion formulated by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi in Semiotica e ideologia (1972), intending to establish when to speak of ‘ideology’: ideology is social planning which may or may not be conscious. The highest degree of unconsciousness is denominated ‘false consciousness’. To opt for this meaning – ideology as social planning – is to set aside Karl Mannheim’s conception of ideology as worldview (Weltanschauung) (1929). All the same, Mannheim’s conception continues to be a significant point of reference considering the distinction he established between ‘total’ and ‘particular’ conceptions of ideology – a complex of more or less deliberate falsifications based on particular interests. We also leave aside the original meaning of the term ‘idéologie’ as understood by Destutt de Tracy (Eléments d’idéologie, 1801–15), where idéologie concerns analysis of mental faculties. Under this respect, a connection is better identified with John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), thanks to the relation he had established at that early time between the study of understanding and semiotics. Before addressing ideology from a semiotic perspective as social planning, we will briefly consider some other meanings of ideology, particularly where it is associated to semiosis, therefore to sign studies (Nöth 2004). In this case, we are mostly in the ‘age’ denominated by John Deely (2001) as ‘post Cartesian and a postmodern age of understanding’. Ideology tout court, ideology as such, is often identified with false consciousness, with false, distorted, deceptive thought. This conception mainly derives from Marx’s and Engels’s Die deutsche Ideologie (1846), where specially Marx deserves mention for having at least intuited the connection between ideology, verbal language and sign in general (Ponzio 1979, 1989; Marx [1881] 2020; on the Marx-ideology relation, Althusser 1978). This negative conception of ideology is also traceable to Napoleon, who used it against the French ‘idéologues’, but also to Francis Bacon and his notion of idola (Novum Organon 1620), particularly idola fori, from the influence of language on understanding. Vilfredo Pareto (1916) also interpreted ‘ideology’ negatively as contrasting scientific thought. But to consider ideology as false thinking, false consciousness is to confuse a possible interpretation and modality of ideology with its general definition. Such negative interpretation of ideology continues to prevail even in recent times, which means to say even after Rossi-Landi’s work in Semiotica e ideologia (1972). Here, instead, he thematizes ideology as ‘social planning’, and even earlier, in his journal Ideologie, founded

260

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

in 1967. From this perspective, a significant reference is the semiotician, more precisely semiologist, Luis Prieto, particularly in Pertinence et Pratique (1975), published in Italian in 1976 in the series ‘Semiotica e pratica sociale’, directed by the same Prieto with Tomás Maldonado and Adam Schaff. Prieto elaborates on the notion of ‘pertinence’ which he draws from Trubeckoj’s phonology, reconsidered through Alan Gardiner (1932). Just as speaker knowledge of phonemes – the pertinent features of a given language – is knowledge of the essential material reality of verbal communication, all knowledge is knowledge of aspects of material reality shared by a certain community and rendered pertinent to given ends. Prieto defines ‘ideology’ beginning from the relation between pertinence and practice. Ideology does not simply denote. It ‘connotes’, in other words, it orients, valuates, judges. By comparison with denotation, ‘connotation’ is sense referred to a second practice, where one form of pertinence depends on another. In this framework, ‘ideology’ is defined by Prieto as knowledge that does not declare its pertinence, but presents itself falsely as absolute. The term ‘connotation’ is also used by Roland Barthes to explain the semiotic production processes of ideology, though not necessarily ‘connoted’ as false consciousness. Connotation, as originally understood by Louis Hjelmslev, expresses the fact that a sign, a unit formed of signified and signifier, can in turn be the signifier of another signified, which co-related gives rise to another sign unit. Connotation can be defined as the overlapping of different senses. In this case ideology is the form (in Hjelmslev’s sense) of connotative meanings (Barthes 1964). The end of ideologies has been proclaimed (among others by Jean-François Lyotard, in La condition postmoderne, 1979), but this is no more than a ‘popular’ opinion. The idea is related to identification of ideology with alternative planning, above all if revolutionary (another falsification). Ideology at the service of reproduction and confirmation of the existent, the world as-it-is, is confused with non-ideological planning, considered as a ‘natural’, ‘realistic’ view of things. The fall of ‘real socialism’, erroneously identified with ‘revolutionary planning’ (in line ideologically with Stalinism), played an important role in generating narratives about the end of the ‘era of ideologies’. But the truth is that ideologies persist with social planning whatever the degree of consciousness or unconsciousness. To address ideology today is to address an issue that is largely considered unfashionable – where ‘fashionable’, not only as dress fashion but also as planning focused on social reproduction, is a positive value, while ‘unfashionable’ applies to what to exclude and eliminate. On our reproposing the question of ideology in semiotics, we accept the qualification ‘unfashionable’, but investing this negative adjective and its contrary with the sense they assume with Friedrich Nietzsche (1873–6) and his ‘unfashionable observations’ and with Walter Benjamin (1978) and his critique of the ‘destructive character’ of the fashionable. Confronted with the statement that to investigate ideology is to investigate something that no longer exists, the immediate question is whether or not by any chance this statement is ideological (Petrilli 2004, 2003b). On the relation between ideology and truth, once we acknowledge that ideology as such is not only, or not necessarily, false consciousness, a distinction must be drawn, as proposed by Georg Klaus (1969), between the objectivity of truth – the state of things independently from the assertion and from the utterer – and objectivism. In the case of objectivism, to be true an assertion must neither be biased, nor pragmatically oriented.

IDEOLOGY AND SEMIOSIS

261

If such a condition does not obtain, then the assertion contains a subjective, arbitrary element to be eliminated in the name of truth. This second criterion places an impossible condition on truth, often used ideologically to attribute ‘objectivism’ to oneself and deny it to others. A significant contribution to the problem of ideology in the framework of general semiotics and human understanding is John Deely’s, as demonstrated by Paul Cobley in ‘Human Understanding: The Key Triad’ (2018). This aspect comes into play when human understanding is referred not only to the notions of subjectivity, intersubjectivity and objectivity, but also to social thought and relations between humans and their environment. These present themselves as affordances – a term introduced by James Gibson (1986), whom Deely reads in relation to Jakob von Uexküll and Martin Krampen (Deely 1990: 29–30; Cobley 2018: 30–1) – ‘which generally facilitate human action’, whereas ideology ‘generally constrain it to the exigencies of determined circumstances’ (Cobley 2018: 18). In Deely’s words: Reality as we experience it is neither purely objective nor purely subjective nor purely intersubjective, but rather a constantly shifting mixture and proportion of all three – a mixture and proportion of which it is not at all easy (perhaps not even fully possible) to keep track. (2009: 243–4, cited in Cobley 2018: 33) Moreover, even affordances ‘furnish opportunities for good or ill’ (Cobley 2018: 29). Effectively, in the sphere of human-computer interaction, alongside positive aspects provided by computers and annexed technologies, we could cite negative aspects, through to the disastrous scenario described by Enrico Manicardi in a book eloquently titled (in Italian) Network, Opium of the People. Internet, Social Media, Techno-culture: The Digital Vice of Civilization (2020). The situation described provides a cue for considering ideology relatedly to the question of hegemony and attainment of consensus, keeping account of the role carried out by sign systems in accepting behaviour that may even contradict the interests of those involved. Such behaviour gives rise to forms of linguistic alienation and semiosic alienation in general. Notably this approach to ideology can be traced in Antonio Gramsci (1977) with his focus on unconscious, unintentional, passive learning and tacit teaching. Without considering the latter, it is impossible to explain how ideologies not expressly formulated are transmitted and condition us. To approach ideology in terms of both ‘social planning’ and semiotics involves considering sign systems as producers and organizers of consensus, a means through which to exert hegemony (Williams 1960). Rossi-Landi believed that Gramsci had at least an inkling of all this, observing that his observations on language continue to be stimulating, however pre-semiotic: Even if it was chiefly the study of sign systems themselves that suggested the hypothesis of their mediating role, it is nonetheless worth recalling that Gramsci introduced the notion of civil society to play the same role of mediation between base and superstructure […]. In Gramscian terms, then, our hypothesis would be that civil society is basically nothing other than the set of sign systems organized within a given society or, more generally, within any society. (Rossi-Landi 1978: 66, English translation)

262

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

At this point the question is what to understand by ‘social planning’ referred to ideology. Rossi-Landi describes three levels of organized action, individual and collective: programme, programming, planning. A programme enters programming and programming enters planning where it will be necessary to consider the third level in order to understand the sense of the first two (cf. Williams 1973). That production today is communication is in the public eye, nor does it take semiotics to recognize this. The topic was addressed systematically by Rossi-Landi already in the 1960s, beginning from his pioneering monograph Language as Work and Trade (1968) (largely snobbed by human scientists as a hybrid between critique of the language sciences and critique of political economy). Having identified the connection between communication and production, Rossi-Landi redefined the concept of ‘dominant class’, based on the principle that power is control over communication (Rossi-Landi 1978, 1992). ‘Communicative development’ today means to promote access to ‘information society’, elaborating strategies to manage special affordances, Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) in learning and education, in the public work sphere and in private life. The destiny of individuals in ‘information society’ is framed according to the ‘inclusion/exclusion’ dichotomy. To have a place in information society implies a commitment from the ‘young’ as much as from the ‘not so young’, for the whole time of ‘active life’, to ‘permanent education’, failing which leads to exclusion, segregation, forms of social alienation. In the face of a society that risks to discriminate between those who have access to communication-information circuits and those who do not, an information society that tends to exclude whoever does not qualify, that can even be threatening at the level of community planning, the only possibility is to aim for ‘inclusion’, for promotion to an ‘inclusive’ information society: either an ‘exclusion society’ or ‘inclusion society’; in or out; marginalized or integrated; excluded or functional to the communicationproduction system. Communication in present-day society is characterized by the tendency to total communication, in terms both of (worldwide) extension and of what can be made to circulate, what can be communicated in terms of people, commodities (including services) and messages. In the current production system, communication and the market coincide; exchange is essentially exchange of commodities; and the tendency to total communication converges with the total market in terms both of extension and of quality, that is, anything can be transformed into a commodity. Messages too become commodities, just as commodities could not be commodities if they were not messages as well. As the circulation of messages-commodities in addition to commodities-messages and as the circulation of people reduced to the status of commodities, the total communication system is convertible into the total market. But, as we have anticipated above, communication today, in so-called globalization (characterized by Pope Francis as ‘globalization of indifference’ insofar as it is based on ‘market reason’ and rendered precarious through competition), is not limited to the central phase, the exchange phase, in the social reproduction cycle (production, exchange, or circulation, or market, and consumption). Communication also pervades the production phase (automation, tele-work, etc.) as well as the consumption phase, which consists in the consumption of commodities-messages and messages-commodities. Communication forms the social structure where all individual and collective behaviours

IDEOLOGY AND SEMIOSIS

263

are part of communication programmes, programmings or plannings that are constitutive of present-day social reproduction and obey its (ideo-)logic. Given that production and communication converge, if the goal of the productioncirculation-consumption cycle overall is production, then too the goal of communication is production: production for production, i.e. communication for communication. This no doubt is production for profit, but profit is subject to production, to expanded reproduction of the productive-communicative cycle, thus of the overall communication network of which production-communication is a part and on which it depends. The dominant class in present-day society is in effect the class that controls communication. Social planning is concerned with continuing communication-production, now globally, and controlling communication-production circuits. Its ideology is the ideology of communication-production. The communication-production ideology of social planning is so realistic, so faithful to the being of things, that it presents itself more as its logic than its ideology, whilst flaunting the good news of the end of ideologies. We have described the process on various occasions as the ‘ideologic’ of worldwide globalized communication-production (Petrilli 2004, 2016, 2017, 2020; Petrilli and Ponzio 2000, 2012, 2016b, 2019a; Ponzio 2002, 2009b, 2011, 2012a, 2013). Ideology functional to the persistence of today’s social system ends up, in good and bad faith, exchanging a specific system for social reproduction generally, in spite of the destructive character of that specific system. Reproduction of the productive cycle itself is destructive: machinery is replaced with new machinery not because of wear, but for the sake of competitiveness; jobs are destroyed as automation advances; products are made obsolete as the market stimulates new forms of consumerism and replaces previous products with similar but new products, wherewith destroying products and markets unable to resist globalized communication-production competitiveness; natural environments and lifeforms are threatened and destroyed; economies and cultures that resist globalization are destroyed; while human intelligence, inventiveness, creativity are reduced to ‘market reason’, made functional to it. The destructive character of this production system is manifest in the expansion of underdevelopment as the condition for development, in human exploitation to the point of non-survival. This is the logic that subtends the phenomenon of migration which in fact has reached massive dimensions compared to earlier phases in the history of social systems. So-called ‘developed’ countries are no longer able to absorb the phenomenon whether because of ‘space’ limitations, or simply because they are not willing for political, economical and cultural reasons. Globalized communication-production is destructive because it is the communicationproduction of war. War demands ever new markets for conventional and unconventional weapons, ever greater consensus acknowledging war as just and necessary, imposed as an inevitable means of defence against the ‘other’ who is represented as a threat: war, a means of asserting the rights of ‘one’s identity’, of ‘one’s difference’. But the truth is that the ‘other’ neither threatens nor destroys identities and differences. The real menace is the present-day social system: identity-difference is encouraged, promoted and at once undermined, thus is fictitious, phantasmal. Experienced in such terms, people in the quest for identity are pushed to cling to it passionately, unreasonably, thus submitting to a world logic that fits the communication-production of war to perfection.

264

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN SIGN STUDIES AND CRITIQUE OF IDEOLOGY On ideology with Schaff and Rossi-Landi The exigency to analyse the structures of social sign production had been evidenced by Rossi-Landi since the mid-1960s. At the time, semiotics, the general sign science, was taking off internationally and entering official culture. The International Association for Semiotic Studies was founded in Paris in 1969. The first World Congress in Semiotics was held in Milan in 1974. In 1967 Rossi-Landi founded the journal Ideologie, published in Rome, and in 1970 he began publishing the special column ‘Dizionario teorico-ideologico’, dedicating several entries to the relationship between semiotics and ideology. In 1972 Rossi-Landi published Semiotica e ideologia in the book series, ‘Studi Bompiani’ (Milan). In 1974 the section ‘Il campo semiotico’ was inaugurated,1 where all subsequent editions of Semiotica e ideologia were published through to the last of 2011. Clearly interest in the general sign science and ideology is closely related, emerging and developing together, at least in Italy. In Trattato di semiotica generale (1975), Eco deals with ideology under the section title ‘Teoria della produzione segnica’, considered relevant to the ‘campo semiotico’ (semiotic field). However, characterizing ideology in relation to semiotics, we must observe that Eco’s Trattato lacks a definition of ideology. ‘Ideology as false consciousness’ we know is not a definition of ideology. The problem of defining ideology is something different from identifying its value in terms of objective truth. Although these two issues are connected, they should not be confused: definition is one thing, valuation in terms of the problem of knowledge is another. Though formed as a definition, the proposition ‘ideology as false consciousness’ is not a definition, but a response to ideology in terms of value. Moreover, ‘ideology as false consciousness’ (a connotation which derives from Marx) refers to a particular ideology, bourgeois ideology in a given historical phase of development, precisely when from revolutionary ideology becomes conservative, which occurs characteristically when a class is ultimately intent upon defending the established order and its own privileges. Again, as Adam Schaff (1964) demonstrates, ideology should not be confused with ‘stereotypes’, that is, with preconceived beliefs arising from habit, from deeply rooted expectations, from valuational and emotional tendencies and relative perspectives, all assumed as absolute without questioning. In Schaff’s view, the stereotype is not an immediate constituent of ideology, though it is generally an integral part of ideology. Nor is the relation between class and subclass, though ideology and stereotypes are interdependent and mutually influence each other: just as stereotypes model ideologies, ideologies influence social stereotypes. Moreover, a semiotic theory of ideology does not simply describe ideology in terms of organization and structure without considering genesis, function and orientation. Such aspects characterize and differentiate ideologies. They underline that to distinguish between ‘ideological’ discourse and ‘non-ideological’ discourse is impossible. In reality, discourse is always more or less ideological, part of specific social planning or better is social planning, as evidenced by Rossi-Landi. To characterize discourse in terms of ideology is to account for ideology as social planning, which is to consider the different genesis and function of different ideologies. Given that ideologies and sign systems imply each other, the study of ideology finds support in semiotic theory understood as a global study of (verbal and non-verbal)

IDEOLOGY AND SEMIOSIS

265

social communication, which is also the study of the structures of social sign production (Petrilli 2014a).

Victoria Welby’s significs The term significs was coined by Victoria Welby towards the end of the nineteenth century for her special approach to sign and meaning. She intended to emphasize the ethical dimension of human signifying processes, hence the interrelation between signs and values. Her focus was on verbal language without neglecting the relation of the verbal to the non-verbal. She introduced the term ‘significs’ in her 1896 essay, ‘Sense, Meaning and Interpretation’, which as a neologism was free from meaning associations with other terms circulating at the time – semantics, semiotics, etc. ‘Significs’ seemed to her the most adequate term to express her main interest, the indissoluble relation between sign and sense, sign and value in all its possible signifying implications, a choice she defended in her correspondence with such scholars as Charles Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Giovanni Vailati, André Lalande, Michel Bréal, Ferdinand Tönnies. Significs transcends pure descriptivism, presenting itself as a method for the interpretation and development of sign process beyond strictly logical-gnoseological boundaries: a method for understanding and evaluating experience and knowledge in terms of pragmatic and ethical value. Other terms that characterize significs include ‘sense’, ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’, a triad which underlines her intention of going beyond the mere description of verbal language and sign use generally. ‘Sense’ concerns the word according to the rules of conventional usage, but also relatedly to the material circumstances of communicative interaction, to the body, the ‘sensuous’ dimension of meaning; ‘meaning’ refers to communicative intention; ‘significance’ designates import, implication, overall value and practical orientation. ‘Significance’ implies ‘sense’ and ‘meaning’, but transcends both to involve import, consequence, essential value of all signifying events and experience. In addition to ‘significance’ according to Charles Morris (1964), Welby’s significance can be associated to the concept of Bedeutsamkeit, central to the ‘School of Bochum’, which refers to Dilthey, who in turn was informed about Welby’s research and notion of significance. As she specified in What Is Meaning? (1903) – reviewed by Peirce (1903: CP 8.171–6)2 – and in her Enciclopaedia Britannica (1911) entry ‘Significs’, the sense of the word as such does not exist, but only the sense in which it is used in a given ‘universe of discourse’, with a given meaning responding to speaker intention, or in spite of intention, and with significance, which is generally multiple, relative to import, emotional strength, value, range, even independently of speaker awareness. ‘Significs’ addresses the question ‘what does it signify?’, fundamental not only for the pragmatic orientation the speaker is aware of, but also the unknown finality, value, implicit plan: all aspects of meaning that cannot be reconducted to ‘meaning’ understood abstractly and reductively in terms of semantics. Significs is a method for critical investigation, a theory of communication and interpretation for conscious awareness, a method of linguistic analysis, a critique of language, a ‘therapeutic’ approach to linguistic alienation associated with dominant communication systems. As sign and meaning theory, significs does not neglect what in our terminology is understood by ‘ideology’. Significs thematizes the danger of ‘linguistic traps’, largely connected with the unconscious use of language, with its maladies. Welby’s immediate interest in fact was not only language as the question of ‘value’ and its signifying implications expressed through verbal language, but also the non-verbal,

266

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

whether in ‘dramatic’ or ‘symbolical’ form. In terms of value, Welby distinguishes between ‘unintentional value’ corresponding to ‘sense’, ‘intentional value’ corresponding to ‘meaning’ and ‘inferential value’ corresponding to ‘significance’. So beyond the philological-historical boundaries of studies on meaning in semantics or formal logic, significs is concerned with the ‘condition of interpersonal relations and man’s mastery over the world’ (Welby [1911] 1985: v–viii). Considering the centrality of the relation of signs to values, of ‘ultimate value’, ‘import’, ‘significance’ in signifying behaviour generally, significs regards all spheres of experience, from everyday life and ordinary discourse to scientific research. In fact, it proposes metalinguistic reflection on the function, sense, foundations and conditions of language in all sectors of knowledge and human praxis. The significal focus on critical consciousness and linguistic usage, which is always subject to improvement, is part of a project for the enhancement of signifying value and understanding in human behaviour generally. Moreover, in terms of linguistic learning and education, the capacity for critique, interpretation and discrimination among different meanings can be developed from infancy. This is a topic Welby addressed in her correspondence with Charles K. Ogden, informing him of a book on significs and education which she was working on at the time, What Is & What Might Be, but never published (cf. Petrilli 2009: 35–36). Significs is a method for philosophical-linguistic analysis in semiotic perspective. With reference to developments in semiotic studies across the twentieth century, it connects with (essentially Peircean) ‘interpretation semiotics’, but is not strictly ‘cognitive semiotics’ as interpretation semiotics tends to be (in spite of Peirce’s sensibility to the ethical dimension of sign studies). The significal reach is broader owing to its insistent focus on the relation of signs to values, its structural connection to axiology. A primary concern for significs is translation of signifying value into concrete sign operations in social practice, investigating interpretive/translative processes in an ethicalpragmatical key. We have proposed the term ‘semioethics’ to name this approach, presented as the title of a co-authored book of 2003, Semioetica (now in Petrilli 2014b); another similar term is ‘ethosemiotics’. With significs, semioethics evidences the importance of the relation of signs to values, of interrogation of sense, of the value of significance, the significance of signification, of the relation between verbal and nonverbal signs for signifying process. Welby describes significs as ‘philosophy of significance’, ‘philosophy of interpretation’ and ‘philosophy of translation’. As a methodology of everyday life, it promotes human behaviour in the sign of responsibility, dialogue, responsive understanding, critique, release from dogmatism, innovation, creativity, the humanization of knowledge and life overall. As a method of observation, experimentation and critical research, significs unites science and philosophy, identifying argumentative procedure as a unifying element, whether deduction, induction or abduction, the latter also named ‘prediction’ or ‘projection’ (Petrilli 2015). Significs is intended not as a new discipline, but as an interdisciplinary method and critical metalanguage relevant to all universes of discourse where the critique of language and knowledge unites with the critique of social practice: In Significs we are not, therefore, claiming to add one more to the historical systems or methods of thought already existing. Rather does it aim at and indeed imply the assimilation and translation of all modes of arriving at truth – to be a Way which is the interpretation and co-ordination of all ways. (Welby [1903] 1983: 99)

IDEOLOGY AND SEMIOSIS

267

Welby warns against the prejudice that the relation between sign and objective world is direct, unmediated: no such thing as ‘hard dry facts’, in other words the relation to objective reality is mediated, indirect. Facts are pervaded by previous experience, values and interpretation, our own and that of others. The signs we use in live communication are not devoid of orientation, of sense before we actually come upon them ourselves, a sign has its own history, contains previous experience, is oriented according to given interests, has ideological valency and as such has its own alterity with respect to speaker intention.

Through Morris (via Peirce) Among the authors influencing Rossi-Landi’s work in relation not only to semiotics, but also ideology is Charles Morris. In 1953 Rossi-Landi published the monograph Charles Morris, enlarged edition, Charles Morris e la semiotica novecentesca, 1975, in the book series ‘Semiotica e pratica sociale’ directed by Tomás Maldonado, Luis Prieto, Adam Schaff; this was followed in 1954 by his Italian translation of Morris’s Foundations (1938). In Signification and Significance (1964), where he relates sign theory to value theory, Morris addresses ideology when he describes ‘conceived values’. In the framework of his value trichotomy, ‘conceived values’ are ideologies understood not as worldviews but as social programmes and social planning connected to sign action (thus analysed following Mead) (Petrilli 1992, 2000, 2001). Morris distinguishes conceived value from object value and operative value. ‘Ideology’ is only associated with conceived value and is thus rightly understood in a restricted sense, we will return to this. Instead, debatable is the assertion that while conceived values are signs given that they can only subsist insofar as they are signified, object and operative values may not necessarily be signs, that is, the object of signification. But all values are part of interpretive processes, and these are necessarily sign processes. In what follows ‘sign’ is understood according to Peirce: the sign is always an interpretant of something and is interpreted, in turn, by another interpretant or by another sign in an open chain of deferrals from one interpretant to the other. Meaning (Saussure’s signifié) corresponds to the interpretant as results from Peirce’s sign model (Petrilli 2019a, 2019b; Petrilli and Ponzio 2005; Ponzio 1990, 2006). On addressing the philosophical question of ‘communication’, semioticians now think less in terms of ‘emitter’, ‘message’, ‘code’, ‘channel’, ‘receiver’, though these notions still circulate among supporters of the sign science vulgata. This way of presenting the communication process derives from a specific approach to semiotics – better, ‘semiology’ given its prevalently Saussurean matrix, influenced by information theory (Shannon and Weaver 1949) as evidenced by the terminology – now known as ‘equal exchange’, ‘code and message’ or ‘decodification semiotics’. Instead, the main reference for so-called ‘interpretation semiotics’ is Peirce’s conception of the ‘sign-interpretant relation’ and his ‘infinite semiosis’. This orientation describes interpretation as resulting from the dialogical relation among ‘interpretants’, better, among ‘interpreted signs’ and ‘interpretant signs’, where the sign’s meaning is identified in the interpretant, rather in the relation to the interpretant, which is another sign that takes the place of the preceding sign: meaning is not pre-established outside semiosical processes (Sebeok 1979, 1986a, 1986b). The interpretant as a sign subsists uniquely through another interpretant and so forth, in an open chain of deferrals among sign-interpretants that render semiosis an open process dependent upon the interpretant’s potential creativity, however relatively to interpretive habit, convention, or ‘encyclopaedia’ of the social community (upon ‘habit’ as the ‘limit’

268

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

of interpretation, Eco 1990: 325–38). Unlike ‘decodification semiotics’, in ‘interpretation semiotics’ semiosis is not guaranteed by a code. Codes too are part of interpretive processes, just as choosing the adequate code for a given sign occurrence qualifies as interpretive activity; as such codes too are susceptible of revision and substitution. Returning to Morris on the semiotics-ideology relation, firstly, as averred by RossiLandi, the three dimensions of semiosis that Morris himself had already described in Foundations of a Theory of Signs (1938) – syntactics, semantics, pragmatics – are considered separately only by abstraction, for analysis. In real semiosis, they cannot be separated, accounting for sign meaning in its totality. From this perspective, the meaning of ‘ideology’ is explained without separating signification (the semantical dimension, therefore the sign-interpretant relation) from significance, value, practical sense (the pragmatical dimension, therefore the sign-interpreter relation). The upshot is that to explain ‘ideology’ means more than to define it, ideology is not reducible merely to the semantic dimension of semiosis. Ideology involves signification and significance. Moreover, the ideological sign is not separate from other ideological signs, niether on the syntagmatic nor on the paradigmatic axis. If we name this complex of relations ‘syntax’, then a semiotic explanation of ideology must keep account of the syntactical dimension with the semantical and the pragmatical. Unlike ‘object value’ and ‘operative value’, ‘conceived value’ requires a responsive interpretant not limited to simply accepting or refusing the quality attributed to the object (object value) and proposed goal (operative value) concerning that object. Instead, ideology requires a responsive interpretant on the level of programmes, of social planning, involving what to do or not to do (conceived value), which it expresses, on which are based object and operative values. The relation between the ideological sign and its responsive understanding interpretant is not direct, immediate; it is not a necessary relation characteristic of Peirce’s indexical signs, as in the statement ‘this is good’ (object value) or ‘this must be transformed in such and such a way’ (operative value); nor is it mediated by a convention, based on conventional habit as in Peirce’s symbolical signs. Saussure’s sémiologie in fact privileges conventional, in this sense symbolical signs, but Saussure understood symbols differently from Peirce. Insofar as it is abductive and puts iconic signs into play, the relation between ideological signs and their interpretants can be interrogated: the uncertainty of abductive argumentation with its iconic signs is neither regulated by the necessity of deductive argumentation (whether implicit or explicit) and its indexical signs, nor by the conventionality of inductive argumentation and its symbolical signs. In ideology the interpretant sign resembles the interpreted sign; thus, response to the ideological sign is oriented by attraction, based on a relation of similarity, resemblance. The sign-interpretant relation is dialogical at varying degrees, relatively to the degree of alterity involved: the higher the degree of alterity, or distancing, difference, excess, novelty (as in the interpretant of abductive inference), the higher the degree of dialogism (Bonfantini, Ponzio 1986). In indexical necessity and symbolical conventionality, the degree of dialogism in the sign-interpretant relation is low; instead, when a question of iconic similarity, the sign-interpretant relation can reach high degrees of alterity and dialogism. All signs contain different degrees of iconicity, symbolicity, indexicality in varying combinations. That iconicity should prevail in ideology means that the interpretant of ideological signs neither obeys causal necessity, nor is defined by conventional norms. In norms the sign-interpretant relation is indexical, deductive: once a given norm is

IDEOLOGY AND SEMIOSIS

269

accepted, an ‘operative value’ in Morris’s terminology, it would be contradictory not to adopt the relative behaviour, the semiosis foreseen. Instead, the interpretant of the ideological sign ranges across the vast, undefined field of similarity leaving free play to imagination, innovation, inventiveness (on the iconicity-abduction-inventiveness relation, see Bonfantini 1987; Bonfantini, Petrilli and Ponzio 2006; Bonfanini and Ponzio 2010).

What are the advantages of this Peircean rereading of Morris’s trichotomy: ‘object values’, ‘operative values’ and ‘conceived values’? In Introduction to Semantics (1960), Schaff already evidences the close connection of verbal signs to concepts and stereotypes, not only in cognitive processes, but also in praxis. However, he does not investigate the difference between stereotype and ideology, but simply states that while the stereotype does not immediately identify with ideology, ideology does not subsist without stereotypes. In stereotypes, the responsive understanding sign-interpretant relation is symbolical, conventional and thus inductive: once the stereotype is passively accepted, based on a given convention, practice or custom,3 it suggests a given behaviour. Hence, ‘negro’ or ‘Jew’ as negative stereotypes can give rise to behaviours that derive from accepting the stereotype. However, not to adopt such behaviours, at least not all, does not result in a contradiction. In ideology the sign-interpretant relationship is iconical, hence abductive: given a certain ideology – ‘conceived value’ – that is more or less stable, more or less defined (though the subject may not necessarily be fully aware of it), the subject in a given context adopts a given semiosis which relates to ideology by resemblance, such that it is recognized and interpreted as the expression and reproduction of that ideology. In The Open Self (1948), after distinguishing between ‘designative signs’, ‘appreciative signs’, ‘prescriptive signs’, Morris adds that levels of reference are multiple and often confused: not only do we have ‘signs of objects’, but also ‘signs of signs’, ‘signs of signs of signs’, so that we are easily deceived, even led to exchange words for things, to believe that wherever there is a word, there is a thing. In extreme cases, we are victims to ‘sign magic’; in less extreme cases, we are guilty of ‘sign confusion’. Morris points to the importance of social planning in the construction of self and society: self and society always presuppose social planning, without any possibility of escape. The problem is not “to plan or not to plan”, but whether to plan a ‘closed self’ and a ‘closed society’ or an ‘open self’ and ‘open society’. In the former, instead of valorizing freedom, manipulation strategies are put into place to control the people, in the first place by controlling mass communication, where the human is no longer an end, but is reduced to means. In the latter, social planning is focused on knowledge, dialogue and freedom (Sebeok, Petrilli, and Ponzio 2001; Petrilli 2013). As regards his attention for sign use, in particular for manipulation strategies of the conscious, Morris in The Open Self (1948) had already denounced the power of mass communication as a widespread form of conditioning. He underlines the interrelation between linguistic use, formation of preferences, choice in ways of living and lifestyle, in behaviour, (non-verbal) semiosis. Nor does he fail to attend to special languages for special uses and purposes – e.g. the discourse of scientists, artists and religious people. All this induces Morris to emphasize the importance of correct linguistic usage. From this point of view, we could claim that he too contributes towards raising awareness for the need of an ethics of language, semioethically concerned with building social relations in the sign of such values as human dignity, freedom, dialogue and responsibility. Such

270

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

problematics effectively relate Morris’s ‘semiotic’ to Welby’s ‘significs’ and ‘critique of language’, with its original developments in the Signific Movement of the Netherlands (Petrilli 2009).

LANGUAGE-WORK, PRIMARY MODELLING AND IDEOLOGY AS SOCIAL PLANNING Language as work For Rossi-Landi semiotics as the global study of signs does not only address the rules that govern message exchange. Semiotics must also study the rules of sign and message production. This means to recover the connection between sign exchange values and the social relations of sign production determining the values that orientate sign exchanges (1974: 31–69). Analogously to Marx when he discusses the ‘fetishism of commodities’, Schaff (1960) introduces the expression ‘sign fetishism’ for all sign and language theories that explain meaning as relations among signs, signs and code, sign and object, etc. whilst losing sight of the fact that sign relations are essentially relations among human beings communicating with each other, in historically determined social situations. That to establish a relation between the ‘fetishism of commodities’ and ‘sign fetishism’ is a scientifically valid operation and helpful in understanding the semioses of human behaviour is confirmed by linguistic value theory as thematized by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Cours (on his unpublished writings, see Ponzio 2018b). Saussure relates linguistics and economics insofar as they are both ‘value sciences’. Taking Marginalist ‘pure economics’ from the School of Lausanne (Walras 1900; Pareto 1916) as his model, Saussure reduces sign value to exchange value among signs in the language system, separated from the structures and social processes of linguistic production. Having dedicated the last years of his life to pure mathematics, precisely differential calculus, Marx demonstrates how the ‘mystery’ of infinitesimal differential calculus, like the ‘mystery of commodities’, can only be solved keeping account of underlying human operations. The form of differential calculus requires examination at each occurrence in the real processes of the algebraic operations that produce it. The enigma of merchandise calls for a similar approach. In both cases, commodities and signs are detached from the ‘real operations’ constituting their function, refraction, expression (Marx [1886] 2020). In Language as Work and Trade (1968, Eng. trans. 1983) and Linguistics and Economics (1974), Rossi-Landi analyses language as work, inaugurating an approach to linguistics that is closely connected to the question of ideology. He develops such concepts as ‘linguistic production’, ‘linguistic work’, ‘linguistic capital’ describing them in relation to ‘social production’. Today such concepts are mistakenly described in terms of ‘immaterial resource’, ‘immaterial capital’, ‘immaterial investment’ (based of course on a reductive definition of materialism), recognized as central factors in a ‘healthy’ global market, for its expansion and performance in terms of competition, productiveness and employment, according to an ideological orientation that capitalizes on such values (Petrilli 1987, 2003, 2018). With his theory of ‘language as work’ in writings of the 1960s and 1970s, Rossi-Landi critiques approaches that simply describe linguistic behaviour (behaviourism), linguistic use (à la Wittgenstein), ordinary language (à la Oxonian philosophy), the ‘state of a given language’ (à la Saussure), the taxonomy (à la Martinet) and ‘worldview’ of a given language

IDEOLOGY AND SEMIOSIS

271

(à la Sapir and Whorf’s theory of linguistic relativity), the ‘generative transformational rules’ of ‘deep structures’ and ‘surface structures’ based on ‘innate universal grammar’ (à la Chomsky, who neither explains, nor even ponders why there exist many languages). Instead, beyond describing, Rossi-Landi aims to explain the structures and historicalsocial processes of linguistic production, the structures and processes that produce such phenomena as those just listed. In Rossi-Landi’s view, production cannot be separated from circulation, thus from the promotion and circulation of social programmes, programmings and planning (ideologies) functional to reproduction of the dominant economico-social production system. Rossi-Landi aimed to overcome descriptive approaches to language theory, including the Chomskyan. In fact, in spite of his explanatory and genealogical orientation, Noam Chomsky focuses on innate universal grammar, which instead hypostatizes the language he wants to explain. In Produzione linguistica e ideologia sociale (1973), Augusto Ponzio investigates Chomsky’s generative-transformational grammar, his innate universal grammar and conception of linguistic creativity in light of Rossi-Landi’s theory of ‘language as work’, hence contributing to a new approach to general linguistics (developed in Ponzio 2002, 2004). Ponzio also works at a critical theory of ideology, closely connected with language studies. Central themes include ‘linguistic abnormality’, ‘linguistic alienation’, the relationship between linguistic and material production – between language and power (thematised in Ponzio 2018a). Evoking Marx, Rossi-Landi sets up the study of language as the passage from the level of the ‘linguistic market’ to that of the ‘linguistic work’ that subtends ‘linguistic value’ (Rossi-Landi 1968, 1974). That language is work implies reconsidering work differently from how it is normally understood, i.e. work as tasking, quantifiable in spite of incommensurability (for example, the ‘credit’ system invented to quantify the ‘immaterial work’ of education and study in hours), thus undifferentiated, depersonalized work. Instead, work is considered by Rossi-Landi as the capacity to create, invent, reelaborate, inevitably involving participation, singularity, innovation. When language and work are instrumentalized for the sake of reproducing the same social production relationships in a given social system, the forces of constriction, exploitation and alienation are clearly evident in both work and language on analysing them in relation to each other. Instead, both ‘material’ and ‘immaterial’ (i.e. linguistic) work understood in terms of inventiveness, innovation, creativity present a capacity for excess with respect to a given system at the level of the relations of production. The human capacity for language and work denounces a relation of disparity, inequality, alterity with respect to social systems and production relations that aim to contain and exploit them in order to persist and endure. In contrast to the being of communication and production characteristic of a given social system, language and work as such involve the possibility of an otherwise than being. They are recalcitrant to ontology, to performing as the custodian of being. Nor can they be contained by alternatives offered by the established order – their vocation is excess, otherness. To speak of ‘linguistic work’ is not merely to establish an analogy with ‘non-linguistic work’. Rossi-Landi shows that the relation between work and language is homological. Language is work. Linguistic production involves the whole of society as an integral part of social reproduction. In this light, definitions of the human as laborans and loquens coincide. The production of messages and the production of commodities do not belong to separate spheres. Both involve semiosis and the linguistic work of modelling.

272

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Language as primary modelling Rossi-Landi’s ‘language as work’ can be associated to Thomas Sebeok’s ‘language as primary modelling’.4 Sebeok names the human species-specific modelling device, capable of inventing and constructing multiple worlds, with the expression language distinct from speech. The first hominid was endowed with primary modelling, fully expressed in Homo habilis, with language precisely, but not speech, unlike Homo sapiens and Sapiens. In Homo sapiens verbal language enormously amplifies the inventive and transformational capacity of language understood as primary modelling (Petrilli and Ponzio 2002). Even before presenting itself as verbal language and performing communicative functions that enhance and renew non-verbal sign behaviours as well (they too ‘languages’), language is modelling procedure (an expression we prefer to ‘system’, recovered by Sebeok from the Moscow-Tartu school in semiotics), a construction model of the world (Sebeok 1991a, 1991b). Its specific function is to signify, interpret, confer sense. All animals are endowed with a construction model of the world; ‘language’ is the human model and is different altogether from modelling procedure in other animals. What is not different are the types of sign used (icons, indexes, symbols, etc.). The distinctive trait of ‘language’ is articulation, syntactics, a combinatorial procedure that allows for the production of an infinite number of senses and meanings with a finite number of elements. The capacity for articulation in verbal language (Martinet’s double articulation) is one aspect of language modelling procedure which articulates our vision of the world on the basis of differentiation and deferral, and from which verbal articulation ensues. As syntactics, therefore, language modelling uses pieces that can be assembled in an infinite number of different ways. It thus gives rise to an indeterminate number of models that can be deconstructed to construct different models with the same pieces. As Sebeok (1986a) claims, thanks to language thus understood, human beings not only produce the world they live in, like all other animals, but they can also produce an infinite number of possible worlds: this is the ‘play of musement’ (an expression adapted by Sebeok from Peirce as the title of his 1981 book), essential to scientific research as to all forms of investigation and simulation, from deception to fiction, and to all forms of artistic creation. ‘Creativity’, which Chomsky considers as a specific characteristic of verbal language, is in truth a derivative therein, proper to language as modelling procedure instead. The a priori is not speech, but language as primary modelling. Language is a modelling device present in the first hominid, though not developed; this species-specific ‘endowment’ explains evolution of the human species to Homo sapiens (Sebeok 1994: 117–28). Language (primary modelling in Homo) emerged and developed through adaptation, much earlier than speech, as part of development of the human species to Homo sapiens. Thus language did not originate as a communicative device, but as modelling procedure. Chomsky too maintains that language is not essentially communicative (Chomsky 1957, 1986), but by ‘language’ he understands ‘verbal language’, Sebeok’s ‘speech’. Instead, for Sebeok verbal language appears from the outset through adaptation as a communicative device. Chomsky’s theory of verbal language does not account for the difference between language as primary modelling and verbal language, but without differentiating, neither the origin of verbal language nor its functioning is adequately explained. Speech developed from language as modelling, following evolutionary development of human physical and neurological capacities, which enabled language for vocal communication. Speech like language also appeared through adaptation, but for communication and much later than language, with Homo sapiens.

IDEOLOGY AND SEMIOSIS

273

In the course of evolutionary development of the human species, through the process of ‘exaptation’ language too develops communicative functions thereby enhancing speech, and speech assumes modelling functions thereby enhancing language as modelling, finding expression in the great multiplicity of different languages. ‘Exapted’ for verbal communication, first oral, then written, language as modelling also favours development of non-verbal human communication, allowing for a broad and complex range of non-verbal languages. Speech, in turn, in the form of a historical-natural language, was ‘exapted’ for modelling, to function, in turn, as secondary modelling procedure. Speech enhances the communication capacity and also empowers the communicative capacity of non-verbal languages, thereby favouring their specialisation and proliferation. Additionally, speech develops the human semiotic capacity, the capacity for metasemiosis, thus for development in terms of cognition, organization, invention, critique, freedom and responsibility. As anticipated, there is a certain confusion in Chomsky’s thesis that communication is not the specific function of language, for he is not referring to language as a primary modelling device. ‘Language’ for Chomsky is ‘verbal language’, particularly speech whose original function is communication, which in fact determined its formation and development. Chomsky lacks the concept of modelling, present instead in Sapir and Whorf’s ‘theory of linguistic relativity’ (Sapir 1952; Whorf 1956) which is diametrically opposed to Chomskyian theory. However, given that linguistic relativity does not trace the (secondary) modelling of historico-natural languages back to language as (primary) modelling, it fails to explain diversity and multiplicity among historico-natural languages, tending to present them as closed universes. Chomsky explains the specific grammar of different historical-natural languages in light of ‘language’ as an innate ‘faculty’, rather than as a species-specific modelling device, as figuration of the world; and even when he uses the expression ‘grammar’ for language (‘universal grammar’ distinct from grammars of different historico-natural languages), an expression suited to indicate the modelling character and transcendental function of language, he conceives of grammar as generating sentences in different languages, endowed therefore with a phonological, syntactical and semantical component, with the sole difference that this is a universal grammar (Chomsky 1965). Chomsky denies verbal language an original communicative function, which means to isolate historical-natural languages from historical-social contexts5 and invest them with absolute autonomy from non-verbal languages (Chomsky 1957, 1966), as though interpretive trajectories could be constructed with verbal signs alone, in relations of deferral from one verbal interpretant to another (surface and deep structures). Not to distinguish between ‘language’ and ‘verbal language’ gives rise (as in scholars like Lieberman 1975, who attempt to explain language origin in terms of Chomskyian theory) to forms of ‘psychological oversimplification’. In other words, ‘complex anthropogenic processes are reduced to the linear development of certain cognitive capacities, described in the language of traditional syntactics’ (Rossi-Landi 1985: 229).

Ideology as ‘Orwell’s problem’ and ‘social planning’ Chomsky addresses and continues to address the problem of ideology (among his recent works, Who Rules the World? 2016), more so now than language and his generativetransformational grammar. In Knowledge of Language (1985), Chomsky investigates two problems relating to human knowledge that have ‘fascinated’ him for years. The first consists of explaining

274

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

how a large quantity of knowledge is possible on the basis of circumscribed data. Chomsky denominates this first problem – that is, that of how we reach a vast and exhaustive quantity of knowledge, organized by precise rules, through limited and fragmentary data – ‘Plato’s problem’ and refers it to language. This is the problem of how linguistic competence is formed, enabling the speaker to formulate and understand an infinite number of sentences in a given language, based on experience limited to a finite number of sentences in that language, moreover not always necessarily complete or correct. The second problem is that of explaining how only limited knowledge is reached, even with a great quantity of data at one’s disposal. This is the problem of ideology: how experience and awareness are organized in a given social situation, how worldview is planned. The problem of cognitive restriction, of cognitive limitations with respect to the quantity of available data is attributed to reasons of the ideological order. Chomsky names this ‘Orwell’s problem’: a correlate in the social and political field to what could be identified as ‘Freud’s problem’ (Chomsky 1985: 3). ‘Orwell’s problem’ is specified in relation to ideology. The statement that ‘Orwell’s problem’ is distinct from ‘Freud’s problem’, as though only the first belonged to the sphere of the socio-political, deserves closer attention. Two chapter titles in Vološinov’s Freudianism (1927) already indicate how to address the issue in relation to ideology: ‘The Dynamics of the Psyche as a Struggle of Ideological Motives and Not of Natural Forces’ and ‘The Content of Consciousness as Ideology’. In 1984 Orwell himself would seem to be aware of the connection between individual psyche and social ideology. That these two problems are addressed unequally is obvious already in terms of quantity: four out of five chapters forming Chomsky’s book, Knowledge of Language, are dedicated to Plato’s problem; only the fifth, ‘Notes on Orwell’s Problem’, attends to the second problem. In his Preface, Chomsky justifies the difference, provoking another more profound difference at the origin of the first, one of a methodological order. Plato’s problem is relevant to science. It calls for explanatory principles, often hidden and abstract. Instead, Orwell’s problem mainly consists of accumulating data and examples (Chomsky 1986: 6). The difference in how these two problems are handled indicates that for Chomsky ideology cannot be studied scientifically: while an explanatory analysis is possible concerning Plato’s problem, Orwell’s problem only foresees a description of facts and behaviours: ‘description’ here as the expression of ‘false consciousness’ calls for denunciation, critique. A net separation emerges between the two fields, that of language and ideology, and Chomsky himself doubles into the linguistic ‘scientist’ and another figure, the political commentator, who denounces dominant ideologies, evidencing the tendency to distortion, reduction, oversimplification, alienation. Consequently, these two fields are treated through different discourse genres: in the case of Plato’s problem the scientific essay; for Orwell’s problem journalistic articles and pamphlets focused on critique of ideology and US politics. The study of ideology is not limited to accumulating data and examples, but can be conducted scientifically, calling for refined theoretical instruments, a method of analysis and support from scientific disciplines, above all the sign sciences. This is amply demonstrated by authors who have dedicated entire volumes to the problem of ideology, both in the restricted (Marxian) sense of false consciousness and in the broad sense of social planning. Schaff, Rossi-Landi and Prieto count among those who have dedicated special attention to the language-ideology relation.

IDEOLOGY AND SEMIOSIS

275

In Chomsky, the difference in method used to approach Plato’s problem and Orwell’s problem is that between the study of language, scientific insofar as it is explanatory, and the study of ideology, unscientific insofar as it is descriptive. Insofar as it is not explanatory, devoid of theoretical foundations, discourse on ideology, accumulating data and examples, becomes accusation, denunciation, but is incapable of critique of ideology. Nor is the study of language, although explanatory – but not to the point of focusing on relations between language and ideology and thus consider the social and political context of linguistic-ideological production – capable of critiquing language. And the historical-social dimension of language is not taken into account because Chomsky addresses Plato’s problem, for what concerns language, resorting to innatism: innatism updated in biological terms. Chomsky investigates the nature of the biological legacy that constitutes the human ‘faculty of language’, the mind/brain’s innate component. Once the innate component enters into contact with linguistic experience, how does it produce knowledge of language, how does it convert experience of language into a system of knowledge (Chomsky 1986: 4)? Rossi-Landi’s conception of language as work (1968, 1974) leads to interpreting ideology as social planning (1972, 1982). On a paradigmatic level ‘social planning’ alternates with ‘programme’ and ‘programming’. ‘Programme’, ‘programming’, ‘planning’ in that order proceed from the less to the more general: A programme can be extremely limited, for example that which supports the conversation normally held between a salesperson and a customer in a shop; programming is not something only vaster, but also more permanent, regulating, for example, the effective exchange of commodities on the market; finally, planning concerns society, or at least some fundamental process of social reproduction, global and potentially exhaustive. (Rossi-Landi 1978: 281, English translation) On considering ideology as social planning, reference is to the sign’s ideological context. Ideology is relative to a given social situation; it requires to be examined and understood in this situation, where it is produced and circulates. As social planning, ideology is not simply the product of a given society, where society subsists autonomously from its ideologies; instead, ideology is one of its social plannings – whether dominant, or marginal, or alternative – in light of which society at a certain time organizes itself, acts, manifests itself in its distinctive features (cf. Williams 1958). Ideology is planning in a given social system and as such contributes to delineating that system. Even when ideology clashes with the social system, tending to transform it or to upturn it altogether, it is still one of its expressions, participating in that system as part of its contradictory nature. That ideology participates in delineating a given society does not mean that it cannot clash with it, thus contributing to the presentation of its internal contradictions. Moreover, ideology as social planning considered from a semiotic perspective studies the influence of the sign sphere on action, which it orientates in a certain direction. Among the fulcrums of semiosis, ideology as social planning pends on the side of the interpreter, as evidenced by the pragmatic dimension. Ideology as social planning highlights those aspects of semiosis that characterize it: context, interpreter and active response – the interpretant of responsive understanding – and the pragmatic dimension.

276

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Rossi-Landi also criticizes the idea (supported instead by Verón 1971) that ideology exclusively concerns the pragmatic dimension of semiosis and connotative meaning: [T]he distinction between the three dimensions [semantic, syntactic, pragmatic] has been useful to clarify many problems, but it does not stand up to close scrutiny (which would involve a long excursus on general semiotics). […] even the syntactical and semantic aspects with language have an intrinsically ideological dimension. It is a complete myth to postulate an opposition between the syntax and semantics of language – which are held to be immune from ideological influence, or which at least tend to be (especially syntax) – and a pragmatic aspect which is saturated by ideology. (Rossi-Landi 1978: 230–1, English translation)6

Ideology and literary excess Ideology subsists in the dialogical relation among interpretants, at different degrees of dialogism and alterity. Thanks to the propensity for innovation and to representational capacity, certain ideological signs escape the horizon of contemporaneity (from which however they draw a given ideology), and like literary artworks flourish autonomously in what Bakhtin names the ‘great time’ (Bakhtin 1981, 1986). In an ideological expression conveying a sense of relative detachment from the ideology depicted in a literary artwork, for instance a sense of irony (if not outright criticism), even caricature, to establish where the author’s awareness begins and where it finishes can be difficult – whether unintentional processes are involved, significations unforeseen by the author, resonating with sense beyond the author’s control. Rossi-Landi (1985), in ‘Criteri per lo studio ideologico di un autore’, speaks of ‘ideological excess’. Thanks to an ‘excess’ with respect to the verbal and non-verbal sign systems that originally conditioned the author, even beyond authorial intention, literary writing can shake the pillars of an ideology already in crisis (cf. also Williams 1977). Bakhtin and members of his Circle, particularly Valentin Vološinov and Pavel Medvedev, gave a major contribution to investigating the relation between semiotics and ideology both in real life semiosis and in literary semiosis, in ordinary discourse genres, in ‘oniric work’ and in literary genres. Ideology for the Bakhtin Circle, as defined by Vološinov (1929), is the complex of reflexes and interpretations of social and natural reality occurring in the human brain, expressed through words or other sign formations (Threadgold 1986). Rossi-Landi points to Freudian ‘oniric work’ which he associates to his ‘linguistic work’, therefore to ‘ideology as social planning’, conscious or unconscious (Rossi-Landi 1978, 1985). Far from contrasting individual praxis (dreaming) and social praxis (speaking), Rossi-Landi evidences the historico-social, co-participative nature of ‘linguistic work’ and ideology. Reading Rossi-Landi and Augusto Ponzio, this aspect of ideology is also developed by Susan Petrilli in relation to the question of translation (Petrilli 2021b). As demonstrated by Valentin N. Vološinov in Freudism (1927) and Marxism and Philosophy of Language (1929), individual consciousness is formed through interiorization of the exterior signs of social communication in a given cultural system. ‘Verbal reaction’ is external and internal discourse, which constitutes all acts of the conscious; the material of both internal and external discourse is historico-social material. On the problem of the conscious, particularly interesting is chapter IX in Freudianism, ‘The Content of Consciousness as Ideology’. Consciousness is language, ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ discourse,

IDEOLOGY AND SEMIOSIS

277

objective, material, historico-social discourse. Levels of consciousness and ideology vary with no difference in principle between them: the difference is in the degree of elaboration of the contents of consciousness, in the capacity to use social materials and instruments, which are sign materials and instruments, firstly verbal. The contents of the individual psyche and of culture belong to the same generative process; the structures producing individual consciousness and those of more complex ideological formations are fundamentally the same. The different levels of consciousness and ideology are different levels of sign elaboration, verbal elaboration. The relation between individual psyche and social ideology is one of continuity; indeed, the first, internal discourse, is interiorization of the second, external discourse. As social clashes and contradictions increase, ‘everyday ideology’ becomes ever more complex, is ever more stratified. Only the higher strata, which correspond to the conscious under censorship in the Freudian sense, present signs of accommodating, even identifying, with the ideology of institutions, imposed by the dominant class: in the lower strata, everyday ideology becomes increasingly distant from official ideology, in full contrast even. These strata correspond to the Freudian unconscious. Vološinov (1927) names the Freudian unconscious ‘unofficial conscious’ distinguishing it from normal ‘official conscious’. Insofar as they are made of language, both are social. The content and composition of the unofficial strata of everyday ideology (corresponding to the content and composition of the unconscious in Freud) are conditioned by epoch and social stratification, as Vološinov says, just as official strata are conditioned by the social, as in legal ideological systems (morality, law, world visions). Homosexual passions of the ancient Hellenic dominant class, for instance, did not create conflict in everyday ideology, such that they freely passed into external discourse, finding literary ideological expression in Plato’s Symposium. The question of the relation between individual psyche, signs and ideology is taken up by Vološinov in Marxism and Philosophy of Language, in the chapter ‘Philosophy of Language and Objective Psychology’. This is focused on such problematics as the sign reality of the psyche, the distinctive quality of the internal sign (internal discourse), and the socio-ideological nature of the psyche. Bakhtin and members of his Circle analyse ideologies in terms still relevant to present-day reality. They scrutinize such issues as the stratification of ideologies, their blending, ambivalence, mutual connivance, homologation, masking, disguise, imprecise physiognomy, lack of identity, doubtful provenance. On the problem of ideological sense, Bakhtin (1963, 1965) draws on the special perspective of literature, specifically ‘carnivalized’ literature, the main genre being the novel. He identifies two particularly significant moments in literary production: penetration of Medieval comico-popular culture into the great Humanist-Renaissance literary tradition (with a focus on Rabelais) and the rise of a distinct novelistic genre, the polyphonic (focused on Dostoevsky). Instead of simply reflecting ‘official ideologies’, ideological systems that are already constituted, literature presents ideologies in the making, as the material of literary form (Medvedev 1928). Literature penetrates the social laboratory where ideologies take shape. With respect to literary value, consolidated ideologies emerge as hologen bodies, investing the text with the character of an educational work, a pamphlet, religious propaganda, etc. Literary writing, instead, is always related to plastic, uncertain, elusive, hybrid ideologies, with subjects mostly indeterminate, divided, plural, without a precise face. Studying Dostoevsky’s ‘polyphonic novel’, Bakhtin encounters ideologies as we experience them today: the distinctive feature is the multiplicity of voices that cannot be channelled into a unifying vision, even if dialectical. Ideological sense in the polyphonic novel always remains other, alien with respect to objectifying consciousness, but at the

278

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

same time it is neither reified nor self-sufficient. As ideologies of contemporary reality, voices in the polyphonic novel do not unite and combine in the unity of a world perceived and understood monologically. Certainly, we can position ourselves according to the unilinear causality of monologism, researching the ideology factor as first cause, just as we can search the polyphonic novel for its author, with the characters as his mouthpieces: but in this case, the ideological universe, the universe of the polyphonic novel is chaotic, a conglomerate of heterogeneous materials. For this reason, as much as Bakhtin accepts the idea that development of Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel is favoured by the reality of Russian capitalism, he considers this interpretation as insufficient for an adequate understanding of Dostoevsky’s novel. The spirit of capitalism is doubtlessly present in the language of art (Bakhtin 1963), particularly in the language of a special variety of the novelistic genre. It will be necessary first to discover the constructive specificities of this multi-levelled novel, devoid of customary monological unity. For this reason, we cannot pass, as though a question of the cause-effect relationship, from the level of the novel made of a multiplicity of senses and voices to the level of reality (Petrilli 2012). However we distinguish between the ‘ideological’ and ‘non-ideological’, all social reality is made of signs, just as life is made of signs – semiosis and life coincide (Sebeok 2001). But in the study of ideologies, rather than defer to another totality (that formed of verbal and non-verbal sign systems), the goal is to show how signs interact with each other, in given communicative contexts, that is, in specific discourse genres. This is why Bakhtin (1963) and Vološinov (1929) both dedicate particular attention to dialogue among utterances within the same discourse genre, without losing sight of varying aspects in relation to different discourse genres, above all when depicted in literary writing.

NOTES 1 Parallel to the journal Versus: Quaderni di Studi Semiotici, both of which were directed by Umberto Eco. 2 Welby’s What Is Meaning? was followed by publication of her Significs and Language in 1911. 3 With reference to our discourse above, this is what Charles Morris named ‘object value’, whether it is assumed in positive or negative terms (e.g. ‘good’, ‘edible’ or ‘bad’, ‘inedible’). 4 It is not incidental that Sebeok should have published the first edition of Rossi-Landi’s Linguistics and Economics in 1974, in a book series directed by himself. 5 And not incidentally Chomsky denies sociolinguistics value as a science. 6 Cf. Ponzio (2012b) for a critique of the separation of syntactics and semantics from pragmatics and consequently from ideology as social planning as a result of keeping account of Chomsky’s generative-transformational grammar. This book by Ponzio expands on a critique that he had already developed in the early 1970s; see Ponzio (1973).

REFERENCES Althusser, L. ([1978] 2004), Marx dans ses limites, trans. F. Raimondi, as Marx nei suoi limiti, Milan: Mimesis. Bacon, F. ([1620] 1878), Novum Organon, ed. T. Fowler (notes), London: Macmillan & Co. Bakhtin, M. e il suo Circolo ([1919–30] 2014), Opere 1919–1930, bilingual Russian/Italian edition, ed. A. Ponzio, trans. A. Ponzio and L. Ponzio, Milan: Bompiani.

IDEOLOGY AND SEMIOSIS

279

Bakhtin, M. ([1929/1963] 1984), Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, C. Emerson (ed. and trans.), Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bakhtin, M. ([1965] 1984), Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bakhtin, M. (1981), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, in M. Holquist (ed.), Austin: Austin University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986), Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, in C. Emerson and M. Holquist (eds), V. W. McGee (trans.), Austin: University of Texas Press. Barthes, R. (1964), Essais critiques, Paris: Seuil. Benjamin, W. ([1931] 1978), ‘The Destructive Character’, in P. Demetz (ed.), Reflections, 301–4, New York: Schocken Books. Bonfantini, M. (1987), La semiosi e l’abduzione, Milan: Bompiani. Bonfantini, M. and A. Ponzio ([1986] 2010), Dialogo sui dialoghi, Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane. Bonfantini, M., S. Petrilli and A. Ponzio (2006), Dialoghi semiotici, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane. Chomsky, N. (1957), Syntactic Structures, The Hague: Mouton. Chomsky, N. (1965), Aspects of a Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, N. (1966), Cartesian Linguistics, New York: Harper & Row. Chomsky, N. (1986), Knowledge of Language. Its Nature, Origin and Use, New York: Praeger. Chomsky, N. (2016), Who Rules the Word?, New York: Metropolitan Book. Cobley, P. (2018), ‘Human Understanding: The Key Triad’, The American Journal of Semiotics, 34 (1–2): 17–38. Deely, J. (1990), Basics of Semiotics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Deely, J. (2001), Four Ages of Understanding, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Deely, J. (2009), Purely Objective Reality, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Destutt, de Tracy, A. L. Cl. (1801–15), Éléments d’idéologie, 5 vols, Paris: Presses Didot. Eco, U. (1975), Trattato di semiotica, Milan: Bompiani. Eco, U. (1990), I limiti dell’interpretazione, Milan: Bompiani; The Limits of Interpretation, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gardiner, A. H. (1932), The Theory of Speech and Language, Oxford: Clarendon. Gibson, J. J. (1986), The Ecological Approach to Perception, Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gramsci, A. (1977), Quaderni dal carcere, ed. V. Gerratana, Turin: Einaudi. Klaus, G. ([1964] 1969), Die Macht des Wortes, Berlin: Veb Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften. Lieberman, P. (1975), On the Origin of Language. An Introduction to the Evolution of Human Speech, London: Macmillan. Locke, J. (1690), Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. Lyotard, J. F. (1979), La condition postmoderne, Paris: Minuit. Manicardi, E. (2020), Rete, oppio dei popoli, Milan: Mimesis. Mannheim, K. ([1929] 1936), Ideology and Utopia, London: Routledge. Marx, K. ([1881] 2020), Manoscritti matematici, trans. A. Ponzio (ed.), Milano: Pigreco. Marx, K. and F. Engels. ([1846] 1970), The German Ideology, C. Arthur (ed.), London: Lawrence Wishart. Medvedev, P. N. ([1928] 1978), The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, trans. A. J. Weherle, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

280

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Morris, C. (1938), Foundations of a Theory of Signs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morris, C. (1948), The Open Self, New York: Prentice-Hall. Morris, C. (1964), Signification and Significance, Cambridge: MIT Press. Nietzsche, F. ([1873–6] 2019), Unfashionable Observations, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nöth, W. (2004), ‘Semiotics of ideology’, Semiotica, 148: 11–21. Orwell, G. (1948), Nineteen Eighty-Four, New York: Penguin, 1982. Pareto, V. ([1916] 1964), Trattato di sociologia generale, Turin: UTET. Peirce, C. S. ([1866–1913] 1931–58), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols 1–6, C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds), vols 7–8, A. Burks (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cited as CP. Petrilli, S., ed. (1987), Per Ferruccio Rossi–Landi. Il Protagora 11/12, XXVII, intro., 7–9, by S. Petrilli. Petrilli, S. (1992), The Correspondence between Morris and Rossi-Landi, Semiotica, 88 (1–2): 37–122. Petrilli, S. (2000), ‘Charles Morris’, in J. Verschueren, J.-O. Ostman and J. Blommaert (eds), Handbook of Pragmatics, 1–26, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Petrilli, S. (2001), ‘In the Sign of Charles Morris’, Recherches Sémiotiques, 21: 1–2. Petrilli, S., ed. (2003), Lavoro immateriale, Athanor (Semiotica, Filosofia, Arte, Letteratura 14.7), Rome: Meltemi. Petrilli, S., ed. (2003), Logica, dialogica, ideologica: I segni tra funzionalità ed eccedenza, Milan: Mimesis. Petrilli, S., ed. (2004), Ideology, Logic, and Dialogue in Semioethic Perspective, Special Issue of Semiotica, 148 (1–4): 1–9. Petrilli, S. (2005), Semiotics Unbounded, in A. Ponzio (ed.), Toronto: Toronto University Press. Petrilli, S., ed. (2009), Signifying and Understanding: Reading the Works of Victoria Welby and the Signific Movement, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Petrilli, S. (2012), Altrove e altrimenti. Con Bachtin, Milan: Mimesis. Petrilli, S. (2013), The Self as a Sign, the World and the Other, New Brunswick: Transaction. Petrilli, S. (2014a), Sign Studies and Semioethics, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Petrilli, S. (2014b), Semioetica e comunicazione globale, Athanor. Filosofia, Semiotica, Arte, Letteratura, XXV, 17, Milan: Mimesis. Petrilli, S. (2015), Victoria Welby and the Science of Signs: Significs, Semiotics, Philosophy of Language, New Brunswick: Transaction. Petrilli, S. (2016), The Global World and Its Manifold Faces, Bern: Peter Lang. Petrilli, S., ed. (2017), Challenges to Living Together, Milan: Meltemi. Petrilli, S. (2018). ‘Linguistica e economia in Ferruccio Rossi-Landi. Lavoro materiale e lavoro immateriale’, in V. Russo (ed.), Linguistica ed Economia, 51–64, Naples: Academy School. Petrilli, S. (2019a), Signs, Language and Listening. A Semioethic Perspective, Ottawa: Legas. Petrilli, S. (2019b), Significare, interpretare, intendere. Tra segni, lingue, linguaggi e valori, Lecce: Pensa Multimedia. Petrilli, S., ed. (2020), Diritti umani e diritti altrui, Milan: Mimesis. Petrilli, S. (2021a), Senza ripari. Segni, differenze, estraneità, Milan: Mimesis. Petrilli, S. (2021b), ‘Translation, Ideology, and Social Practice’, in Meng Ji and Sara Laviosa (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Translation and Social Practices, 23–44, New York: Oxford University Press. Petrilli, S. and A. Ponzio (2000), Il sentire della comunicazione globale, Rome: Meltemi.

IDEOLOGY AND SEMIOSIS

281

Petrilli, S. and A. Ponzio (2002), I segni e la vita. La semiotica globale di Sebeok. Milan: Spirali. Petrilli, S. and A. Ponzio (2010), ‘Semiotics and Philosophy’, Semiotica, 179 (1–4): 33–45. Petrilli, S. and A. Ponzio (2012), ‘Semantics and Critique of Political Economy in Adam Schaff’, Semiotica, 189 (1–4): 133–68. Petrilli, S. and A. Ponzio (2016a), Lineamenti di semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio, Perugia: Guerra Edizioni. Petrilli, S. and A. Ponzio (2016b), ‘The Right to Peace and the Globalization of Infinite War’, Calumet – Intercultural Law and Humanities Online Review, 1–26, https://calumet-review. com/index.php/it/2016/10/10/the-right-to-peace-and-the-globalization-of-infinite-war-adialogue-with-susan-petrilli-2/. Petrilli, S. and A. Ponzio (2019a), Identità e alterita, Milan: Mimesis. Petrilli, S. and A. Ponzio (2019b), ‘Linguaggio dell’economia e progettazione ideologica’, 87–102, in di E. M. Piccirilli and Va. Russo (eds), Linguistica ed Economia, vol. 2, Un contributo tra due discipline come ricerca filosofica nell’economia degli scambi, a cura e Presentazione, 9–10, Naples: Academy School. Plato. (1985), Symposium, London: Penguin Books. Ponzio, A. (1971), ‘Basi biologiche e strutture storico-sociali del linguaggio’, Aut-Aut, 129 (30): 83–104. Ponzio, A. (1973), Produzione linguistica e ideologia sociale, Bari: De Donato; new ed. 2006, Bari: Graphis. New expanded edition in French, Production linguistique et idéologie sociale, Candiac (Québec): Les Éditions Balzac, 1992. Ponzio, A. (1974), Filosofia del linguaggio e prassi sociale, Lecce: Milella. Ponzio, A. (1975), Dialettica e verità, Bari: Dedalo. Ponzio, A. (1976), La semiotica in Italia, Bari: Dedalo. Ponzio, A. (1979), ‘Note su semiotica e marxismo’, Versus. Quaderni di studi semiotici, 23, 3–14. Ponzio, A. (1989), ‘Semiotics and Marxism’, in T. Sebeok and J. Umiker-Sebeok (eds), The Semiotic Web 1988, 387–416, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ponzio, A. (1990), Man as Sign, S. Petrilli (ed.), Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Ponzio, A. (1993), Signs, Dialogue, and Ideology, in S. Petrilli (ed.), Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ponzio, A. (2002), Individuo umano, linguaggio e globalizzazione nella filosofia di Adam Schaff, Milan: Mimesis. Ponzio, A. (2004), ‘Ideology’, in R. Posner, K. Robering and T. A. Sebeok (eds), Semiotik/ Semiotics, vol. 4, 3436–47, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Ponzio, A. (2006), The Dialogic Nature of the Sign, Ottawa: Legas. Ponzio, A. (2008), Linguaggio, lavoro e mercato globale, Milan: Mimesis. Ponzio, A. (2009a), ‘Semiotics after Sebeok’, in J. Deely and L. Sbrocch (eds), Semiotics 2008, 3–22, Ottawa: Legas. Ponzio, A. (2009b), Da dove verso dove, Perugia: Guerra Edizioni. Ponzio, A. (2011), La filosofia del Linguaggio, Bari: Giuseppe Laterza. Ponzio, A. (2012a), Ferruccio Rossi-landi e la filosofia del linguaggio, Lecce: Pensa Multimedia. Ponzio. A. (2012b). Línguistica Chomskyana e ideologia social, trans. C. A. Faraco, Curitiba: Editora Ufpr (Univesidade Federal do Paraná, Brasile). [A reviewed and enlarged edition of the 2006 edition of Ponzio 1973.] Ponzio, A. (2013), Fuori luogo, Milan: Mimesis. Ponzio, A. (2015a), Il linguaggio e le lingue, Milan: Mimesis.

282

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Ponzio, A. (2015b), Tra linguaggio e letteratura, Michail Bachtin, Milano: Bompiani. Ponzio, A. (2016), ‘John Poinsot Immer Wieder’, in P. Cobley (ed.), Deely in Review, Special Issue of Chinese Semiotic Studies, 12 (3): 313–19. Ponzio, A. (2018a), Il linguaggio e le lingue, Perugia: Guerra. Ponzio, A. (2018b). ‘La linguistica di Saussure prima dei suoi corsi di linguistica generale. Gli Écrits de linguistique générale di F. De Saussure a cura di Tullio de Mauro’, in C. Stancati et al. (eds), Linguistica e filosofia del linguaggio. Studi in onore di Daniele Gambarara, Milan: Mimesis, 429–36. Ponzio, A. (2019), Alterità e identità. Con Emmanuel Levinas, Milan: Mimesis. Prieto, L. J. ([1975] 1976), Pertinence et Pratique, Paris: Minuit. Pertinenza e pratica, D. Gambarara (trans.), Milan: Feltrinelli-Bocca. Rossi-Landi, F. (1953), Charles Morris, Milan: Bocca. Rossi-Landi, F. (1968), Linguaggio come mercato e come lavoro, Milan: Bompiani; Language as Work and Trade, M. Adams et al. (trans.), South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey. Rossi-Landi, F. ([1972] 2011), Semiotica e ideologia, 5th edn, A. Ponzio (ed.), Milan: Bompiani. Rossi-Landi, F. (1973), Ideologies of Linguistic Relativity, The Hague: Mouton. Rossi-Landi, F. (1974), Linguistics and Economics, The Hague: Mouton. Rossi-Landi, F. (1975), Charles Morris e la semiotica novecentesca, Milan: Feltrinelli. Rossi-Landi, F. ([1978] 1990), Ideologia, Milan: ISEDI; Marxism and Ideology, trans. R. Griffin, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rossi-Landi, F. (1985), Metodica filosofica e scienza dei segni, Milan: Bompiani. Rossi-Landi, F. (1992), Between Signs and Non-signs, S. Petrilli (ed.), Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rossi-Landi, F. (2016), Linguistica e economia, A. Ponzio and C. Zorzella (eds), Milan: Mimesis. Sapir, Edward (1952), Culture, Language and Personality, D. G. Mandelbaum (ed.), Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Schaff, A. ([1960] 1962), Introduction to Semantics, trans. O. Wojyasiewics, London: Program Press. Schaff, A. (1964), Jęzik a poznanie, Warsaw: Wiedza. Schaff, A. (1967a), ‘La definition fonctionnel de l’idéologie et le problème de la “fin du siècle de l’idéologie”’, L’Homme et la Societé, 4: 49–59. Schaff, A. (1967b), Szkice z filosofii jezika, Filosofia del linguaggio, trans. A. Scarponi, Rome: Editori Riuniti. Schaff, A., F. Latouche, F. Rossi-Landi, A. Ponzio and H. P. Jeudy (1975), Linguística, Socíedade e Política, Lisbon: Ediçoes 70. Sebeok, T. A. (1979), The Sign and Its Masters, Austin: University of Texas. Sebeok, T. A. (1981), The Play of Musement, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sebeok, T. A. (1986a), I Think I Am a Verb, New York: Plenum Press. Sebeok, T. A., ed. (1986b), Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, 3 vols., Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Sebeok, T. A. (1991a), American Signatures: Semiotic Inquiry and Method, in I. Smith (ed.), London: The University of Oklahoma Press. Sebeok, T. A. (1991b), A Sign Is Just a Sign, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sebeok, T. A. (1994), Signs, trans. S. Petrilli, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sebeok, T. A. (2001), Global Semiotics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sebeok, T. A., S. Petrilli and A. Ponzio (2001), L’io semiotico, Rome: Meltemi.

IDEOLOGY AND SEMIOSIS

283

Shannon, C. E. and W. Weaver (1949), The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Threadgold, T., ed. (1986), Language, Semiotics, Ideology, Sydney: Pathfinder Press. Verón, E. (1971), ‘Ideologie and Social Sciences: A Communicational Approach’, Semiotica, 1: 59–76. Vološinov, V. N. (1927), Frejdizm, Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat; Freudianism. A Critical Sketch, Eng. trans. I. R. Titunik, ed. I. R. Titunik and N. H. Bruss, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. [Russian original and Italian translation in Bakhtin, M. e il suo Circolo ([1919–30] 2014).] Vološinov, V. N. (1929), Marksizm i filosofija jazyca, Moscow-Leningrad: Priboj, 2nd edn. 1930; Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973, new edn. 1986. Walras, L. (1900), Éléments d’économie politique pure, Lausanne: Rouge; Elementi di economia politica, It. trans A. Bagiotti, Turin: Utet, 1974. Welby, V. ([1903] 1983), What Is Meaning?: Studies in the Development of Significance, ed. A. Eschbach, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Welby, V. ([1911] 1985), Significs and Language, ed. H. W. Schmitz, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Whorf, B. (1956), Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings, ed. and intro. J. B. Carroll, Foreword S. Chase, New York: John Wiley and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1959. Williams, G. (1960), ‘The Concept of “Egemonia” in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci’: some Notes of Interpretation, Journal of the History of Ideas, 4: 586–99. Williams, R. (1958), Culture and Society 1780–1950, London: Chatto & Windus, reprint 1967. Williams, R. (1973), ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, New Left Review, 2: 3–16. William, R. (1977), Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

284

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Classifying Signs PRISCILA BORGES

INTRODUCTION People have been trying to classify signs ever since they started talking about signs. The Stoics, St Augustine, Port-Royal semioticians, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Condillac, Diderot, Wolff, Bolzano – they all have distinguished different types of signs based on different sign conceptions (Nöth 1990: 15–34). Among modern authors, Charles Sanders Peirce stands out for deeply imbricating his general theory of signs with sign classification, building the most complex set of sign typologies to date. Peirce’s interest in classification antedates semiotics. Throughout his life, he embarked on numerous classification enterprises. He studied Agassiz’s method of zoological classification and published papers about the classification of chemical elements, the natural classification of arguments and the classification of sciences. The greatest labour, however, he devoted to the classification of signs (Fisch 1982: W 1.xix–xxii). The very development of his general theory of signs coincides with the increase of the complexity of his classifications of signs. Peirce (1878: EP 1.143) presents the work of a naturalist as an example of how the method of classification functions. A given naturalist, willing to study a certain species, collects a number of specimens. While observing them, he notices that many have Sshaped markings in their bodies, but some have C-shaped markings instead. Since they are supposed to be of the same species, he assumes that there must be something that connects the S-shaped markings with the C-shaped markings. This supposition presupposes the hypothesis of continuity within the scope of a single species. If he cannot find a link between the two shapes (think of melanin, which links the variety of human skin colours), he might eventually come to the conclusion that he found a new species. The idea of continuity that permeates the naturalist’s classification process is deeply imbricated in the development of Peirce’s sign classes. In 1885, Peirce (1885: W 5.162–6, EP 1.225–8) distinguished three types of signs: symbols, indexes and icons. At that time, he was not yet talking specifically about sign classes, but the germs of the notion were already there. A few years later, in the system of ten classes, he proposed (Peirce 1903: EP 2.289–99) three degrees of iconicity, four degrees of indexicality and three degrees of symbolicity, which are intermediate forms between the icon, the index and the symbol. Later, when he proposes systems with twenty-eight and sixty-six sign classes, we see continuity still playing its role, as these systems present further gradations between the classes, ever more subtle, making the continuity between the classes increasingly evident (Peirce 1908: EP 2.477–91). It is precisely to emphasize the processual character of

286

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

semiosis and the interrelationship between the sign classes that I refer to Peirce’s sign classifications as systems of sign classes and opt to represent them in tree structures that evince the relations between the classes (Borges 2010). According to Fisch (1986: 330), the fundamental concept of Peirce’s semiotics is the concept of semiosis and not that of sign. If we note that the notion of sign already outlines the action of a sign, we can better understand Fisch’s claim. The first sign definitions presented by Peirce state that the sign is a relation between parts. In Some Consequences of Four Incapacities, he emphasizes the prepositions that indicate how the sign relates to its correlates: ‘a sign has, as such, three references: 1st, it is a sign to some thought which interprets it; 2d, it is a sign for some object to which in that thought it is equivalent; 3d, it is a sign, in some respect or quality, which brings it into connection with its object’ (1868: W 2.223). This suggests that Peirce’s definitions are based on the performances of the sign. In another very famous definition, Peirce states that ‘[a] sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign’ (Peirce c.1897: CP 2.228). Besides showing how the sign works, Peirce adds the idea that a sign generates another sign, leading to the notion of infinite semiosis. Even when the concept of sign becomes more complex and Peirce presents the divisions of the object and of the interpretant, such terms are presented considering their function in the sign process (1908: CP 8.343). The concept of sign corresponds to the concept of representation presented in On a New List of Categories (Peirce 1868: W 2.49–59, EP 1.1–10). Peirce begins by saying that he based his list of categories on the theory that ‘the function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous impressions to unity’ (1868: W 2.49, EP 1.1), which is similar to the work of the naturalist, who isolates features of a species by observing the variety of specimens collected. In addition, ‘this theory gives rise to a conception of gradation among those conceptions which are universal’ (1868: W 2.49, EP 1.1). Peirce is not only presenting the concepts of quality, relation and representation, but, most importantly, he is showing the relations between the categories. Something very similar occurs when Peirce presents his concept of sign. The concept of representation appears precisely as the third category that encompasses both relation and quality. The order of appearance of the categories in On a New List of Categories reveals how these concepts relate, or, rather, the very concept of gradation. The notion of a pure abstract quality is necessary to reach the notion of a relation between correlates. Likewise, the relation between correlates is necessary in order to achieve representation. Representation, therefore, is a category that involves relations between correlates and qualities. This means that the sign, being a representation, is a sort of triadic relation that involves dyadic relations, but cannot be reduced to a series of dyadic relations. The concept of sign, with its terms and relations that lead to the process of representation, is fundamental to the logic of the sign classes. That is why we must not lose sight of the sign process when looking at the systems of sign classes; otherwise, we might reduce the classes to mere drawers labelled with a complex nomenclature. It would not make any sense if a concept of sign based on the sign process culminated in a static classification, which cannot show the sign in action. In this chapter, I present Peirce’s systems of sign classes in ascending order, from the smaller to the larger systems, focusing on the idea of semiosis and the continuity between

CLASSIFYING SIGNS

287

the classes. To illustrate the sign classes and demonstrate their usefulness as systems that display the action of the sign, I select a well-known phenomenon, a famous archaeological discovery by Pierre-François Bouchard in 1799. I have distinguished five systems of sign classes in Peirce’s texts. The first is a system of three sign classes, which considers only the sign-object relation. The second is a system of six sign classes that takes into account not only the sign-object relation, but also the sign-interpretant relation. The third system, with ten sign classes, takes into account three aspects of the sign, the sign itself, the signobject relation and the sign-interpretant relation. I dedicate the majority of the chapter to these three systems because they are simpler, which makes it easier to follow the logic of development of the classes. The same logic applies to the systems of twenty-eight and sixty-six classes. The intent and size-limit of this chapter, however, do not allow me to offer the same level of detail for the last two classes. Still, I will discuss the main features of the last systems, focusing on them functioning as methodological tools for the analysis of semiotic phenomena.

A SYSTEM OF THREE CLASSES OF SIGNS A system of three sign classes can be derived from two Peircean texts: On a New List of Categories (1868) and On the Algebra of Logic (1885). He begins by distinguishing three types of representations, or signs, according to the relationship between the sign and its object (Peirce 1868: W 2.57, EP 1.7). The first type, in which the relationship between the sign and its object is given by similarity in quality, he initially called likeness, but later renamed it as icon. In the second relation, there is a ‘correspondence in fact’, that is, some sort of direct connection between the sign and its object. This one was called index. The last relation is grounded on an ‘imputed character’: the sign represents its object through some kind of rule or convention that establishes that this refers to that. This one is called symbol. In On the Algebra of Logic, Peirce further describes these three modes of relation. He explains that the symbolic relation is one of mental association, which is necessarily conventional or arbitrary. In the indexical relation, the sign refers to its object ‘by virtue of being really connected with it’ (1885: W 5.163; EP 1.226–7). This is the typical mode of relation found in natural signs, like physical symptoms. Indexes are like pointing fingers: they assert nothing; they just ‘say’, ‘There!’ They bring attention to their objects, but do not describe them or say anything about them. The third mode of the sign-object relation, the iconic, is a degenerated dyadic relation that consists of a resemblance between the sign and the object virtually without mediation. Unlike the index that points towards its object, the icon replaces its object so completely that it is difficult to distinguish between them. Peirce exemplifies this by saying that icons function as geometric diagrams (say a drawn triangle) that are employed as if they were the very abstract notion they represent (the triangle itself); or when you, upon observing a painting, forget for a moment that what you see is a copy and somehow feel like experiencing the thing itself. Think of a religious icon. For the believer, the icon is not a mere drawing or scheme of the saint. It somehow connects him with the divinity itself. In that moment of spiritual (or mathematical) transcendence, when the distinction between the real and the copy disappears, the sign functions as an icon. Peirce’s illustrations, of course, refer initially to symbolic signs: a triangle, obviously, is the arbitrary symbolic representation of the abstract notion of a triangle from Geometry. And a painting is a 2D translation mediated by rules of perspective and shading of some

288

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

image in the mind of the painter. What is iconic is actually the possibility of confusion between the symbol and its object given by their similarity. This means that signs are not exclusively iconic, indexical or symbolic, but are iconic, indexical and symbolical simultaneously. These are the first three classes of signs: iconic, indexical and symbolic. These three types of signs are distinguished by the three aspects of the relation between a sign and its object [S-O]. The three aspects of the sign-object relation follow the three categories from On a New List of Categories – Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. This is a main feature of all the systems of sign classes. Figure 13.1 shows a schematic representation of the system of three sign classes. Let us see this system functioning in the archaeological example. In 1799, while exploring a site in North Africa, a French company of soldiers stumbled upon a huge and heavy piece of black rock. The stone caught the attention of officer Pierre-François Bouchard. It could be a stone as any other, except for its curious shape and the presence of some strange markings on one of its facets. After examining those markings, officer Bouchard realized that their lines were precise and formed a pattern. The qualities of the markings suggested that this stone was special because those kinds of markings did not appear to be the result of natural wear. Rather, they seemed to be inscriptions, which might have archaeological value. This conclusion was only possible because Bouchard had had collateral experiences with other inscriptions, which allowed him to identify similarities with the markings he saw on the stone. Recognition is not given by iconic aspects alone, but by their relationship with the indexical aspects. The stone was found on a site east of Alexandria, the location being an indexical sign that corroborates the iconic one. The marked black stone found somewhere east of Alexandria is an object of experience that calls direct attention to the act of carving done by some human being who wanted to write something. Bouchard actually realized that there were three types of inscriptions and identified one of them as being Greek. Recognizing a stone as an archaeological artefact corresponds to the symbolic aspect of this sign. It is a first step towards the discovery of human activity from a past civilization and the meaning of the texts written in the stone.

A SYSTEM OF SIX CLASSES OF SIGNS In Sundry Logical Conceptions, Peirce (1903: EP 2.267–88) describes two dyadic relations that constitute the sign. The first is the one we have already seen in the system of three classes: the sign-object relation. The second is the sign-interpretant relation, here presented

FIGURE 13.1  The Signtree model of the system of three classes of signs.

CLASSIFYING SIGNS

289

for the first time and described in three terms: sumisigns (later called rhema), dicisigns (later called dicent), suadisigns (or arguments), corresponding respectively to the modes of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. A rhema is a sign whose interpretant is a vague idea, a mere feeling of what may be its object. It is like a non-confirmed hypothesis, its conclusion drawn in the interrogative mood. Dicisigns are signs that convey information. They are either true or false, but furnish no reasons for being so. Arguments produce an understanding about a general object. With these six types – icon, index, symbol, rhema, dicent and argument – arranged in two trichotomies (a trichotomy being a triadic set of modes of being) – the sign-object relation [S-O] and the sign-interpretant relation [S-I] – we can build a system of six sign classes.1 As the sign-object relation precedes the sign-interpretant relation, the mode of the sign-interpretant relation depends on the mode of the sign-object relation (see Figure 13.2). This logic of dependence is based on the logic of the categories. Firstness is the simplest category; it is independent, being constituted by no other category, but is a constituent of the other two. Consequently, the mode of being of Firstness in the sign-object relation [S-O] restricts the next aspect, the sign-interpretant relation [S-I], to Firstness. The mode of Secondness is constituted only by Firstness, restricting the next aspect to Secondness and Firstness. Then, if Secondness is the mode of being of the signobject relation, the sign-interpretant relation is restricted to the first and second modes of being. Thirdness, being constituted by Firstness and Secondness, is the most complex one, and when the sign-object relation is of the third mode, it allows the three modes of being in the sign-interpretant relation. Icons are signs related to their objects by Firstness. The mere resemblance which is characteristic of the icon can only produce a vague idea about its object. This means that an icon can only relate to its interpretant by Firstness, and that is what being rhematic means. This is the first class of this system, the rhematic-icon. Indexes are signs related to their object by Secondness, which implicates an existential relation. Secondness is a category from which we can prescind Firstness (Peirce 1885: W 5.238). Every existential relation must have features, which are qualities. This is how Firstness is a constituent of Secondness. An index may have two types of relationship with its interpretant. In a relationship of Firstness, it produces a vague idea about its object, which corresponds to the second class, the rhematic-index. In a relationship of Secondness, it conveys information about its object, which corresponds to the third class, the dicent-index. As we know, the sign never corresponds completely to its object, only partially (Peirce c.1897: CP 2.228). The interpretant of a rhematic-index shows the

FIGURE 13.2  The Signtree model of the system of six classes of signs.

290

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

qualities of the existential relation it has with its object. The interpretant of a dicent-index shows the existential relation with its object. Symbols are signs related to their objects by Thirdness. Thirdness is a category from which we can prescind Firstness and Secondness (Peirce 1885: W 5.238). As a conventional relation, the symbolic is constituted of existential relations (Secondness) and must have their own qualities (Firstness). The relationship between a symbol and its interpretant, then, can be of three modes. The first must show its qualities, being rhematic. This gives us the fourth class, the rhematic-symbol. The second must show its replicas, or its existential relations, constituting the fifth class, the dicent-symbol. And the third one must show its generality, leading to a comprehension of a general, which constitutes the sixth class, the argumentative-symbol. Let us get back to the stone officer Bouchard found in 1799. Now that we can distinguish more aspects of the sign, we can see that what led officer Bouchard to conclude that the stone had some archaeological value was an analogy he made between the qualities of the stone with its inscriptions and other inscriptions he had seen before. These are iconic aspects of a symbolic sign. It is the interpretant that shows the iconic aspect of a symbol. The sign class that works like this is the rhematic-symbol. We need, then, to distinguish the rhematic-symbol, from the rhematic-index, and the rhematic-icon. Since rhematic signs have the effect of raising hypotheses, we could think of them in terms of questions raised in an investigation. When Bouchard identified the markings on the stone as being inscriptions, he could have been prompted by questions regarding the civilization that left it behind. One of the first questions that could have come to his mind is ‘what do the inscriptions mean?’ That is the question of the rhematic-symbol; to answer it, it is necessary to identify the writing and to be able to decipher it. If the sign-object relation is indexical, what would be the question raised by the rhematic-index? The indexical relation shows an existential relation. The stone has qualities that do not seem to have been caused by chance, but resemble markings made with human instruments to transmit some information. Such qualities are the iconic aspect of this indexical relation. The marked stone indicates that, at some point in time, there was a person who intentionally registered something on the stone. This hypothesis is corroborated by the fact that the stone was found in a place occupied by past civilizations who dominated the technology of writing. So the questions raised by the rhematic-index must regard the act of the registration of a message: ‘who carved the stone?’, ‘with what instrument?’, ‘at what time?’, ‘in what place?’ And what about the questions raised by simple iconic relations that are independent of the index and the symbol, that is, the questions of the rhematic-icon? The iconic relation is given by all the qualities of the stone. Such qualities suggest that the markings on this stone are different from the ones found in stones that suffer from natural weathering. The qualities of this stone probably led officer Bouchard to wonder if a stone with such qualities, which are not characteristic of the formation of stones nor of natural weathering, could be something more than a mere random building stone. Collateral experience with other markings of this type and the location where the stone was found led Bouchard to acknowledge that those markings were inscriptions, and that the stone was a sign crafted to transmit some information. Signs that convey information are dicent. In this system, we have two classes of dicent signs, the dicentindex and the dicent-symbol. We mentioned above that the rhematic-index suggested that, at some point in time, there was a person who inscribed something in the stone. The detailed analysis of the qualities of the stone plus the acknowledgement of the place

CLASSIFYING SIGNS

291

where it was found conveys the information that the markings are inscriptions, which is proper of a dicent-index. A dicent-symbol, on the other hand, must give information related to the symbol, not to the index. Since the symbol is a conventional sign, and, in this case, conventionality is given by the inscription found in the stone, the information conveyed must be related to the type of inscription found. The qualities of those particular inscriptions suggested to Bouchard that there were three different types of scripts and he even identified one as being Greek. The identification of the script is the first necessary step in order to discover its meaning. The form of the inscriptions together with the way they were written allowed archaeologists, who had more collateral experiences with ancient scripts, to identify the other two as being hieroglyphics and a type of Demotic script used in Ancient Egyptian. The information given by a symbolic sign can only be understood if collateral experience is given. In other words, it is necessary to have previous experiences with a given script in order to recognize it. The argumentative-symbol is a sign that leads to an understanding of a general sign. Peirce exemplifies the argumentative-symbol saying that the proposition ‘a tall man’ differs from ‘a man is tall’ precisely because of its generality (1903: EP 2.282). ‘A tall man’ does not need to refer to any tall man in particular to convey its meaning. Its understanding is given by a general knowledge of the class ‘man’ and of the subclass ‘tall man’. In the case of Bouchard’s stone, the qualities of the rhematic sign suggested that this was a special stone. The dicent-index informed him that it was a stone with inscriptions and the dicent-symbol that they were written with three different scripts. If stones with inscriptions in one script have already been taken as important artefacts in the past, what about a stone with three different scripts? One can conclude – and here is the argumentative-symbol – that such stone is not disposable. Its importance is inferred from the observation that there are three scripts together on the same artefact. But this is all we get with six classes of signs. In order to learn more about this artefact, archaeological investigation will have to dig deeper to reach its cultural sense.

PEIRCE’S SYSTEM OF TEN CLASSES OF SIGNS Peirce’s system of ten sign classes appears in Nomenclature and Divisions of Triadic Relations (Peirce 1903: EP 2.289–99). To the two trichotomies we have already seen (the sign-object relation [S-O] and the sign-interpretant relation [S-I]), Peirce adds a third, that of the sign itself [S]. This trichotomy adds to the system of ten classes three new modes of being, for the sign itself can be a qualisign, a sinsign, or a legisign. Let us see how this new addition improves the system. According to Peirce, a qualisign ‘is a quality which is a sign. It cannot actually act as a sign until it is embodied; but the embodiment has nothing to do with its character as a sign’ (Peirce 1903: EP 2.291). A qualisign is a potency, not an actual: A sign by Firstness [i.e. a qualisign] is an image of its object and, more strictly speaking, can only be an idea. For it must produce an Interpretant idea; and an external object excites an idea by a reaction upon the brain. But most strictly speaking, even an idea, except in the sense of a possibility, or Firstness, cannot be an Icon. A possibility alone is an Icon purely by virtue of its quality; and its object can only be a Firstness. (Peirce 1903: EP 2.273)

292

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

When we perceive it, a qualisign is already an embodied sign. What makes it function as a sign, however, is not its embodiment (for an embodied sign is already of Secondness, see below), but the fact that it refers to an object by means of a quality. When the sign itself is of Secondness, it is a sinsign: A Sinsign (where the syllable sin is taken as meaning ‘being only once’, as in single, simple, Latin semel, etc.) is an actual existent thing or event which is a sign. It can only be so through its qualities; so that it involves a qualisign, or rather, several qualisigns. But these qualisigns are of a peculiar kind and only form a sign through being actually embodied. (Peirce 1903: EP 2.291) The embodiment of a qualisign mentioned previously is already a sinsign, for sinsigns are actual occurrences (existents, as Peirce says). And since all existent things must have qualities, sinsigns are necessarily constituted by qualisigns. Finally, when the sign itself is of Thirdness, we have a legisign, that is: a law that is a sign. This law is usually established by men. Every conventional sign is a legisign. It is not a single object [i.e. a token], but a general type which, it has been agreed, shall be significant. Every legisign signifies through an instance of its application, which may be termed a Replica of it. Thus, the word “the” will usually occur from fifteen to twenty-five times on a page. It is in all these occurrences one and the same word, the same legisign. Each single instance of it is a replica. The replica is a sinsign. Thus, every legisign requires sinsigns. But these are not ordinary sinsigns, such as are peculiar occurrences that are regarded as significant. Nor would the replica be significant if it were not for the law which renders it so. (Peirce 1903: EP 2.291) Qualisigns and legisigns are similar in the sense that they are not actuals and require sinsigns to be perceived. While the qualisign, being a possibility, needs to be embodied in a sinsign, the legisign, being a generality, depends on several instances of sinsigns behaving accordingly, as a law. Let us see now how this trichotomy relates to the others generating the ten classes. Following what happened in the system of six classes, where each class had to contemplate all the aspects of the two trichotomies considered, in this system, each class must contemplate the aspects of all the three trichotomies, ordered according to the functioning of the sign. The sign itself comes first because it is necessary to any sign relation. Then comes the sign-object relation, since this relation is previous and necessary to the signinterpretant relation, the last one. As we saw in the system of six classes, the modes of being of the previous aspect restrict the possibilities of the next aspect considered. And so, the three trichotomies combined generate ten sign classes (see Figure 13.3). The first classes are involved in the later ones, and legisigns, being general signs, work through their replicas, which are special types of sinsigns (Peirce 1903: EP 2.294–7). Let us also return to our friend Bouchard and his singular stone covered with three different scripts to see how each of the ten classes function: 1. Rhematic-iconic-qualisign This class represents a possible sign that is not yet a sign. Being rhematic, the sign does not convey information, but may raise a very basic question, such as “is there

CLASSIFYING SIGNS

293

FIGURE 13.3  The Signtree model of the system of ten classes of signs.

anything here”, for its qualities do not yet make it possible to distinguish anything precisely. This question comes before the question raised by the rhematic-icon of six classes, which seems to be related to an actual existent sign, that is, a sinsign. Somehow, all of the signs related to the stone found by officer Bouchard relate to this class, for it includes all the possible instances of the question “is there anything here?”, not only the one raised by Bouchard’s troops who brought him to the stone in the first place, but also Bouchard’s own impressions, the eventual conclusions of the archaeologists who studied the stone, and even anyone else who studied it in the past or will study it in the future. But not only those. For it also includes all past meanings the stone had since it was carved. 2. Rhematic-iconic-sinsign This class, being a sinsign, embodies a qualisign. As an actual occurrence, its qualities are clearly distinct. This is why it is possible to perceive that the qualities of Bouchard’s stone are different from the qualities of other building stones. Its markings do not seem to be the result of natural weathering. Its singularities raise the question whether this stone is something more than a mere stone. 3. Rhematic-indexical-sinsign This sinsign class, being indexical, directs the attention to the object that causes it and necessarily involves a rhematic-iconic-sinsign (Peirce 1903: EP 2.294). It is similar to the rhematic-index in the system of six classes. The markings on the stone suggest that someone carved it. The questions raised from it relate to the act of carving: “who carved this stone?”, “with what instrument?”, “at what time?”, “in what place?” 4. Dicent-indexical-sinsign This class provides factual information about its object. It must involve a rhematiciconic-sinsign and a rhematic-indexical-sinsign, the two previous classes (Peirce 1903: EP 2.294). In the rhematic-iconic-sinsign, we saw that the qualities of the markings on the stone suggested that they were made by something or someone. The rhematic-indexical-sinsign calls attention to the external agent who produced the markings, the instruments employed and the circumstances of production (time and place). The information conveyed by the dicent-indexical-sinsign is drawn from these: the detailed analysis of the qualities of the stone, including the inquiry

294

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

regarding the external agent that produced it, conveys the information that the markings are inscriptions. Archaeologists, who have collateral experience with artefacts of this kind, in the face of such questions, managed to achieve more accurate information than Bouchard and discovered that the stone was carved during the Helenistic period, that it was originally displayed in a temple and that, later, it was used as a building block in the construction of the fort where it was found. 5. Rhematic-iconic-legisign Legisigns are general signs that govern single replicas, which are sinsigns. This first legisign class, being iconic and rhematic, governs the rhematic-iconic-sinsigns (Peirce 1903: EP 2.294). In the rhematic-iconic-sinsign class, we saw that the singular markings on the stone indicated that it was no ordinary stone. What was strange about those markings was that they followed patterns. Bouchard himself, who was no linguist, but certainly was a ‘user’ of written language, realized that those patterns suggested a type of writing. Were the inscriptions written texts? What types of scripts would these be? 6. Rhematic-indexical-legisign The rhematic-indexical-legisign is a general sign that governs its replicas, which are rhematic-indexical-sinsigns (Peirce 1903: EP 2.294). In the rhematic-indexicalsinsign class, we saw that the qualities of the stone suggested that an external agent, probably a person, carved it, raising questions related to the act of carving: “who did it?”, “how was it done?”, “when and where was it done?” Archaeologists, then, discovered that the carvings matched the tools and techniques employed in the production of steles during the Hellenistic period (c.323–31 BCE). Based on previous knowledge about the use and of steles in that period, further questions rise: “was this stone singular?”, “were there other steles with similar texts?”, “was this part of a set of steles?” If this stone was not singular, but one of a set, then there must be a law, that is a legisign, that determines how and why they were built. 7. Dicent-indexical-legisign This legisign class provides information about an object by means of the two previous legisigns. The rhematic-iconic-legisign conveys information about a subject that is indicated by the rhematic-indexical-legisign (Peirce 1903: EP 2.294–5). The rhematic-iconic-legisign led us to hypothesize that the markings in the stone were some kind of scripture. Were the inscriptions written texts? What types of scripts would these be? The rhematic-indexical-legisign raised the possibility that particular stele was not unique, but one of a set of steles. Further archaeological investigation showed that there were three types of scripts in the stele – hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek – and that there were other steles like that across Egypt, for a similar one was found in the nineteenth century. Steles like that were placed in temples and were inscribed in three languages that corresponded to the languages of the gods (the hieroglyphs), of documents (Demotic) and of the Macedonian Empire that dominated Egypt at the time (Greek). 8. Rhematic-symbolic-legisign This legisign class connects with its object by means of an association of general ideas and tends to produce a general concept due to habits of mind. Its replicas are rhematic-indexical-sinsigns (Peirce 1903: EP 2.295). The symbolic aspect of the stone relates to the texts inscribed on it. Knowing that there are three texts – for

CLASSIFYING SIGNS

295

there are three different patterns of scripture – the question that rises is “what do they mean?” This question can only be answered if the three writings can be read, meaning that their three codes must be deciphered. 9. Dicent-symbolic-legisign This legisign class relates to rhematic-symbolic-legisign in the sense that it must answer the question raised by it. In the case of our stone, the question was “what did those texts mean?” The first to be deciphered was the Greek text. It was found out that it was a decree issued by the Council of Egyptian priests in 196 BCE. Knowing what the Greek meant, archaeologists finally raised the hypothesis that the other two texts could mean the exact same thing, and that the stele function was to publicize the decree in three different languages. 10. Argumentative-symbolic-legisign The argumentative-symbolic-legisign is a sign whose law guarantees “that the passage from all such premises to such conclusions tends to the truth” (Peirce 1903: EP 2.296). The hypothesis that the three texts contained the same decree proved to be correct when the other two writings were deciphered. It also confirmed that stone was one of a set of steles placed at the entrances of temples to publicize the decree across Egypt. If we were to describe the processes of discovering everything that is known about that stone, we would certainly find many comings and goings across the sign classes. Consider the question whether the stone was unique or not. It could not be answered immediately, but only upon the discovery of a similar stele or through an inferential process based on the knowledge of the stele’s text and its social purpose. There is another important detail about the way in which the texts on that stele were deciphered. Jean-François Champollion, the philologist who managed to decipher the hieroglyphic text, had no access to the stele itself, only to reproductions of the inscriptions. This means that the stele itself was not necessary for the deciphering of the texts. Yet, the fact that the stele had three texts combined was fundamental for the deciphering process. This shows how legisigns exist beyond the concreteness of the sinsigns that constitute them.

PEIRCE’S SYSTEM OF TWENTY-EIGHT CLASSES OF SIGNS Peirce proposes a system with twenty-eight sign classes in a letter to Lady Welby dated 23 December 1908 (Peirce 1908: EP 2.478–81). He does not develop this system fully, but mentions that it considers six trichotomies: the dynamic object, the immediate object, the sign itself, the destinate interpretant, the effective interpretant and the explicit interpretant (Peirce 1908: EP 2.481). Unlike the other systems presented so far, the system of twentyeight classes takes into account only the terms of the sign relation, without considering any relation between the terms. This feature undermines the representation of the semiotic process. Still this system is interesting because it includes a more complex concept of sign by distinguishing two types of objects and three types of interpretants. The distinction of two types of objects is important because it reveals two directions of determination. The immediate object ‘is the Object as the Sign itself represents it, and whose Being is thus dependent upon the Representation of it in the Sign’ (Peirce 1906: CP 4.536), while the dynamical object is ‘the Reality which by some means contrives to

296

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

determine the Sign to its Representation’ (Peirce 1906: CP 4.536). This means that the immediate object is the facet of the object represented by the sign, while the dynamical object is the reality that determines the sign in the first place. The sign, of course, represents its dynamical object, but it does so only partially or perspectivally, as an immediate object. Peirce defines the immediate object as a hint given by the sign that indicates the dynamical object (Peirce 1908: EP 2.480). The interpretant is the effect of the sign in a mind, the result of an iteration of the semiotic chain. By dividing the interpretant in three, Peirce shows that signs do not produce a single effect, but a manifold of effects. When presenting the twenty-eight classes, however, Peirce only names the modalities of the interpretants, without giving further details. The names he employs are rather unusual and, in fact, he will use at least three other triples to designate interpretants: intentional, effectual, communicational (Peirce 1906: EP 2.478, SS 196); emotional, energetic, logical (Peirce 1907: EP 2.409–12) and immediate, dynamical, final (Peirce 1908: CP 8.343, EP 2.482), which is the most frequent and the one he adopted in his last writings.2 In fact, in the day after he wrote the letter about the twenty-eight classes, he writes another letter to Lady Welby where he proposes the system of sixty-six classes and where the interpretants are no longer destinate, effective and explicit, but already immediate, dynamical and final (Peirce 1908: CP 8.343, EP 2.482).3 Since the detailed discussion of the interpretants is developed in the context of the sixty-six classes, I will focus this presentation of the twenty-eight classes in the division of the objects. Peirce calls the sign abstractive, concretive and collective when its dynamical object is respectively of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. Regarding the immediate object, the sign can be descriptive, designative and distributive (or copulant) (Peirce 1908: EP 2.480). Since the dynamical object [DO] is the reality that determines the sign in the first place, it is the first trichotomy to be considered. Next, we have the trichotomy of the immediate object [IO], leading to six combinations of objects. The introduction of the trichotomies of the dynamical object and of the immediate object before the trichotomy of the sign itself [S] generates six classes of qualisigns, which are possible signs, not yet realized (see Figure 13.4). These six types of qualisigns show us that we can distinguish types of possibilities. The representative potential of the sign varies according to the type of object that determines it. These objects can also be distinguished in the sinsigns, which appear grouped in three sets. Each set has immediate and dynamic objects of different modalities (concerning designative-concretive, designative-collective and distributive-collective sinsigns). They correspond to the objects of three qualisign classes, the sinsign classes showing how these possible signs function when they become actual occurrences. The other three combinations among immediate and dynamic object modalities are exclusive of qualisigns. They are descriptive-abstractive, descriptiveconcretive and descriptive-collective. The objects of these classes are not explicit on the sinsigns, but are somewhat involved in the sinsign classes in the same way iconic sinsigns are involved in indexical sinsigns, and both are needed for the symbolic sign to work, for descriptive signs are involved in designative signs and both are necessary for the distributive sign. Even though Peirce did not explain the relation between the classes in the system of twenty-eight classes, the logic of the relations presented in the system of ten classes fits perfectly here (and also in system the sixty-six classes), for it follows the same logic. In Figure 13.4, you can see the full diagram of the twenty-eight classes. Next, I will present the six qualisigns classes and dig further into the mystery of the stele found by officer Bouchard in 1799.

CLASSIFYING SIGNS

297

FIGURE 13.4  The Signtree model of the system of twenty-eight classes of signs.

Class #1: Descriptive-abstractive-qualisign The first qualisign class4 presents dynamical and immediate objects of Firstness. Being abstractive and descriptive, this class concerns the most abstract and general qualities described in the sign. These qualities, however, are not present in a certain thing, somewhere. This class represents only the possibility of some qualities to appear and be effective in a sign. The descriptive-abstractive-qualisign refers to the universe of archaeological artefacts, fundamental for the recognition of an archaeological artefact as such. If the troops that found the stone had no contact with the universe of archaeological artefacts, they would have left it behind, taking it to be something irrelevant.

Class #2: Descriptive-concretive-qualisign The second qualisign class has a dynamical object of Secondness and an immediate object of Firstness. This means that the descriptive-concretive-qualisign particularizes the qualities described in the first qualisign class in a sign that has materialized qualities capable of being experienced in a certain sense. The discovered archaeological artefact is a block of greystone that measures 114 cm × 72 cm and weighs almost 760 kg. In one of its facets there are three types of markings. It was found by accident on 15 July 1799 by

298

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

soldiers of the army of Napoleon while digging the foundations of a fort near the town of Rashic (also known as Rosetta) in the Nile delta.

Class #3: Designative-concretive-qualisign Peirce says that a concretive sign is a sign determined by an occurrence, an ‘existent thing or actual fact of past or future’ (Peirce 1908: EP 2.480). The dynamical object is a real occurrence, while the immediate object designates a real and singular occurrence in a determined time and space. ‘Designatives […], which like a Demonstrative pronoun, or a pointing finger, brutally direct the mental eyeballs of the interpreter to the object in question, which in this case cannot be given by independent reasoning’ (Peirce 1908: EP 2.484). Something like an occurrence will cause an impact on the sign. As a result, the sign will designate its object. The marked black stone is our sign. It calls direct attention to the act of carving done by some human being. The dynamical object is the real occurrence, at some point in the past, of a relation between the stone, a person that carved the stone, and the instrument that person used to carve it. The immediate object shows that the markings were done some time in the past in a peculiar way. The markings on the stone carry a visual quality that is indicative of their mode of production. However, some collateral experience with inscriptions and writings is necessary in order to interpret the markings on the stone as being carvings done by someone, and, as such, as an inscription.

Class #8: Descriptive-collective-qualisign This qualisign class describes laws and rules that determine specific qualities in the sign. As the first two qualisigns described above, this one has an immediate object of Firstness (descriptive sign). Unlike the others, its dynamical object is of Thirdness (collective sign). Being of Thirdness, it is a rule that determines the qualities described in the sign. The dynamical object of Thirdness is not a singular object that really occurs, such as ‘a man or Charlemagne’. It is actually a collection, such as ‘mankind’ (Peirce 1908: EP 2.489). This object can be a concept, an idea. It is associated with cognition, an object of representation. While a stone and a person carving it were the dynamical object of the concrete sinsigns, the dynamical object of the collective sign is an archaeological artefact, a stele, which is an inscribed stone used by a civilization for some purpose. Being a stele, the dynamical object includes all cultural practices related to it. The three scripts imprinted on the stele have features that are fundamental for the recognition of the scripts and for deciphering their meaning. Hieroglyphic script, for example, sometimes presents texts enclosed within an oval frame with a straight line at the end, at a right angle to the oval. This form is called cartouche, and it indicates that the enclosed text is a royal name. This detail of the hieroglyph script was crucial for the deciphering of this stele. The form of the symbols, or graphemes, their possible combinations and their visual composition in the text are all important features of writing systems that must be present in a sign that represents it.

Class #9: Designative-collective-qualisign In this class, although the dynamical object is of Thirdness, the immediate object is of Secondness. This class shows its dynamical object of Thirdness as if it were a singular occurrence in a specific time and space, that is, a replica. The dynamical object of

CLASSIFYING SIGNS

299

Thirdness refers, for instance, to the generic concept of a stele with three inscriptions, which is a collection of all occurrent and possible steles of this kind (as shown in the Class #8). Its immediate object of Secondness, on the other hand, refers to a single member of this set; not any member, but the very first one ever found in which there are fourteen lines of hieroglyphic script, thirty-two lines of Demotic script and fifty-three lines of Ancient Greek. The texts in the steles are also designative-collective-qualisigns since each piece of text is itself a replica of a system of writing, which is a collective sign.

Class #14: Distributive-collective-qualisign In this class, the immediate object passes from Secondness (designative) to Thirdness (distributive). Objects of Thirdness can only be known by collateral experience. For Peirce, collateral experience is a ‘previous acquaintance with what the sign denotes’, not an ‘acquaintance with the system of signs’ (Peirce 1909: EP 2.494). Most of the archaeological discoveries involving this stele were only possible due to collateral experiences with the field of linguistics, required to decipher the texts, and with ancient history, required to understand its meaning as a cultural artefact. The distributive immediate object involves the logical relations that structure a language. The logical relations of a written language are not restricted to the ones employed in a particular text, but include them. The few lines with hieroglyphs had a logic of this kind structuring them, although the logical relations of the hieroglyphs were not known when this stele was found. This logic is present in the sign, independently of the text being deciphered or not. To understand the meaning of the text one must know the language in which it was written. In the particular case of Bouchard’s stele, the comprehension of the three written languages was necessary to confirm that the three writings contained the same decree and to understand its cultural meaning. The rules that configure cultural aspects are also part of the dynamical object of Thirdness.

PEIRCE’S SYSTEM OF SIXTY-SIX CLASSES OF SIGNS This system considers ten trichotomies that refer to the sign, its correlates and their relationships: the dynamical object [DO], the immediate object [IO], the sign itself [S], the relation between the sign and the dynamical object [S-DO], the immediate interpretant [II], the dynamical interpretant [DI], the relation between the sign and the dynamical interpretant [S-DI], the final interpretant [FI], the relation between the sign and the final interpretant [S-FI], and triple relation involving the dynamical object, the sign and the final interpretant [DO-S-FI] (Peirce 1908: EP 2.483–91). A major discussion regarding the system of sixty-six classes involves the order of the trichotomies of the dynamical object, the immediate object and of the sign itself.5 As we have seen, in the system of twenty-eight classes, Peirce chose a logic of determination in which the dynamical object was first, then came the immediate object, then the sign itself (Peirce 1908: EP 2.480–1). However, in the letter he wrote the next day, he changed this order, beginning with the sign itself, then the immediate object and only then the dynamical object (Peirce 1908: EP 2.483–91). We can say that the first order is ontological; in the sense it focuses on what is most fundamental for being. The dynamical object is the ontological ground of the immediate object, which is what is immediately represented by the sign. The second order, in its turn, we may call epistemological, for it focuses on what is most accessible to a mind: the sign signifies the immediate object, which is the sole means of access to the elusive character of the dynamical object.

300

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

However, in this same letter, we have a very important hint towards the proper order, when Peirce analyses the nine possible relations between the trichotomies of the immediate object and the sign itself. For he dismisses the relations in which the sign determines the immediate object, and, as a consequence, only those where the immediate object determines the sign remain (Peirce 1908: EP 2.485–8). In addition, at the final pages of the letter (1908: EP 2.489), he says that there are two restrictions for the possible relation between the dynamical object and the immediate object trichotomies. First, if the dynamical object is a mere possibility, the immediate object can only be of the same kind. Secondly, when the immediate object is of Thirdness, the dynamical object must also be of Thirdness. From this, we can conclude that the dynamical object should be the first trichotomy considered, followed by the immediate object and the sign itself, as in the ontological order. The system of sixty-six classes is reached similarly to the other systems, by applying the logic of the categories to ten trichotomies. We have dealt with the majority of them already. The sign-dynamical-object relation corresponds to the sign-object relation in the system of ten classes. Similarly, the sign-final-interpretant relation corresponds to the sign-interpretant relation we have discussed then. The trichotomies of the objects were also seen in the system of twenty-eight classes. What is missing are the trichotomies relative to the interpretants. The size-limit of this chapter, however, does not allow me to run through all of these trichotomies and to provide detailed examples of each of one of the classes. What I will do is present sets of classes that are fundamental to a general understanding of the system, focusing on the interpretant trichotomies to evince the flow of inquiry. Similarly to what we have seen when Peirce divided the object in two, the division of the interpretant into three types reveals the process through which interpretation occurs. The immediate interpretant is the sign’s capacity to determine an interpretant. Once generated, the interpretant becomes a dynamical interpretant, which is the mental or emotional effect produced by the sign. Peirce’s final interpretant is a tendency or ‘the one Interpretative result to which every Interpreter is destined to come if the Sign is sufficiently considered’ (Peirce 1909: SS 110–1). A word on class nomenclature used in this text before we dive deeper into the complexity of the sixty-six classes. In the system of three classes, the names of the classes coincided with the names of the aspects of the sole trichotomy considered in that system, the sign-object relation: ‘icon’, ‘index’ and ‘symbol’. When we added a second trichotomy to the next system, we obtained six classes, which were named by merging the aspects of the two trichotomies, for instance, ‘rhematic-icon’ and ‘argumentativesymbol’. Then we added a third class and obtained the system of ten classes, which led us to add a third aspect to the names, for instance, ‘rhematic-indexical-sinsign’.6 The same logic applies to the system of twenty-eight classes, even though I did not use it, because I was focusing on the objects of the qualisigns. A fully named class in the twenty-eight system would be something like ‘{descriptive-abstractive}-{gratifying-sympatheticalhypothetical}-qualisign’. It is not feasible to keep naming classes like this (and here is the importance of the diagrams), especially when we reach the sixty-six classes with ten trichotomies, which mean ten different aspects. This is why I have started already in the twenty-eight classes to discuss sets of classes based on the ten classes. I will continue to do so here. The set of qualisigns is identical to the one already presented in the system of twentyeight classes. They relate to the sinsigns sets in the same way described then. Each set

CLASSIFYING SIGNS

301

of sinsigns may lead to different interpretants because they have objects of different modalities. As we saw in the system of ten classes, these classes are not only related, but the ones with greater modality involve the ones with lower modality. Designativeconcretive-sinsigns, for instance, are involved in designative-collective-sinsigns, and designative-collective-sinsigns are involved in distributive-collective-sinsigns. The three sets of sinsigns are identical in relation to the aspects of the sign itself. Each set begins with a rhematic-iconic-sinsign, followed by five rhematic-indexical-sinsigns that gradually passes from Firstness to Secondness, and ends with two dicent-indexicalsinsigns. The rhematic-iconic-sinsign describes a possible object of the sign and raises a hypothesis about it based on its description. The first rhematic-indexical-sinsign calls attention to the object and launches other hypotheses considering the rhematic-iconicsinsign that precedes it. The following four rhematic-indexical-sinsigns raise questions about the object of the sign, passing from being less precise (sympathetic, suggestive, gratifying, rhematic, instinctive) to more definite (percussive, imperative, practic, dicent, experimental), until reaching the dicent-indexical-sinsign classes that affirm something based on the hypotheses and tests made by the interpretants of the rhematic-indexicalsinsigns. The proliferation of interpretants shows us that there is a long interpretive path that may or may not lead to the discovery of the object of each set of sinsigns. The set of legisigns, being general signs, occur through their replicas, which are sinsigns. The sets of sinsigns, then, are sets that may refer to proper sinsigns or to replicas of a legisign. The legisign set is composed of one rhematic-iconic-legisign, five rhematic-indexical-legisigns, two dicent-indexical-legisigns, fifteen rhematicsymbolic-legisigns, ten dicent-symbolic-legisigns and three argumentative-symboliclegisigns. The rhematic-iconic-legisign, the set of five rhematic-indexical-legisigns and the two dicent-indexical-legisigns are involved in relations that are very similar to the relation between the rhematic-indexical-sinsigns and the dicent-indexical-sinsigns (presented in the previous paragraph). The rhematic-iconic-legisign raises a hypothesis about its object based on iconicity, or similarity of qualities. The rhematic-indexical-legisigns call attention to their objects, and raise hypotheses based on indexicality, or factual relation. The dicent-indexical-legisign tests the predictions made by the rhematic-iconic-legisign and the rhematic-indexical-legisign and gives definite information about their object (Peirce 1903: EP 2.294–5). The fifteen rhematic-symbolic-legisigns are arranged in five groups, one group on the left-side branch (classes #39, #46, #52, #57, #61) and four groups on the rightside branches (classes #40–43, #47–49, #53–54, #58) of the symbolic classes in the Signtree (see Figure 13.5). In the left-side group, all aspects related to the interpretants are of Firstness, while the right-side groups have both Firstness and Secondness. This indicates that the association of ideas in the classes of the left side is based on sympathy, suggestion and gratification, which are proper of the interpretants of Firstness. The classes that have interpretants of Secondness (on the right side), which can be categorical, percussive, imperative and practical, show that experience affects the association of ideas, transforming a mere impression into a more definite interpretation. These sets of rhematic-symbolic-legisigns are followed by sets of dicent-symbolic-legisigns that express the more or less vague information raised by the rhematic-symbolic-legisigns. The set of symbolic classes exhibits a large variety of interpretants that seem to relate to an inquiry process. The accuracy of the semiotic process is guaranteed by abductive, inductive and deductive processes expressed in the classes with interpretants of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness.7

302

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

FIGURE 13.5  The Signtree model of the system of sixty-six classes of signs.

The last set of legisigns is the set of argumentative signs. An argument can show which proposition series have connections that will lead to conclusions that tend to the truth.8 The three classes of arguments differ only in the last aspect, which considers the nature of the assurance of the utterance (Peirce 1908: EP 2.490). Arguments can be guaranteed by instinct, experience and form. At this point it is already clear that the stele found by officer Bouchard is a very important archaeological artefact. It contained a decree written in three different scripts: Greek, Demotic and hieroglyphic. Each fragment of the text was a replica of the laws of each script. Linguists were tasked with the discovery of the code of the hieroglyphic script, a work that spanned many years. Several hypotheses were raised and tested, but

CLASSIFYING SIGNS

303

not all interpretants led to the object of the sign (the hieroglyphic script). The main hypothesis was that the hieroglyphic script was ideographic, not phonetic. Because of that, people tried to figure out the meaning of the hieroglyphs based solely on royal names (given by the cartouche mentioned earlier) and the overall structure of the text compared to the Greek version. The philologist Champollion was the first to conceive the possibility that the hieroglyphs did not represent only images, but also sounds. Besides comparing the hieroglyphs to the Greek text, he compared the hieroglyphic script to the Coptic language, the latest stage of the old Egyptian language, and discovered its phonetic structure. To accomplish this, he did not restrict his work to the fragments on the stele, but analysed other fragments, that is, replicas of the hieroglyphic script. In an inquiry process, we may reach many results. Some of them are based on interpretants of Firstness, culminating in a conclusion that can only be assured by instinct, which is proper of abductive processes. Others are based on interpretants of Secondness, culminating in an assurance by experience, which is proper of inductive processes. Finally, when all interpretants are of Thirdness, a conclusion is assured by form, which is proper of deductive processes. Processes of interpretation, however, are not pure. Rather, they are complex mixtures of the three modes of reasoning, which can be seen in the interpretants represented in the diagram of the system of sixty-six classes. The process of deciphering the hieroglyphic script began with several abductive leaps pushed by feeling or instinct, followed by experimentations that narrowed down and eliminated hypotheses. Its definite confirmation, however, as is usual in science, took several years, when hieroglyphic language was fully comprehended and many other texts were properly translated. The black stone found by chance by officer Bouchard in the village of Rosetta back in 1799 triggered one of the most amazing semiotic chains in history. It was so special that it was granted a unique sign that distinguished it from every other stone, past or future. It became known as The Rosetta Stone.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS In 1907, after approximately twenty years dealing with semiotics, while working in his expansion on the sign classes, Peirce justified the imprecision of some of the terms he employed saying: ‘I am, as far as I know, a pioneer, or rather a backwoodsman, in the work of clearing and opening up what I call semiotic, that is, the doctrine of the essential nature and fundamental varieties of possible semiosis; and I find the field too vast, the labor too great, for a first-comer’ (Peirce 1907, EP 2.413). On Christmas Eve the following year, in a letter to L. Welby in which he presents a proposal for the ten trichotomies he writes a note affirming: ‘I have myself been entirely absorbed in the very same subject since 1863, without meeting, before I made your acquaintance, a single mind to whom it did not seem very like bosh’ (Peirce 1908, EP 2.490). Peirce devoted himself intensely to semiotics. He was a pioneer and did not abandon it, even though he knew he would not be able to finish it, counting on ‘future explorers’ to continue the work (Peirce 1907: EP 2.482). His expanded classes remained incomplete, but his systems of sign classes have a unique complexity and the lacunae remaining indicate the great potential for future investigations to carry out Peirce’s proposal. In this chapter, I presented Peirce’s systems of sign classes from the most well-known ones (three and ten sign classes) to the ones merely proposed by him, and, thus, left open (twenty-eight and sixty-six sign classes), in a process that presupposes that such systems constitute a continuous process of development of Peirce’s semiotics. The smaller systems,

304

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

therefore, are fundamental to understanding the more complex ones. By following the development of the sign classes throughout Peirce’s thought, we can see that each system describes the action of the sign with increasing detail. To evince semiosis and the relation between the sign classes, I chose the example of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.9 As we moved through the systems of sign classes, the description of the discovery process of the Rosetta Stone became increasingly more complex, showing how Peirce’s classification of signs can be employed to describe the dynamic semiotic motion that characterizes semiosis.

NOTES 1 A system of six classes is far from being objectively presented in Peirce’s text, which is, in fact, a preparation for the presentation of the system of ten sign classes. I propose this system between the system of three and the system of ten classes for pedagogical reasons, based on the logic of the development of the later systems. 2 The correspondence between these triples has been a topic of great discussion and some divergence among commentators. See Johansen (1985), Savan (1977), Santaella (2001), Short (2007), Jappy (2017), and Bellucci (2018). 3 There is an open dispute about the proper correlation between the terms he uses in the two letters. I relate the destinate to the immediate, the effective to the dynamical and the explicit to the final interpretant (Borges 2015), as does Jappy (2017). Savan (1988: 52–3) and Bellucci (2018: 460), on the other hand, relate the destinate to the final, and the explicit to the immediate interpretant. 4 Class numbers correspond to the ones in Figure 13.4. 5 See Weiss and Burks (1945), Sanders (1970), Savan (1988), Müller (1994), Farias and Queiroz (2003), Borges (2010, 2014) and Bellucci (2018). 6 I decided to include the three aspects that correspond to the three trichotomies in the names of all the ten sign classes for pedagogical reasons. Peirce used to omit the first and second aspects when they were not necessary to describe the class. For example, he simply called ‘qualisign’ the class I designate as ‘rhematic-iconic-qualisign’. Since all qualisigns must be rhematic and iconic, he chose to omit the first two aspects. For those accustomed to the way Peirce names the sign classes, his omissions are not a problem, but for those being introduced to them, I believe the redundance helps. 7 In Borges (2019), I argue that the interpretants of symbolic classes relate to a method of reasoning based on abduction, deduction and induction. 8 An example of how the propositions work on the sixty-six sign classes can be seen at Borges (2014). 9 I would like to express my gratitude to Juliana Rocha Franco, who suggested me in the first place to try to describe the discovery of the Rosetta Stone using Peirce’s sign classes.

REFERENCES Bellucci, F. (2018), Peirce’s Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics, New York: Routledge. Borges, P. (2010), ‘A Visual Model of Peirce’s 66 Classes Unravels his Late Proposal of Enlarging Semiotic Theory’, in L. Magnani, W. Carnielli and C. Pizzi (eds), Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology, 221–37, Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Borges, P. (2014), ‘Experience and Cognition in Peirce’s Semiotics’, The American Journal of Semiotics, 30 (1–2): 1–26.

CLASSIFYING SIGNS

305

Borges, P. (2015), ‘A System of 21 Classes of Signs as an Instrument of Inquiry’, The American Journal of Semiotics, 31 (3–4): 245–76. Borges, P. (2019), ‘Confidence through the Semiotic Process’, Semiotica, 228: 55–76. Farias, P. and J. Queiroz (2003), ‘On Diagrams for Peirce’s 10, 28, and 66 Classes of Signs’, Semiotica, 147: 165–84. Fisch, M. (1982), ‘Introduction’, in M. H. Fisch, C. J. Kloesel, E. C. Moore, D. D. Roberts, L. A. Ziegler and N. P. Atkinson (eds), Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce: A Chronological Edition Vol. 1, xv–xxxv, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fisch, M. (1986), Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism: Essays by Max H. Fisch, in K. L. Ketner and C. J. W. Kloesel (eds), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jappy, T. (2017), Peirce’s Twenty-eight Classes of Signs and the Philosophy of Representation, London: Bloomsbury. Johansen, J. D. (1985), ‘Prolegomena to a Semiotic Theory of Text Interpretation’, Semiotica, 57 (3–4): 225–88. Müller, R. (1994), ‘On the Principles of Construction and the Order of Peirce’s Trichotomies of Signs’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 30 (1): 135–53. Nöth, W. (1990), Handbook of Semiotics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Peirce, C. S. ([1857–92] 1982–2010), Writings of Charles S. Peirce, 7 vols (1–6, 8), ed. Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as W. Peirce, C. S. ([1866–1913] 1931–58), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols 1–6, C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds), vols 7–8, A. Burks (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cited as CP. Peirce, C. S. ([1867–93] 1992), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, ed. N. Houser and C. Kloesel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP 1. Peirce, C. S. ([1893–1913] 1998), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, ed. Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP 2. Peirce, C. S. ([1903–11] 1977), Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, ed. C. Hardwick and J. Cook, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as SS. Sanders, G. (1970), ‘Peirce’s Sixty-six Signs?’ Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 6 (1): 3–16. Santaella, L. (2001), Teoria geral dos signos. Como as linguagens significam as coisas. 2nd edn, São Paulo: Pioneira. Savan, D. (1977), ‘Questions Concerning Certain Classifications Claimed by Signs’, Semiotica, 19 (4): 179–96. Savan, D. (1988), An Introduction to C. S. Peirce’s Full System of Semeiotic, Toronto: University of Toronto. Short, T. (2007), Peirce’s Theory of Signs, New York: Cambridge University Press. Weiss, P. and A. Burks, ed. (1945), ‘Peirce’s Sixty-six Signs’, Journal of Philosophy, 42 (14): 383–8.

306

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Applying Signs W. JOHN COLETTA AND DIDIER TSALA EFFA

In this chapter, our goal is to show how semiotic perspectives, primarily Peircean and Greimassian, are transforming the workplace and the research lab.1 Indeed, applied semiotics is already at the cutting edge of the field of marketing and branding, perhaps because the power of the sign has long been recognized in that field. Innovators such as Laura O. Oswald (Marketing Semiotics Inc.), Rachel Lawes (Lawes Consulting LTD), Martina Olbert (Meaning.Global) and Chris Arning (Creative Semiotics) are leaders in the field. Readers should familiarize themselves with the annual international conference called Semiofest.2 See also The International Journal of Marketing Semiotics & Discourse Studies. More broadly, an excellent starting point for learning about applying signs is Louis Hébert’s An Introduction to Applied Semiotics (2020). This book clearly and powerfully links theory and practice, both within the analytical and continental traditions, highlighting especially ‘the school of semiotics established under A.J. Greimas’s influence, the school of semiosemantics that developed under F. Rastier, the school of R. Jakobson, and the school of C. S. Peirce’ (Hébert 2020: 1). The article ‘Greimas between France and Peirce’, by Thomas F. Broden (2000), provides an excellent theoretical context for those interested in ‘applying signs’ from a Peircean, a Greimassian and a French-semiotic point of view, outlining ‘areas of convergence and divergence’ (2000: 27–8). Broden’s theoretical article also has profound practical importance for those interested in ‘applying signs’ – or in making applications of Greimassian ‘signification’. Indeed, given that ‘the process of signification replaces the sign’ in Greimassian semiotics (Broden 2000: 30), we may ask ourselves, ‘Is the whole notion of “applying signs” a naïve one’? However, it is precisely the productive difference between a dynamic ‘signification’, rooted in ‘movement and architecture’ (2000: 35), and, as Deely has said, the ‘singular event’ of the sign, though ‘not so much the being’ of the sign but ‘the action such being gives rise to and depends upon for its sustenance throughout’ (1994: 186, qtd. by Broden), that Broden’s article powerfully highlights. Broden’s ‘Greimas between France and Peirce’, then, allows readers to familiarize themselves with a range of approaches to making applications of ‘signification’ and to applying the ‘sign’, including: 1. Paris semiotics, and the above-mentioned ‘highlighting signification rather than the sign’ (Broden 2000: 39), as well as its commitment to ‘signifying processes’ appearing as ‘dynamic states of affairs more than as singular events’ (2000: 37);

308

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

2. Greimassian ‘signification’, one tenet of which favours the study of ‘constituent signifying structures that generate “cooked” signs’ over a focus on the sign ‘as the “raw” object to be accounted for’ (2000: 48) and 3. the Peircean ‘sign’, which may be characterized sometimes as (merely) a ‘singular event’ – however, as Broden writes, ‘Peirce’s intellectual development is marked by a novel coming into awareness of the importance and ubiquity of signs’ (2000: 47). And so we might say that it is precisely by means of a sign’s having achieved the status of a ‘singular event’, of the sign’s having achieved the ‘ubiquity’ of its ‘singularity’, that the sign has been able to serve as a sign of a sign, one by means of which it invites us to itself, and thereby serves as a call to ‘action’, as an invitation to all living things to engage in the signing action of life and to thereby help shepherd into being emergent truths out of the dynamic field of ‘infinite semiosis’. In practical terms, the ‘sign’ can be studied as a ‘sign’, as part of a ‘text’, as part of a ‘code’ and within the context of various interpretive fields, or ‘metaforms’ (Sebeok and Danesi 2000: 38–43). The applications of ‘signification’ and ‘applying signs’, then, are complementary functions. Semiotics is also opening up new avenues of thinking in fields that have, in many cases, resisted an explicit semiotic approach, fields such as biology, cognitive science and law. Such resistance may often be an unwitting one, as the dominant scientific and philosophical paradigms (especially the mechanistic and physicalist ones in biology and the analytical tradition in philosophy) create contexts within which young researchers may never be exposed to the role that semiotics might play in their field of study. However, Thomas Sebeok and Jesper Hoffmeyer succeeded in opening up in biology the field of biosemiotics. See today the journal Biosemiotics and the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies (ISBS). In the field of cognitive science, the journal Cognitive Semiotics is the official organ of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics (IACS). In law, legal semiotics, a field created by Roberta Kevelson, is represented by the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law – Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique. The International Association for Semiotic Studies – L’ Association Internationale de Sémiotique (IASSAIS), founded in 1969 – is the world’s leading organization in semiotics, with its official journal being Semiotica. The IASS-AIS website (https://iass-ais.org/semiotic-researchinstitutes/) contains a long list of ‘Semiotic Research Institutes’ from around the world with links to their websites. The dual language (French and English) website www. signosemio.com is another valuable digital source. And for those readers interested in ‘applying signs’ or exploring ‘signification’ in the political and cultural sphere, consider Semiotext(e)/Intervention Series, an offering of short, palm-sized ‘polemical texts by intellectual agitators’ published by MIT Press. In a recent LinkedIn article entitled '10 reasons why you can do semiotics and a machine can't', Rachel Lawes (2018) writes, as reason 10: ‘Automated systems regard meaning as located within semiotic signs – but semiotic theory tells us that meaning is located everywhere but the sign – it is located in everything that the sign excludes.’ ‘Semiotics’, then, might be defined as the study of everything a machine can’t do. In a world increasingly given over to machines and algorithms, the good news is that, since machines can’t do semiotics, ‘applying signs’ and making applications of ‘signification’ are here to stay. But what about ‘Big Data’, some will ask? As Rachel Lawes writes, though, in ‘reason 1’ of her ‘10 reasons’, ‘Machines can aggregate data and arrange it in different ways – but this is not in itself analysis or interpretation’. Again, semiotics,

APPLYING SIGNS

309

the field that studies interpretation, will continue to have a practical role to play. We should add that Lawes’s recognition that ‘semiosis’, the action of signs that defines life, cannot be reduced to simple machine algorithms is general in semiotic theory. For example, the authors of Theses on Biosemiotics: Prolegomena to a Theoretical Biology (Kalevi Kull et al. 2009) write that ‘Biology is incomplete as a science in the absence of explicit semiotic grounding’ and that ‘The predictive power of biology is embedded in the functional aspect and cannot be based on chemistry alone’. Here these scientists are asserting in a biological context the same point that Lawes is making: the mechanistic, physicalist and analytical traditions that have held sway for centuries have their significant limitations. Again, if semiotics is the study of interpreting and applying signs, of making applications of ‘signification’, the research shows that semioticians are still desperately needed in all fields: in medicine, 10–30 per cent of diagnoses are wrong (Schiff et al. 2005); in law, one out of eight times, juries are wrong (Tremmel 2007); in marketing and branding, more than 70 per cent of marketers failed to deliver real results to their clients,3 and roughly 75 per cent of ads will creatively underperform (regardless of media)4; in forensic science, one-third of murder cases in America go unsolved5; and 11 per cent of individuals involved in police shootings were later found to be innocents misidentified as criminals6; finally, in cultural semiotics, nearly 40 per cent believe we’re living in the end times (Chumley 2013). INT3RP INC7 is one consulting company offering semiotic services in each of the above domains.

APPLYING SIGNS IN A PEIRCEAN CONTEXT In addition to Nicole Everaert-Desmedt’s excellent chapter on applying Peirce in Hébert’s An Introduction to Applied Semiotics (2020),8 readers should familiarize themselves with The Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Peircean Semiotics (2019), edited by Tony Jappy, and the Approaches to Applied Semiotics (AAS) book series, from de Gruyter, within which series have been published books featuring a wide range of applications of semiotics across several fields. The first volume in that series, Thomas A. Sebeok and Marcel Danesi’s The Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis, could be considered something of a foundational text for applying semiotics in general. We should also foreground Applied Interdisciplinary Peirce Studies (2019), Volume 10 of Peirce Studies, ‘a peer-reviewed monographic series edited by members of the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism at Texas Tech University’. Volume 10 offers a range of cutting-edge applications across several fields. The Commens: Digital Companion to C. S. Peirce (http://www.commens.org/home) is also indispensable, as is the ‘Applying Peirce’ conference series. In what follows, we will describe what avenues of research seem especially rich today while integrating into our discussion two Peircean tools or heuristics for applying Peircean semiotics.

Forensic semiotics Forensic semiotics is the application of semiotic theory and practice both to the solving of criminal cases, what Marcel Danesi calls FS1 (First-Order Semiotics), and to helping professionals in the field understand the cultural dimensions of crime, both its origins and its relationship to how it is represented in the media (FS2, Second-Order

310

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Forensic Semiotics). As Danesi writes in Signs of Crime: Introducing Forensic Semiotics (2014: 68): Each sign present at a crime scene has a plethora of possible meanings, which need to be examined in the context of the scene, in the light of relevant cultural and historical knowledge, and in terms of available scientific information, in order to be properly interpreted. Even if the first assumptions prove to be false, the placement of the signs in relation to the other signs present at the scene as a form of analysis may help guide the investigators to a logically connected system, which can be modified or even rejected. Here Danesi highlights a key to forensic semiotics: data don’t assemble themselves; data need to be interpreted. (See especially below Tool 2, Principle 12: The Sherlock Holmes ‘Room-to-Think’ Principle and Principle 13: The Sherlock-Homing Principle.) Therefore, training in forensic semiotics should be a necessary component of training in forensic science and a necessary complement to training in the modern, digital technologies that have come to dominate that field. Television crime shows focus overmuch on the science of data collection and its supposed infallibility, assuming somehow that data interpret themselves and are bias free. Peirce’s 10/28 Classes of Sign, presented below (see Tool 1), will also yield key forensic insights, as all evidence related to a crime will fall out along the continuum formed by the sign classes (Peirce 1903: EP 2.289-99; Farias and Queiroz 2003; Jappy 2017). For example, detectives will not want to confuse sign class III, an ‘envirogram’ (a rhematic indexical sinsign, say a ‘spontaneous cry’ originating from outside a witness’s local environment and that carries with it only indexical [directional] information) with sign class VII, a ‘vocalization’ (a dicentic indexical legisign, say a ‘grunt’ or a ‘scream’, a sign that carries not only indexical information, as does the aforementioned ‘envirogram’, but that also conveys information about its object – pain, gender, age, anger, etc.). Each category will help forensic scientists and semioticians to explore the limits and potentials of every piece of evidence and to help in the interrogation of witnesses. A series of workshops for police officers on ‘applying signs’ would be especially helpful. Police officers would do a better job of interpreting the meaning of the complex situations in which they find themselves with two simple semiotic tools: 1. Peirce’s triad of icon (e.g. ‘Is that a real gun, or a toy that resembles a real gun?’); index (Is the [toy?] gun actually pointed at someone? In another words, is the ‘gun’ merely being ‘carried for purchase’, or is it being actually ‘wielded’?); and symbol (How does my view of the situation depend on ‘received’ notions of the race, gender and/or class of the person holding [pointing? purchasing?] the [toy?] gun?) AND 2. Peirce’s notion of the ‘interpretant’, that the meaning of a sign is a function of its having been interpreted; if police officers understand themselves as co-creators of the scene in which they find themselves, they will have greater control over its unfolding.

Medical semiotics As Tredinnick-Rowe and Stanley discuss in more detail (this project: vol. 2. chp. 6,), medical semiotics is the application of semiotic theory and practice to the medical science of diagnostics, providing physicians with a range of semiotic tools with which to

APPLYING SIGNS

311

classify signs and symptoms (or to help disambiguate said signs and symptoms) as they manifest themselves in everything from imaging technologies to the decoding of complex patient narratives (see the field of narrative medicine). A semiotic perspective would be invaluable in the growing medical informatics field as well (see for example Epic Systems: Healthcare Software Company). Historically, as we learn from the father of medicine (and semiotics), Hippocrates, the first signs were symptoms. Since semiotics has its origins in the history of medicine, getting physicians on board with ‘applying signs’ in their own work should be easy: they invented the field, after all. One might think that modern medical testing, with its ability to produce objective signs (test results) not subjective ones (symptoms), would have obviated the need for semiotics, for the science of interpretation. But x-rays and MRI scans, for example, are always already interpretations, complex constructions. In fact, a whole range of false diagnostic images has arisen, artifactual signs, signs that purport to stand for bodily objects but that in fact stand for nothing but themselves or the processes that have created them. Radiologists can also benefit from an understanding of the nested nature of Peirce’s 10/28 classes of sign because every seemingly simple image (x-ray, MRI, CT scan) is in fact an amalgamation of (even hierarchy of) sign classes. Every MRI scan has, for example, two-dimensional and three-dimension components – as well as components that could be either – and therefore confused for each other; for example, juxtaposition can be mistakenly taken for depth or vice versa. Peirce has names for those 2D and 3D signs (sign type II, the diagram, technically, a ‘rhematic iconic sinsign’, and sign type III, the envirogram, technically, a ‘rhematic indexical sinsign’). Being able to name the parts of an image makes one more aware both of those dimensions themselves and of the potential of misnaming them. As John Burnum, MD, referencing Nietzsche and the Peircean ‘interpretant’, reminds us concerning the contingency of much medical diagnosis, ‘there are no facts, only interpretations’ (1993: 942). For example, the same MRI scan, a clue or ‘dicentic indexical sinsign’ (see sign type IV, subtype 13: ‘environmeans’), can mean two different things in two different temporal contexts (see also Principle 2: ‘The Theory of Context Dependency’). The image (the material basis of the sign) changes not an iota – only its meaning does (see Figure 14.1).

Marketing and branding semiotics The semiotics of branding and marketing is powerfully represented today in the work of Laura R. Oswald and Rachel Lawes. An early and still relevant book is Marketing and Semiotics, edited by Jean Umiker-Sebeok. Marcel Danesi has also authored and coauthored important books in the field of advertising and semiotics, and for marketing and branding professionals looking to add a strong Peircean theoretical perspective to their work, I recommend Tony Jappy’s Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics. Principles 1–4 and 9 below are especially useful for applying signs in a marketing-and-branding context. Fine distinctions, as between sign classes 14, the Pictogram; 15, the Ideogram; and 16, the Ideojam can help advertising agencies fine-tune the design and the effects of the images that they deploy. Familiarity with sign class 25, for example, the ‘Reisign’ (‘an hypothesis about an object that changes the object’) – see MacGyver’s transformation of a soy-sauce packet into a ballistic weapon – can help marketing and branding teams better understand and deploy the knowledge base behind how, for example, the ‘jelly egg’ (once only an Easter candy) was transformed several decades ago into (via reification) a ‘jelly

312

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

FIGURE 14.1  Three-fold sign function.

bean’ – a much more marketable, all-year-long, candy treat. For more on marketing and branding semiotics, see Bankov and Trendafilov’s chapter ‘Semiotics in Marketing and Branding’ in vol. 2 chp. 14 of Bloomsbury Semiotics.

Cultural semiotics Marcel Danesi and Paul Perron’s Analyzing Cultures is a classic in the field. Certainly, the scientific nature of Peircean semiotics – grounded as it is in the ‘dynamic object’ and the psychological/phenomenological reality of the ‘immediate object’, as well as in the grounded fitness of sign to object as expressed in Peirce’s famous triad of icon, index and symbol (see Principle 8, The Rule of Three, below) – provides many interpretive

APPLYING SIGNS

313

tools for deconstructing conspiracy-theory thinking and the ‘logic’ of so-called ‘endtimes thinking’ as well as for unpacking the term ‘fake news’ or for making sense of the radically competing perspectives on the Covid-19 pandemic. Principles 3 and 11 below, the ‘More-Else Measure’ and the ‘Meme-Deme-Seme Distinction’, can be very useful for showing how the structures that underpin the ‘logic’ of conspiracy theory deconstruct themselves. Elliot Gaines’s Media Literacy and Semiotics (2010) is a powerful and clearly written Peircean antidote to the ‘fake news’ phenomenon. Gaines explains in clear terms and then shows readers how to use Peirce’s ‘Pure Grammar’, ‘Critical Logic’ and ‘Speculative Rhetoric’ to achieve ‘media literacy’. Critical Global Semiotics: Understanding Sustainable Transformational Citizenship, edited by Maureen Ellis (2020), contains important theoretical frameworks for understanding how semiotics and semiosis are (and may be used in the process of) creating a socially and ecologically sustainable society; this volume also contains more than a dozen case studies related to how to apply a critical global semiotics perspective and methodology (involving Critical Realism and Systemic Functional Semiotics) in specific cultural settings related to achieving ‘sustainable transformational citizenship’, cultural settings such as planning, management, education, the arts and film, politics, and international studies and relations. The specificity of terminology of Peirce’s 10/28 classes of sign can be helpful here, too. The rhematic iconic legisign, for example, sign type V, what I call an IDEOGRAM (with its sub-types, sign types 14–16), is a picture (an iconic sign) that gives us a feeling (a rhematic sign) of an idea (a legisign). But, a ‘rhematic iconic legisign’ is not an ‘argumentative symbolic legisign’ (sign type X, an ARGUMENT), a law- or habit-making structure. As Peirce says, ‘Pictures alone, – pure likenesses, – can never convey the slightest information’ (1893: EP 2.7). A pure image should never be confused with a real argument, no matter how emotionally powerful it is. Thus, a picture of a foetus (an iconic sign posing as an ‘argument’ against abortion) held by a pro-life activist is not an argumentative sign– even if it is presented as one. The television networks need a semiotics go-to person to make these semiotic points on the air.

Cognitive semiotics Cognitive semiotics today is well represented by The International Association for Cognitive Semiotics and their Journal of Cognitive Semiotics. One important sub-domain that I will mention here relates to the application of Peirce’s 10/28 classes of sign to research in artificial intelligence (AI). As Marguerite McNeal (2015) writes in ‘Fei-Fei Li: If We Want Machines to Think, We Need to Teach Them to See’: Any decent self-driving car will eventually need to distinguish between, say, a large rock in the roadway and a similar-sized paper bag – and that it should brake and steer to avoid the rock but ignore the bag. Today, computers can spot a cat or tell us the make, model, and year of a car in a photo, but they’re still a long way from seeing and reasoning like humans and understanding context, not just content. As McNeal tells us, the ability of computers to understand, to ‘see’, to unpack visual metaphor (as in the ‘bag’ = ‘rock’ conundrum faced by autonomous cars) is still ‘a long way’ off for AI. However, by flipping AI on its head and considering not AI but EI (Evolutionary Intelligence), one realizes that, from a biosemiotic point of view, in nature,

314

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

irony (misrepresentation, mimicry, metaphor) has been there from the beginning (think of the Trojan-Horse-like strategies of viruses cheating past our immune systems). For AI, however, ‘getting’ irony is still a thing of the future. Note, though, that every day, raccoons, coyotes and eagles are ‘reading’ and solving complex biological metaphors and visual puzzles such as ‘toad = stone’ and ‘egret = reed’, even as complex autonomous vehicles have yet to solve the rock = paper-bag metaphor. Significantly, Peirce’s 10/28 nested classes of sign below can serve as the epistemological basis for – as an evolutionary and cognitive scaffolding for (even as the source of training materials for) – developing EI (Evolutionary Intelligence) applications, especially as pertains to robots and autonomous avatars, the latter in virtual space. A study done by Brodeur et al., ‘HoME: a Household Multimodal Environment’ (2017),9 describes how HoME provides a virtual interactive space ‘for artificial agents to learn from vision, audio, semantics, physics, and interaction with objects and other agents, all with realistic context’. Based on a HoME-like platform, ‘Minding the Reef’ – a Peircean ‘virtual interactive space’ being developed by EI-AI-O (Evolutionary Intelligence-Artificial Intelligence-Online) (Farming Intelligence)  – a research initiative of INT3RP INC (www.int3rp.inc) – is being designed to allow ‘predatory’ autonomous avatars (virtually embodied agents), in gamified environments, to evolve language competency within a 3D, reef-like maze, through interactions with various virtual prey ‘species’. These virtual prey species represent themselves to predatory autonomous avatars as the equivalent of the ‘misrepresentations’ of biological mimicry, that is, as complex visual puzzles (like the ‘toad = stone’ and ‘egret = reed’ pictorial predications above), as examples, therefore, of Peirce’s ‘pictorial predicates’ (Stjernfelt 2014: 64) and Stjernfelt’s ‘natural propositions’ (2014) – all composed from/of elements drawn from Peirce’s 10/28 classes of sign below, understood as representing Hoffmeyer’s ‘semiotic scaffolding’ (2008: 138). EI can be a key initiative for ‘applying signs’ in cognitive semiotics.

TOOL 1: CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE’S 10/28 CLASSES OF SIGN RE-PACKAGED While Peirce’s threefold names for his ten classes of sign ([1893–1913] 1998) are preserved below, new, easy-to-remember, yet precise one-word names have been supplied (except where noted by an asterisk) for Peirce’s 10/28 classes of sign so as to aid semiotic researchers and practitioners in applying each class of sign. Two works in particular, one by Edwina Taborsky (2007) (ET below) and one by James Lizka (1996) (JL below) (the inspirations for my ‘naming’ and ‘nesting’ project below), are indispensable in any effort to explore the scaffolded logic of Peirce’s classes of sign represented below, as is the chapter ‘Classifying Signs’ by Priscila Borges in the present volume, Vol. 1 (Chapter 13). Taborsky’s article includes a powerful, Peircean coding system that could be of value to digitalizing research in AI/EI. (For other aids to understanding Peirce’s 10/28 classes of sign, see Merrell (2000), Farias and Queiroz (2003, 2006) and Jappy (2017).) Peirce’s 10/28 classes of sign below are represented with respect to their evolutionary and cognitive scaffolding – like ‘Russian dolls’. Note that this scaffolding can be read both ways, from a bottom-up/inside-out emergent point-of-view (say, of an E coli bacterium) or from a top-down/outside-in integrative point-of-view (say, of a person). Thus, a human being experiencing ‘peer pressure’ and an Escherichia coli bacterium responding to the ‘pressure’ from its being part of a ‘microcolony’ are both caught up in a Holosyst/ Holopeer – sign class 3 of Peirce’s 28. To show such a dual valence, signs sometimes, as

APPLYING SIGNS

315

in the above case, have two names, in which case they are marked as follows: ← Holosyst/ Holopeer →. (See Coletta (2021) for a fuller exploration of Peirce’s 10/28 classes of sign.)

I. Holosign The Holosign corresponds to Peirce’s ‘rhematic iconic qualisign’ designation, a feeling (or a corresponding physical/chemical state) for/of a quality, such as ‘yellowness’, for a bee or a person, when the source of that feeling or quality (say a dandelion) is (at this point) unknowable. More developed signs, to be explored below, include sinsigns (instantiated, knowable signs) and legisigns (laws and habits): e.g. ‘It’s a dandelion!’ (a sinsign), and then, ‘It’s a weed!’ (‘Extirpate it!’) or ‘Yes, wine!’ (‘Harvest it!’), two opposite possible legisigns of the same sinsign. Note: From an evolution-of-mind point-of-view (EMPOV), the Holosign is the first or ‘lowest’ class of sign. 1. Holosign: a chemical/physical state or feeling generated within the ‘self’; 2. Holodex: a state or feeling deriving from an external physical stimulus; 3. ← Holosyst/Holopeer →: a reaction or response to a (liberating or oppressive?) law or system – be it physical, chemical, biological, or social.

II. Diagram The Diagram, Peirce’s term, corresponds to his ‘rhematic iconic sinsign’ designation, a feeling that (or a physical/chemical state in response to) a real difference or similarity or choice exists (‘an instantiated icon’); first instantiation of a sign; though signs are always triadic, here is the origin of the recognition of the binary, thus, the FIRST 2-D SIGN, which is to say that the sign at this stage emerges as a record of its own ‘singularity’ (JL) or individuality in the universe precisely by highlighting the similarity with (iconicity) the other – and so the signifier-signified (the 2-D aspect of the always triadic sign) relationship is born – the sign stands out as a sign, one with ‘the power to represent its object as similar to’ itself (JL), as when a cat rubs its head against your hand as a sign to you to rub its head; or when a cow senses that standing here (in the dark; under a tree) is cooler than standing there (in the light; out of the shade): dark = cool; light = hot. (Later, with the Ideogram [sign class V], a tree seen in the distance may serve as a ‘picture of the idea’ to a cow that it should move towards the tree [the shade] if it wishes to cool off. By sign class IX, the Grammisign, we can speak of a ‘shady character’.) 4. Diagram: a diagram is a state of or feeling for (or a physical/chemical register for) a difference that makes a difference; 5. Organogram: an indexical response to a felt (perceived) difference; 6. Optigram: a feeling that responses are available (ET); 7. ← Diacert/Diachoice →: a feeling of being certain about a choice (ET).

III. Envirogram The Envirogram corresponds to Peirce’s ‘rhematic indexical sinsign’ designation, a feeling that something signifies (or a physical/chemical state in response to) something somewhere; a ‘spontaneous cry’, for Peirce, a sign that carries no ‘law-like associations such as a grunt’ (JL), but which, ‘because of its unique spatial and temporal location, is interpreted as pointing to or drawing attention to its object’ (JL), thereby instantiating

316

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

a feeling for/a sense of space and time. [The Envirogram is the first 3-D sign; in terms of the evolution of semiosis, space & time now become resources as the ‘outside’, the ‘environment’, becomes folded within an inside looking out: from a phenomenological point of view, this constitutes the origin of the ‘Mem-Brain’.] 8. Physiogram: the surface of an organism/of a body itself becomes a register, a sign, of ‘outness’ or ‘otherness’; 9. ← Enviraction/Envirinsight →: a feeling, an ‘Ah, ha!’ (or a physiological equivalent), within the body or organism that a ‘place’ or ‘space’ (or even a thought now recognized as an ‘other to the self’) is exploitable; 10. Envirogram: a feeling within the body or organism for a difference that could make a difference – in space/place; 11. Enviraptation: an organism’s external environment, considered as a past series of analogue encounters digitalized; the actual difference that made a difference.

IV. Clue The Clue corresponds to Peirce’s ‘dicentic indexical sinsign’ designation, e.g. a symptom, weathervane, hoof print. As a dicentic sign, the Clue, as Peirce writes to Lady Welby about dicentic signs in general, is ‘a sign represented in its signified interpretant as if it were in a Real Relation to its Object’ (qtd. in JL 1996: 41). The origin of true and false, ‘[b]ut a dicisign does not furnish reasons for being true or false’ (Nicole Everaert-Desmedt [NE-D, below]). The origin of the cognitive internalization of cause and effect. [First sign caused by the object that it represents.] 12. Environmeters: Signs that are themselves objects (and may remain so) but that also may be used by organisms as indexical signs of (registers or metres of) their physical causes or sources but not yet of sign-object relations that result as the working out of laws that have been digitalized (wind as a cause vs. genes as a cause). 13. Environmeans/Environmeants/Environmemes: Affordances/Genes/and Digital Memes. Clues that are generated out of the matrix of laws that have been digitalized. ●●

●●

Environmeans: Affordances. An ‘affordance’ is an object that is also a sign to an organism of some potential other use for that object, a use that others generally overlook but that when recognized can then be used to change both the user’s and the object’s future (say a chewing tone for a dog in a wooden-handled hammer) (primarily analogue); when this sign lies embedded in a legisign, however, sign types V and up, a ‘projectileweapon’ ‘tone’ might be identified consciously in a packet of soy sauce by a MacGyver (primarily digital at that point); Environmeants: The analogue, external environment and its cause-effect relations have now been internalized (and repackaged, as genes) according to a digital logic, such that every individual released into the world from out of that digital package represents to that world its own (and its species’) inner model of it, and the cause-and-effect relationships that obtain between that digital, internal model of the world and the analogue, outside world itself are the continual sites where what was ‘meant’ is measured against what continues to be and will be. Say, everything from an E. coli bacterium’s genetically programmed ‘random walk’, which propels such

APPLYING SIGNS

317

bacteria randomly into new environments so as to take advantage of space as inherently valuable; to ●●

Environmemes: Say, internet memes that represent ‘leaps’ into & represent and create (encode) cultural environments.

V. Ideogram or Pictogram The Ideogram or Pictogram corresponds to Peirce’s ‘rhematic iconic legisign’ designation, say, a curve on a line graph (JL) (‘diagram type’) showing population growth, or a visual icon of an animal type on a cave wall, say ꓯ. [First predominantly conventional sign; the feeling of an idea or a feeling for a type.] 14. Pictogram: a picture (an icon) of, a feeling for, an idea; 15. Ideogram: an idea received through the ‘mental’ juxtaposition of icons (a diagram), say ‘exponential growth’ after looking at a line graph; 16. Ideojam: a new or original diagrammatic idea (not so much ‘received’ or prepacked – see the Ideogram) emerging through an environ/mental ‘triangulation’ of icons.

VI. Deicticism The Deicticism corresponds to Peirce’s ‘rhematic indexical legisign’ designation, a demonstrative pronoun: this, that, these, those. ‘Any conventional sign which acts primarily as an index’ (JL). The Deicticism is the first fully conventional sign. Key: with respect to the evolution of semiosis, the conventional has now become ‘physically real’. We now have the origin of what Stuart Kauffman (qtd. in Hoffmeyer 2008: 89) calls ‘context space’ (which is to say that objects and signs have learned how to create a ‘gravitational’ field of meaning around themselves). The Deicticism is ‘always instantiated in a rhematical indexical signsign’ (JL), an Envirogram, Sign type III (JL). The Deicticism, then, is a result of how conventional signs that create environments are scaffolded on the physical instantiations of such environments. 17. Boolean deixis: ‘an individual concept based on pure reason, as mediated by a set of hypotheses; the Sign is innovative and individual’ (ET). A feeling for the idea of how (or a chemical or biological response to how) the world reveals itself through relationships of ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, ‘too’ (from chemical bonding to biological symbioses to cliques in high school to data retrieval.) 18. Signature deixis: ‘an individual concept based on pure reason, as mediated by external experience; the Sign is innovative and individual’ (ET). The use of signs to stand for and create individually indexed relationships in time and space, say ‘that’s dad’s knock’ or a bird whistle standing for a territory. 19. Daseindeixis: ‘an individual concept based on pure reason, as mediated by a set of hypotheses; the Sign is an internal emotional experience’ (ET) of the ‘thisness’ of a person, thing or relation, as well as of the self and of its spatial and temporal relation to other selves and even of its relation to the idea of relation(ship) itself; the experience of ‘being there’, of ‘fitness’. ‘Thisness to fitness’. 20. Deicticentre: ‘an individual concept based on pure reason, as mediated by external experience’ (ET); the sign is an ‘internal emotional experience’ (ET) or idea of the concepts ‘here’ or ‘there’/or ‘now’ or ‘then’ (Space & time deixis), or of ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’ or ‘they’ (Person deixis).

318

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

VII. Mercator The Mercator corresponds to Peirce’s ‘dicentic indexical legisign’ designation, say, a ‘scream’ for help or a ‘street cry’: ‘Beer here!’ [A Mercator is a conventional sign that not only is indexical but also conveys information about its object. As such, it represents the beginning of ‘content space’.] 21. Contention: a content-rich sign that is ‘[A]n indexical or mechanical physical reaction operating in a habitual, standardized manner’ (ET). The ‘ticking of a clock’ (ET). Of course, humans created the clock; 22. Vocalization: ‘Innervocality’ (ET). ‘The Sign is expressed externally but mediated internally’ (ET). ‘A heartbeat’ (ET) (now, humans ‘are’ the clock) or a grunt or ‘street cry’ (“Beer here …”!).

VIII. Digisign The Digisign corresponds to Peirce’s ‘rhematic symbolic legisign’ designation, a noun or predicate, a sense for what could be predicated about a class of things. ‘An iconic image of a universal, a common noun’ (ET). Words or letters, say the letter A, now no longer an icon of an animal head (ꓯ), but, when turned on its ‘head’, a sign for a sound [here A = ‘æ’], a sound that can be part of a digital string of sounds in a word that stands for its object through convention, say the word ‘Apple’ – and nobody now thinks, ‘Hey, what’s that upside-down animal head doing in my apple’. Origin of the digital in human language (as scaffolded on Boolean deixis, sign class 17 above): ‘the digital code frees human beings from the chains of actuality’, writes Hoffmeyer (1996: 49). 23. Logosign (or Petrosign, or Communisign): a noun, a term, predicate, a distinction, say ‘pet name’ or ‘ … is a pet name’; 24. Digivalence: a grammatical marker, the underlying idea of a real-world relationship that grammar is the sign or mark of; the grammar of thought; 25. Reisign: a word as a hypothesis about an object that changes the object (MacGyver’s transformation of a soy packet into a ballistic weapon).

IX. Grammasign The Grammasign corresponds to Peirce’s ‘dicentic symbolic legisign’ designation, including propositions and assertions: an index linked to an icon so as to create a symbol with a factual interpretant – the ‘index’ connecting the symbolic to an object – the origin of the objective – as in how objects are transformed into objectives. (How things and relations acquire ‘existential features’ [ET]; such an ‘a-signing’ of ‘existential features’ scaffolds the Birth of Grammar.) The Grammasign, as a dicent sign, creates a logically defensible model of the world as an ‘as if’ structure: Peirce writes, ‘I define a dicent as a sign represented in its signified interpretant as if it were in a Real Relation to its Object’ (1904: SS 33-34, qtd. in Liszka 1996: 41). The birth of the virtual – of the virtureal. 26. Inductive and deductive propositions: say, ‘Fido is her pet’s name’, a proposition that may be arrived at inductively or deductively. 27. Abductive proposition: say, ‘I bet she gives her cats dog names’.

APPLYING SIGNS

319

X. Argument The term ‘argument’ is Peirce’s original term for this sign class, the argumentative symbolic legisign; a sign often evincing an ‘If …, then … ’ format (i.e., how the world comes to take on ‘law-like features’; ‘The Sign is a process of reasoning not a particular existential entity’ [ET]. Accordingly, having now escaped from the realm of ‘particular existential entities’, signs help scaffold the Birth of Reason – or conscious irony or humour. 28. Argument: say, ‘If Fido is her pet’s name, her pet most likely is a dog’; or ‘If I know Bill, Fido is a cat.’ For a fuller discussion of Peirce’s 10/28 classes of sign, see Coletta (2021).

TOOL 2: THIRTEEN PRINCIPLES OF APPLIED PEIRCEAN SEMIOTICS The following thirteen principles of applied Peircean semiotics are designed to be of use across a wide range of what we might call ‘semiotic service domains’, including marketing and branding semiotics; forensic semiotics; cultural semiotics; medical semiotics; legal semiotics; gaming semiotics; security semiotics and cognitive semiotics (including AI research – remember that Rachel Lawes understands semiotics as the study of what ‘you can do’ that ‘a machine can’t’, and so the following thirteen principles, from a cognitive semiotics point of view, may be seen as functions that AI must learn to perform if it is to be considered fully intelligent). These principles describe, then, in relatively simple terms, both how semiosis (the signing action of nature) works and how we can talk about semiosis. (See, for an extended discussion of thirty, not thirteen, principles of semiotics, Coletta 2021.)

Principle 1: The law of affect A sign is often more powerful (more flexible and efficient) than the object it represents. (Isn’t this the whole key to marketing and branding, selling the ‘sizzle’ not the ‘steak’?)

Principle 2: The theory of context dependency The very same sign can mean different things in different environments. Hippocrates understood this with respect to the problematic interpretation of symptoms, the first ‘signs’ in Western philosophical discourse. It might be helpful also for those who are understandably suspicious of the claim that meaning isn’t in the sign itself to recall what modern geneticists tell us: the ‘meaning’ even of a given DNA sequence (such sequences serving in the popular imagination as the very archetype of deterministic meaning: It’s all in the genes, we say!) is not in that sequence itself but in how that sequence is interpreted (transcribed and translated [see Figure 14.2]), since the very same sequence can have several different outcomes or meanings in different interpretive environments (see Lewontin (1993 [1991]: 66–7)).

Principle 3: The more-else measure (drawn from Umberto Eco) Signs shouldn’t merely stand for something else (a recipe for conspiracy thinking); signs should stand for something more than themselves (a basis for a Peircean science of semiotics).

320

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Principle 4: The thought-sign principle ‘All Thought Is in Signs’ (Charles Sanders Peirce), but thoughts don’t originate in the mind; rather, mind is in part an environmental phenomenon – and signs are the environ/mental platform, scaffolding or currency of thought. [Here is a lesson that could much benefit contemporary AI research, which for too long has been based on a Cartesian philosophical tradition of innate ideas.] Corollary 1: The Hypothetical Principle: ‘Every sign is an hypothesis about its Object’ (unless otherwise noted, the quoted lines in this ‘Corollary’ section are all from Michael Cabot Haley 1999)). Corollary 2: The Power of Partiality: ‘No sign does or can represent everything about its object’, so, the more we pay attention, the more objects grow into themselves. Corollary 3: The Mediation Principle: ‘All thought is mediated by signs; there is no immediate understanding … but this is not a bad thing.’ Indeed, ‘mediated judgments and perceptions can be self-critical’. Corollary 4: Signs Make the World: As the Jeep commercial says, ‘The things we make make us.’ And Peirce writes, ‘nothing can be more futile than to attempt to form a conception of the universe which shall overlook the power of representations [signs] to cause real facts’ (1904: EP 2.322).

Principle 5: The rule of the third The meaning of a sign is not in the ‘Sign vehicle’ (Charles Morris’s phrase) itself (Peirce’s representamen, the First) or in the object it represents (the Second) but in the interpretation (the Third, the interpretant, the ‘proper significate outcome’) of the sign. In fact, the interpretant (as a kind of field of interpretation) creates a prior context within which the representamen first represents the object. Principle 5 is a key to deconstructing the ‘logic’, for example, that medical test results (e.g. MRI scans) are supposedly ‘in no need of’ interpretation.

Principle 6: Relations are as real as things Relations (instantiated as signs) are themselves real, have their own agency and in fact come to define individual things. William of Ockham’s belief that ‘only individuals exist, and that “relations” arise only when there are two or more individuals similar in some feature(s) according to a comparison made by some observer, in some mind’, is not semiotic – such a belief suffers from the ‘pars pro totto’ (part for the whole) fallacy (Deely 2010: 32). Rather, Corollary 1: ‘The whole calls out its parts’ (Peirce 1902: CP 1.220); Corollary 2: The future calls out the present (Deely 2010: 35); Corollary 3: A ‘telos’ of ‘diagrammatization’ (Shapiro 1991: 118) seems general – in language and in nature. Corollary 4: ‘Semiotics studies the causality of the non-existent.’ (Deely in conversation) [Marketing and branding professionals and cognitive scientists alike must learn to see and map, the trajectories of these relational wholes.]

APPLYING SIGNS

321

Principle 7: Peircean ‘habit’, semiotic scaffolding and the principle of ‘irrealevance’ The universe has evolved habit structures to free itself from the tyranny of its own constitution. (See Hofstadter and his concept of ‘responsible irrelevance’ [I Am a Strange Loop 2007], what I call ‘irrealevance’.) ‘Habit’ formation, then, can be understood as the production of ‘irrealevance’ and as the agent of the emergence of ‘semiotic freedom’, a key concept for Hoffmeyer (1996). See for example how vocal cords are 100 per cent necessary for speech but are (except in rare cases) completely irrelevant to the meaning of the words uttered. [The question for engineers and cognitive scientists is this: how can we replicate that process whereby nature has been able both to make itself indispensable and expendable and to seal itself off from that for which it is responsible – and thereby increase its ‘semiotic freedom’?]

Principle 8: The rule of three (compare with ‘The rule of the third’ above) All signs are irreducibly triadic in at least three ways: they always have (1) a Presentative function (how the sign ‘presents’ itself – as i. qualisign [a quality, ‘Firstness’ in Peirce’s triadic phenomenology], ii. sinsign [a fact, ‘Secondness’], and iii. legisign [a habit or law, ‘Thirdness’]); (2) a Representative function (how the sign re-presents itself via its relationship to its object – as i. icon [a resemblance, again, ‘Firstness’], ii. index [an instance of cause-and-effect, ‘Secondness’], and iii. symbol [the instantiation of a habit or convention, ‘Thirdness’]); and (3) an Interpretative function (how the sign relates to [determines] its future interpretation – as i. rheme [as determining ‘the interpretant to focus on the qualitative characteristics’ of what is ‘assigned’, as in the predicate ‘ … is a pet name’, ‘Firstness’]; ii. dicisign [factual determinations, as in ‘Fido is her pet’s name’, ‘Secondness’]; and iii. argument [law-like or habitual determinations, ‘If Fido is her pet’s name, then her pet is likely a dog’, ‘Thirdness’]) (see Figure 14.2). A propos of Figure 14.2 and Principle 8, two Peircean heuristics that can be of great use are perhaps best represented by Edwina Taborsky (2007) and James Liszka (1996). The first are the six relations that are used to form the always triadic Peircean sign (which relations can be helpful in applications ranging from marketing and branding semiotics to cognitive semiotics and developing strategies for training AI, specifically deep-learning neural networks): Firstness as Firstness (1-1, pure feeling, or an equivalent physical or physiological state), Secondness as Secondness (2-2, pure physical relation), Secondness of Firstness (a feeling or a state really connected to something outside or related to itself), Thirdness of Firstness (lawful or habitual feeling or state), Thirdness of Secondness (how law or habit conditions the actual), and Thirdness of Thirdness (how laws or habit evolve telically). As Taborsky writes, There are Six Relations [listed above] that can be used to form a SIGN. A Sign is made up of three Relations that interact as a Function where f(x)=y. This is a triadic interaction, where the input data, known as X, is transformed by mediation, f, into a singular informational output Y. This triad, which can also be called the Object – Mediation/ Representamen [Sign] – Interpretant in Peircean terms, is irreducible. A sign always operates as a function made up of three Relations which operate as a triadic processing of data to information within the operational format of: input-mediation-output. (2007: 20)

322

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

FIGURE 14.2  Understanding and naming Peircean sign types.

In addition to the f(x) = y function for understanding the triadic dynamism of the Peircean sign, those wishing to apply signs should also be aware of a second functional triad, the three ‘axes of interpretation’ (Romanini 2006): (1) the Axis of Objectivation: This model is important because it shows Peirce’s commitment to a belief that ‘real’ Objects propel and constrain semiosis. Such a model undermines purely relativistic points of view about semiotics; (2) the Axis of Interpretation: This model highlights how interpretation, the Peircean Interpretant, drives semiosis. Such a model undermines the naïve mechanistic modelling of much contemporary science; and (3) the Axis of Signification: This model highlights Signification, the power of the Sign itself to determine

APPLYING SIGNS

323

the direction and force of semiosis. As an example, Liszka (1996: 32) represents the Axis of Objectivation (the first axis described above) as follows. Note how the Axis of Objectivation is driven by the generative force of the Dynamic and Immediate Objects (DO and IO); thus DO→IO→S→II→DI→FI, where the ‘→’ equals the ‘order of determination’ (Liszka 1996: 32) and DO = Dynamic Object, IO = Immediate Object, S = the Sign (or Representamen), II = Immediate Interpretant, DI = Dynamic Interpretant and FI = Final Interpretant. The other two axes (of Interpretation and Signification) represent semiosis as determined by the Interpretant and the Sign, respectively, and so the ‘orders of determination’ will change accordingly (see, again, Romanini 2006; Coletta 2021). Taken together, the three axes will help those interested in applying signs to create algorithms that represent the threefold nature of semiosis and thereby represent a range of desired outcomes, again, in fields as varied as marketing and branding semiotics and cognitive semiotics.

Principle 9: The ‘commens’-sense principle; or Peirce’s ‘social principle’ The meaning of a sign, of what we sense and what makes sense, is constituted as much by and for the community (Peirce’s concept of ‘commens’, 1906: EP 2.478) as it is by the nature of the sign vehicle itself. [Marketing and branding professionals must understand that the same product can mean different things to members of different communities.]

Principle 10: SST (sign system thinking) principle Every sign (x) exists within a text in a context: x-te(x)t-conte(x)t – inside a paradigm (a metaphor).

Principle 11: The meme-deme-seme distinction Distinguish between (1) memes, signs with their own agency; (2) demes, signs planted in the pages of the mind or in the media and maintained there artificially (thus deemed to be memes by others) through the agency of another, say a wealthy corporate sponsor; and (3) semes, those wrinkles (seams) in the semiosphere that are deemed to be memes but that are not even signs, having no interpretants (effects) other than that of seeming to have them. [Can you say, ‘Fake news’?]

Principle 12: The Sherlock Holmes ‘room-to-think’ principle Ideas are not in the head; rather, our ideas are staged in a space that we construct with which to think, which is why we talk of inquiry as ‘finding out’ – a kind of mental outsourcing!

Principle 13: The Sherlock-homing principle; or Peircean abduction An interpretation, if a good one, may be more real than the clues that spurred that interpretation in the first place, such that even if the earlier clues later prove to be wrong, the interpretation may still serve ‘to home in on the truth’ by discovering new interpretations of the old clues. [A key for forensic semiotics.]

324

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

GREIMASSIAN SEMIOTICS: PRACTICAL DEFINITIONS As we argue at the beginning of this chapter, Greimassian and Peircean semiotics complement each other, as such a study serves to show how ‘signification’ and ‘applying signs’, respectively, are complementary functions. Let us now look at how we may ‘apply’ our understanding of ‘systems of signification’ from a Greimassian point of view.

Semiotics: What is it? Semiotics is a human science which aims at analysing systems of signification whenever they are considered as meaning-making sources, no matter the language or the forms that express them: texts, utterances, pictures, spaces.

Semiotics: Where does it come from? Semiotics doesn’t come out of nowhere; it originates from three fundamental disciplines whose goal is to find scientific approaches to signification: cultural anthropology, linguistics and epistemology.

Semiotics and signification Signification is not the meaning; it is also not the reproduction of reality (a reference to true thoughts or the ‘true world’); or the only form of communication; or ‘what I want to say’; and, finally, not ‘what I understood’ (receiver’s comprehension). For semiotics, the content of a message cannot be limited to the intentional or received meaning. Signification is the way in which reality has been constructed: the conditions concerning the way in which meaning is produced. The questions to ask are not ‘What is this text saying?’ or ‘What does this author want to say?’ but ‘How does this text or this author say what they are saying?’

Semiotics: What is the point? For example, by distinguishing signification from the languages which express it, it is possible to work on verbal and non-verbal discourses and to show which relationships exist between a title or a claim of an advertisement, and the texts or pictures which accompany them. One might ask: What is the best claim for an advertisement? What is the impact of this picture on this magazine, at this place? By refusing to assimilate the intention of communication, of signification and of what is heard or understood, semiotics can aid in the distinction and contrast of a copy strategy, the resulting advertisement and the manner in which those materials will be understood by their receiver. Which project executes better the strategy selected by the company? In which elements are the consumers’ perceptions of a message based? By intending to identify the senses of words without removing them from their context, semiotics permits the understanding of how one single word can express many meanings. Is the identity of the sender of the message the only guarantee of the relevance of a text? What strategy should be adopted to express a particular acceptance of a concept?

APPLYING SIGNS

325

What is the goal? 1. More intelligibility, more clarity: the refusal of fuzziness, vagueness, and imprecision; 2. More relevance: comparing only what is comparable; 3. More differentiation: identifying differences.

GREIMASSIAN SEMIOTIC APPROACHES Three aspects characterize semiotic approaches in the Greimassian tradition: they are autonomous, structural and generative. 1. Autonomous: Semiotics doesn’t need input from other disciplines (such as psychology, sociology and ethnology) to understand how meaning works. 2. Structural approach: The language is not a system of signs but a system of relationships. 3. Generative approach: The manner of production (signification) is more important than the final product (sense). Semiotics aims at distinguishing and grading the steps of the emergence of meaning (signification): from the minimal oppositional relationships from which they are born to the complex organizations as revealed in texts, pictures, film, etc. (as illustrated in Figure 14.3).

GREIMASSIAN SEMIOTIC TOOLS FOR MARKETING AND COMMUNICATION The foundation Facing the power of psychosociological approaches in an increasingly dynamic qualitative research market, Eric Fouquier, director of the Thema research firm, was the first to understand, in 1980, that it was necessary to include ‘semio-studies’ in the global field of qualitative studies in order to understand their operational part. His initial questions were very simple:

FIGURE 14.3  Theoretical model of the generative approach.

326

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

FIGURE 14.4  Fouquier’s model of the message.

1. What are we talking about when we talk about communication and marketing? It is a question concerning the message. 2. Taking the semiotic point of view, which definition(s) best establish the idea of ​​the message? Any message is made of the figures (‘images’) it constructs and puts in relation: a figure of the sender, a figure of the world, a figure of the receiver and a figure of speech. Hence, the discussion is about the simulacrum. In other words, for Fouquier, what is put into discourse is not the equivalent of reality, and any serious analysis will refuse to take things into account from this perspective. The world in question is nothing other than a (de)constructed world, that is to say, a sign composed of two planes: the plane of expression (the signifier) ​​and the plane of content (the signified). This definition provides an essential framework for ‘semio-studies’: any message must, in fact, be considered in two ways: as a sign (which conveys a concept, an idea, a value) and as communication (that is to say as an interaction, exchange or a relationship with the world). In short: ‘semiology is the study of the life of signs in social life’ (Saussure 1916). By relying on the notion of message, Eric Fouquier invites us to take into account the two definitions in parallel, because this is the preliminary nature of the objects of communication and marketing. These objects are both intended to simulate the world (Hjelmslev) and to make it transmissible (Saussure). Fouquier’s methodological framework proceeds from these two prerequisites: it is based on four preliminary questions which are representative of any communication situation. 1. Who is speaking? (the figure of the sender); 2. To whom? (the figure of the receiver); 3. About what? (the figure of the world); 4. How? or What? (the figure of speech). Eric Fouquier’s framework and definitions, thus, make it possible to identify the relevant semiotic tools for analysing a communication discourse. They constitute reading and analysis grids for communication and marketing (see Figure 14.4).

APPLYING SIGNS

327

THE GREIMASSIAN FIGURE OF THE SENDER: THE BRAND IN ITS STATUS For brands and institutions, the notion of sender unquestionably returns to the matter of the identity envisioned in the brand’s relationship with the other. Thus, the question ‘who is speaking?’ is consubstantially linked to the problem of self-reference: ‘who am I?’ To situate oneself as a sender, that is to say, in a situation of communication, always presupposes imagining oneself vis-à-vis, the other facing oneself, which, in fact, corresponds to being able to refer to oneself. This subject, which Paul Ricoeur treats extensively in his philosophical work Soi-même comme un autre [Oneself as another], is taken up in a concise manner by Jean-Marie Floch, who offers a useful heuristic reading. It turns out that, contrary to popular belief, the identity – of an individual, a community, a territory, a brand – is neither immutable nor static. It has its own dynamic, its engine; it is in the making. Defining an identity, thus, comes down to taking into account this duality: identity-permanence, its foundations (character, achievements, values, ‘the word kept’, ‘ways of doing’, ideals, standards, models, etc.) and the dynamic identity, changing, under construction over time (the acquired habits which make us lose sight of our commitments, the dispositions which deserve to be deepened, the healthy breaks or not, the rebounds, etc.). Identity is then discovered in the interval, between the invariant elements of identity: its distinctive features and signs of recognition, and the dynamic elements that make identity a construction or, even, an invention. Managing an identity means, above all, understanding ‘what it works for’, its life project and its deep values, so as ​​to make them perceptible by consumers, whatever the chosen modes of expression: rather than clinging to ‘what we are recognized for’, to its particular signs. In other words, self-affirmation sometimes involves renouncing the same discourse and refusing it.

Methodological implications Thus, we will always consider two axes to analyse an identity when it is put into discourse. 1. The first: what characterizes it as a difference, what distinguishes it in its environment. This is its paradigmatic dimension. 2. The second axis is what inscribes it in time, testifies to the persistence of its values ​​ and expresses its constancy in action. This is its syntagmatic dimension. You cannot have one without the other. To analyse a particular identity in its dynamics and its movement, the narrative schema is an essential methodology. An identity, whether carried by a brand, an institution, a territory or an individual, is defined above all as an active subject, that is to say, inscribed in a history, a future. It is endowed with a role: Manipulator (authority which orders or which sanctions), Subject (author of an act), Adjuvant (the one who permits the action to take place) or Opponent (the one who hinders the action), bearer of values ​​that they confer on objects (products, buildings, statutes). That is what should be observed. But from what point of view?

328

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

The efficiency of the narrative schema The narrative schema generally revolves around four stages: Contract, Competence, Performance and Sanction. Although schematic, these steps make it possible to grasp the correspondences in the work between the different characteristics of an identity and its dynamics. In the case of a brand, its fulcrum would undoubtedly be its platform, from the point of view of the communication strategy, namely all of the fundamentals that embody it as an identity in form and substance. In a generic way, these elements, available and sometimes variable, are: 1. The vision, which defines the raison d’être of the brand, and the philosophy, which determines its position in its competitive segment; 2. The mission, namely the role it confers to itself, and the goal it must achieve in society; 3. The ambition, that is the position a brand wants to have and the manner in which it wants to be seen; 4. The values, that is to say, the qualities that will justify its success; 5. The personality, namely the (character) traits that define his way of being and acting; 6. And, finally, its targets or the recipients the brand aims at, and to whom it carries out its mission. 7. By putting these elements in correspondence with the canonical articulations of the narrative diagram, we obtain: 8. The contract, a dynamic effectively centred on the brand’s mission and ethics (its vision), with a modal interface: on the one hand, the brand’s wanting-to-do; on the one other hand, its having-to-do; 9. Competence, a dynamic centred on its values, expertise and capacities, with its knowing-to-do and its being-able-to-do as a modal interface; 10. Performance, a dynamic centred around its personality – meaning its engagement and its definition as an actor in the modal plane: on the one hand its making, on the one other hand its being; 11. Lastly, the sanction, a dynamic centred on its ambition and its vocation vis-à-vis its targets, with a modal interface: on the one hand its wanting-to-be and, on the one other hand, its having-to-be. The following diagram (Figure 14.5) from a methodological proposition by Jean-Paul Petitimbert can be used, in marketing, to address general issues of narrative brand identity management.

Receiver figure: The target As much as the concept of receiver is a constant, in linguistics and in communication, the matter is discussed very little. At best, it is defined as a complementary position of the issuer, which is not sufficient. The situation is the same in marketing, where the term used is ‘target’: the definition might be instrumental (the target is the population that we want to ‘reach’ during a commercial or advertising campaign) or else, strictly actantial (the receiver is defined as the body that allows the message to be personalized, increase its efficiency, reduce the costs, manage marketing pressure).

APPLYING SIGNS

329

FIGURE 14.5  The marketing diagram of the narrative scheme.

The psychosocial approach is the one that seems to provide the most interesting way of defining this notion. According to this approach, it is the socio-cultural environment that forms the basis of personality and behaviour. We are individuals, products of culture, norms, roles and statuses. We are community beings, that is to say, identifiable within small groups. The role of communication and/or marketing is precisely to register each person in a role within these groups. For example, ‘normative groups’ (such as family, social, or professional groups) and ‘roles’ (of father, mother, son, boss, etc.) define a way of being qua individual within a circumscribed group.

Methodological implications For semiotics, being interested in the figure of the receiver amounts to taking into account the conditions of these ways of being, that is to say, a double-entry approach for each of the identifications of this figure. That would mean: 1. identifying the role assigned to them; 2. pointing out the socio-cultural role which determines their status, their position and their attitude in this identification. The work consists of taking support from influencers specific to each small group (clichés, archetypes) and then to see how these influencers contribute to determining statuses (young people, hipster, a specific socio-professional category, etc.) or specific segments (luxury, premium, ethnic, etc.).

THE GREIMASSIAN FIGURE OF SPEECH: THE FORM, THE SENSITIVE To consider the figure of speech as an observation pole means to question the plastic dimension of discourse. Our main interest resides in the materiality of the signifier, which corresponds, for example, to the formal structure of the packaging of a product, or to the

330

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

graphic structure of a magazine, the architecture of a commercial space, in the form of a logo or the textuality of a statement.

Methodological implications The analysis is carried out under different hierarchical levels to establish the constituents to be analysed. 1. We can consider that these constituents already have a meaning in themselves, with their own operating rules: they are the fundamental constituents. 2. We can also consider that these constituents only make sense by the way we perceive them within a construction: they are the immediate constituents. 3. We can consider that these elements only really make sense insofar as they constitute a larger construction. Undoubtedly, these constituents are only the result of cut-outs. That is why it’s all about style or idiolect. Meaning is constituted at the discretion of an order inferred by the act of production and/or by the act of reception. Likewise, for logotypes, rather than trying to find their content straight away, it is enough to take them as such: composite graphic forms, with fundamental constituents (in other words: any type of recognizable typographic characteristics) and relations between these constituents (hierarchical relations, combination, selection, solidarity, exclusion, etc.). Identifying and naming these constituents and relations can largely suffice to determine the conditions of significance. We can imagine the sum of the possibilities offered each time: creating names, elaborating texts, creating logos, organizing architectures, designing packaging, designing graphic structures.

THE GREIMASSIAN FIGURE OF THE WORLD: THE BRAND, THE PRODUCT AS AN OFFER Although it is easy to understand, when it comes to fiction, that the notion of the figure of the world refers, for example, to the description an author makes of the world in which their speech is developed. More generally, it is about the substance of the discourse; in other words: ‘what we are talking about’. For semiotics, the figure of the world is never more than the result of a correlation between a mode of appearing (a manifestation) and the mode of symbolic apprehension (of grasping) of this manifestation by the receiver. Therefore, it is possible to consider this subject from two complementary angles: the aesthetic angle – the product of the imagination – and the syntactic angle – the product of a discourse of understanding and analysis. From an aesthetic point of view, the world as it presents itself is a world that is felt, returned to us materially with more or less abstract properties. We can already see the interest that such a definition represents for an approach to communication and marketing. This world is shaped, a built world. As a result, it embodies, not an analogue, a more or less iconic representation of the real world, but a sensitive organization, according to specific individual, collective or cultural imaginaries, to which we can add intentional, commercial and strategic imaginaries that can be projected by anyone. In semiotics, we use the notion of a schema to analyse such a definition of the world. It is a residual form which, beyond the concept or the universe it is supposed to translate – for

APPLYING SIGNS

331

example, the revolution of the world of mass consumption, told by various authors of the late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century without variations (Zola, Balzac and Maupassant in particular) – always restores the imaginaries that both parties project onto it. This is how we can speak of ‘the world of Zola’, ‘the world of Balzac’ or ‘the world of Maupassant’ as a singular universe or an archetype.

Methodological implications Brands use the same process, particularly when it comes to building a distinction in their competitive field. At the same time, as they work to conform to the universe of reference at their foundations, they must always emphasize the specific imaginary that sets them apart. We then say that they define a universe of their own, one that carries all of their forms of expression: graphic, visual and rhetorical (aesthetic form in general) and mythical (brand names, stories, signatures, etc.). They always formulate the content of the concept or the universe that they have chosen first, to then identify themselves by introducing their nature, the qualities of their essential attributes. The semiotic analysis does this by exploring the multiple definitions (lexical, literary, cultural and/or mythical) that determine a brand or its products, to mention an example. The resulting synthesis is the opportunity to identify the meanings, that is to say, the imaginaries associated with them. In this case, that is the general procedure for defining the positioning of brands or the difference of a product in a market segment. From a syntactic perspective, the world is given in the form of a compromise. It is never anything but the restitution of a point of view, in the way in which Jacques Fontanille regards this notion. Based on dictionary definitions, Fontanille considers the point of view either as the place where one is located to see an object as best as possible, or as the particular way in which a question can be considered, either as the particular opinion it inspires or as the place where an object must be placed to be properly seen. For brand communication, this results in interaction strategies, which optimize the visibility and attractiveness of the products and services that one wishes to promote.

A COMBINED CONCLUSION In conclusion, whether making Greimassian applications of ‘signification’ or ‘applying signs’ in a Peircean manner, these twin modes of analysis may be understood as complementary functions as well as complimentary functions. Regarding the latter, the most practical and ethical approach to an applied semiotics is to respect (and thus to take time to compliment) the other point of view. Doing so will help practitioners of semiotics apply multiple approaches to the same questions and tasks, thereby liberating their multiple solutions from their singular methodologies.

NOTES 1 This chapter represents a unique collaboration between two schools of thought that are often kept separate; however, the sections applying the thought of C. S. Peirce are written solely by W. John Coletta, and the sections applying the thought of A. J. Greimas are written by Didier Tsala Effa, in part based on an earlier collaboration with Jean-Paul Petitimbert. 2 https://www.semiofest.com/ 3 https://www.fournaisegroup.com/marketers-got-it-wrong-in-2013/

332

4 5 6 7 8 9

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

https://www.fournaisegroup.com/marketers-made-3-effectiveness-mistakes-in-2014/ https://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/395069137/ https://www.learnaboutguns.com/2009/02/17 www.int3rpinc.com See Chapter 17: ‘Peirce’s Semiotics’ (Hébert outsourced two chapters). https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.11017.pdf

REFERENCES Anttila, R. (1992), ‘Change and Metatheory at the Beginning of the 1990s: The Primacy of History’, in C. Jones (ed.), Historical Linguistics: Problems and Perspectives, 43–73, Whiteplains: Longman Press. Barthes, R. (1964), ‘Éléments de Sémiologie’, Communications, 4: 91–134. Bertrand, D. (1999), ‘La Constitution d’une Identité Rédactionnelle: Le Cas de la Presse Télévisuelle’, in B. Fraenkel and C. Legris-Desportes (eds), Entreprise et Sémiologie, Analyser le Sens Pour Maîtriser l’Action, 121–32, Paris: Dunod. Bisanz, E. (2019), Applied Interdisciplinary Peirce Studies, Bern: Peter Lang. Broden, Thomas F. (2000), ‘Greimas between France and Peirce’, The American Journal of Semiotics, 15/16 (1–4): 27–8. Brodeur et al. (2017), ‘HoME: A Household Multimodal Environment’ (2017), 31st Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Long Beach, CA, USA, https://arxiv. org/pdf/1711.11017.pdf). Burnum J. (1993), ‘Medical Diagnosis through Semiotics: Giving Meaning to the Sign’, Annual of Internal Medicine, 119 (9): 939–43. Charon, Rita et al. (2016), The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine, New York: Oxford University Press. Chumley, C. K. (2013), ‘4 in 10 American Adults: We’re Living in the End Times’, The Washington Times, Thursday, 12 September. Coletta, W. John (2021), Biosemiotic Literary Criticism: Genesis and Prospectus, Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. Coquet, J. C. (1982), Sémiotique, Paris: L’École de Paris, Hachette Université. Danesi, M. (2007), The Quest for Meaning: A Guide to Semiotic Theory and Practice, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Danesi, M. (2014), Signs of Crime: Introducing Forensic Semiotics, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Danesi, M. and P. Perron (1999), Analyzing Cultures: An Introduction and Handbook, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Danesi, M. and V. I. Gromak (2002), Persuasive Signs: The Semiotics of Advertising, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Danesi M., P. Perron and B. Ron (2000), Signs for Sale: An Outline of Semiotic Analysis for Advertisers and Marketers, New York: Legas. De Certeau, M. (1994), L’Invention du Quotidien, Paris: Gallimard. Deely, John (1994), New Beginnings: Early Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Thought, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Deely, John (2010), Semiotics Seen Synchronically: The View from 2010. New York, Ottawa, Toronto: Legas. Eco, U. ([1973] 1988), Le Signe, edition française, Bruxelles: Labor. Eco, U. (1979), Lector in Fabula, Paris: Grasset. Eco, U. (1992), La Production des Signes, Paris: Le Livre de Poche-Essais.

APPLYING SIGNS

333

Ellis, Maureen, ed. (2020), Critical Global Semiotics: Understanding Sustainable Transformational Citizenship, London and New York: Routledge. Everaert-Desmedt, Nicole (2020), Chapter 17, ‘Peirce’s Semiotics’, in L. Hébert (ed.), Julie Tabler (trans.), An Introduction to Applied Semiotics: Tools for Text and Image Analysis, 241–9, London and New York: Routledge. Farias, P. and J. Queiroz (2006), ‘Images, Diagrams, and Metaphors: Hypoicons in the Context of Peirce’s Sixty-Six-Fold Classification of Signs’, Semiotica, 162: 287–308. Farias, P. L. and J. Queiroz (2003), ‘On Diagrams for Peirce’s 10, 28, and 66 Classes of Signs’, Semiotica 147: 165–84. Floch, J. M. (1983), ‘Le Carré Sémiotique: Pour une Topologie du Sens’, in Institut de Recherches et d’Études sur la Publicité (eds), Sémiotique et publicité II, 57–78, Paris: IREP. Floch, J. M. (1988), ‘The Contribution of Structural Semiotics to the Design of Hypermarket’, International Journal of Research in Marketing, 4 (3): 233–52. Floch, J. M. (1990), Sémiotique, Marketing, Communications, Sous les Signes les Stratégies (Formes Sémiotiques), Paris: Presse Universitaire de France. Floch, J. M. (1999), ‘Identités Visuelles’, Collection Formes Sémiotiques, Paris: Presse Universitaire de France. Fontanille, J. (2008), Pratiques Sémiotiques (Formes Sémiotiques), Paris: Presse Universitaire de France. Fouquier, E. (1981), L’Interprétation de la Tenue d’Autrui, Sémiologie Appliquée, Diogène, 114, April–June 1981, 51–67. Fraenkel, B. and L. Desportesc (1999), Entreprise et Sémiologie, Paris: Dunod. Gaines, E. (2010), Media Literacy and Semiotics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Greimas, A. J. (1966), Sémantiques Structurale, Paris: Larousse. Greimas, A. J. (1970), Du Sens, Paris: Le Seuil. Greimas, A. J. (1976), Maupassant, la Sémiotique du Texte, Paris: Le Seuil. Greimas, A. J. (1977), Sémiotique et Sciences Sociales, Paris: Le Seuil. Greimas, A. J. (1986), Du Sens II, Paris: Le Seuil. Greimas, A. J. and Courtés J. ([1979] 1986), Sémiotique, Dictionnaire Raisonné de la Théorie du Langage (I/II), Paris: Hachette Université. Grunig, B. N. (1990), Les Mots de la Publicité, Paris: Presses du CNRS. Haley, M. C. (1988), The Semeoisis of Poetic Metaphor, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haley, M. C. (1999), ‘Your Question on Triadicity’, email correspondence 6/28/1999. For a powerful explication of applying metaphor, see also Haley’s The Semeiosis of Poetic Metaphor (1988), Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, and also the way in which Haley’s understanding and use of metaphor, as explored in his book, is applied by Colin Purdy (who adds his own important insights) in ‘Signs of Spirit: An Application of Semeiotic to the Effectiveness of Symbols by Claude Lévi-Strauss’, by Colin Purdy, in Arisbe: The Peirce Gateway, 7 March 1999. In a very original way, this article, in the context of applying signs, ties the work of Lévi-Straus and Structuralism to Peircean semiotics. Hébert, L. (2020), An Introduction to Applied Semiotics: Tools for Text and Image Analysis, trans. Julie Tabler, London and New York: Routledge. Hjelmslev, L. (1979), Le Langage, Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Hoffmeyer, J. (1996), Signs of Meaning in the Universe, trans. B. J. Haveland, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hoffmeyer, J. (2008), Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs, Scranton: University of Scranton Press. Hofstadter, Douglas (2007), I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books.

334

BLOOMSBURY SEMIOTICS: HISTORY AND SEMIOSIS

Jappy, T. (2013), Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics, London: Bloomsbury. Jappy, T. (2017), Peirce’s Twenty-eight Classes of Signs and the Philosophy of Representation: Rhetoric, Interpretation and Hexadic Semiosis, London: Bloomsbury. Kevelson, R. (1988), The Law as a System of Signs, New York: Plenum Publishing Company. Kull, K., T. Deacon, C. Emmeche, J. Hoffmeyer and F. Stjernfelt (2009), Theses on Biosemiotics: Prolegomena to a Theoretical Biology, 4 (2), 167–73. Lawes, R. (2018), ‘10 Reasons Why You Can Do Semiotics and a Machine Can’t’, LindedIn article, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/10-reasons-why-you-can-do-semiotics-machine-cantdr-rachel-lawes/ Lawes, R. (2020), Using Semiotics in Marketing: How to Achieve Consumer Insight for Brand Growth and Profits, London: Kogan Page. Legris-Desportes, C. (2004), ‘Sémiologie, Médias Informatisés et Entreprise’, Communication & Languages, 142: 9–18. Legris-Desportes, C. (2006), ‘Regard Sémiologique sur la Communication d’Entreprise’, Éducation Permanente, 167: 57–68. Lewontin, R. C. (1993 [1991]), ‘The Dream of the Human Genome’. Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA, 59–83, New York: HarperPerennial. Liszka, J. (1996), A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McNeal, Marguerite (2015), ‘Fei-Fei Li: If We Want Machines to Think, We Need to Teach Them to See’, Wired, Conde Nast, 6 August 2015. Web. 15 July 2020. Merrell, F. (2000), ‘Peirce’s Basic Classes of Signs in a Somewhat Different Vein’, in M. Bergman and J. Queiroz (eds), The Commens Encyclopedia (www.commens.org/ encyclopdeia/article). Oswald, L. R. (2015), Creating Value: The Theory and Practice of Marketing Semiotics Research, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peirce, C. S. ([1866–1913] 1931–58), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols 1–6, C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds), vols 7–8, A. Burks (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cited as CP. Peirce, C. S. ([1893–1913] 1998), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, Peirce Edition Project (eds), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP 2. Peirce, C. S. and V. L. Welby ([1903–11] 1977), Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, C. Hardwick and J. Cook (eds), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as SS. Pike, K. L. (1964), ‘Tagmemics: The Study of Units beyond the Sentence’, College Composition and Communication, May and October: 2–8. Saussure, F. D. ([1916] 1972), Cours de Linguistique Générale: Paris, Payot. Schiff, G. D. et al. (2005), ‘Diagnosing Diagnosis Errors: Lessons from a Multi-institutional Collaborative Project’, in K. Henriksen, J. B. Battles, E. S. Marks and D. I. Lewin (eds), Advances in Patient Safety: From Research to Implementation, vol 2, Rockville: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (US). Sebeok, T. A. and M. Danesi (2000), The Forms of Meaning: Approaches to Applied Semiotics, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Stjernfelt, F. (2014), Natural Propositions: The Actuality of Peirce’s Doctrine of Dicisigns. Boston: Docent Press. Romanini, Anderson Vinícius (2006), Minute Semeiotic: Speculations on the Grammar of Signs and Communication Based on the Work of C. S. Peirce. Dissertation. Graduate Program in Sciences of Communication, School of Communication and Arts, University of São Paulo.

APPLYING SIGNS

335

Semprini, A. (1995), La Marque, Paris: Presse Universitaire de France. Shapiro, M. (1991), The Sense of Change: Language as History, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Taborsky, E. (2007), ‘Comments on Figure 9 Transforming into figures 3 and 4; that is, a Triadic Set of Relations Transforming into a SIGN’, Semiotics, Evolution, Energy, and Development, 6 (1): 19–31. Tanaka-Ishii, Kumiko (2010), Semiotics of Programming, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tesnière, L. (1969), Éléments de Syntaxe Structurale, Paris: Klincksieck. Tsala Effa, D. (2006), ‘Le Temps et le Jeu des Bonifications dans la Construction des Objets de Valeur en Marketing’, in J. Fontanille and D. Bertrand (eds), Régimes Sémiotique de la Temporalité, 461–73, Paris: Presse Universitaire de France, Collection Formes Sémiotiques. Tsala Effa, D. (2009), ‘Analyse Sémiotique des Logos. Quand le Présupposé Pragmatique Prend le pas sur l’Analyse’, in D. Verbeken (ed.), Entre Sens et Signification, Paris: l’Harmattan. Tremmel, P. V. (2007), ‘New Study Shows How Often Juries Get It Wrong’, in J. Zlatev (ed.) (2015), ‘Cognitive Semiotics’, in P. P. Trifonas (ed.), International Handbook of Semiotics, Dordrecht: Springer.

INDEX

abduction  46, 92–3, 231, 318, 323 accommodation  253, 257 n.10 active  vs. passive modus intelligendi activus  56 modus intelligendi passivus  56 modus significandi activus  56 modus significandi passivus  56 adaptation  149, 151, 156–8, 163, 223, 272 mutation  158 stabilization of  158–60 ad placitum  54, 58 affordance  135, 151, 158, 249, 261–2, 316 Ahlner, F.  210 Al-Khalili, J.  219 Andrews, E.  215 anthropic principle  28, 219 Anthropocene  34 Aquinas, T.  58, 95 archaic mind  81–2 argumentative-symbol  291 arguments  19, 46, 76, 92, 100, 102, 131–43, 198, 289, 319 Aristotle  40, 42, 44–7, 54, 56, 60, 62 nn.21, 23, 28–29, 72, 111, 134, 216, 223 Armstrong, R. L.  78 Arnauld, A.  70–2, 82, 85 n.18, 94 artificial intelligence (AI)  313–14, 319–21 artificial selection  160 Ashworth, E. J.  76, 84 n.6, 86 n.32 assimilation  253, 257 n.10 Atkins, R. K.  244 Augustine, St.  40–1, 51–3, 58–60, 63 n.43, 70, 72–4, 216 autonomous  121, 275–6, 314, 325 Autopoiesis and Cognition (Maturana and Varela)  216 axis of interpretation  322 of objectivation  322 of signification  322–3 Bacon, R.  8, 29, 57–60, 64 n.49 Baker, L. R.  142

Bakhtin, M.  276–8 Baldwin effect  158–9 Barthes, R.  26, 126 n.7, 195, 204–5, 223, 260 Battistella, E. L.  225 behaviourism  94, 150 Benjamin, W.  260 Bertrand, D.  121 Bierman, A.  198–9, 201, 211 biological lineages  151–3, 158 biosemiotics  10, 19, 25–7, 29, 34, 137, 149–51, 156, 164, 171, 308 biparental organisms  149, 161–2 Black, M.  13 n.2 Bloch, E.  31–2 Block de Behar, L.  23 ­Bloomfield, L.  226 boolean deixis  317 Borges, P.  304 n.7 Bouchard, P. -F.  287–8, 290–4, 296, 299, 302–3 Brandt, P. A.  30–2 Brier, S.  24 Broden, T. F.  307–8 Bruhn Jensen, K.  22 Cairncross, F.  20 Carney, M.  33–4 cartouche  298, 303 categorial objects  184 Chalmers, D. J.  169 Champagne, M.  10, 177, 200 Champollion, J. -F.  295, 303 Chomsky, N.  271–5, 278 n.6 Cho, Y. S.  225 Christian rhetoric  51 Classical Antiquity  45–6, 48, 51, 53, 60 clues  316–17 Cobley, P.  3, 8, 261 cognitive linguistics (CL)  11, 228–9, 233 Colapietro, V. M.  104 Coletta, W. J.  12 commens-sense principle  323 common sign (semeion koinon)  48, 62 n.29

INDEX

communication  23, 33, 92, 161–2, 262–3, 267, 273, 326, 329 communicative development  262 commutation test  220–2, 224 complementary distribution  221 complex ideas  75 conceived value  267–9 conceptual metonym  228 Conimbricenses  84 n.4 conjecture  42, 50 connotation  227, 232, 260, 264 consciousness  10, 169–81, 183, 186, 200, 248–55 definitely  253–4 double  246, 248, 250, 256 n.8 false  11, 259–60, 264, 274 habit  253–5 pictorial  10, 204–8 consistently mythological phase  82 contention  24–5, 28, 318 Continental semioticians  94 Copenhagen School  222 Coquet, J. -C.  26 Corpus Hippocraticum  41–2, 61 n.3 Covid-19 pandemic  2, 32–3, 313 creativity  267, 271–2 Critical Global Semiotics: Understanding Sustainable Transformational Citizenship (Ellis)  313 de Cuypere, L.  209 ­Damasio, A. R.  180, 216 Danesi, M.  11, 79–80, 152, 232, 309–12 Darwin, C. M. A.  158, 160 daseindeixis  317 De Doctrina Christiana (Augustine)  51–2, 216 deduction  92 Deely, J.  5–6, 12, 23–4, 28, 40, 70, 74, 78, 84 nn.3, 5–6, 85 n.22, 136–7, 249, 259, 261, 307 Degérando, J. M.  206 De Homine (Descartes)  216 deicticentre  317 deicticism  317 Deleuze, G.  124–5 demonstration (apodeixis)  48 Dennett, D. C.  138, 140–1, 159 Derrida, J.  115, 118, 122–3, 226 Descartes, R.  82, 216 De Signis (Bacon)  57–9 diacert/diachoice  315 diagram  98, 103–4, 205–6, 209, 315

337

dicisigns  100, 246, 289 dicent  100, 289, 318 dicent-index  289–91 dicent symbols/symbolic dicents  101–2, 291 universal dicent symbol  101 Différence et répétition (Difference and Repetition, Deleuze)  124 digisign  318 digivalence  318 Dingemanse, M.  203, 209 discrete  10, 20, 126 n.3, 163, 204, 251 dissociation  252–3 distinctive feature analysis  221–2, 224, 277, 327 distributive-collective-qualisign  299 diversity  29, 34, 81 DNA  17, 152, 155, 158–9, 319 Dostoevsky, F.  277–8 double asymmetric relationship  183 double sensations (Doppelempfindungen) 181–2, 186 Durham, K.  232 dynamical interpretant (DI)  300 dynamical object (DO)  97, 295–300 ecological fitting  156 Eco, U.  9, 25, 94, 109, 120–2, 124, 126 n.7, 132, 211 n.1, 212 n.2 distinction  203 iconicity  194–8, 204–5 La struttura Assente (absent structure)  116–17 Trattato di semiotica generale  264 Effa, T.  12 Eigen, M.  152 Eldredge, N.  159 elimination (anaskeue)  48 Eliot, T. S.  7 Ellis, M.  313 ­Emerson, R. Waldo  218 Emmeche, C.  154 endophoric iconicity  209 Engels, F.  259 enviraction/envirinsight  316 enviraptation  316 envirogram  310–11, 315–17 environmeans  316 environmeants  316–17 environmemes  317 environmeters  316 E-O relation  183

338

Epicureans  46–9 epigenetic  149–51, 154–5, 159–60, 163, 164 n.4, 187 n.5 equipollent opposition  221 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke)  70, 75, 77–8, 83, 259 ethosemiotics  266 evidential procedure (signum)  50, 52, 56, 63 n.39 evolution  10, 149–52, 154, 156, 158–60, 163–4 evolutionary adaptations  157–9 Evolutionary Intelligence (EI)  313–14 exophoric iconicity  209 Extended Evolutionary Synthesis  150 externisensations  248–9 Fabbrichesi, R.  131 family resemblance  162 fantasia  219–20 final interpretant (FI)  300 Firstness  97, 104, 200–1 Fisch, M.  286 ‘Fixation of Belief, The’ (Peirce)  95 Fletcher, A.  219–20 Fonseca, P. de  74 Fontanille, J.  26–8, 31, 119, 121, 331 forecasting (pronoia)  42 Foucault, M.  85 n.16 Foundations of the Theory of Signs (Morris)  94, 268 Fouquier, E.  325–6 Freud, S.  274, 276–7 functional load  224 Fundierung  175–9, 181, 184–6 physike  78 Gaines, E.  313 Gallagher, S.  179–80 Gardiner, A. H.  260 Gates, B.  34 generative approach  325 generative path  122 generi fantastici  81 generi intelligibili  81 genes  153–5 genetic assimilation  149, 159, 163 ­Gibson, J.  196–7, 206 Giraldo, V.  210 global enterprise  22–7 globality  8, 17–23, 25, 27, 30–2, 34 globalization  19–23, 32, 262–3

INDEX

Godel, R.  116 Gombrich, E. H.  195 Goodman, N.  198–9, 208, 211 Gould, S. J.  159 grammasign  318 Gramsci, A.  261 Greek medicine  41–2 Greek rhetoric  49 Greenbaum, J. J.  232 Greimas, A. J.  12, 26, 110–11, 113–15, 118–25, 126 nn.1–2, 4, 222–3, 307–8 communication and marketing  325–6 receiver  328–9 semiotics  324–6 sender, figure of  327–9 speech, figure of  329–30 world, figure of  330–1 habit  241, 321 categories  241–2 consciousness  253–5 Firstness  242–4 Secondness  244–9 to sign growth  251–3 Thirdness  249–51 vividness  251 Halliday, M.  121 Hébert, L.  307 heredity  151–2, 154, 159 Hermerén, G.  202–3 Hippocrates  19, 311, 319 Hjelmslev, L.  94, 110, 126 n.2, 260, 326 Hobbes, T.  78–9, 82 Hoffmeyer, J.  29, 151–2, 154, 156, 158, 164 n.3, 308, 314, 318, 321 holodex  315 holosign  315 holosyst/holopeer  315 Homo sapiens  272 Household Multimodal Environment (HoME)  314 Houser, N.  4, 93, 102 Husserl, E.  172–3, 175–6, 178–82, 194, 196, 200, 204, 206–7, 210–11 hypostatic abstraction  243, 256 n.4 hypothetical principle  320 iconicity  193–4 Bierman’s and Goodman’s logical critique  198–9 Eco’s critique of  194–8 non-visual  208–10

INDEX

Peircean  199–204 and pictorial consciousness  204–8 ­primary and secondary  202–4 icons  98–100, 195, 199, 201, 208, 287, 289 ideogram  317 ideojam  317 idéologie  259–61, 263–4, 271, 274–5, 277–8 ideology  33, 259–65, 267–9 and literary excess  276–8 Orwell’s problem and social planning  273–6 image  98 imagination  81–3 imaginative universal  81–3 immediate interpretant (II)  299–300 immediate object (IO)  131, 295–300, 312, 323 imposition (impositio)  54, 59 inconceivability (adianoesia)  48 indexes  99, 287, 289–90, 310, 318 induction (epagoge)  46, 62 n.28 inductive and deductive propositions  318 inferencing  92, 250–1 Information and Communications Technologies (ICT)  262 information society  262 intellectual works  49, 115 intentionality  170, 177, 255 animation and operative  178–80 intersubjectivity and shared  181–2 language and symbolic  184–5 sign use and signitive  183–4 subjectivity and perceptual  180–1 International Association for Semiotic Studies  264 interpretant  77, 84 n.6, 97–100, 136, 153, 199, 230, 267–9, 289–91, 295–6, 300–1, 303, 320 interpretative function  321 Introduction to Applied Semiotics, An (Hébert)  307 Introduction to Semantics (Schaff)  269 isolated opposition  221 Itkonen, E.  174 Jablonka, E.  152, 159 Jakobson, R.  6, 34 n.1, 116–17, 122–3, 209, 221 James, W.  91, 93 Janzen, D. H.  156 Jappy, A.  206 Johnson, M.  228

339

kairos  49, 63 n.38 Kant and the Platypus (Eco)  109, 117, 121 Kant, I.  84 n.3, 84 n.6, 123 Kennedy, J. M.  197 Klaus, G.  260 Kleisner, K.  160 Knowledge of Language (Chomsky)  273–5 Konderak, P.  7, 10, 173–4 Kozyreva, A.  179 Kretzmann, N.  76 Kuhn, T. A.  25 ­Kull, K.  2, 10, 23–4, 156, 164 n.10 Kunz, W.  162 Lagopoulos, A.  25 Lakoff, G.  228 Landowski, E.  26 language English  96, 220–2, 225, 229 French  99, 114, 115, 124, 318 function of  231 iconicity in  208 as primary modelling  272–3 and symbolic intentionality  184–5 thought and reality  56 verbal  29, 259, 265, 272–3 and work  270–1 Language as Work and Trade (RossiLandi)  270 Lawes, R.  308–9, 311, 319 legisign  100, 292 argumentative-symbolic-legisign  295 dicent-indexical-legisign  101, 294, 301, 310, 318 dicent-symbolic-legisign  295, 318 iconic (rhematic) legisign  101 rhematic-iconic-legisign  294, 301 rhematic-indexical-legisign  101, 294, 301, 317 rhematic-indexical-legisign  294 rhematic-symbolic-legisign  294–5, 301 Leib-Körper structure  182, 187 n.5 Lenninger, S.  204 Leone, M.  7, 9 Lévi-Strauss, C.  222 Lindekens, R.  195 lineages  149–50, 152–3, 156–60 linguistic pragmatics  91, 93 structuralism  109–10, 225 thesis  76–7 work  271, 276

340

Linguistics and Economics (Rossi-Landi)  270 Liszka, J.  321, 323 Locke, J.  9, 75–9, 81–3, 84–6 nn.3, 25–27, 29–30, 33, 130, 259 logica modernorum  54 Logic Proper  47, 92–3 logosign  318 Lotman, J. M.  82, 121 Lyotard, J. -F.  22, 26 McLuhan, M.  20, 22, 24, 29–30 McNeal, M.  313 Manetti, G.  50, 63 n.39 Mannheim, K.  259 Maran, T.  160 markedness association of response codes (MARC)  226 markedness theory  224–6, 232 ­Marshall, D. L.  80 Marx, K.  31, 113, 116, 259, 264, 270–1 material supposition (suppositio materialis)  55 Maturana, H.  216 meaning making  116, 150, 170, 174, 177, 186, 199, 242, 324 Meaning of Meaning, The (Ogden and Richards)  218 Media Literacy and Semiotics (Gaines)  313 mediation  17–20, 98, 194, 199, 261, 320 medicine as prognosis  42 scientific character of  41 medievals  51, 53–5, 57, 60, 70–2, 85 n.25, 92, 95, 122, 174, 277 Medvedev, P. N.  276 Meillassoux, Q.  134 meme-deme-seme distinction  323 mental commitment  243 Merleau-Ponty, M.  121, 126 n.2, 169–70, 175–7, 179, 185–6 Merrell, F.  103 metaphors  98–9, 205–6 metaphysics  44, 48, 78–80, 83, 86 n.30, 97, 130–1, 137 Miller, G.  227 mimesis  182 mind-dependent reality  70, 78, 130, 141–3 mind-independent reality  70, 78, 130–1, 137–43 mirror image  205 mode of being (modus essendi)  56 mode of signifying (modus significandi)  56

INDEX

mode of understanding (modus intelligendi)  56 modistae  55–6 modus tollens  41, 61 n.8 Morris, C.  6, 13 n.2, 93–4, 265, 267–9, 278 n.3 Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM)  187 n.3 mRNA  153, 159 multidimensional/multilateral opposition  221 mythological consciousness  82 narrative schema  328 natural disposition  252, 254 natural selection  149, 151, 158–60, 163 natural signs (signa naturalia)  52, 72 neo-Darwinism  149–50, 154, 156, 158–9, 163, 164 n.9 neurodiversity  29 New Science (Vico)  79–80 Nicole, P.  70–2, 82, 85 n.18, 94 Nietzsche, F.  260 noesis  180–1 noetic-noematic structure  180–1, 185 nominalism realism and  94–5 Saussure’s  95 norm  134, 176, 226, 268 Nöth, W.  9, 206, 209, 231 objectivism  260–1 ­object value  267–9 Ogden, C. K.  4, 103, 218, 266 Olmsted, D. W.  232 Open Self, The (Morris)  269 Opera Aperta (Eco)  116–18 operative value  267–9 Opposition: A Linguistic and Psychological Analysis (Ogden)  218 oppositions  215–17, 232 day-versus-night  218, 224, 226 give-versus-accept  224 gradient concepts  218–19, 221–3, 227–8, 230–2 gradual  221 health-versus-disease  224 one-dimensional/bilateral  221 polar  218–19, 222–5, 227–9, 232 right-versus-left  226, 232 and semiosis  229–31 types of  220–3 white-versus-black  218

INDEX

optigram  315 Order of Things, The (Foucault)  85 n.16 organogram  315 Origin of Species (Darwin)  160 Orwell, G.  273–5 Osgood, C. E.  227 Oswald, L. R.  311 Ott, W. R.  86 n.30 paradigmatic dimension  327 Pareto, V.  259 Pareyson, L.  116–18 particular dicent symbol  101 particular sign (semeion idion)  48, 63 n.29 parts of speech (partes orationis)  57 Paterson, H.  161 PAX6 gene  155 Peirce, C. S.  4, 9, 12, 19, 23, 77, 86 n.33, 91–104, 110, 113, 122–4, 130–1, 137–8, 151, 164 n.3, 177, 193–4, 196, 204, 208–12, 216, 229, 241–55, 256 n.8, 267–70, 285–91, 303–4, 304 n.6, 307–9 On the Algebra of Logic  287 classes of signs  287–8 cognitive semiotics  313–14 Collected Papers (CP)  103 communication theory  92 cultural semiotics  312–13 forensic semiotics  309–10 Greimas and  324–5 hypo-icons  205–6 iconicity  199–204 marketing and branding semiotics  311–12 medical semiotics  310–11 model of the sign  230 On a New List of Categories  286–8 phenomenology and the sign  95–8 ­realism  95 state-of-the-art  102 Sundry Logical Conceptions  288–9 system of signs  98–102 system of six classes of signs  288–91 system of sixty-six classes of signs  299–303 system of ten sign classes  291–5 system with twenty-eight sign classes  295–9 10/28 classes of sign  310, 314–19 thirteen principles  319–23 writings  103 Pelkey, J.  163–4, 186 n.1 perceptual model  195 perceptuations  248–9

341

Percy, W.  138 personal supposition (suppositio personalis)  55 pertinence and practice (Prieto)  260 Petrilli, S.  23 phenomena  19, 22–3, 28–9, 33, 40–2, 142, 169 phenomenology  97, 109, 175–83, 205 philosophical speculation  41 photographic colours  207 physiogram  316 physiosemiosis  28–9, 150 Piaget, J.  173, 180, 182, 205 pictogram  317 Pierre of Ailly  85 n.20 Pititto, R.  78 Plato  40, 42–4, 49, 61 n.17, 274–5, 277 Poinsot, J.  70, 84 n.3, 84 n.6 polarity-gradience framework  218–19 polar oppositions  218–19, 222–5, 227–9, 232 Polidoro, P.  195–6, 203 polyphonic novel  277–8 Ponzio, A.  23, 271 Popper, K.  174 Port-Royal Logic (Arnauld and Nicole)  70–4, 79, 82–3, 84 n.8 postmodernism  21–2 poststructuralisms  109–10 chronological vs. logical  112–13 effects  112 genesis of  110–11 paradoxes of  113–15 proto-  115–18 structuralisms vs.  125–6 within and without structuralism  118–24 poststructuralist  109–13, 115–16, 118–20, 123–5, 226 power of partiality  320 practical (praktike)  78 pragmaticism  31, 91, 93–4 pragmatist maxim  91 pragmatist semiotics (Peirce)  91–3 ­pragmatism  91, 93–5, 102 Prague School  11, 215, 217, 220–2, 224 presentative function  321 Prieto, L. J.  260 primary qualities  75–6 privative opposition  221 probabile  50 Proctor, R. W.  225 Produzione linguistica e ideologia sociale (Ponzio)  271 proper poststructuralist works  115

342

proportional opposition  221 proprietates terminorum  54 protosemiosis  153 punctuated equilibrium  159 qualisigns  99–100, 291–3, 296–300 descriptive-abstractive-qualisign  297 descriptive-collective-qualisign  298 descriptive-concretive-qualisign  297–8 designative-collective-qualisign  298–9 designative-concretive-qualisign  298 Quine, W. V. O.  132 reality  138, 261 defined  130 language and  56 object and  97 subject and  124 ‘Real Patterns’ (Dennett)  138 reductio ad absurdum  77 reduction (apagoge)  46, 62 n.27 reisign  318 relations  320 relative fitness  156 religion  41 repraesentatio  73 representative function  321 resemanticization  197 rhema  289 rhematic-iconic-qualisign  292–3 rhematic symbols  101, 290 rheme  100–1, 321 rhetoric  49 Christian  51 doctrine of  50 Roman  49–50 Richards, I. A.  4, 103, 218 Ricoeur, P.  327 RNA  152–3 Robin, R.  103 room-to-think principle  323 Rosetta Stone  303–4 Ross, A.  197 Rossi-Landi, F.  11, 259, 261–2, 264–5, 267–8, 270–2, 275–6 s­ ameness  164 n.4 Sapir, E.  233 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis  141–2 Saussure, F. de  6, 9, 19, 73, 83, 94–5, 99, 113, 122–6, 126 n.2, 136, 193, 195, 209, 215–17, 232, 267–8, 270

INDEX

différence  216 langue and parole  117–19 linguistic structuralism  109–10 nominalism  95 structural systems  9 sayable (lekton)  47 Schaff, A.  264–5, 269–70 Schuster, P.  152 scienza  79–80 Scotus, D.  95 Sebeok, T.  8, 19, 22–7, 130, 137, 272, 308 secondary qualities  75–6, 85 n.26 Secondness  97–8, 104, 200–1 secundum placitum  54–5 self-defeating  131–4, 143 semantic differential  226–7, 232 Sémantique structurale (structural semantics, Greimas)  113–15, 118 semeia  42–3, 46, 62, 72 semeion  40–2, 45–8, 50, 53, 61 n.13, 62 nn.26–27 semiosis  1, 9–10, 59 argument  131–42 and consciousness  169–71, 173, 179, 186 habit in  253, 255 opposition and  215–16, 229–31 semiotica  85 n.25 Semiotica e ideologia (Rossi-Landi)  259, 264 Semiotic Hierarchy (SH-framework)  169–71, 174, 178, 185–6 development of  171–8 layers of  178–85 meaning  171–2 phenomenology  175–8 problems  173–5 semiotics  17–22, 41, 61 n.3, 69, 75, 83, 130, 308, 324 ancient Greek medicine  41–2 branches of  92 cognitive  169, 173–4, 182, 266, 308, 313–14, 319 critical global  313 cultural  312–13 decodification  268 Eastern  60–1 n.1 fitness  156 fitting  156 forensic  309–10 of genes  153–5 global  21–9, 31–3 marketing and branding  311–12 medical  310–11

INDEX

­ arratives of  18 n normative science  93 of passions  119, 126 n.4 selection  160 and semiology  94 and signification  324 square  111, 222–3 tensive  119, 121 Western  60 n.1 ‘Sense, Meaning and Interpretation’ (Welby)  265 Sextus Empiricus  46–7, 63 n.32, 85 n.17 sexual selection  160 Sharov, A.  10 Sherlock-homing principle  323 signa ad placitum  72 signa data  52 signature deixis  317 signification (significatio)  54–5, 76–7 Signification and Significance (Morris)  267–8 significs  265–7 signifying, modes of  56–7 sign-inferences  40, 42, 45–9 sign itself (S)  97, 99, 230, 287, 291–2, 295–6, 299–301, 319, 322 sign-object-interpretant (S-O-I)  103–4 signs  63 n.41, 164 n.2 classes of  100–2 classification of  52, 54, 58–9 definition of  52, 58 of dialectic knowledge  43 effects and purposes  96 formal  74, 86 n.30 hereditary  10, 149–53, 157–8, 160 instrumental  74, 85 n.22, 86 n.30 object of  96–7 origin  73–4 phenomenology and  95–8 and reality  97 representation  72–3 theory of  71–2 token and type  96 Signs Language and Behavior (Morris)  94 Signs of Crime: Introducing Forensic Semiotics (Danesi)  310 sign system thinking (SST) principle  323 Signtree model  288–9, 293, 297, 301–2 Silverstein, M.  122 simple ideas  75 simple supposition (suppositio simplex)  55 sinsigns  99–100, 292 dicent-indexical-sinsign  101, 293–4, 316

343

iconic (rhematic) sinsign  100 rhematic-iconic-sinsign  293, 301 rhematic-indexical-sinsign  100–1, 293–4, 300–1, 310–11, 315 ­social planning  259–64, 267–78 Socrates 44 Sokolowski, R.  183–5 Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (Fisch)  286 Sonesson, G.  10, 173, 183, 195, 204, 210 species  26, 29, 34, 48, 52, 160–3, 285 speculative grammar  55–7, 92, 98 Speculative Rhetoric  92–3, 102 speech 272–3 square of opposition  223 stereotypes  123, 264, 269 Stoics  8, 39–40, 46–9, 60, 62 n.29 structural approach  325 structuralism  109–10, 112–25, 194–5, 199, 217. See also poststructuralisms Strum, S. C.  137 subjective fitness  156 Suci, G. J.  227 Summulae (compendia)  54, 71 supposition (suppositio)  55 symbolon  40, 53 symbols  96, 99–100, 133, 142, 184, 289–90 symmetry argument  198 synechism  137 syntactics  272 syntactics-semantics-pragmatics  93 syntagmatic dimension  327 Taborsky, E.  314, 321 Tannenbaum, P. H.  227 Tartu School  219 tekmeria  62 n.29, 72 tekmerion  41–2, 44, 46, 61 n.8 terminists  54 theoretical (physike)  78 Thèses  116 Thirdness  98, 200–1 Thomas of Erfurt  56 threefold sign function  312 three-part ontology  174 transassociations  252–3 transcription  50, 153, 155, 159 translation  114–15, 153, 156, 212 n.2, 266–7, 276 triadic structuralism  194, 199, 202 Trubetzkoy, N. S.  220

344

Turing, A.  230–1 two-channel heredity  154 Uexküll, J. v.  29, 81, 135, 137, 150–1, 156, 172, 216, 261 Umwelt  27–32, 82, 135–7, 151, 172–3, 216 unconscious  176, 179–80, 186, 225, 227, 233, 259–60, 277 Uspensky, B. A.  82 utopian  8, 31–2, 34 van Hateren, J. H.  156 Varela, F.  216 ­Velmezova, E.  2 verbal reaction  276 Verene, D. P.  81, 220 verum-factum principle  80–1 Viana, A.  80 Vico, G.  9, 69–70, 79–83, 219 vine circle (circulus vini)  59 visual stimulus  139–40

INDEX

vocalization  318 volitionally internal and external  248 Vološinov, V. N.  274, 276–8 vox significativa ad placitum  71 Vrba, E.  159 Waddington, C. H.  155 Wang, D. D.  232 Waters, M.  21 Welby, V.  265–7, 270 Whorf, B. L.  231, 273 Wiener, N.  217 Wierzbicka, A.  222 William of Ockham  55, 70, 95, 320 Wittgenstein, L.  121, 132, 162 Zahavi, D.  181 Zilberberg, C.  119, 121 Zlatev, J.  7, 10, 171–3, 175–6, 178, 183, 210 zoosemiotics  27

345

346

347

348

349

350