On Translating Signs: Exploring Text and Semio-translation 9042016426, 9789042016422

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On Translating Signs Exploring Text and Semio-Translation

APPROACHES TO TRANSLATION STUDIES Founded by James S. Holmes Edited by Henri Bloemen Dirk Delabastita Ton Naaijkens Volume 24

On Translating Signs Exploring Text and Semio-Translation

Dinda L. Gorlee

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004

Cover design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of "ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence". ISBN: 90-420-1642-6 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004 Printed in The Netherlands

This book is dedicated to Thomas A. Sebeok my esteemed teacher who passed away on December 21st, 2001 signa pedum segui his memory will be forever treasured

Contents Foreword Bibliography

9 14

Text and Interdisciplinary Texture Introduction to the Semiotic Web of Text Toward a Working Definition of Text Interdisciplinary Texture Text-Linguistics and Text-Grammar Text, Word, and Sentence Text Semiotics Peirce, Text and Sign Text and Semiosis Textual Reasoning Barthes's Work and Text Notes Bibliography

17 17 24 30 33 42 48 58 63 67 75 83 90

Semiotranslation and Abductive Translation Semiotranslation Semiotranslation and Interpretive Webs Target-Oriented Futurology Text-Manipulative Activities Image, Model, Metaphor The Eureka Procedure: Pragmatic Discovery in Translation Abduction: Intuition vs. Instinct Translation: Justification vs. Discovery Semiotranslation Revisited Abduction and Translational Creativity The Translator's Eureka Experience Notes Bibliography

99 99 101 104 107 108 114 118 120 122 127 129 132 139

Trial and (T)error: Peirce's Fallibilism and Semiotranslation Peirce's Sop to Cerberus True and False Signs Force, Continuity, Evolution Synechism and Freud

145 145 151 158 16 7

Contents

Errors in Fallacy Transparency and Traducement in Translation Errant Errors in Semiotranslation Fact and Fancy of Quasi-Thought Fantastic Tricks Fixing Belief Notes Bibliography

177 190 199

203 212 216 224 233

Name Index

241

Subject Index

247

8

Foreword No one translated is mortal; but if no mortals go to heaven I am much mistaken; hence if all who go to heaven are translated, I am much mistaken. To say that from a proposition it would follow that I err when I know I am right would amount to denying that proposition, and conversely, to deny it positively would amount to saying that, if it were true, I should be wrong when I know I am right. A denial is thus the precise logical equivalent of that consequence. (Peirce in Century Dictionary 1880, quoted from Prior 1964: 84)

If we accept Charles Sanders Peirce's (1938-1914) view that "a man does not always know how he originally came by ideas which occupied him at first little, but afterwards more and more, up to almost complete absorption for many Jong years" (CP: 2.554 note 1), this life experience would happen not only to Peirce's self-controlled vir but also, it is hoped, to homo, standing for the human being, which includes both man and woman (Krolokowski 1964: 257-258). On December 14, 1908 Peirce wrote the following to his fellowscientist and English correspondent, Lady Victoria Welby, that in reference to his article A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God (CP: 6.452-491 ), "I am particularly curious to know what sensible women think of it; for I think they are less likely to be influenced by theories of logic, and that their instincts in such matters are better than men's" (PW: 66). This kind of intuitive meditation is practiced by "intelligent and educated men, yea, and a large class of young women" (MS 634: 19). Peirce's remarks are reflected in his theory of abductive argument, in which women's instinctive capabilities find a place. In translation theory, the choice between man and woman can be intricate. For example, take the "gradual semantic shifting" of Jifi Levy (1967: 2: 1176) when faced with translating the translation of German word Mensch, which includes both man and woman man, into English alternatives that provide for man or woman. Levy's gender-related choice between variations of homo sapiens builds on contextually built-in "instructions" and "paradigms" concerning language and cultures (Levy 1967: 2: 1171, 1173), distinctions familiar to translators. Peirce had kept company with women long before his friendship with Lady Welby began. Indeed, he wrote in 1904 to Lady Welby that some of "my very best friends have been very radical women" (PW: 23). Many years earlier, in 1861, Peirce wrote to his then-

Foreword

fiancee, Harriet Melusina Fay, a feminist and religious woman, about the "surplus decision" (Levy 1967: 2: 1174) of what women cherish as their "singleness of heart" (PW: 23). The solutions arrived at by women, according to Peirce, would eventually lead to his own three universes: not only to the abode of God, but also to free mind and to free matter (MS 920: 48 & endnote 245, quoted in Esposito 1980: 45, see also CP: 6.32, 6.487). The friendship with women scholars - Myrdene Anderson, Janice DeledalleRhodes, Beryl Foster, Louise Rayar, Lucia Santaella, Gloria Withalm, and others (named here in alphabetical order) - has been important to the development of my work. The solution is Peirce's "humble" argument on guessing and deciphering which in my volume is called translating - the "riddle of the sphinx" (CP: l.354ff. with sphinx image W: 6: 165ff. and front page Peirce Edition Project 1998). This was a popular topic in Peirce's day and today forms the subject of the essays in this book. To answer, fallibly and infallibly, the puzzling riddle of the hybrid, winged monster (usually depicted mostly with a human head, male or female) is for all beastly intents and purposes the cosmological object of Peirce's inquiry. If we come up with the right answer, we can govern the all-embracing worlds of chance, irregularity, and chaos - also called emotion, volition, and cognition, as well as feeling, experience, and mediation. Scientific explanation would appeal firstly to the enchantment of the heart, no less an enigmatic experiment than the dreamlike associations of Peirce's "musement" as applied in his famous essay A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God (CP: 6.452ff.). It is the difference between satiety and mystery, viewed as self-reflexing and self-generating, autosemeiopoetic signaction (Merrell 1995: 216). Musement is created by the wordless but mindful inquirer's brain, by his or her jouissance of the pleasure of this individual, tribal, collective and even eroticized kind of euphoria (Barthes 1975). This experience leads to the blissful process of reading old texts, which leads further to the composing of new texts - the professional activity of the translator, as discussed in this book. This book offers a chronological selection of metalinguistic and metaliterary essays that I have written during the past decade. Except for the final chapter on Peirce's fallibilism, which was written last, the order of the chapters follows the order in which they were originally drafted and revised. The first chapter is an introductory one on text; the second embarks on the subject of translation; and the third focuses on both text and translation. The chapters perhaps qualify as metacreative or analytical ("philosophical" would be too rigorous) essays concentrating on the same set of themes: the aspects of 10

On Translating Signs

semiotic approaches to translating and translation, with said approaches based intimately on Peirce's semiotics. Metacreation is, according to the translation theoretician Anton Popovic, a "[s]econdary, derivative literary creation, the impetus for which has come from another literary work. It is preceded by metalinguistic (analytical) activity. Metacreation in translation is a synthesis of the translator's absorption in the text-generating process" (Popovic 1975: 12). The following chapters are preoccupied with my lifelong work in this area of sign- and text-theory, borrowed primarily from Peirce's writings as well as other semiotic as well as translation-theoretical publications. The essays therefore do not create a monologue, but rather a truth-seeking dialogue (or multilogue) aimed at finding utterly new opportunities for the fate of old texts. This ongoing effort has its origins in my previous book on the symbiosis of Peirce's semiotics and translation theory, Semiotics and the Problem of Translation: With Special Reference to the Semiotics of Charles S. Peirce (Gorlee 1994). This present book continues that earlier volume ideologically, literarily, and philosophically. Peirce argued that we should not let ourselves pretend to deny in our philosophical (and otherwise) attitude what we know in our hearts to be true. Peirce stated that "[t]he fallacy of over-precision which consists not in taking an ell when one has a right to an inch, but in stretching a warrant for a percentage of a micro-micron to more than the sum of all macro-kilometres, may be called the Philosopher's Fallacy" (CP: 8.224). Whatever caution the contents of On Translating Signs: Exploring Text and Semio-Translation may nourish in its heart and also in our hearts, it is devoutly hoped that the present volume will become a furnace of activity for future semioticians of translation studies. Driven by the energetic force of my evolutionary love for Peirce's semiotic ethos, I earlier (1992) coined and baptized the term semiotranslation (Gorlee 1994: 226 ff.), which now enjoys some currency in sign-theoretical circles, and which in the heading of this book it is called etymologically semiotranslation. In describing the hidden treasures of semiotranslation (with and without hyphen), I hope to have accurately pointed up some intricacies of Peirce's doctrine of signs, entering into the stream of publications about Peirce and, frankly, adding a little more theatricality to the flux of semiotranslation for my readers. As I see things, there are no signs pointing to the impending abandonment of this term. Rather, semiotranslation retains an ongoing excitement and creates a niche in semiotic and translationtheoretical scholarship. My hope is that it will remain a vital and fruitful

11

Foreword

challenge to future researchers everywhere, especially those who pay no mind to the noise of passing scholarly genres and fashions. The fabricated compound semiotranslation, a hybrid word made up of two nouns, seems to wield an invisible force over us. It has become a commonly used term in scholarly circles of semiotics as well as translatology. It followed the introduction of Thomas A. Sebeok's zoosemiotics (proposed in 1963, see Sebeok 1972: 178-181 ), Rene Thom's (translated from French) semiophysics (1990), Michael L. Raposa's theosemiotic ( 1989) and other sign-oriented neologisms with academic-semiotic jargon: biosemiotics, endosemiotics, anthroposemiotics, physicosemiotics, phytosemiotics, microsemiosis, protosemiotics, ecosemiosis and the like (Deely 1990, Noth 1998, 2001, 200la). Still intrigued by the allure of semiotranslation, I expand it further in this new volume, which is written from a wider interdisciplinary perspective that was my earlier work. I hope that it offers, as Peirce would have liked, more developed and progressive essays on the textual and translational topics, thereby constituting a touchstone for modem(ized) audiences. Such academic overlap among the various essays is unavoidable in the scholarly semiosphere in which we live, in the international world in which we need to survive. My work is intended to be provocative and illuminating even to non-

followers of sign and translation theories, in its elucidation of my intellectual passions, texture and translation. This collection of essays brings semiotranslation into sharpened textual focus, seeking to be a point of reference for a modem, internationalized, multilingual, and philosophyspirited audience. With the encouragements of friends and colleagues about the significance of the work, along with my own feeling that the latter left much to be said, I decided to develop further my feelings, beliefs and convictions concerning the important yet still little-discussed relations between the semiotic approaches to translation, with an eye to assessing in more detail the scope and import of controversial yet eternal topics in traditional translation studies. Peirce argues that science, understood as any scientific inquiry, research, and enterprise, including creation and criticism in translation theory, is best conceived of as a permanent and ongoing search, which unfolds dynamically as a goal-directed and truth-seeking process, a teleological activity that nevertheless does not possess or offer fixed results, methods, or definitions. All eventual results, methods, definitions and so on are only temporary guideposts and provisional judgments, no more and no less than that.

12

On Translating Signs

The same, in my view, also holds for translation and interpretation, as both process and as a product. Semiotranslational views, if pursued accurately, would dramatically change the whole traditional approach to translation and interpretation of texts, which still appears to concentrate heavily on questions that translation-theoreticians ask about semiotic or "semioticized" kinds of problems. These include questions about the mental and intuitive activities of the sign and the "invisibility" of the translator, the supposed differences between translatability and untranslatability, equivalence and fidelityinfidelity, the function and role of the translator, as well as the fate of the source-text and the destiny of the target-text. My discussion thus far should have clarified three things: firstly, what semiotics is; secondly, that we ought to consider the logical, behavioral, and intuitive implications of Peirce's semiosis as a suitable paradigm for the translation of all kinds, of which translation from one language into another is just one example; and thirdly, that translation (and interpretation) in tum exemplifies semiosis, thereby giving brand-new answers to perennial questions concerning translation and theories thereof. Preparation of this book involved various stages of researching, lecturing, teaching, and publishing articles. All of these were prompted by my research and lecturing stays at different universities worldwide, but they stem primarily from personal study. I must thank my students for listening with patience and competence to my ongoing research into Peirce's writings that, implicitly and explicitly, engage with to the sign-oriented translatology. The essays here have been renewed, re-fashioned, and re-translated so as to suit this book. Selected and fragmentary parts of the first two chapters have over time been published in a variety of languages (Gorlee 1992, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2003). Permission to reprint any previouslypublished material is gratefully acknowledged. I thank Jean Umiker-Sebeok for her gratitude and love in welcoming the dedication of this book to her husband. Lastly, my special thanks go to my dear son, Jorrit van Hertum, for his editorial suggestions, advice, and support of the project. The practice of love "flowing with milk and honey" has Peircean requirements: discipline, concentration, and patience (Fromm 1965: 78f.) Dinda L. Gorlee The Hague, Spring 2004

[email protected]

13

Foreword

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. 1975. The Pleasure of the Text (tr. Richard Miller). London: Jonathan Cape. (Original: Le plaisir du texte. Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1975) Deely, John. 1990. Basics ofSemiotics (Advances in Semiotics). Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Esposito, Joseph L. 1980. Evolutionary Metaphysics. The Development of"Peirce 's Theory of

Categories. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press Fromm, Erich. 1965. The Art ofLoving. 4 1h ed. London: Unwin Books. Esposito, Joseph L. 1980. Evolutionary Metaphysics: The Development ofPeirce's Theory of

Categories. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Gorlee, Dinda L. 1992. 'Symbolic argument and beyond: A Peircean view on structuralist thought' in Poetics Today 13-3 (Fall): 407-423. 1994. Semiotics and the Problem of Translation· With Special Reference to the Semiotics of

-

Charles S. Peirce (Approaches to Translation Studies 12). Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. -

1995. 'Towards a Peircean text semiotics' in van Driel, Hans and van der Lubbe, Jan (eds)

Peirce in verscheidenheid: Papers presented at the 5th and 6th Peirce Toogdag, Broek in Water/and, 1992 and 1994 (Peirce Circle of The Netherlands). Tilburg: Peirce Kring Nederland. 95-104. -

1996. 'A Eureka procedure: Pragmatic discovery in translation' in S: European Journal for

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1997. 'Hacia una semi6tica textual Peirciana I' in Signa 6: 309-326.

Semiotic Studies 8 (2,3): 241-269. ~

1998. 'Hacia una semi6tica textual Peirciana II' in Signa 7: 185-20 I. 2000. 'Text semiotics: Textology as survival-machine' in Sign System Studies (SSS). (Special

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issue: I11µ£tWnKij) 28: 134-157. - 2001. 'Imagery of text semiotics' in Kukkonen, Pirjo and Hartama-Heinonen, Ritva (eds)

Mission, Vision. Strategies: A Celebration of Translator Training and Translation Studies in Kouvola. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. 59-68. -- 2003. 'Meaningful mouthfuls in semiotranslation' in Petrilli, Susan (ed.) Translation

Translation (Approaches to Translation Studies 21 ). Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 235-252. Krolokowski, Walter P. 1964. 'The Peircean vir' in Moore, Edward C. and Robin, Richard S. (eds) Studies in the Philosophy ofCharles Sanders Peirce (Second Series). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 257-270. Levy, Jil'i. 1967. 'Translation as a decision process' in To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the

Occasion ofhis 70th Birthday, 2 vols. The Hague: Mouton. 1171-1182. Merrell, Floyd. 1995. Semiosis in the Postmodern Age. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Noth, Winfried. 1998. 'Ecosemiotics' in Sign Svstems Studies 26: 332-343. -

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2001. 'Protosemiotics and physicosemiotics' in Sign Systems Studies 29-1: 13-26.

On Translating Signs -

200 I a. 'Ecosemiotics and the semiotics of nature' in Sign Systems Studies 29-1: 71-81.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931-1966. Collected Papers ofCharles Sanders Peirce, Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks (eds). 8 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press. (In-text references are to CP, followed by volume and paragraph number) -

1977. Semiotic and Signifies: The Correspondence between Charles Sanders Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, Charles S. Hardwick (ed.). Bloomington, IN and London: Indiana University Press. (In-text references are to PW, followed by page number)

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1982-2000. Writings a/Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Peirce Edition Project at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (eds). 6 vols. Bloomington, Indiana University Press (In-text references are to W, followed by volume and page number)

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Unpublished Manuscripts. Peirce Edition Project. Indianapolis: Indiana University-Purdue University. (In-text references are to MS, followed by manuscript number and page number)

Peirce Edition Project (Houser, Nathan, Andre De Tienne, and other associates). 1998. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 2 (1893-1913). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Popovic, Anton. 1975. Dictionary.for the Analysis ofLiterary Translation. Edmonton: Alta.: Department of Comparative Literature, University of Alberta. Prior, Arthur N. 1964. 'The algebra of the copula' in Moore, Edward C. and Robin, Richard S. (eds) Studies in the Philosophy ofCharles Sanders Peirce (Second Series). Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. 79-94. Raposa, Michael L. 1989. Peirce's Philosophy ofReligion (Peirce Studies 5). Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Sebeok, Thomas A. 1972. Perspectives in Zoosemiotics (Janua Linguarum, Series Minor 122). The Hague and Paris: Mouton. Thom, Rene. 1990. Semiophysics: A Sketch (transl. Vendla Meyer). Redwood City: AddisonWesley.

15

Text and Interdisciplinary Texture I say there is no better preparation than that of spending an hour more or less, remembering for how very short a time attention can be on the stretch without relaxation,

in spending then the

remnants of an hour, much of it given to rest and to bringing attention back, in thinking how thought is a discourse of the self that has been to the critical self that is coming."! says to myself," say the wise unlearned. Thought is nothing but a tissue of signs. (Peirce MS 1334: 45-46)

Introduction to the Semiotic Web of Text This chapter is about the phenomenon of text, textuality and texture, and prepares the way for the upcoming chapters concerning metatextuality, which is the technical name for secondary, derivative literature on texts (Popovic 1975: 12-13). Metatextuality includes one of the topics of the present study: interlingual and other kinds of translation (Jakobson 1959). For this reason, it seems obvious to start with a formal definition of what exactly must be understood here by the term text. This is, however, easier said than done. Not only is the concept of text used to refer to widely diverse objects, but also can a text be seen from a great many viewpoints, both theoretical and practical. We take a semiotic view of "text" here, in order to ground what Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914 ), the forefather of American semiotics, advanced as his categorial method, which here is employed nicely, handily, and usefully. The etymological and cultural history of the word text flows from the ancient Greek term, techne. Following Scholes' description (1992: 143 ff.), techne signifies the production, or craft, of art; authorship was connected with the crafts of carpentry, metal work, and shipbuilding for males. For women, the "equivalent" art was weaving, knitting, and, more generally, the practical guides lines of textual fabrication: We can see also that the extension from material handicraft to verbal construction is reinstated and extended, taking on specific references to verbal composition or style (as opposed to weaving). In Latin we find texo, texere "weave; to join or fit together any thing; to plaid, braid, interweave, interlace, intertwine; to construct, make, fabricate. build; to compose" and textum "that which is

Text and Interdisciplinary Texture

woven, a web; that which is plaited, braided, fitted together, a plait, texture, fabric"; figurative: "of literary composition, tissue, texture, style" (Lewis and Short [ 1980]). The meanings related to weaving and woven fabrics were to remain with these words and with many of their descendants (texture, textile, etc.), but the verbal extension of meaning toward literary style and composition became more and more important in the history of the textum itself. (Scholes 1992: 143) The term text is applied to the New Testament as the "Text: textus "text, wording, contents of speech or writing; charter, Gospel-book" and acquired "a verbal emphasis through its association with Christian doctrine" (Scholes 1992: 143-144,seefurtherthere). Today we read World Wide Web pages and the word semiotic web is used to indicate signs of the textile friendship, a network of relations uniting the sign, the object represented in the sign, and the product, the interpreting and translated sign into a seamless whole. This is "a favorite metaphor" (Deely 1990: 14 ). The metaphor comes from the father of zoosemiotics, Thomas A. Sebeok (1975). Sebeok chose this apothegm as the title of his International Yearbook, The Semiotic Web, whereas the source of the designation "semiotic web" itself is Jakob von Uexkilll (1864-1944 ), the forefather of this biosemiotic view which casts new light on the plans and goals of nature. Originally in German, Uexkilll's statement may be translated into English as follows: "As the spider turns its threads, every subject spins his relations to certain characters of the things around him, and weaves then into a firm web which carries his existence" (1934: 14, quoted from Deely 1990: 14 n., see von Uexkilll 1982). The semiotic web is itself a semiotic text comprised of different kinds of textures stranded together to make the web of life (see also Capra's ecological title, The Web of Life [1996]). Consider, for example, Uexkilll's source German text and a variety of edited, revised, and translated target texts in English, as well as primary and secondary texts in other languages (unmentioned here). Consider the many "borrowings" of the designation "semiotic web": Merrell used it as follows, in the chapter "The Semiotic Web: Our Chronic Prejudices" in Semiotic Foundations (1982) on a theory of written signs integrated in our (limited) life-view: Observe a spider as it spins its web. It is constructing the materialization, the somewhat abstract externalization, of an inner boundaried space. Assume that the spider is not conscious of the purpose of its actions. (Perhaps much like the purposeless goal of 18

On Translating Signs

the "Zen of archery.") It does it because it is innately programmed to do it. It follows a set of invariant rules (the code) and employs certain strategies depending upon the geographical terrain upon which it constructs its web. (Merrell 1982: 107ff.) Merrell's paragraph on semiotic web and text has grown into the topic of this study: text and translation are written, translated, sent, exchanged, edited, rejected, arranged, etc. in different times and from different places. The semiotic web is today more than the public exposure to conventional media. The information highway gives access to electronic data of all kind. The sensation of the World Wide Web has transmogrified source viewers into target browsers searching, cross-referencing and retrieving www. What are the relevant norm and standards applied in such textual manipulations? The definition of text or, to put it vaguely, a textual entity is, following Algirdas Julien Greimas's ( 1917-1922) structuralist encyclopaedia Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary (itself a translation from French into American-English languages), a metalinguistic paraphrase and/or description, which "plays on the elasticity of discourse as a result of the relation expansion/condensation" (Greimas and Courtes 1982: 70). The definitions of such a flexible object could be scientific or non-scientific, intensional and extensional, expression and content, formal and operational, and it utilizes provisional "concepts or postulates, which are necessary for its organization and its coherence" (Greimas and Courtes 1982: 70f.). Yet despite the confusion of the term text, it is constantly used and probably understood, so that it may be assumed that we somehow intuit, whenever a practical case arises, whether the object in front of us qualifies as a text or not. This is a spontaneous understanding which ostensibly requires apparently no formulaic definition in order in order to "work" for all human inquirers/receivers of texts. How problematic it is to give a concise and yet comprehensive definition of "text" is also reflected in how little agreement there is among theoreticians about what it is. Just to cite one, if vague, example: Allen observes that a text, written or spoken, can among other things be looked upon as a basically undefined variety of things: ... a message in a communicative situation, an act, a way of organizing some intended content, a model of a possible world, a means of suppressing information, an experimental field for grammatical and lexical analysis, an application of a generative 19

Text and Interdisciplinary Texture

model, a flow of linguistic data, a reflection of an author's temperament, a genre piece, a prognosis of certain reactions in the receiver(s). (Allen 1982: 15-16) What these undefined descriptions have in common is that they may refer to a meaningful, observable and intelligible object, but unfortunately no more than that. It should already be clear, even from this far from exhaustive list, that "text" is widely interpretable, and hence translatable for human minds. Furthermore, "text," even when conceived as an exclusively verbal entity, cannot be studied adequately by linguistic (or metalinguistic) methods alone. Text-theoretical research is highly interdisciplinary or, better, transdisciplinary (see Gunn 1992). Roughly speaking, it includes, besides language-related disciplines, such as poetics (or poeticalness), rhetorics, stylistics, (general and applied) linguistics, semantics, (pragma)linguistics, speech-act theory, theory of signs, and other humanistic disciplines like philosophy (in its various specializations and ramifications), psychology, sociology, ethnomethodology, as well as other interdisciplinary research fields, such as translation theory, artificial-intelligence research, information theory, and so on. Given the transdisciplinary nature of textual studies, the phenomena of text and textual activities would be best served by a holistic or organic approach, preferably in the theoretical framework of a general semiotics in its American tradition, embodied by Peirce and his followers. The overall aim of the present inquiry is to argue this methodological choice and to develop a (partial, always partial) text theory based on the semiotic ideas of Peirce, will be, to formulate it globally, the aim of this inquiry. 1 If the concept of text is notoriously difficult to define "hardly" (using a

Peircean concept), numerous attempts have nonetheless been made. Indeed, text has been defined and re-defined many times, by many different scholars, and from many different angles. To answer the question of "what a text is" requires at least the two following considerations: on the one hand, one should make crystal clear the ontological status assigned to the entity "text" abstract and/vs concrete, general and/vs individual, code, producer, receiver. On the other hand, the "essential" properties of texts should be established (Lieb 1981) instead of the accidental phenomena we address spontaneously and intuitively. From a strictly linguistic point of view, these problems can be addressed only partially; whereas from a wider, general-semiotic perspective, a text must be considered as a complex linguistic sign couched in articulated language and functioning as a genuine communicative agency.

20

On Translating Signs

The concept of sign, as defined and re-defined by the sign-theoretician Peirce, does not identify "sign" with "linguistic sign," but considers a sign to be any perceptible phenomenon - visual, auditory, olfactory, or otherwise that interests, excites, or even puzzles those who receive it. (We return to this subject later.) It is by virtue of these intriguing qualities that a semiotic sign functions; that is, it conveys a message to an interpreting mind (a key word in this study). In this broader conception of the sign, the exchange of messages in verbal language, as embodied in actual texts, is one accepted form of communication. We restrict ourselves to human verbal communication, which takes place at a highly sophisticated level as compared to non-verbal communicative events that occur between all living creatures, human and non-human alike. At first blush, the Peircean sign might appear too vague or too broad or ambiguous. Still, we venture to suggest here and demonstrate throughout this book that Peirce's notion(s) of sign can be fruitfully operationalized in all their scope when applied to the definition and investigation of the kaleidoscopic varieties in Peirce's textual phenomena. Before contemplating a semiotic conception of text, I first give some definitions which draw upon different linguistic and linguistically-related theories. Given the aim of these introductory remarks, the overview here must be selective, and the discussion must remain global and informal. A primary reason for problems in distinguishing between a linguistic and a semiotic conception of text, is that a Saussure-based theory of semiotics comes and takes language and linguistic operations as its primary model and paradigm. In contradistinction to Saussure's "semiology," Peirce-based semiotics deals with movements in and between verbal and nonverbal signs alike, and with the same terminology. This fact may be illustrated by Brinker's definition of text as "a coherent sequence of verbal signs or sign complexes which are not embedded in another more comprehensive unit" (Brinker 1979: 3; my translation). This rather static definition emphasizes syntactics - i.e., sign structures and their hierarchical relations (paradigmatic or associate relations as well as combinatorial ones). On this view, meaning and use incorporated in semantic and pragmatic aspects are de-emphasized or even ignored. This situation echoes not Peirce's model, but rather Charles Morris's ( 1901-1979) triadic model which focuses on channel of relations among interconnected sign vehicles in a text ( 1971: 311 ff. passim). Syntactics is traditionally called "grammar," which includes the "rules" and norms of morphological, lexical and syntactical structures. Semantics and pragmatics are for the most part ignored here.

21

Text and Interdisciplinary Texture

British linguists, by and large, tend to define "text" as follows: "The word TEXT is used in linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole" (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 1). Subsequently, this definition, which would encompass all verbal utterances, is nuanced and fine-tuned as follows: We know, as a general rule, whether any specimen of our language constitutes a TEXT or not. This does not mean there can never be any certainty. The distinction between a text and a collection of unrelated sentences is in the last resort a matter of degree ... A text may be spoken or written, prose or verse, dialogue or monologue. It may be anything from a single proverb to a whole play, from a momentary cry for help to an all-day discussion on a committee. A text is a unit of language in use. It is not a grammatical unit, like a clause or a sentence ... A text is not something that is like a sentence, only bigger; it is something that differs from a sentence in kind. A text is best regarded as a SEMANTIC unit: a unit not of form but of meaning. (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 1-2) This means that there must be, beyond the intuitive level, a linguistic distinction (at least in principle) between a text and a non-text, and that this distinction is based upon meaning. A text makes sense, whereas a non-text may be nonsensical; the difference lies in the presence (or absence) of what is called "texture" 2 . As argued lengthily in Halliday and Hasan ( 1976), texture is what defines the text, as opposed to the verbal object without texture, the so-called non-text, a virtual semiotic object. Texture is the property of connectedness which results from lexicogrammatical relations that join parts of the text together in a whole. The text derives its texture from the fact that it functions as a meaningful unity with respect to its everyday situational, usually denominated context or sociocultural environment. After Halliday and Hasan first formulated it, this functional-semantic concept of text was (as shall be shown later on) adopted by and further developed within text linguistics. Weinrich writes: Among all imaginable linguistic units, the oral or written unit called "text" (more exactly speaking: "text-in-a-situation") has a most prominent status as the only given unit. Confined in communicative boundary-markers ... it is given by communicative evidence. There is no need for the text to be defined. (Weinrich 1981: 228) 22

On Translating Signs

Taken for granted as the "primum datum of linguistics" by Weinrich ( 1981: 228), the text is nevertheless clearly regarded by this distinguished linguist as the unit of communication in a linguistic-cultural milieu and the colloquial, ceremonial, and other modes and genres of language-use therein. This is further re-affirmed and made explicit, in the same year, by de Beaugrande and Dressler ( 1981: 3-14 and passim), for whom a text is an event, a total "communicative occurrence" in which seven standards of what is called here "textuality" must be realized. These well-known standards are cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality (see further de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981 ). According to Beaugrande, "the legitimate basis of the actualization and utilization of texts" lies in textual constraints that can be both signintemal (information from within the text itself) and sign-external (from a source outside the text) ( 1980: 19). Cohesion translates connectivity of compound signs into "grammatical formatting of phrases, clauses, and sentences" and "such devices as recurrence, pro-forms and articles, coreferences, ellipsis, and junction" (de Beaugrande 1980: 19, see also 1981: 910). Coherence organizes the textual knowledge into a logically accessible virtual world inside the text. Intentionality means that the text is a human project, a strategy with a certain goal in mind (Beaugrande 1980: 19, 1981: 4-6). Acceptability means the probable (or improbable) impact of the text on prospective receivers' minds; reception implies a certain degree of cohesion and coherence of stored knowledge (Beaugrande 1980: 7-8, 1981: 20). lnformativity presents (un)known and (un)expected knowledge existing in the receivers' minds, and uncertainty organizes the textual items into novelty and/or gossip, given and/or new information (de Beaugrande 1980: 8-9, 1981: 20-21 ). This scholar argues that "situationality even affects the means of cohesion" ( 1981: I 0) and that it focuses, in an economical fashion, the textual message according to the available knowledge in the receivers. A text meets emotional, practical, intellectual, and other "personal" desires as wekk market needs. A text might be conceived as either a gift or a burden, since gift exchange involves reciprocity, self-interest, and altruism (Komter 1996). Beaugrande's last item, intertextuality subsumes repercussions of the text with other previously heard or read texts. Intertextuality "is the major factor in the establishment of text types" (Beaugrande 1980: 20) like "parodies, critical reviews, rebuttals, or reports, the text producer must consult the prior text continually, and text receivers will usually need some familiarity with the latter" (Beaugrande 1981: 11 ).

23

Text and lnterdisciplinwy Texture

Despite the variety of constraints on textuality or texture, a text is, following de Beaugrande, "a naturally occurring manifestation of language," and a text takes place as "meaningful configurations of language intended [for] communication ( 1980: I). Only cohesion and coherence are "prominently text-oriented" (Beaugrande 1980: 21 ). Communication should indicate the relevant futurology of a presently-occurring textual project, the latter being understood as a relevant sign vehicle conveyed organically to exchange, transmit, and interpret messages, particularly among human individuals, though we might also speak about exchanges between man and computer, man and animal, and so on. A text is never isolated, but flows within some meaningful environment. This operational concept brings the definition of actually-realized, complex signs into what we call ordered texts; that is to say, the motion is usually away from chaotic texts. Ordered (or orderly) texts, as filtered through the discursive logic of human meaning, move back to contextual or meaning-related uses or effects on interpreters; in a word, to pragmatic parameters. This blurs Morris's original trichotomy but still remaining within semiotic domains. Texts are an ordered set of instructions given to one or any number of communication partner(s). Textual communication realizes sigificant aspects of meaning, both prospective and retrospective, by means of sign action as elucidated in Peirce's notion of sem1os1s. Toward a Working Definition of Text Moving away from linguistic theories and towards a semiotic point of view on text, texture and textuality, the following definitional statement emphasizes the general communicative dimension of the text: "We might sketchily and provisionally understand this unit as a verbal expression such that: (a) is produced by an actual addresser (i.e., an individual uniquely determined in space and time), and (b) makes up a complete communicative performance" (Bertinetto 1979: 144). From such a pragmatic perspective, the operational property of "being a text," which is to say, being incorporated in texture and textuality, is defined by placing the text not just in a linguistic framework, but also in that of speech-act theory. A text is "a set of sentences (or possibly a single sentence), that is (a) thematically coherent, (b) endowed with a communicative function which depends on a neatly defined illocutionary potential, ( c) produced within a concrete (in terms of space and time) communicative performance" (Bertinetto 1979: 145-146). A communicative approach such as Bertinetto's, which is concerned with the text as manifestation of language use, goes beyond text linguistics and approaches a wholly semiotic perspective, yet without using sign-theoretical 24

On Translating Signs

concepts. When we analyse a text, we may move away from an account into semiotic grounds, with different modes of reinterpreting, complementing, and contradicting each other, so as multiple meanings, ambiguities, alternatives, and metaphors of textual work(s) and writing(s).

objective discourse to clarify particular

Van Dijk's focus on a " 'communicative' or 'pragmatic' component" of the text intends to bring about "yet a further extension of grammar and competence" ( 1972: 3 ). Insofar van Dijk's text theory squares with Bertinetto's definitory statement above, inasmuch as both concentrate largely upon "a particular type of text: literature" (1972: 1), thus narrowing down the scope of text theory only to forms of aesthetic, fictional and "non-utilitarian" language use. Van Dijk defines text by opposing it to discourse (or verbal utterance), as "the abstract notion of TEXT, [underlies] what is intuitively known as 'connected discourse"' (1972: 1). The scope of the term text has become so expanded that "text" and "discourse" are today used well-nigh interchangeably (see Pet6fi 1986: 2: I 080). Originally, the term discourse referred only to spoken utterances; but because Saussure concentrated first and foremost on acoustic linguistic signs, and he used text only in the philological sense, to refer to classical texts, the study of spoken language (or discourse analysis) went relatively neglected in Europe until the advent of speech-act theory. 3 In his later work, van Dijk moves away from his (text)linguistic and (text)literary project(s), and draws more upon cognitive and social psychology and artificial intelligence. As his interest has shifted to the cognitive comprehension of the term discourse, van Dijk has become concerned with semantic macrostructures, i.e., with higherlevel structures involved in the processing and presentation of information. Consequently, his earlier text-discourse dichotomy has become blurred and seems to have been replaced by the unified notion of language use which "manifests itself in utterances that, as object types, we interpret as discourses or texts of a certain natural language" (van Dijk 1980: 5). This distinction between the concrete (or at least observable) discourse and the abstract theoretical text has thus been superseded in later text theory by a definition which acknowledges that text or discourse is an operational notion and that "being a text" cannot be considered as an inherent property of certain linguistic objects; rather, a linguistic object becomes a text because a person (either on the utterer/sender :;ide of the verbal message, or on the interpreter/receiver side) decides, for "extra"linguistic reasons, to consider it as what we denominate a text. In Pet6fi's words, 25

Text and Interdisciplinary Texture

For a producer or receiver of a written or spoken verbal object, a text is an object which, in his opinion, in a given communication situation can/should be handled as a connected and complete entirety. This opinion arises on the basis of extra-textual factors which in the case of reception have a decisive impact on the analysis/interpretation of the intra-textual factors. (Pet6fi I 986a: 545) Pet6fi defines a text as "a linearly-ordered object with a basic constituent consisting solely of verbal signs, or having a dominating verbal kern, if it meets the definitory criteria of the analyzer" (Pet6fi 1986: 2: 1081 ). If the "analyzer" may more or less freely decide which properties are considered as "essential" for a verbal object-in-reality to qualify as a text, this would mean that, in the final analysis, "being a text" is defined by the receiver's (your, my, one's) own analytic aims. Now the main purpose of our research turns semiotic in nature. Rather than dwell further on further linguistically-inspired definitions, I shall therefore try to indicate how the sign-theoretical conception of sign applies to the definition and operativity of written verbal messages of all kinds. All written signs have a "physico-logical form (or arrangement, appearance)" and all text types would possess "any fictional meaning" or "external reference" (Aarseth 1994: 52). 4 The latter would indicate a mixture of both fictive themes and (suggested or real) truth values: for example, histories and stories in the Bible, legal texts, (auto)biographies, historical novel (War and Peace), tourist guidebooks, legends (the Odyssey and the Kalevala). Written texts possess a (or any) form or shape of writer/sender/author, as well as reader/receiver/audience. In addition to "ordinary," written bookentry texts on paper we need to deal with the practical introduction of texts in an automated environment: Yet the advent of computer-mediated textuality seems to have left many of those theoretists and critics who noticed it in a terminological vacuum. In their eagerness to describe the brave new reality, they let a few words like electronic and hypertext cover many different phenomena. Behind the electronic text there is a large and heterogeneous variety of phenomena, and, as we shall see, a computer mediated text may have more in common with a paper-

26

On Translating Signs

based one than with one of its electronic brethren" (Aarseth 1994: 52). Electronic word processing lies beyond our scope. Thus the question of whether or not written texts represent spoken language can thus not be addressed here; nor, in general, the relation between spoken and written discourse. On the other hand, a genuinely semiotic text-theory must account for all text types and does not concentrate on one type (literary texts, for example) while excluding others. The purpose here is to study written textual signs, how they serve human communication in a cultural milieu, and what they can mean. If we concentrate, as we do, on written texts, the notion of "document" comes easily to mind as a possible equivalent. Despite primafacie correspondences between document and text, their usages spread widely. A document was originally a tangible piece of paper, such as a will, a passport, a marriage certificate, a deed, or an insurance policy. This public document had an officially recognized scope, usage, and function within a particular legal system; and in the case of an ancient document, a copy referring to the written historical material permitted it to be used as a record of past reality, as evidence by which to write history. According to Weinberger ( 1996), in today's electronic era, the term document has passed from the concrete to the abstract. It has been imported by the makers of word processors and is used to refer especially to the kind of files visible on the menu entry. Thereby it has become an umbrella terms covering anything from a text-only wordprocessing file to a spreadsheet to an interactive Web page. Moreover, with the advent of cyber-multimedia, written text-documents have incorporated non-verbal elements such as picture, sound, movement, as well as touch; for example, the mouse and touch-pad on computers, the touchscreen on Xerox machines and coffee machines, and the like. The additional feature of smell is probably forthcoming, and soon all senses will be exploited interactively on-screen, The ensuing virtual-reality environments will make more complex the textual landscape available for human communication, and push to its extremes the development from the concrete to the abstract media to its very extremes. The term "text" means today "that portion of a message containing the data to be conveyed, such as the line of data typed into a terminal, that is preceded by a start-of-text character and followed by an end-of-text character" (Darcy and Boston 1983: 251 ), offering a technical definition without non-technical discourse. The contents and the receiving person(s) or milieu can be added; 27

Text and Interdisciplinary Texture

hence a trademark of the message is that it becomes in communications "a item of data with a specific meaning, transmitted over communication lines and composed of a header, the information to be conveyed, and an end-ofmessage indicator" (Darcy and Boston 1983: 164). However, a text is more sophisticated than a simple e-mail message. The conception of message goes back to the early twentieth-century views of communication theory, where it is defined as an "ordered selection from an agreed set of signs (alphabet) intended to communicate information" (Cherry 1957: 307). It was taken up through the theory of communication advanced by Marshall McLuhan ( 1911-1980) and in the "art" of modem advertising, to stimulate forcefully the unconscious. Roman Jakobson ( 1896-1982), too, in his further linguistic-poetic discussions on message and text, considered it as "artistically" meaningful speech, or the meaningful fragment of speech: "The message of a motorcar is not only rapid transportation from A to B, but the total network of roads, regulations, social changes, and automotive industries along with the other socioeconomic factors that create the ground of the automobile culture" (de Kerckhove 1986: I: 529). The former statement holds true for other signs, events, and phenomena: the metaphorical case of written texts. In the preface to Semiotic Foundations: Steps Toward an Epistemology of

Written Texts, Merrell writes the following about text:

To my knowledge an adequate definition of a "text" does not exist. Rather than taking up the arduous task of defining the term, I have, perhaps to the chagrin of the purists who incessantly seek concise definitions before proceeding, chosen simply to set down parameters delineating a specific type of text to be considered. "Written texts", according to the term as it will be used below, entail all corpora written in natural and/or artificial languages for the purpose of conveying observations, ideas, thoughts, intuitions, feelings, and emotions. Verbal discourse in the oral tradition, such as myths and folktales, as well as filmic and other iconic texts, are obviously excluded from this classification. Yet the general class of written texts definitely involves a broad spectrum ranging from poetry through religious, philosophical, and historical works to journalism, and then to reports in the social and physical sciences and even mathematical proofs. (Merrell 1982: vii)

28

On Translating Signs

In spite of the modest overtones of Merrell's characterization, his definition contains in fact an excellent common-sense (as opposed to an analytical) definition of the relevant written text, one that is striking by its nondoctrinaire clarity in what seems a jungle of other attempts to define text. However, the term "corpora" in Merrell's descriptive definition would deserve further specification and, for the purpose of this study, its semiotization as a limited, open, and representative corpus with confounding and disconfirming examples, including public knowledge as well as subjective impressions, in order to reach any tentative theoretical explanation (cf. Greimas and Courtes 1982: 63f, 285f). This would move them away from schematic associations with linguistic semiotics and fill them out with Peircean semiosis or sign-activity of all kinds. A written text would come from original chaos and arrive at creating a certain ordered set of instructions. This suggests the original idea of corpora. The characteristics of the written text are those of "reading, writing, and stability" (Aarseth 1994: 53, Aarseth's emphasis). In the company of PetOfi's linearly ordered subject, Greimas' elasticity, and Beaugrande's cohesion and coherence, the notion of "stability" offers a solution to Merrcll's fuzzy term corpora. It now intergrates into the text all linguistic genres and all kinds of texts. The triad of textual factors - reading, writing, stability - which "regardless of mutual contradiction" (Aarseth 1994: 53) are better called opposing theories, will produce the concept text as follows: ( 1) A text is what you read, the words and phrases that you see before your eyes and the meanings they produce in your head. (2) A text is a message, imbued with the values of a specific writer/genre/culture. (3) A text is a fixed sequence of constituents (beginning, middle, end) that cannot change, although its interpretation might. (Aarseth 1994: 53) A text is a signifying whole, as seen from a linguistic viewpoint, but provided with literary, even poetic undertones, as one finds in advertisements of Givenchy perfume, travel brochure, love letter, or internet site. A text is semiotically any written verbal entity that, Firstly, in Peirce's sense, is materially recognizable and delimitable as such; Secondly, deictically anchored in "real" time and space; and Thirdly, becomes meaningful by being used in a specific social context. This threeway paraphrase does not exclude the creation of private meaning, because in a Peircean semiotic framework, social meaning in fact includes and presupposes the so-called private meaning. Both are intertwined. A written verbal text is obviously the 29

Text and Interdisciplinary Texture

compound of actually realized public signs, filtered through the discursive logic of human intentionality. Indeed, the irreversible serial order in which the verbal text is presented is a prerequisite for producing intersubjective meaning for human readers. To conclude and complement these introductory remarks, I shall in what follows concentrate upon problems involved in written texts as meaningful wholes. Before moving to my main argument, a Peirce-based theory of texts and forms and shapes of textual manipulation, I must first give a critical survey of other existing theories of text, some of which have long received warm acclaim before becoming, as it were, a mere bag of clever but finally unchallenging tricks. In the following sections I argue that there were scientifically good reasons for the enthusiasm to subside and give way to indifference.

Interdisciplinary Texture From the late 1960s, the traditional school exercise in stylistics, which under the French name of explication de texte had until that time been considered the most suitable way of teaching empirically criticism of (mainly literary) texts, began gradually to disappear from the college and university curricula. In its place, the prevailing winds elevated textual studies of different stripes to the new and pseudo-sophisticated status of "in" subject or, as we say, cult object. Often appearing in various ideological guises, textual studies invaded large parts of academic teaching as well as research. Still, and despite four decades of textual work, theoretical text-studies have done relatively little to delimit the text-domain and to define the concept of text in an unambiguous way. Neither has the wanton proliferation of applied textual studies yielded a single, homogeneous idea of the object they work with and on. Consequently, what is or is not a text has in fact become more blurred rather than more transparent. Today almost any sequence of words - War and Peace, a haiku, the lyrics of a Beatles song, Anne Frank's Diary, a grocery list, a radio interview, a doctor's prescription, and the like - may yet qualify as a text and consequently be filtered through one and the same textprocessing grid. The same holds for non-verbal and partially verbal phenomena such as a comic strip, a theater performance, the urban landscape, a wedding cake and a gay costume. What those different texts have in common and what makes them different, has too often stayed implicit and must, it appears, be intuitively "grasped."

30

On Translating Signs

This shift in textual paradigm was to have far-reaching consequences for the history of humanistic academia. Literary scholars, for example, left, or were urged to leave, the ivory tower where they had traditionally been able to pursue their version of textual studies, virtually undisturbed and unquestioned by the outside world. "Inferior" objects of study such as folktales, nursery rhymes, detective novels, Western novels, doctor's romances, among many other forms of other popular literature, could no longer be neglected nor looked down upon, and were included, on methodological and/or sociocultural grounds, within the academic canon. The same happened with newspaper columns, oral and written personal documents, and texts from other kinds of modem mass media items. Popular(ized) texts thus acquired a status ostensibly equal to that of traditional belles-lettres. The canon became an open semiotic system. 5 The distinction between what was considered high-brow and low-brow was now seen as a sign of elitism, to be swiftly dissolved. This meant, of course, that "low" literature acquired popularity, whereas "high" literature's monopoly was seriously threatened. The newly canonized texts, usually called "discourse messages," were clearly on the offensive, using the space created by the lack of consensus on what constituted the new "Text," as it was often capitalized in structuralist thought. The concept of text, and of popularized culture in general, was widening to fill more and more space of the traditional gap between literature and linguistics. This rapprochement between the history of verbal canon and text duly emphasized what both disciplines had in common: language and its use for the purpose of human communication. Efforts to create a common ground for the insights of both literary studies and linguistics proved fruitful in many ways for the two disciplines. At the same time, however, this interdisciplinary project led to considerable frustration, particularly on the side of literary studies. Literary scholars were often as unprepared to define rigorously their field of research, conceptual apparatus, and methodology in the linguistic rigorous and exact way, as they were understandably reluctant to re-define their work in terms of their linguistic counterparts, who at the time were going through a highly creative and expansive period. How could one effectively to define and defend the value of "literariness" in the face of the Chomskyan and post-Chomskyan linguistic revolution? How to weld together two disciplines which were in fact, despite appearances to the contrary, growing apart? With one engaged in an identity crisis, and the other upwardly mobile, the two were, in the end, bien etonnees de se trouver ensemble.

31

Text and Interdisciplinary Texture

Partnership between literary studies and linguistics was not exactly a novel project in those days. It had been prefigured and advocated by Jakobson. In his famous closing address on Linguistics and Poetics, which he gave at a 1958 symposium on "Style and Language" at the Bloomington campus of Indiana University, Jakobson expressed his firm conviction that for humanistic studies to survive, such a joint venture is crucial. Answering his own question "What makes a verbal message a work of art?" (Jakobson 1960: 350), Jakobson offered his model of the basic functions involved in verbal communication, by arguing that emphasis on ... the MESSAGE as such, focus on the message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language. This function cannot be productively studied out of touch with the general problems of language, and, on the other hand, the scrutiny of language requires a thorough consideration of its poetic function. Any attempt to reduce the sphere of poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to poetic function would be a delusive oversimplification. Poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent. (Jakobson 1960: 356) This explication of "poeticalness" (Jakobson 1960: 359) implies that for Jakobson linguistics emcompasses, and is hierarchically above, "poetics," which was another term he used for literary criticism. Hence his "attempt to vindicate the right and duty of linguistics to direct the investigation of verbal art" (Jakobson 1960: 377). This adventure lead Jakobson to conclude unreservedly that "a linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachronisms" ( 1960: 3 77). Jakobson had in fact developed this view long before he put it forward in his Bloomington lecture. Even so, in those days this proposal was still considered pioneering and overtly provocative, and its prophetic overtones would shortly become clear within semiotically-grounded research projects. Jakobson, however, carried his point beyond the relationship between linguistics and poetics, when he observed, almost in passing, that "many poetic features belong not only to the science of language but to the whole theory of signs, that is, to general semiotics. This statement, however, is valid not only for verbal art but also for all varieties of language" (Jakobson 1960: 351 ). In his lifelong "quest for semiotics" (Eco 1986: 402), Jakobson indefatigably promoted a broad interdisciplinary "pansemiotics, a generalized 32

On Translating Signs

and not only general) science of signs" (Barthes 1986: 160), in which language-based objects of research, such as the (partly or predominantly) non-linguistic phenomena found in folklore, film, advertising, painting, and comics, would have an equally relevant status. This was indeed the full scope of Jakobson's "magnificent gift" (Barthes 1986: 159) to the academic world community; a gift not only to literary studies, as suggested in Barthes's article (published originally in 1971 in Le Monde ), but indeed to the whole of humanities and social sciences, both contemporary with and folllowing Jakobson. Not surprisingly, textual studies came to be one of the areas in which the Jakobsonian notion that literature and linguistics should be studied together within a semiotic framework, was met with interest, and even with enthusiasm. Semiotics, albeit one version of semiotic theory of signs, offered thus the framework to overcome old prejudices and controversies, and to broaden the research field. Unfortunately, it also helped create new problems, because, as shall be argued in subsequent sections, semiotic ecology was, and to some extent still is, internally divided about the status to be given to language as one of many sign systems, and about other important aspects of semiotic doctrine, such as that of poeticalness. Text-Linguistics and Text-Grammar Theoretical work on texts as it emerged from the 1960s onward, was mainly done by linguists. It has appeared under different names and guises, such as text linguistics, text processing, textology, text grammar, grammar of discourse, text theory, discourse analysis, text pragmatics, text semantics (see the classifications in Petofi 1986). These and other names for research, the fields they investigate, and their methodological orientations are in a sense similar but far from identical. As a result, they have perhaps caused more confusion than transparency. At the same time, such terminological diversity has probably been one imnportant reason why the development of so-called linguistic analysis of texts has in part stagnated after the initial triumphs it appeared to score. Another contributing factor to the rather short-lived nature and limited scope of the success of (text)linguistic research was probably because it became more and more to put its faith in formalized, machine-like methodologies (see Colby and Knaus 1974). To simplify greatly a complicated story, let me say that two directions, text linguistics and text grammar, above all others, led the way in text-theoretical research. Of these, Textlinguistik emerged first and was developed with par33

Text and Interdisciplinary Texture

ticular enthusiasm in Germany (at that time, West Germany). Text linguistics is a widely-used term to indicate the then youngest subdiscipline of linguistics, successor to traditional stylistics and (literary) rhetorics. Both disciplines study the mechanisms governing text production, but they do so from different perspectives (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 15-17). Stylistics conceives a text as the product of more or less systematic choices made from a series of options; thus it retraces the selection and distribution process by which the text has received its characteristic style. Rhetorics is concerned with text production from a communicational point of view, and studies how ideas can be successfully transformed into discourse, so as to produce maximum effect on the intended addressee(s). The name text linguistics (or textlinguistics) is not unambiguous, but is really an umbrella term covering different theories and methodologies. What these different versions of text linguistics have in common is that as a rule they, first, use linguistic methods and, further, that the texts studied are always exclusively linguistic. These linguistic texts can, at least in principle, be of all kinds, literary and non-literary, oral and written texts, or a blend of both. Last but not least, all text-linguistic research is radically opposed to the linguistic analysis of isolated sentences, and is therefore always text-oriented research (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 15, Hartmann 1975: 1). The object of text linguistics is to study "the phenomenon of textual construction, that is, the

construction of a suprasentential verbal sequence consisting of hierarchically-ordered linear units" (Harweg 1974: 88, my translation). In the wake of Z. Harris's distributional analysis of discourse, Harweg's definition emphasizes the syntagmatic dimension of the structure of texts and their constituent parts. Text linguistics seeks to discover the systematic nature of texts, the "text-constructing laws" (Harweg 1974: 92: my translation) governing them. A text functioning as a single significant unit must have an internal unity, its texture or textuality, as seen in the framework of the general theory of semiotics. In text linguistics these concepts have a narrower meaning which may be called pre-semiotic; because while implying the general concept of sign as that which stands for something else to somebody or something, text linguistics does not use explicit semiotic terminology and thus lacks the wide heuristic scope which characterizes semiotic concepts. What makes a text recognizable as a text, and what therefore distinguishes it from a non-text, is, in text-linguistic terms, a combination of textual cohesion and coherence. Both cohesion and coherence refer to textual relations which 34

On Translating Signs

make a text a meaningful whole, and different from a nonsensical verbal sequence. The term cohesion, as introduced by Halliday, refers to intratextual semantic relations: Cohesion occurs where the INTERPRETATION of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another. The one PRESUPPOSES the other, in the sense that it cannot be effectively decoded except by recourse to it. When this happens, a relation of cohesion is set up, and the two elements, the presupposing and the presupposed, are thereby at least potentially integrated into a text. (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 4) The investigation of cohesive patterns is, for Halliday and Hasan, wholly a linguistic affair: "Cohesion is expressed partly through the grammar and partly through the vocabulary. We can refer to GRAMMATICAL COHESION and LEXICAL COHESION" (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 5-6). On the other hand we may speak of a text's coherence. Coherence within a text enables the text user to make sense of it on the basis of his or her previous knowledge of the outside world. This knowledge includes general concepts such as causality, time, and place. Without such experiential knowledge a text remains meaningless to its reader or listener: a text does not really prompt meaning, but its meaning is supposed to be a result of a cognitive process in the interpreting human mind. Through this process the text user constructs his or her version of the meaning of the text. Since an individual person differs, psychologically considered, from all other persons, different meanings can be extracted from one text, though in spite of the differences a common core does appear. Next, we have text grammar. Text-grammatical research is alternately regarded as an offshoot of text linguistics in the broad conception, but as a separate subdiscipline. Text grammar has been represented most typically by scholars like van Dijk, Peti:ifi, and Rieser. Originally inspired by generativetransformational grammar, text grammarians nevertheless soon added to it the semantic component which Chomskyan grammarians considered irrelevant to their own syntactic considerations. Text grammarians further reject the Chomskyan notion of competence, the abstract ideal knowledge of language by native speakers, which corresponds more or less to Saussure's langue. Instead, they concentrate on the and individual utterance, or Chomsky's performance, heir to Saussure's parole. In text-grammatical as in text-linguistic research this performance level always consists of more than

35

Text and Interdisciplinary Texture

one sentence, something which concentration on the sentence.

goes

against

Chomsky's

systematic

Text grammars are intended to be grammatical models devised for the formal descriptive "processing" of texts. They map the structure of sequence connectivity, both on the syntactic and the semantic levels. These theoretical models are applied rather selectively to the analysis of one finite subset of texts in general, these being literary - narrative, poetic, theatrical - texts (van Dijk 1972: 165-309, Ihwe 1973). The one-sided nature of the demonstrations is particularly unfortunate, because it raises justified doubts as to the general applicability of such models, outside the literary genre. This is one reason why the validity of this line of investigation has come seriously under fire, and why non-literary scholars in particular have sought different analytical tools to find more satisfactory solutions. In the beginning of the 1970s, Pet6fi took a next step toward his proposed comprehensive text-theory, and offered his "partial text theory" (Pet6fi 1974, 1975), on the basis of which he built a pragmatic-semantic text interpretation process. Pet6fi called his theory "TeSWeST," short for TextstrukturWeltstruktur Theorie. New in this theory, first of all, was a partial relexation of the formality requirement, because the theory "does not attempt to (and, in fact, cannot) be completely formal" and yet it "offers methods and means for representing the interpretation yielded as a result of the pragmatic interpretation process in a completely formal manner" (Pet6fi 1980: 89). In Pet6fi's text-structure world-structure theory, which is nevertheless based upon formal logic, detailed rules of correspondence are established between the structure of the text and the structure of the world. The point of departure of this complex model is that a text is the representation of a state of affairs as seen by individual actors who also engage in interaction, while the whole is embedded in relations of time and place. The state of affairs is, strictly speaking, the object of the communication. The complex network of relations can, according to Pet6fi, be exhaustively described using a normative "interlingua", which he called "canonical language". The latter is an elaborate formal code, with combinational/connective rules and a lexicon, wherein the properties, rules, and mutual relations are explicitly stipulated. It is noteworthy, in reference to this, that this notational model shows a renewed interest in the sentence level, now re-named "atomic text" in Pet6fi, who even returned, though not unreservedly so, to the term "sentence grammar" (Pet6fi 1980: 96) that was tabooed by all earlier linguistic text-theories.

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On Translating Signs

In Petofi's text-structure world-structure theory, textual descriptions have two components, a co-textual component and a con-textual component. Cotextuality (introduced in Pet6fi 1971) is concerned with the internal properties of text, with their "grammatical" structure in the broad sense. It includes the syntactic, semantic-intensional 6 , and acoustic-graphemic aspects of the text, as well as some non-"grammatical" features such as metrics, rhythmics, and euphonies. Con-textuality, in Pet6fi's conception, refers to all text-external relations, such as extensional semantics, text production, text reception, and text interpretation. Whereas earlier text-grammatical studies were exclusively concerned with the co-textual aspects of text structure, Petofi drew in the con-textual aspect, thus adding a pragmatic dimension to the study of the syntactico-semantic construction of a text. More than continuing the cohesive and coherence-making relations in a text, cotextuality and con-textuality, in combination with textuality proper, expand Halliday's dichotomy and place the text in a total communicational context which transcends both linguistics and logic, and enters into domains such as psychology and sociology. This, then, opens the way for text-grammatical studies to adopt a more global, and more humanistic, perspective on its object of study, and one which does not limit itself to formal descriptions. Because formal logic, if unaccompanied by more humanized and humanizing methods of research, inevitably becomes an arid path for those pursuing humanistic studies. It should by now become clear that in the second half of the twentieth century, relatively few conscious efforts were made to bridge the gap between linguistics and poetics, so acutely felt by Jakobson. Ifanything, this gap even widened. Indeed, linguistic theory, which in Katz and Fodor (1962 and 1964) is still based on purely linguistic methods, has from the 1960s increasingly and systematically borrowed concepts from logic and its theory of meaning. Both Chomskyan syntax and generative semantics have adopted methodological strategies of logicians. Text-linguistic analysis has followed this trend:

Certainly, generative grammar has always been a few steps ahead of text linguistics so far as technicalities are concerned, but this is not so with respect to the discovery of empirical facts. On the contrary: the scope of generative grammar is a priori reduced, and problems are only recognized as significant if they can be solved with the means provided by the theory. Much of the success of generative grammar is due to the strategy to exclude unfavourable examples, if

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at all possible. Naturally this does not leave comprehensive heuristics (Rieser 1981: 327)

room

for

Generative grammar has provided text linguistics with a formal basis and new concepts such as syntactic well-formedness and semantic acceptability, which were readily applied to text analysis. Formalization can thus certainly be instrumental in theory construction, but formalism is not identical to theory: "In hindsight it can be said that text linguistics tried to apply formal apparatuses too early, perhaps because in general the role of formalization in theory construction was grossly overrated" (Rieser 1981 :334). The application of theoretical tools provided by logic assumes that texts are reducible to a series of rigid a priori schematizations, and can be exhaustively described in some logical language. This approaches Gardin's wise critique: There is no a priori reason why a Chomskyan representation of one hundred sentences from the Precieuses ridicules [The Affected Misses] would be a superior characterization of the work because it is a linguistic characterization; neither is there any reason why a content analysis of the notes left posthumously by thirty persons who did commit suicide, would be particularly revealing inasmuch as it is based upon mathematical classification methods; and finally, there is no reason why the deep meaning of Mesopotamian myths

would appear more accurately from a computerized than from a non-computerized analysis. (Gardin 1974: 12-13; my translation) What has in the process been neglected is, according to Rieser, the weight of empirical data provided by intuition: "The precise explication of one's linguistic intuitions should come first, and only then does formalization make sense" (Rieser 1981: 334). It is instructive to observe once again that this statement echoes, albeit from a different point of view, the value Peirce gave to abduction as the first step in sound logical reasoning. As against formal linguistic theory, pragmatic linguistics (or pragmalinguistics) defends the use of language as an instrument used to communicate meaning. It concentrates thus on the parole or performance side of language used in so-called speech acts. In this connection, a speechact theory has been developed which is most typically represented by Searle's 1969 Speech Acts (a continuation of Austin's 1962 How to Do Things with Words). Building on Wittgenstein's concept of language-game and Pike's behavioreme, among others, a speech act corresponds to neither sentence nor text, but focuses instead on the utterance as an intentional, rule-governed, 38

On Translating Signs

goal-oriented linguistic activity, through which a speaker or speakers communicates with a user or users. Speech-act theory may thus be integrated with profit into a text theory in which the text is conceived as a verbal action functioning in relation to context that are social, political, and/or cultural. If a text is considered thus, as a communicational process, pragmatics represents its purposiveness. The latter occurs as intentionality in text production; as acceptability in text reception; and as situationality in the communicative framework (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981: 32). Its emphasis on the communicational process does, however, not relate the speech act to its extralinguistic referent in reality, as determining its meaning from the outside. At this time a reference to an expanded version of text theory is in order. The dialogue between the text and its function in society is as central to pragmatic text theory as it is to so-called Textwissenschaft (Plett 1979). Despite the latter's apparently broad and rather pretentious appearance, this term is, however, an updated version of the German term literaturwissenschaft and has been proposed in its stead to cover the new, extended concept of the modem(ized) literary text. In a post-Jakobsonian perspective, Textwissenschaft approaches the text from three sides: linguistic, rhetorical, and semiotic. Whenever a text reflects an aesthetic intention to create Jakobson's version of verbal art in all its scope, it is regarded in this sense as partaking of rhetorics. This applies to any language-based artistic artifact which for some reason and to some extent deviates from the norm of strictly utilitarian everyday speech (Plett 1979: 29-30). This occurs not only in poetic (literary) texts, but may also be found in the language of comic strips, publicity slogans, libretti, and all other rhetoricized texts and subtexts. Though so-called text science used such an extended conception of what is a literary text, it is nevertheless restricted to some definition of literariness. Such a definition determines which texts are non-literary, and excludes these as irrelevant. From the viewpoint of a comprehensive text theory, this and similar proposals based upon the study of non-ordinary language, are a reductionism precluding the project of a text theory suited to all kinds of texts, without exception. To conclude this survey of linguistic text theories: I have tried to argue that the ineffectiveness of what has been achieved in this field is perhaps mainly due to the fact that it used non-linguistic methods borrowed from mathematics. In doing so, text theory became, in scholarly eyes, more and more esoteric and thus, perversely, it became less and less palatable to those it sought to entertain, convince, or instruct. This is of course yet another 39

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instance ofC. P. Snow's notorious and well-known "two cultures" (originally the title of an article published in 1956 in The New Statesman): I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly split into two polar groups ... [:] at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, who incidentally while no one was looking, took to referring to themselves as "intellectuals" as though there were no others ... [,] at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension - sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. (Snow 1964: 3-4). To these negative feelings could be added prejudice and fear; all of them stifling any commitment to real growth, mental, intellectual, cultural, or other: There seems to be no place where the cultures meet ... The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures - of two galaxies, so far as that goes, ought to produce creative chances. In the history of mental activity that has been where some of the breakthroughs came. The chances are there now. But they are there, as it were, in a vacuum, because the two cultures can't talk to each other. (Snow 1964: 16) To remedy this tragic situation and avoid further loss to culture as a whole, Peircean semiotics must offer a scientific theory and a conceptual apparatus which may be, and indeed is, fruitfully applied to disciplines within either "culture." Not coincidentally, Peirce, the polymath, was himself the living example of transdisciplinary scholarship; not only was he both a scientist and a logician, but his voluminous writings cover a remarkable spectrum of other disciplines and fields of investigation, original and emergent. His semiotics is the only truly unified and unifying science, as will be discussed further in the last chapter. Returning from Snow and Peirce to text linguistics and text grammar, the lukewarm response from these sides had, however, far-reaching consequences for applied text analysis -a field which, while lacking a supporting theoretical framework, or maybe because of this, went through an extraordinarily expansive period. Without a firm theoretical foundation on which to build its methodological structure, applied text studies could engage 40

On Translating Signs

in flurries of intellectual speculation, and give free play to more or less fleeting fashions. This theoretical anarchy enabled and encouraged the practical analysts of texts to freely apply, and even give absolute dogmatic value to, their own theories, which in addition to being non-linguistic paradigms, were often of a political or otherwise ideological nature. Many a text analyst has thus used, e.g., Marxist concepts or pieces of feminist, gender or ethnic doctrines, and has applied them without restraint to a great variety of texts. To demonstrate that this has often been done astutely and with an extraordinary persuasive force, lies outside the scope of the argument here, which seeks to provide a theoretical, not an applied, description of the textual phenomenon. My text-theoretical argument has up to now traced some developments in linguistics during, especially, the second half of this century. For Chomsky, linguistics was, in essence, syntactic theory. As has been shown, semantic theory was added first, followed by pragmatic theory. Linguistics theory thus approaches semiotic theory, with particular reference to Morris's division of the field of general semiotics into three branches: syntax, semantics, pragmatics (Morris 1938 and later works). According to Morris , who in tum drew from Peirce, signs have three kinds of relation. The "syntactical dimension" is the relation of sign-vehicle(s) to other sign-vehicle(s); the "semantic dimension" is the relation of signs to their object(s); and the "pragmatic dimension" is the relation of signs to their interpreter(s), or more general, their user(s). In tandem with speech-act theory, Morris's tripartite view has been introduced (from Petofi and Rieser 1974 onward) as a methodological tool, or thinking-model, having become a (pragma)linguistic text theory and thus operationalizing the perspective of a separate, but not independent, sign user. This was one way in which text theory was led toward sign theory. The other way was, as shall be shown next, structuralism. The application of a semiotic paradigm to text analysis, which characterizes text semiotics, is in the end what distinguishes the formalized approach of text grammar from a more comprehensive point of view, that of communication in the broad sense of the term. Indeed, texts are objects, tools, or artifacts containing and conveying information as messages that are encoded, sent, transmitted, received, decoded, and given some interpretation. And semiotics in the broad sense is precisely concerned with the study and analyses of all signifying practices - verbal, non-verbal, or a combination of both - by which living creatures, human and non-human, communicate. How vital this pursuit is, has been repeatedly emphasized by Sebeok, who refers to it as life's, and thus also man's, "survival-machine" (Sebeok 1986: 5, cf. 41

Text and Interdisciplinary Texture

Gorlee 2000). In order to study the many different ways in which signs can function, semiotics has developed a full and variegated repertoire of concepts. Semiotics is therefore in the unique position to describe, explain, as well as to predict human thought as operative in the sign process. Moreover, a semiotic analysis does not peculiarly involve a value judgment, neither a priori nor a posteriori; for as the radically general theory of signs, semiotics, at least in its purest form, is incompatible with ideological discoloration of the facts it studies. Textual production and textual interpretation are, among innumerable other human practices, forms of communication through the function of signs. The text-phenomenon can therefore be studied from the perspective of a theory of signs. Obvious as this may perhaps seem, a "semiotic textology" (Baxtin 1990) 7 is nevertheless a relatively recent enterprise within semiotics, and remains in many ways a little-explored field of applied semiotic investigation. An important reason for this is that text semiotics, as practiced thus far, has often concentrated rather one-sidedly on linguistic semiotics, or sign theory in the Saussurean tradition. In contrast, a semiotic textology from the point of view of Peircean sign-theory, has as yet received scant attention. Without going into the details of the sectarian "warfare" between followers of the two sign-theoretical traditions, the discussion here will concentrate instead on their respective relevance to the case in point. Moreover, the

insights as developed in the former Soviet Union (the Moscow-Tartu school) will be drawn upon whenever relevant. No attempts will therefore be made here to resolve semiotic disputes. 8 It will instead be argued that Peirce's theory of signs has been unduly neglected in text theory, and that its potential for text-theoretical study fully deserves further exploration. To explore this well-nigh pristine ground will be the primary aim here.

Text, Word, and Sentence The study of texts is traditionally the province of literary scholarship, together with such text-oriented disciplines as ethnology/ethnography, history, philosophy, religious studies, and law; more recently joined by sociology, psychology, and psychiatry. Though traditional linguistics is primarily concerned with language as a whole, it concentrated in practice on the study of short language units, that is to say, at the sentence level. The results of such study were then held to be representative for language as a whole. According to Zellig Harris in his (originally 1952) Discourse analysis,

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On Translating Signs

Descriptive linguistics generally stops at sentence boundaries. This is not due to any prior decision. The techniques of linguistics were constructed to study any stretch of speech, of whatever length. But in every language, it turns out that almost all the results lie within a relatively short stretch ... This limitation has not seemed too serious, because it has not precluded the writing of adequate grammars: the grammar states the sentence structure; the speaker makes up a particular sentence in keeping with this structure, and supplies the particular sequence of sentences. (quoted in Saporta and Sebeok [1959] 1972: 43-44) Saussure had challenged the received view of the world as the basic theoretical or at least empirical unit of verbal behavior and hence of linguistic description. For him, the "concrete unit must be sought not in the word, but elsewhere ... A rather widely held theory makes sentences the units of language; we speak only in sentences and subsequently single out the words" (Saussure [1916] 1959: 105-106). In his Syntactic Structures, Chomsky's states that "[fJrom now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements" (1957: 13). More than ten years after Syntactic Structures, Fillmore's "case grammar" remains equally restricted to the sentence level: "The sentence in its basic structure consists of a verb and one or more noun phrases, each associated with the verb in a particular case relationship" (Fillmore 1968: 21 ). Finally, in his 1972 "universal grammar", Montague, too, does not go beyond sentential level equally studies sentences, claiming that it "is the task of the syntax of a language to name its linguistic objects (words, sentences, and their parts in so far as they have a syntactic function) and to make explicit their syntactic properties and internal relations" (Montague and Schnelle 1972: 5, my translation). Against this supremacy of the sentence, classical European linguistic structuralism, of which Jakobson is of course an eminent representative, at an early date took neither the word nor the sentence, but the text or discourse as its research object. 9 The same is true for another branch of linguistic structuralism, Hjelmslev's "glossematics." In Hjelmslev's then-revolutionary view, language is a set of different texts, and If the linguistic investigator is given anything ... , it is the as yet unanalyzed text in its undivided and absolute integrity. Our only 43

Text and Interdisciplinary Texture

possible procedure, if we wish to order a system to the process of that text, will be an analysis, in which the text is regarded as a class analyzed into components, and so on until the analysis is exhausted . . .. The object of interest to linguistic theory are texts. The aim of linguistic theory is to provide a procedural method by means of which a given text can be comprehended through a self-consistent and exhaustive description. (Hjelmslev [ 1943] 1961: 12-13, 16) The "procedural method" referred to by Hjelmslev in the above quotation from his 1943 Prolegomena to a Theory ofLanguage, was conceived by him as a two-sided thinking model. Following Saussure's distinction between the signifier and the signified, Hjelmslev differentiated in the linguistic sign two planes, which he called the "plane of expression" and the "plane of content". Both planes may be further divided into smaller units, such as "phonemes" on the plane of expression, and "semes" on the plane of content. According to Hjelmslev, language is in essence a combinational process; and this process can, in his view, only be fully described if the text is taken as the object of study. Hjelmslev started thus from the text as a whole and proceeded deductively, working his way "down" from the textual level. Other linguists after him did inverted this procedure, and arrived inductively at the textual level. This was especially the case with the American linguists, Harris and Pike. Though their theories diverge, both Harris and Pike concentrated on linguistic units beyond the sentence, thereby opposing Chomsky's fashionable procedure. To be sure, before Chomsky published his Syntactic Structures, Harris had already built upon the textual level taking "discourse ... as the fullest environmental unit for distributional investigation" (Harris 1954: 158). Harris's "discourse analysis" is "a method of see in any connected discrete material, whether language or language-like, which contains more than one elementary sentence, some global structure characterizing the whole discourse (the linear material), or large sections of it" (Harris 1963: 7; orig. 1952). Harris offered a "distributional" analysis of structural equivalences between successive sentences. His descriptive transphrastic linguistics is concerned with the occurrence, distribution, and combinations of repetitions and parallellisms on the syntactic level. Harris rejected meaning as irrelevant outside the actual identification of repetition. In order to increase the number of equivalences, Harris proposed the grammatical "transformation" of the linguistic strings he focused upon. The concept of "transformation," introduced 44

On Translating Signs

by Harris, was subsequently elaborated by his student, Chomsky. 10 The latter also followed Harris in concentrating exclusively on morpho-syntactic relations, the "grammmaticalness," and did not consider semantic relations. This "shortcoming" 11 which was to have far-reaching consequences, not only for "pure" linguistics but also for applied-linguistic analysis; that is to say, for text analysis using linguistic, or in the case of structuralism, "linguistic" methods). Meaning is, however, an essential component in the linguistic analyses deviced by another American linguist, Kenneth Pike. For him, verbal sequences are composed of grammar and form on the one hand, and on the other hand, of meaning, both lexical and structural (or distributional) meaning. Pike coined the term "tagmemes" to refer to verbal sequences; and hence his theory is called "tagmemics." Tagmemes are discursive structures in which form and meaning occur interdependently. Pike analyzed these tagmemes according to the so-called "slot-and-filler" method which he devised. In this method, tagmemic segments are both functional slots within a next "higher" structural unit of the "pyramided hierarchy" on various levels (morpheme, word, phrase, clause, sentence, paragraph, discourse); and at the same time tagmemes realize or "fill" this function through a particular form, shape or grammatical class. In this fashion Pike provided matrices for the structural description of what he called "hyper-utterances," which are suprasentential pieces of writing and/or speaking. Unsurprisingly, Pike states in his monumental Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior ( 1967) that his view "continues to be (as in the first edition of this book, 1954) that the sentence is a totally inadequate starting or ending point. Sentences themselves cannot be analyzed without reference to higher-level relationships" (Pike 1967: 147). Moreover, as the title of Pike's work suggests, he integrates anthropological insights into linguistic analysis. Unlike other, "pure" linguists solely concerned with linguistic facts, Pike thus conceives (verbal) utterances in their relation with non-verbal facts surrounding or accompanying the realization of the verbal act, thereby moving from the direct context and the communicative situation to the whole of culture. In Pike's words, Hierarchical structure does not stop with the sentence, nor begin with it. Rather it must begin with the total language event in a total cultural setting ~ which, in tum, is in a total physical setting. It is precisely this interlocking on higher and higher levels of integration

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that forces us to treat language as merely one phase of human behavior, and structurally integrated with it. (Pike 1967: 484) This means that for Pike, linguistic analysis goes beyond the hyper-utterance and must "begin with the composite verbal-nonverbal behavioreme" (Pike 1967: 147). In its tum, a "behavioreme" may be of any size. Pike even introduces the term "hyper-behavioreme" (Pike 1967: 130), and he offers a linguistic-semiotic analysis of a church service, a football game, and a family breakfast as typical examples of such highly complex behavioral units. The scope and application of Pike's conceptual framework make him into a key figure in the development of linguistic analysis of different kinds of texts. Where the more traditional approaches to language and the modem linguistic theories tend to diverge, Pike instead proposes and defends an interdisciplinary and, in many ways, revolutionary method for discourse analysis conceived in the broadest terms. The way in which Pike's referential filler classes - such as actor, purpose, recipient of an action, time, place - fill tagmemic slots, such as subject, object, predicate in many ways resemble Fillmore's procedures as well as Greimas's actantial functions (Greimas and Courtes 1982: 3-4 ). Pike's slot-and-filler method is inspired by Hjelmslev's model of a form-substance dichotomy and its double articulation of the grammatical and referential levels; thus it ultimately builds, albeit implicitly,

on Saussure's signifier-signified relation. If this dichotomous thinking shows signs of a structuralist spirit, this kinship tends to be confirmed by Pike's ethnolinguistic concerns; because on the one hand, Pike's method seems to echo Propp's narrative functions, while, on the other, approaching LeviStraussian and Malinowskian ideas. In spite of the differences between LCviStrauss's structural anthropology and Malinowski's functional anthropology 12 , both scholars strongly emphasize the close relation of language to non-verbal behavior. Both Levi-Strauss and Malinowski observe verbal and non-verbal symbolic signs as ultimately rooted in, and framed by, questions concerning human culture. In the same spirit Pike, the linguist, answers his own question, But what was the largest linguistic act to be distributed within? Here we were inevitably committed to the relevance of culture, or nonverbal behavior, as a distributional setting for large linguistic units. It was only a matter of time, therefore, until the total theory, in order to survive at all, had to embrace nonverbal as well as verbal behavior. (Pike 1967: 288)

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On Translating Signs

Indeed, by absorbing the multifarious ideas and perspectives put forth by many different linguistic scholars, French structuralism showed its ambition to be, or at least to become, the "total theory" pointed at in Pike's quotation. As will be argued in the following sections, structuralism has, however, some built-in and self-imposed limitations that thwart its becoming a universal methodological tool. For now let us just say that the structural, or better structuralist, method is in principle less suitable for application to nonlinguistic facts of culture than is the "semiotic" method. The latter, exemplified by Peirce's process of inquiry - after touching series of hypotheses through observation and reasoning, as well as leading to gloss the truth - is better equipped to describe the flexible ebb and flow of language than is a fixed "pigeon-hole" system, which is precisely designed to halt motions. Why this is so and what the implications of this distinction are for text analysis, will be discussed shortly. Pike's perspective, in addition to its repercussions on modem French structuralist thought, also prefigures some aspects of text linguistics, and particularly Pet6fi's Textstruktur-Weltstruktur Theorie, which was presented above. Yet the family resemblance between Pike's approach and textlinguistic/text-grammatical research is more apparent than real. This is because text linguistics and text grammar have systematically followed the path of logical formalization. In doing so, they certainly fulfilled Chomsky's requirement that linguistic theory must be formal in order to be scientifically valid; but this also implies that both text linguistics and text grammar reject a basic assumption made by Pike, namely, that "Tagmemics is set up as a part of the structure of behavior not merely as a formal algebraic system", while "[t]he necessity for intuitive components in the action of the analyst rules out an analytical algorithm for procedure" (Pike 1967: 501, 289). Indeed, Pike emphasized that what he calls "intuitive steps" or "analytical leaps" (Pike 1967: 224-225) are crucial elements of his linguistic analysis and of other procedures based upon it. On this view, intuition enables the linguist to "identify, crudely, etically, with a wide margin of error, something of [the] characterics in the data before he applies his rigorous emic procedures to this material to arrive at a structural refinement of that material" (Pike 1967: 224) 13 • Firstly, meaning is discovered intuitively; only then can these data be exploited by formal descriptive methods. As opposed to the transformationalists and their successors in text linguistics and text grammar, Pike asserted unreservedly that "there is no mechanical discovery procedure" through which meaning can be recovered; and he added to this:

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The gratuitous adding, by implication, of the word "mechanical" before the phrase "discovery procedure" we vigorously reject. Rather, we have discovery procedures which are of the guess-andcheck type ... Once a system is arrived at by such procedures, with intuitive components, then description (as over against discovery) can choose to present only a part of the data (the formal part) and leave out the semantic component. I have chosen, on the other hand, to retain semantic components in presentation for a simple reason: I wish to be able to know, after I have presented a linguistic structure, what it means - not merely that it is well-formed - since language is a communicative system. (Pike 1967: 225n., Pike's emphasis) To conclude the argument I would like to suggest that Pike's argument seems, in many ways, to move away from the structuralist thought to which it has served as an important contributory factor, and towards Peirce's semiotics. What is emphasized in the above quotation - intuition as the initial step in a discovery procedure, and from which the first impetus must come toward sound logical reasoning - clearly recalls Peirce's "abduction," or instinctive reasoning. Peirce's abductive thought, which is radically conjectural in nature, yet a plausible, though far from infallible, reasoning method, will be discussed further in the next chapter. From foregoing and subsequent discussions, it should be clear that textlinguistic, text-grammatical and similar research, as comductied in compliance with the Chomskyan formalization requirement, have in so doing proceeded from false premisses. This is especially obvious when seen in the light of Peirce's logic of signs, which is anything but impressionistic and which explicitly includes abductive thought. Text-linguistic and textgrammatical researches have certainly provided new and intelligent theoretical and applied constructs, and were an excellent improvement over their largely impressionistic predecessor - literary stylistics. As a final answer, however, it seems destined to failure. Text Semiotics Different semiotic theories have defined the text by establishing a relation between the concept of text and that of the semiotic sign. This does not mean, however, that there is agreement among the community of semioticians about what precisely is a text. Theories vary according to the restraints of their Saussurian, Peircean, and otherwise philosophical-semiotic 48

On Translating Signs

backgrounds, and according to the constraints of their cultural, political, legal, and otherwise surrounding, extratextual environments. All of these leave a deep mark on the open versus clandestine nature of textual meanings. Indeed, what text can be mean varies according to the different definitions, explications, or descriptions given, explicitly or implicitly, to the concept of the (linguistic) written or printed sign. This subchapter provides brief overviews of the theories in question; for further information, readers are encouraged to pursue the references cited. In the "linguistic semiotics" of French structuralism, the written verbal sign is regarded as a graphic utterance-sign occurring as a sequence of wordsigns, that is, as an "entity endowed with meaning ... , prior to any linguistic or logical analysis" (Greimas and Courtes 1982: 362). Only after the object in question is analyzed or described does it become a signifying whole -a text. A text is thus only as a result of the process of what is called "signification," meaning that a certain articulated meaning comes into existence and is made visible within the given meaning of the relevant text. This means that a text is "made up only of those semiotic elements fitting the theoretical goal of the description" (Greimas and Courtes 1982: 340). Different types of ideological analysis will perceive different pertinent traits, will choose, retain, and process different signifying features, and will consequently produce different texts. This sign-theoretical approach studies how the utterer, who in this predominantly literary-oriented tradition is often referred to as "narrator," addresses himself to the reader. Because the reading of the literary text concentrates on retracing the process in which meaning is encoded and textualized, linguistic semiotics is primarily concerned with text writing and text production, and hence with sign production. This agrees with Roland Barthes's ( 1915-1980) concept of the text, or capitalized Text. The latter textualizes "discourses [that were] being woven around him, which were displacing prejudices, questioning the 'obvious,' proposing new concepts"; among his influences, Barthes mentions the following: Propp, discovered through Levi-Strauss, made it possible to apply semiology with some rigor to a literary object, narrative; Julia Kristeva, profoundly transforming the semiological landscape, gave me personally and principally the new concepts of paragrammatism and intertextuality; Derrida vigorously displaced the very notion of sign, postulating the retreat of signifieds, the decentering of structures; 49

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Foucault accentuated the problematics of the sign by assigning it a historical niche in the past; Lacan gave us a complete theory of the scission of the subject, without which science is doomed to remain blind and mute as to the place from which it speaks; Tel Que!, finally, initiated the attempt, unique even today, to relocate all these mutations within the Marxist field of dialectical materialism. (Barthes 1988: 6) Barthes' Text hinges on the sign qua signifier, while its counterpart, the meanings of the signified, can be endlessly explored. This is the horizon of Barthes's "semiological adventure," an adventure which would also mean that the true scope of any Text must necessarily remain elusive and fugitive. As Barthes originally formulated it in 1974: And what is the Text? I shall not answer by a definition, which would be to fall back into the signified. The Text, in the modem, current sense which we are trying to give this word, is fundamentally to be distinguished from the literary work: it is not an esthetic product, it is a signifying practice; it is not a structure, it is a structuration; it is not an object, it is a work and a game; it is not a group of closed signs, endowed with a meaning to be rediscovered, it is a volume of traces in displacement; the instance of the Text is not signification but the Signifier, in the semiotic and psychoanalytic acceptation of that term; the Text exceeds the old literary work; there is, for example, a Text of Life, one I tried to enter by writing apropos of Japan. (Barthes 1988: 7) In so far as the often cryptic nature of Barthes' ideas and the somewhat daunting nature of his parlance do permit a transparent and unambiguous interpretation, a structuralist concept of text seems to de-emphasize what is central to other semiotic theories, namely that a text would serve, first and foremost, the plan, purpose and strategy of human communication, which Barthes referred to as "hope, Science, Text" (1998: 7). Yet to conceive of a text as a self-contained entity with its own internal structure, independent (at least in principle) of whatever possible or virtual interpretations it may at any time receive, is to ignore the almost obvious; namely, that this structure or form exists as it is precisely to organize and convey messages efficiently. 50

On Translating Signs

Before anything else, a written text must therefore be considered as a communicative event, a writer's device for telling something to somebody, the reader( ship). Barthes clearly understood the importance of getting a message across, as his above comment about Japanese signs indicate; further, the issue of international comparativism is relevant to our concern with translation studies. Barthes used literary and pictorial images of his entrance into a foreign culture and "becoming Japanese" or pseudo-Japanese. This was a complex task for a Frenchman crossing the threshold of Japanese culture, to engage with the alien imagery of Japanese ideographs, the subtleties of Japanese etiquette, and Japanese riddles like satori, sukiyaki and haiku (Barthes 1988: 7, Barthes 1970, where Barthes called Japanese images Texts). In non-structuralist semiotic theories, and in semiotic theories which, while bearing the stamp of Saussure, are not as directly Saussurean as structuralism is, communication does indeed take center stage. In the former Soviet Union, this was clearly prefigured in the text-theoretical work by Jakobson's first period and of Baxtin (often transliterated as Bachtin and Bakhtin), which focuses upon the (preferably artistic) text qua individual utterance, both written and spoken. In the political milieu of those days, their studies were then conceived as a polemical dialogue between Saussurean linguistics and "metalinguistics," the latter a Baxtinian concept, not coextensive with Jakobson's 1960 notion of metalanguage, which emphasized the diachronical and cumulative aspects of literary hermeneutics instead of the static, synchronic langue-model proposed by Saussure (see, e.g., Baxtin 1990, an

essay composed in 1959-1961 ). This marks crucially the critical transition, in so-called Soviet semiotics, from a cybernetic and scientistic research paradigm, to one that focused on culture, including Slavonic studies, historiography, mythology, philosophy, anthropology, and translation studies. To the extent possible in the Soviet milieu of the time, the Baltic school, founded by Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman (1922-1993), engaged with such politically delicate subjects as entropy, noise, meanings, and text analysis, the latter focusing on both permitted and tabooed use of language, as well as on issues of authorship, genre, style, and metaphors (see Voigt's 1995 commemorative essay on Lotman). The "old" Moscow-Tartu school of sem1ot1cs, headed by Lotman, approached communication generally as a fact of culture; hence, manifestations of communication, both linguistic and non-linguistic, were viewed as "cultural texts" and characterized with the ambiguous meanings of

51

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this term. Lotman gives the following, deliberately broad characterization of the linguistic text and its opposite, the nontext: A text is a separate message that is clearly perceived as being distinct from a 'nontext' or 'other text' ... The distinctive character of a text is not randomly distributed among semiotic levels. For a linguist, a sequence of sentences may be perceived as distinct from what precedes and follows in a linguistic relation, syntactically for instance, and thus as forming a text; and yet it may not possess such a delimitation according to certain legal standards. For a lawyer, a sequence of sentences is part of a text if it belongs to a broader unity, and is a nontext if it does not belong to such a unity ... A text has a beginning, end, and definite internal organization. An internal structure is inherent by definition in every text. An amorphous accumulation of signs is not a text... (Lotman 1988: 119) Considered as a semiotic sign, the text is for Lotman again a delimited whole. Firstly, the text must have clear external boundaries, which set it apart from other texts in the same linguistic code. Secondly, and in addition to its outward demarcations, the text often has an inner distinctiveness, insofar as it consists of parts (strophes, chapters, paragraphs, etc.). The text is itself hierarchically

(intertextually)

organized

in

a

variety

of

subsigns

corresponding to levels of structural-semantic organization, or subtexts. 14 In order to be understandable - thus interpretable and translatable - as a single coherent unity, both in terms of shape, form and in terms of meaning, texts must for Lotman be viewed as rooted in a given culture and in its accepted plurality of linguistic and cultural codes. As Ann Shukman, the semiotic translator of Lotman's works into English (e.g., Universe of the Mind, Lotman 1990), points out on following about the specific language(s) and specific cultural characteristics pertinent to how a text is to be read, deciphered, decoded, and the like: " 'Code,' in Lotman's usage, may refer to semantic level, literary convention, level of consciousness or ideology. Used in this way, it is a heuristic device not strictly or ideologically defined" (Shukman 1986: 1088, see also Zaliznjak, Ivanov and Toporov 1988: 50). Here it is not so important how texts with an informational transcription and contents are interpreted, because widely divergent interpretations are often possible, ranging from complete translations to fragmentary versions. Rather, what is most important is the fact that they make sense in a community or culture and can be efficiently interpreted by its members. Perhaps here lies 52

On Translating Signs

the difference between Lotman's and Barthes's ideas of textual entity: Both scholars consider the text as an autonomous and whole object. Yet Barthes's analyses disregard all extratextual properties and relations, whereas these play a decisive role in Lotman's textual interpretations, which account for both intratextual and extratextual elements as they mix together to produce meanmgs. Lotman and Pjatigorskij (1988) argue that culture consists in sets of rules (codes) that function as a system of signs. The written text is a cultural product and may be regarded as a " 'semiotic space' in which the various codes combine in a unique manner" (Shukman 1986: I 088). In order to become texts, verbal messages must function semiotically, that is, they must possess a special cultural significance. This means that they must have a meaningful relation not only with other texts, but they must also function meaningfully within the relevant system of social and cultural codes governing religion, law, medicine, politics, art, and the rest. All texts are embedded in, and to some degree, conditioned by, certain sociocultural rules. This relationship can be simple and straightforward, or it can be polemic and ambiguous; but a verbal message that has no cultural impact cannot be endowed with a textual status. For this reason, everyday utterance, or linguistic speech without cultural meaning beyond the purely utilitarian, does not qualify as a semiotic sign, or Lotman's "text." It is therefore a "nontext." But the division between a text and a nontext is neatly defined only in theory. This may be exemplified by the New York stock-index, a sports report, a shopping list, or weather report, all of which are obviously mundane texts, true - but they are not devoid of cultural relevance. It must be underscored that in the text-semiotic perspective as developed in the former Soviet Union, strictly linguistic wellformedness a la Chomsky is not as such decisive in verbal utterances. For what at first blush might seem to be a random sequence of words - for instance, a magic formula, children's nonsense rhymes, a Dada poem - can in fact make perfect sense to specific interpreters and/or specific sociocultural contexts. This "cryptography" was a crucial but ordinary fact in Lotman's milieu. Of the three semiotic dimensions - syntactic, semantic, pragmatic distinguishable in the relevant text, the first two are integrated into, and overshadowed by, the third. Therefore, Eenie Meenie Minie Mo really does function as what Lotman conceived as a "real text," replete with intricacies of all possible and puzzling kinds of significations (Lotman 1988: 124).

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In spite of the wide range of their interests and committments, Lotman and his associates, which include Ivanov, Uspenskij, Toporov, and many others, gravitate towards a concept of text which is particularly applicable to dividing texts into "artistic" and "non-artistic" texts. This is hardly surprising, because those theoretists are especially interested in how culturallyfunctioning signs (Lotman's "real texts") not only reflect a certain encoded meaning in a language, but also how they enable interpreters to generate new and unexpected meanings of them; for example, by placing them in the context of a cultural (sub)code that is different from the original or "natural" one: In the course of the cultural functioning of the text, its original meaning is subjected to complex re-makings and transformations, which result in an increase ofmeaning. This may therefore be called the creative function of the text. In contrast to its communicative function, where the slightest change represents an error and a distortion of meaning, a text in its creative function tends to produce new meanings (cf. E. T. A. Hoffmann's words in the preface to his Lebensansichten des Katers Murr about the creative role of misprints, and also the numerous incidents mentioned by Tolstoy, Akhamatova, and others, where errors, slips of the pen, etc., have played a part in the creative process). If in the former function noise

swallows up the information, it may creatively transform it in the latter. (Lotman 1987: 161, Lotman's emphasis) By concluding that "the text in its modem semiotic definition, is no longer a passive carrier of meaning, but appears as a dynamic, intrinsically contradictory phenomenon, as one of the fundamentals of modem semiotics" (Lotman 1987: 163), Lotman transforms the text-sign from a mere vessel of meaning into an active meaning-generating agent. With this he approaches the boundary-crossing problems of translation theory (discussed in the final chapter, "Trial and (T)error: Peirce's Fallabilism and Semiotranslation"). In the final analysis, this dynamic conception of the text as interesting and puzzling sign would seem more germane to semiosis in Peirce's sense of triadic sign-action, than to Saussure's dyadic sign-relation, between a signifier and a signified. It is true that the semiotic tradition in the former Soviet Union was conceptually closer to Saussure and, to some degree, to Hjelmslev, than to Peirce's semiosis. One example of this is the notion of culture, which echoes langue, and the vision of the text as parole; another, that Lotman operates with binary oppositions such as systemic/non-systemic, 54

On Translating Signs

univocal/ambivalent, center/periphery. Moreover, Lotman's focus, in tandem with Saussure's, is on man-made signs interpreted by human interpreters. Peirce, on the other hand, conceived of the sign in a much broader way, to include all signs, man-made and/or natural (discussed in Gorlee 1994 ). Be that as it may, for both Lotman and Peirce the meaning of the text is not reducible to the system in which it is inscribed; it is an ongoing process whereby new relations with the world are being established, and hence new meanings are being forged. The events of sign-breaking and sign-forging move us closer to what happens in motion in translation studies. Lotman's conception of the "real" sign as determined by culture can be regarded as akin to Peirce's "genuine" sign, at least, in one of the senses in which Peirce uses this term. In addition to being an entity in itself, a "genuine" sign is a two-faced agency that mediates both functionally and creatively between reality as represented in the sign and reality as interpreted by an interpreting mind, and is subject too all changeable factors of time and place. By contrast, Saussure's sign consists of, and is thus reducible to, the fixed, sign-internal interaction and mutual dependency between its material side (signifier) and the "content" (signified) with which it is connected. Next, we tum to Umberto Eco's concept of the written or printed text, which seems to be a radically eclectic concept. In it he seeks to harmonize and integrate many different semiotic traditions: particularly "Russian" semiotics, "French" semiology, and "American" semiotics; the "geographical" quotes indicate their primary semiotic webs, which now extend worldwide. In tandem with semiology, more commonly called structuralism, Eco concentrates on modes of text production, in his first theoretical milestone A Theory of Semiotics ( 1976) and later theoretical work. He borrowed textual concepts and terminology mainly from the model deviced by information theoreticians. At the same time, however, Eco began to develop a theory emphasizing textual interpretation, in a series of essays written from 19591977, and his exploration of the "role of the reader" in interpreting texts has been guided expressly by Peircean concepts (Eco 1984, 1st ed. 1979). Drawing eclectically on a wide range of semiotic conventions, Eco's text-sign came to view the text-sign as a "cultural unit" and "result of many intertwined modes of production" (Eco 1979: 67, 259). In A Theory of Semiotics, Eco notes that "usually a single sign-vehicle conveys many intertwined contents and therefore what is commonly called a 'message' is in fact a text whose content is a multilevelled discourse" (Eco 1979:57; Eco's emphasis) 15 • If a text can express several coexisting messages, 55

Tea and Interdisciplinary Texture

Eco argued, it is because the codes according to which it is encoded, arc ideally shared by the utterer and the interpreter of the text. Except in the rare case of the absolutely simple and rudimentary sign, every sign constitutes for Eco a text; thus, a complex sign such as a painting is, for Eco, "not a sign but a text" (Eco 1979:20,250). Eco realizes, of course, that while every sign is a vehicle of meaning, in order to do so it does not necessarily have to be produced by a human individual. Many signs have no utterer; this is the case, for example, with the so-called "natural" signs of the weather, medical symptoms, and so on. But a sign does not function as a sign until it is recognized and understood as such, and until it is interpreted by some (real or potential) interpreter. For Eco, what is crucial in making a sign a text, be it verbal or non-verbal, is strictly its potential for multiple meanings (as opposed to Lotman's more diverse requirements, explained above). A sign must be open to receiving more than one meaning, including non-intended, contradictory, and even fanciful ones. In the act(s) of interpretation, new meanings can emerge as a result of the application by the interpreter of codes that were not intended by the sign producer. In Eco's favopred expression, the sign must even be capable of lying. Eco's identification of sign with text holds true inversely: the written and printed text as a semiotic sign, intentionally produced and conventionally interpreted. When Eco considered the sign as a text, he really used the term

text in an extended, even metaphorical sense. In his consideration of the verbal text as a sign, Eco also uses the term "text," but primarily in reference to the particular written object. Hence, overall, his usage of the term text is somewhat confusing in that it can be understood as literal, figurative, as well as abstract. As it happens, Eco's argument concentrates upon the latter, that is to say, the abstract sense or concept of text, while assuming a general acquaintance with the former, the object called text. Poorly defined, if defined at all, this object can only be known through the fragments of verbal texts which Eco uses to illustrate his text theory. In Eco ( 1984), these include literary texts as heterogeneous as a short story (Un drame bien parisien, by Alphonse Allais), an excerpt from a poem (Toto-Vaca, by Tristan Tzara), a paragraph from Wittgenstein's Philosophical investigations, and Peirce's linguistic-semiotical definition of the value of the words "hard" and its opposed "soft," as well as the the analysis of the chemical element "lithium" (CP: 2.330, c.1902). In his choice of texts with such wide-ranging topics, Eco shows a universal, Peircean spirit and departs from other semiotic traditions which either limit textual study to only literary texts, or which define what constitutes a text in 56

On Translating Signs

terms of kinds of culture - high and/or popular cultures, specialized and nonspecialized cultures, etc .. Following Peirce's line of reasoning, the crucial distinction is not between the artistic and the non-artistic, the verbal and the non-verbal, the cultural and the natural. Rather, as shall be shown in more detail in the next section, the crucial distinction to be made is between the genuine, or triadic, sign and signs that do not function triadically. In short, Peirce opposes semiosis to non-semiosic forms of sign-action. In The Role of the Reader Eco states that literary, philosophical, chemical, and other communications which one normally "calls 'message' is usually a text, that is, a network of different messages depending on different codes and working at different levels of signification" (1984: 5). At the same time he points out that "every text is a syntactic-semantico-pragmatic device whose foreseen interpretation is part of its generative process (Eco 1984: 3, 1 1). This last definition of the text as concept not only accomodates all three semiotic dimensions of the text; it also emphasizes the crucial role which text interpretation has to play, in tandem with text production; and the use of the designation "device", rather than "sign", underscores that the text is a complex human construction, something contrived by design. At the same time, it is a means for bringing about a result, a kind of tool or instrument that requires, from both its maker and its user, a combination of workmanship and creativity, of skill and imagination. The boundaries of textual interpretation, which Eco qualifies as either controllable or uncontrollable in his The limits of Interpretation ( 1990), would position human and narrative sign-activity close to the creation of translated signs, that is to say, translated interpretants. Eco, the international known scholar and novelist, also worked as literary translator early on, as mentioned in his Experiences in Translation (2001, see review Gorlee 2002). 16 For example, Eco translated Gerard de Nerval's Sylvie and Raymond Queneau's Exercises de style into Italian, and also worked as a semiotic translation-theoretician, jointly with Siri Nergaard ( 1998). In a piece written in 1796, "Peirce and the semiotic foundations of openness: Signs as texts and texts as signs" (Eco 1984: chapter 7), Eco channels some of Peirce's concepts in the direction of textuality. Eco focuses less on Peirce's well-known triad, icon-index-symbol, and more on his theory of the interpretant or interpreted sign( s). Eco goes beyond these three relations which the sign has - with itself, with its referent, and with the meaning it is given - that is, beyond what the sign stands for. He also concentrates on the dynamic process by which the sign-text arouses an interpreting, that is translatable, sign-meaning in different cultures and different languages, in 57

Text and Interdisciplinary Texture

some interpreting mind (reader). Such a pragmatic enterprise includes and presupposes an approach by way of both semantics and syntactics, in the same way as Peirce's Thirdness includes and presupposes Secondness and Firstness. In fact, it is one of the many manifestations of Peirce's three modes of being. Rather than going into greater detail about Eco's reading, interpretation, and application of Peirce's ideas, let us next take a closer look at how Peirce himself equated or otherwise connected text, as defined for our purposes, with the adventure of the sign. Peirce, Text and Sign Peirce, as fin-de-siecle scientist, did occasionally use "text" in a modem sense of the term. 17 Nevertheless, in Peirce's day "text" was commonly used in classical philology, religious studies, and related disciplines, to refer to the words of Greek and Latin authors, and other, preferably "ancient" (CTN: I: 158, 1892), pieces of writing. These were manuscripts invested with special authority, the Bible especially, and Aristotle's writings. Peirce referred to the latter's "Greek text," saying that "the context of the book calls more emphatically for a chapter of very different meaning from that which we read in the present text" and the "meaning that can be attached to the existing text," written by Aristotle (MS 759: 10-11, c.1906). This is how Peirce commonly used the term, and likewise this is how his Swiss contemporary,

Saussure, spoke of (translated) "written texts" (Saussure [ 1916] 1959: I, 7), namely, as objects of commentary and exegesis. With regard to the modem meaning of text, which we take as the object of research in these pages, Peirce, as a sign-theoretician, used terms such as symbol, discourse, proposition, and argument, thereby addressing himself to purpose of Thirdness, involving the logical properties of the text today. Here it must suffice to characterize briefly the several concepts through which Peirce approached the phenomenon of text: A symbol is a sign requiring intelligent interpretation to become meaningful. It is the agreed-on vehicle of thought, and "all thinking is conducted in signs that are mainly of the same structure as words ... , or symbols" (CP: 6.338, c.1909, Peirce's emphasis). Reasoning - that is, the logical interpretation of signs by signs, whether spoken, written, or otherwise - always takes a discursive form (as opposed to discourse today, as mentioned before). Peirce wrote that Reasoning by our older authors Shakespeare, Milton, etc. is called "discourse of reasoning", or "discourse" simply. The expression is not yet obsolete in the dialect of philosophers. But "discourse" also 58

On Translating Signs

means talk, especially talk monopolized. That these two things, reasoning and talk, should have come to be called by one name, in English, French, and Spanish, a name that in classical Latin means simply, running about, is one of the curious growths of speech. (MS 597:2,c. l 902) However, Peirce hastened to add to this that discourse, or reasoning, is "communication", and hence not "a sort of talk with oneself ... addressed to oneself' (MS 597: 3, c.1902), but a dialogue addressed to some real or fictional receiver or interpreter. Peirce stated that "discourse consists of arguments, composed of propositions, and they of general terms, relative and non-relative, of singular names, and of something that may be called copulas, to rrelative pronouns, etc. according to the family of speech that one compares the discourse to ... " (MS 939: 27, 1905). Accordingly, a "proposition" is, for Peirce, "any product of language, which has the form that adapts it to instilling belief into the mind of the person addressed, supposing him to have confidence in its utterer" (MS 664: 8, 1910). A proposition "may relate to several such universes" such as " 'No admittance except on business,' over a door is a general proposition, but it relates to that door" and "if I say 'Hamlet's purposes were sometimes undecided,' I refer to the fictions created by Shakespeare," whereas "the proposition 'all men are mortal,' refers to the actual universe" (MS 789: 7, 3, 5, 6, n.d.). Proposition refers to a series of possibilities in speech, leading to a certain belief in the hearer. In what Peirce called argument, "[ c ]ertain facts are stated in such a way as to convince a person of the reality of a certain truth, that is, the argumentation is designed to determine in his mind a representation of that truth" (MS 599: 43, c.1902). Applied to written texts, the concepts of symbol, discourse, proposition, argument, inter a/ia enable us to deal logically (that is, semiotically) with the text as a device for verbal definition, suggestion, persuasion, instruction, and other forms of communication deviced through words in a particular language which speaker and hearer have in common. Firstly, it is necessary to consider the text as a material object. Construed in Peircean terms, it is a sign and, more specifically, a verbal sign. As a sign it must be seen on a par with all other objects which in Peirce's logic are susceptible of signhood. In a Peircean semiotics, anything - any feeling, object, event, phenomenon, concept, etc. - can, observed in certain circumstances, become a semiotic sign. A sign signifies, and thus survives, because it has some quality or distinctive property which tum it into a sign to 59

Text and Interdisciplinary Texture

somebody or something. This implies that a sign must be somehow puzzling, interesting, intriguing, or otherwise require someone's special attention, by suggesting that it means something other than itself, thereby inviting, even requiring some explanation. For me, a semiotic translation-theoretician, this new information is a translation of the primary sign. Max Fisch underscores that "Peirce's general theory of signs is so general as to entail that, whatever else anything may be, it is also a sign" (Fisch 1983: 56). According to Peirce, "Signs in general [are] a class which includes pictures, symptoms, words, sentences, books, libraries, signals, orders of command, microscopes, legislative representatives, musical concertos, performances of these ... " (MS 634: 18, 1909). In short, "A sign is any sort of thing" (MS 800: 2, [ 1903?], provided it is an interesting or puzzling "representation" to someone or something, and thus "stands for something to the idea which it produces, or modifies. Or it is a vehicle conveying into the mind something from without" (NEM: 4: 309, 1895), that is to say, something in the world. 18 Peircean scholars have frequently commented on the fact that Peirce's concept of sign is very broad; at any rate, much broader than and emcompassing all other semioticians's conceptions of signhood. According to Greenlee, it is "deliberately broad" ( 1973 :24 ), but not just for the sake of

broadness. We must note Peirce's own affirmation that it "is a very broad conception, but the whole breath of it is pertinent to logic" (NEM: 3: 233, 1909). Indeed, despite Peirce's numerous definitions and redefinitions of the sign throughout his intellectual career 19 , he never abandoned the broadness of its scope; nor did he change the essence of the logical properties of the sign as "something, A, which denotes some fact or object, B, to some interpretant thought, C" (CP: 1.346, 1903). There is substantial evidence from Peirce's work that he took a keen interest in language and linguistics, in addition to many other fields of research, theoretical and applied. Peirce's numerous linguistically-oriented essays, the first of which was his 1865 Harvard Lecture I (W: I: 162ff., 1865)), manifest a deeply-felt concern with language as a logical sign system, which for Peirce meant a semiotic sign system. This interest manifests itself most promently in Peirce's later period (from 1902), when the idea of a phenomenology governed by the three modes of being - Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness - had crystallized deeply in the philosopher's mind. Unlike phenomenology in the more customary sense, Peirce viewed it as the phenomenological science that studies "the collective total of all that is in any 60

On Translating Signs

way present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not" (CP: 1.284, 1905). The object of study can thus be, in a Peircean phenomenology, all that can possibly be perceived or thought. Thus we find linguistic phenomena rubbing shoulders with the myriad phenomena of a non-linguistic nature which catch the attention of the seer, listener, reader and interpreter. Peirce's doctrine of the three categories provides a means of dealing with all such phenomena, without discrimination, though not equally. To place Peirce's thought under the banner of philosophy of language is, nevertheless, a serious misconstrual of the facts, because it would fail to do justice to the universal scope of Peirce's logic. This is brought out beautifully by Jakobson, thus: Peirce's semiotic edifice encloses the whole multiplicity of significative phenomena, whether a knock at the door, a footprint, a spontaneous cry, a painting or a musical score, a conversation, a silent meditation, a piece of writing, a syllogism, an algebraic equation, a geometric diagram, a weather vane, or a simple bookmark. The comparative study of several sign systems carried out by the researcher revealed the fundamental convergences and divergences which had as yet remained unnoticed. Peirce's works demonstrate a particular perspicacity when he deals with the categoric nature of language in the phonic, grammatical and lexical aspects of words as well as in their arrangement within clauses, and in the implementation of the clauses with respect to the utterances. At the same time, the author realizes that his research "must extend over the whole of general Semeiotic," and warns his epistolary interlocutor, Lady Welby: "Perhaps you are in danger of falling into some error in consequence of limiting your studies so much to Language." (Jakobson 1987: 442) By categorizing signs not by their material aspects but by the different ways in which they may be meaningful, Peirce conceived of many human languages - speech, gestures, music, and others - in which experience may be communicated. Language, consisting of verbal signs is, of course, pivotal among these languages. Peirce said that "By a 'verbal sign' I mean a word, sentence, book, library, literature, language, or anything else composed of words" (MS 318: 239, 1907) 20 . This list, from Peirce's later period, is nearly echoic of earlier enumerations, such as "words and phrases, and speeches, and books, and libraries" (MS 404: 5, 1893). As Fisch interprets Peirce,

61

Text and Interdisciplinary Texture

It goes without saying that words are signs; and it goes almost without saying that phrases, clauses, sentences, speeches, and extended conversations are signs. So are poems, essays, short stories, novels, orations, plays, operas, journal articles, scientific reports, and mathematical demonstrations. So a sign may be a constituent part of a more complex sign, and all the constituent parts of a complex sign are signs. (Fisch 1983:56-57)

Scattered throughout Peirce's works are numerous references to, and discussions of discourse in the form of written signs of all kinds, from isolated simple word-signs to complex verbal structures. For instance, the words "witch" (MS 634: 7, 1909), "Hi!" (MS 1135: 10, [1895]1896), "runs" (MS 318: 72, 1907), and "whatever" (CP: 8.350, 1908) are for Peirce signs; so is "the word 'man' [which] as printed, has three letters; these letters have certain shapes, and are black" (W: 3: 62, 1873; cf. MS 9: 2, 1904). Peirce considered as a semiotic sign "[a]ny ordinary word, as 'give', 'bird', 'marriage"' (CP: 2.298, 1893) 21 and combinations of words, such as "all but one", "twothirds of', "on the right (or left) of' (CP: 2.289-2.290, c.1893). In his writings, Peirce further presented and analyzed many sentence-signs, both grammatically complete or elliptic, such as "Napoleon was a liar" (MS 229C: 505, 1905), "King Edward is ill" (MS 800: 5, [1903?]), "Fine day!" (MS 318: 69, 1907), "Let Kax denote a gas furnace" (CP: 7.50, 1867), "Burnt child shuns fire" (MS 318: 154-155, 1907), and "Any man will die" (MS 318: 74, 1907). By the same token, Peirce wrote that "If - then--","-causes --". " - - would be --", and " - - is relative to - for--" are "among linguistic signs" (CP: 8.350, 1908). Peirce's favorite examples of sentence-signs were perhaps, chronologically, "This stove is black" (e.g., CP: 1.551, 1867), the military command "Ground arms!" (e.g., CP: 5.473, 1907 and MS 318: 37, 175, 214, 244, 1907), and "Cain killed Abel" (e.g., NEM: 3: 839, 1909 and CP: 2.230, 1910), all of these repeatedly used by Peirce as illustrative logical examples. Pieces of discursive writing (that is, texts) are signs. Though a sentence may sometimes be a text in itself, texts are more commonly combinations of sentences, complex signs that in tum consist of signs, which again consist of signs. This may be exemplified by the syllogism, understood as a compound sign built up, logically as well as linguistically, of three subsigns, which are in tum divisible, and which lead to a result: "All conquerors are Butchers I Napoleon is a conqueror I [therefore] Napoleon is a butcher" (W: 1: 164, 1865). The theater directory and the weather forecast published in the 62

On Translating Signs

newspaper are, for Peirce, predictive signs (MS 634: 23, 1909); so are "the books of a bank" (MS 318: 58, 1907) and "an old MS. letter ... which gives some details about ... the great fire of London" (MS 318: 65, 1907). As a further example of a verbal text-sign mentioned by Peirce we might finally mention "Goethe's book on the Theory of Colors ... made up of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, etc." (MS 7: 18, 1904 ). Text and Semiosis

All linguistic signs, regardless of size or complexity, are first and foremost signs of Thirdness: Peirce's symbolic signs (see CP: 5.73, 1903). "All words, sentences, books and other conventional signs are Symbols" (CP: 2.292, c.1902). They stand for the intended object not because they have a qualitative or structural similarity to it, which would make them iconic signs; nor are they physically or causally connected with their object, as is the case of indexical signs. A symbolic sign is a sign "simply because it will be understood to be a sign" (MS 307: 15, 1903) and it "is applicable to whatever may be found to realize the idea connected [with it]" (CP: 2.298, 1893). As Thirds, symbolic signs only function fully in a triadic sign relation that includes the sign itself, the object it stands for, and the sign in which the "first" sign is interpreted, its interpretant: Ifthis triple relation is not of a degenerate species, the sign is related to its object only in consequence of a mental association, and depends upon habit. Such signs are always abstract and general, because habits are general rules to which the organism has become subjected. They are, for the most part, conventional or arbitrary. They include all general words, the main body of speech, and any mode of conveying ajudgment. (CP:3.13, 1867)

"Habit" must here be understood in the Peircean sense: not as something fixed once and for all, but, on the contrary, as a flexible rule of procedure adopted for the practical purpose of successfully interpreting a sign. All signs that not only deal with feeling (Firstness) nor with action (Secondness) but with thought (Thirdness), namely Peirce's "intellectual concepts" (CP: 5.467, 1907), are in this sense habitual. The understanding and interpretation of linguistic signs is an intellectual, cognitive activity, and linguistic signs are therefore a habit-bound, rule-governed activity2 2 • Nevertheless, the rule must always be conceived as being ultimately based upon some deliberate resolution adopted by the language users to give certain 63

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linguistic signs certain meanings. This in tum implies that language users as a group may also at any point decide to change the rules, and "new" rules may be over-ruled in their tum by any subsequent decision. As repeatedly argued by Thomas Sebeok, change is essential to the verbal sign, including the constant change in all human languages. This is a crucial concept for the development of translation studies. The concept of the linguistic sign as an ad hoc rule of procedure would seemingly make it into an arbitrary entity, one which, paradoxically, would be unsuitable for efficient communication. The fact is, however, that the linguistic sign is both habit-bound and at the same time conventional, inasmuch as a word, sentence, or text can only function as a means of communication if the rule or habit is, to some extent, agreed upon by a consensus among the community of language users. In order to communicate its message the text-sign must function in a tripartite, sign-object-interpretant relation called semiosis. Semiosis as Peirce conceived it, seems to be both the action of the sign itself and the process of its interpretation. These are in fact two aspects of the same activity, because a sign is only capable of producing an interpretant in a thinking mind if it is an element of a triadic relation. Only the interpretant constitutes a real thoughtsign, as opposed to the "quasi-sign" which is governed by "automatic regulation" (CP: 5.4 73, 1907) between sign and object. In a dyadic sign relation the sign is "physically connected with its object; they make an organic pair, but the interpreting mind has nothing to do with this connection, except remarking it, after it is established" (CP: 2.299, c.1902). In order to be meaningful, a non-triadic sign does not require intelligent interpretation that is, an interpretation which is at the same time habitual and habitchanging, conventional and creative -, either because the sign immediately exhibits its meaning or because it directly points toward it. That there is no real logical action in the interpretation of a one-place, iconic sign, should be clear; but the two-place, indexical sign equaly disqualifies itself from semiosis, because it signifies its object either by law or by "brute force with no element of inherent reasonableness" (CP: 6.329, c.1909). Peirce emphasized explicitly that by semiosis he meant "an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable between pairs" (CP: 5.484, 1907, Peirce's emphasis). Text semiosis means that it is essential for the text-sign to embody ideas, thoughts, a message, because they are what the text is about: its object, the contents of the text. However, it is not sufficient for a text-sign to have a meaningcontent; it must be recognized, identified, and interpreted as such in order to

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operate as a full-fledged symbolic sign. It may on occasion even be misunderstood or manipulated, because from a strictly Peircean perspective the nature of the interpretation produced is, in the final analysis, as irrelevant as is the person of the individual interpreter. The text-sign itself is endowed with a power which, coming from the object and ultimately referring back to it, must in order to realize its full semiotic effect, appeal forward through it (the sign) to what is potentially an endless series of interpretant signs, each one interpreting the one preceding it. Textual semiosis teaches that the meaning of the text-sign is not necessarily identical with the prima facie object which the text refers to, but rather with the rule or habit (its interpretant) by which one would, under certain conditions, read, understand, and interpret it. This suggestion for translation studies and its survival can be illustrated by Peirce's account from the "life" of one text-sign, thus: Take, for example, that sentence of Patrick Henry which, at the time of our Revolution, was repeated by every man to his neighbor: "Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of Liberty, and in such a country as we possess, are invincible against any force that the ennemy can bring against us." Those words represent this character of the general law of nature. They might have produced effects indefinitely transcending any that circumstances allowed them to produce. It might, for example, have happened that some American schoolboy, sailing as a passenger in the Pacific Ocean, should have idly written down those words on a slip of paper. The paper might have been tossed overboard and might have been picked up by some Jagala on a beach of the island of Luzon; and if he had them translated to him, they might easily have passed from mouth to mouth there as they did in this country, and with similar effect. (CP: 5.105, 1902) The history of Henry's pronouncement is, at least potentially, the life history of all text-signs. Texts need to receive a real or potential interpretation in order to be able to operate as signs in different spatial and/or temporal settings. That is to say, they must be meaningful (signifying) in shifting semiosic relations to the listeners, readers, etc. If a combination of verbal signs does not draw the attention toward itself as a sign and does not manifest itself as mediating between what it can mean and what it is interpreted to mean, it remains a non-text. A text which, when transplanted in time and/or place, loses its power to appeal to an interpreting mind, becomes 65

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thereby a non-semiosic, dead entity. From the perspective of Peircean semiotics, the text-sign is characterized by endless and unlimited semiosis, by the ongoing process of growth through interpretation. What keeps the text-sign alive is precisely that it elicits an interpretant again and again, and that these interpretants (and the interpretants of the interpretants) are not only rule-governed entities but also, virtually or really, rule-changing and rulecreating new activities. It is apparent that for Peirce, a written text was a complex verbal sign

partaking of the basic properties common to semiotic signhood. Unfortunately, the significance of his theory for a text-semiotics, Peirce's textology, will require some interpretive extrapolation. We shall soon get to that. But first let us make sure that, from the foregoing arguments, the following is clear: a Peirce-based text-semiotics must be dramatically different from other sign-theoretical text-theories, particularly from those based on Saussure's text-theories. As opposed to French semiology, with its emphasis on text production, pragmatic semiotics in the Peircean tradition proceeds in the contrary direction, manifesting itself first and foremost as a theory of sign interpretation. The sign as Peirce conceived it is, in contradistinction to its semiological counterpart, not defined in terms of an utterer and/or interpreter but in terms of its dynamic relations, both conventional and new. Through semiosis, the sign deploys its meaning; its full meaning is thus ideally knowable, if only in some hypothetical future, unreachable today. Sign-action and sign-interpretation are not necessarily determined by a human utterer nor interpreter. Peirce's semiosis is selfgenerating triadic action. As all semiotic signs, the text-sign is a living agency actively seeking to realize itself through some interpreting mind rather than passively waiting to be realized by it, as is the case in linguistic semiotics. One reason why a Peircean concept of text, and hence a Peircean textsemiotics, may at first seem fanciful is that it diminishes the significance of the reader/interpreter. In a semiological text-theory, the reader/interpreter is customarily looked upon as the sole discourse-producing subject, as the agency that gives the text-sign its meaning by matching signifier with signified. A pragmatic, Peircean paradigm, emcompasses the presence of an interpreter, which is somehow subsumed but at the same time deemphasizes it. Apparently, Peirce did not have in mind one single person or not even one specific mind, but in an abstract way any receptive organism capable of generating textual interpretants. Peirce called this an intelligent "quasi-mind." As Peirce wrote, semiosis "not only happens in the cortex of the human

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brain, but must plainly happen in every Quasi-mind in which Signs of all kinds have a vitality of their own" (NEM: 4: 318, c.1906); and a "quasiinterpreter" is one example of such a "quasi-mind" (CP: 4.51, 1906) 23 . Peirce did therefore not include the interpreter as a fourth component of semiosis, in addition to the interpretant. This is not to say that Peirce did not acknowledge the existence of the interpreter, because he did in fact refer to an interpreter occasionally - e.g., in his often-cited definition of a sign as "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" (CP: 2.228, c.1897). On the whole, however, Peirce seems to indicate that the meaning of the textsign must be logically conceived as relatively independent from the reader/interpreter and that it transpires wholly in an endless series of individual semiosic events. As will be argued and documented in the following, this proposition provides a new and fruitful perspective on the phenomenon of text, one which undercuts subjective signification and elevates semiotic textology to the plane of intersubjective and objective inquiry. thereby enhancing, not restraining, its creative component. Textual Reasoning

The question to be considered in this and adjacent paragraphs is, How the scientific pursuit of the truth, in its various argumentational configurations, realized in the thought of structuralist thinkers engaged in textual studies. An account of the way in which these scholars tend to (in Peirce's terminology) settle their beliefs and create thinking habits will, it is hoped, provide a deeper insight into the semiological approach to the text-phenomenon, that is, into its procedure, assumptions, and conclusions. Beyond this immediate purpose, it is also hoped that the discussion here will bring some additional clarity to the problematic and, indeed, controversial division between linguistic semiotics and general semiotics, as roughly embodied in the Saussurean and the Peircean traditions of semiotics, respectively. It will be argued that these semiotic theories are anchored in different types of reasoning which determine their conclusions and, particularly, the extent to which those conclusions reflect the objective truth - that is, the extent to which they can rightly be called scientific inquiries. Modem European structuralist scholarship pursues a mainly deductive course of reasoning; and the same is, a fortiori, true for text-grammatical research 67

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entirely based, as it is, on formal methods approaching those of mathematics'. Text-grammar differs from structuralism in that its reliance upon a deductive argumentation is professed overtly and without disguise; whereas structuralism proceeds in a more insidiously deductive manner. Both discursive procedures present themselves, however, as necessary reasoning; to each particular case (such as textual data) a general rule is applied which is assumed to provide the exclusive key to its meaning. The rule to which structuralism applies - and, indeed, seeks almost to enforce as the only possible option - suggests that all semiotic objects, such as texts, are optimally and exhaustively categorized into binary oppositions. On the assumption that this is a true premiss corresponding to a valid abstraction from the facts, the conclusions drawn from it would necessarily be true. On the other hand, a falsification of the rule would, according to this line of thought, automatically invalidate the conclusions drawn from it. The whole procedure would thereby have to be regarded as a simple calculation error -a blunder requiring swift correction. First, let us consider the scope of the rule. Rules applied in any form of argumentation are not God-given laws but man-made principles. They are of conventional or experiential origin (CP: 2. 778, 1901 ), based upon pure agreement, on a product of previous experience and the lessons drawn from it, or on a mixture of both. In the case of a strictly conventional rule (the case of pure deduction) the agreement may be an ad hoc decision and/or a longstanding habit, sanctified through long years of practice during which time the memory of the original ruling act has gradually faded into oblivion. The sacrosanct rule-as-such having then become ossified, it is symbolized which is to say that it is merely enacted and re-enacted in its applications. Although the rule is therein (iconically) exhibited and (indexically) pointed toward, its validity is itself never again explicitly brought into question. A preestablished rule is therefore not tested out on random cases; because, if it were, an exception could be found, which would contradict the rule and thereby jeopardize the unfailing and definitive nature of the procedure. The leading principle of structuralism - binarism - has acquired the character of a conventional rule. The rule of binary oppositions constitutes the rigidly fixed a priori which has been elevated to the status of universal rule. But it has not been verified statistically, on the basis of random examples, prior to its having achieved this sophisticated status. The experiential rule is more flexible than its conventional counterpart, and it results from some form of practical experimentation that has led inductively to its adoption. Whenever it is used for reasoning of a formal nature, this strictly hoc tempore rule, 68

On Translating Signs

based upon experience, makes for a symbolic reasoning procedure with strong indexical overtones. By the same token, Peirce stated that induction "is justifiable as long as one keeps on the alert for the first exception" (CP: 8.237, 1910), for if and when this case occurs, the experiment requires revision or even rejection of the rule (not the case!), whereupon a new experiment can be carried out, and so forth. Each experiment can, of course, also confirm the existing rule and thereby strengthen its validity. In short, the rule is, in scientifically valid reasoning, the standard or norm resulting from an ongoing process of learning and growth. In Peirce's pragmaticist view, this is the right kind of rule: one which is experimentally concluded from the premisses and not one which is presupposed by them, as is the rule in deduction - and hence in structuralist policy. According to Peirce, only if knowledge is improved, challenged, and continually increased, and only if in the process new insights are allowed to be developed and tried out, does Ransdell's "communal hunt" (1986: 238) stand a chance of being a living pursuit that will approximate to its purpose and goal. All scientifically valid reasoning owes its "efficiency" (CP: 2.779, 1901) to the fact that it must involve a blend of both the empirical (induction) and the law-like (deduction), both being preceded by the hypothetical (abduction). Such a threefold, mixed scenario first infers from an actual fact, event, or phenomenon a hypothetical "maybe," followed by a "would be"; the latter is the inductive conclusion, which, as Peirce stated, "can be (usually) but indefinite, and can never be certain" (CP: 8.236, c.1910). To this Peirce hastened to add what seems to be a correction: "But in ordinary cases an induction would become both precise and certain" (CP: 8.237, 1910). It is clear that in Peirce's evolutionary concept of pragmatism, the two last-quoted statements do not contradict but reciprocally support, each other. In Peirce's variety of pragmatism, the conditional futurity of "would be" is required in order for reasoning to conform to the essence of reality and truth; it proposes a law which is the product of human reason in all its virtues and but ultimately inspired by limitations, which is not infallible reasonableness 24 . Only after an infinite series of cases has been closely studied can true answers be given 25 . In contradistinction to the conditional mood of "would be", structuralism advances absolute "must be"s. The latter policy is falsely assumed to lead directly to the truth, what it does is to undercut the creative dialogue between rule and experience. This concept of "law" takes a shortcut to the "truth" by taking the preestablished rule and creating absolute uniformity with it. It is, however, a bare uniformity among faits accomplis, and its futurity is a merely self-fulfilling prophecy. 69

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Structuralism epitomizes what Peirce called procedure which he described as follows:

schematic

reasoning,

the

We form in the imagination some sort of diagrammatic, that is, iconic representation of the facts, as skeletonized as possible ... This diagram, which has been constructed to represent intuitively or semi-intuitively the same relations which are abstractly expressed in the premisses, is then observed, and a hypothesis suggests itself that there is a certain relation between some of its parts - or perhaps this hypothesis had already been suggested. In order to test this, various experiments are made upon the diagram, which is changed in various ways. This is a proceeding extremely similar to induction, from which, however, it differs widely, in that it does not deal with a course of experience, but with whether or not a certain state of things can be imagined. (CP: 2.778, 1901) The iconic abstraction (abductive conclusion) on which structuralist reasoning is systematically modeled, is that reality is, and must be, organized in binary fashion. Once adopted, this hypothesis is used to divide any object - verbal, nonverbal, or a combination of both - into logically opposite domains. This is done, moreover, on the assumption that the object's meaning

is totally defined by these binary features. More often than not, the application is fruitful, because the objects are hardly chosen at random. In that case, the hypothesis is promoted to the position of rule and thereby acquires an inviolable status. The binary principle is placed above and beyond discussion. No longer a mere suggestion or possibility, it has become a conventional rule - but without first having to pass through the hazards of experimentation. Structuralist investigation lacks a full-fledged inductive stage; rather, it merely goes through the motions of induction. It seems to select its objects in order to confirm what started out as a working hypothesis. What can be accordingly verified is whether the hypothesis is applicable, and no more than that. This methodology is unsuited to telling what is in fact more relevant: namely, whether the hypothesis is true and actually reflects reality. This limitation is corroborated by Peirce's remark about deduction that "[a]mong the characters to which we pay no attention in this mode of argument is whether or not the hypothesis of our premisses conforms more or less to the state of things in the outward world" (CP: 5 .161, 1903 ). As long as binary oppositions can lead an abstract life within the symbolic realm of a 70

On Translating Signs

dialectically organized "reality," they they do not resist playing the role assigned to them. But that role can never be more than a part in a mental game, an exercise in make-believe. As long as structuralism does not admit to extralinguistic reality's being cooperative, at least as its tertium comparationis, the procedure followed by structuralist sign-theoretists will remain a sign-internal manipulation that is unreceptive to the possibility of becoming a triadic relation. Only the latter relation, with its typical interaction between a sign, its object, and its interpretant as a result of semiosis or sign action, can supply clues to reality and truth. It goes without sayinf that the task of scientific methodology is to seek the truth, and eventually to attain it; and this is a task which deductive argumentation alone, however cogent, is not equipped to perform. The truth of deductively attained conclusions is wholly dependent on the truth of their premisses which are in tum attained through abduction. The fact that the necessary nature of the conclusions is so passionately defended cannot make them any less gratuitous. As Peirce observed, "[t]he greatest point of art consists in the introduction of suitable abstractions" (CP: 5.162, 1903). Are binary oppositions "suitable abstractions" in this sense? Provided the abductive origin of these abstractions is duly acknowledged, binarity clearly makes for an interesting heuristic principle capable of offering perspectives on signifying patterns which would otherwise perhaps have escaped attention. This may be typified by the rules in Levi-Straussian anthropology, which are still regarded as the outcome of human choice. There has, however, been a growing tendency toward determinism and Greimas's theory of actants and the polemic principle which underlies it can almost, as Peirce would say "be worked by a machine" (CP: 5.579, 1898). 26 That the binary principle has lost, in structuralist thought, its speculative nature is testified to, for example, in the text of the authoritative Semiotics and Language : An Analytical Dictionary, coauthored by Greimas and written by associates from his semiotic "school of Paris." Here binarity is defined as ... an epistemological postulate according to which the binary articulation or grasp of phenomena is one of the characteristics of the human mind . . . A set of historical and pragmatic factors has given binary structures a privileged place in linguistic methodology. This may be due to the successful practice of the binary coupling of phonological oppositions established by the Prague School, or due to the importance gained by binary arithmetical systems (0/1) in automatic calculus, or to the operative simplicity of binary analysis 71

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in comparison with more complex structures, since every complex structure can be formally represented in the guise of hierarchy of binary structures, etc. (Greimas and Courtes 1982: 25) In short, "the elementary structure of signification" rests upon "a distinction of opposition", while the semiotic square is "the visual representation of [this] logical articulation" (Greimas and Courtes 1982: 308). Shrewdly camouflaged here, it would see, is the diagrammatical procedure of Firstness in its different ramifications, such as icon, abduction, hypothesis, and instinct. And why this "epistemological postulate" is indeed so powerful that it makes binarity the most basic logical paradigm, eclipsing other possible, and equally meaningful, divisions, is largely and uncritically ignored. The alternative, as proposed and elaborated by Peirce, would consist in a triadic paradigm. Since triads include both dyads and monads (Thirds build upon Seconds and Firsts), Peirce's thinking model does not reject the binary principle but rather places it within a broader conceptual framework. As Peirce so forcefully pointed out: Now triads have at all times recommended themselves to all minds. There are psychological attractions for other numbers than three. Two is the number of hard common sense, of the stem moralist, of

the practical man. "Yes or no? Answer me categorically," says such a man. Heaven and hell, right and wrong, truth and fiction, gain and loss, agent and patient, living or dead, - on such distinctions our practical life turns. The philosophy of two comes within my scheme. (MS 907: 2, n.d.) Yet Peirce also spoke forcefully, in A Guess at the Riddle, about moving from dyad to the notion of triad: First and Second, Agent and Patient, Yes and No, are categories which enable us roughly to describe the facts of experience, and they satisfy the mind for a very long time. But at last they are found inadequate, and the third is the conception which is then called for. The Third is that which bridges over the chasm between the absolute first and last, and brings them into relationship. (CP: 1.359 and W: 6: 172, 1887-1888) Considering structuralism's concentration upon binarism, it is hardly surprising that the binary principle is demonstrated within it to work well, 72

On Translating Signs

nor is it surprising that the law of deduction works well on binary thought, because this policy illustrates Peirce's definition of deduction, "which depends upon our confidence in our ability to analyze the meanings of the signs in or by which we think" (CP: 8.385, 1913). And, judging by the productivity of structuralist analysis over the last few decades, structuralism has not been lacking in self-confidence. To be sure, the binary paradigm was, of course, no invention of Greimas, and it was certainly not discovered after his passing. Before him and his colleagues, including Levi-Strauss, Kristeva, and Todorov, the binary paradigm had been a leading feature of classical European structuralism, building upon Saussurean and Jakobsonian linguistics, among others: Saussure's basic definition of differential units as "negative, relative and oppositive" has been seminal. The idea of opposition as the primary logical operation universally arising in humans from the first glimmerings of consciousness in infants and from youngsters' initial steps in the buildup of language was viewed as the natural key to the inquiry into verbal structure from its highest to its lowest levels. The inalienable property of opposition which separates it from all other, contingent differences is, when we are dealing with one opposite, the obligatory copresence of the other one in our minds, or in other words, the impossibility of evoking long without a simultaneous, latent idea of short, or expensive without cheap, "voiced" without "voiceless," and vice versa. (Jakobson and Waugh 1979:20) Saussure's original binary concepts - signifier/signified, langue/parole, paradigm/syntagm, matter/form, sound/meaning, synchrony/diachrony - are echoed in Hjelmslev's dichotomies - expression/content, form/substance and in Jakobson's binarism - code/message, selection/combination, metaphor/metonymy, etc .. Traditional structuralism has thus generated "this pervasive habit of the linguist of bifurcating his cosmos [which] continues to permeate semiotic method" (Rauch 1986:917). Outside of French semiotic theory it is found, for example, in Sebeok's (1985) mutually opposed categories inner/outer, vocal/nonvocal, verbal/nonverbal, witting/ unwitting, and the like; and, last but not least, in Lotman's distinction between primary and secondary modeling systems, internal and external communication, closed and open cultures, primary and secondary encoding, primary and secondary value of texts etc. (see further Lotman's essays in Lucid 1988). Yet Lotman, in his chapter The Text as a Meaning-Generating 73

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Mechanism ( 1990) on poetic creation approaches to information in a natural

language, moved to the ... threefold semantic value of the text; the primary general linguistic value; the secondary semantic value, which arises from the syntagmatic organization of the text and from yuxtaposition with the primary values; and thirdly, values that arise from the introduction into the message of extra-textual associations, ranging from the most general to the extremely personal. (Lotman 1990: 29) Lotman's system of textual rules is not based on Peirce, but apparently on Morris and Jakobson. The primary value is a formal (formalized) code, this syntactic value becomes semantic with the secondary value. The categorial tension grows with the inclusion of pragmatic interpretation, including translating into a different verbal language or nonverbal code. This focus draws on the three types of translation - intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translations - coming from the semiotic "patriarch" of translation studies (1959, discussed in Gorlee 1994: 147-168 and Eco 2001: 67-77). That it was not Jakobson's intention to universalize and perpetuate the Saussurean model is, however, evidenced in his early and pioneering interest in the thought of Peirce, the patriarch of American semiotics. As an alternative to Saussurean division into dichotomies, Peirce's radically triadic thought was "discovered" by Jakobson as a new thinking model to be introduced into all language-oriented fields of research 27 . This happened, moreover, at a time (the early 1950s) when Peirce was virtually unknown in the field of Jakobsonian "linguistics and poetics." How momentous Jakobson's insight really was, and still is, will not be fully appreciated until linguistics and poetics have been studied within a thoroughgoing Peircean framework. Despite many valuable attempts, this ambitious semiotic project has not yet been carried out. Unfortunately, Shapiro's 1980 judgment that "[l]inguistics and poetics as disciplines have yet to undergo what must eventually become a full-blown Peircean revolution in the humanities and social sciences" (Shapiro 1980:97) remains essentially true, even after Eco's "millenium bug" of the year 2002 (Gould et al. 2001: 187-189), which did not as predicted bring about the end of (semiotic) time. The Saussurean semiotic tradition has tried very hard to weld linguistics and poetics into one unified field of research, the subject of which is written texts, especially narrative texts. So far, however, Jakobson's prophetic vision 74

On Translating Signs

has remained a mirage - alas for Jakobson, and alas for the whole of humanistic scholarship. In spite of appearances to the contrary, this does not mean that the project itself was an utopian construct, a figment of Jakobson's visionary mind, an enterprise best abandoned and forgotten. For the misconception did not lie in the project itself but in structuralist methodology. Dyadic thought was not destined to become the master code suitable to bringing about the desired unification of all disciplines dealing with verbal messages. Beyond Jakobson's embryonic hence meager assessment of Peirce, a full-fledged Peircean semiotics not only unifies all language-based disciplines, but goes veen further, to provide one comprehensive theoretical framework which is applicable to all sign-based disciplines, verbal and nonverbal alike. As viewed from a Peircean perspective, structuralists concentrate largely upon symbolic and indexical argumentation, thereby failing to see that reasoning must proceed from icons (Gorlee 1994: 55-56). As Peirce reminded us, "[ w ]hile symbols and indices are indispensable in reasoning, yet it is icons only that rationally determine any true representation of the object" (MS 292: 9-10, c.1906). To retrieve the truth-seeking mission of reasoning, it is thus essential to mobilize all three dimensions in which signs (and thus, types of reasoning) which are (at least potentially) meaningful. Triadic thought by no means excludes dyadic thought; the latter is an essential part of it. As to monadic thought, it is, in the Peircean framework, the cornerstone of all valid reasoning. Acknowledging of the fact that we think and reason by means of all three categories - by Firsts as much as by Seconds and Thirds - is a conditio sine qua non for objective validity and hence, for scientificity.

Barthes's Work and Text It seems easy to categorize different semiotic theories into labeled compartments. But reality is not neat, if only because it consists in "living matter," which is prolific, spontaneous, anarchic, and untrimmed. Structuralism has been considered above as a more or less abstract concept. Structuralism has been treated collectively, by a "cabinet of signs" (Barthes 1970: 144 f., 1985: 86), commonly called the "Paris school" or the "school of Greimas," as having one single-minded and single-voiced identity. This is certainly useful as a thinking model, but it is today a fiction, after Greimas's death in 1992. 28 In this connection, Liszka reminds us that "[t)here are perhaps as many structuralisms as there are structuralists" (1981:41). Thus, it should be underscored that the present discussion has so far focused on the

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common core of structuralist thought, and moreover, as seen from a nonstructuralist, Peircean viewpoint. No real effort has so far been made here to penetrate individual structuralist minds or ideas. To remedy this broad generalization, let us now briefly explore the workings of one of these fine and naturally individualistic minds. This will show that beneath the prima facie uniformity of structuralist thought lurks a pluralism, perhaps relative, but nonetheless real, which resists being pressed through a single grid. We shall dwell briefly on some aspects of Barthes's thought, because the complexity of structuralist text studies is, as will be shown, typified by this semiologist thinker. If we ignored that fact that the boundaries of structuralism are actually somewhat blurred, then the argument emerging from the foregoing survey might be viewed with a suspicious eye, as a facile reductionism that corrupts rather than faithfully reports the message. We now tum away from structuralism's langue, so to speak, and listen to the voice of Barthes. His particular parole has been chosen here on the grounds that not every aspect of Barthes's thought seems to be coterminous with mainstream structuralism, with which it is commonly and loosely identified. Barthes may be instead regarded as something of a dissident among structuralist thinkers, one who is mildly subversive of the Saussurean semiological tradition. In this connection, we first note that Barthes reversed Saussure's subordination of linguistics to semiology. 29 This predominance of linguistics over semiology - the description and analysis of nonverbal sign structures as languages - is, however, a common feature of modem structuralism as a whole. More specifically Barthesian, in the structuralist context, is that the phenomenon of text is neither confined to nor defined by its computable properties as a textual totality. Rather, the exploration of a text, for Barthes as for Julia Kristeva, is "productivity," a creative activity; and in the tension between ecriture and lecture, the dynamic action between text production and text interpretation, Barthes's reader embarks upon an open-ended adventure. Finally, Barthes does not endorse what was described above as a distinctive feature of structuralism and a result of its language-orientedness, namely, the bracketing of Firstness and the limited role given to Secondness. It is typically through these "deviations" from structuralist dogma that Barthes's semiotic text theory can be characterized as bordering on, but certainly not identical with, a Peircean conception of sign and signification.

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On Translating Signs

Barthes foregrounds the fragmentary and elusive nature of the text, as opposed to the finitude of what he calls the "work," or material form in which the text manifests itself. The work under its aspect of signifier is a chain of verbal signs. The meaning of the work is determined by, on the one hand, the linguistic code in which the latter is couched and, on the other, by the work's physical, space-time world: The work closes upon a signified. We can attribute two modes of signification to this signified: either it is claimed to be apparent, and the work is then the object of a science of the letter, which is philology; or else this signified is said to be secret and final, and must be sought for, and then the work depends upon a hermeneutics, an interpretation (Marxist, psychoanalytic, thematic, etc.); in short, the work itself functions as a general sign, and it is natural that it should represent an institutional category of the civilization of the Sign. (Barthes 1986: 58-59) The closure which characterizes the work is, as argued by Barthes, radically absent from the adventure of the text. The very limits of the text are, and must be, in eternal movement and forever resisting final classification; while its meaning is impossible to capture and define once and for all: The Text ... practices the infinite postponement of the signified, the Text is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier; the signifier must not be imagined as "the first part of the meaning," its material vestibule, but rather, on the contrary, as its aftermath; similarly, the signifier's infinitude does not refer to some notion of the ineffable (of an unnamed signified) but to a notion of play ... (Barthes 1986: 59) The work versus text dichotomy yields one metaphorical definition for the work, and another for the text: [T]he metaphor of the work ... refers to the image of an organism which grows by vital expansion, by "development" (a significantly ambiguous word: biological and rhetorical); the metaphor of the Text is that of the network; if the Text expands, it is by the effect of a combinative operation, of a systematics (an image, moreover, close to the views of contemporary biology concerning the living being) ... (Barth es 1986: 61)

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Barthes's idea of the text as a labyrinthine operation clearly squares with Peirce's semiosis, the evolving process which can be studied only by isolating one or several instances of it from an endless chain of semiosic events. 30 . With this, Barthes ostensibly parts company with the more static concept of text which prevails in structuralism, one which would better fit Barthes' description of the "work." The ubiquity of semiosis apud Barthes seems to point away from Saussure and toward Peirce. This appears to be true both for both the text itself and for its interpretation. For Barthes, textual exploration never proceeds like machine-like clockwork, but is a creative and open-ended activity. The text, in all its sensuous plurality, compels a person's attention and forces him or her to make some sense of it. Barthes pictured this situation as an alien world: [T]he reader of the Text might be compared to an idle subject (who has relaxed his image-repertoire): this fairly exempt subject strolls (this has happened to the author of these lines, and it is for this reason that he has come to an intense awareness of the Text) along a hillside at the bottom of which flows a wadi (I use the word to attest to a certain alienation); what he perceives is multiple, irreducible, issuing from heterogeneous, detached substances and levels: lights,

colors, vegetation, heat, air, tenuous explosions of sound, tiny cries of birds, children's voices from the other side of the valley, paths, gestures, garments of inhabitants close by or very far away; all these incidents are half identifiable: they issue from known codes, but their combinative operation is unique, it grounds the stroll in a difference which cannot be repeated except as difference. (Barthes 1986: 60) The passage above is an image of what Peirce called "the sheer wonder and manifold of first impressions" (MS 906: 2, 1909). Peirce himself described the qualities of an alien tropical world as follows: I take ship and sail into the tropics for the first time. The first time we come into post, I lean over the toprail and gaze at the scene. There is no reason known to me why that scene should be typical of the tropics, in general; and it does not occur to me that is perhaps so. Yet a general impression is produced in my imagination, a generalized picture of the picture before me; and in point of fact I already know the tropics, or that which is most distinctive of that 78

On Translating Signs

clime. Although I have only seen some palm-trees from a distance, I already, without suspecting it, have an idea which, I shall guess, fits the whole vegetable Kingdom of the Tropics, and its animals as well, including its men and women, their physique, their dispositions, their manners and customs, and their whole life. (MS 599: 40-41, 1902) Barthes's image of the alien world and Peirce's "Icon of the Tropics" (MS 599: 41, 1902) show graphically "a sort of composite photograph, more or less vague and general" (MS 1135: 5, [ 1895] 1896; CP: 6.232f., 1898), and are clearly suggestive of Firstness (Savan 1987-1988: 20) followed by Secondness. See, for example, how Peirce pictured himself wrapped up in Firstness: Imagine me to make and in a slumberous condition to have a vague, unobjectified, still less unsubjectified, sense of redness, or of a 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. (CP: 1.303, c.1894) Many interesting parallels could be cited to illustrate the resemblance between Barthes's sensationalism and Firstness accrued by Secondness, Peirce's precognitive "consciousness which is intensified by attention" (CP: 6.222, 1898). The mixed distinction between Peirce's categories is the focus of this book as a continuation ofGorlee (1994: 40-42 and passim) and Savan ( 1987-1988: 7-14). The categoriology shall be closely argued on abduction in textual translation. Here, one particularly striking passage by Peirce must suffice for illustration: It will sometimes happen that a traveller goes to bed over-fatigued

in a large chamber ill-lit by a single candle, getting out of his dayclothes and into his night-clothes as expeditiously as his drowsiness permits. After a long and profound sleep he opens his eyes in broad day-light, and gazes at what is pictured on his retinae in absolute passiveness and vacancy, at first seeing things but hardly perceiving them ... Presently the blood returns to his brain, he experiences a slight sense of Shock, or general disturbance, proportionate to the break from his unconscious expectation; and to that shock he reacts by noticing what he sees by an exertion of attention ... Therein he no longer merely feels, but begins to know. (MS 801: 2, 1908)

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Peirce's disoriented traveller is woken up from his "slumberous condition" (CP: 1.303, c.1894) by "bumping up against hard fact" (CP: 1.324, 1903), and Peirce continued: "The waking state is a consciousness of reaction" (CP: 1.324, 1903). Indeed, our sense ofreality is entirely made up by "reactions of Secondness between the ego and the non-ego" (CP: 1.325, n.d.). Not coincidentally, this parallels what Barthes, in the above-quoted paradisiac paragraph, calls "difference" 31 . By retrieving the idea, if not the name, of abduction, which is one of the varieties of Firstness, Barthes opposes the deductive course of reasoning pursued by mainstream structuralists. Whereas the latter a deductiveinductive policy, as has been argued above, Barthes approaches the text from what could be called the opposite side. In his abductive-inductive text theory one looks for a theory to explain the textual phenomenon, and one tries out different hypotheses, but without ever expecting or articulating final answers. This almost Peircean interpretation of Barthes's attitude toward the text is confirmed by Barthes's own statement on the text, namely, that "its reading is semelfactive (which renders any inductive--deductive science of texts illusory: no 'grammar' of the text" (Barthes 1986: 60). 32 The text, verbal or otherwise, is at once a single, self-contained here-andnow and an ongoing dialogue with other texts, which it overlaps, confronts,

absorbs, echoes, or otherwise makes felt in their direct or indirect impact on its own individuality. This phenomenon is commonly understood as Baxtin's variety of intertextuality, both synchronic and diachronic. 33 From Peirce's viewpoint, intertextuality focuses on Firstness and Secondness; it stresses transtextual likenesses and points away from the "first" text to other texts, from known to unknown texts. This procedure permits, and indeed invites, the discovery of certain patterns which render the text both meaningful and unmeaningful at the same time. But Barthes's reader is always acutely aware that his or her reading is in the final analysis only "play," only one reading among other, equally possible readings. In Barthes's textual project no definitive and no final reading exists, and the reader must be forever wary of surprises as a result of new and different readings superseding previous or even later interpretations. Barthes' textual project can thus, in a certain sense, be characterized as firmly committed to what Peirce's called "experiment without preconceived ideas," an experiment in which the inquirer must "take an interrogative position" (MS 1519: 31, 1901 and NEM: 4: xii). Barthes would probably have agreed with Peirce's cautionary remark that '[t]o be wedded to a preconceived idea is 80

On Translating Signs

[to] replace interrogation by affirmation, and not to listen to what Nature has to say' (MS 1519: 31, 1901 and NEM: 4: xii). Viewed from this perspective, Barthes's thought would seem to be inspired by Peirce's, and this would make the French structuralist a pragmatist (or pragmaticist) malgre lui. To claim this, however, would partially distort the facts. Barthes did certainly not follow Peirce. Rather, in deemphasizing, even rejecting, aspects of Saussurean thought, Barthes happens to concur with some aspects of general semiotics in the Peircean tradition. Barthes's emphasis on semiosis as a playful activity does indeed foreground Firstness: Peirce's "play of fancy without any reason and without any compulsion" (MS 404: 2, 1898). This corresponds to a dimension in Peirce's logic that is far from adequately addressed in structuralism's mainstream, but is also a dimension that, in Peirce's logical system, utterly lacks the autonomous position to which it has been raised in Barthes. Barthes indeed recovers the abductive by giving it, in the abductive-inductive combination, almost mythic proportions. Peirce, however, would have viewed such a magical inflation of truth value as being just as incommensurate with good reasoning as the inverse, the deductive approach. Peirce did bring Firstness in all its manifestations right into the foreground, but the scope of his thought went far beyond that. It must be granted that Peirce seems to pre-echo Barthes's "pleasure of the text" (1975) in stating, seven decades before the French thinker, that "gratification, pleasure, is the only conceivable result that is satisfied with itself; and therefore since we are seeking for that which is fine and admirable without any reason beyond itself, pleasure, bliss, is the only object which can satisfy the conditions" (MS 449: 11, 1903). But such indulgence in the aesthetic-sensuous would, in Peirce's words, ... if taken in all its purity and carried to its furthest extreme ... amount to saying that the one ultimately admirable object is the unrestrained gratification of a desire, regardless of what the nature of that desire may be. Now that is too shocking. It would be the doctrine that all the higher modes of consciousness with which we are acquainted in ourselves, such as love and reason, are good only so far as they subserve the lowest of all modes of consciousness. It would be the doctrine that this vast universe of Nature which we contemplate with such awe, is good only to produce a certain quality of feeling. (MS 449: 10-11, 1903)

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In the final analysis, Barthes himself, rather significantly, defines the reader as an amateur (in the French-etymological meaning of the word), and reading as the "erotic practice of language" (Barthes 1985a: 999, my translation). After Firstness, what is, in Peirce, Secondness corresponds, in Barthes, not to a confrontation with reality, but to placing the text ... in a new frame of reference defined m its essence by the intercommunication of two different epistemes: dialectical materialism and psychoanalysis. The materialist-dialectical reference (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao) and the Freudian reference (Freud, Lacan) together identify the champions of what is the new text-theory. For science to be new, it is not sufficient to extend its depth or latitude (which happens when one goes from a sentencebased linguistics to a semiotics of the work); there must be a meeting of different epistemes which are not commonly aware of each other (as is the case of Marxism, Freudianism, and structuralism); and this meeting must produce a new object (it is no longer a question of a new approach to an old object). When this occurs, the new object is called text. (Barthes l 985a: 997; my translation) At this stage of the inquiry, Barthes's theory of text strays irreversibly from Peirce. Barthes's ideological baggage is incompatible with Peirce's objective logic, which is a non-doctrinaire doctrine. Inasmuch as Barthes's frame of reference exhibits a multiple doctrinaire bias, it is opposed to Peirce's Secondness, in the same way that Barthes's "play, task, production, practice" (1986: 62) undercuts the very notion of finality, rule, and authority - that is, of Peirce's Thirdness. In spite of appearances to the contrary, Barthes and Peirce therefore inhabit two different worlds and represent two semiotic theories which cannot be brought into harmony. Peirce's pragmaticist approach to signs and their meaning is incompatible both with mainstream structuralism and with Barthes's version of the theory of text ( 1985). In the Peircean framework the truth, or Thirdness, cannot be attained by advancing one unfailing rule and by ruling out reality, nor, for that matter, by proclaiming as Barthes would suggest that reality is essentially unruly, such that what Peirce called the "whole meaning" would be forever beyond our reach; it would be impossible to reach a truth in criticism of fictional texts that produces "particular meanings" (Barthes 1987: 82

On Translating Signs

22). Peirce's evolutionary logic - truly general and universal semiotics, as opposed to linguistic semiotics - sets out from Firstness only to try to attain via Secondness a higher goal beyond both Firstness and Secondness. For Peirce, the intellectual enterprise is the pursuit of knowledge of reality; and the growing thinking-habit (the uniform belief, or universal consensus) is the rule as it crystallizes itself, given time, in the thinking mind. And in this pursuit undertaken by serious investigators, the trophy - much coveted but maybe never won - would be the real truth of reality.

Notes 1 On

2

a brief survey of Peirce's biography and works, see Gorlee 1994: 37 ff

Double quotation marks are used here to indicate the first occurrence of a technical term from

linguistic and semiotic "jargon." "Text" is not considered to be a technical term in this sense; yet it carries double quotation marks whenever used with special emphasis. 3

For a more detailed discussion of the use of text and discourse within text linguistics and text theory,

see the informative surveys in Vitacolonna ( 1988) and Virtanen ( 1990). 4

"Yet the advent of computer-mediated textuality seems to have left many of those theorists and critics

who noticed it in a terminological vacuum. In their eagerness to describe the brave new reality, they let a few words like electronic and hypertext cover many different phenomena. Behind the electronic text there is a large and heterogeneous variety of phenomena, and, as we shall see, a computer mediated text may have more in common with a paper-based one than with one of its electronic brethren" (Aarseth 1994: 52). Electronic word processing is not relevant here. 5

See Scholes 1992: 139 ff. Gray stated that "A large part of the gain has been those works cut

off by the various evaluative conceptions of literature that have reigned in literary study since its conception. Songs and tales of primitive peoples, "pulp" fiction, jestbooks, broadside ballads, gawdy anecdotes, Aesop's fables, Chinese storytellers' promptbooks, saints' lives, ghost stories, dime novels, yams, nursery rhymes, tall tales, "Western", detective stories (both oriental and western), mummers' plays, parables - all are classifiable, or potentially so, as literature ... " ( 1975: 145). 6

Logical thought since Carnap has distinguished between "intensional" and "extensional" semantics.

Intensional semantics deals with the semantic unit as given in a certain sign system and determined by the functional and combinatory rules of that system. Intensional semantics calls for the invariance of

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meaning-content, but is unconcerned with referents in reality, which belong to the province of extensional semantics. Extensional semantics is a function of intensional semantics, and deals with semantic units as corresponding to actual objects-in-the-world, things, concepts, events, thoughts, etc. These referents can be perceived with the senses; therefore, they are either true or false. Extensional semantics is concerned with the truth value of semantic units. The contrast between intension and extension parallels Frege's earlier distinction between Sinn, "sense" and Bedeutung, "denotation." This also corresponds to Peirce's distinction between logical "depth" and "breath". For a further discussion of intension vs. extension, see Pelc 1986. Eco conceives meaning from a semiotic point of view, as a cultural (more than a logical) phenomenon reflecting a common cultural notion of something. For him, a semantic unit corresponds to "a precisely segmented portion of a given cultural background" (Eco 1976: 62), the meaning of which is explained and clarified in ever new culturally meaningful messages. In his version of intensional semantics, Eco defines cultural units as "the meaning to which the code makes the system of sign-vehicles correspond" (Eco 1976: 67), thus linking culture with the ongoing process of sign interpretation which Peirce called semiosis. 7

The semiotic term textology was originally an invention of Bachtin's from the Leningrad school of

semiotics. See his 1959-1961 article "Das Problem des Textes" (Bachtin 1990: 437-438, note 2 [composed by the translators]). 8

The semiotic school in Tartu, Estonia is an addition to the argument and references in Noth ( 1978).

9

For a more detailed discussion of this, see van Dijk (1972: 25ff) and Rieser (1981).

10

See, e.g., Chomsky (1957: 44, n.8).

11

Chomsky assumed his theory to be "completely formal and non-semantic" (Chomsky 1957: 93 and

ff.). That in spite of this Chomsky did not completely exclude the semantic aspect from grammatical

theory, may be deduced, for example, from his reference to a "metatheory that deals with grammar and semantics and their points of connection" (Chomsky 1957: 102). He also acknowledged that "[t]o understand a sentence we must know much more than the analysis of this sentence on each linguistic level. We must also know the reference and meaning of the morphemes or words of which it is composed; naturally, grammar cannot be expected to be of much help here" (Chomsky 1957: 103104 ). According to Chomsky, grammatical theory must first and foremost be and remain formalized: "The motivation for this self-imposed formality requirement for grammars is quite simple --there seems to be no other basis that will yield a rigorous, effective, and 'revealing' theory of linguistic structure" (Chomsky 1957: 103).

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On Translating Signs

12

In the introduction to his monograph Man'.1 G/as.1y Essence, called Search for a Theory ofCultural

Symbolism, Singer states that the differences between Levi-Strauss and Malinowski

" can be

interpreted by the Saussure-Peirce contrast, namely, that between a dyadic sign-relation, in which sound images (the signifiers)

acquire their 'meanings' or 'concepts' (the signifieds)

from a

conventionalized linguistic code (langue), and a triadic sign-relation, in which the sign denotes an object, signifies a

property or relation of that object, and interprets another sign in an endless

interchange between utterers and interpreters of the sign" (Singer 1984: 5). This division d'esprits runs not only through anthropology, but has created an "ideological" controversy between "semiologists" and "semioticians" in each of the numerous fields on which sign theory is applied, as well as in the general theory of signs itself 13

"Etic" and its opposite "emic" are terms coined by Pike to refer to two different approaches to the

analysis and description of behavior, verbal and non-verbal. The etic approach "treats all cultures or languages (or a selected group of them) at one time", while the emic view is "on the contrary, culturally specific, applied to one language or culture at the time" (Pike 1967: 37). "The etic viewpoint studies behavior as from outside of a particular system, and as an essential initial approach to an alien system", whereas "[t)he cmic viewpoint results from studying behavior as from inside the system" (Pike 1967: 37). Not surprisingly, the etic-emic opposition is particularly popular in anthropology and ethnology. For more details on etic/emic, see, e.g., Brend 1986. 14

In addition to its hierarchism, the concept of text is defined in Lotrnan (1977: 50ff) in the (not

widely abstracted but closely interrelated) terms of (I) expression through the material signs of a natural language as Saussure's parole or speech (2) demarcation of the text, meaning the boundaries between exclusion and inclusion, beginning and end, stylistic boundaries, and (3) structure of the text as a structural wholeness. These features do not appear seriatim, but are blended into the discussion. 15

Eco inverts the use of "text" and "discourse" as found in, for example, in the work of van Dijk, for

whom "text" is "the abstract notion ... , underlying what is intuitively known as 'connected discourse"' (vanDijk 1972: I). 16

Eco's Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation (2003) was published when this book was ready.

Unfortunately Eco's book cannot be discussed here. 17

Some random examples from Peirce: "We shall undoubtedly naturally conclude that the publication

of Andronicus would be of Opera Inedita, including all works of which a decidedly new recension was found; but naturally of Aristotle's polished and finished productions no such text would be found" (CP: 7.235), where text refers to Aristotle's classical writings.

But we find text used in a different,

modernized sense in a letter to his friend William James, where Peirce wrote "l refer to you particularly

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to p. 30 I et seq. I will quote a few phrases, though of course it is the continuous text that talks," with text signifying a scholarly paper that Peirce had written earlier. See, particularly, text in Peirce's review-articles for The Nation, where he referred, for example, to "the illustrations, which are woodcuts in the text" (CTN: 2: 62, 1894); "there was a date, 10 Nov. 1619, in the text, and 11 Nov. 1620, in the margin" (CTN: 2: 93, 1889); "its pages were filled with solid text" (CTN: 2: 197, 1899); "The text occupies less than six hundred pages" (CTN: 2: 265, 1900); "a text of half a million words" (CTN: 3: 34, 190 I); "the Appendix to the book ... fills more than half again as many pages as the body of the text" (CTN: 3: 62, 1890); "Heiberg prints for the first time the Greek text of Anatolius on the first ten numbers" (CTN: 3: 87, 1902). Some examples from Peirce's other works: "End of footnote" is immediately followed by "Text resumed" (MS 646: 8, 1910); and apropos of an opera Peirce remarked: "The business of the composer was to invent 'beautiful melodies.' The text that was written below it was a secondary affair. Music and words were yuxtaposed, as it were" (MS 1517: 31, 1896). The latter quote is from Peirce's translation of William Hirsch's Genius und Degeneration, and Peirce's use of the word text here is evidently a transposition of the original German Text; on Peirce as translator, see Gorlce (1996). Consider also the following passage: "I hold that it is necessary to make an emendation to the text of the 25th chapter of the Second Prior

Ana~vtics

... "(MS 318: 187, 1907),

where Peirce also used text in the sense of "words." In this connection it is interesting to note the following quote:" ... if we take a piece of blank paper, and form the resolve to write upon it some part of what we think about some real or imaginary condition of things, then, that resolve being made and the whole sheet (called the[ ... ] ) having been devoted to that purpose exclusively, ... " (MS 678: 42, 1910; blank space and emphasis in Peirce's handwritten original). To fill the blank space in the parentheses, Peirce could perhaps have been looking for the word "text", or an equivalent. 18 Pharies notes that "Peirce's definition of the term as anything capable of standing for something else is so broad that it includes many things that would not normally qualify for the term in everyday

English (tokens, marks, badges, signals, ciphers, symbols; objects, animals, persons; propositions, arguments, sentences, paragraphs, books; mountains, seas, planets, stars, galaxies, universes), although it would be possible to say, for example, that a robin on the lawn is a sign of approaching spring, that a book is a sign of the author's labors, or that a galaxy is a sign that the laws of physics continue to operate" (Pharies 1985:14). 19

For bibliographical key references, see Parmentier ( 1985: 45, n.2).

'0

In his monograph on Charles S. Peirce and the Linguistic Sign, Pharies takes the linguistic sign only

in the narrowest sense: "Peirce would use it to refer to any linguistic representation, including words, sentences, conversations, even whole books. I am employing it in the sense that has become traditional in linguistic literature, namely, that is 'word"' (Pharies 1985: 9, n.7).

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On Translating Signs

21

In July of 1905, Peirce wrote the following to Lady Welby, in a draft of a letter which was never

sent to his correspondent: "The dictionary is rich in words waiting to receive technical definitions as varieties of signs" (PW: 194, 1905). His long list includes many instances of verbal communication, spoken and/or written: "Then we have mark, note, trait, manifestation, ostent, show, species, appearance,

vision, shade, spectre, phase. Then, copy, portraiture, figure, diagram, icon, picture,

mimicry, echo. Then, gnomon, clue, trail, vestige, indice, evidence, symptom, trace. Then, muniment, monument, keepsake, memento, souvenir, cue. Then, symbol, term, category, stile, character, emblem, badge. Then, record, datum, voucher, warrant, diagnostic. Then, key, hint, omen, oracle, prognostic.

Then, decree, command, order, law. Then, oath, vow, promise, contract, deed. Then, theme, thesis, proposition, premiss, postulate, prophecy. Then, prayer, bidding, collect, revelation,

disclosure,

narration,

relation.

homi~v.

litany, sermon. Then,

Then, testimony, witnessing, attestation,

avouching,

martyrdom. Then, talk, palaver, jargon, chat. parley, colloquy, tittle-tattle, etc." (PW: 194, 1905).

Regrettably, the rest of this text, which possibly contained Peirce's comments on the catalogue, did not survive. 22

Habit (and following items discussed here) will be further developed in the last chapter on

fallibilism. 23

24

Quasi-mind and its associates are developed in the last chapter on fallibilism. How completely at odds Peirce's pragmatist view was with main-stream tum-of-the-century

logic is demonstrated by the following passage: "But the views of all leading schools of logic of the present day, of which there are three or four, are all decidedly opposed to those of the present writer. That common tendency of them which he most of all opposes is that toward regarding human consciousness as the author of rationality, instead of as more or less confirming to rationality. Even if we can find no better definition of rationality than that it is that character of arguments to which experience and reflection would tend indefinitely to make human approval, there still remains a world-wide difference between that idea and the opinion just mentioned. But the thinkers of our day seem to regard the distinction between the product of human mind and being to which the human mind would approximate to thinking if sufficiently influenced by experience and reflection, as a distinction of altogether secondary importance, and hardly worth notice; while to the writer no distinction appears more momentous than between 'is' and 'would be"' (MS 640: 16-18, 1909, Peirce's emphasis). 25

Peirce's "would be" means that "the total meaning of the predication of an intellectual concept

consists in affirming that, under all conceivable circumstances of a given kind, the subject of the predication would (or would not) behave in a certain way - that is, that it either would, or would not, be true that under given experiential circumstances, or under a given proportion (taken as

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they would occur in experience), certain facts would exist, that proportion I take to be the kernel of pragmatism. More simply stated, the whole meaning of an intellectual predicate is that certain kinds of events would happen, once in so often in the course of experience, under certain kinds of existential circumstances"(MS 318: 49, 1907, Peirce's emphasis; comp. MS 318: 136, 140, 1907). By the same token, Tzvetan Todorov, whose analytical methods are indebted to both Levi-

16

Strauss and Greimas, among others, provides an "abstract grid" of logical "action rules" which is "necessary to comprehend the work" (Todorov 1966: 129, 132,

my transl.). Symbolically,

perhaps, Todorov applies this early, not strictly binary, program to the classic epistolary novel,

Les liaisons

dangereuses

by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos ( 1782) (transl. as Dangerous

Connections in 1784 and later as Dangerous Acquintances in 1924). The novelistic material of Les liaisons dangereuses is conveyed by a cynical exchange of dual letters, sent from one person to the next. See, also, the later collection of structuralist articles by Adam (1976). 27

Jakobson began drawing on Peirce's work in the middle of his intellectual career, at a time when

own his semiotic insights were already largely formulated. As was argued by Bruss ( 1978), Jakobson presented a version of Peirce which did not reflect the manifold, shifting, and yet consistent nature of Peirce's thought; rather, Jakobson availed himself of Peirce to help strengthen the case of structuralism. This procedure was possibly in part a reflection of the heterogeneous and fragmentary nature of the collage-like Collected Papers (CP). That Jakobson read Peirce's writings rather selectively, and gave his own interpretation of them rather than a balanced view, is demonstrated, for instance, by his attempts to transpose the binary oppositions to Peirce, transmogrifying the latter into "a genuine and bold forerunner of structural semiotics" (Jakobson 1971: 565; see also Liszka 1981). Dyadic structures are an important part of Peirce's theory of signs; but triadic, not dyadic, relations are obviously the central features of his thought. It is perhaps interesting to note in this connection that the preface to the first English edition of Propp's 1985 Morphology ofthe Folktale was written by Jakobson's wife at that time, Svatava Pirkova-Jakobson, because there Propp proposed, among other things, that ternary narrative elements can be regrouped and then reduced to contrasting pairs. 28

See in memoriam articles by Larsen ( 1992) and Broden ( 1995).

29

For Saussure language,

"the most complex and universal of all systems of expression, is also the

most characteristic; for in this sense linguistics can become the master-pattern for all branches of semiology although language is only one particular semiological system" (Saussure 1959: 14). While for Saussure "[l]inguistics is only a part of the general science of semiology" (Saussure 1959: 16), and the latter embraces all human sign systems, for Barthes Saussure's hierarchical order is reversed. He argues in his Elements ofSemiology (first published in French language in 1964) that "linguistics is not

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On Translating Signs

a part of the general science of signs, even a privileged part, it is semiology which is a part of linguistics" (Barthes l 986a: 11 ). This postulate, in fact, opposes the entire tradition of structural linguistics. 30

Barthes's "network" approximates, in its symbolic meaning, to the "labyrinth" as construed by Eco

( 1984: 80-84) in his series of suggestive metaphors, such as the net, the meander, and the rhizome - all of them models for encyclopedic thought (semiosis), in contradistinction to dictionary-like thought: "The structure of semiosis, that is, the universe of human culture, must be conceived as structured like a labyrinth ... : (a) It is structured according to a network of interpretants. (b) It is virtually infinite because it takes into account multiple interpretations realized by different cultures: a given expression can be interpreted as many times, and in as many ways, as it has been actually interpreted in a given cultural rramework; it is infinite because every discourse about the encyclopedia casts in doubt the previous structure of the encyclopedia itself. ( c) It does not register only 'truths' but, rather, what has been said about the truth or what has been believed to be true as well as what has been believed to be false or imaginary or legendary ... ( d) Such as semantic encyclopedia is never accomplished and exists only as a regulative idea; it is only on the basis of such a regulative idea that one is able actually to isolate a given portion of the social encyclopedia so far as it appears useful in order to interpret certain portions of actual discourses (and texts). (e) Such a notion of encyclopedia does not deny the existence of structured knowledge; it only suggests that such a knowledge cannot be recognized and organized as a global system; it provides only 'local' and transitory systems of knowledge, which can be contradicted by alternative and equally 'local' cultural organizations; every attempt to recognize these local organizations as unique and 'global'--ignoring their partiality-- produces an ideological bias" (Eco 1984: 83-84, Eco's emphasis). On horticultural metaphors in text and translation, see Gorlee

( 1987) on the sayings of gardner Chauncey Gardner in Kosinki's Being There, and my forthcoming (2004) article 'Horticultural roots of translational semiosis.' 31

32

See also Chapter l 0 of Merrell (l 982). Compare Greimas's statement to the contrary: "Textual practice should in our view always be

approached both inductively and deductively.

The growing number of texts analyzed would

progressively increase the stock of models of discourse organization, and this would make broader generalizations possible; while the inventory of ever more abstract semantic and grammatical categories would enable the construction of grammatical and semantic simulacra of a clearly hypothetical nature, but which enable us nevertheless to imagine at some point the semiotic instances capable of producing narrative syntagrns or even whole discursive objects" (Greimas and Nef 1977: 85, my translation.).

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33

See Barthes (1985: 998-999), Greimas and Courtes (1982: 160-161) and Greimas and Courtes

(1986: 119-122).

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Sebeok, Thomas A. 1975. 'The semiotic web: A chronicle of prejudices' in Bulletin of Literary Semiotics 2: 1-63. 1985. 'Zoosemiotic components of human communication' in Innis, Robert E. (ed.) Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology (Advances in Semiotics). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 294-324. - - 1986. 'A semiotic perspective on the sciences: Steps toward a new paradigm' in his I Think I am a Verb (Topics in Contemporary Semiotics). New York and London: Plenum Press. 17-44. Shapiro, Michael. 1980. 'Poetry and language, considered as semeiotic' in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 16:97-117. Shukman, Ann. 1986. 'Literary texts' in Sebeok, Thomas A. (gen. ed.) Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics (Approaches to Semiotics 73). 3 vols. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 2: 1087-1088. Singer, Milton. 1984. Man's Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology (Advances in Semiotics). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Snow, C.P. 1964. The Two Cultures: And a Second Look. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1966. 'Les categories du recit litteraire' in Communications 8: 125-151. Uexkiill, Jakob von. 1957. 'A stroll through the worlds of animals and men.' In Schiller, Claire H. (ed.and tr.) Instinctive Behavior: The Development ofa Modern Concept. New York: International Universities Press, Inc .. 5-80 (German original from 1934 is ([ 1934] l 956). Streifzuge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Memchen: Ein Bilderbuch unsichtbarer We/ten - Bedeutungslehre. Hamburg: Rowohlt) - - 1982. 'The theory of meaning' in Semiotica 42-1: 25-82 (German original from 1940 is Bedeutungslehre) Virtanen, Tuija. 1990. 'On the definitions of text and discourse' in Folia Linguistica 24/3-4: 447455. Vitacolonna, Luciano. 1988. "Text"/"discourse" definitions' in Pet6fi. Janos S. (ed.) Text and Discourse Constitutions: Empirical Aspects, Theoretical Approaches (Research in Text Theory, 4). Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. 421-439. Voigt, Vilmos. 1995. 'In memoriam of "Lotmanosphere' in Semiotica 105-3/4: 191-206. Weinberger, David. 1996. 'What's a document' in Wired (August): 112. Weinrich, Harald. 1981. 'Text as primum datum of linguistics' in Pet6fi, Janos S. (ed.), Text vs Sentence Continued (Papers in Textlinguistics 29). Hamburg: Helmut Buske. 228230. Zaliznjak, A. A., V. V. Ivanov and V.N. Toporov. 1988. 'Structural-typological study of semiotic modeling systems' in Lucid, Daniel P. (ed. and tr.). Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology.

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Foreword Thomas A. Sebcok. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press: 47-58 (lst ed. is from 1977)

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Semiotranslation and Abductive Translation since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you ( e.e. cummings)

Semiotranslation

A text-sign creates a material entity to a user (a reader, in the case of verbal texts), which echoes to him or her a "real world," in which the referent or the textual object is dealt with by our limited, natural and, hence, restricted capacities. What characterizes this process is the ability which the sign not only to represent something else meaningfully, to distinguish, to establish, to state paradoxical things, events or phenomena outside the sign and yet addressed within the sign; but also to be decoded, understood and interpreted as such. This means the Scholastic aliquid stat pro aliquo formula, which has been used as a definition of the semiotic sign from Augustine to Jakobson. More than a textsign, semiosis - the semiotic name for sign action - is the key word: a portrait needs to be a representation of someone or something else, real or imaginary, a Japanese haiku must somehow represent to someone the cherry-blooms of the original scene. This is also valid for the meaning of verbal structures or textsigns. The object is knowable through the sign, but semiosis mediates dynamically between the sign and what it is supposed to stand for. This means that the "real" meaning of the text-sign is ascertained by being understood, comprehended and adressed. Semiosis provides pieces of information about the object, which thereby discloses itself gradually and eventually to the interpreter/reader; that information creates an infinite chain of interpreting signs. Since the translated and translating text-sign are open-ended, each new interpretation is a novelty and an ultimate interpretation is impossible. In this way, the process of sign action (semiosis) operates both backward towards the object and forward toward the interpretations, thus generating the "meaningful mouthfuls," the handy and appetizing concept borrowed from Nida's classic in translation studies ( 1964: 128). Haiku-poetry generates itself meaningful mouthfuls, since it consists of an artistic ascetism made up of triadic features representing mental serenity: loneliness (solitude), poverty (emptiness), and simplicity (austerity). The paradoxical stillness of haiku seizes the life-breath of things in our "reality" which animated the poem - here the cherry-blooms - and seeks its central idea,

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or "spirit." So taught one disciple of the Japanese master Bash6: "Our Master used to admonish us to learn about the pine-tree from the pine-tree itself, and about the bamboo from the bamboo itself. He meant by these words that we should totally abandon the act of deliberation based on our ego" (Izutsu 1977: 189) and identify with the spirit of the object. Making haiku teaches that, "As the light (of deep reality) of a thing flashes upon your sight, you must on the instant fix it in verse before the light fades out" (Izutsu 1977: 189). This paradox' transpires equally in the old adage traduttore traditore and its implication that a translator is probably a traitor. Such is the case, even though Peirce's best-known definition of sign said, also triadically and referring to the cryptic opposition of man/mind as a sign (CP: 5.313), that a "sign, or representamen, is something which stands for something in some respect or capacity" and he adds "[i]t addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign" (CP: 2.228, Peirce's emphasis), thereby providing a semiotical activity to translation and interpreting. The logical implications of semiosis is are a paradigm for sign translation, and sign translation exemplifies in its tum semiosis, or sign action. Translation creates a secondary text-sign that is judged equivalent sign: a secondary text-sign which is judged equivalent to the primary text-sign, in that the sign activity brings the different meaning-potentialities conveyed by the translating text into a cognitive relationship with the translated text. For example, a haiku translated in English often reverses the Japanese order of thought, making it grammatically equivalent to the English order; the same transpires in rhyme, accent, unfinished sentences, etc. (Toury 1995: 176-80). The translated equivalents (in semiotic terminology, the interpretants) cannot, of course, be anything more than a guide, the invention of the translator. A text-sign (and equally subtexts, intertexts, hypertexts, as well as contexts) is a new linguistic pattern and no less than an amenable meaningful mouthful to intellectual study than is generating an equivalent text in a different linguistic code. The truth value of a translated text, its nominative faculty, creates a second world that is filtered through the discursive intuition, practice and logic of the readership. The truth value is generated in a new social context. The collective environment does not exclude the creation of private meaning: in a Peircean semiotic framework, social meaning in fact includes and presupposes private meaning. But translation and interpreting follow the expression aliquid stat pro aliquo, with an unknown object having access to an extralinguistic and extrasemiotic world. This makes translations open to conflicting interpretations.

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Semiotranslation and Interpretive Webs

Peirce's semiotic thought is triadic, it functions with a sign, its object, and the interpretant. The sign includes the object (its idea-potentiality) and must be interpretable or translatable and represented by a further sign, its interpretant. The sign translates itself, it "addresses somebody, that creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign" (CP: 2.228): Thus "man" is the interpretant of "homme," and stands for its signified object by standing for the antecedent sign "homme." "Homme" in its tum stands for the antecedent sign "homme." "Homme" in its tum stands for some further antecedent sign - say, "uomo" - of the same object.( ... ), we know that "man" stands for the individuals, Tom, Dick, Harry, etc., not only through its antecedent sign "homme" but directly through our everyday use of our own language. (Savan 1987-1988: 44) The interpretant is the sign's translation of textual as well as language usage; it signifies a habit, understood as a repeatable or nonrepeatable pattern of behavior, with ideally the same object as the primary sign. It is itself a semiotic sign-action because it is also interpreted by a variety of interpretants ad infinitum. In its three-fold relation with its object - signifying/dynamics/identifying - the interpretant is a semioticallly mediating "translatant" (Savan 1987-88, 41) that integrates all characters, media, and codes, including linguistic ones. Those three dimensions of translation are based on Peirce's categories of F irstness I Secondness I Thirdness, and they generate a complex terminology (explained in Savan 1987-1988). Its categorial branches of qualisign I sinsign I legisign, immediate I dynamical I general object, immediate I dynamical I final interpretants, along with its logical dimensions of abduction I deduction I induction, icon I index I symbol, rheme I proposition I argument, instinct I experience I form and many others, together yield an evolutionary triadic model, an endless series of interpretants. All of these terms are relevant to translational issues, most of which have not received full theoretical discussion (see Gorlee 1994). Peircean signs and sign-systems are said to be self-organized, and in order to occur they need no outside observer. The translator is pressumed and assumed in semiotic processes, but is at the same time generalized (i.e., de-personalized and de-emphasized). Growth (or complexity) is connected with change in signs. Nothing is ever fixed: all signs and sign-systems move from a state that is more chaotic, surprising, paradoxical, etc. state and go through translation towards a more ordered, predictable, rationalized state. "State" means always state in flux,

IOI

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so that "structure" and its synonyms are relative concepts characterized by their (real or imagined) further development, i.e., by their purposive, yet partly unpredictable, catastrophic sign-activity. All systems and their elements are adaptive in that they evolve by utilizing acquired knowledge and information. Meaning as meant by new translations is destined to remain relative, because the truth can only be reached in the hypothetical long run. New patterns from new translations and from new translators may seemingly arise ex nihilo. Peircean translations are provided by chance instead of eternity. The life history of all meaningful verbal text-signs is identical, in so far as they all need to receive an interpretation (including translation) in order to be able to operate as signs in different temporal and/or spatial settings. They must have the capacity to carry significance amidst shifting semiosic relations. Ifa combination of verbal signs does not (or ceases to) draw our attention toward itself as a sign and does not manifest itself as mediating between what it can mean and what it is interpreted to mean, it becomes meaningless, a nontext and a nonsign. A text that, when transplanted in time and/or place - that is to say, into a different language and a different culture - loses its power to appeal to an interpreting mind, thereby becomes a nonsemiosic (dead) entity. The text is characterized by its unlimited and never-ending translation, the ongoing process of growth through interpretive webs. What keeps the text-sign alive is precisely that it elicits an interpretant again and again, and that these interpretants, plus the interpretants of these interpretants, are not only rule-governed entities but also imply (whether virtually or really) rule-changing and rule-creating activities (Gorlee 1996). The flatness of a decision-tree is not a graph able to represent the polydimensional problem-solving and decision-making of addressing texts, including their translation. According to Eco (1984: 46-86), this paradigm is not characterized by a dictionary-like but an encyclopedia-like representation. This ambitious yet necessary program for text-interpretation may take many different forms, each with a different raison d'etre. It may be conceived as a study of the taxonomy of the text-sign as an exemplary cross-section of the world's text-signs, together with an analysis of its rules and presuppositions, and a quantitative/qualitative assessment of the text. This is, for example, the case with literary criticism and hermeneutics. Such study can also call for the (re)textualization of previous documentary material meant to reconstruct verbally a past reality, and to give the latter a meaning, in fact, any meaning. This occurs in historiography (the writing of history). It is further found in editing, from working, often in conjunction with the author of a manuscript, to produce the desired final text, to that almost unmentionable area of publishing: rehashing existing textual material for new projects. Last but not least, what transpires in 102

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translation, in all of its intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic varieties, is also a kind of text interpretation, which is made visible as rewriting or recodification (or rather, as transcodification) but which is in fact a complex process of diachronic and/or diaspatial reimagining, rethinking, remodeling, and recontextualizing. Original works are, and often remain, authentic, autonomous, unique, and hence essentially irreplaceable entities. A translation, however, lacks the stability of an original work and becomes ossified as a dated text-sign. This special dynamic of translation implies that translations have only a limited lifespan; their novelty soon wears off, they tend to become unfashionable, to be left aside, and nobody ever looks at them again except out of curiosity. The reasons underlying this ephemerality of translation, the diminishing appeal of most translations and the need for retranslation can only in part be reduced to rapid changes in language, style, and literary fashion. It cannot be emphasized enough that translations become obsolete because of continuous changes in general and specific cultural contexts (such as the parameters of the translator's communicative task and the expressive functioning of the text, original as well as translated), thereby undermining questions such as translatability vs. untranslatability and fidelity vs. infidelity, and making them wholly redundant. In a semiotic paradigm, equivalence is thus not merely a linguistic affair: it is always connected with function and related to a purpose, and emphasis is placed on the idea of growth through interpretation. Indeed, the image of translation that emerges from a semiotic view is one of change and growth, of overall expansion through transformation. This is perhaps why equivalence (a central topic in translation theory) was treated rather cursorily by Peirce (Gorlee 1994, chapter 9). He seems to have taken the view that sign relations, and all the elements which compose them as well as those included in them (such as the translator) are vulnerable to constant change. Nothing is fixed in sign translation: the translating text-sign, the translated text-sign, the linguistic and nonlinguistic codes, the translator, and the translational and general-cultural norms are all subject to continual interaction and change, even if to a minute degree. Outside the text, too, the dynamical (real) object is also evolving, as is everything in both lived and imagined reality. If both the world we experience and the world we create are both constantly expanding, then our knowledge of the world in all its manifestations is not only fallible (see the next chapter) but lags behind, and thus requires continuous criticism, improvement, and correction. A translation is always translatable. Semiotranslation (term coined in Gorlee 1994: 226) is a unidirectional, future-oriented, cumulative, and irreversible

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process, a growing network which should not be pictured as a single line emanating from a source text toward a designated target text. Rather, we must conceive of any number of such translational lines radiating in all directions from a starting state to end-states of variable value. Semiotranslation advances, in and by successive instances, toward higher rationality, complexity, coherence, clarity, and determination, while progressively harmonizing chaotic, unorganized, and problematic translations (and elements and/or aspects of translations), as well as neutralizing dubious, misleading, and false ones. By steadily integrating new pieces of information about the object, translations of it make the real meaning of the original ever more complete, detailed, and continuous. Yet informational lacunae will always remain. By this token, a translation is never finished and can always, however minimally, be improved upon. The survival of text-signs lies in their being translated and retranslated. A standard translation or "authorized version" is in fact an oxymoron. Target-Oriented Futurology

Mention of developments in literary studies is in order here because, as an important subdisipline of translation studies, that field has been expanding beyond the limitations imposed by strictly linguistic-oriented methods and theories. The translational approach deemphasizes the traditional, one-sided (source-oriented) study of literary translation. Since the process of translation itself occurs in a black box, its study must remain empirical. Taking as its object of investigation the source-sign, or translating text, and contrasting it with the translated sign, the traditional approach is largely confined to a restrictive and prescriptive program of what the translator must do (and must not do) in order to solve translational problems in a semiotic fashion. Semiotically, translated literature is now irreversibly directed at the purpose of target-orientedness, that is, at the value of the interpretants. Emphasis is increasingly moving away from the (still mysterious) translation process, which is concerned with the primary sign, toward the qualities of its secondary product. The latter is readily available to inspection, both as an actual object in itself and as an artifact functioning within the target culture, or, since we are dealing here with literary translation, within its context, i.e., the new literary system: ... a view of literature as a complex and dynamic system; a conviction that there should be a continual interplay between theoretical models and practical case studies; an approach to literary translation which is descriptive, target-oriented, functional and systemic; and an interest in the norms and constraints that govern the production and reception of 104

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translations, in the relation between translation and other types of text processing, and in the place and role of translations both within a given literature and in the interaction between literatures. (Hermans 1985: 1011) Modem literary translation displays a Jakobsonian affinity with Eastern European semiotic approaches to the (literary) sign. In modem literary translation the (traditional) idea of translational norms has not been rejected, but appears in a new, nonprescriptive form. Both of these tendencies have been developed in the work of Toury: "although the process of translating obviously precedes its product (and the cross-systemic transference - the intra-systemic employment of the transferred for communicative purposes) in time, it turns out that from the semiotic point of view, the (potential) product, and especially its (prospective) position and functions in the target system, should be assigned precedence over the process" (1986: 1121, Toury's emphasis). Target-oriented futurology is at first sight more innovative and user-friendly, and hence a more appealing, strategy than is source-orientedness. But caution is advised. It is not unthinkable that a translation closely parallels the original because the translator (or his patron) is committed to maintaining the status quo, and is for this reason reluctant to make a deviant statement. On the other hand, some readers may have trouble imagining that in a world with, say, strong nationalist or fundamentalist sentiments, the translator is motivated to move away from the original and towards a version that is palatable to the norms and values of the political or religious leadership. Also, undue explicitness as well as omissions and expurgated translations testify to a patronizing or pedantic spirit, such as that residing in a translator who seeks more to gain a high( er) status for him-/herself than to be a neutral transmitter of the original message. Translation involves not one but a whole gamut of text-manipulative activities exploring the kinetic space between a primary text-sign and its interpretant-signs, or potential, actual and possible translations. The latter do not emerge ex nihilo or even ex nova, but are determined by the former, if only to a small degree (Gorlee 1992). While referring back to the same object as the primary sign, each new reinterpretation has a different material shaping and coding. It is also differently world-bound (that is, time-, culture- and language-bound) and is capable of determining in its tum different interpretations, thereby challenging oppositional labels such as objectivity and subjectivity, realism and idealism, autonomy and dependence, and sameness and otherness. What the abovementioned metatextual operations have in common is their manipulation (in the ideologically-neutral sense of doing-and-making) of the text-sign. But manipu105

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lation may in tum involve selection and modification, and progressively lose its sense of being value-free. As manipulation becomes more than reproductive and/or mimetic, and acquires nonfactual and/or creative overtones, it becomes evaluatively, and thus ideologically, determined. The time, place and world that often separate the translational habitat from that of the primary text, necessitate a degree of cultural adaptation or assimilation. The concept of a bipolar (source-oriented and/vs. target-oriented) approach discussed in the previous section needs to be further diversified, because cultural adaptation may be applied to time as well as place. Temporal and spatial aspects are not mutually exclusive but interactive and cumulative. In translation, this creates a model with four polarities and many shifting interrelations, which may determine the translator's overall strategies and ad hoc ways of dealing with problems which emerge on all textual macro- and micro-levels. These strategies need not always be consistent, accurate, or even reasonable, because contradictory solutions, improvised equivalents, mistranslations and other translational faux pas are semiotically also translations. The fact that they may have, for example, a reduced practical usefulness, need not prevent them from being aesthetically pleasing or logically valid; and the reverse is also true. Given the time passed, translation qualifies as diachronic (intertemporal, crosstemporal) translation. Emphasis is placed here on the treatment (i.e., semiotic modification or transmodification) of the world of historical and temporal realities. A historicizing, or retrospective, approach is pitted against the modernizing, or prospective, approach. Historicization implies that the target text is motivated linguistically and culturally by the source text, thereby sounding archaic to modem ears, a relic of the past. The reverse principle, modernization (or actualization), means that the text is modified linguistically and culturally to suit the assumed reality, taste and critical standards of the target readership; it attributes modem ideas, things, etc. to ancient man and woman. The temporal and spatial programs overlap and their expressions often coincide. The notions of length or duration, course, interruption, localization, departure point, limit, interval, distance, sequel or continuation express, either prospectively or retrospectively, both place and time and make them mutually translatable. In addition to being time-bound, the distance between the world of the primary sign and our world of the secondary sign (translation) is also geographical; and hence cultural adaptation is also space-oriented. The category of displacement applies especially in the case of strong cultural difference between source culture and target culture. The translator can deal with foreignness in two opposing ways: either by closely reproducing the original's topical, linguistic and 106

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stylistic expressive elements (this is exoticism), or by making the source cultural elements invisible in the translation; this is called naturalization (or acculturation). To put it differently: the translator has a choice between anachronism and anatopia (Gorlee I998a). Text-Manipulative Activities

Metatextuality, the common denominator of the above operations, is rooted in the metalinguistic function which Jakobson ( 1960) attributed to language as a tool for communication, in tandem with the other communicative functions of language. A metalingual text in Jakobson's sense is a verbal text that refers to itself or identifies the (linguistic or, more generally, cultural) code being used. In translation, this functional modality operates in at least two ways. On the one hand, it exemplifies the fundamental Thirdness of language, its conventional, arbitrary, and hence rule- and culture-bound relation to the possible object in reality; this gives room for manipulative semiotics, i.e., the usage of language with an ideological bias, in which the sign disengages itself from extra-linguistic reality and is granted a referential mobility permitting it even to be used as antithetical and self-referential artifices. On the other hand, metalanguage shows language's capacity for Firstness, i.e., the (degree of) similarity 2 , with reference to form, or shape, pattern, or otherwise, between the antecedent text-sign and its consequent interpretations and/or paraphrases, as well as with reference to all text-signs involved and their object in extra-linguistic reality. Through this blend ofThirdness and Firstness through Secondness (the actual instances), the rule for the transformation of the text into its translations is progressively reformulated, thereby becoming steadily more determined. To quote David Savan ( 1987-1988: 35): "Likeness of form or structure is a ground whereby one system of laws, hypotheses, or formulae may be taken as a sign of another such system." The rule of transactional relativity transpires thus in a constantly moving system, a semiosic adventure. Translation thus involves a pre-existent text-sign which produces a potentially infinite network of interpretant text-signs which, in the hypothetical long run, are destined to converge, 3 but in real time/space may be thought to either share relevant properties with their primary text-sign, to be radically different from it, or to take an intermediate position and stand in an existential, if not a physical, connection to it. By the same, triadic token, Peirce divided iconic signs (which he called hypoicons for this purpose) into images, or first Firstnesses; diagrams, or second Firstnesses; and metaphors, or third Firstnesses (CP: 2.277, c.1902); this is Peirce's division of icons according to their similarity to their object(s) in reality. In the following, I shall conceive of reality as a semiotic concept, 107

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indicated by "reality" being placed in inverted commas. I shall use Peirce's threefold distinction to study translation from the dual perspective indicated above: both as a serial processuality (the ultimate goal of which is truth) and as a product (conceived as one element in this chain of interpretants ). I hope to argue convincing in favor of the pertinence, in translation theory, of the resulting notions of objective reality, objectual reality (i.e., with reference to the object), and the interplay between both. Image, Model, Metaphor A target text, or translated text, in order to be considered as one, must be viewed as imaging a number of qualities of its source text or, as it is called in common usage, its "original"; that is, it must be characterized by sharing essential properties with the text it purports to translate. From this perspective, both texts are viewed as mental maps conveying all purported information simultaneously, as wholes and in their parts. Paradoxically, perhaps, language (i.e., both linguistic codes involved) places both texts under the aegis of symbolicity (i.e., functioning independently from the object in reality, while perhaps involving some iconic and/or indexical elements). This means that some linguistic elements and/or features of a written text may mirror the non-linguistic referent in reality, but without their signhood being rooted in this possible similarity. Word-images stand on their own. They create a quality of feeling, or moodscape, which proceeds hie et nunc and from one word to the next, but without per se spurring analysis and further processing, and without being future-oriented. In our mental activity of text interpretation (which implies text translation), however, the essential things are the progressive organization, transformation, and rationalization of feelings and emotions - that is, of indeterminate Firstnesses confined to themselves (such as loose words). This is the pragmatic way of approaching objective reality (the truth). Each new translation, with its own immediate object, seeks to give new and more complete information about the dynamical object. The dynamical object itself remains outside the translational semiosis, but is the objectual reality which source text and target text ultimately have as their common goal. While aesthetic immanence (iconicity) is thus a dominant feature of texts, its role can in the final analysis only be subservient to the relevance to the world (indexicality) and thought content (symbolicity). Aesthetic text interpretation operates as a dramatic visualization or kaleidoscopic vision enacted in an otherwise passive mind. This mind's uncritical attitude is, naturally but unconsciously, undetermined by criteria for what is considered an essential feature and what is not an essential feature and can be dispensed with in the 108

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interpretation. The text is thus viewed as one watches a postmodern videoclip: a series of moving images, rich and suggestive in and by themselves, but with no apparent consistency of form and/or matter, and therefore subject to many different translations, all of them equally true and/or false. This would mean, extremely speaking, that any text may be considered a translation of any other text. In order to be recognized as more than an eclectic possibility, the iconicity inherent in the text must free itself from its embrace of pure indeterminacy, relativism, and subjectivity. Its iconic nature must be embodied in a universe of discourse with material (deictic) features, thereby proving that there is an objective reality, or worldscape, outside the individual mind as well as outside language. In other words, images (first Firstnesses) do not suffice, and diagrams (second Firstnesses) are called for. Diagrammatic constructs anchor the verbal sign-structure to time, space, and events of the "real" world. The latter may, of course, be a fictive or virtual reality, but the diagram's structure is isomorphic with its object in this reality. A diagram is more abstracted from its referent than an image is; yet its schematic nature follows certain rules, which makes the diagram partly arbitrary, partly conventional. As opposed to images, diagrams do not prompt meaning; they must be interpreted in order to produce insight. A diagram of a text shows the (syntactic, semantic, and/or pragmatic) relations between its aspects and/or constituents; and it shows these relations (which may be sensible and/or logical) iconically. This makes a diagram a correlational, or dyadic, icon, in which the meaningless juxtapositions and sequences of sensations pertaining to the image, have hardened into significant entities which can be cognized, remembered, and shared. In the written text, this corresponds to the sentential, or propositional, level, where translation (in tandem with meaning) has become verifiable, and hence also falsifiable. With each new diagrammatic feature and/or item, the textual universe, or textual wor(l)dscape, adjusts accordingly; and each change affects the text-internal correlational pattern while also influencing the (textexternal) relations to the object(s). In contradistinction to the image, which always presupposes the prior existence of the object, the diagram may precede and follow its object. Johansen writes that while the image represents a pre-existing original, and the same is true for "the archeologist who makes a diagram of a Greek temple," yet "[w]hen an architect makes a blueprint of a building he wants to build, however, the object comes after and is a realization of the sign" ( 1996: 40-41 ). In translation as a process, the object here is of course the interpretant, or actual translation; and the translated text always follows the text-to-be-translated, even in the case of so-

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called pseudotranslations 4 and reverse translation (commonly called backtranslation\ One crucial criterion for the existence of a translation qua translation is the real, potential, or even imagined existence of a source text, pertaining to a different culture and written in the language belonging to that culture, and from which it is thought to be translationally derived. A translation results from, and creates, a dyadic relationship: the target text focuses and directs attention to its source text. As a degenerate (in Peirce's sense 6 ) indexical sign, however, constituents of the target text (particularly the linguistic code it is in) will be other than analogous constituents of the source text, yet isomorphic with them. That is to say, isomorphism obtains, but without identity. Physical, or even existential, continuity is lacking in Peirce's Third and most "rational" mode ofFirstness, metaphor. A metaphor is an icon under its aspect of arbitrariness and abstraction from the object7; it implies a rule in which two otherwise unrelated entities, sign and object, are two brought into correlation, thereby bridging the discontinuity and constructing meaning. A metaphor is not the same as an explicit assertion of a comparison. While it presupposes an underlying comparison (or simile, in literary parlance), it can surprise, puzzle, or even startle us precisely because it represents the character of a sign by representing an overall parallelism in something completely different (cp. CP: 2.277, c.1902) 8

- that is, when transposed to another object of experience and/or investigation, applied to another context, or expressed in another medium - as is the case with interlingual translation 9 . Due to its essential two-facedness - two separate linguistic codes and their cultures consciously brought into interaction - interlingual translation is a dynamic comparison, or mapping of the structures of source messages onto target messages. 10 This mapping has metaphorical overtones, which not only show the parallelisms and similarities but at the same time, and rather strongly, underscore and problematize the perceived discontinuities and differences, even irreconcilable differences, between the languages and cultures involved 11 • As happens in all cases of conceptual metaphor, the incongruities and tensions inherent in translation on the level of grammaticized and textualized linguistic messages are bound to create controversy, but at the same time they place text and translation in a state of flux, a continuous inducement to new production of meaning. This productivity contrasts sharply with the untouchability of the image; at the same time, however, the variety of mood and suitability of choice are replaced, in the metaphor, by interpretive orthodoxy and consistency. For 110

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Peirce this was no surprise, because they represent the polarities of possibility, another term used by Peirce for Firstness, or icon. Among the various definitions of the verb "to manipulate" which we find in Webster'.~ Dictionary and other sources, is the implication that expert skill in handling and/or managing something easily slides into exerting control over it and, by artful, unfair, or insidious means, changes it to one's own advantage. The underlying drive is, of course, power. Power is used and indeed abused to serve one's own purpose or purposes - which may be beauty (another mode of Peirce's Firstness), usefulness (Secondness), thought (Thirdness), or (more often) an amalgamation of these three. From the point of view of ideology and rhetorics, another term for thought (Thirdness) is persuasive logic, which may degenerate (to use Peirce's term) into either overt or covert manipulation. Interpretive manipulation may be figurative and analogical, implying that hypoicons are assembled, processed, and interpreted in the receiver's mind in the form of, Firstly, images, Secondly, diagrams, and Thirdly, metaphors which are pre-programmed as such by the sender. The novelty introduced into the reasoning process here means that such thought-icons are a product of the sender's doctrine -a readymade set of ideas, meant to be adopted as the exclusive basis for actual practice (such as translation). This "hidden agenda," which is never openly avowed and can only be gathered from circumstantial evidence, works by what Peirce called abstraction. 12 The metaphorical nature of translation brings into sharp focus the issue of freedom vs unfreedom granted to the authorized sender and privileged receiver. Manipulation (taken in the pejorative sense of ideological closure) is a common phenomenon in translation, which has only recently been challenged by translation theoreticians of what is significantly (but rather fancifully) called the above-mentioned "manipulation school." Though this includes the discussion of manipulation in the form of constraints, controls, and regulations governing the publishing industry, and hence is also applied to the work of translators 13 , at an early date this topic took central stage in the work of one "manipulation" scholar, Lefevere. He called this phenomenon "patronage," and (rather broadly) defined it as "the regulatory mechanism who steers the course of literary systems ... in which the patron represents the dominant ideology, and in which he also has the power to bestow money and status, or to withhold it" (Lefevere 1984: 92-93). The result of the constraints of patronage is that literary texts, original and translated, tend to be severally "refracted": A refraction would then be any text, produced on the basis of another, with the intention of adapting that other text to a certain ideology (the

1II

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fascist Schiller, for example, as a "brother in arms of the Flihrer," or the Hamlet who suffers from an Oedipus complex) or to a certain poetics (Voltaire's Othello in alexandrines and minus Desdemona's offensive handkerchief, or Christopher Logue's Patrocleia) and, usually, to both. Refractions are made to influence the way in which readers read a text. As such they are a powerful instrument in ensuring the "right" reading of works of literature and in perpetuating "right readings." (Lefevere 1984: 89) 14 The observations above, about manipulation of the translated text and its reception, are not applicable just to "transplanted" texts, nor are they limited to aesthetic literary expressions. For instance, the case of censorship, imposed by governmental authority, by a religious body, or sometimes a private interest group, demonstrates that all types of expression, verbal and nonverbal, may be regarded as politically subversive (often sexually obscene). Journalism, speech, advertising, cinema, television, theater, photography, and other arts have been subjected to preventive and/or punitive censorship. It should, however, come as no surprise that foreign types of expression are often believed to be alien to home-grown values and ideals, and to threaten the political, social, or moral order. Manipulation builds on Peircean metaphor in so far as disparate elements are

"thrown together" 15 so as to convey one pre-determined meaning, while other possible, but undesirable, meanings are discouraged, precluded, or even forbidden. From a Peircean perspective, the actual nature of the meaning constructed (the interpretant) is, in the final analysis, as irrelevant as is the person of the individualized interpreter (the translator) 16 . According to Peirce, the text-sign itself is endowed with a power that comes from the (dynamical) object and ultimately referring back to it; in order to realize its full semiotic effect, that power must appeal forward, through the text-sign, to a potentially endless series of interpretants or translations, each one interpreting the one preceding it. Textual semiosis teaches that the meaning of the text-sign is not necessarily identical with the prima facie (or immediate) object to which the text refers, but rather with the rule or habit (its interpretant) by which one would, under certain conditions, read, understand, interpret, and hence translate it. Through ideological manipulation free deployment of the meaning of the text is temporarily thwarted or even stalled. In extreme cases, the text-sign may lose its "soul" and die. In translation, ideological manipulation of the text-sign not only affects the target text (as shown above) but also the criteria governing the transfer between the 112

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text-to-be-translated and the translated text (as exemplified by, e.g., the aesthetic preconceptions of literary criticism, and the religious motivations of Bible translators such as Eugene Nida and Kenneth L. Pike (see Gorlee l 998a, l 998b ). Finally, the source text can also be manipulated so as to accord with some ideology, prejudice, dogma, or belief. Sometimes the source text has been modified, even mutilated, peripherally or almost beyond recognition. Such manipulation may happen, and be accepted, welcomed, or simply ignored in the target culture, due to the linguistic and cultural distance between the codes involved (Nida 1964: 160), the temporal and/or spatial distance between the text-to-betranslated and the translated text, and/or for other reasons, be they social, commercial, political, religious, institutional, and so on. Examples abound of manipulation, in which the source text has been modified, even mutilated, peripherally or almost beyond recognition. Such manipulations may take place virtually and subsequently be accepted or ignored by the target culture, due to the linguistic and cultural distance between the codes involved (Nida 1964: 160); these would include the temporal and/or spatial distance between source text and target text, and/or other matters stemming from social arrangements, politics, religion, commerce, and so on. As illustration, we take The Thousand and One Nights. Those tales arose in oral, anonymous literary tradition in India, and became codified in written form in a Syrian manuscript, still extant, dating from the fifteenth century or thereabouts. Further, The Thousand and One Nights became progressively more Muslin in spirit and is today "native" to Persia and/or other Arabic-speaking countries, the title itself often appearing now as the original The Thousand and One "Arabian" Nights. Many versions of the tales have appeared over the centuries, best-selling yet expurgated, free, abridged, revised, and otherwise manipulated translations (target texts) have appeared, using different and ideologically uncertain source texts, usually excluding the more sexually explicit stories, yet including some of its best-loved, yet "apocryphal" stories, such as those of Ali Baba and Alladin, which were not appended until the eighteen century (on this matter, see Borges' article, "Los traductores de las 1001 Naches" from 1936, as recently discussed in Louis 1996). Another example would be indirect translations, or translations two-layers-deep, as seen, for example, in the translation of Tolstoy's work War and Peace from, say, a German or French translation into Dutch or Norwegian. This phenomenon blurs the "original" source text and has been (and sometimes still is) common practice on the market, particularly in the case of those minority languages considered "exotic" target languages. To wrap up this section on semiotranslation. Translation is essentially an affair of self-referential iconicity. The universe of discourse ( objectual reality) of 113

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source text and target text experiments with the space between text-internal and text-external reality, between the creative tension and mutual constraints of the dynamical object with the immediate object. In its different stages, translation moves from the Firstness of moodscape (image) through the Secondness of world~cape (diagram) to the Thirdness of mindscape (metaphor). In this process, translation creates for itself more and more referential freedom and space for the creative and/or doctrinaire maneuvering of meanings. As a metaphorical mindscape "it creates its own referents" and in this respect "it creates and refers selfreferentiality to its meanings" (Hausman 1989: 222). In the final analysis, only their relevance to objective reality (the dynamical object) saves source text and target text from becoming estranged and arbitrary entities, both "apt, faithful, adequate" and "inappropriate, unfaithful, or whatever" translation (Hausman 1989: 222).

The Eureka Procedure: Pragmatic Discovery in Translation Here we engage questions and answers concerning the actual genesis of the translation, and especially concerning the first phase of the translational procedure, whereby the translator asswnes responsibility for questions raised by translational-theoretical critique. Is interlingual translation 17 wholly an affair of knowledge and experience? or does the (hwnan) translator not rely solely on his logical intelligence but also (or rather) on something as vague and elusive as hwnan intuition? In other words, and paraphrasing the famous lament voiced by Goethe's Faust: "Zwei See/en wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust, Die eine will sich van den anderen trennen" (1961: 41), translated in English as "Alas! two souls within my breast abide, And each from the other strives to separate" (1959: 38). To answer positively to this somewhat rhetorical initial question, the translation process will be discussed as a seemingly paradoxical dualism, with special emphasis placed on the role of intuitive knowledge in translation. I hope to shed light on this and related issues by placing them in the triadic framework of Peirce's translational semeiotic. Yet the article of abductive translation builds on Peirce's works, but aims to "re-discover" the great achievements of Harley C. Shands's (1916-1981) book The War with Words: Structure and Transcendence (1971 ); his free speculative inquiries about the human mind are applied to the semiotic approach to translation studies. 18 Faust exclaimed about his nonsemiotic method of escaping "clutching tentacles" entangled in the "klammerden Organen" 1961: 38, 41) of conventional linguistic translation theory. Faust, the "semiotic translator," exclaimed: "Yes, were a magic mantle only mine, Away to foreign lands I'd lightly swing!" (Goethe: 1961: 41 ), translated from "Ja, ware nur ein Zaubermantel mein Und triig er mir in fremde Lander!" (Goethe 1959: 41). 114

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That the topic of translational intuition is of living interest within current Obersetzungswissenschafi is shown by Kommissarov's (1995) essay, "Intuition in translation." In his argument, this Muscovite translational-theoretical scholar builds upon aspects and passages of Wills's Kognition und Obersetzen (1988), 19 while also underscoring the continuing descriptive shortcomings and explanatory lacunae of the linguistic approaches used in modem translatology. Kommissariv writes: (1) A considerable part of the translator's actions are prompted by intuition. It is an important feature of the translating process which must be the object of theoretical analysis. (2) The translator's intuition is based, to a large extent, on his/her knowledge, skill and habits. At the same time it can prompt the translator to some sudden, faster and very successful solutions of complicated problems. (3). An investigation of the translator's intuition, like any other branch of translation theory, is aimed at getting objective data of the object studied. Given the present state of our knowledge about the creative activity of the human brain, a comprehensive description of the translator's intuition is still unattainable. However, even the most general or limited results of studying it are of theoretical and practical value. (Kommissariv 1995: 354) Kommissariv seeks to put forth such a partial theory, within the evolutionary architectonic

of Peirce's

modes

of logical

reasoning.

Let us

endorse

Kommissarov's claims as he argues that the linguistic approach to the process and product of translation tends to focus on the description of the interface of two (or more) linguistic systems, in search of patterns, regularities, and strategies, thereby doing insufficient justice to problem-solving in the bold experiment of translational action. For the purpose of the sign-oriented argument here, the translator's actions, as well as the resulting translation, are not viewed from a contrastive bonus/malus standpoint; they are considered in and by themselves, as neither "good" nor "bad", "correct" nor "false", "adequate" nor "non-adequate", "useful" nor "useless." This seems to be justifiable because a considerable part of the terms mentioned cannot be generalized because they follow no standard thinking-strategy. Instead, we encounter here a unique product of objective and subjective aspects of the translator's knowledge. The latter is the strength of subjective intuition, even purposively random thought in the translator's performance and experience. Still, to fail to acknowledge and assess the role of heuristics and 115

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creativity in the translational act means to flatten that activity and reduce it to the mechanical (re)production of dead replicas of the originai. 20 It is no secret that text linguistics and text grammar have systematically followed the path of logical formalization, nor that the linguistically-biased translation studies which emerged in their wake shows the same logical orientation. In doing so, they did indeed fulfill Chomsky's requirement that linguistic theory must be formalized in order to be a scientifically valid human form and shape. 21 But to do so requires that the object of investigation be viewed as a formal algebraic system, which leaves no room for comprehensive heuristics. On this view, problems are only recognized as significant if they can be solved with the means provided by the theory. Thus, much of the success of generative grammar attributable to its strategy of excluding unfavourable examples whenever possible. In "reality," however, the necessity for intuitive components in the translator's action rules out an analytical algorithm for translational procedure. Sich an algorithm violates what is the basic assumption here; namely, that what Pike called "intuitive steps" or "analytical leaps" (1967: 224-225) are crucial elements of all linguistic analysis and the metalingual procedures based on it such as procedures involved in interlingual translation. Pike, the American linguist on whose work some of the propositions here will build, numbered among those scholars who introduced Chomsky into linguistics, but whose ideas on linguistics and translation studies have, ironically perhaps, continued to

remain radically opposed to generative syntax and transformational grammar as developed by Chomsky and his associates. Transformational-generative grammar has provided text linguistics with a formal basis and new concepts such as syntactic well-formedness and (to some extent) semantic acceptability, which were readily applied to text analysis as well as translation. Formalization oflinguistic material can thus certainly be instrumental in theory construction, but formalism is not identical to theory: "In hindsight it can be said that text linguistics tried to apply formal apparatuses too early, perhaps because in general the role of formalization in theory construction was grossly overrated" (Rieser 1981: 334). The application of theoretical tools provided by logic assumes, e.g., that written texts are reducible to a series of rigid a priori schematizations, and can be exhaustively described in some logical language. 22 What has been neglected in all this is the weight of empirical data provided by human intuition: "The precise explication of one's linguistic intuitions should come first, and only then does formalization make sense" (Rieser 1981: 334). This and similar critical statements make it possible, in the post-Chomsky era, to 116

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revive non-transformational theories of language (including pre-Chomskyan ones) and to place them on the new linguistic agenda. Considering the fact that translation research and translation criticism naturally use language-theoretical methods and are rooted in, and intertwined with them, it is instructive to observe that the emergence of new paradigms also makes possible a whole new orientation within translation studies. Pike asserts unreservedly that "there is no mechanical discovery procedure" through which meaning can be recovered; and he continues: The gratuitous adding, by implication, of the word "mechanical" before the phrase "discovery procedure" we vigorously reject. Rather, we have discovery procedures which are of the guess-and-check type ... Once a system is arrived at by such procedures, with intuitive components, then description (as over against discovery) can choose to present only a part of the data (the formal part) and leave out the semantic component. I have chosen, on the other hand, to retain semantic components in presentation for a simple reason: I wish to be able to know, after I have presented a linguistic structure, what it means - not merely that it is well-formed - since language is a communicative system. (Pike 1967: 225n., Pike's emphasis) Just as meaning must be discovered intuitively, before these crude data can be explained by formal descriptive methods, the same intuition provides the initial step in the discovery procedure called translation, and from which the first impetus must come toward sound reasoning that eventually yields logically good (or bad) results. Not by coincidence, and in tandem with the above-quoted statements by Pike and Rieser, this situation echoes, albeit from a different point of view, the value that Peirce gave to his proverbial expressions "hunches and guesses" re-posed in abductive thought, so-called instinctive reasoning, as the first step in logical reasoning. Seen in the light of Peirce's logic, his "semeiotic", which is anything but impressionistic but in which abductive thought is explicitly included, the endeavors of text-linguistic, text-grammatical, and similar research, as conducted in compliance with the Chomskyan formalization requirement, have in doing so proceeded from false premisses. Since false beliefs can also have a great influence, all beliefs must be viewed as hypotheses in a fallibilistic spirit. Peirce's abductive thought is conjectural in nature, yet a plausible (though far from infallible) reasoning method, and as applied to the phenomenon of translation will therefore be the central issue of this essay. 23

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Abduction: Intuition vs. Instinct

Early on, Peirce strongly rejected the notion of intuition in its philosophical meaning of immediate cognition "not determined by a previous cognition of the same object, and therefore so determined by something out of consciousness" (CP: 5.213 = W 2: 193, 1868). He considered the belief that knowledge may be private and independent from any previous knowledge as the basis of Cartesianism in all its guises and disguises. 24 Instead of such epistemological solipsism (which has been espoused by the vast majority of major philosophers since Descartes), Peirce taught that all cognition is in signs, mediated by the inferential process, and hence shared and open to scientific verification. "We have no power of thinking without signs," he stated (CP: 5.265 = W 2: 213, 1868); and "life is but a series of inferences or a train of thought" (CP: 7.583 = W I: 494, 1868). Inferences, or thought-signs reflect the different ways in which we make sense of phenomena we observe; and any premiss may form the conclusion of a previous demonstration. This is reflected in Peirce's theory of instinct as it develops towards reason, and is embodied in the buildup of his three modes of reasonmg. This means that, for Peirce, there is a sharp divide between two terms - intuition and instinct - which otherwise, in a non-technical sense, are used almost interchangeably to designate the quality or ability of direct perception of a truth, fact, and so on, or having quick insight into, or natural talent for something. 25 Not coincidentally, this capacity, though overshadowed by logical reason, is particularly highlighted in abduction, the pivotal Peircean concept which he "invented" as early as 1866 (W 2: 108, 1867). Peirce thereby expanded the traditional dichotomy (deduction and induction) to a trichotomy in which abduction plays a preliminary but vital part. Abduction seeks to explain satisfactorily and make sense of any external fact which is surprising or anomalous to an observer or inquirer, thereby challenging his or her ingenuity. The abductive process consists in the search, framing, choice, and tentative retention of an hypothesis that is strong enough on which to build further argumentation. Within the abduction-induction-deduction trichotomy, the abductive inference has essentially a weak truth value. In and by itself, instinctive reasoning can therefore lay no justifiable claim to absolute certainty, the truth value which we aspire to reach. Abductive conclusions are not based on an identifiable cause or constraint which ensures that the pattern we choose to observe will also occur elsewhere. Abduction is an exploratory method to create a simple and attractive hypothesis which accounts for the external experience under investigation. Though this means that the hypothesis cannot be accepted as providing proof or 118

On Translating Signs

demonstration until it is tested further, abduction is far more than gratuitous guesswork and mere speculation. The quality of the intuitionistic judgment cannot be guaranteed, yet "it has seldom been necessary to try more than two or three hypotheses made by clear genius before the right one was found" (CP: 7 .220, 1901 ). Abduction is also the creative force that introduces new and original ideas into what would otherwise be a "reasonable" (CP: 5.174, 1903) but utterly rationalistic and, thus, lifeless procedure. Without the ideas generated through abductive inference in a trained mind guided by, as Peirce said, "ii lume naturale, which lit the footsteps of Galileo" (CP: 1.630, 1898) 26 , the logical procedures would not only be badly lacking in inventiveness and initiative, and therefore remain incomplete; but more seriously, they would tend to be self-serving, self-actualizing, and, thereby, self-validating, and could go no further. Abduction is concerned with making relevant, clever guesses involving fresh, new connections between question and solution through a flash of understanding; this crucial experience is the eureka act. 27 Truly brillant insights that is, development leading to scientific progress - are not won by pure deduction: they are reached by metaphor - drawing an analogy from something observed to something unobserved. In Peirce's words, to do is "to find out, from the consideration of what we already know, something else we do not know" (CP: 5: 2 = W: 3: 244, 1877). Knowledge, therefore, is not some entity existing in the outer world, waiting for an observer or inquirer to discover it and, perhaps, to manipulate it according to his or her wishes and fashions. Rather knowledge is created and/or invented in the inquirer's inner world in order to account for a particular piece of experience. Such creative ideas are typically won at key moments of abductive insight, requiring a trained mind capable of entering the desired meditative state of mind. This is Peirce's suggestive notion of "musement" (see further CP: 6.452-6.465, 1908), which stands for a felicitous concatenation of internal forces, including genetic ones, that affect the inquirer, as well as a favorable coincidence of external factors. None of these cannot be fully controlled or determined by the inquirer's will: they are partly conscious and partly unconscious. Abductive ideation is a special reasoning power which deserves a better fate than to be granted secondary status. Cognitive psychology regards feeling and emotion as secondary to thinking. 28 Abduction may only be a half-conscious, and hence a false and undeveloped - in Peirce's terminology, a degenerate problem-solving method, the "mystery that overhangs this singular guessing instinct" (CP: 7.46, c.1907). But that certainly does not mean abduction is all instinct and no reason, nor that it is resistant to being successfully applied outside the syllogistic framework of pure logic. Indeed, abductive heuristics is essential 119

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to all interpretive acts - that is, acts requiring inspired discovery of all kinds and in all fields of research and inquiry, scientific as well as praxical. 29 The fragmentary but signifying steps of abductive activities, are encountered in the present investigation of interlingual translation. The investigation seeks the possible (yet simple, plausible and fugitive) hypotheses that have the most explanatory power. The abductive approach to translation, at the interface of nature and culture, shows the shift from (biologically determined) instinct to (culturally determined) method, while at the same time eschewing Peirce's problematic reliance on a vague and "mystic" instinct and other metaphysical (as opposed to empirical) beliefs. Translation: Justification vs. Discovery That abduction, as the logic of creative or genetic discovery is relevant to translation, has so far been little acknowledged by translators, translation theoretists, and translation didacticians. Concerning translation as a process, there are occasional references to non-inductive and non-deductive creativity (Wilss 1988: 111 ). Perhaps counterintuitively, one finds the notion of explanatory hypothesis, and hence of discovery, in descriptive translation studies concentrating on translation as a product or result of the translation process, and particularly in the thought ofToury. In Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond ( 1995), Toury reaffirms his target-oriented paradigm - his emphasis on the translated text and its constituents - as the primary object of investigation: its form, its usage of the target language, its role and functionality in the target culture, and its genesis. In contradistinction to the translated (source) text, and a fortiori the translation process, which are non-observable entities and need (re)construction before they can be studied, the object at hand is usually not the text-to-be-translated, but rather the translated text (Toury 1995: 36). That the latter is really a translation, is an assumption, the first result of an entire set of intuition-based inquiries yielding explanatory hypotheses which will have to undergo systematic justification if they are to be accepted as valid explanations. For Toury, this means the following: A translation at the outset can only be tentatively marked as such by the investigator, because it might still tum out to be, say, a pseudotranslation (Peirce's chance) or a biased (i.e., manipulated) translation (mentioned above). Peirce's architectonic argued from chance to law to the tendency to take habits (CP: 6.32, 1891, cf. CP: 1.407-1.409 and W: 6: 207-208, 1887-1888). In this development from irregularity toward regularity, 120

On Translating Signs

"an element of pure chance survives" (CP: 6.33, 1891) - Firstness, Peirce's sign meaning puzzle and paradox. 30 The positioning of the (assumed) translation in the target language and culture is, until further notice, equally an explanatory hypothesis rather than a real fact. Finally, there is the transfer postulate. This postulate assumes that certain similarities and/or relationships exist which justify regarding the (assumed) translation as being translationally derived from another text that pertains to a different culture and is written in the language belonging to that culture. As illustration, we can point to the joumies through different times, places and languages in The Thousand and One Nights, discussed above in the section on "Image, Model, Metaphor." It should be evident that Toury's argumentation follows, albeit implicitly (not explicitly), the course of Peirce's scientific method, while giving what Peirce called abduction the weight it deserves. Those equivalent translated signs (interpretants) that original signs give rise to in the minds or quasi-minds of interpreters 31 may follow from these primary signs hypothetically (abductively), inductively, or deductively, so that conclusions are those interpretants which are especially singled out from other possible interpretants. This happens theoretically within a process of inquiry that starts out with an abductive hypothesis being "entertained interrogatively" (CP: 6.524, c.1901) and that proceeds to justify itself inductively before reaching, deductively, the definitive conclusion intended to give the truth. Although among induction, deduction and abduction the latter kind of hypothesis is endowed with the lowest coefficient of objective truth, it is the engine of reason, the primus motor towards the deductive conclusion, at which stage all weaknesses and contradictions should have been eliminated from the system. This also holds for pragmatical translation, both as process and as product.

The process of translation deals with complex utterances in some language, about which partial, transcoded interpretants are generated on three levels, which are then combined and made to meaningfully interact in a new whole. If one views the interpretants composing the translation as partly grammar-generated solutions, then meaning is the result of an exhaustive search, in which partly new ideas or chance discoveries (in Peirce's sense) arise. The latter are a plausible, if not perfect, solution to the problems encountered. The abductive solution is found without examining all of a (possibly enormous) mass of relevant information, but instead results from the intuitive shortcuts that characterize decision-making. The emergence of such solutions, translational and otherwise, "is never either a quantum leap to a state of affairs totally unrelated to a previous state of affairs or a continuous transition from one state to another. Both factors are always involved in discovery" (Tursman 1987: 22). Although "Peirce gives 121

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more weight to continuity than to abruptness" (Tursman 1987: 22), translation should not be equated with rule-bound step-by-step behavior; it is only determined to a point by the linguistic codes of the translated text. What remains is open to free and speculative discovery, guided by unpredictable clues about cultural context. When Toury describes the actual discovery-plus-justification procedure, still with reference to descriptive translation studies, his account sounds genuinely semiotic, yet once again without using overtly semiotic terms in reference to that procedure. In tandem with his schematic representation of discovery procedures and their corresponding counterpart, justification procedures, Toury places emphasis on their non-linear nature: Rather, in every phase, from the very start, explanatory hypotheses will be formulated, which will then reflect backwards and affect subsequent discovery procedures. The normal progression of a study is thus helical, then, rather than linear: there will always remain something to go back to and discover, with the concomitant need for more (or more elaborate) explanations. (Toury 1995: 38) This passage is crucial, because it places each new semiosis on a higher meaning, in accordance with Peirce's view of semiosis as a helical (or pyramidal) motion. 32 According to this view, semiotranslation begins with an unsystematic search in a certain direction, the unfocused essence of abductive discovery, which is gradually but rhapsodically integrated into the course of action by controlling it - that is, by experimenting with it and rationalizing it. Toury's account shows that Peirce's logico-semiotic method is wholly applicable to the identification, description, and analysis of translation as a meaning-generating thought experiment in which an abductively generated hypothesis is tested in various ways. Semiotranslation Revisited

Two themes run throughout my notion of semiotranslation. First, we should consider seriously the logical implications of Peirce's semiosis as a paradigm for (sign) translation, of which interlingual translation is only one ramification. Second, translation in tum exemplifies semiosis, translation being understood here in its manifold varieties, but especially focusing on Jakobson's languagebased distinction, with particular emphasis on interlingual translation. In the sign relation, the sign is wholly determined by the object, while the interpretant (or translation) is determined by the sign only up to a point. The sign's meaning is 122

On Translating Signs

thus, on the one hand, bound to remain, at least partly, indeterminate; on the other hand, and thanks to this indeterminacy, the threefold sign-relation becomes a process of inquiry and discovery that focuses on the shifting scope of precisely the "space between" the interpretant (translation) and the object (real state of affairs). Semiotranslation is, as indicated before, a sem10tlc web that ressembles a "growing tree" (MS 283: 98, 1905) that will lead to a "developed tree" in Peirce's friend, William James's (1890) Principles ofPsychology (1910: 222). 33 James coined the influential metaphor "stream of consciousness" to refer to the fluid symbols in the unbroken flow of thought (Abrams 1981: 186-187). Beyond known, public syntax and semantics the interpreter reaches out to respond to the verbal suffusion of his or her unknown, inward feelings: It is the overtone, halo, or fringe or the word in an understood sentence. It is never absent; no word in an understood sentence comes to consciousness as a mere noise. We feel its meaning as it passes; and although our object differs from one moment to another as to its verbal kernel or nucleus, yet it is similar throughout the entire segment of the stream. (James 1910: 281)

The semiotically "equivalent" ideas arising from the aspiring tree, while rooted in a common trunk, shoot out like new branches and subbranches in different directions. The branches and subbranches progressively harmonize chaotic, unorganized, and problematic interpretations in the original translations, as well as elements and/or aspects of translation and mistranslation. Through steadily integration of new pieces of information about the dynamical object, an interpretive and translational order is created out of chaos. At the same time, the new translations tend to neutralize dubious, misleading, and false ones. The varieties of sign-translations make the real meaning of new branches ever more complete, detailed, and continuous. Yet there will always remain informational lacunae in any translation. "Ah how fleeting, ah, how empty" 34 aptly characterizes how a translation - that is, the rule of translation between sign and object as it happens to crystallize itself - is never finished and never perfect. A translation is, eventually, a temporary guide pointing towards itself and towards other translations. Abduction is the first phase of the entwined life-forms of translating. It involves, firstly, the rapid glance of the translator's mind at the text to be translated to sense its possible translatability and untranslatability of that text. A rapid glance means a brief and largely unconscious perception or sensation, without 123

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thoughtful observation by the would-be translator. It is a fleeting feeling, like a shiver of delight that runs down the spine of the translator, without yet coming to express any further belief or conviction regarding into old (translatable) and new (translated) areas. The old text is scanned with a gaze of discovery, without the riveted attention that would lead to a detailed and fixed certainty of knowing, but only a wondering gaze of curiosity or even surprise. The translator toasts his bittersweet victory (or defeat). The view of the possible translator remains abductive at the preliminary level. At this stage occurs the vigilance of glimpsing gaps between the panoramic abstraction of general translatability, and a still future possibility of concrete attentive action; and between the knowledge of the translatable text, the knowledge of the translator's mind, and the knowledge of the future audience including lack of knowledge regarding untranslatability. Abductive translation is a visual fallacy, misfallacy, and fallacious disorder; it is an error inherent in the human condition. 35 Let us take a practical issue in translation theory for which a solution could be found by placing it into (or better, outside) the framework of Peirce's abduction. We have argued that the brain perceives by anticipation, that is to say, by sensation before action. It formulates perceptional hypotheses about the degree of (un)translatability. In translation studies the abductive phase (under a nonsemiotic name) does not engage issues of translatability, but rather those of readability, and it considers transferability factors of different alphabet-like systems, text systems, writing systems, and the like. Since the translation process is a mental process not open to direct scrutiny (the so-called black box), it might be argued that translation can only be explained by a public action that follows from a secret, abductive motion. This means that, after surviving abduction as translatability, the a priori act filters out of the translation process, as argued in actual translation theory. In translation studies, the translation procedure in itself has been commonly but arguably "hypothesized" as a chronological sequence involving variously three or four stages. The first translatability phase has been assured. In a highly praxisoriented spirit, Koller distinguishes between three translational phases, consisting of the draft, or "shortlived," translation; the working, or "middlelived," translation; and the print-ready, or "longlived," translation: "The draft translation may be further developed into a working translation, thereby improving its quality; and the working translation can again become the point of departure for a print-ready translation" (1992: 203; my translation.).

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Koller's linguistic criteria here are qualitative and correspond to a mounting scale of grammatical, lexical, stylistic, and other factors contributing to "accuracy, correctness, and adequacy" (Koller 1992: 204; my translation). As explained by Koller, the first phase produces a draft translation of limited scope and usage. Its focus on accuracy means that there must be identity in terms of content, but violations against morphological, syntactic, phraseological, lexical, stylistic, etc. rules are still accepted at this stage. In a second-phase translation, accuracy as well as correctness are required; it may contain no grammatical, lexical or stylistic errors. Finally, Koller's print-ready translation is characterized by the triad of accuracy, correctness, and adequacy. A product of solid research and serious reflection, it aims to satisfy the most rigorous norms and expectations.

It must be noted, however, that the progression from, roughly, fidelity to sourcefact, agreement with target-code, and finally accordance with text-type between source-text and target-text, sets singularly relative priorities. The three steps advanced by Koller to describe the quality of the translator's performance can only be defined in relation to one another. External criteria of assessment are absent here. This greatly reduces the usefulness of Koller's three-step process outside pure translation practice and pedagogy. Yet it is tempting to view Koller's first product, the rough draft, as a product of abduction, since the rough draft, like abduction, is impromptu in nature, originates in speculation, and has only provisional value. It should also be remembered that in a Peircean paradigm, too, a translation is evaluated in terms of quality. Yet, in contradistinction to Koller's exclusive focus on translation in terms of its practical usefulness as judged by the intended target receiver(s), for Peirce quality meant truth-value in reference to some purpose of beauty (Firstness), usefulness (Secondness) or insight (Thirdness). The strong point of abduction lies, of course, in proposing beauty. Such aesthetic qualities are de-emphasized, if not ignored, by Koller.

With some necessary "theoretical speculation," Toury proposes a four-stage schematic representation of translation: (1) an indispensable decomposition of the initial entity up to a certain, varying level, and assigning its constituents at this level the status of "features;" (2) a selection of features to be retained, that is, the assignment of relevance to some part of the initial entity's features, from one point of view or another;

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(3) the tramfer of the selected, relevant features over (one or more than one) more or less defined semiotic border; (4) the (re)composition of a resultant entity around the transferred features, while assigning to them the same or another extent of relevancy. (Toury 1986: 1114) In contradistinction to Koller's practical proposal describing the quality of the end-product, Toury's program here is highly theoretical and process-oriented. A prerequisite for it is that the text ab quo can be divided into discrete units, some of which may then be considered as relevant "from one point of view or another" (as semiotic signs) and others as irrelevant (as non-signs). Only the former are then transcoded, while the fate of the latter, evidently disposable, units remains rather unclear in Toury's proposal. Responding to this, it seems to me that no parts of a source text may be concealed by camouflage without some form of erosion taking place, whereby the semiotic substance can only be thinned in the successive semioses it undergoes, instead of becoming progressively richer in content, and growing toward truth, as Peirce would wish. The notion of relevance brandished by Toury is really a dangerous and indiscriminate weapon. It may have an intuitive basis (which makes the operation an abductive one), but it may also have an ideological bias (in which case we are rather facing a deductive procedure). Toury's scenario here seems more tailored to suit rhetorical needs than to lead to the truth in the way Peirce saw it. In After Babel, Steiner proposes for the translation process a fourfold "hermeneutic motion" (1975: 296), which in his description really consists of three stages and an illusory fourth. In the first stage, which resembles Peirce's abduction, there is "initiative trust" in the meaningfulness of the '"other' as yet untried, unmapped alterity of statement" in the text-to-be-translated (Steiner 1975: 296). This trust "will ordinarily be instantaneous and unexamined, but it has a complex base" (Steiner 1975: 296). After what looks like a description of Peirce's Firstness, Steiner proceeds to the second stage of translation, where the initial trust is put to the test of confrontation, and the "manoeuvre of comprehension [becomes] explicitly invasive and exhaustive' (1975: 298). The text is now attacked, as it were, in its "otherness," in an act of aggression in which we "'break' [its] code ... leaving the shell smashed and the vital layers stripped" (Steiner 1975: 298). This is remarkably similar to Peirce's Secondness. "The third movement", Steiner continues, "is incorporative, in the strong sense of the word ... embodiment ... [W]e come to incarnate alternative energies and resources of feeling" (1975: 298-299). This last process, of "comprehensive 126

On Translating Signs

appropriation," may result in a "complete domestication, an at-homeness" of the translation in its new situation; or the translation may have acquired a "permanent strangeness and marginality" in it (Steiner 1975: 298). The fact that a translation may work either as "sacramental intake" or as its opposite, an "infection" (Steiner 1975: 299), means that it still lacks ... its fourth stage, the piston-stroke, as it were, which completes the cycle. The a-prioristic movement of trust puts us off balance. We "lean towards" the confronting text ... We encircle and invade cognitively. We come home laden, thus again off-balance, having caused disequilibrium throughout the system by taking away from "the other" and by adding, though possibly with ambiguous consequence, to our own. The system is now off-tilt. The hermeneutic act must compensate. If it is to be authentic, it must mediate into exchange and restored parity. (Steiner 1975: 300) By reaching a new state of synthesis, Steiner's model has reached an idealized level unattainable in actual real-life translation. Steiner's step-wise scenario has an important virtue when recontextualized within semiotics: it resembles semiosis and is interestingly reminiscent of Peirce's succession of three interpretive moments as manifested in the First (immediate/emotional), Second (dynamical/energetic), and Third (final/logical) interpretants - the latter in tum subdivided in a non-ultimate and an ultimate logical interpretant (Short 1986: 115). These perhaps partly overlapping, inferentially reached developmental stages show an increasing degree of "hardness" or solidity of belief, and reflect Peirce's "three grades of clearness" in the solution of mental problems (CP: 3.456ff., 1897), of which problem-solving in translation is one, equally processoriented and equally norm-governed, example. Particularly the "radical generosity" of Steiner's translator, which "will, ordinarily, be instantaneous and unexamined" but has "a complex base," sounds remarkably like instinctive reasoning a la Peirce, primarily because it focuses on the role of a translator, who is involved in a mental activity closely linked with abduction, in a doingand-making by more than trial and error. Abduction and Translational Creativity

By now it should have become clear that the human translator commonly arrives at the translational answer, choice, and/or decision, however provisional, by a much more catch-as-catch-can method than by analysis and transcoding of words, sentences, paragraphs, etc., which is the case in computer translation. Anderson (1987) distinguishes scientific creativity, which Peirce dealt with 127

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explicitly, from artistic creativity, which must largely be extrapolated from Peirce's work. While both hinge on abduction, scientific creativity leads to discovery and builds on analogy, whereas artistic creativity leads to creation and builds on metaphor. Taking as his point of departure Peirce's division of iconic signs in images, or First Firstnesses; diagrams, or Second Firstnesses; and metaphors, or Third Firstnesses (CP: 2.277, c.1902), Anderson ( 1987: 68) argues that the goal of scientific discovery is a hypothesis which is analogous ( diagrammatical) to the existent world; in contrast, the goal of artistic creativity is the presentation of a new quality of feeling, which is metaphorical in nature. Since a translation, in order to be considered as one, must parallel, both as a whole and in its parts, the qualitative structure of some pre-existent text-sign, it is an index whose iconicity is dominant. Language, together with linguistic codes involved, places both translated and translatable texts under the aegis of symbolicity; that is, involving in tum both iconic and/or indexical elements. In one respect, this uni vocal likeness makes translation a case of analogous thought, i.e., of scientific discovery. On the other hand, if the translator freely indulges his artistic skills, he is bound to create not an analogy but rather a metaphor, i.e., something new, by building on an equivalent likeness between two things whose qualitative structures are essentially dissimilar but are considered similar for the purpose of the argument. This makes metaphor a symbol in which iconicity plays a dominant rolc. 36

The distinction between both modes, which like every concept in Peirce's thought are not mutually exclusive but must be placed on a continuum, corresponds to what is commonly referred to as literal vs. free translation; this distinction is often used with special reference to informative texts on the one hand and poetic texts on the other. In a Peircean paradigm, this traditional dichotomy, which is reflected in most text typologies, is replaced by a sliding scale, so that the transition between text types is never sharp, but always fluid. 37 The initial stages of translation, when a first logical interpretant is generated, consist in serendipitous yet serious guesswork by the translator; but also in the course of later semioses, whenever the translator/inquirer seems to have maneuvred himself into an impasse where new impulses are needed, the abductive fire may be rekindled to help spark hopeful suggestions and thus inform the elaboration, verification, and consolidation of the translation (including falsification and deleting of the translation). Indeed, to Peirce, pragmatism is "the logic of abduction" (CP: 5.195 and following paragraphs, 1903); and in Peirce's pragmatic parlance, abduction is Peirce's "rock bottom" of inquiry. Abductive

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translation takes central stage in the primary, hardening process of soft translation habits. Despite his keen interest in abduction, Peirce, the anti-psychologist logician, never described a logical step-by-step process of how a creative individual generates hypotheses. His logic of discovery focuses chiefly on the methodology of inquiry and problem-solving (Peirce's methodeutic, also called speculative rhetoric) at the expense of speculative critique and speculative grammar. Peirce's emphasis on developing "a method of discovering methods" (CP: 2.108, 1902) and its exemplification in his project of the economy of research 38 implied that the logic of discovery is the abductive process. Peirce had outlined this originary logic, which "addresses itself to the question of how new ideas or hypotheses arise in the mind and of what kinds these may be" (Tursman 1987: 14), as a philosophical pursuit rather than a practical manual, without providing a full account of the question of the eureka act and the quality of the ideas. The conditions and/or the criteria for a successful hypothesis are, as can be expected in a Peircean paradigm, three in number. They are judged in reference to some purpose of beauty, usefulness (experimental testing), and/or insight (explanatory power). The forte of the abductively generated interpretant is, of course, beauty in the broad Peircean sense of simplicity, uniqueness, drama, initiative, and other ramifications of Firstness, all of them affectively colored. The Translator's Eureka Experience

What induces the translator to find sudden and successful solutions to the linguistic problems facing him? Once again, the preconditions are three in number. First and foremost, what is needed are genius and study. Great stress must be laid on the primary development of special skills - in this case, the complete mastery of the rules of (at least) two languages and the cultures in which they are embedded, as well as the manifold interfaces between them. This implies that the professional translator must have learned and internalized a vast number of associations and combinations with reference to individual languages (intralingual translation), language pairs (interlingual translation), and the interactions between language and non-verbal sign systems (intersemiotic translation). 39 It should be obvious that no one individual, however trained and intelligent, can possess the unlimited resources needed to know fully the range of such processes within all universes of discourse, including the ability to anticipate and plan the future behavior of all possible intersemioses within both the arts and the sciences. Yet, for a complex yet unitary idea to emerge effortlessly, it needs the

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intuitive power of a disciplined and fertile mind; in fact, any such mind, not a particular mind belonging to a particular individual. Peirce was quite clear on this point. 40 Unless we are spontaneously at home in these cognitive fields and have acquired experiential expertise in areas in which they may and actually do occur, there is no basis for inspired discovery, only for discovery as a mere accident. Intelligence and professional skills are thus the first requisite for abductive ideation. The second requisite involves the translator's mood and attitude. To achieve the hypnotic state of mind in which the unconscious (the imagination, in the etymological sense of the word) is both unblocked and stimulated, what is needed is a temporary suspension of voluntary action and conscious mental activity, and an equally temporary indifference toward logical routines and mental prejudices (which make the inquirer blind to valid, true, and/or relevant elements outside his own presuppositions). Only in this state of lassitude and reverie - Peirce's musement (CP: 6.452ff., 1908) - can the translator's skilled mind relax, submit itself unselfishly to the problem (which may be a word, word combination, sentence, paragraph, etc.), and dissolve his "I" into it. He will look at the problem, view it in different lights, and freely explore it all over, that is, he will feel and listen for each meaning of an element of the problem, smell and touch it, as it were, with the tentacles of the mind and the heart. This is the first step in the abductivc technique of translation. Next, abduction proceeds to its second stage. With an eye to "hitting on" a solution which fits the textual "image," the source element and its target version are brought together in the mind to see how they fit. This enables the translator to "make exact experiments upon diagrams, and look out for unintended changes thereby brought about in the relations of different parts of the diagram to one another" (MS 292: 3, c.1906). What is looked for here, playfully and absentmindedly yet "[w]ith your eyes open, awake to what is about or within you" (CP: 6.461, 1908), is a synthesis of different elements, a meaningful solution where a neat combination is made and a new pattern set, like pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. 41 Now, most translators' heads are bent over their papers with absorbed attention, or they have their eyes fixed on the screen of their monitor. Yet what they actually see there is a chunk of text which they have already memorized at first glance. Their visual concentration is thus unnecessary, even counterproductive. By concentrating, mentally and physically, on the printed letters on paper or on the screen, they are unable to let their thoughts drift and freely associate or engage in some other "playful" occupation of the mind. Consequently, they 130

On Translating Signs

literally manipulate scattered fragments, thereby blocking access to the kinds of synthetic solutions which are generated abductively. Instead of the above procedure, after a quick glance at the piece of text to be translated, translators should be encouraged to lean back in their chairs and look at the ceiling, out of a window, or (better still) no particular place at all; they should close their eyes, stare into empty space, and focus their attention "inwards," oblivious to the world and absorbed into the process of translation. From "out there" the problem space should be moved inside the mind, be perceived by the inner eye, and be manipulated thus: the sequentially-ordered linguistic signs (which the translator is required to transpose into a different linguistic mode or code) must first be transformed into image-ideas, that is, into mental icons conveying all purported information immediately and simultaneously.42 Such word-images serve as a visionary, nonverbal interlingua 43 between the problem as a unitary whole and its abductive solution; and this transitional phase permits the abductor to go beyond the given material signs, to transcend the surface structure of the text-to-be-translated, and not merely to choose from a set of pre-given (dictionary) alternatives. 44 Surely, there is an important task here for translation didactics. As the third and last requisite come the external circumstances experienced by the creative individual in search of a eureka. As the moment of translational "truth" approaches, his musings are easily disturbed and frustrated by noise 45 of all kinds: not only acoustic noise, but also visual noise, physiological noise, psychological noise, social noise, documentary noise, and so on, all of them random and unwanted. Alas, only idealized situations are noiseless; in real life noise is usually unavoidable. It causes a degree of disorder which distracts the translator from his work, which is unconscious and invisible yet intense. And once interfered with, musement can hardly be re-induced by any specific voluntary action. When the situation seems at last to be ripe for discovery, one chance action, event, or thought suffices to trigger the eureka: the (hopefully) lucky guess emerges suddenly and spontaneously as a flash of brilliance. This is the third and last stage of abduction, itself the primary logic of sign interpretation, and hence also of interlingual translation. Here, the gap between the universe of the source text and the evolving universe of the target text is bridged abductively by an explosion of likeness. The translator, thrilled, may react to the ecstatic moment by acting out his exhilaration: he may laugh, jump to his feet, throw his arms into the air, clap his hands, or otherwise break his trance-like spell and express his joy in jerky body movements and/or expansive gestures. 46 131

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For the hannonious evolvement of the translation qua sign, the imagic-verbal hypothesis further needs to be further translated into future action. This necessity to go beyond abduction is one implication of the pragmatic maxim 47 about "effects that might conceivably have practical bearings" (CP: 5.402 = W 3: 266, 1878). In our case, the effects of translation must be connected to the "real world," where they manifest themselves as actions. The meaning-potentiality carried by the source text is actualized and deployed through controlled signaction in the future. Peirce's empiricism therefore allows for verification. In 1905, Peirce reworded his pragmatic maxim in semiotic language, thus: The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all general modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all the possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol. (CP: 5.438, 1905) Applied to the translation situation, this means that the translation is intended to reproduce and translate itself into forms of rule-creating behavior. This behavior consists in a series ofinterpretants, each of which is a (still partial) realization of its full meaning. Directed, in a conditional way, toward some future time, and guided by the principle of "fixation of belief," the translation will eventually achieve its point of fulfillment, at which time all information, explicit and

implicit, conveyed by the source text is supposed to have re-materialized in the target text, bringing relaxation to the translator's task. The ultimate (or, more realistically, still non-ultimate) logical interpretant is produced at the moment supreme when final performance (or delivery) is due, the orgasmic moment when all meanings must be realized and all purposes attained. Once all obligations have been satisfied and all tasks performed, the summum bonum of law and generality has been achieved. At the same time, however, through the final "execution" of the translation, which marks both its completion and its death, an Edenic situation is restored: pretranslational, pristine, unburdened, free 48 and, if so desired, ready to assume new tasks and assignments.

Notes 1

On horticultural semiosis, see note 31 of the previous chapter, "Text and Interdisciplinary Texture."

2

On similarity and/vs sameness in translation, see Chestennan ( 1996) and Gorlee ( 1994, Chapter 9).

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3

For Peirce's cumulative-convergence theory of scientific progress, see Rescher 1978: 26-27.

4

Following Toury (1984 and 1995: 40ff.), a pseudotranslation is a text which only masquerades in the

target culture as a translated text, but which in reality lacks a source text. This makes not a target text but just "a" text. 5

In backtranslation, a text in language 1 is translated into language 2; a different translator then turns

the translated text back into language 1, whereupon the result is compared with the original text in language 1. This metalinguistic,

yet non-communicative, procedure serves to show the corres-

pondences and deviations between languages 1 and 2, on the levels of both langue and on the level of

parole (for more about this, see lvir (1988]). 6

On Peirce's degeneracy, see Gorlee 1990 and the references mentioned therein. Also see the next

chapter, on Peirce's fallibilism. 7

Peirce's logical concept of metaphor is decidedly broader than the figure of thought used in literary

language. In the latter, an element "which in standard ("literal") usage denotes one kind of thing, quality, or action is applied to another, in the form of an identity instead of comparison" (Abrams 1981: 63). 8

Instead of "representing" one should perhaps speak of "modeling." According to Anderson and

Merrell (1991: 4): "'Modeling' captures the complementation, the provisionality, the counterfeit involved in open-ended synergies. 'Representing' by comparison conjures up a highly targeted, a priori, nonproblematic, closed system." 9

Henle (1958: 178) described as follows the creative synergy ofThirdness and Firstness in linguistic

metaphor, thus: "Metaphor, then, is analyzable into a double sort of semantic relationship. First, using symbols in Peirce's sense, directions are given for finding an object or situation. This use oflanguage is quite ordinary. Second, it is implied that any object or situation fitting the direction may serve as an icon of what one wishes to describe. The icon is never actually presented; rather, through the rule, one understands what it must be, and, through this understanding, what it signifies." 10

See, however, Marmaridou (1996), who argues that the structures of the target language, which is

commonly the translator's mother tongue, are mapped onto the source text in order to make it understood by the target language reader. In Marrnaridou's article, "structures" means "conceptual structures"; and the emphasis on Thirdness is achieved at the expense of Firstness in language. 11

To view translation as mere code-switching, as still happens, would be a simplification of the facts

of the translatory matter. Therefore I must disagree with Johansen's ( 1996: 41) statement that interlin-

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gual translation "wouldn't count as a metaphorical transfonnation, although the goal of translation certainly is to find the correspondence or parallel expression in the target language. In this case, however, although the vocabulary, structure, etc. of the two languages are different, they are still two species of natural language." Instead, I wholeheartedly agree with Marmaridou (1996) who, following Lakoff and Johnson ( 1980), convincingly argues that translation is a realization of textual metaphor, and as such, it is also an instance of conceptual metaphor. 12

13

On Peirce's concept of abstraction, see Zeman ( 1983 ). See also the recent article by Kovala (1996), which concentrates on "paratextual mediation"

exercised by publishers, booksellers, translators, reviewers, libraries, etc.; they serve different interests (commercial, informational, etc.) as they surround the literary text (in book form) with paratextual material such as mentions oftitle(s), author's and translator's names, series, publisher's logos, prefaces, blurbs, notes, advertisements, and illustrations. 14

15

This and similar ideas are developed in Lefevere (1985) and the case-studies in Lefevere ( 1992). Significantly, Peirce remarked that the word symbol in the technical sense in which he had chosen to

use it, "that of a conventional sign, or one depending upon habit (acquired or inborn)", is not so much a "new meaning as a return to the original meaning", because "[e]tymologically,

it should mean a thing

thrown together" (CP: 2.297, c.1895). 16

The translator plays a dual role in the communicative relationship in the process of translation. He or

she is both receiver and sender, the end and the beginning of two separate but linked chains of communication: encoder 1 (author)---> text 1 --->sender 1 (author)---> receiver 1 (translator)---> decoder 1 (translator) ---> transcoder (translator) ___, text 2 ---> sender 2 (translator) ---> receiver 2. In semiotic terms, the translator is charged with both the standing-for and the standing-to relation, and thus he or she monopolizes the whole sign-manipulative process in which translation consists. On the role of the interpreter from a Peircean perspective, see Gorlee 1994: chapter 9. 17

In his influential article, On linguistic aspects of translation, Roman Jakobson proposed his well-

known three kinds of "interpreting a verbal sign". His distinction reads thus: "(!) lntralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language. (2) Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of some other language. (3) Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems" (Jakobson 1959: 233). For an analysis of Jakobson's three types of translation from the viewpoint of Peirce's doctrine of signs, see Gorlee 1994,

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particularly chapter 8, "Translation after Jakobson after Peirce." In the present chapter I concentrate on Jakobson's "interlingual translation or translation proper." 18

My arguments on abductive translation are dedicated to the miraculous flush of"abductive"

fluency ofShands's (1971) book. I was inspired by Shands's immersion in frenzied activities as a symptom not so much of his abductive energy as of the flow of abductive musement. Shands was a "pre-semiotic" scholar, loaded with widening significances. He was "semioticized" by Sebeok (1991: 45; see introduction ofShands's 1971). 19

See Wilss 1988, especially chapter 6, "Der Begriff der Kreativitiit im 0hersetzungsprozej3," and the

references mentioned therein. 20

21

See Gorlee 1994, especially chapter 4, "Translation and the semiotics of games and decisions." On Chomsky's view, intuitive judgment does exist, but has no validity: "It is undeniable that

'intuition about linguistic form' is very useful to the investigator oflinguistic form (i.e., grammar). It is also quite clear that the major goal of grammatical theory is to replace this obscure reliance on intuition by some rigorous and objective approach" (Chomsky [1957] I969: 93-94). Semiotic theory published during the heyday of Chomsky's linguistics, discusses creativity as well as the generation of new and alternative language constructs; but in those theories, intuition is non-existent (see Den Ouden 1975). 22

This approaches Gardin's wise critique: "There is no a priori reason why a Chomskyan

representation of one hundred sentences from the Precieuses ridicules [The Affected Misses] would be a superior characterization of the work because it is a linguistic characterization; neither is there any reason why a content analysis of the notes left posthumously by thirty persons who did commit suicide, would be particularly revealing inasmuch as it is based upon mathematical classification methods; and finally, there is no reason why the deep meaning of Mesopotamian myths would appear more accurately from a computerized than from a non-computerized analysis" (Gardin 1974: 12-13, my translation). 23

For a similar analogy, within social and cultural anthropology, see Castaiiares (1994), on which I

have drawn. 24

See further Jones (I 976).

25

For more on Peirce's theory of instinct, in which he distinguished between rational, animal, and

vegetable instinctive action, as well as between selfish and social instinct and their relation to abduction, see Ayim (I 97 4 ).

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26

For more about "ii lame naturale", see Ayim (1974).

27

Spinks (1991: 114) offers a whole list of related types of "not so neat process[ es] of information

handling: the hunch, the guess, the intuition, the insight, the eureka, the revelation, the enlightenment, the inspiration, the Voice, the satori, and so on." Spinks calls "Peirce's demon abduction" crucially a "not-so-neat process of information" or "raw data" (199 l: 114), based on experience and not on real intercourse or communication. 28

See, however, Zajonc 1980, who argues that both are parallel, mutually interactive systems. In this

connection, Zajonc fails to mention Peirce's abduction but, interestingly, highlights the work of Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), the German philosopher and pioneer in the field of experimental psychology of whom Peirce was an admirer. Wundt's emphasis on dynamic processes, his affirmation that thought is inferential, his ideas on the principle of creative resultants or synthesis (the whole perception is more than the sum of the stimuli), and his theory of "total feeling" (which goes beyond the narrow pleasure and displeasure paradigm) bring him near to Peirce. Throughout Peirce's work, references are found to this phenomenologist avant la lettre. See particularly Peirce's review article of Wundt's Principles of Physiological Psychology (CP: 8.196-8.204 =CTN: 3: 229-233, 1905) and Peirce's stress on the "practical corollaries" of its main topic: "the bodily substrate of mental life" (CP: 8.204 =CTN: 3: 233, 1905). 29

Indeed, in his writings Peirce himself showed the relevance and usefulness of abductive reasoning to

several fields and experiences, practical as well as scientific, in which a "mysterious" problem must be solved by man, the investigator. At times, he also discussed abduction, but without calling it by that name, probably not so not to deter his (logically untrained) audience. Such is the case in Logic and

Spiritualism (CP: 6.557-5.587, c.1905), for example, the article which Peirce wrote for The Forum and in which he spoke unreservedly of "unconscious or semi-conscious irreflective judgments of motherwit" (CP: 6.569, c.1905), by which he meant instinctive reason rooted in everyday familiar experiences "like air and water" (CP: 6.565, c.1905) and "primitive conceptions of 'force' and 'matter"' (CP: 6.573, c.1905); extremely "delicate in its sensibilities" yet at its best "simple, sleepy" (CP: 6.569, c.1905), and in Peirce's view constituting the _fims et origo of all great scientific inventions. He pitted such "conclusions men reach they know not how" (CP: 6.570, c.1905) by instinct, against the "unscientific logic" (CP: 6.570, c.1905) conducive to belief in spiritualism, telepathy, clairvoyance, and other related psychic phenomena. In Peirce's day, these were popular yet controversial pursuits of which he as a scientist, laboratory-man, and Christian was sharply critical (we return to this topic in the next chapter, on religion and fallibilism). Such negative criticism dramatically illustrates that, for Peirce, abduction is a form of scientific reasoning, albeit instinctive reasoning.

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On Translating Signs

30

The belief in motion and change leads to absurdities; for Zeno's paradoxes, see the next

chapter on Peirce's fallibilism. 31

For more about mind and quasi-mind, see the following chapter on the subject offallibilism in

translation studies. 32

For an extensive discussion of the pyramid model of semiosis, see Spinks (1991: passim). In CP:

6.581 ff., c. 1905 Peirce discussed three principles of movement: elliptic, parabolic, and hyperbolic. According to Esposito (1980:

167), elliptic movement is Firstness, "microscopically

reversible

(directionless) and homogeneous throughout"; parabolic movement is Secondness, "globally reversible (cyclical) and heterogeneous within cycles"; and hyperbolic movement is Thirdness, "irreversible and heterogeneous throughout (developmental)." This corresponds to twice degenerate, once degenerate, and genuine semiosis; about Peirce's notion of degeneracy, note 5 above and particularly the following chapter on fallibilism). On Peirce's own account of semiosis as a logically, categorically, and pragmatically ambiguous concept, see Colapietro ( 1985). 33

James argued in a pragmatic spirit: "The grammatical sentence expresses this. Its 'subject' stands for

an object of acquaintance which, by the addition of the predicate, is to get something known about it. We may already know a good deal, when we hear the subject named - its name may have rich connotations. But, know we much or little then, we know more still when the sentence is done. We can relapse at will into a mere condition of acquaintance with an object by scattering our attention and staring at it in a vacuous trance-like way. We can ascend to knowledge about it by rallying our wits and proceeding to notice and analyze and think. . . . But when we know about it, we do more than merely have it; we seem, as we think over its relations, to subject it to a sort of treatment and to

operate upon it with our thought. The words feeling and thought give voices to the antithesis. Through feelings we become acquainted with things, but only by our thoughts do we know about them. Feelings are the germ and starting point of cognition, thoughts the developed tree" (James 1910: 222, James's emphasis; see Peirce's review CP: 8.79 written inc. 1891). On translation as "horticultural machinery," see Gorlee 1994: 192 and references mentioned in note 1. 34

From an ancient chorale text, and also the title of a clavichord piece by Baroque composer Georg

Bohm (1661-1733). 35

On fallibilism in translation, see the next chapter.

36

See further Anderson (1987: 68ff.). Peirce's logical concept of metaphor is decidedly broader than

the figure of thought used in literary language, in which an element "which in standard ("literal") usage denotes one kind of thing, quality, or action is applied to another, in the form of an identity instead of

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Semiotranslation and Abductive Translation

comparison" (Abrams 1981: 63). Due to its essential two-sidedness (two languages in interaction), interlingual translation is a comparison (simile, in literary parlance) with metaphorical features which not only show the similarities but at the same time, and rather strongly, underscore the differences (even irreconcilable differences) between the languages involved. Thus I essentially agree with Johansen's conclusion that interlingual translation "wouldn't count as a metaphorical transformation, although the goal of translation certainly is to find the correspondence or parallel expression in the target language. In this case, however, although the vocabulary, structure, etc. of the two languages are different, they are still two species of natural language" ( 1996: 41 ). 37

See also, Gorlee (1995) and the references mentioned therein.

38

See further the chapter on "Peirce and the Economy of Research" in Rescher (1978: 65-91 ).

39

This well-known distinction was "invented" by Jakobson ( 1959). See further the chapter

"Translation after Jakobson after Peirce" in Gorlee (1994: 147-168). 4

°For an account of the far-reaching

consequences of this for the role and status of the translator, see

Gorlee (1994: 188-195 and 227). 41

For the jig-saw puzzle analogy, see Gorlee (1994: 67-87).

42

Transfer of verbal material at the image-level entered the agenda of psychology at an early stage; see

Nida(l964: 146-147). 43

The term interlingua is borrowed from computer translation, where it refers to the intermediate phase

when the text's semantic structure is coded in a formalized language (not bound to any particular natural language) through automatic inferential processes. Here, I use interlingua in an almost opposite sense of vague, tentative visual forms which can only be called linguistic in a metaphorical sense. 44

This corresponds to Eco's thought-provoking distinction between a nonsemiosic, dictionary-like

representation of knowledge vs. a semiosic, encyclopedia-like representation of it. For one version of this, see Eco ( 1984: 46-86). 45

46

On the notion of communicative noise, see further Scheffcyzyk ( 1986). Without pushing the analogy too far, one might compare this abductive epiphany to a kind of

katharsis in the Aristotelian sense. What both experiences have in common is that they are

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On Translating Signs

postdramatic states of mind, in which the emotions are "cleansed," the tensions relieved, and the energies renewed, making it possible for the mind to embark afresh upon the next discovery procedure. 47

The pragmatic maxim, in its early ( 1878) formulation, goes as follows: "Consider what effects that

might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object" (CP: 5.402 = W 3:266, 1878). For a chronology of the pragmatic 48

maxim~.

see Gorlee ( 1993).

Compare this to: "What the world was to Adam on the day he opened his eyes to it, before he had

drawn any distinctions, or had become conscious of his own existence - that is first, present, immediate, fresh, new, initiative, original, spontaneous, free, vivid, conscious, and evanescent" (CP: l.357, 1890-1891).

Bibliography Abrams, M.H. 1981. A Glossary ofliterary Terms. 4th ed. New York and Chicago: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Anderson, Douglas R. 1987. Creativity and the Philosophy of CS. Peirce (Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library 27). Dordrecht, Boston, and Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff. Anderson, Myrdene and Floyd Merrell. 1991. 'Grounding figures and figuring grounds in semiotic modeling' in their (eds) On Semiotic Modeling (Approaches to Semiotics 97). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter: 3-16 Ayim, Maryann. 1974. 'Retroduction: The rational instinct' in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce

Society 10-1: 34-43. Castafiares, Wenceslao. 1994. 'Abducci6n y traducci6n entre culturas' in Rosa, Alberto and Vaalsiner, Jaan (eds) Exp/orations in Socio-Cultural Studies. Vol. l: Historical and Theoretical

Discourse. Madrid: Fundaci6n Infancia y Aprendizaje: 48-55. Chesterman, Andrew. 1996. 'On similarity' in Target 8-l: 159-16. Chomsky, Noam. [1957]1969. Syntactic Structures (Janua Linguarum, Series minor 4). 8th printing. The Hague and Paris: Mouton. Colapietro, Vincent M. 1985. 'Peirce's attempts to define semiosis' in Deely, John (ed.) Semiotics 1985. Lanham, NY and London: University Press of America. 479-486.

Den Ouden, Bernard D. 1975. Language and Creativity: An interdisciplinary Essay in Chomskyan

Humanism (Philosophy of Language I). Lisse: The Peter de Ridder Press. Eco, Umberto. 1984. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language.

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Esposito, Joseph L. 1990. Evolutionary Metaphysics:

The Development of Peirce's Theory of

Categories. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Gardin, Jean-Claude (1974). Les analyses de discours (Collection Zethos). Neuchatel: Delacheux et Niestle. Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von. 1961. Faust: Eine Tragodie (ed. Erich Trunz). 6th ed. Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag. - - 1959. Faust: A Tragedy (tr. Alice Raphael). Illustr. Eugene Delacroix. New York: The Heritage Press. Gorlee, Dinda L. 1990. 'Degeneracy: A reading of Peirce's writing' in Semiotica 81-1/2: 71-92. - - 1992. 'Symbolic argument and beyond: A Peircean view on structuralist thought' in Poetics

Today 13-3 (Fall): 407-423. --- 1993. 'Evolving through time: Peirce's pragmatic maxims' in Semiosis 71172-3/4: 3-13. 1994. Semiotics and the Problem of Translation: With Special Reference to the Semiotics of

Charles S. Peirce (Approaches to Translation Studies 12). Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. - - 1995. 'Contours of a Peircean text semiotics' in Cruzeiro Semi6tica. (Special issue: Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Sebeok) 22/26: 119-128. - - 1996. 'A Eureka procedure: Pragmatic discovery in translation' in S: European Journal jiJr

Semiotic Studies 8 (2,3): 241-269. - - l 998a . .' Bridging the gap: A semiotician's

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Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 512: 153-69. - - 1998b. 'Der Fall Kenneth L. Pike. Neue Perspektiven fur den sprachwissenschaftlichen Ansatz in der Obersetzungsforschung' in Holzer, Peter and Freyer, Cornelia (eds) Text, Sprache,

Kultur. Frankfurt am Main and Berlin: Peter Lang. Hausman, Carl R. 1989. Metaphor and Art: lnteractionism and Reference in the Verbal and

Nonverbal Arts. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Henderson, Harold G. 1958. An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology ofPoems and Poets from BashrJ

to Shiki. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Henle, P. 1958. Language, Thought, and Culture. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Hermans, Theo. 1985. 'Introduction: Translation studies and a new paradigm' in his (ed.) The Manipu-

lation ofliterature: Studies in Litermy Translation. London and Sydney: Croom Helm. 715. lvir, Vladimir. 1988. 'Translation and backtranslation' in Radovanovic, M. (ed.) Yugoslav General

Linguistics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 131-143. Izutsu, Toshihizo. 197). 'The elimination of colour in Far Eastern art and philosophy' in Portmann, Adolf et alii (eds) Color Symbolism: Six Excerptsfrom the Eranos Yearsbook. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications. 167-195.

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Jakobson, Roman. 1959. 'On linguistic aspects of translation' in Brower, Reuben A. (ed.) On Translation (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 23). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 232-239. - - 1960. 'Closing statement: Linguistics and poetic' in Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.) Style in Language. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 350-377. James, William. 1910. The Principles ofPsychology. Vol. I. London: MacMillan and Co., Ltd. and St. Martin's Street. Johansen, fargen Dines. 1996. 'lconicity in literature'in Semiotica 110-1/2: 37-55. Jones, Royce. 1976. 'Is Peirce's theory of instinct consistently non-Cartesian?' in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 12-4: 348-366. Koller, Werner. 1992. Einfiihrung in die Obersetzungswissenschaft (Uni-Taschenbiicher 819). 4th, fully revised ed. Heidelberg and Wiesbaden: Quelle & Meyer. Kommissarov, Vilen N. 1995. 'Intuition in translation' in Target 7-2: 347-354. Kovala, Urpo. 1996. 'Translations, paratextual mediation, and ideological closure' in Target 8-1: 119147. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Lefevere, Andre. 1984. 'That structure in the dialect of men interpreted' in Shaffer, E.S. (ed.) Comparative Criticism: An Annual Journal

6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

87-100. - - 1985. 'Why waste our time on rewrites? The trouble with interpretation and the role of rewriting in an alternative paradigm' in Hermans, Theo (ed.) The Manipulation ofLiterature: Studies in Literary Translation. Sydney: Croom Helm. 215-243. - - 1992. Translation, Rewriting & the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London and New York: Routledge. Louis, Anne Marie. 1996. 'La traduction selon Jorge Luis Borges' in Poetique 107-2: 289-300. Marmaridou, A. Sophia S. 1996. 'Directionality in translation processes and practices' in Target 8-l: 49-73. Nida, Eugene A. 1964. Toward a Science of Translating: With Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translating. Leiden: Brill. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931-1966. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks (eds). 8 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press. (In-text references are to CP, followed by volume and paragraph number) - - 1975-1987. Contributions to The Nation, Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Edward Cook (eds). 4 vols. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech Press. (In-text references are to CTN, followed by volume and page number)

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- - l 982-2000. Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Peirce Edition Project at Indiana University-Purdue University . Indianapolis (eds). 6 vols. Bloomington, Indiana University Press (In-text references are to W, followed by volume and page number)

- - Unpublished Manuscripts. Peirce Edition Project. Indianapolis: Indiana University-Purdue University. (In-text references are to MS, followed by manuscript number and page number) Pike, Kenneth L. 196 7. language in Relation to a Unified Theory ofthe Structure o/Human Behavior (Janua Linguarum, series maior 24 ). 2nd., revised ed. The Hague and Paris: Mouton. Rescher, Nicholas. l 978. Peirce's Philosophy of Science: Critical Studies in His Theory of Induction

and Scientific Method. Notre Dame, IN and London: University of Notre Dame Press. Rieser, Hannes. l 98 l. 'On the development of text grammar' in Dorfiniiller-Karpusa, Kathi and Petiifi, Janos S. (eds) Text, Kontext, Interpretation.

Einige Aspekte der texttheoretischen

Forschung (Papiere zur Textlinguistik 35). Hamburg: Buske. 317-354. Savan, David. l 987-1988. An Introduction to C. S. Peirce\· Full

.~vstem

of Semeiotic (Monograph

Series of the Toronto Semiotic Circle l ). Toronto: Victoria College of the University of Toronto. Scheffcyzyk, A. l 986. 'Noise' in Sebeok, Thomas A. (gen. ed.) Encyclopedic Dictionary of

Semiotics (Approaches to Semiotics 73). 3 vols. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. l: 607609. Scbcok, Thomas A. 1991. Semiotics in the United States (Advances in Semiotics). Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Shands, Harvey C. 1971. The War With

Word~:

Structure and Transcendence (Approaches to

Semiotics 12). The Hague and Paris: Mouton. Short, Thomas L. l 98 l. 'What they said in Amsterdam: Peirce's semiotic today' in Semiotica 60-l/2: 103-128. Spinks, Jr, C.W. 1991. Semiosis, Marginal Signs and Trickster: A Dagger of the Mind. Houndmills and London: MacMillan. Steiner, George. 1975. Afier Bahe/: A.1pects of language and Translation. Oxford and London: Oxford University Press Toury, Gideon. 1984. 'Translation, literary translation and pseudotranslation' in Shaffer, E.S. (ed.)

Comparative Criticism: An Annual Journal 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 73-85. 1986. 'Translation: A cultural-semiotic

perspective' in Sebeok, Thomas A. (gen. ed.)

Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics (Approaches to Semiotics 73). 3 vols. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 2: l l l l-l l 24. 1995. Descriptive Translation

Studies and Beyond (Benjamins Translation Library 4).

Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Tursman, Richard. 1987. Peirce's Theory of Scientific Discovery: A System of Logic Conceived as

Semiotic (Peirce Studies 3). Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Wilss, Wolfram. 1988. Kognition und Ubersetzen: Zu Theorie und Praxis der menschlichen und der

maschinellen

Ubersetzung

(Konzcptc der Sprach-

und Literaturwissenschaft

41 ).

Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer. Zajong, R.B. 1980. 'Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences' in American Psychologist 35(2): 151-175. Zeman, J. Jay. 1983). 'Peirce on abstraction' in Freeman, E. (ed.) The Relevance of Charles Peirce (Monist Library of Philosophy). La Salle, IL: The Hegeler Institute. 293-311.

143

Trial and (T)error: Peirce's Fallibilism and Semiotranslation Do we fancy ourselves infallible') (Peirce MS 1369: 24-25)

Peirce's Sop to Cerberus

Peirce's systematic and architectural philosophy is complex and intricate, since it builds on the mixture of different elements to make "somehow" a whole new entity, activated within his triadic percussivity (to use Peirce's term). This "somehow" is the vital force in Peirce's semiosis, the key term of his thought. Peirce referred to "somewhat" in wondering if "a concept to vague and confused as a 'psychic somewhat' can be of any service at all to philosophy" (CTN: 2: 202). An apologetic statement "somehow" would refer to the sometimes vague modalities or mentalities of the sign-receivers and sign-makers, which "might be indeterminate at a given time as regards a power or ability to do something which he or she might definitely have or not have the ability to do at another time" (Ransdell 1986: 2: 682). The same vagueness or confusion would determine the use of grammatical pronouns and determiners in Peirce's speech. Take cases (or histories) such as the use of"something" and "somebody", as well as collectives and plurals where, as Peirce stated, "it is only the ideas of them that are grouped" and "no common peculiar character" is "gathered together" or is "externally affected" (MS 200: 63). Another elaborate device that Peirce employed in his equally elaborate writings, "to cany his readers with him to higher reaches of generality, and perhaps to assist his own ascent, was the use of adverbs such as "almost," "all but," "virtual," and, above all other expressions, the key word "quasi-" in binomial compounds occurring in "quasi-sign," "quasi-mind," "quasi-utterer," "quasiinterpreter" (Fisch 1983: 60), as well as "quasi-proposition" and "quasinecessary, or formal, doctrine of signs" (CP: 2.227). From a (non)semiotic viewpoint Peirce also used the prefix "quasi-" (see index in NEM: 4: 148) in different expressions. In this chapter on Peirce's fallibilism as applied to the degrees of making of translations, let us add the terms "quasi-fallacy," "quasierror," and the key term "quasi-thought" to apply to all professional activity whatsoever. Peirce's efforts at generalization are evident in his many definitions and redefinitions of the semiotic sign: "A sign, or representamen, is something which

Trial and (T)error: Peirce's Fallihilism and Semiotranslation

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" (CP: 2.228) or "It is something which is in such a relation to an object that it determines, or might determine, another sign of the same object" (MS 939: 38). These some-words and any-words (Leech and Svartvik 1975: 289f.) within Peirce's grammatical interpretive discourse on philosophy stress the contrastive "reality" 1 of these vague indeterminacies with usage and re-usage of a series of interpretants and re-interpretants: "I define a sign as anything ... which is on the one hand so determined .. through the medium of a mind ... and on the other hand, in its turn so affects some mind" (NEM 3: 233). These properties tum the sign from a general into a generalized "medium of communication" (MS 339: 526 and Peirce 1998: 389 from MS 283, 544 note 22). More broadly, it becomes an implement of private and communal intercommunication (MS 283: 103f. in Peirce 1998: 389, see further MS 793: 2f.), making it an adequate sphere for a Peirce-based or Peirce-linked semiosic triad of perceiving, describing, and analyzing texts and translations. The generalized process of a "mediately determined" (NEM 3: 233) mind is discussed again in Peirce's writings, and would tend to make his whole philosophy indistinguishable through the haze of included and excluded signs in the act of semiosis, where they act together in a close, but vague, working relation. Y ct clearly or unclearly, and depending on the qualities of "somehow," the Peircean sign-idea always presupposes the basic idea-potentiality of mediating representation, the forceful semiotic force underlying "the idea of manifestation is the idea of the sign. Now a sign is something A, which denotes some fact or object, B, to some interpretant thought" (CP: 1.346, Peirce's emphasis). At the same time, the general attributes and imputed characteristics of Peirce's sign-theory (or maybe better: his semiosis-theory) are readily applicable to a variety of other disciplines or fields, some of which he mentions - logics, biology, physics, experimental psychology, theology2 - and others which go unmentioned, since they did not exist in his day. An example of the latter would be the generalized discipline of translation studies, which is the fundamental subject of investigation here ( Gorlee 1994 and further articles). In translating, we are faced with a variety of intriguing and puzzling signs, that is, with "anything which represents something else, its Object, to any mind that can Interpret it so' (MS 640: 8, Peirce's emphasis). The genesis of action by the addressers and addressees, embodied in various actors, would thus produce the threefold creation of "disposition, action, or imagination" (MS 339D: 664). This occurs, in Peirce's view, in accordance with the categorial scheme.

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On Translating Signs

The "somehow" of the sign semiosis - non-technically called sign-action or technically, mediating representation - guides the reader toward Peirce's enigmatic puzzle of his "sop to Cerberus" (PW: 81 ). The latter can be understood in Peirce's ideas about sign-theory expressed in letters to his English friend, the logician and scientist Lady Victoria Welby (Fisch 1986: 342-344, Gorlee 1994: 190, 216). According to Fisch, the sop to Cerberus was unclear since it kept "lapsing from sign-talk into psych-talk - from semiotic into psychology" ( 1986: 343), the reference here being to the first experimental psychology advocated by Peirce. In classical mythology Cerberus represents the doglike monster located strategically at the entrance of Hades, the underworld. To startle the arriving dead spirits Cerberus sported a mane, a tail of snakes, and 50-100 heads. The working duties of the monster involved greeting the arriving souls of dead men, women and children, which had been ferried by Charon across the river of the dead (Styx). This night journey induced loss of memory, oblivion, forgetfulness of real life, as one moved towards the realm of Hades. At the same time, this forgetfulness prevented souls from leaving the hellish underworld home, where Cerberus seemed to reign supreme. Cerberus embodies an immortal god, who ruled over the forlorn wilderness of the realm of the dead shades. He waged a war between life and death, thereby transcending both the powers of life and their shadows in the black waters of death. The periphery of semiosis would also iconize, and even idolize, the symbolic involvement in the area of translational activity: the mythological janitor named Cerberus "disguises" himself as the pseudo-interpreter and quasitranslator. As hidden interpreter or translator the frightful monster may embody

the mind of the visible and invisible utterer of expired spirits, the internal and external listener of the text-sign. His deceitful mind performs the destructive or instructive hero-task that pertains to both present and absent interpreters (or better, their interpreting minds), and he accompanies the force of the source text. Cerberus (he or non-mythologically and virtually she) acts as both slave bound to the source text as well as creator linked by force to the target text (Gorlee 1994: 188-195), to stand for the statical and dynamical, doubly bound interpretive demon: a real but mythic quasi-sign. The given definition and redefinition of the sign revolve around the object and the interpretant, but semiosis de-emphasizes the practical sign-maker, also called quasi-interpreter. Peirce does not explicitly include the interpreter or sign-using translator as a fourth component of semiosis, which would be in addition to the interpretant which gives the meaning, any meaning of the sign. This is not to say that Peirce does not recognize the active existence of the interpreter, because he does in fact refer to a human interpreter occasionally, in his expression "a sop to 147

Trial and (T)error: Peirce's Fallibilism and Semiotranslation

Cerberus" and elsewhere in his writings. Apparently, what Peirce had in mind here was not an individual person nor one specific mind, but in an abstract way an intelligent quasi-mind or quasi-interpreter, called by the name of "repositories of thought" (MS 318: 206) also called in a poetic vein "theatres of consciousness, of which the one is the agent that utters the sign (whether acoustically, optically, or otherwise) while the other is the patient mind that interprets the sign" (MS 318: 55, Peirce's emphasis). Such a mediating and interpreting agency between sign, object and interpretant must be "somehow" implied by Peirce in his triadic (and not dyadic nor tetradic) structure of passive (object) and active (interpretant) semiosis through some interpreting mind; because without the intervention of the interpreting mind, actual or potential, human or non-human, there can occur no interpretation and no translation, and hence no semiosis as sign representation. The "very essence of representation," Peirce said, is "that endless process of suggestion or inference" (W: 3: 64), or semiosis. Peirce stated that "signs require at least two Quasi-minds; a Quasi-utterer and a Quasi-interpreter; and although these two are at one (i.e. are one mind) in the sign itself, they must nevertheless be distinct. In the Sign they are, so to say, welded' (CP: 4.551, Peirce's emphasis). This presents us with a dilemma, since godlike Cerberus would possess the active sign power to arrange the "marriage" ceremony between quasi-utterer and quasi-interpreter. In Peirce's words, which

ring with desperation: It is clearly indispensible to start with an accurate and broad analysis of the nature of a Sign. I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former. My insertion of"upon a person" is a sop to Cerberus, because I despair of making my broader conception understood. (PW: 80-81)

The absence of accurate mediation is a statement of Peirce's fallibilism in sign representation. The undeveloped semiosis induces trial and error and provokes divorce proceedings in self-reflexing and self-returning conflicts as they occurr in primitive quasi-minds. Despite the sweet honey-cakes which dead spirits offer in flattery to the doglike monster, to move him to treat them kindly, this sop to Cerberus, does not deceive this non-"person," this non-creative non-sign. He remains in the traditional role of watchdog of the gates of death and hell, unwilling to give up his duality and self-conflict. 3

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On Translating Signs

It is important to note the significance of the sop to Cerberus. Both his honeycakes and the madeleines nostalgically remembered by Proust make skillful but careless gifts, since they reveal to receivers a hidden source of infinite regret and forgotten (and recovered) memories. Webster'.s Dictionary gives the literal meaning of sop as "a piece of solid food as bread, for dipping in liquid food", further developed as pars pro toto materially as "anything thoroughly soaked" and formally as "something given to pacify or quiet, or as a bribe" and the metaphor "a weak-willed or spineless person" called "milksop" (1989: 1357). A mouthful of cakes might ultimately act as a conciliatory or propitiatory gift by which to secure mercy in the underworld. An impossible task meant for Peirce's interpreting minds. The genuine definers, such as Peirce himself, would throw a sop to their own three-headed watchdog, not the Cerberian monster in flesh and blood but the categorial scheme (discussed further in adjoining paragraphs). The sop to Cerberus is a bone-dry response to the semiotic sign affair. It "somehow" involves gift-giving of food, magic, and idolatry in a symbolic or practical sense. 4 At the same time, the sop has positive attributes that extend towards myth-making semiosis in general.

In studying the discipline of translation, we use Peirce's categories - Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness - to measure new knowledge-making, in the sense of composing new and unknown translation(s) - the target text - from an original and known source text. In translatology, we never have to hand the complete knowledge of all kinds of texts, such that faultless new versions may be composed. There is no organized knowledge of the whole endless series of possible texts. Rather, knowledge is rooted in the progressive triad of intuitive knowledge and of the fallible, and hopefully some infallible, adoption of increasing knowledge and further learning in the eternal ways of translational reasoning. Following Peirce, knowledge is fallible, and we possess no infallible knowledge. All our claims are erroneous. Following Peirce's general abstractions, this would mean that feelings, beliefs, and persuasions in all disciplines may at first look truthful, but in the course of further inquiry Peirce's concept of instruction, further defined - become doubted, changed, eliminated, or rejected. Fallibilism is generally ubiquitous in Peirce's semioticphilosophical writings. 5 Peirce's systematic philosophy is no hobby. It is serious study. Peirce's inquiry must be considered a wholeness united in fragmentary items, which stand well on their own and provide a reliable, but still provisional, guide to Peirce's thought. His philosophy consists of a number of related theories, which in Peircean scholarship are intellectual or physical efforts that are interrelated so as

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to generate a whole out of the assembled subfields. The overall methodological structures are these: Among the most characteristic of Peirce's theories are his pragmatic ism (or "pragmaticism," as he later called it), a method of sorting out conceptual confusions by relating meaning to consequences; semiotics, his theory of information, representation, communication, and the growth of knowledge; objective idealism, his monistic thesis that matter is effete mind (with the corollary that mind is inexplicable in terms of mechanics); fallibilism, the thesis that no inquirer can ever claim with full assurance to have reached the truth, for new evidence or information may arise that will reverberate throughout one's system of beliefs affecting even those most entrenched; tychism, the thesis that chance is really operative in the universe; synechism, the theory that continuity prevails and that the presumption of continuity is of enormous methodological importance for philosophy; and, finally, agapism, the thesis that love, or sympathy, has real influence in the world and, in fact, is "the great evolutionary agency of the universe." The last three doctrines are part of Peirce's comprehensive evolutionary cosmology. (Houser and Kloesel 1992: xxii, authors' emphasis) We come now to Peircean fallibilism and (as Peirce often called it) his infallibilism, as operative in the science of doing translations as a certain form of interpretation. We may compare them to the category of virtual, real, and possible existence, as suggested, mostly implicitly, by Peirce's writings. In this way we may modernize Peirce's evolutionary fallibilism from that of waning Victorian days to apply to today's standards. We shall now approach Peirce via his notion to fallibilism, which he derived and changed from the traditional science of right and wrong, of true and false, of yes and no. After that, we shall apply the mutual cooperation of truth and falsehood to one discipline - the errorbound, human translation studies - to see what knowledge that brings. Peirce's argues in a semiotic-philosophical spirit, concerning "the means of attaining the end of thought" (CP: 2.198). Other scholars refer to reasonings from heart, action and mind, that is to say, mental and muscular efforts in trying to "stumble upon the truth" (CP: 2.329). The effort causes a dramatic change over space and time in human, not divine, "reality" (see further note I). Peirce traversed the logical and economic progression of hypothesis, called abduction, as an actual experiment on the way toward induction. Thereby Peirce included two kinds of non-demonstrative, hence fallible, logical inference - abduction and induction - as abstracted from truth-giving deduction. They approximate a 150

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certain degree of infallibility, though never reaching it entirely. They retain a degree of fallibility. The ultimate lesson here conforms with the model of laboratory experiment, which leads from perceiving the known to possible knowledge of the unknown. This concerns also the virtual "laboratory" of the translator who is provided with an suitably qualified, workmanlike (or frequently workwomanlike) mind, 6 one who is no idealistic know-it-all but who creates from the known text an unknown but knowable text. An experiment is usually founded on observed facts in induction, at a specific place and time in "reality", and is reducible to one single prior value and reduceable one simple proposition. Even so, it must give a fallible proposition, since it gives only one single sample from among the entire collection of facts, and thus could be fallible or infallible. Peirce's inquiry permits narrower and broader interpretations, namely, fallible propositions within the bounds of scientific research. These seem to be akin to Peirce's abduction, for they "erupt" under the sign-generated pressure of interesting or intriguing events or associations. Then the inquiry moves under the pressure of their productive forces in the direction of induction and deduction. A key word in dealing with errors in semiosis is the termforce, and its multiple derivations: the plural form "forces", "forcible", "forceful" and the verb "to enforce." The three-stage hierarchical process has a deductive form, an abductive origin, and an inductive confirmation. 7 True and False Signs

Peirce's lifelong commitment to the doctrine of fallibilism did not bring him fame and celebrity, which is no surprise if one considers the pejorative nature of this quasi-skeptic subject of investigation. The greatness of Peirce's focus lies in the endeavour to reach the widest pragmaticism within various branches, which also transpires, like the doctrine of fallibilism, in all sciences of research. They are focused on by Peirce according to his categorial scheme: firstly, mathematics, secondly, philosophy, with three branches of categories, normative science (aesthetics, ethics) and metaphysics, and thirdly, special sciences (fields of inquiry such as linguistics, history, archeology, optics, crystallography, chemistry, biology, botany, and astronomy, 8 as well as other, non-scholarly pursuits. They count as well: One man will investigate the velocity of light by studying the transits of Venus and the aberration of the stars; another by the opposition of Mars and the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites; a third by the method of Fizeau; a fourth by that of Foucaults; a fifth by the motions of the 151

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curves of Lissajous; a sixth, a seventh, a eighth, and a ninth, may follow the different methods of comparing the measures of statical and dynamical electricity. They may at first obtain different results, but, as each perfects the method and his processes, the results are found to move steadily together toward a destined centre. So with all scientific research. Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force outside themselves to one and the same conclusion. (CP: 5.407 = W: 3: 273) On the other hand, Peirce's domestic scenario offers the same proofs: "If I dream that I find I can float in the air, this matter of dream is not matter of fact, for the reason that the only sense in which I can float in the air is that so my dream represented by the latter" (CP: 8.126). Error performed through "the admission of incurable fallibility" (CF) is always present here, there, and everywhere. Certainty is the possibility of justification and unjustification, called assurance and doubt, to achieve the objective truth of the puzzling fact, statement, or proposition (Rollins 1967: 67). Peirce's Scientific Fallibilism (SF), to be published in his Writings by the Peirce Edition Center, 9 is the main subject of this investigation. 10 Peirce wrote this lecture Scientific Fallibilism (SF) in the year 1893 on composing virtual, real and genuine paradigms on the (co)cxistcnce of truth and certainty, arguing as a theological lawyer that:

For if any faculty of the mind, or any witness, human or angelic, professes to give us infallible knowledge, he must bring some credentials, - otherwise prudent men will doubt. Nor these credentials have to be subjected to the eye of reason, and to the judgment of reason is liable to errors. (SF) This sets the tone. "The doctrine of fallibilism will be denied by those who fear its consequences for science, for religion, and morality" (CP: 1.149 = SF). In the year 1893 Peirce wedded religion and science to create a humanizing science dealing synoptically and ethically with the moral and educational elements encountered in the revolutionary scientific advances of the jin-de-siecle industrial age. Peirce devoted his life toward the logic and structure of the existing sciences in order to bring them together. His universal pragmaticism signifies therefore the meaning of ethical thought as it bears on human conduct, bringing together feelings, action, and thoughts of scientists to solve all mental, moral, and religious problems (see Peirce's heritage: Science and Religion in Peirce 1958: 345-379). 11

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Usually these various sciences and arts are sketched as applied sciences. They take part in diverse categories that symbiotically combine together aspects of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Peirce's threeway categoriology said that "First is the conception of being or existing independently of anything else; Second is the conception of being relative to, the conception of reaction with, something else; Third is the concept of mediation whereby a first and a second are brought into a relation" (CP: 6.32). Firstness is only pure potentiality (CP: 1.422), which is "predominant in the ideas of freshness, life, spontaneity, freedom" (CP: 1.324). Firstness means unanalyzed, instantaneous feeling, direct 'suchness,' a basic assurance of maybe (or maybe not) dependent on nothing else beyond its own qualitative understanding of the sign without thought. Firstness is undivided and undividable oneness, where thinking is still absent; only an instantaneous shiver of feeling would run through the inquirer's human experience. Secondness is dynamic motion, offering a specific "here and now" assurance. Secondness thinks about details of many-sided actuality, it sets events into action and reaction as a response to a stimulus which may cause a change of state from Firstness to movement. Thirdness states the set of previously formed habits, change of habits, and adoption of habits which control the changing activity of human experience with respect to its response to logical stimulus. This is Peirce's "would-be." Thirdness involves bringing states of Firstness and events of Secondness together in a communal and mutual companionship (see further Ransdell l 986a). Whereas Firstness rests on the idea of independence and Secondness is the idea of opposition, Thirdness rests on the idea of the complexities ofrelationship (CP: 1.297), a complex friendship with its ups and downs to work on. Among the categorial characteristics of Thirdness are therefore mediation, thought, laws, rules, and habit (CP: l.345f., l .405f.), all terms meant in Peirce's sense. These symbolic terms are always infinite, borderless, and never fixed. Peirce argues the dynamical aspects of Thirdness change according to different convenience in "reality"; this is Peirce's habit-change. The state of feeling (perception and reperception) then changes, the action(s) and reaction(s) can also be changed, to as to to embody (a) new sign(s) and (a) new meaning(s). This is called habituality, the repeated support of new habits. Semiosis or forceful sign-activity changes with time and space; it entertains successively new doubts, new beliefs, and new persuasions. Under duress of new circumstances a habit formation cycle is regenerated. The distinctive habits of individuation and classification associated with it fit back into the renewed semiotic process ofleaming. 12 In a late essay (from 1910), Peirce confessed, tongue-in-cheek, that he might be suffering from a disease called "triadomania", namely "the anticipated suspicion 153

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that he (Peirce) attaches a superstition or fanciful importance to the number three, and he indeed forces the division to a Procrustean bed of trichotomy" (heading of CP: 1.568). Here, the triadic paradigm is found by Peirce in all kinds of phenomena which run the whole gamut from the history of theology, science, physics, biology, and mathematics to the truth in his theory of signs. Yet if "the angel Gabriel were to descend and communicate to me the answer of his riddle from the breast of omniscience" (CP: 5.553 = Peirce 1998: 380 from MS 283), man (and woman) would in fact receive the Latinate "summum bonum" expression of ultimate human wisdom giving certainty, as well as doubt of uncertainty of his angelic messenger manifesting itself "somehow" to humans. This truism comes from Peirce. It would happen in the form of a semiosic state of mind, offered by this angel of truth, that punishes all who deviate from conventional righteousness, our common error. Gabriel's attributes are displayed in mixed signs of Firstness and Secondness, by the conventional white lily or jleur-de-lys to show signs of his affinity with Mary's purity, his winged flight with flurrying birds, and particularly the telltale sign of his speaking hands. It would be a delight to know in which Thirdness, that is, in which language, dialect, or perhaps human tongue Gabriel spoke in his appearances and salutations, by which he conveyed thoughts from God to humans. Returning to Peirce's MS Scientific Fallibilism example.

The concept of religious

(SF= CP: 1.151) let us take one

studies varies much in its historical

developments, undergoing dramatic changes in the course of space and time. Religious studies, as argued in Peirce's classification, seem to be adorned with hagiographical biography, church ornaments and rituals: "living beings and their deeds" (MS 1135: 24), "making church ornaments" (MS 1135: 35), and "processions ... religious solemnities" (MS 1135: 112). It thereby becomes a practical art (MS 1135: 28) and involves semiotic pieces, things or phenomena rich in spells, beauty and charm, while poor in relational aspects of signs and reasoning. This implies a theoretical approach with a utilitarian application, semiotically characterized by Secondness with underlying Firstness, namely pictographical events that iconize (or fetishize) the texts around us in "reality." Church mythology corresponds to "occupations calling the mind into activity for the sake of excitement" (MS 1135: 113). Religious studies would today involve a signification that goes deeper than pictorial representations, beyond the mere enjoyment of present signs. Thinking and knowing involve not what is not immediately present, but an awareness of the past and anticipation of the future; the formal and formalized structure of reasoning of absent sign structures. The logically possible, or virtual, descriptions of "God, devil, angel, Bible, revelation" are "all classed under Affections" and focus on things brought to light by extra-sensory perceptions such as "hallucinations, delusions, superstitous 154

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imaginations, and fallacies of all kinds" (SF). Peirce explicitly mentioned the charms of"sorcery, divination, table-tuning, astrology ... " (MS 1135: 2, see also MS 1135: 3), which were fashionable in his day (Potter 1988; and see Peirce's manuscripts in Robin 1967: 103-109). These parapsychological experiences of the existence of extrasensory perception embody in tum a kind of applied art, but one provided with quasi-mystical - that is, anti-causal and anti-scientific subconscious connotations (Shewmaker and Berenda 1962). They are qualified as Thirds in the company of Seconds and Firsts, what Peirce calls "Arts of life and pursuits" and "Arts connected with excitement offeeling" (MS 1135: 22). These mixed signs move away from the focus of Peirce's logical Thirdness, which "deals with the formal structure of reasoning, not with its texture, not with the concomitant feelings, the pushes and pulls, associated with the actual thinking process" but the "best" mode of studying reasoning would describe "the structures of reasoning shorn of the inner experience of thinking, logic observes reasoning as it would be were there no feeling, desire, or will" (MacDonald 1964: 332, 345). Peirce wrote that logic "teaches us to expect some residue of dreaminess in the world, and even self-contradictions" (CP: 4.79). This nonobjective logic has subjective aspects of Firstness and Secondness in degrees of "subjective probabilities, or likelihoods" (CP: 2.777) of facts or events involved in the communication of ideas. It represents degenerate logic of a weaker truth value than that of purely logical assertions (Gorlee 1990). From a semiotic point of view, extrasensory experiments would affect the reactional and emotional mind of particular (not all) human individuals. Modernizing Peirce's words, the experiments would respond to the psychodynamic phenomena of experiences with the Other in the "unknowable" world, in view of the truism that "God is necessarily incomprehensible" (SF). These personalized experiences within "vividness of feeling" (MS 1135: 68) are often "misunderstood" (SF). Raposa, in his discussion of scientific theism ( 1989: 11 ), argues that the experiences possess a triadic product of inquiry aiming to seek emotionally and perceptually that unreachable and divine "spirit, which is determined not to rest with existing opinions, but to press on the real truth of nature" (CP: 6.428). This pressure becomes a vital element in religious studies. Peirce questioned himself, saying And what is religion? In each individual it is a sort of sentiment, or obscure perception, a deep recognition of something in the circumambient All, which, if it strives to express it, will clothe itself in forms more or less extravagant, more or less accidental, but never acknowledging the first and the last, the A and n, as well as relations to 155

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that Absolute self, as a relative being. But religion cannot reside in its totality in a single individual. Like every species of reality, it is essentially a social, a public affair. It is the idea of a whole Church, welding all its members together in one organic, systemic perception of the Glory of the Highest - an idea having a growth from generation to generation and claiming a supremacy in the determination of all conduct, private and public. (CP: 6.429) Peirce's emphasis in Scientific Fallibilism on the definitive and final assurance of creeds and dogmas in the institution of the church underscores again its human, that is fallible and erroneous, nature. This limitation is a human truism that "would undermine Religion" (SF), although Peirce, a scientist and religious man, argued with burning heart: I do not believe they are so antagonistic. The dogmas of the church may be infallible: in the sense in which it is infallibly true that it is wrong to murder and steal, - practically substantially fallible. But what use could matter of a mathematical infallibility, I fail to see ... in determining what the church sould say to the novelties of science; and I don't think they have maneged the business with very distinguished success so far. They have begun by recoiling with horror from the alleged heresies, - about the rotundity of the earth, - about its rotation, about geology, - about Egyptian history, etc. and so forth, - and they have ended by declaring that the church never breathed a single word against any of these truths of science. Perhaps it be just so with fallibility. For the present those knowing in divine things insist that infallibility is the prerogative of the church; but maybe bye and bye we shall be told that this infallibility had always been taken in an ecclesiastical sense. (SF, Peirce's emphasis) Indirect perception communicates a degenerate Thirdness influenced by the mixture of Secondness and Firstness into Thirdness, proposed for your acceptance (signs thought to be true) or rejection (signs thought to be untrue). This includes also "higher matters, as honor, aspiration, and love" (SF) and other outward aspects of Thirdness. Only direct sense perception (with subject and predicate given) would signify genuine Thirdness: "I may think a thing is black, and on close examination it may tum out to be bottle-green" (SF). To know God starts, in Peirce's scholarly view, with a sensuous inquiry into our image-maker: "as to God, open your eyes, - and your heart, which is also a perceptive organ, and you see him" (SF). God aims to transform fallibility into infallibility, and constitutes thus a living miracle (Orange 1983). 156

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The symbiotic amalgam of the triad of Peirce's categories is, however, eternally judged within a dual kind of reasoning, good vs. bad, yes vs. no. This qualitative standpoint would, considering Peirce's doctrine of signs, be a serious fallacy, a dual misconception. The subject and predicate proposition should yield to an intermediate position, creating a triad of three possibilities in inquiry, including interpretant-signs giving all kinds of true and false signs: Religion recognizes the saints with the damned. It will not admit a third fate. Morality insists that a motive is either good or bad. That the gulf between them is bridged over and that most motives are somewhere near the middle of the bridge, is quite contrary to the teachings of any moral system which ever lived in the hearts and consciences of a people. (CP: 1.61) Peirce would have applied his probability of fallacy in the framework of "the moral necessity of the principle of toleration and of freedom of thought" (SF) to all kinds of fallacies of which he "somehow" had good knowledge. This even includes experiences such as undergoing hypnotic trance, a common practice in Peirce's time, although obviously not considered an inquiry in Peirce's laboratory sense. Hypnotism, which in Peirce's day was used effectively as a psychic (and later, a psychiatric) remedy, is one of the xenophrenic symptoms which Peirce argued were absolutely erroneous: "You know that about one man in twenty is capable of being put into a condition in which he holds the most ridiculous nonsense for unquestionable truth" (SF, Peirce's emphasis). Peirce realized that it is impossible to claim eventual completeness in all imaginable inquiries. The truth cannot be reached in human activities, because "the divine mind is inscrutable" and "the purposes of God cannot be fathomed" (SF). God is only revealed in a symbolic manner, as in the Biblical image of the blazing bush (Exodus 3: 2 ff.) and other visible sign-manifestations. The rest is veiled language, to be interpreted and reinterpreted. God is not perceived; He is not seen and heard, in the sense of perceiving the burning bush, in the sphere of allencompassing and objective generality of human mentality. This inability gives a "distorted idea" (SF) and offers a false belief of God. No genuinely final interpretant of the real image of God can exist. Peirce traces the long rivalry and conflict between dyadic and triadic theories. He inherited from Kant and Hegel the ardent desire for achieving this perfect architectonic structure, and his demand is at variance with his actual procedure of arriving at dual antithetical elements. Yet he undertakes to record every twist and tum in the debate on the triadic structure, which overlies forms of dyadic 157

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structures. He maintains that theories are essentially models of society, containing forceful realities which are always less than perfect and therefore constantly subject to modification within the action of habits used and consulted. Peirce offers the hard-and-fast rule of seeking a triadic structure in all entities, in order to arrive at the real truth. Peirce teaches that, although our knowledge is not limited to signs, triadic knowledge is necessarily involved in signs (and sign structures) and we think about signs in further (and possibly growing) signs. "We have no power of thinking without signs", Peirce stated (CP: 5.265 and W 2: 213), and "life is but a sequence of inferences or a train of thought" (CP: 7.583 and W 1: 494; cp. CP: 5.314 and W 2: 241). Thought-signs and non-thought signs reflect the different ways in which we make linguistic sense of phenomena we observe in our environment. Deeply stirred by the force in signs, Peirce introduced it in the modes of reasoning. These are complex triadic thought-signs reflecting basically Thirds that in tum consist in sign and the like in the actual and virtual company of Seconds and Firsts. Peirce makes three fundamental divisions of signs, based on the point of view from which they are analyzed (CP: 2.243). One division must therefore determine "somehow" one or several together of the triadic aspects of the semiotic sign as representamen: it indicates the material quality of the sign, namely its triadic subdivision into qualisign (e.g. a feeling of redness), sinsign (a given sentence considered as a spatio-temporal set of marks), and legisign (a given sentence considered as an assertion, independent of particular physical occurrences). Another division is from the point of view of how the sign denotes its object. It may be an icon: a sign that diagrams or pictures its object, e.g. a photograph, a map, a caricature. Or it may be an index: a sign that indicates or points to the object, e.g. a weather vane, a gesture of pointing. Lastly, and our subject comes here, comes the symbol, which is a sign established by convention. Yet another division is from the point of view of how the sign may connote: thus the sign may be either a term, sentence, or inference. The interpretant, too, may be divided triadically, into the subdivisions rheme, dicent and argument. The whole of sign-activity is directed toward semiosis, which organizes and interprets data in human experience. Force, Continuity, Evolution

Peirce's fallibilism and infallibilism begin and end his sweeping survey of triadic semiosis. He attributed to each case a certain degree of expressive clarity and error, its percussivity (Peirce's term) contains a "residuum of error in every individual's opinions" (CP: 8.12). The error becomes an adequate or inadequate attitude, accurate or inaccurate, acceptable or not acceptable. Peirce's fallibilism 158

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no longer concerns itself with fundamental dyadic structure, such as good and bad, helpful and helpless, truth and falseness, and so on. Despite the obvious importance of the dyad, Peirce's judgment mainly rely on his favorite triad with three classifications of sign-object-interpretant, which act on each other in direct contact or over an interval of time and space. The triad considers the friendly interaction between the collective and abstracted ideas of "three of the leading conceptions of science, of Force, of Continuity, and of Evolution" (SF). 13 This triad of fallibilism gives endless and symbolic movement to Peirce's semiosis. The ideas of seeing-doing-knowing give progressive rise to reasonable doubt in the minds of the utterers. Utterers are situated in the intelligent mind of inquirers, as receivers, deliverers, interpreters and, in this application, translators of known texts into unknown texts. The horizons of utterers are broadened, from wild skepticism toward the possibility of framing both fallible and infallible knowledge into "reality" for deliverers and other consumers. Peirce speaks about a "subjective Modality (which) refer(s) to a Sign or Representamen which is assumed to be true, but which does not include the Utterer's (i.e. the speaker's, writer's, thinker's or other symbolizer's) total knowledge" (CP: 5.455). Moving away from conservatism and its "eagerness to carry consequences to their extremes," we observe here the experiences offallibilist radicalism that would, in Peircean vein, be "cocksure", namely the perfect safety rooted in a novelty, a liberal "radicalism that tries experiments" (CP: 1.148 = SF, Peirce's emphasis). The workings of open-minded real experiments are, as always in Peirce, threefold: force is "fragment", continuity or "unbrokenness ... is fluidity, the merging of part into part" (CP: 1.164 = SF) in order to form a textual wholeness that moves toward eventual evolution as "infinity" ( CP: 1.165 = SF). Force is Firstness, it embodies expressive force, which Peirce calls percussivity, the original source of all inquiry. Force means scattered fragmentary things, events, or phenomena: all puzzling semiotic signs, yet imbued with the "compulsive power" (SF) to find new solutions. Take, for example, physical entities in nature (fossils, rocks) or collections of linguistic elements: from words, paraphrases, and definitions - or in semiotical terms: vocabulary, phraseology, and textology - all referred to as fragmentic items, studied in the course of inquiry. They are viewed and listened to as mere "patchworks from experience" (SF) and provoke in the receivers' minds vague ideas that are no more expressive than general, "soft" moods with no space for "harder" feelings. These broken and unbroken pieces can still be assembled together by Peircean intelligent mind(s) and would subsequently form the law or principle of the conservation of energy. The whole uniting principle, of the working companionship governing sign activity, offers to the fragment a certain forceful 159

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value, called fragrance or emotional mood, which is conferred upon them to give them strength. This is done always with infallible knowledge based on one sample experiment with its abductive result. Peircean forces may in the course of laboratory experiments take on clearer focuses and more sharpness of direction from original Firstness, and be guided upwards guided by the presence of "somehow." Peirce responded to this query: may these "forces of nature not be somehow amenable to reason? May they not have naturally grown up?" (CP: 1.175 = SF). They certainly do grow steadily during further habit-transforming experiments to which they are subjected in order to acquire novelty. In the beginning their "compulsive power would be single sensations sporadic and utterly irregular" (SF). Then they would grow "warm" through the influence of habit as a gentle force which stimulates them to heat up until they acquire meaningfulness. This process intensifies in Peirce's epoch, and leads to the Darwin-inspired notion of spontaneous variety through "energetic projaculation," where "new elements of form are first created" (CP: 6.300) and the others expire. Peirce speaks of the duty imposed on Darwinian Firstness: ... [a] dab of formless slime floating in the water up to an ape has been accomplished by one imperceptible step after another, and each of these steps has consisted in a slight fortuitous variation of some animal from its parents. That whole branch of universal progress has been accomplished by accidents" (SF). Darwin's theory of evolution called for a "new Darwinism" with relevant revisions, a task that has been taken on by the distinguished paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. 14 Peirce refers again to the occurrence of accidents during other experiments, undertaken by sign-deliverers and sign-consumers to escape from old conservatism into newness. Firstness "occurring in Explanatory Sciences, such as Geology, Evolution, and the like, they always have been and always must be theatres of controversy" (CP: 5.578). Escaping from the controversies of Firstness, the experiment creates new habits to change old-fashioned habits into nouveautes: "These controversies do get settled, after a time, in the minds of candid inquirers; though it does not always happen that the protagonists themselves are able to assent the justice of the decision. Nor is the general verdict always logical or just" (CP: 5.578). This processuality leads steadily to still eternally fallible and "somehow" unsatisfactory knowledge of new signs. New habits can be the result of new experimental accidents, rooted in changing 160

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laws and standards. New experiments serve to establish new patterns of freshness and regularity: Habit, however, forces them to take practical shapes, compatible with the structures they affect, and, in the form of heredity and otherwise, gradually replaces the spontaneous energy that sustains them. Thus, habit plays a double part: it serves to establish the new features, and also bring them into harmony with the general morphology and function of the animals and plants to which they belong. (CP: 6.300) Ever-changing habits make continuity or Secondness possible. This last involves the disconnection of traditional source-forces and their organization into new patterns in the new target-versions regarding the genesis of rule and law. "All inspired matter has been subject to human distortion or coloring" (CP: 1.143 = SF). Also, these patterns offer both an open and secret ideology: "We come to consider the idea of continuity, or unbrokenness, which is the leading idea of the differential calculus and all the useful branches of mathematics, which plays a very great part in all scientific thought, the more so the more exact that thought is, and which is the master-key which in the opinion of adepts must unlock the arcanas of philosophy" (SF). Direct experience, grounded in inductive testing, provides fallible knowledge based again on a single experiment. Even applications of statistical procedures have fallacies (Levi 1962). Yet continuity here does not ask for "an absolute certainty" (CP: 1.167 = SF), the question raised is of a more skeptical nature: in all new experiences, "can we ever say it is so with any ordinary degree of security?" (CP: 1.167 = SF). These experiences move from the known to the unknown thing, event, or phenomenon, semiotically called a sign. The known sign is direct to our experience, we know it, can perceive it. The unknown is indirect and requires some thought: "a discontinuous series with additional possibilities" (CP: 1.170 = SF). It can be full of hidden surprises that we cannot see before nor even after the experiment we are undertaking. We deal with newness according to our changing tastes and conventions, according to our habits, which are triadically interactive and are congenital, acquired, or conventional. Peirce's habits work within particular but always changing time and space. The non-fixed habits build on more than the idea or ideal of continuous time and continuous space. They exist in the present, with its cuts and ruptures, potential and actual; but the cuts do not contain a continuum. Finally, evolutionary continuity includes the idea of infinity (see SF). Evolution is Thirdness. The cuts and limits in Secondness change to fit new relevant 161

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circumstances in Thirdness; "an existing thing is simply a blind reacting thing" although "existing things do not need supporting reasons; for they are reasons' (CP: 5.107). The mind develops not through chance alone, not through the mechanism of"blind law" (W: 6: 63) but through a redistribution of matter and motion from the original vague and indeterminate arrangement to a more concentrated, multiform and particular one. Force in itself (pure Firstness) does not produce growth, mechanism in itself (pure Secondness) does not produce growth, evolution transpires through a dynamic persistence of force and mechanism toward infinite and symbolic evolution (Thirdness): Now, the essential of growth is that it takes place in one determinate direction, which is not reversed. Boys grow into men, but men not into boys. It is thus an immediate corollary from the doctrine of the conservation of energy that growth is not the effect of force alone. (W: 6: 63, Peirce's emphasis). Growth - increase of knowledge from chaos to order, meaning from fallibility to possible infallibility - is irreversible motion toward future life. Let us again read Peirce's comments on the Darwinian metaphor: a "dab of formless slime floating in the water up to an ape has been accomplished by one imperceptible step after another, and each of these steps has consisted in a slight fortuitous variation of some animal from its parents. That whole branch of universal progress has been accomplished by accidents" (SF). He refers again to accidents in the course of processual experiments, which create habits and change habits to make new ones. This habituality lead to fallible and unhappy fits of knowledge, but aim to leading eventually to the limits of the infallible, and hence happy knowledge. This irregularity follows in the footsteps of evolutionary hope vis-a-vis growing and unavoidable errors: The principle of continuity is the idea of fallibilism objectified. For fallibilism is the doctrine that our knowledge is never absolute but always swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy. Now the doctrine is that all things so swim in continua. (CP: 1.171 =SF, Peirce's emphasis) 15 In the words of Peirce, "the entire universe ... which we are accustomed to refer to as 'the truth' - all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs" (CP: 5.448, note 1). Without saying that this universe is swimming with signs, Peirce implied that we are surrounded with false signs that give us false assurance. Yet we still live and survive by interpreting these forceful signs and sign systems in building our human "reality". Yet Peirce wrote 162

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that "it is not my purpose to doubt that people can usually count with accuracy", adding that "nor does fallibilism say that men cannot attain a certain knowledge" (SF, Peirce's emphasis). We receive false information from sophisticated and conceivable messages. Through our intelligence we "somehow" arrive at signmessages that are encoded, interpreted, exchanged, and translated versions, which are in turn transmitted and sent from one individual or institution to the next. That is our human survival. Our knowledge is obviously fallible, yet our minds have a way to work against the errors. Logically good reasoning is controlled and self-controlled experiences - in other words called Peircean semiosis - through which thinking persons will come ever closer to the ultimate purpose of rational thought, which Peirce mentioned under the term summum bonum. Thinking is interpretive reflection in the form of deliberate, future-oriented, evolutionary action. This feedback converges in the hypothetical long run to law-like uniformity, through the influence of habit. Habits must rely upon the action and reaction (change of action) of individuals. They are adopted, changed, rejected, etc. in accidents occurring in what Peirce called evolutionary science. Experimentation with different habits brings about a feedback process that includes self-control. Its ultimate aim is to arrive finally at the evolutionary truth. Peirce wrote that ... the pragmaticist does not make the summum bonum to consist in action, but makes it to consist in that process of evolution whereby the existent comes more and more to embody those generals which were just now said to be destined, which is what we strive to express in calling them reasonable. In its higher stages, evolution takes place more and more largely through self-control, and this gives the pragmaticist a sort of justification for making the rational purport to be general. (CP: 5.433, Peirce's emphasis). The thinking mind makes the formless and "soft" universe consisting of pure irregularity and chance, into liveable and "harder" objects and events. This making-process from fallibility to possible (or better, eventual) infallibility creates a dynamic and never static organ, with changing form and changing contents. It shapes the contours of experimental science, which consists of evolutionary inquiry, not eternal doctrine. The function of human minds is to guide and stimulate this inquiry in human "reality" and embody it in the triadic framework of categories. The process of inquiry is symbolic and endless, yet it represents different stages of mediation-to-achieve-definitive-truth axioms, with its primary subdivisions abduction, induction, and deduction (discussed above). The central objective of inquiry is "somehow" in history to make it infallible, 163

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that is, structured, orderly, and reasonable. In time and space chronology, this "somehow" lies "hopelessly beyond the reach of our knowledge?" or "after the universe is dead (according to the prediction of some scientists), and all life has ceased forever, will not the shock of atoms continue though there will be no mind to know it?" (CP: 5.409). Peirce's shortcomings of human minds, which can be intelligent but still hopeless in terms of achieving the real summum bonum, the terms of divine reality, made him neither a really skeptic nor a philosopher inclined to negativity or relativity as regards sense, genuineness, and truth in human communication. There is a remedy against the denial contained within fallibilism. The skeptic could eventually embrace God's omniscience "as a regulative but not a speculative conception" (CP: 8.44 = W: 5: 229). Peirce argued that God's knowledge "leaves no question unanswered" (CP: 8.44 = W: 5: 229 ). Semiosis in religious studies creates therefore not an absolute infallibilism but a certain degree of "moderate skepticism" (Hookway 1985: 73): 16 This activity of thought by which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a fore-ordained goal, is like the operation of destiny. No modification of the point of view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape the predestinate opinion. This great hope is embodied in the conception of

truth and reality. The opinion is fated to be ultimately agreed by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality. (CP: 5.407) Peirce's fallibilism "escapes scepticism only by a crucial hair's breath" (Hookway 1985: 73). Evolutionary reality is the remedy that changes Peirce's skeptic view, since it is cheerfully "animated by a cheerful hope" (CP: 5.407). The hopefulness is invested in the supreme value of honesty and persevering inquiry by individual minds sharing a common desire within Peirce's community of scholars to learn and later discover the definite truth (see note I). Peirce's famous dictum "Truth crushed to earth shall rise again" (CP: 5.408 = W: 3: 274) argues this ultimate target, the future belief in the progress of knowledge over the course of time. This creed includes the creation of new ideas and the selfcorrectiveness of scientific inquiry in the scholarly community: ... the opinion which would finally result from investigation does not depend on how anybody may actually think. But the reality of that

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which is real does depend on the real fact that investigation is destined to lead, at last, if continued long enough, to a belief in it" (CP: 5.408) The nature of a sign gives truthful or false expressive propositions for the "essential absurdity to suppose the answer to be brought to human intelligence" (CP: 5.553). Peirce claimed that "truth is the conformity of a representamen to its object, its object, ITS object, mind you" (CP: 5.554, Peirce's emphasis) 17 . Human thought and intelligence is obviously disconnected from truth, which is enforced in the elements of the sign within the dual - both immediate and dynamical - object, the visible and invisible sign found inside and outside of the sign as well as inside and outside of semiosis: What the sign has to do in order to indicate its object - and make it its all it has to do is just to seize its interpreter's eyes and forcibly tum them upon the object meant: it is what a knock at the door does, or an alarm bell or other bell, or a whistle, a cannonshot, etc. It is pure physiological compulsion; nothing else. (CP: 5.554) The object-burden represents "somehow" the sign "in its true light" (MS 599: 28). The sign "is a species of medium of communication" (MS 339D: 526) which "seems to be connected with a purpose or end (and an) object may be said to have an end" (MS 292: 13). It can and will express true or false interpretants, and still "somehow" builds further on them. Two objects exist at the same time, the immediate, sensible object "which is the immediate determination of the sign considered as equivalent to the Object in its determination of the sign", and the dynamical, insensible object "which is the object in its mode of being as an independent agent determining the sign" (MS 292: 16). These two objects may differ greatly from each other (see Gorlee 1994: 53-56). The interpretant represented directly by the sign itself is the immediate object, should be expressed clearly in semiosic activities, and could be truth or false. The interpretant expressing the dynamical object remains unclear; its wholeness is unknown for the interpreter, for whom certain fragments will be all too familiar to him or her. This generates falsehood. In fact, "no general description can identify an object" (MS 283: 129), it needs to be specific for the interpreter, "one of a limited collection of objects" (MS 283: 130). About this Peirce wrote: Otherwise I would say "represented as external" and "represented as internal" or better "represented as real" and "represented as imaginary."

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But to avoid the wrong ideas these suggest, I will take the colorless designations "active" and "passive." (MS 339D: 529) It is also called actual vs. concrete in regard to their "subtle distinctions ... in regard to actuality, or existence" (MS 339D: 539) or "partial objects ... agent and patient" (MS 640: 13):

So, then, a sign, in order to fulfill its office, to actualize its potency, most be compelled by its object. This is evidently the reason of the dichotomy of the true and the false. For it takes two to make a quarrel, and a compulsion involves as large a dose of quarrel as is requisite to make it quite impossible that there should be compulsion without resistance. (CP: 5.554) The object is in itself a Secondness, existing within Firstness in immediate object and within real Secondness in dynamical Secondness. Objects "are divided into figments, dreams, etc., on the one hand, and realities on the other" (CP: 8.12). The interpretant with reference to the dynamical object would in Peirce be more than these brute compulsory forces called Firstness and Secondness, which are still unreasonable but physical or experimentally psychological 18 , but rather secretly oriented toward reason. They "influence our thoughts" that "have been caused by sensations, and those sensations are constrained by something out of the mind" (CP: 8.12). Peirce wrote to his friend William James, who advocated the existence of a finite God, that the person "who interprets that Sentence (Napoleon was lethargic) (or any sign whatsoever) must be determined by the Object of it through collateral observation quite independently of the action of the Sign" (NEM: 3: 2). God is no finite sign, but He is an infinite symbol. Threefold activities, in the form of semiosis including interpretive Thirdness, would then create iconic, indexical, or symbolic messages together, usually a yam-spinning between free invention and the mixture of one or the other element(s) of Peirce's normative science elements. The interpreted sign and interpreting sign are variously influenced by the object "through other Sign, or through collateral experience, or through an indication of how the interpreter of it may proceed in order to identify it" (MS 640: 14).Yet Peirce concludes that "collateral observation, aided by imagination and thought, will usually result in some idea" of new aspects of the research object (MS 640: 77). It evolves "a general drift in the history of human thought which will lead to one general agreement, one catholic consent" (CP: 8.12, Peirce's emphasis). To summarize truth-seeking in the history of "reality," "all human thought and opinion contains an arbitrary, accidental element, 166

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dependent on the limitations in circumstances, power, and bent of the individual; an element of error, in short" (CP: 8.12).

Synechism and Freud Serious errors are present everywhere and pursued in ampliative inquiry too all intents and purposes: from the known to the unknown, from old affairs to new predictions. Peirce, the writer and scientist, was a "contrite fallibilist" (CP: 1.14) and could not disagree with his own, certainly negative, maxim in the vocative case: "Don't believe the road of inquiry" pursued as "you must not be cocksure" (SF, Peirce's emphasis). Despite the errors that we disfortunate humans continuously commit, we possess a remedy, "the beautiful principle of the scientific inquiry ... which leads to closer approximations to the experience which is to follow" (SF). The signs themselves and our receiving minds possess this remedy to ensure "vital scientific growth" (SF) in the future. So, in the end, the final "one corrollary which deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry" (CP: 1.135) will, if changing continually in terms of content and form, continue to change research habits into the future. Firstly, "Life is but a sequence of inferences or a train of thought" (CP: 7.583). This hints at the complexity and overlapping of both sign processes and life processes (or survival processes), the needs of signs to be interpreted and thus developed, or rather to interpret and develop themselves. Such self-perpetuating practices are engaged in by human individuals, animals, plants, bacteria, and viruses. A sign is oriented toward its eventual goal, to be interpreted and to develop itself. A sign that is never interpreted, ceases eventually to be a sign, becomes a nonsign, and dies. Secondly, Peirce's notion of "intellectual curiosity," which leads to fallible semiosis, saves itself through self-correction of its interpretations. "Science has solved its problems mainly by virtue of the spirit of inquiry" and by "really wanting to know (this) involves the acknowledgment you don't know already" (SF, Peirce's emphasis). The creative feeling - Peirce's term for the chance and desire elements in any form of thinking inquiry - is gradually integrated upward in the course of action by controlling and checking its steadily upcoming fallibilism, which lays a claim to its final completeness. We experiment with the inquiring actions and radically rationalize its fallacies as they arise. This transpires through the intermediary of logical categories, coming from quasi-fallible abduction to the self-correction in induction toward the quasiinfallible deduction.

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The assurance reaches us through the following serious errors in different sorts of acquired knowledge: theoretical, perceptual, and even mathematical. In the lecture Scientific Fallibilism, Peirce embarks firstly on gaining knowledge of religious studies, of the image of God (mentioned above): I st by direct experience 2nd by suggestion owing to associations of ideas 3rd by inherited and innate conceptions 4th by inspiration from on High (MS 862: 4 19 =SF) Peirce refers here to knowledge "in one of three or four meanings" (SF), because divine inspiration, the fourth item, meaning revelation from God into human hearts, pretends obviously to provide a certain knowledge, but only has an uncertain class of truth. Inspiration must always possess an infallible nature, since this "sporadic and miraculous" fact (CP: 1.143 = SF) includes disclosure from God's voice in terms of His speaking and humanity's hearing. But it is therefore a fallible experiment, only an instinct or human experiment in accordance with our fallible triple view, excluding God's voice, will and law. "We cannot penetrate the counsels of the most High" (CP: 1.143) Peirce stated decisively. Deification of sacred books in scriptural religions has in the course of history

characterized monotheistic beliefs, although Christianity was, Peirce wrote, "a higher development out of Buddhism, modified by Jewish belief in a living God" (PW: 78). Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are different religions consisting of human revelations, particularly because humans intuit, believe, and read socalled "authenticated" translated texts of the authentic Biblical scriptures, probably written down "somehow" under divine guidance. A penetrating question posed in religious and theological circles is: did God also guide the mind of the translators? This is an embarrassing question, or better a belief, impossible to answer genuinely. Nida argued that the Bible translator ... is caught in the dilemma of "the letter vs. the spirit," for in being faithful to the things talked about, he can destroy the spirit that pervades an original communication. At the same time, if he concentrates too much upon trying to reproduce the original "feeling" and "tone" of the message, he may accused of playing loose with the substance of the document- the letter of the law. (1964: 2-3) And Nida continues:

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To make matters even worse, translators must deal with a medium of communication which is constantly in process of change. To be a useful instrument for social intercourse, language must be able to admit new knowledge and new organization of knowledge. In a sense, it must fit reality or it is useless ... Moreover, it must have sufficient generality of utility to be employed by the masses of the people, and not merely by some small coterie of initiates. It is therefore a private code but a public system of symbols, constantly, if slowly, being remade to fit the exigencies of a changing world. (1964: 3) New knowledge is Firstness, real life is Secondness, logic is Thirdness. Doing or performing that which is divinely willed is a type of faith that truthwise does not transcend a pure philosophical fallacy. Its affirmation would lie in conventional, cultural, or personal forms of faith, and not in the genuine truth. It remains fallible. These public and private beliefs of Bible translators return again to the fallibilistic values of Peirce's categoriology, guiding our beliefs as Firsts, Seconds, or Thirds in feelings, beliefs, or convictions. 20 Peirce starts with the third item, inherited and innate ideas. They give disputable and fallible beliefs, not unlike the acceptance of divine revelations. Traditional actions and reactions exist but "require to be corrected by scientific investigations", though they still give "a root of truth" (MS 862: 7 = SF). Inherited and innate ideas have, despite their misfortunes, a "practical bearing" (MS 862: 7 =SF) according to Peirce. We miss the divine principle of all good, says Peirce, the doctrine of religious trinity (MS 862: 7 = SF). God, Son, and Holy Spirit are symbolic and (in)visible for human individuals. This materiality makes inherited and innate ideas into better pragmatic logical instruments, but they are still fallible beliefs. The second item, knowledge by suggestion owing to associations of ideas lacks further discussion in Peirce's Scientific Fallibilism (Peirce's MS 862 is abruptly discontinued in his lecture). A triadic structure can nonetheless be appreciated in this argument. It starts from inherited and innate ideas as signs of collective Thirdness, followed by suggestion through association as signs of Secondness. This gives harmonious and/or discordant (sinful) contiguity, but not absolute certainty. It is followed by direct experience of the thinking self, with borrowings or better "fragments" (MS 839). 21 Fragments are signs of Secondness, to which the company of Firstness adds to confusion. For direct knowledge, consider the skeptical assurance provided by reading text books:

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Consider, for example, fallacies like these instanced in the logic books, blunders that would justify putting the perpetrator of any of them under guardianship. Suppose for instance the so-called reasoning involves a confusion between rain, such as falls from the heavens, and a reign by the grace of God. Stupid as the confusion is, the things confounded have one point of similarity, namely the pronunciation of these English names. The reasoner has taken this character as a sample of all the characters as the two agree in all the characters [;] of the sample of characters, he has assumed that they agree in all the characters they possess. The sampling is inconceivably giddy, not to say lunatic; still the reasoning really is of the nature of reasoning from a sample. (MS 839: 179 = SF) The reasoning of the sample, fragment-like signs composed by the reasoner could be judged "well or ill" (MS 839: 179 = SF), but it is still "somehow" on the way toward reasoning. Take opposed terms like attention and inattention paid to the varying qualities of the signs: We may grant that this remark is founded on a true psychological observation, without admitting that attention and inattention differ otherwise than in degree, or that there is any threshold, or Schwelle, between them. Considered as a definition of consciousness, the proposition simply restricts that word to a particular kind of selfconsciousness (CTN: 2: 202)2 2 Differences between quantitative and qualitative error-bound differences do not tie their fate to separate (sub)fields, but are proportionate to the amount of motion or the power of force invested and are of the same general nature. What goes unquestioned are the abilities or perfections of the individual self, which is de-emphasized in Peirce's writings. Direct experience is neither certain nor uncertain, because it affirms nothing, it just is. There is no perfect man or woman. This is affirmed by Firstness, lacking feeling of freedom or non-freedom from doubt. The wild speculation inherent in signs of Firstness proves to be the ultimate fallacy. In his writings from 1893, Peirce clearly downplays the person of the person of the interpreter (the reasoner), the user of the known proposition and the actual maker of the interpreting unknown interpretant-sign (Gorlee 1994: 193-195). The reason for this "denial" of actual personality (Colapietro 1989: 63) could be the result of the rejection of the self in religious studies 23 , where the "evidence" (CP: 7.567) of the community transcends the images of individual privacy: "A man is capable of a spiritual 170

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consciousness, which constitutes him as one of the eternal verities, which is embodied in the universe as a whole" (CP: 7.576). Truth gives access to the infallible, to the God's-eye point of view. Peirce proposed synechism as "the tendency to regard everything as continuous" (CP: 7.565). By the doctrine of synechism, the self of the utterer was deleted, replaced by the godlike utterer. These upward-soaring, and downward-gliding, entities of the fine gradations of fallibilism never lead toward the virtuality of achieving expressive or percussive clarity. Nor are errors in expressions of self, sin, and materiality - or the reverse process: materiality, sin, and self - guided or (self)corrected. Neither are expressions of force, continuity, and evolution corrected - or the reverse: evolution, continuity, and force. These qualitative threesomes I would call angelic qualities, because they serve as missionary omens. They moreover guide the divine principle of all good and lead to all happiness, particularly in logic and religious studies, as different from each other as these kinds of inquiry may be. After Peirce's forced resignation from Johns Hopkins University, he worked as an active research scientist employed for the Coast and Geodetic Survey. From 1885 on, Peirce reoriented himself to a new lifestyle in which he researched the doctrine of categories and conception of truth values. Evidence of this renewed semiotic-philosophical course can be seen in his An American Plato: Review of Royce's Religious Aspect of Philosophy, his One, Two, Three: Fundamental Categories of Thought and ofLanguage, and Types of Third Degenerate in the Second Degree, all written in 1885 (W: 5: 221-253). His renewed attention to such semiotic-philosophical issues was again made plain in 1893, the year Peirce wrote his lecture on Scientific Fallibilism, the subject of our present chapter. Peirce's daily life became chaotic and his monetary situation dire after he left his job at the Coast and Geodetic Survey on December 31, 1891 - in no small part because of the high and dandyish lifestyle led by Peirce and his wife Juliette at their country house Arisbe in Milford, Pennsylvania, and particularly in the archetypal marketplace of New York City. Money became more than an emotional fix; from an indulgence of the senses it skyrocketed from ego expression to the actual stress of worrying about all ( self)indulgences, small and big. This and other matters are discussed in Brent on Peirce's biography ( 1993 ), particularly in Chapter 4, "Paradise Lost". Peirce's contributions to the periodical The Monist laid out the ultimate workings of his triadic categoriology, but regrettably Peirce "never achieved his fantastic - and intoxicated - purpose of explaining the universe, material and immaterial, etc." (Brent 1993: 208).

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Peirce's evolutionary cosmology is comprised of five essays, and ends in 1893 with his famous essay Evolutionary Love (CP: 6.288 ff.), the latter written during in 1893, the same year as Scientific Fallibilism was composed (Walther 1989: 226-227). He once again engaged with the issue of religious studies, the "queen of sciences" (CP: 1.40), a subject in great vogue during Peirce's epoch. He argued that, together with other sciences, religious studies in fact formed one science "of the great empire of ideas" (CP: 7.569) so as to compose "the onement of religion and Science" (CP: 7 .578). Peirce understood the idea of the spiritual influences of agape, that form of self-less love which God extends and which He most appreciates in return. Peirce focused on how the impact of humankind in terms of creative love, the problem of evil and "its everlasting solution" (CP: 6.258). Peirce's theory of synechism is sketched in this triple formula, where the element of a continuuum, his sign of Thirdness, prevails through the transformation of changing habits from Secondness containing its potential or actual cross-sections in time and space. Peirce wrote eloquently about habits, "unshakably established or to be forever exploded" (CP: 7.569). These work together in a synechism that is never fixed, but volatile and dynamical, and that change and transform parameters of time and space from what can be called a penumbra of insensible unconsciousness into continuous consciousness. The Thirdness of evolution occurs in the company of physical and mathematical laws as Secondness and matter as effete mind as Firstness (Santaella 2001, quoting Peirce's terms). In ordinary life, religious ideas suffer ... a degeneration in religion from a perception to a trust, from a trust to a belief, and a belief continually becoming more and more abstract. then, after a religion has become a public affair, quarrels arise, to settle which watchwords are drawn up. This business gets into the hands of theologians: and the ideas of theologians always appreciably differ from those of the universal truth. They swamp religion in fallacious logical disputes. (Peirce 1958: 354) The religious (political, scientific, and otherwise) ideas degenerate by gradations of clarity, they are all fallible and false degrees. The "soft" Firstness becomes relatively "harder" in Secondness, and more gradually vital in the degree of Thirdness regarding evolutionary matters. And vice versa: in regeneration, because a genuine sign with a "perfect and qualified existence . . . must be understood only of phenomena to the exclusion of their underlying substrates" (CP: 7.596) of unconscious soil including "appreciations, depreciations, hopes, fears, joys, and pains ... [; it is the sign] deprived of its content, context, texture, and felt qualities" (MacDonald 1964: 345). 24

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Synechism has to do with continuity (CP: 7.565) and means ethymologically the "continuity of parts brought about in surgery" (CP: 7.565 footnote 28). Parts as force (Firstness) and fluidity as continuity (Secondness) generate the "unattainable limit of experience (which I call the Absolute)" (CP: 7.566) - that which should be embodied in the summum bonum in its quality of ultimate and errorless Thirdness. Thinkers who would gain freedom from local conventions and unthinking habit, and who would instead embrace Peirce's (endless and symbolic) synechistic pragmatic ism, must declare themselves utterly antagonistic and favor Peirce's thinking and interpreting triadicity: Synechism, even in its stalwart forms, can never abide dualism, properly so called. It does not wish to exterminate the conception of twoness, nor can any of these philosophic cranks who preach crusades against this or that fundamental conception find the slightest comfort in this doctrine. But dualism in its broadest legitimate meaning as the philosophy which performs its analyses with an axe, leaving as the ultimate elements, unrelated chunks of being, this is most hostile to synechism. (CP: 7.570) Peirce adds that "physical and psychical phenomena are entirely distinct" (CP: 7.570), thus separating body and soul, form and matter (Walther 1898: 226). The synechist prides him- or herself on the complete wholeness of signs, which Peirce refers to as "phenomena": "In particular, the synechist will insist that all phenomena are of one character, though some are more mental and spontaneous, others are more material and regular. Still, all alike present that mixture of freedom and constraint, which allows them to be, nay, makes them to be teleological, or purposive" (CP: 7.570). Here, Peirce uses the "archetypal idea" (CP: 7.576), his term of spiritual consciousness, of the division into three over- and underlying elements: Firstness with Secondness to Thirdness. The myriad forms of these interact dynamically with each other to lead to the future. Humanity's symbol-using activities produce these dreams to embrace a much larger reality through a montage of interlocking patterns of meaning. Dreams produce these myriad forms of bricolage out of original and "utterly irreponsible" Firstness (CP: 1.342). Ifit possesses "thisness or thatness" or "hereness and nowness," narrative semiosis moves upward toward deepest desire (Secondness) to fresh ideas (Thirdness) (CP: 1.341 ). Peirce gives new example from a "practical" text, which announced Peirce's pragmatic plan: the recipe for cooking a traditional apple pie (CP: 1.341 ). The keyword is the passionate desire to make a copy or replica, a single individual 173

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apple pie following the general rules of the cookbook and using new ingredients like juicy apples. Peirce's term "pleasure" is translated into the feeling, choice, and plan. During the culinary activities a delightful artifact is created through the triadic workings of Peircean references as well as pre-Jungian archetypes: "A man is capable of a spiritual consciousness, which constitutes him one of the eternal varities, which is embodied in the universe as a whole. This as an archetypal idea can never fail; and in the world to come is destined to a special spiritual embodiment" (CP: 7.576). These observations seem to forecast later archetypes of the Jungian collective unconscious, creating a harmony of conscious life and unconscious background. As known, these suggestions are borrowed from Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), who begins with the analysis of dream images in order to explain the significance of (not Peirce's, but "general") symbolism in dreams and archaic images in art. 25 Let me insert an addendum on the revolutionary significance of Sigmund Freud ( 1856-1939), both Peirce's contemporary and Saussure's contemporary in Europe, yet unknown to both of them. At the same time as Peirce was working in isolation on his theory on fallibilism, Freud, also in isolation, was introducing his new ideas on psychoanalysis, including a book on errors in linguistic interaction. The Interpretation ofDreams was published in December 1899, but was postdated to 1900 so as to inaugurate the new millenium. The book landed Freud little success in influential psychiatric circles, which in those days were

largely unconcerned with the symptomatic treatment of mental illnesses. A few years later, in 1904, Freud published his P~ychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud 1938, first and revised English translation book I Psychopathology of Everyday Life 35-178 and revised translation of 1913 of book II The Interpretation ofDreams 179-549). Freud wrote those early works on linguistic influence on his own, in scientific separation from his colleagues. As Freud wrote in his memories about the origins of his psychoanalysis, he wanted to uncover the sexual meaning of his patients' "secrets of the alcove" (Freud 1938: 937). His new method in psychoanalytic theory was poorly received by the rest of the medical world (Shands and Meltzer 1973: 8 ff. and passim). Later Freud was successful and became the absolute icon of psychoanalysis in the new century: So that the very secret of knowledge which stands at the basis of psychoanalysis was offered in the mode of a secret communication later denied public acknowledgment. The original secret concerning origins is conceived to itself require effacement in secrecy. And like the secret of the confessional, it issues from a closed and protected space, the alcove, a recess in which the dark recesses of the soul are explored 174

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and revealed. The place of the confession and the need for confession seem to touch on hidden secrets whose revelation, in the proper transferential relation of knowledge and power, take place in a closed circuit of communication which, protected from divulgence to the outside, may have healing results. (Brooks 2000: 89-90, Brooks's emphasis) Unlike Jung's analyses, the Freudian dream (Firstness) and surrounding dreamworld (Secondness) forged in the dreamer a therapeutical antagonist in the person of a truly prophetic dream interpreter (Thirdness ). The Psychopathology ofEveryday Life presented the novel thesis that slips of the tongue, errors, accidents, and faulty memories are symptomatic actions which, therapeutically and interpretively, should be regarded as disturbing conflicts caused entirely by unconscious motives. The dynamic psychology led to the invention of Freudian psychoanalysis, which seeks remedies for the neuroses generated by nervous disorders. The explanation of the neuroses includes the role of amnesia in terms of changing space and time. Amnesia seeks to repress neurotic forces by turning their percussive contents into the kinds of unconscious behavior mentioned above. These forces are described as symptomatic and unconscious (non-logical) actions in The Psychopathology ofEveryday Life. The treatise describes the nature and reasons behind the actual mistakes uttered by the patients. Freud's reflections are based on striking instances of a multitude of errors taken from personal histories, which indicated patients' childhood experience as the original source of the errors. The mysteries of the human psyche disturbs the mind through accidents that occurr in "everyday life." The instances sketch "the multiformity or vividness of the morbid manifestations" (Freud 1938: 178). Although Peirce and Freud did not know each other, Freud's explanations of fallacious disorders present "somehow" recall Peirce's sketches of the expressive forces and modalities of semiosis.

On Freud's view, the mind survives in the forceful struggle for practical existence -a process guided by Darwin's "natural selection" based on chance, heredity and environment. The latter are also referred to in Peirce's laboratory inquiry. Furthermore, Freud's psychoanalysis is a form of inquiry that experts use in treating patients, usually done in the same fashion as Peirce's scientific inquiry. Freud's associate and psychoanalytic psychiatrist, who was simultaneously first editor and translator of Freud's writings into English, Abraham Arden Brill ( 187 4-1948), aptly describes this kind of inquiry of trial and error:

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The discoverer begins with some nucleus, some kernel of material, which for some unconscious reason takes possession of him. He then compulsively elaborates upon it through a long labor of trial and error until it is accepted by others - one might say, until he forces its acceptance by others. For no matter how true a thing may be, the world-at-large at first refuses to believe it. The world-at-large is the conservative old sage, who regularly objects to anything new and accepts it only after experience has demonstrated the truth of the discovery, and thus forces conviction upon him. I am presumptuous enough to feel that psychoanalysis is one of the greatest discoveries of our age. Freud has repeatedly been compared to Darwin, Spinoza, Newton, Einstein, and other great geniuses, whose works were at first combated and repudiated, but finally accepted. (Brill introduction to Freud 1938: 4, Brill's emphasis). Internal and external kinships between the semi-contemporaries Peirce and Freud (as well as Jung and even Saussure) would make a fascinating story of those thinkers as "True Interpreters" (Bloom 1996: 118) - an enterprise that awaits further research and possible incorporation into the doctrine of semiotic signs. 26 Human truth and/or reality in scientific reasoning is the aim of both Freud and Peirce, yet the mechanism in each case are the reverse of each other. One reason for this circumstance is that, in Peirce, the fallacies are treated in an episodic, non-logical fashion. In his extensive yet incomplete writings on the subject, Peirce states his position "not from a strict logical point of view but in a human, mundane manner, as well as my poor talent in that direction will" (NEM: 4: 70). Peirce's first talent directed him primarily from committing errors such as confusing salt and sugar, positive and negative values (Peirce's + and -), up to embarking on his always preferred "intellectual operations" (NEM: 4: 70). Peirce, the pragmaticist and synechist reasoner, used a transdisciplinary mixture of algebraic, geometrical, legal, and logical notations, rules, and doctrines, in order to "exercize one's power of penetrating an author's real thought" (NEM: 4: 72). His "antagonist," the psychiatrist Freud, locates Fehlleistungen in speech. This fully convinces him that unintentional speech blunders during verbal interactions or intimate dialogues in the course of psychoanalytical therapies result from a priori psychic errors. His psychopathology narrates past (and thus unknown) emotions, events and phenomena from the "reality of everyday life." Freud aimed to discover the meaning and significance of the substitute thoughts, that are revealed during childhood regression therapy. The analysis of Peirce's open, telltale and public messages with present data, as well as secret and hidden 176

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messages with absence of clear data, can eventually be found in Freud's writings. The casuistry includes both positive, true uses of good conduct and negative, fallacious applications of good conduct. Both Peirce and Freud used the function of interpretant-signs, but nevertheless continued to follow opposing paths of life. Turning to reason, we find that it belongs to the doctrine of natural and artificial signs. The erroneous experience sees their simultaneous relationships in a holistic fashion. Freud and Peirce happen to receive various semiosic catastrophes as speech blunders. Freud's speech blunders emerge as gaps or failures in the performance of the survival mechanism, and therapy leads backward to a temporary forgetfulness or memory loss involving the actual sign that is produced. It is a discovery of Peirce's object. The failure takes place in the real use of false and "free" substitutes which, as Freud was keen to stress, the analysand always attributes to a more remote psychic motive, action or feeling. Distanced mistakes are in Freud's work the result of an amnesiacal displacement, transposition, fusion, or contamination of taboo, "forgotten" words. In Freud's therapies, they represent the processuality of neurotic complexes existing in private individuals; these complexes are conveniently "translated" "through a strange stream of thought unconscious at the time" (Freud 1938: 60). In contrast, Peirce's lapsus linguae are mistakes in "collective" speech which are at the same time incorrect substitutes; but these are not left to the arbitrariness of sign and object as are Freud's errors. The series of interpretants explores the scene of the crime. Slips of the tongue are often banal in mood and tone. At the same time, they acquire a compulsory attraction. Expressing a cautious combination of enthusiasm and skepticism, they remain false ideas which are fixed in place and time by group habits or by ideological habits that lead to a structure of power and authority - from Firstness, Secondness to Thirdness. Man-made, artificial, sign-ideas take "natural" paths, following in the footsteps of inaccurate, mechanical and common habits (NEM: 4: 70- 73). The new interpretive habit would come "from its proper occasions to others that have some resemblance to them" or it "shall form a contrary habit, a business which will often involve no small expenditure of energy" (NEM: 4: 71 ). Peirce's errors form habitual paths forward, leading to unperformed, yet misapprehended or misconstructed interpretive signs. That experience is highlighted next. Errors in Fallacy

Assured of the possibility (through trial and error) of acquiring knowledge from true and false signs, and from triadic (not dyadic) sign-action, Peirce offered

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different versions of errors in his lecture Scientific Fallibilism first definitions are quoted verbatim:

(1893). Peirce's

I st by direct experience 2nd by suggestion owing to associations of ideas 3rd by inherited and innate conceptions 4th by inspiration from on high (MS 862: 4 = SF) In the uncompleted fourth sequence of Scientific Fallibilism, Peirce proposed a new list of errors, as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Reasoning Direct Experience Suggestion Innate Ideas Tradition Inspiration (MS 862: 3 = SF)

The additions in the second version are "Tradition", earlier belonging to "inherited and innate conceptions" (MS 862: 4 = SF), which are now considered to be "peculiar experiences, those of hearing narratives ... namely of the meanings of the sounds heard" (MS 862: 3 = SF). The other addition is "reasoning"": Finally, reasoning estimates the value of the suggestions" (MS 862: 3 = SF). Reconstructing the referential meaning, i.e., the value of not only the immediate, visible object but also the value of extra-semiotic and invisible dynamical object- requires the (always historical) task of text semiotics. Text semiotics involves a significative combination-making of life semiotics, including narrative and discursive semiotics, which assures the survival of virtues together with virtual errors made by the human species. Theology, philosophy, literature, or another ideological or literary system of ideas seduces, moves, and instruct within the framework of a narratives that serve purposes in the context of some speaking, social and changeable group identity. Group networks offer an experimental study of the self-organized potentialities of groups or tribes, when they set out to solve specific problems. In this way, Peirce's pragmaticism thereby transcends essential and substantial Firsts, which are self-referential but have no essence, no substance, no things-in-themselves in the semi-open doctrine of his categoriology. Peirce's concept of information takes its origin from man's circle of society:

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Man makes the word, and the word means nothing which the man has not made it mean, and that only to some man. But since man thinks only by means of words or other external symbols, these might tum round and say: 'You mean nothing which we have not taught you, and then only in so far as you address some word as the interpretant of your thought.' (CP: 5.313) To explain this paradox, Peirce states that, "men and words reciprocally educate each other; each increase of a man's information involves and is involved by, a corresponding increase ofa word's information" (CP: 5.313). Peirce's somewhat obscure concept grows outward, from man as a sign toward his circle of society, the growth of man as sign reaches harmoniously a wider and wider society, to encompass both the whole society and fragments of it. This devotion to community, on Peirce's view, takes effort and energy, dominated by the vibrating current of force, in order to win the whole community of scientists. Instead of personal success and other professional and private life goals, truth should be the central criterion for building the ever-changing, processual, and smoothly flowing new society. Peirce returned once again to fallibilism in his notorious MS L 75, called Logic: Regarded As Semiotic, written in 1902 (Robin 1967: 180). In it he applied, with a 76-paged manuscript, for an extensive research grant from the newly founded Carnegie Institution of Washington, DC. The grant would enable him to complete his treatise on logic, which he had been writing in drafts for the last thirty years and which he had arranged to consist of a series of 36 memoirs. This enterprise, no doubt fueled by Peirce's long-time geographical and financial isolation in Arisbe, never came to fruition. His , undeservedly rejected by the Executive Committee of the Carnegie Application, includes prospective summaries of memoir 26 On Fallacies. 27 Peirce's intent and purpose were ... that these memoirs should not only be scientific but that they also be useful. I propose to devote this to fallacies, because I think, though it is not an attractive subject for a logician, that I make the discussion very useful. I shall not attempt a strict theoretical development, but shall discuss fallacies under five heads, according to their causes, showing under each head how they come about, how we can avoid them in original reasoning and in controversy, how to detect them and reply to others who fall into them. The five heads are: 1st, slips; 2nd, misunderstanding; 3rd, fallacies due to bad logical notions; 4th, fallacies due to moral causes; and Std, sophisms invented to test logical rules, etc. This will thus be of an entirely exceptional character among 179

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the mem01rs ... (MS L75: 169 emphasis)

=

NEM: 4: 25-26

=

JR, Peirce's

This memoir was rephrased twice by Peirce, chronologically in draft D and draft E. Draft E repeated, in a more expanded form, the five classes of committing fallacies: 1st mere slips, like errors in adding up column of figures; 2nd, misunderstandings; 3rd, fallacies having their origin in loose logica utens or faulty logica docens; 4th, fallacies having their origins in bad morals; and 5th, sophisms which cannot deceive a sound mind but which try the efficacy og logical rules ... I st, certain rules may be given for checking our reasonings so as to correct slips. 2nd, the ignoratio elenchi and petitio principii are fallacies which presuppose that the logical process is sound. Accordingly, no plea that an argument is one of these fallacies should be entered in case there is an objection to the logical process, unless that objection is to be waived. 3rd, fallacies of the third kind are extremely common, and the remarks under this head ought to be serviceable. 4th, the fallacies of the fourth class are common enough, too: but it is evident that no logical medicine can reach the seat of the disease. The rules of good logic in good faith. 5th, logic began with sophisms and some of them still merit attention. (MS

L 75: 170 =JR, Peirce's emphasis) Draft D is itself a further development of the earlier memoirs: ... I divide them into three classes, as follows: I st, those whose fallacies are mere slips, such as one may fall into adding a column of figures, which is, indeed, a fallacy; 2nd, those which arise from misunderstanding, such as the ignoratio elenchi and petitio principii; 3rd, those who have their origin in loose logica utens, or more frequently, in the inexact logica docens. To these may be added, 4th, sophisms which really deceive nobody, but which present problems in logic often highly instructive. I make an attempt to enumerate all varieties. Those of the first class are hardly worth noticing; yet still not utterly useless, any more than it would be to call attention to the ways in which there is danger of error in performing an algebraic computation. My remarks about the petitio principii I hope will be useful. In the third class, I call attention to a number of fallacies that are not mentioned in any of the books. Such, for example, is the extension of the doctrine of the burden of proof to cases where it has no meaning,

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but where formalistic reasoners appeal to it as a source of knowledge, as if it were a law of nature. Another class of examples of fallacies, to which logicians are especially liable (and logicians are the most fallacious reasonners in the world), are objections to arguments as being fallacious which are, in reality, sound, and are merely understood by the objector to be arguments of a different kind from what they profess to be. (MS L75: 276-277 = NEM: 4: 61 = JR, Peirce's emphasis) Peirce editorializes about his reviews for The Nation: "The books are full of pretended refutations of fallacies where the reasoning criticized is really sound. Indeed, my observation leads me to conclude that persons of good sense whose minds are not vitiated by logical notions rarely fall into fallacies, unless they be mere slips" (MS L75: 277 = NEM: 4: 25-26 = JR). Subsequently he pursues faults and errors that he encountered in German and English logic books. Another lengthier but incomplete draft, unmentioned in Ransdell's version (JR), is quoted entirely in Carolyn Eysele's earlier The New Elements ofMathematics. An abbreviated version without many specific details goes as follows: In that quite non-logical way, it seems to me useful to divide fallacies into five classes, according to their causes. Class I consists of fallacies due to mere slips, such errors as one may committ in footing up a long column of figures. . .. We may as well consider putting salt in one's coffee and sugar on one's potatoes as fallacies of this description. ... Class II consists of misunderstandings, particularly the petitio principii and ignoratio elenchi ... But in attempting to refute the reasonings of others, one has to take pains to understand just how they have reached their opinions. The common mistake is that one thinks of a line of thought by which an opponent might have reached his opinion, and then hastily assumes that it is that process that he has followed .... For if you accuse an opponent of making an assumption which he has no right to make, you have not only to show that he had no right to make the assumption, but you have further to show that this was not a mere side remark, but that it is essential to his argument. ... Class III consists of fallacies having their origin in a loose logica utens or in a faulty logica docens. This a large class of very common fallacies, perhaps the commonest of them all. A large part of the memoir must be devoted to them. One common fallacy consists in urging that the "burden of proof' lies upon the opponent to a purely theoretical proposition in order to establish it without any knowledge of the matter at all. The burden of 181

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proof is strictly an affair of legal procedure, where, owing to the necessity of deciding each case one way or another, certain rules of presumption are adopted by the courts. There is something analogous in other cases in which questions must be decided, and in which there are some recognized rules for deciding them in the absence of data. But a purely theoretical question need not to be decided at all, and therefore, in such a case, there is no "burden of proof' (NEM: 4: 70-73, Peirce's emphasis) Peirce in his constant definitions and redefinitions plays the "game" of selftranslation or autotranslation, a procedure common in literary studies, but naturally rare in philosophical and legal discourses. As a self-translator Peirce composes a total of six interpretant-signs with uncertain common classifications provided with old and new meanings. He starts with a brief summary and ends with more far-reaching and detailed messages with new significances: "Peirce revises and refines the content of the doctrine while retaining the form and terminology unchanged. Thus, extensive revisions of position pass unnoticed under a shell of changeless terminology, to the utter confusion of the reader" (Murphy 1961: 88-89). In Scientific Fallibilism Peirce gives two accounts. His first is an abstract, giving only four errors with definitions on use and usage of speech concerning their truth value, also called the concept of being or quality (CP: 1.551 ). The second lists six errors: reasoning, direct experience, suggestion, innate ideas, tradition, and inspiration. It is complete and incomplete, since it gives no definitions. Descriptions would "somehow" classify the fallible errors into the three terms of Peirce's three categories. The nature of the assurance of the errors can be made in terms of the interpretant "as to the Nature of the Assurance of the Utterance: assurance oflnstinct; assurance of Experience; assurance of Form" (CP: 8.374). In early Peirce, the instinct, experience, and form (or thought or habit) correspond to three possible interpreters, namely I, It and Thou (W: 1: 174). They speak of the truthful adequacy of the erroneous verbal message, as it is rooted in the individual essence, outward objectual essence, and communal thought. 28 Peirce's view on the three references of these personal pronouns (as utterers in three universes) are that the verbal message: ... has three relations. The first is its relation to the pure Idea or Logos and this (from the analogy of the grammatical terms for the pronouns I, IT, THOU) I call this relation of the first person, since it is its relation to its own essence. The second is its relation to the Consciousness as 182

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being thinkable, or to any language as being translatable, which I call its relation to the second person, since it refers to the power of appealing to a mind. The third is its relation to its object, which I call its relation to the third person or IT. (W: 1: 174) Peirce continues on the use of false and true in linguistic propositions, stating that they are determined by the quality of the text-receiver's mind involved and are no longer implicated in goodness and badness. He considers them to be triadically informed and therefore ... subject to three distinct systems of formal law as conditions of its taking up these three relations. If it violates either one of these three codes, the conditions of having either of the three relations, it ceases to be a symbol and makes nonsense. Nonsense is that which has certain resemblance to a symbol without being a symbol. But since it stimulates the symbolic character it is usually only one of the three codes which it violates; at any rate, flagrantly. Hence there should be three different kinds of nonsense. And accordingly we remark that we call nonsense meaningless, absurd, or quibbling ... (W: 1: 174, Peirce's emphasis) In our errors, direct experience is false (degenerated) Firstness, belongs to instinctual assurance; this is Peirce's I, usually identified with personalized feeling and chance). Idea-based suggestion and innate ideas give a false idea of Secondness, based on the motion in "reality" coming from outward influences on the self and/or senses of action and reaction; this is Peirce's Thou, reflecting group identity in actual real life. This suggests a (degenerated) First of Secondness, and that innate ideas are a Second of Secondness. Tradition, reasoning and inspiration are false Thirdness, based on thought, learning, or habit; this is Peirce's It reflecting general concepts and terminology we hold to. Tradition is (degenerated) First ofThirdness, inspiration is (degenerated) Second of Thirdness and reasoning is Third of Thirdncss (Potter 1997: 17 and Gorlee 1990). All are fallible signs, but they reflect signs that "somehow" evidence some degree of clarity, so that in the course of serious study and attention they can be invested with virtual infallibility: real Thirds, when humanly possible. In the different versions of MS L 75, complete and incomplete, Peirce continued to classify errors. The classifications, closely related to his categories, are not gratuitous, but necessary in order to get to reasoning. The first version of On Fallacies needed to arrive at "an entirely exceptional character among the memoirs" (MS L75: 169 = NEM: 4: 25-26 = JR, Peirce's emphasis). Divine 183

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inspiration, as a sign of fallible reasoning, was duly eliminated. Logic was, for Peirce, the third of the normative sciences, as he wrote in 1903 (one year after sending the application MS L 75). The second was ethics; the first, aesthetics. The normative sciences are intimately connected with Peirce's categories and investigate "the universal and necessary laws of the relation of Phenomena to Ends, that is, perhaps, to Truth, Right, and Beauty" (CP: 5.121, Peirce's emphasis). They highlight the ends or purposes of semiosic relationship, moving further away, if possibly, from duality until triadic goodness. Normative sciences govern the three kinds of goodness. Esthetics governs esthetically good (beautiful) and/or bad (ugly) feelings. Ethics deals with good (wise) and/or bad (unwise) conduct: The three normative sciences - esthetics, ethics, logic - were associated with three kinds of goodness ( esthetics considers "those things whose ends are to embody qualities of feeling"), ethical goodness (ethics considers "those things whose ends lie in action"), and logical goodness (logic considers "those things whose end is to represent something"). (Houser and Kloesel 1992: xxxi) Peirce's account of the hierarchical dependence of logic upon ethics and of ethics on esthetics, provided a unity in the all-governing fallibilism, which distinguished his version of pragmatic ism from other versions his own pragmatic

maxim (Gorlee 1993). In logic, which is for Peirce coterminous with semiotics, truth is only encountered in the final interpretant, the final norm, and the final and unattainable cause. The rest offers give-and-take errors. Their ideas can "somehow" be used, abused or disused through intervening in "reality," since they build programs which learn from experience. Knowledge can to some extent be intuited, acquired, learnt and even forgotten. According to Peirce's normative sciences, the desired ideal - that is, perfect knowledge - would give esthetic, moral, and logical rules to speech-blunders, the latter being constrained by human attitudes such as vague emotions, economical measures, and spontaneous treatments. Sentiments that are unwished-for, hasty, obstinate, arrogant, and the like are recognized as false, but nevertheless obtrude themselves with great tenacity and become "somehow" the mark of normative ideals. For instance, take unsuccessful Peircean and similar examples of the habits of improper errors in precision and economy. They are all editorial mistakes in mental, ethical and logical use in language: procedural slips, substantial misunderstandings, discomfort with scholarly discourse, manipulations of quotations, misquoting references, scholarly feelings and doubts, deceiving sophisms, contradictory findings, rudimentary or sophisticated 184

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misconstructions of logic, and so on. All these are fallible signs to be remembered by future readers and writers, and thus to be avoided, if we follow Peirce's fallibilistic editorial advice. Peirce, though largely unpublished in his own lifetime (W: 1-6), speaks to us as a talented thinker, logician and scientist. He had to depend on his usage of language in order to earn a living: as a reviewer of The Nation (Peirce 18751887) and composer of over 15,000 dictionary entries for the Century Dictionary (1889-1991, W: 6: lvii-lviii); as indefatigable correspondent with Lady Victoria Welby, William James, and many other scholars (Peirce 1977, CP: 8); and even as a translator (Gorlee 1994: 115 ff., 1996c). Peirce focuses intensely on the tension between the demands of the particular fact and the objective commands, particularly in his incomplete versions of fallibilism. Peirce stated: "Whenever I come across a dilemma, I look out for the fallacy, my experience having shown me there almost was one" (CP: 8.244). The wholeness of a logical integration of words, sentences, and logic would be the only strategy by which to show vitally what semiosis really stands for. This project would mean semiosis with fallacies, occasioned by ambiguity, by ellipticity, by vagueness, or resulting from naive presumption about language (Holowka 1986: 250-251 ). The fallacies reflect the verbal assumptions inherent in the fragile human condition. Peirce aims only to sketch a few symbols of normalcy, greatly expounding on some verbal generalizations that irritated him immensely. Logical errors rule within the mercurial fallibility of signs, and they are the cause of major controversy. Peirce's writings on verbal errors tend to correspond implicitly to one of his three categories, or a mixture of them, as usually in Peirce. Those categories are not named in Peirce's writings on logical ambiguities in fallibility. Logical rules, added in good faith and consonant with Peirce, are mentioned here as the ideal of triadic conditions leading to truth and falsity as conceived by today's human standards: Logic (or semiotic), in turn, has three branches: speculative grammar, critic, and speculative rhetoric. (Sometimes Peirce used different names.) Speculative grammar studies what is reqms1te for representation of any kind; it is the study of the "general conditions of signs being signs" (CP: 1.444). Critic is the formal science of the truth of representations; it is the study of the reference of signs to their objects. Speculative rhetoric studies how knowledge is transmitted; it might be called the science of interpretation. (These three branches correspond more or less to Carnap's syntactics-semantics-pragmatics

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triad, which he learned from Charles Morris, who had probably derived it from Peirce). (Houser and Kloesel 1992: xxxi-xxxii, their emphasis) Peirce's errors in MS L 7 5correspond to logical mistakes. "Mere slips" (I st or Class I) are mistakes in Firsts, fallacies in mere misconstructed signhood-assuch. They belong to speculative grammar ands are "somehow" forgivable. "Misunderstandings" (2nd or Class II) "refute the reasonings of others" and distorts the truth of their arguments. They belong to objectual critic, as First of Secondness (immediate object). Fallacies related to outside semiosis, called here "bad morals" or "bad logical notions" (3rd or Class III), "form an objection to the logical process" and correspond to real Secondness, or Second of Secondness (dynamical object). Sophisms (4th or 5th) that are formally infallible, but fallible in content, belong to speculative rhetoric and are concerned with interpretants and their broad dissemination of knowledge. This section on legal "burden of proof' is cut short, since evidence "invented to test logical rules" is fundamentally crucial for the repair of errors transmitted in good faith. The translational interpretant is an evolutionary sign produced secretly and privately in the mental black box of the translator, then presented publicly to the inquirer as a true copy. It should be characterized as "an Unknowable Knowable" (CP: 6.492 = CF) and is thought to be a true or false belief (or a medium between the two). The belief "is proposed for our acceptance" (CF); for all intents and purposes, whether the belief is true or false no longer makes any logical difference. All logical signs, events, and phenomena are fallible habits. These are embodied in self-corrective propositions and/or flexible belief-habits, and as mentioned above, those propositions and habits spring from dreams and desires: Yet when we consider that logic depends on a mere struggle to escape doubt, which, as it terminates in action, must begin with emotion, and that, furthermore, the only cause of our planting ourselves on reason is that other methods of escaping doubt fail on account of the social impulse, why should we wonder to find social sentiment presupposed in reasoning? (W: 3: 285). The person-oriented sentiment and action of immediate and dynamical interpretants as well as the end of final interpretants, is the end of the chilling collective proof of fallibilism caught up with us in Peirce's quasi-logical versions. Fallibilism ends up in a "virtual reality" identifiable in the collective of scholars, and approaches the level of Peirce's community. God's infallible certainty has "somehow" disappeared into thin air. 186

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An enlightening example of Peirce's conception of scientific inquiry, with its openness, fallibility and his doctrine of infallible intuition, show itself in the interdisciplinary variety of Peirce's book reviews during the forty year period he spent writing them for The Nation 29 . In his reviews, Peirce returned again and again to distinguish carefully the actual practices of sciences from the pseudo-scientific theories which were supposedly "proven" by science .... Thinkers of conflicting viewpoints have always claimed that their particular dogma is "scientifically proven." But in the doctrine of fallibilism, Peirce argues that every claim of knowledge, no matter how basic, is subject to possible revision .... Any theory of knowledge where we can only say that we know something when we know it absolutely is rejected as specious; it is one of the ghosts that has haunted philosophical speculation. (Bernstein in Peirce CTN: 1: 19) The present-time editor of Peirce's writings adds that Peirce demanded genuine scientific realism. Be it philosophical, legal, astrological, biological, anthropological, and so forth. This realism would follow the analysis of proven facts in terms of their spatiotemporal acceptability; that is to say, whether or not those facts are considered to be true: Perhaps the most entrenched dogma concerning the pragmatists is that they are obsessed with utility and conventional practicality. Peirce, himself a victim of intolerance to pure inquiry, severely criticized this tendency in American life. He used the pages of The Nation to plead for a greater encouragement of a disinterested pursuit of truth. (Bernstein in Peirce CTN: I: 19) During the time of Scientific Fallibilism and while writing MS L75, Peirce commented (probably in 1902) on editorial fallacies in an article that appeared in The Nation on May 21st 1903. He attributed these fallibilistic memoirs "in part to editorial skill, and partly to the writers not having to enter into all the details of argumentation (CTN: 3: 129). He added that the authors . . .should awaken to the fact that there is such a thing as the ethics of words, which for them should be about the most sacred part of the moral law; and the sooner they begin to tum their attention to this, the sooner they will experience the satisfaction of the scientific man's conscience, who is faithful to his duty of gathering premises as the 187

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basis of his inferences which only distant generations can draw, and in drawing will first discover what scrupulous pains have been taken to make those premises accurate. (CTN: 3: 129) A significant review on the infallible intuition of argumentative ethics, called "Hegel's Logic Interpreted," serves as a good example of Peirce's procedure (CTN: 3: 122-125). Published in The Nation on May 21st 1903) the review operates as a Peirce-written interpretant-sign of the book-sign Hegel'.5 logic: An Essay in Interpretation ( 1902) by John Grier Hibben. Hibben was president of Princeton University (the successor of Woodrow Wilson) and, in those days, professor of logic, Biblical studies (he was also minister of the Presbyterian Church), and the emergent science of psychology. Peirce, too, committed himself to studying all these inter- or transdisciplinary fields. In the mentioned review, however, Peirce detects serious faults and fundamental errors in the writings of the distinguished American educator. In fact, Peirce, in his "ethics of words" (CTN: 3: 129), repeats mistakes throughout Hibben's book on logic, which he arrogantly dismisses as "some tangles which are perhaps not so essential as they have been thought to be" (CTN: 3: 122). Basically Peirce does attack the intricacies of the entire book. Key passages of Peirce's attacks on the book serve to illustrate the fallibilistic study discussed by himself. Peirce launches his strong fallibilistic criticism with the header "Hegel made easy; Hegel brought to the level of the meanest capacity," a self-serving remark that reflects "only an epigrammatic expression"(CTN: 3: 122). Other epigrams, repeated with different nouns by Hibben himself, drag his work down to the level of what Peirce called "explaining [the book] to a child of five" (CTN: 3: 122). The reviewed and thereby interpreted book for this reason makes it "impossible to interpret him [Hegel] ... to the effect of destroying all the tonicity of his thought and leaving it lax and flaccid" (CTN: 3: 122). Peirce questioned the scholarly attitude of the intended public of The Nation: "Here a professor of logic ... cannot even state the ordinary doctrines of his own discipine accurately" (CTN: 3: 122). The tonicity of Hibben's argument would be its semiotic force (Peirce's Firstness), but its niche as carved out in this book blocks the opportunity of achieving coming-together and, "somehow," a scholarly companionship (Secondness and Thirdness). Peirce examines Hibben's book on several crucial points that make it an "unsuccessful" explanation given to the community of this brute and still unreasonable force. Halfway stuck semiotically, the book is a "thought to interpret experience, and not to anticipate it" (CTN: 3: 124), a degenerate sign displaying no token for regeneration into logical - or for Peirce, quasi-logical - thought.

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Hibben was further characterized by Peirce as a "washy" fallibilist (CTN: 3: 124), who wandered in fallibilistic duality between his "wholly true and its opposite wholly false" judgments (CTN: 3: 123). As Peirce stated: "Who ever maintained such a position? The opposite of the wholly true is that which is more or less false" (CTN: 3: 123, Peirce's emphasis). In Hibben's book "[t]hose parts of Hegel's doctrine which set ordinary logic as defiance - that is to say, the woof and warp of his whole work - are treated as being merely a manner of phrasing" (CTN: 3: 122). Hibben's mistakes regarding the contradictions of the excluded middle in logical analyses were discussed widely by Peirce, who judged him a "false ... loose thinker" (CTN: 3: 123). Hibben's methodology, as concerns the meaning of his judgmental "maxims," the "precise definitions, and precision generally, should be eschewed - [they are] calculated to confuse discussion and to prevent its issuing in the test of experiment" (CTN: 3: 123124). Hibben doggedly followed the so-called "Encyklopiidie," a Hegelian glossary (pre )fabricated for Hibben's own use of the book, which tend to gloss over inadequacies in the data with generalizations. Hegel's Logic Interpreted, Peirce argued, was particularly unsuitable for a work to be presented to the wide community of scholars. All of the discovered editorial errors were valued by Peirce as false signs and then handled as though they were true signs. This is Peirce's complaint. Hibben and other Hegelians, writes Peirce, "dog the steps of their master [Hegel] in almost textual comments [but] are profoundly unfaithful to the spirit of Hegel and his philosophy" (CTN: 3: 124). Peirce considered Hegel's thought to be "anti-evolutionary, anti-progressive, because it represents thought as attaining perfect fulfillment. There is no conceivable fulfilment of any rational life except progress towards further fulfilment" (CTN: 3: 124). Peirce continued, claiming that Hegel "with all that romanticism ... was characteristic of his epoch" (CTN: 3: 124) and he believed genuinely in chronological progress of human thought and thereby in the eventual possibility of human infallibility. In his review of Hibben's book Peirce notes that "ninety years have paraded itself before us since the "Logik" was written" (CTN: 3: 124), with little progress having been made toward human infallibility. Peirce, in considering similar thinking of his time, condemned Hibben's book as "a striking instance of the mental fossilization that results from their method of study" (CTN: 3: 125). Peirce's harsh review of the book - only one of the 21 review articles that he wrote for The Nation during the year 1903 - did not win him the friendship of American logician and minister John Grier Hibben at Princeton University. Overall, Peirce's review aims at a synthetic and critical survey of the named "syllabus oflectures" (CTN: 3: 124). It is in itself an interpreted re-view, a binomial theorem itself that displays a bias against the reader-friendly purpose of Hibben's book. In the review Peirce refers 189

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to fallacies pertaining to translation, which will be studied in the following paragraphs.

Transparency and Traducement in Translation "For fallibilism is the doctrine that our knowledge is never absolute but always swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy," Peirce wrote, and added in conclusion: "Now the doctrine is that all things so swim in continua" (CP: 1.171 = SF). Peirce's doctrine of fallibilism bears on inquiries and errors performed, accepted, or rejected in the range of translation studies. This interdisciplinary field is relatively "modem" and was theoretically non-existent in Peirce's time; by today's standards it must be seen, and in fact is, full of"quasifallacies" and "quasi-errors." This situation clearly shows itself in the scholarly reviews that Peirce wrote for The Nation. Peirce's critical skills are displayed in his review of Hibben's book, see for instance the mistranslations of the implications of German Grund, from the sentence "Alles Zufiillige hat seinen zureichenden Grund," which is corrected regarding implications of "Jedes behauptende Urtheil is zureichend zu begriinden" (TCN: 3: 123). Hibben, having studied at the University of Berlin, knew the German language quite well. Peirce was considered by the editorial board of The Nation to be a general expert on non-American books on logic, science, and otherwise, and was certainly considered a multilingual expert in the strange phenomena existing of "human tongues" (as compared with Peirce's precise system of existential graphs [MS: 280: 35] and further discussed in Gorlee [ 1994]). Translation is a metatextual, linguistic operation and falls under the category of Peirce's verbal-editorial skills. It is acknowledged as, in principle, an unsure individual action ensured by further learning which is "somehow" (inter)woven in (or inside) the translators' minds and becomes thereby higher and programmed learning, shown in the work of the translator. This professional point of view stands out in narratives of translators' experiences over the course of history: The translator's analytical operation . . . aims at setting up rational criteria for evaluating the original. Its purpose is to locate the invariant core of the original and to evaluate the translation objectively as an interliterary communication. Thus it acts as the chief influence on the translator's decisions. (Popovic c.197 5: 13)

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The knowledge of translators can be perceived in a negative vein, as their fallacies and errors. Adapting Peirce's three categories to literary translation, the translation-theorician might give credence to the expert judgment of RussianEnglish translator and translator-theoretician Nabokov ( 1899-1977). Regarding the agony of the (literary) translation, the fallacy lies in the radical melancholy of performing "three grades of evil." Nabokov believes that The first, and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge. This is mere human frailty and thus excusable. The next step to Hell is taken by the translator who intentionally skips words or passages that he does not bother to understand or that might seem obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers; he accepts the blank look that his dictionary gives him without any qualms; or subjects scholarship to primness: he is as ready to know less than the author as he is to think he knows better. The third, and worst, degree of turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into such a shape, vilely beautified in such a fashion as to conform to the notion and prejudices of a given public. This is a crime, to be punished ... (Nabokov 1941: 160) The crime goes from simple adornment and transparency to absolute traducement in the form of caricature, paraphrase or parody, 30 and only covers translating fictional texts (literary texts). The experienced translator of texts of whatever kind, when he or she works alone as an individual interpreter, seeks to concentrate his or her private instruction as the absolute key to improving of his or her translatorial fallibility. Semiotically, this means refinement, accumulation and growth of his or her knowledge over time and place. The translator uses his or her own intuition and learning as a personal enterprise but intuition flows over into public business. The trivial or precise details of this emotional and experiential instruction concerning the intersubjective agreement reached by the translator's variation(s) in his or her second-hand activity, in company of the false comparison of the true and false habits followed by the translator, and together with the capable choices made by the translator, constitute data that are "somehow" analogous to the logical discussion on textual recoding that Peirce uses in laying out his fallacies. The artistic subject of Popovic's and Nabokov's cntJc1sm was interliterary communication with its various stylistic materials and expressive means. Take the translation of commercial, legal, and other kinds of interlingual (or multilingual) communication, the translations of which take a different road. For all intents and purposes, legal translation pursues the source legal system and 191

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language, and is certainly not particularly given to committing fallacies in word usage and errors in breaking grammatical units, such as sentences or paragraphs. Errors would naturally defeat the purpose of standards of correctness in legal translation. This kind of source-based movement normally follows the formalaesthetic equivalence as defined by Koller (1992); it is extrapolated from Nida's formal equivalence translating which is "designed to reveal as much as possible of the form and content of the original message" ( 1964: 165). This occurs in contradistinction to dynamic equivalence translating, which mechanically seeks complete naturalness in the target language text, and tries to relate the target audience to "the closest possible equivalent" (Nida 1964: 159); that is, to the natural modes of linguistic and cultural (in this case, legal) behavior of the target environment. The practical philosophy of source-oriented translating links up with all intelligible and decipherable qualities of the primary, translatable sign, whereas the dynamic equivalence translating is connected to all intelligible and decipherable qualities of the interpretant, the translated and translating sign. Dynamic equivalence tries to forget the original sign, source-orientedness tries to forget the knowledge of the target receivers. The strategy of source-orientedness is one of stereotyped extremes. Even so, it offers legal translators constrained and restrained opportunities to translate terms, to coin certain neologisms, to utilize generalizations, and to create all other lexical terms of active interlegal translating, as far as this is allowable in the target legal culture. Sourceorientedness connects with the concept of the objectified legal text, and the invisible role of the legal translator. This argument is made in Stolze's Hermeneutisches Ubersetzen ( 1992). In legal hermeneutics, the unity of the legal texts is viewed as implicit in the sign. The meaning is "somehow" hidden in the sign and the correct meaning must be actively discovered by the interpreter and translator. The authentic term or sentence or text, its development and the actual intention of legal documents should be released from their primary dogmatic meaning and reconstructed at the discretion of the translator experienced in matters of national and international law. The experienced text-mediator, the sign-maker of a unified sense of the text, performs the new task of the original drafter, which is transferred to its privileged reader, the legal translator. Legal translating creates a liberal but correct and uniform method without performing multilingual and multifaceted juridical fallacies. This relative success governs source equivalence in legal translating. 31 Nida's methodology is argued non-semiotically in House ( 1998), where the quality of translation is assessed according to the "operationalization of concepts" ( 1998: 197). House requires that what is needed, firstly, are "anecdotal 192

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and subjective, including neo-hermeneutic approaches," which includes an account of Stolze (1992). In House's view, the writings of Stolze fall into this category. Secondly, Nida's "response-oriented approaches" are involved in his notion of dynamic equivalence "with three criteria for an optimal translation: general efficiency of the communicative process, comprehension of intent, and equivalence of response" but House added meaningfully that "the criteria prove to be vague and non-verifiable" (1998: 197). House is in fact looking for informative but linguistically-defined rules in order to guide her as judge, but in translation theory she finds no rules to use. House finds no such concepts in Reiss's, Wilss's, and Vermeer's works, and not even norms in Toury's publications 32 (1998: 1998-199). Hence, she must conclude the following: By its very nature, translation is simultaneously bound to the source text and to presuppositions and conditions governing its reception in the target linguistic and cultural system. Any attempt at evaluating translations must take this basic fact as a starting point. What is needed then is a model which attempts to transcend anecdotalism, reductionism, programmatic statements and intuitively implausible onesided considerations of the source or target text alone. (House 1998: 199) House's schema is dually modelled, using opposed linguistic-pragmatic paradigms to sketch the semiotic match-up between sign and interpretant, which House negatively refers to as "a distinction between dimensional mismatches and non-dimensional mismatches ... (so that the) final qualitative judgment of the translation consists then of a listing of both types of errors and of a statement of the relative match of the two functional components" (1998: 199). She distinguishes between two opposed classifications of text and context: overt translation with "overtly erroneous errors," and covert translation with "covertly erroneous errors" (1997: 45). When understood correctly, overt errors are, for target receivers, untranslatable errors in the source text. Covert errors are untranslated errors in the target text and for target receivers, what Chesterman called "expectancy norms" (1993) pertaining to the semiotic or semioticized expectations of target language and culture. There is some confusion in the definition of House's terms. Perhaps overtly erroneous errors are misconstructions to varying degrees of connotative equivalence; and covertly erroneous errors misconstruction in one real denotative equivalence. This classification departs from semiotic doctrine, where equivalence in translation is practically a non-existent entity. 33 Or remaining within semiotics, House meant, maybe, the integration of the internal object 193

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(intrinsic merits of the translatable text) but no dealings with external object (extratextual object coming from the outside source and target milieus, and their relevance to translation). 34 The normative aspect is predominant in House's linguistic-empirical-descriptive approach, dictating how we should translate, not how we actually do translate. 35 House's paradigm excludes the changing values of semiotic-fallibistic theory and concentrates on two fixed types of functional binary and non-binary errors in language and text, in register and genre. Thus her model "is still one-sidedly devoted to overt erroneousness, particularly in the training of translators" (Hatim 1998: 93, pointing to Pym 1992). Following Hatim and further Chesterman (1993 ), I agree with the objection to Pym's argument and reject the supposition that college or university students of a school of translation are able to shoulder the responsibilities put upon trained and experienced translators. A student community is per se unable to share this professional rationality, and certainly does not share our object of investigation (Chesterman 1993: 13). There is not one choice but a set of choices determined by the translator's selective mind. The dual misconstructions (good/bad) offered in House's argument, might well include the opposed (and probably relevant) theories of structuralist dyadic distinctions, but no mention is made of Peirce's triadically informed reasoning, which involves the varying and varied truth value of abduction, induction and deduction applied to translating and translation. 36

We can detect in Peirce's lecture on fallibilism the interpretative problem of the conflict between objectified and subjectified foci, namely source-oriented and dynamical-oriented metalinguistic translating strategies. The three categories are not recognizable as such, but they occur en ensemble in different values inside the same category: positive, negative, and a mixture of both- a virtue turned into vice. Peirce, the optimist, viewed the prospect of the victory, saying "how we can avoid them [i.e., errors] in original reasoning and in controversy, how to detect them and reply to others who fall into them" (MS L75: 169 = NEM: 4: 26 =JR).

An example: the translation of ancient Chinese philosophy into modem European languages is for the translator a complex task: Unfortunately their pioneering work was embroiled in controversy from the beginning, because the translation of Confucius was part of a growing polemical battle. Some - including the translators and editors favored a position that sought to interpret classical Chinese texts in a way that was not antithetical to Christian dogma; their opponents in the 194

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Church bitterly attacked such casuistry, and argued that the Jesuits were abandoning fundamental articles of their faith in a futile effort to reach an accommodation with Chinese superstition. (Spence 1997: 8) For Christian missionaries to translate otherwise would be a theological traducement or treason. A translation of Confucius (c.551-479 BC) by a philosopher would be a traducement because it would lack knowledge of old Chinese characters. A translation made by an anarchist man of letters would certainly lead to a political traducement. Even a translation by a "general" translator would lack historical background, thus becoming a timely, but not timeless, traducement. The translation of such an hermetically closed text - by anyone - would constitute a traducement, unless the translator of it has invested years in gaining knowledge of translating and translation studies, Chinese ideographs and characters, classical Chinese language and literature, moral judgment in philosophy, Confucius and Confucianism, education, cultural identity, ethnocentrism and evolution in China. There is a constant struggle going on between all kinds of temporal, geographical and social strategies, with each individual traducement expressing different individual (but fugitive) subtleties of the involved translator as belief-habits. The translator is not seen here as a flesh-and-blood individual but as a working mind, that is, as a mental sign, or quasi-sign (Gorlee 1994: 192), one that does not touch the surface of Confucius's ancient words, much less the desired, real, and intended meaning of his collected sayings. A traducement is, in brief, a genuine catastrophe; it represents "the principle of the inverse path" (Thom 1985: 184). In performing this "supertask" of including proximity and separation (Maier 1984 ), the translator seeks forces of unification, guidance and documentation in the experiences of his fellow professionals and in the pertinent literature. This is done in order to remove any skepticism about the spontaneous, factual and conventional words of wisdom translated into modem English, Dutch or Spanish, and about decisions made concerning differences in linguistic time and cultural place. This (un)skepticism is the hard and honest criticism of "somehow" treating to recycle old things into new things, with acute awareness that the new things are probably correct (or incorrect) but never infinite. The discovery process involved in the performance and acceptance of translations governs, firstly, the affairs of mysterious creativity; secondly, the justification of uncertainty; and thirdly, the further validation of frailties - all of which goes toward generating scholarly results: the desired translations. This procedure virtually assures at least some personal and professional error. Translators are "swimmers": they "plunge" head over heels into uncertain 195

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diversification of speech, as they seek to increase a variety of poetic, legal, theological, and other disciplines. After taking this plunge, they go on to nurture continuous growth to syntax, semantics, and pragmatics through and by texts, by composing the modem(ized) translations at that particular date and place. For Peirce, this kind of semiosis "somehow" constitutes a leap forward into the mind, a leap made by those mentalities that generate "growth in men's ideas" (CP: 1.40). The connection with actual logic is thereby doubtful, leaving ample room for all kinds of non-logical aproaches. Translators are secret fallibilistic deceivers who give their narratives a recognized means by which they can air their grievances and opinions. They make quasi-errors and commit quasi-fallacy, and usually get away with it. Despite the daily acceptance of human fallibilism, the relationship between the speaker and the listener remains a puzzling affair, because who is to decide on the certainty (or rejection) achieved in the choices made a priori by translators? In fact, translation does not constitute a rule or a law, but an attempt at dialogue about writing, "which is traditionally conceived as monologue - solitary writers and readers hermetically doing their own thing" (Merrell 1995: 42). In sum, a translation would become a unilateral transaction that links further to a contractual or communal foundation. Translation 1s a hypothetical bargain, good or bad or something in between, a false Third. 37 Translators can be classified into three character-types, and considered as signs provided with varied semiotic forces of increasing (and decreasing) refinement and (in)comprehension in their translational work: The first consists of those for whom the chief thing is the qualities of feelings. These men create art. The second consists of the practical men, who carry the business of the world. They respect nothing but power, and respect power only so far as it [is] exercized. The third class consists of men to whom nothing seems great but reason. If force interests them, it is not in its exertion, but in that it has a reason and a law. (CP: 1.43) The principle of synechistic continuity describes the final, yet virtual, arc of actual semiotranslation: art, business, and (trans)mission. Hybridization is, as always in Peirce's categories, both possible and inevitable. At the intemational(ized) level, the synchronic and diachronic variety of fields of translation is manifested in the chronology of the (reversed) transmission of religious texts for evangelization, in diplomatic and legal translators for doing business, and literary translation of old classics, including the activities of the interpreters. 38

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The desired ends are meant to flower "somehow" in a discursive culture that appreciates instruction and communicates teaching, and enjoys new and translated texts. The translations, composed for a "speechless" public can be either a mistake or a misfortune, where a translation becomes a version shown up in "strange costumes" (CP: 1.42). Translators' own dress code are revealed in their trained, professional selves: they are "at home" as opera translators, dictionary-makers, political propagandists, publicity translators, hymn translators, Torah translators, and so on. Translators "motion" the readers of the translation toward trusting their intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic knowledge. The knowledge is carried inside their professional "pockets," in their bodily attitude, in the paradigmas and schemas of their (invisible) translatorial brain. Their forceful knowledge is characterized as "organized knowledge" -a Peircean threesome scientific attitude to be performed in business. Translators wait silently yet expectantly, and passionately make "diligent inquiry into truth for truth's sake, without any sort of axe to grind, nor for the sake of the delight of contemplating it, but from a impulse to penetrate into the reason of things" (CP: 1.44). Translators have no ulterior motive or selfish purpose in serving professionally, and their ethics tend to be non-ideological. Rather, translators provide invisible and quasi-eternal (inter)communicators for use as rhetorical signs, in small-group networks on up to the level of the entire community. Translators busy themselves with essential Thirdness, with factual Secondness and Firstness. These are enshrined in terms suitable for use by interlingual and intercultural translators and interpreters according to their knowledge expertise, skill, know-how, and the like - being equivalent terms for Thirdness, Secondness, and Firstness. Three degrees emanate from the categories of Peircean cosmogony, and appear with different and varied degrees of brillance and clarity in the rhetorical texts to be translated. Translators are agents dedicated to alternative and conflicting (re)(trans)mission of texts. Particular translations may be seen as "'faithful,' 'accurate,' or 'effective"' (Nida 1964: 179), creating suggestive or interrogative, indicative and imperative modalities of the influence of the sign. In this three-way processuality they interlingually and intersemiotically exchange words, paraphrases, and definitions, and (re)question their status in terms of "truth, consistency, or evidential warrant" (Scheffler 1967: 37). Vocabulary encompasses the image of words alone; interjections and exclamations remain at the level of poetic notes, parentheses or outcries, rather than meeting the demand for real communication. A vocabulary "may be said to represent a means of delimiting and sorting what are taken to be things" (Scheffler 1967: 37). Meaning can reach from groups of 197

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words in order to build actual phraseology from a mere few phrases. Phraseology creates meaning as human messages "dependent upon an available conceptual apparatus" (Scheffler 1967: 37). Textology produces statements about standardized meaning; it serves as "a device of reference" (Scheffler 1967: 37), as an instrument that mines the ambiguous wealth of different cultures and treasure of languages. Translators circulate significant information, knowledge and passions around the globe: "These are the men whom we see possessed by a passion to learn, just as other men have a passion to teach and to disseminate their influence. Ifthey do not give themselves over completely to their passion to learn, it is because they exercise self-control" to justify their shortcomings and errors (CP: 1.43). This cheerful, quasi-prophetic vision proclaims the reconstitution of a united life and working friendship between Firstness and Secondness, the two combining to form the genuine wholeness of Peirce's Thirdness, which semiotranslation possesses, but which fallibilistic translators seem to lack. 39 Three-way semiotranslation deals with body-involved gestures, which fuse with the mind to form a unity of the flowing breath of life. The faults and shortcomings in accurate precision and rhetorical economy offer no magical ritual; they exorcize no spasmodic or muscular tour de force. It is also a professional life rife with human errors. Translators are in essence logical utterers geared to merely inertial derivative habits and transformations. They tell

a sad story of ill fortune bringing guilt and shame at errors made and remade by themselves. The translators surrender themselves to a life of essential skepticism and misery when they see the translation was mistaken, turned adrift from the meaning of the source message. This fallibilistic source produces, formally, a dual equivalence or a dynamic equivalence of two-fold correspondence to form and content of the source texts (following Nida 1964: 159 ff.). Despite variations in their tone, mood, and strategy, translators nevertheless possess a judge-like capacity that is enabled by the three qualities of efficient translation: firstly "general efficiency of the communication process", secondly "comprehension of intent", and thirdly "equivalence of response" (Nida 1964: 182). Judges can be wrong to the maximum, minimum, and in between, about anything in the communication of the legitimate translation: the particular value of the sign, the (in)variants of the object, and the truth status of the interpretant achieved. Take, for instance, authoritarian or totalitarian uses of aesthetics, moral philosophy, and epistemology of the translated text to exemply or serve as the model for Peirce's beauty, goodness, and truth. Translatorial adherents of such varying ideological values - suggestive of the semiosic activities in the translators's mind - pursue in fallibilistic strength, force and weakness the semiosic passion offirstperson signs (First), adorned with social forces (Second) to establish communal 198

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contact, thereby establishing regularities that restore continuity and smooth over discontinuity (Third). The mind of translators qua sign-judges "somehow" negotiate the threefold, neurotic road of habitual experiments, and "somehow" escapes the ambush of false/true, narrative life-signs in order to create beauty, goodness, and truth. Falsifiability broke this universality of the translator's art into separate pieces and insisted on the singularity of every act of translating textual fragments; this includes scrutiny of multiple recodings in the translator's mood, manner, and in the end his or her chosen (fixed) strategy. A shift of code, away from translating by decipherment, opens the road for instinctual and body-oriented translated versions that unfortunately do not hold up under strict logic, and vice versa. The universality of truth or God's reality so far fails to fill the gaps and fissures that are presented as a new text forming a transparent medium. A secret not avaible to the future general readership is the fact that "spatial and temporal intervals are not objective [but] are subjective" (McGinn 2002: 39), that is, subject to the moods and manners of each individual translator. Translation studies leads then to the mixed ethology of undemonstrative, fallible social development. Translation is recast in ultimate human fallibilism, which is malleable so that it fits with varying spatiotemporal circumstances. It is logically limited, or even false, or fixed to a certain context, and to some extent partial or deluded, or otherwise constricted. Translation leads semiotically to a subtle sense of immediate and dynamical interpretants, and exists thereby in pictorial graphs or flat space, offering emotional and verbal nuances but never reaching the appropiate target, the three-dimensional finality which leaves no doubt about the truth: the sign of God. It plays a man-made (and woman-made) game without the inclusion of final interpretants. This ultimate error derives from the eternal "quasi-fallacy" and "quasi-error" in all translational (that is, business) action. Translation is never fixed once and for all, never above being changed by men and women of action. It is grounded in this force expressed in fragmentary signs, and what they stand for (their objects) moves ever onward, without reaching continuity and evolution. Still, the future wish for full meaning persists, even if that meaning is impossible to attain.

Errant Errors in Semiotranslation In reference to action, semiotical translation-theoreticians claim with Peirce "practical infallibility in matters of business" (SF). Translation takes place amidst fallibilistic translation studies. There "any observed phenomenon is simply a sporadic spontaneous irregularity" (CP 1.157 = SF). Despite the irregularities, 199

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however, translation studies generate signs of spontaneity depending on "newness, freshness and diversity" (CP 1.160 = SF), three qualities that are influenced by Firstness. Most irregularities in textual nature arise mainly from the texture as a whole, from its divisions and laws, that is to say, from Secondness. Hence, such "irregularities"are not an irregular form but an effect, a fragment, or even a regularity, each of which constitutes a general(ized) sign that embodies Firstness and Secondness, but not Thirdness. Here we encounter a strange but true obedience to relevant forms to new laws, and then to new meanings. Translating embodies essentially a "boundless machine working by the blind laws of mechanics" (CP: 1.162 = SF). Intelligible, humanly controllable mechanisms create a new universe of discourse that is unknown in real life, a universe composed by a "perfectly idle and functionless jliineur in the world, with no possible influence upon anything~ not even upon itself' (CP: 1.162 = SF). Such universes reflect the First-oriented sop to Cerberus. The direct influence of the utterer as translator, judge, and executor is, as always, deemphasized in fallibilistic translation (Gorlee 1994: 192-195). The receivers as quasi-judges survive "somehow" both suggestio veri and suggestion falsi which arrive on their desk. They should, as quasi-judges, build their own truth and untruth on these mixed suggestions, when they choose to adopt, reject, or exclude certain practical translations. Peirce's speaks of "business meaning" in

regard to the purpose of seeing and doing; such meaning is relatively far from Peirce's logical standards of perfection as reflected in his summum bonum. Translations are generally never precise and exact: "I know my opinion is false, still I hold it", yet this message "must be false or true, ... For if it is false it is hereby true. And if not false it is hereby not true" (W: 1: 174). This is "this marvellous self-correcting property" (CP: 5.579) of translation as it occurs theoretically. Peirce wrote that "Theoretically, I grant you, there is no possibility of error in necessary reasoning. But to speak thus 'theoretically,' is to use language in a Pickwickian sense. In practice, and in fact, mathematics is not exempt from that liability to error that affects everything that man does" (CP: 5 .577, Peirce's emphasis). The making of a translation yields neither a deductive conclusion nor a product of mathematical reasoning. Fallibilism, in individual translation, is never absolute, never radical, and never dramatic, but must be regarded as an exploratory style of "somehow" that rouses true belief in individual, human utterers through the simplicity, the passion and the force of Peirce's categories. That is what ultimately gives hope, amidst accidents, to writers, readers, and translators (these last, of course, are a combination of both writer and reader). We can summarize by saying that, in 200

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generalized fallibilistic sign-activity, translators must detect common fallacies by means of experiment. Some of the experiments are sound, some false, some partially sound and false. The experiments happen in the radical signprocessuality of translating within formal and fortunate habits that are actively involved in the single act of translating, performed by one translator to traverse from known discourse to unknown discourse through the halfway intervention of the intermediate value. The knowledge is both extensive, accurate and new. The advantage of accumulated science is the "somehow," the triadic means of making the new, translated sign. The latter has the same characteristics: beauty, goodness, and truth. The translation may denote something viewed with indefinite skepticism or mistrust primarily because it looks new, unfamiliar, or untried; or according to the text's genre, it may look correct, familiar, or conventional. In Peirce's semiotic terminology, textual fragments - such as rhyme, word choice, and stylistic evils of the trade - during the journey from known to unknown, gradually become integrated into the translator's course of action by being (self-)controlled or, ifnecessary, not (self-)controlled. Moreover, those fragments present receivers with certain degrees of quasi-falsifiability and quasi-correctness, in hopes that the receivers will accept their fallible and infallible Secondness. New experiments create new translations through the actual influence of Peirce's semiotic force. According to Peirce, these experiments take place through changing habits which give rise to new accidents and, thus to continuity, inasmuch as they pose problems that translators will need to grapple with in the future. Translators rationalize the sign progressively through the introduction of new habits; they detect faults; and affect textual evolution through their editorial skills and novelty. For an explanation of the habitual - never habitualized - action, reaction and (for some) survival of errors in this game played by an individual translator and a committee of translators, read Peirce's words: The main element of habit is the tendency to repeat any action which has been performed before. It is a phenomenon at least coextensive with life, and may cover a still wider real realm. Imagine a large number of systems in some of which there is a decided tendency toward doing again what has once been done, in others a tendency against doing what has once been done, in others elements having one tendency and elements having the other. (W: 3: 553, quoted and discussed in Gorlee 1994: 228) And Peirce continued the game (of translation) thus:

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Let us consider the effects of chance upon these different systems. To fix our ideas suppose players with dice, some of their dice are worn down in such a way that the act of losing tends to make them lose again, others in such a way that the act of losing tends to make them win. The latter will win or lose much more slowly, yet after a sufficient length of time they will be in danger of being ruined and if the game is quite even, they will eventually be ruined and destroyed. Those whose dice are so worn as to reproduce the same effects, will be divided into two parts, one of which will quickly be destroyed, the other made stronger and stronger. For every kind of organism, system, form, or compound, there is an absolute limit to a weakening process. It ends in destruction; there is no limit to strength. The result is that chance in its action tends to destroy the weak & increase the average strength of the objects remaining. Systems or compounds which have bad habits follow the same course; only those which have good habits tend to survive. (W: 3: 553, quoted and discussed in Gorlee 1994: 228) Fallibilistic errands, or perhaps errant errors, occur triadically in the design, chance and thought that goes into the chores of a sporting event (PW: 73, CP: 2.666). One thinks, for example, of the (un)fortunate game of the pack of cards in different varieties in all other games. The pack of cards gives different effects - chance, bad luck or success. Semiosis explains and exemplifies the total effect of the development of habits, rules and strategies, embodied in three-way interpretants, and making them predictable and lucky despite their having serious errors. It also shows that this happens at the expense of other unlucky habits, which do not survive and die as non-signs (see, further, Rescher 1995). The same is true for the semiotic approaches to translation. On the basis of this post-Darwinian, normative capacity of escaping errant error, those translations made according to "bad" habits, as understood in Peirce's sense, represent falsehood and will eventually be lost in the game of composing and evaluating translations. Conversely, "good" translations will again engender other translations; better habits will survive and "somehow" create further interpretantsigns in the future. Ideally, they will in the long run emerge from the winding stream of semioses as individual translations fulfilling the conditions of "truth" the final norm as well as the final cause in translation, where nothing is certain and nothing can be fixed. Translation means true or false reproductions, which I call today "clones." Peirce speaks to the biotranslation of"clones": Thus, if a sunflower, in turning towards the sun, becomes by that very act fully capable, without further condition, of reproducing a sunflower 202

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which turns in precisely the same reproductive power, the sunflower would become a Representamen of the sun. But thought is the chief, if not the only, mode ofrepresentation. (CP: 2.274 =MS 283: 121). Peirce's "repositories of thought" (MS 318: 206) are reasonable workings of Peirce's human and non-human quasi-mind, but reason (Thirdness) is not involved there. 40 Translation seeks to produce ever-increasing variety and growth of all aspects of the source-text, whether those productions are good, bad, or somewhere inbetween. Translation as growth signifies an increased diversification of vocabulary, phraseology, and textology used strategically in the target text so as to figure into the genesis of the source text. Sporadic and systematic growth of the original text outgrows the original constraints on the development of the text, and produces new, discrete textual varieties. Such diversifications are unexpected and new in form and/or meaning (MS 955: 36) but they tend to represent "one and the same impulse" (CP: 6.288). They survive for a period of time, then change occurrs. This regularity moving toward increased irregularity disrupts order into variety, thereby renewing the semiosis of the budding version. Spontaneous chaos disturbs the mutual relations among sign-object-interpretant in the original. The translated text suggests new didactical means by which to learn the new semiosic task. Fact and Fancy ofQuasi-Thought

Undeveloped and degenerate force and continuity as well as evolution are the "three ways of falling short of certainty" (CP: 2.662), that we encounter as fallibilism in translation studies. See the quasi-logical modes of "reality" encountered in translation studies, "probability, verisimilitude or likelihood, and plausibility" (CP: 2.662, Peirce's emphasis) reflecting categorial modes of being "Actuality, Possibility, Destiny (or Freedom from Destiny)" (CP: 4.549), as discussed. The fancy and fact of fallibilism in translating activity connect Firstness with Secondness, of "information and suggestion" (MS 283: 119). But they are not necessarily connected upward to the truth of Thirdness. Reasonable logic is certainly included and excluded by quasi-minds engaged in translating, as well as by their quasi-critics. Yet, the translated signs to be charming, likely and plausible, even with their contradictions, negations, and possibilities: In mathematics, the negative of quantity is zero; but instead of being set over against quantity as its eternal foe, it is regarded as merely the limit of quantity, and in a sense as itself as special grade of quantity. This is 203

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no violation of the principle of contradiction: it is merely regarding the negative from another point of view. There are some languages in which the negatives make an affimative. Those are the hard logical languages. The people who speak them ought, for consistency, to be hard, moral natures. In other languages, probably the majority, a double negative remains a negative, just as 0 x 0 = 0, none of which is none. These are quantitative languages. (MS 283: 109-110) The modes of reasoning triadically unite exactitude, certitude, as well as universality, but they exist in changed and mixed forms in all areas. The "reality" is the reality of the translated text-signs by human quasi-signs, and their equivalent quasi-interpreters. Paradoxically, the "real" translation is fiction. "We should expect the people who speak them to be more humane and more highly philosophical ... though it is not the view of the hard moralist, nor of the hard logician, [it] does not really involve any bad reasoning" (MS 283: 110) (see further Levi 1962). The product or result of translating semiosis includes the idea of "fixing belief' (CP: 5.378ff., see CP: 5.358ff. = W: 3: 242ff.). This happens to varying degrees in the fictional "machinery" (CP: 4.550) that integrates private and social feelings and experiments into quasi-thought (so christened in MS 315 verso pages quoted from the Peirce Edition Project 1998: 532). Absent thought (Thirdness) should here not be taken "in that narrow sense in which silence and darkness are favorable to thought. It should rather be understood as covering all rational life, so that an experiment shall be an operation of thought" (CP: 5.420). Fixing belief, applied to translation experiences, includes, then, the best "perfect knowledge" (CP: 5.420) available to the human machinery coming from quasiminds. The fixing of belief does not lead to truth and reality as we know it in our limited "reality," but remains infallible and error-bound. It is doubtful that such higher levels can be attained via the specifically human varieties and realities of sign-manipulating in the field of man-made translation studies. In translation a perfect sign is no longer a real possibility. Perfectibility is the ultimate human purpose consisting in the ... ability to innovate, to react in novel ways to new situations. The innovator, however, must in the first place be discontented, he must doubt the value of what he is doing or question the accepted ways of doing it. And secondly, he must be prepared to take fresh paths, to venture into fields where he is by no means expert. This is true of major forms of innovation; they make it possible for other men to be expert, 204

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but are not themselves forms of expertise. Freud was not an expert psycho-analyst; before Freud wrote there was no such thing; he created the standards by which psycho-analysts are judged expert. Neither was Marx an expert in interpreting history in economic terms nor Darwin an expert in revolutionary biology. Ifa man is trained, purely and simply, to be expert and contented in a particular task he will not innovate; Freud would have remained an anatomist, Marx a philosopher, Darwin a field-naturalist. (Passmore 1970: 282) And Confucius would have remained an ambassador or even government administrator, though he certainly knew a great deal on archery and charioteering, and even "acquired quasi-religious status" as a philosophical Teacher (Spence 1997: 10). Innovative translation, our first goal, is no absolute perfection attained by quasi-interpreters, it is not dependent on human habitformations "of what any particular mind or minds think those characters may be," yet instead of perfect signs "it imparts some sense to our talking of thoughts" (MS 315 verso pages quoted from Peirce Edition Project 1998: 532). The translated discourse is our goal, but that discourse is pregnant with absurdity and contradiction. A perfect sign possesses unity, harmony and happiness. Perfection has become unsusceptible to primary undeveloped verbal interpretation and translation, its hubris is cognitive and logical. In Peirce's theory, a perfect sign is viewed as an agreed-upon "tolerably fixed" sign, whose allotment of "non-existent abstractions" increases through the translating of signs into signs, and reaches ultimate intellectual knowledge (Peirce's growth). It means that the perfect sign is fixed, easy to reconstruct, it "never ceases to undergo changes of the kind we rather drolly call spontaneous, that is, they happen sua sponte but not by its will" (MS 283 quoted from Peirce Edition Project 1998: 545, Peirce's emphasis). The perfect sign needs the company of imperfect signs with their Firstness and Secondness to have "somehow" access to a Third logical interpreting-sign. A translated sign "will be sort of a cross between a dialogue and a catechism, but a good deal like the latter" (CP: 5.422). Here dialogue and catechism metaphorically refer to the practice of raising and replying to questions and answers, 41 but the push beyond growth to new inventions within institutions or movements of thought would be composed of more than immediate experience and individual sensation. It requires thought instead of quasi-thought. An "interpreting quasi-sign" (MS 283: 119) creates no further perfect sign but produces a mere undeveloped or degenerate sign in the primary form and

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secondary content of a dialogic sign, which may also remain at the primary stage ofmonologic sign. They are none other than Peirce's ... imaginary signs called thought (which) convey ideas from the mind of yesterday to the mind of tomorrow into which yesterday has grown. Of course, then, these "ideas" are not themselves "thoughts," or imaginary signs. They are some potentiality, some form, which may be embodied in external or in internal signs. But why should this ideapotentiality be so poured from one vessel into another unceasingly? Is it a mere exercize of the World-spirit's Spiel-trieb, - mere amusement? (MS 283: 98-99, Peirce's emphasis) Yet the translated sign "has no ulterior aim at all" and possesses no "assertion by proof'; hence the notion that "the continual increase of the embodiment of the idea-potentiality is the summum bonum" (MS 283: 100, Peirce's emphasis) does not exist in translational sign-theory. The translation carries the force "to prove by the minute examination of logic that signs ... should be merely parts of an endless viaduct for the transmission of idea-potentiality" (MS 283: l 00). This happens "without embodiment in something else than symbols, the principles of logic show there never could be the least growth in idea-potentiality" (MS 283: l 0 l ). Imaginary signs, made by an interpreting quasi-mind "of vigorous and intellectual intellectual impulses" (MS 283: 101) work "somehow" without Peirce's logical standards of total wholeness, as they would be reflected in the verifiable form summum bonum which flows out of the act of translating. The latter produces a belief, in which we hold something to be "true, - real, genuine, practical holding for true, - whether that which is believed be the atomic theory, or the fact that it is Monday, or the fact that this ink is pretty black, or what you will" so, "Belief may be mistaken," it happens to "appear" (PW: 72)4 2 to be true in real, genuine and practical quasi-thought, which includes experimentation and accepts, slips, errors, faults, mistakes, tricks, etc. made by the individual quasimind and quasi-interpreter - including the translator's professional duty of making imperfect signs. "This is elevating Modality too high. It should not be the question what the object is in itself but whether it is represented" (MS 399C: 499). The problem is highlighted by the representation of the object in the sign "by its true light" (MS 599: 1902). A perfect sign solidifies experimental wishes and perceptions into (the beginning of) wisdom: Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force outside of themselves 206

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to one and the same conclusion. This activity of thought by which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a fore-ordained goal, is like the operation of destiny. No modification of the point of view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape the predestinate opinion. This great hope is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. (CP: 5.407 = W: 3: 273) A perfect sign would constitute a stable crystallized sign, which "is perpetually acted upon by its object, from which it is perpetually receiving accretions of new signs, which bring fresh energy, and also kindle energy that it already had, but which had lain dormant" (MS 283 quoted from Peirce Edition Project 1998: 545). A translated sign would be false and erroneous by receiving quasi-agents, because it has an internal object but no external object: "it does itself state that it has no object, (yet) it talks of itself and only of itself and has no external relation whatever" (W: 1: 174-175). As a dynamic and changing force of reasoning, a translated sign's lack of constancy of logic and method is acted upon by counterforces that obtain both inside and outside of sign-functioning. Those forces are the immediate object and dynamical object, the powers of which correspond to the qualities and quantities of those objects. The object deals with the influence of the Other, that is to say, with what lies outside the sign. It handles the receiving quasi-agents so to allow agents what is going on in the signs, and to hypothesize about how forcefully the signs in the text wield influence over and orient these quasi-agents towards the signs' originality, common sense, or an attempt to generality. The sign, including the text which is "also a medium of communication" (MS 339D: 526), is determined by two objects that influence the sign's present/absent behavior and that guide the attention of the quasi-interpreter through the sign: (1) the immediate object is the "standing for" relation in the sign-use; (2) the dynamical object, which is absent, and which constitutes the real object outside whatever semiosis the quasiinterpreter engages with. The immediate object reveals itself in the face-value that it presents to the quasi-interpreter. It represents the object, which is itself a Second, in its Firstness, and is "degenerately Secundan" (MS 339C: 498). This is the material for sign-activity (including the activity of translation). While the immediate object is the object "inside" the sign or "the idea which the sign is built upon" (MS 318: 70), the dynamical object is "that real thing or circumstance upon which that idea is founded, as on bed-rock" (MS 318: 70). It represents the object, which is still a Second, in its Secondness, and is "genuinely 207

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Secundan" (MS 339C: 498). The object "outside" the sign (MS 318: 70) elicits and informs the sign without being seen, perceived, or read. The dynamical object is an absent sign, which the "Sign must indicate ... by a hint"; and "this hint, or its substance, is the Immediate Object" (PW: 83). Although the dynamical object is hidden and only indirectly expressed by the sign, careful study of the sign in its surrounding context, together with what what may be called "experience" and, in Peirce's words, "collateral observation, aided by imagination and thought, will usually result in some idea" (MS 318: 77) of what it is about or of what goes on in text-semiotic quasi-thought. The immediate object is "represented as imaginary" and the dynamical object is "represented as real" (MS 339D: 529). The dynamical object, or the object as it would be in itself, abstracted from its from its occurrence and role in certain sign-uses, would in the end correspond to the sum total of the instances of the sign-bound immediate object. This "would be" is the purpose of text semiotics. Knowledge of the dynamical object, the real meaning of the sign, can only be acquired by "unlimited and final study" (CP: 8.183) of the present immediate object in its space-time context. The dynamical object is thus the end result of a series of semiosic processes (Peirce's processuality). This implies that the more knowledge people, including translators, have about a particular phenomenon, event, or other communicative sign used in the text-sign, then the more the immediate object (passive to the sign) and dynamical object (active to the sign), different as they are, will tend to be the same. The interpreter, as the mind of the quasi-interpreter, constructs and manipulates imaginary signs, and in so doing can make any kind of mistakes: The interpreter has no logical right to admit any active object without the specific assurance of a sign. He has a logical right to admit all the passive objects he can conjure up. When the sign has given him the right to admit an active object ... [he makes] active objects [which] may be termed actualities and passive objects possibilities. (MS 339D: 529, Peirce's emphasis) The interpreter, working with the outer flow of speech, cannot penetrate to the level of the "deeper" dynamical object, the "essential ingredient of the Utterer or a sign" (MS 318: 287). The (wo )man-made interpretant remains at the "surface" level of Firstness and Secondness. Interpretation and translation present an object which "can be nothing but a representation of which the first representation is the interpretant" (NEM: 4: 309). All kinds of actual errors, both true and false, are possible, since the translator's quasi-thought works only 208

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through both clear and unclear "indication[s] of how the interpreter of it may proceed in order to identify it" (MS 640: 14). The interpreter works to gain Peirce's "collateral view" of his or her "partial objects" (MS 318: 73). The textsign is fundamentally determined by "the Complexus, or Totality, of Partial Objects. And in every case the Object is accurately the Universe of which the Special Object is member, or part" (CP: 8.177 note 4). This member or part is invisible to the quasi-interpreter's mind. He or she works on the "progenitor" of the text-sign at hand: the "Natural Father" abstracted from the meaning of the real "putative father" (MS 499: 3). Accordingly, signinterpreting activity eventually ceases to face the scenario of "lying signs" (MS 318: 205) in the false, error-bound translation: ... Objective, or Naive, or Rogate Interpretant, that interpretant that the sign itself involves, its self-valuation thoughtless of the possibility of there being any other. There is the dynamical interpretant which is the effect or the result which the sign actually does determine, and there is the Normal Interpretant, which is the true Interpretant, which the sign ought to produce. Its true value. (MS 499 S: 4-5, Peirce's emphasis) This mediation between two objects and three interpretants, all of them changing, creates new thought-signs characterized as quasi-thought-signs with a low degree of certainty, affirming nothing in particular, and subject to correction through further (self)inquiry, etc. (see further Gorlee 1994: 62-66). Peirce poeticizes the fallacy of the displaced individual quasi-interpreter as translator as follows: The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are to be, is only a negation. This is man, "... proud man, Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence." (CP: 5.317)4 3

The (wo)man-sign as translator takes narcissistic pride in his or her abilities and relationships. This is vanity with no semiosis, and it continues despite the loss suffered by the dynamical object in endless semiosis (see Tasca 1997). Translators' quasi-thought are inseparable from Peirce's flavor and reaction that arise from their previous knowledge, and they interpret the mediation of those

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reactions by means of further quasi-thoughts (Peirce's Carnegie's Application MS L 75, mentioned above, see NEM: 4: 18). Peirce's quotation of Shakespeare presents an interpretant derived from Measure for Measure (performed in 1604, first printed in 1623). This tragicomedy - the secondary interpretant - was drawn from the Biblical account by Matthew, the tax collector who became one of Christ's disciples. In that account, Christ says, "For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again" (Matthew 7: 2). This would be the primary sign here, along with the slightly different versions in Mark and Luke: "And he [Christ] said to them, Take heed what ye hear: with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you: and unto you that hear shall more be given" (Mark 4: 24), and "Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again" (Luke 6: 38). Such repetitions with slight variation might appear to be only a text-economical procedure, but quasi-imitation is in fact a special device that has an evangelical significance. 44 Peirce again presented his indirect interpreting-sign by using a few lines from Measure for Measure (Act 2 scene 3). The following lines, spoken by the virtuous heroine Isabella, tell of man's vicious exploration of the hidden pitfalls of morality: ... But man, proud man, Dressed in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence, like an angry ape Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As makes the angels weep, who, with our spleens, Would all themselves laugh mortal. (Shakespeare 1987: 797) Reliable commentators and translators of Peirce's quotes will find themselves engulfed in a maelstrom of conflicting and contradictory renderings, paraphrases, and translations in different academic fields: Bible translation, poetry translation, drama translation, philosophy translation. The scholars and translators ought to understand the historical implications of Saint Matthew's first sign, which was quasi-knowable in the Greek language and culture of early Christian communities; and he or she should also be familiar with the possible meanings of variant interpreting-signs that appear in Mark and Luke. A variety of different English Bible translations are available; the quotation here comes 210

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from the most widely disseminated version of all time, the King James Version (The Holy Bible ed. 1991: 854, 886, 912). In dealing with Measure.for Measure, a moralistic-ethical play, the translator must first understand the sense and wording of Shakespeare's dramatology, as well as secondary literature supposes direct and familiar acquaintance with Peirce's theory of signs. Such familiarity enables the translator to argue with Peirce's poetic suggestions which are intriguingly included in the quite unrelated framework of philosophical discourse. Why? How? To answer such questions, and to gain the kinds of knowledge described above, is no easy task for a quasi-interpreter who aims at "hooking both right and wrong to th' appetite" in order to "follow as it draws" in making new translations (Shakespeare 1987: 800) - and at the same time, without "somehow" committing errors in the various sacred, literary and philosophical texts that he or she creates. The utterer and quasi-sign listens to Isabella's passage to hear what is morally and ethically good and bad, and in-between: Ignominy in ransom and free pardon Are of two houses lawful mercy Is nothing kin to foul redemption (Shakespeare 1987: 800) or better Firstness-ThirdnessThis is Firstness-Secondness-Thirdness, Secondness. 45 The reader's interpretations are interpretations of interpretations of interpretations, and so on. Law-like man "though [he] errs like others" (Shakespeare 1987: 797), appears still to trust his own forceful energy and boundless pride, but both qualities are disconnected from their basis in pure animal instinct. (Take Shakespeare's iconic messages and their poetic imagery of laughing and/or weeping apes and angels.) Man produces strong, if in the long run powerless and fallible quasi-signs; further, he does so without the inspiration or pneuma of divine reason without any impulse of divine reason, the summum bonum. Instinctive ideas are unchanging, whereas applications of habits do change. In Peirce's view, men and women substitute "ridiculous nonsense for unquestionable truth" (SF, discussed above). They rely on their own "assurance of Instinct; assurance of Experience; assurance of Form" (CP: 8.374). But one can never be "cocksure" (SF, Peirce's emphasis) of a feeling, belief, or quasipersuasion when he or she is using Peirce's controlled, laboratory inquiry, which also exists in the translator's laboratory.

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Fantastic Tricks

In view of the quotation from Shakespeare, translation appears as a fallible activity, if and when it is seen as one translator's "series of distinctive efforts" (CP: 5.181 ). Still, a "man goes through a process of thought" (CP: 2.27), and generalized or intersubjective semiotic thought has inferential, portent-like, and predictive results. Such collective work does not present an atomistic succession of separate business actions performed by an "imaginary interpreter" (CP: 5.490 from MS 318). Rather, such collective work constitutes a web of continuous related experimentation, which deals with "only one general theorem" (CP: 5.490 from MS 318) and which as a whole forms a forceful and enforced continuum of meaningful semiosic events. Translating becomes then the logical result of a real symbolic activity, a Shakespearian "fantastic trick," one that is abstracted from the tricks of individual reaction or private sensation. Originally translation was considered to be the "glassy essence," only a mirror-like, transparent, fleeting imagery. This incommunicable message comes from a lonely "prophet" and "looks in a glass that shows ... future evils" (Shakespeare 1987: 797). Messages about the future become public and general; they become then a truly communicable message, in the form of a habit of action that is real, living and changeable as to space, time, and events. The habit expresses the mental willingness to discover and learn, its "verbal formulation merely expresses it" (CP: 5.491 from MS 319) in symbols. A guaranteed set of acceptable and unacceptable habits makes possible cognitive diversification and growth. The discovery of mental fluidity as well as application of habits help establish purpose, infinity, and continuity. Habitbreaking, habit-changing, habit-adopting, habit-rejecting and habit-taking predicts unbrokenness which would exist in the future. The logical and "conditional mood [in] Peirce's '"would-be"' (CP: 5.482 from MS 318) symbolizes the purpose of semiosis. Eventual Thirdness, which bursts forth out of Secondness, can be established by agreement in the community of all associated quasi-minds, not just as the bearers of fragmentary knowledge (and lack thereof), but also as a collection of quasi-interpreters. They can predict, through "humble fallibilism" (SF), a possible search to logical reality: Peirce's "betweenness" (CTN: 3: 191, Peirce's emphasis). The inquiry to reach the Thirdness of would-be is a gift offered through close study and endless investigation carried on to reach the truth "in the flow of time" (NEM: 4: 309). In pursuing their studies and inquiries, most quasi-interpreters prefer "truth to fiction" (CP: 5.494 from MS 318). Instead of imaginary signs composed for fact and fancy by one quasi-interpreter's mind, the community of translators should get rid of certain "mental associations" associated with personal conjectures or 212

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small cliques of indiduals. To do so would help avoid errors caused by such elusive qualities as feelings, quality, and intensity. The community could abandon quasi-person-oriented habits "buried in masses of hardly relevant semioses" (CP: 5.490 from MS 318) and proceed to create the "irresistible effect" (CP: 5.494 from MS 318) of the perfect and infallible sign. The perfect sign, which comes to light if one follows the "unfailing rule" of translating (CP: 5.490 from MS 318), it is manifested via the translatable, sign-internal, immediate object and the (un)translatable sign-external dynamical object (on the grounds indicated above). To reject "mere agencies" and to accept "real agencies" (CP: 5.493 from MS 318) involves an expansion of thought that, though perhaps false, skips the commonplace and the fragmentary, and instead enters the undeveloped domain of idea and content of the genuine logical meaning in final and definitive opinion. Semiosis as a process of perfection is analogous to the purpose and results of a "sporting event" (PW: 73, CP: 2.666). Rather than the view that analogy in terms of the (un)fortunate game of the pack of cards, which was discussed earlier, we see here the fatal and fallible paradox of Achilles, the sportsman who races the turtle inside the Greek stadium. 46 In Greek mythology, Achilles was the son of king Peleus and goddess Thetis. He could run swiftly the word Achilles means "the lightfooted" - but his heel was vulnerable, and this was Achilles' error or weakness. In the course of the Trojan Wars, Paris killed Achilles by shooting an "indexical" arrow into the runner's weak point, the heel. Achilles, in his martial life, won fame as a impassioned warrior. If he was unhappy (Firstness), then defeat was inevitable (Secondness). If he was happy and fought as a hero, his victory (Thirdness) was guaranteed. In these "Games of Logic, involving probably reasoning, but not calculations of chance" (MS 1135: 180, Peirce's emphasis), the dramatic paradox - as a sign of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, that is, of logical argument - reflects the (foot)steps of the intuitive, not real, urge to race that overcomes the fast runner and his slow competitor, the turtle. The footrace is a personal performance of "Agility and Strength" (MS 1135: 101, Peirce's emphasis). Thanks to his effective habit-taking and habit-breaking, Achilles manages to overtake the tortoise, despite the fact that the tortoise has a whole stadium's head start and runs ahead, leaving Achilles to catch up. This peculiar footrace is a puzzle: Zeno argues that Achilles is obliged to run forward to the point where the tortoise started. By the time he gets there, the tortoise has moved to a further point, and so on. In this endless progression, motion is hardly possible; the runners must make the run to the halfway mark, then to the next mark, and indefinitely regress between the first, second, and the third points - all of them 213

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fallible points. The footrace never reaches a preestablished terminus. It presents a continuum problem, in that the length of distances between the two runners will be subdivided infinitely. Such an unsolvable continuum prevents either runner from winning or losing, which is the purpose of any race. To establish a real race with actual winners and losers, one must have an accurate terminus one must place no limit on the time allotted for the runners to reach different points along the racetrack (Gray 1975: 202). The Biblical report of the victory of the footrace is made by Paul saying: "Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain" ( 1 Corinthians 9: 24) followed by Paul's words: "I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight, not as one that beateth the air. But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway" (1 Corinthians 9: 26-27). To have an infallible footrace, understood as a perfect sign, we need an agreedupon and manifested goal or purpose, which can be accomplished in finite intervals in order for us to avoid a more-or-less terminology: "'Achilles is behind the tortoise' and 'Achilles is ahead of the tortoise"' and Merrell adds on the footrace: "There is simply no middle ground" (see further 1995: 194, see also 188-189), but the racetrack does not lead to expansion, or what Peirce called growth. Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the turtle poses an interesting experiential problem; but, however it is to a laboratory problem, it cannot be solved by experiments leading to consistent, common-sense results in "reality." The relationship between the two situations must, in Peirce's terms, be "said to be obscure" (W: 3: 258) (Peirce explains the distinctions between "clear" and "obscure" and between "distinct" and "confused," in his How to Make Our Ideas Clear, published in 1878). As opposed to "hard-science," we are dealing with sign-activity in translation studies, expressed in natural languages that seek to present clear and explicit ideas, by means of "seemingly" (W: 3: 259) unclear and implicit thought (see W: 3: 260). A translator fallibly manipulates his or her quasi-thought, pretending it is infallible knowledge. Human knowledge is fallible. Peirce overcomes Zeno's argument by stating, firstly, that he sees the conclusion as "an act of insight, although of extremely fallible insight ... not controllable and therefore not fully conscious" (CP: 5.181, Peirce's emphasis): Namely, just as Achilles does not have to make the series of distinct endeavors which he is represented as making, so this process of forming the perceptual judgment, because it is subconscious and so not amenable to logical criticism, does not have to make separate acts of inference, but performs its in one continuous process. (CP: 5.181)

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Secondly, Peirce argues that the race between Achilles and the turtle is a bodily problem, the paradox that "a fast runner cannot, as a matter of fact, overtake a slow one," but this argument is only "sound according to some system of logic which admits that sound necessary reasoning may lead from true premisses to a false conclusion" (CP: 2.666). Racing - or translating - from continuum to common sense yields both truth and falsehood. True and false translations constitute an absurd yet sound problem. The would-be is the terminus of all translators translating independently (see CP: 2.665). Translators, at least the fast-running ones, deal with a type of infinity which exceeds that of the normal set of natural numbers. Their goal reaches, in their semioses, a speed and velocity of new differences, which are in quantity and quantity more complicated that a simple footrace. Growth brings forth "the kind of behavior in which the habit becomes actualized" (CP: 2.666) within the growing text of the translation. A translation has three means of becoming actualized: probability, likelihood, and plausibility. This threefold spectrum of truth includes normal cases as well as abnormal ones, which proves that spectrum ... to be a matter of culture rather than physics. Some cultures make many distinctions within one segment of the spectrum; other cultures make no distinctions within other segments but many distinctions within other segments ... The advantage of classifying by continuum is that this emphasizes similarities rather than differences and is thus able to better to do justice to those inevitable individuals that would otherwise fall between the stools. The problem of borderline cases is almost eliminated with a continuum. Ifsomething falls between red and violet, we call it purple; if it falls between red and purple, we call it fuchsia. (Gray 1975: 203) Indeed, there "is no limit to the increasingly refined distinctions that we can make on a continuum . .. in taking animal classification rather than our color classification as our model we are admittedly sacrificing some very real advantages" (Gray 1975: 203). Consider the emotional and bodily expressions of Shakespeare's angry apes and weeping angels, which display fantastic tricks of interpreting and translating signs. Consider literary works, which are the collection of imaginary text signs: Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (which) is thoroughly and unequivocally a work of fiction for all that it was inspired by a sensational real-life murder. Truman Capote's Jn Cold Blood: A True Account ofa Multiple Murder and Its Consequences barely qualifies as fiction ... Not just Gibbon's The Decline and Fall ofthe Roman Empire 215

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but the New York City telephone directory could be subjected to literary analysis ... Fiction is perhaps always concrete, but not all concrete accounts are fictional - for example, the transcript of a trial or the report of a laboratory experiment. In addition to being concrete, these would be examples of the factual ... " (Gray 1975: 203-205). Most text signs are a mixture of cultural categories and their classification depends on degrees of utterance. The interpretation of text-signs relies on categories made by the new utterers (readers, listeners, etc.). Their written translation of text-signs adheres to categories that are created, not discovered, within paradigms of the new source culture. In "reality," logical would-he's are not observed in the translator's laboratory. There, one abandons the idea of providing truth via necessary reasoning or real thought (as opposed to the quasi-thought that translators employ). Such reasoning is replaced by variable shades of "subjective probabilities, or likelihoods" of facts, events, and phenomena (CP: 2.777). The translator discovers, sees and uses all findings, be they black, white, or gray; he or she observe that a variety of textual possibilities can entail impure and fallible errors. But to observe and justify falsehood, in any relevant sense, is impossible for his or her own quasi-mind. A translators' "committee" has created the collective idea of hypothesis, belief, and expectation, no matter how conflicted, ambiguous or

parallel that idea might be. The translators' committee makes communal decisions, for better or worse. Important is the "endless succession of finite times or spaces" (CP: 2.666) in each and every decision or translation, "provided there is no fixed finite quality which every member of an endless part of that series must each and every one exceed' (CP: 2.666, Peirce's emphasis). Decisions or rules governing the unlimited community overcome the doubts that arise in the individual translator's mind. The communal truth of decisions made in future translations must always be jointly discovered, questioned and agreed upon by the collectivity of translators. 47 Fixing Belief

Eco wisely emphasize that "every sensible and rigorous theory of language shows that a perfect translation is an impossible dream" (Eco 2001: ix). Despite the impossibility of that dream, Eco adds that even so, "people translate" (Eco 2001: ix). And the community of translators, with a real professional self, translates even better. The paradox of Achilles and the turtle -a quick mortal and a slow animal, neither of them translators - bears some similarity to the making of translations. Eco writes: 216

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Theoretically speaking, Achilles should never reach the turtle. But in reality, he does. No rigorous philosophical approach to that paradox can underestimate the fact that, not just Achilles, but any one of us, could beat a turtle at the Olympic Games. (2001: ix). The practical activity of making translations camouflages the significance of Achilles' error: the faulty heel whose injury killed him. The heel balances the entire body through tensions, imbalance and contractions. It signifies positive, negative and the intermediate shades of stamina to finish the race against time and space. It means lengthening and shortening, strength and lameness, speed and limping. 48 The concept of heel is equivalent to the ambitions and aspirations pinned on the end result of the translations. Such results (re)validate the awful (t)errors survived by translators, whose loyalties are ever tom between a fast runner (Achilles) and a slow one (turtle). This argument returns us to the creative attitude, success and eventual happiness experienced by translators: their optimal solution is to follow a so-called "minimax" strategy (Levy 1967: 2: 1179). Translators tend, after their deliberations, to make final choices which express alas! - not real and inevitable meaning but "more or less, expressive meanings and stylistic values, though it is probable that, after hours of experimenting and rewriting, a better solution might be found" (Levy 1967: 2: 1180). The minimax strategy translates the various and varying knowledge reflected semiotically in the translators' minds. Levy wrote that translators "adopt a pessimistic strategy, they are anxious to accept those solutions only whose 'value' - even in case of the most favourable reactions of their readers - does not fall under a certain minimum limit admissible by their linguistic or aesthetic standards" (1967: 2: 1180). This relative (and relativized) "value" can be translated into a mixture of Peirce's feeling, practice and intellect. Translation is determined by the predominance of self-generating and praxis-generated knowledge guided by a higher purpose, the logical intellect. The relative hubris of translators provides intellectual knowledge - Firstness and Secondness with aspirations to Thirdness - that goes into minimax strategy, all this linked to the purpose and constraints of quasithought. Levy outlines the limitations of this game of translation, which produces a "payoff matrix" of a community of translators and a felicity of "style preserved+ purity oflanguage preserved" in the translation delivered. 49

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The minimax strategy is a decision process composed of a dual "series of a certain number of consecutive situations - moves, as in a game - situations imposing on the translator the necessity of choosing among a certain (and very often definable) number of alternatives" (Levy 1967: 2: 1171). The sequences are often two opposed alternatives, as is usual the case in structuralist modelling. Yet toward the end of the article on the minimax process, Levy pronounced a threefold categoriology reminiscent of Peirce's Firstness: "the translators in fact make intuitive guesses concerning the possibilities of the different evaluations by readers" (1967: 2: 1181). Levy goes on to examine decisions taken in or during the act of translating different texts. These decisions involve Secondness, which Levy calls the texts' "utility," and linguistic laws intended for "agents" in the audience, that is to say, Thirdness, which he refers to as "standards." This distribution of the actual text and working situation of the translators (translating patterns) is followed by positions adopted by the utterer/receiver/audience. Levy describes the activities of "agents" in the framework of translational semiosis as mixed categorial transfigurations of Peircean quasi-agents. The sign-activity of making translations has been called a superwise supertask (PW: 173; Tursman 1987: 78). It represents "attitudes of thought, but not movement of thought" (CP: 2.27) and concentrates, firstly, on the undeveloped (or underdeveloped) attitudes of thinking that go into the translation, which we understand as the interpretant coming from quasi-thought. Assurance of the translator's abilities is formulated "in an assertion, which, we will assume, has some sort of likeness -I am inclined to think only of a conventionalized one" (CP: 2.27). Ifthe quasi-mind is happy with the iconic premiss of the translation, then the translator "proceeds to cast about for a sentence expressed" that resembles "some previous attitude of his thought ... [and that is] logically related to the sentence presented" (CP: 2.27). If this indexical premiss is true, then the conclusion will also be true, if it turns out false, the conclusion will be false. In this machinery of making and judging translations, cause and effect, demand and supply (CP: 5.382 note 1) are ofa vital order in this "market." Peirce argued that "the self-observer has absolutely no warrant whatever for assuming that that premiss, represented an attitude in which thought remained stock-still, even for an instant" (CP: 2.27). Although "our errors balance one another" (CP: 5.350), inquiry, according to Peirce, must hold to a firm belief of true, unsound and false terms, propositions and arguments (CP: 8.337 and PW: 33f.) in translated signs made by the community of intelligent (by translatology standards) quasi-signs as created by quasi-interpreters. Semiotically and realistically, a translated sign can be asserted 218

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or denied "as if it were" (CP: 8.336 and PW: 34, Peirce's emphasis) the whole translation, but this is not true. Peirce wrote that a "Term is simply a class-name or proper-name" or common noun "that is not true or false", whereas a ''proposition ... is not an assertion but is a sign capable of being asserted" and an argument "need not be submitted or urged" as a proposition or a term, but "as if it were a Sign of the Interpretant or perhaps as if were a Sign of the state of the universe to which it refers, in which the premisses are taken for granted" (CP: 8.337-8.338 and PW: 33-35, Peirce's emphasis). Translation that attains the status of logical argument would be the perfect sign (discussed earlier), but that status is unattainable in quasi-thought. Secondly, if the movements of quasi-thought are followed, then the mind and body of the community of translators hypostatizes Eco's dreams (Firstness), accompanied by the answering of queries, raising questions and making of decisions (Secondness). Peirce argues that questions about "doubt and belief' (CP: 5.370ff. = W: 3: 247, see also W: 3: 261) tend to fix the habit (in Peirce's sense) will ultimately assure the "fixation of belief' (CP: 5.358ff. = W: 3: 242ff.). Constant repetition of self-correcting behavior provides the translator's quasi-thought with the pleasurable and virtual horizons of some truth "affirmed with practical certainty only if by a 'long run'" (CP: 2.664), without that upward effort to create "somehow" a future harmony in translation; a harmony which is not a matter of good luck, nor of holy miracles, but of true and untrue results of semioses that try to achieve the efficient cognitive truth (Rescher 1992: 10 I). so Translation works embedded in a constant, moral force exerted on linguistic expression. It does not spring from taste, or fashion (CP: 5.383), but out of the repetition of flexible habit. The habit of action transforms caricature into the art of eternally adequate belief; it is locally and temporally fixed but not eternally so. The object of translation study - linguistic mechanisms (here, text-signs) grows through the influence of this changing moral force: ... [that] a force is an acceleration, or that it causes an acceleration, is a mere question of propriety of language, which has no more to do with our real meaning than the difference between the French idiom "fl fait froid' and its English equivalent "It is cold." Yet it is surprising to see how this simple affair has muddled men's minds. In how many profound treatises is not force spoken of as a "mysterious entity," which seems to be only a way of confessing that the author despairs of ever getting a clear notion of what the word means! (W: 3: 270, Peirce's emphasis)

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Translation persists through the threefold restless influence of evolutionary force, as "vital and procreative ideas which multiply into a thousand forms and diffuse themselves everywhere, advancing civilization and making the dignity of man" (W: 3: 276). Translation is "an art not yet reduced to rules" (W: 3: 276) and it is never a clear notion. The end, or final product, of inquiries carried out by translation studies is, by analogy, phrased and rephrased in Peirce's essay The Fixation of Belief (CP: 5.353-5.387 = W: 3: 242-257). 51 When the cycles of hesitancy-opinionjudgment have ended, the final and definitive translation is put down. Peirce's final opinion may cover the whole story, but the final norm belongs to the notyet and not-known. The final interpretant is claimed to be a normal interpretant, but is in fact a quasi-proposition (Savan 1987-1988: 66); this means that it remains a semiotic sign which can be interpreted and translated again. Everywhere we are surrounded by new transformations and metamorphoses made by fallible human hands. We mortals reach the truth only locally, associatively and cognitively within our immediate local environment (Rescher 1992: 101), our "reality"; all the rest is unknown territory. Because they work with man-made linguistic and cultural signs, translation studies are fallible, and unfortunately no emergent finality is available. There are no final translations, no final "say" that would calm the nervous irritability (CP: 5.373) coming from the translator's "disturbance of feeling, or sense of reaction [ that accompanies] the transmision of disturbance between nerve-cells, or from a nerve-cell to a muscle-cell, or to the external stimulation of a nerve-cell" (CP: 6.22). On Peirce's view, these phenomena transpire also in the mechanisms of the linguistic text in, through, and between vocabulary, phraseology and textology, so as to reach the so-called final translation for the translator's mind (or translators' minds). Finality is only a temporal "stoppingplace" (CP: 5.397), it would "appease the irritation of doubt, which is the motive for thinking, thought relaxes, and comes to a rest for a moment when belief is reached" (CP: 5.397). This happens to a certain point and to a certain degree. Then there is a break: the "stopping-place ... is also a new starting-place for thought" (CP: 5.397). The ultimate conclusion could awaken new doubts and real beliefs that trigger (certain fragments of) the translation to start anew. The ''.final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition ... which will influence future thinking" (CP: 5.397). Future knowledge, investigation, and different habits of action remain inscrutable and mysterious. Everything is forever doubted; error is everywhere. Our prospects of approaching the successful perfect sign have vanished from sight.

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Settlement of opinion through doubt is reached with the "hard" qualities derived from defective ways of quasi-thought. The question about quasi-thought is, "how hard, and how it got that way" (Fisch 1986: 3). According to Fisch's reading of The Fixation of Belief, Peirce's beliefs constitute a "final" solution (or selfsolution) in a particular time or place, if one construes those beliefs as "final" judgments in quasi-thought - here, the quasi-thought that goes on in the translator's laboratory. The smoothing-over of irritation in feeling, practice and intellect takes place, as always in Peirce, through a mixture of three methods. Firstly, settlements of beliefs stem from Peirce's method of tenacity with which we translators hold firmly to their answers to questions asked of the translated text, "taking any answer to a question which we may fancy, and constantly reiterating it to ourselves, dwelling on all that may conduce to that belief, and turning with contempt and hatred from anything which may disturb it" (CP: 5.377). This method is habitual in translators who work alone. Tenacity is an unsound method, since "clinging spasmodically to the views they already take" does not give real satisfaction. The happiness of the translator arises from using his favorite technical method, hidden for the target audience. This private method creates the public risk of a lack of "fallacies and misstatements" (CP: 5.377). Secondly, tenacity follows the practical judgments of "organized faiths" (CP: 5.380), a committee or association of translators. This is the method of authority, arising from the authorized beliefs of the community. The individual translator defers to the "correct doctrines" (CP: 5.379) at all costs. The translator abandons his or her own instinct and knowledge and he or she engages in communal "sympathy and fellowship" (CP: 5.397). Authority is "no easy task - it became apparent that nature would not follow human opinion, however unanimous" but it certainly teaches "a lesson in humility" (CP: 5.384 note 1). The appeal to authority represents a social, powerful, and sometimes cruel method. While it essentially follows "the path of peace" (CP: 5.386), it permits "all men who reject the established belief [to] be terrified into silence" (CP: 5.379). "Certain non-conformities are permitted; certain others (considered unsafe) are forbidden" (CP: 5.386), if you "seriously hold a tabooed opinion" you are "treated with a cruelty less brutal but more refined than hunting you like a wolf' (CP: 5.386). Methods based on auctoritas tend to do away with dissidents, political as well as translational. Thirdly, since "no institution can undertake to regulate opinions upon every subject ... the most important one can be attended to, and on the rest men's minds must be left to the action of natural causes" (CP: 5.381 ). The individual translator is upwardly mobile again, when following the "caprice either of themselves or of 221

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those who originate the popular opinions" (CP: 5.382). To settle opinions, he or she sees that working alone may be enjoyable but that, in the end, better results come from keeping professional company and from agreements reached by colleagues "conversing together and regarding matters in different lights, gradually develop beliefs in harmony with natural causes" (CP: 5.382). By "natural causes" Peirce means the "willful adherence" to "a wider sort of social feeling" where the method is decided after consideration, and to consider "which agrees with experience, but that which we find ourselves inclined to believe" (CP: 5.382). This a priori method undertaken by "a small band of laboratory men" (CP: 5.384 note 1) offers a communal reservoir of experience "with one natural inclination to adopt" (CP: 5.382 note 1). This group-opinion "delivers our opinions from their accidental and capricious element" but still "only magnifies that of others" (CP: 5.383). It freely and without reservation indulges in making human errors. Again, we are dealing with an unsound method by which to pursue future truth, connected as it is to the (t)errors of human quasi-thought. Fourthly, there is the method of science as "determined by nothing human, but by some external permanency" (CP: 5.384). Here we tum from a belief in "reality" to a belief in Reality. "Some mystics imagine that they have such a method in a private inspiration from on high" (CP: 5.384), as put forth in different interpretants of Peirce's Scientific F allibilism (SF). Such imaginings are untrue and largely a result of Peirce's tenacity discussed above, They correspond to adopting a selfish act of personal guesswork, a mixed argument comprised predominantly of inward Firstness along with the practical effort of Secondness. Let us call this maltreatment of the quasi-sign the quasi-interpreter; this phenomenon corresponds to Nabokov's first grade of personal evil "due to ignorance or misguided knowledge" (1941: 160). On this level, Nabokov finds the translator to have "insufficient acquaintance with the foreign language"; further, such a translator "unconsciously bas[ es] his renderings on some false meaning which repeated readings have imprinted on his mind" ( 1941: 160). Methods based on authority and the a priori appeal to the urgency of lawful acts and the arbitrary force those acts on other translators. These methods form yet another mixed argument, this one predominantly based on the social side of Secondness, and the spontaneous or arbitrary side of Firstness. By contrast, the Thirdness of rational science is "not an appeal to my feelings and purposes, but, on the contrary, itself involves the application of a method" (CP: 5.385) and "encourages us to hope that we are approaching nearer and nearer to an opinion which is not destined to be broken down - though we cannot expect ever quite to reach that ideal goal" (CP: 5.384 note I). It serves as a scholarly method to come from the known to the as yet unknown - or starting from the source text to arrive 222

On Translating Signs

at the target text. This method is semiotically a mishandling of the object-side of the sign: a translator attacks the very purpose of the text when he or she sins willfully, by "leaving out tricky passages" or by leaving in the original, foreign language, whatever tabooed words that seems "obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers" (Nabokov 1941: 160), leaving them in the original foreign words, attacks the purposes of the text. Peirce argues that, eventually, the last and finn belief derives from nervous doubt. Truth exists in the application of the force of habit-taking and the force of habit-breaking, and comes from the mind struggling with one modification after another. Inquiry is a struggle to meet the demands and constraints of logical reason; it obeys the "derivative and approximate" (Fisch 1986: 5) law of demand and supply. The opinions of the quasi-sign and quasi-interpreter may be false, dangerous, or flawed in countless other ways: "Hence it is said that bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic" (CP: 5.385). Nabokov locates the traducement of the interpretant of the text here, where the translator twists things "to his own taste and with professional elegance ... to improve the looks of his victims" (1941: 160). In literary translation, the results in local color being camouflaged, characters violated, and so on, We can deduce now the requirements that a translator must possess in order to be able to give an ideal version of a foreign masterpiece. First of all he must have as much talent, or at least the same kind of talent, as the author he chooses ... Second, he must know thoroughly the two nations and the two languages involved and be perfectly acquainted with all details relating to his author's manner and method; also with the social background of words, their fashions, history and period associations. This leads to the third point: while having genius and knowledge he must possess the gift of mimicry and be able to act, as it were, the real author's part by impersonating his tricks of demeanor and speech, his ways and his mind, with the utmost degree of verisimilitude. (Nabokov 1941: 161) This threeway semiosis involves intercourse among sign, object, and interpretant. Truth, Peirce's goal-directed purpose, gives way to the real and living belief in the self-critical and self-controlled results, the translations: "Truth is neither more nor less than that character of a proposition which consists in this, that belief in the proposition ... To say that truth means more than this is to say that it has no meaning at all" (CP: 5.375, note 2).

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Trial and (T)error: Peirce's Fal/ibilism and Semiotranslation

Attractive, convincing or persuasive translations presuppose the disguise of the fugitive but endless series of trial and (t)error committed by each single translator and by the whole community of translators. This is the "fallacious tendency of thought" (CP: 5.365) that Peirce described in 1877. Returning to that description in 1903, he added a footnote stating that he is not "cocksure" of human quasi-thought (CP: 5.365 note 1, see also SF), an interpretant of his own interpretants. There is no infallible translator: the translator gets under the skin of language by using so-called "Primal Sense" (PW: 131 ), and ... again you must surely be conscious of a power of constructive translation? The ordinary analyser, logical or no, takes to pieces (and in the process reduces the living unit to the dust-grain) but you create, or rather perhaps follow creative footsteps ... (PW: 131, Peirce's emphasis) The judge sees them as much as good or evil. In Peirce's semiotic eyes, the judge sees translators as the very paradigm of virtue and vice in their struggle with a task of monumental difficulty - virtuous and sinners no matter if they represent changing and conflictive habits or Peirce's well-reasoned readiness of musing about the problems, no matter if they slip into self-serving and selfgenerated interests while wrestling with past knowledge in their present translational experience: "Nobody will try new experiments without a leaning to an unsupported hypothesis" (PW: 145, Peirce's emphasis). We close by quoting the words of Peirce scholar Floyd Merrell, in hopes they will provide encouragement to translators seeking to be superwise in performing their supertask: "there is no Infallible Pen, no Great Patriarchal Tongue, no Superreader or Superwriter, but merely the self interacting with its other self, people interacting with people, signs interacting with signs" (1995: 43).

Notes 1 "Reality is in Peirce's view, dependent on the concept of unreality." It is written here in italics. Peirce wrote "reality" (for example see CP: 5.384) to point to its universal Thirdness and to emphasize how it differs from human "reality": Firstness and Secondness. The infinite series of

interpretants classified as true and untrue, real and unreal, etc. - these come from human "reality": "And what do we mean by the real? It is a conception which we must first have had when we discovered that there was an unreal, an illusion; that is when we first corrected ourselves" (CP: 5.311 ). "We" referes to the judgment of the community of human inquirers,

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On Translating Signs

Peirce's "COMMUNITY" written in capital letters, (re)affirrning "a proposition whose falsity can never be discovered and ... contains ... upon our principle, absolutely no error" (CP: 5.311) (see Turley

1977:

113 note 13).

See further introduction to Den Ouden 1975 (especially

"Philosophical Humanism and Interdisciplinary Methodology," 7-10). 2

Here I draw further on Esposito 1980.

3

The theatrical roles of the honey-cakes are similar to Proust's famous madeleines. In A la recherche

du temps perdu, the French tendres madeleines signify the subterranean, hidden memories that recreate Proust's exclusive deja vu. It is a memory sign, a quality of feeling experienced by the narrator (Proust), intended here for readers (including translators!) of Swann in love. In this novel, which is both fictional and autobiographical though composed "somehow" of imaginary signs, the honey-cakes are future-oriented sweets, since as threeway semiotic signs they attempt to embody a form and content amenable to live and death, and to the latter's guardian in the underworld. On the false and true signs involved in the event of deja vu, see Reed's encyclopedia article (1987: 182-184) and then read Peirce's profound argument about "revivification of the effect of the earlier idea" saying that "the feeling of amazement at the 'sense of pre-existence,' as it has been called, amounts virtually to nothing more than the natural confusion of that which is necessary by virtue of the constitution of the mind with that which is logically necessary" (NEM: 4: 257-258). 4

For literature on the semiotic practice of giving culinary items such as honey-cakes see e.g., Douglas

1970 in general; Lehrer 1991 including apple pie, sushi and bagels; for wedding cakes see Charsley 1988. For the sociological-semiotic burden of gift giving as reciprocity with overtones of self-interest and altruism, see Malinowski, Levi-Strauss, Simmel, and others in Komter (ed.) 1996. 5

Secondary literature on Peircean fallibilism (in chronological order), see Savan ( 1964), Tohen ( 1977),

Haack (1979), Kolenda (1977, 1979), Orange 1983, and Almeder (1982); further Holowka (1986). My essay draws mainly on Peirce's primary literature. On assessing the semiotic quality of translation, see in chronological order Stolze (1992) and particularly Chesterman (1993), which contains detailed references); Koller (1997) and House (1997, 1998); for ease of reading, I here quote mostly from publications in English. Schmitt's (1998) study on quality management is mostly practical and does not engage the philosophical issues that interest us here.

6

This is no play on words: translators is often viewed as a feminine profession and in the sense of

classic sex-role stereotypes of "nursing" or "caring" for the future life of a text-sign. The formal correspondence in English man-woman is also found in Hebrew (Genesis 2: 23) "in which the Hebrew word isshah 'woman' is derived from ish 'man"' (Nida 1964: 165).

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Trial and (T)error: Peirce's Fa//ibi/ismand Semiotranslation

7

See also the previous chapter on semiotranslation and the subchapter on abductive translation, as well

as Gorlee l 996a and revised translations into the Spanish language l 996b and the German language 2000. 8

On Peirce's theoretical sciences ofresearch, see further (sub)divisions in: NEM: 4: 15-17 and Peirce's

1895-1986 extensive worksheets on A Classification of Ideas and Words in MS 1135 to replace Roget's Thesaurus. 9

See De Tienne (2001) about the genesis of Peirce's "forgotten lecture" on fallibilism. I am extremely

thankful for receiving the text of Peirce's full lecture Scientific F a/libi/ism, written in 1893 in four sequences, complete and incomplete, to form one whole, a text (coming back to the first chapter of this book). The entire lecture was graciously sent to me by the editors of the Peirce Edition Center in Indianapolis, whom I hereby fully acknowledge in appreciation of this precious gift. Significant portions of the lecture had already been published in the Collected Papers: CP: 6.492-6.493 and CP: 1.141-1.175. The whole lecture-text is reconstructed from a collection of different manuscripts, principally the content of MS 955 (see Robin 1967: 117), Robin called this MS Fa/libi/ism, Continuity, and Evolution, see heading of CP: 1.141-1.175). It is prefaced by other manuscripts: MS 860 (see Robin 1967: 106, Robin called this MS Nominalism, Realism, and the Logic of Modern Science). Despite the editorial bricolage we encounter in Scientific Fa/Iibi/ism, in the form of fragments under different titles published in CP, the present essay refers to the whole as SF (with no page numbers for forthcoming publications). The entire lecture will be published in the forthcoming W: 9. 10

For earlier references to error, fallacy, fallibilism, and falsity, see W: 5: 606-607, on Peirce's writings

from 1884-1886. 11

See Peirce's biography Walther 1989: 226-227; Peirce pairs religion and science from 1893 onward,

a "movement" continued by Peirce's friend and Protestant theologian William James ( 1842-1910) see James' psychological and "universal" discussion in his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience ([1902] 1982). In the Western world, religious values still determine the ethical standards, despite the ever-growing influence of Darwinism. 12

In translation studies, what Chesterman calls "nonnative laws" are a parallel to Peirce's "habit":

"Nonnative laws originate in rational, norm-directed strategies which are observed to be used by professionals. These laws are empirical, spatio-temporally falsifiable, probabilistic, predictive and explanatory" (1993: 1). 13

See note 3. MS 955 (see Robin 1967: 117) was called by Robin Fallibilism,

Evolution.

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Continuity, and

On Translating Signs

14

On new and revised Darwinism, and for fresh insights into Darwinian logic as evolution shaping the

living world, see Gould (200 l) and the review-article Flannery (2002, in footnote l Gould's list of books and articles). The late Stephen Jay Gould's (1941-2002) new Darwinism is certainly inspired by Peirce's three categories and merits further semiotic research. 15

Fallibilism objectified means "in other words, a correct logical analysis will lead one inevitably to a

doctrine of continuity and a doctrine of continuity precludes the possibility of law ever being absolutely precise and exact" (Potter 1997: 160-161 ). 16

See the opposition with McGinn's review article "An ardent fallibilist" (2002). For Peirce, see his

1885 review of Josiah Royce's book Religious Aspect ofPhilosophy (MS 541 = CP: 8.39-8.54 = W: 5: 221-234). 17

This follows the discussion in Johansen 1993: 87.

18

Peirce wrote to Welby on "brute force" (PW: 66-68), arguing that it would mean that the force is

"irrational, that is to say, are incapable of selfcontrol" (PW: 67, Peirce's emphasis). The expression "brute force" means further "force in no measure derived from reason, like the muscular force of a policeman's or huissier's (baillift's) arm, even if it obeys reason; just as a dog is none the less brute for obeying a master who taught him by force of habit, if not by bruter means" (PW: 68, Peirce's emphasis). 19

MS 862 was a "mysterious" seven-page manuscript of 7 pages, now included in Scientific

Fa/libilism. Robin called it On the Recognition ofDivine Inspiration ( 1967: 106). 20

See further Hutchinson (1963, particularly Chapter XI "Images of Biblical Faith"). To further

exemplify the erroneous value of "inspiration from on high" (MS 862: 4 = SF) as regards determinate non-religious statements, Peirce offers two personal testimonies in his capacity as a scientist-scholar:

"If the Angel Gabriel who has been hypothetically maligned so often by suppositions of his corning down and telling the most incredible tales, were to testify that the original height of the pyramid was the periphery of its base exactly in the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference, perhaps I should have to give up" (MS 955: 58 = SF). See also Peirce's skeptic example of reading a book review, saying "I might be willing to accept the assurance of a scholar that a book in a language I could not read and whose contents I did not know, contained a true relation of the events it narrated. But this I should call a most imperfect and unsatisfactory kind of knowledge" (MS 862: 6 =SF). 21

MS 839 was called Fragments by Robin. Now parts of it are included in Scientific Fa/libilism (l 967:

103).

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Trial and (T)error: Peirce's Fallibi/ism and Semiotranslation

22

The Gennan word Schwelle means English "threshold," the doorstep or brink between inward

inattention and outward attention, between unconsciousness and consciousness, and between degrees of falsity and errors which can also be measured. The symbolic meaning of the term threshold was en

vogue in Peirce's days, see William James' (1842-1910) discussion in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). James fleshes out the psychological-pragmatic problems of religion, to reach a threshold of consciousness where "one state of mind passes into another" ((1902] 1982: 144). James explains the concept of threshold further: "Thus we speak of the threshold ofa man's consciousness in general, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all ... Similarly, when one is sensitive to small differences in any order of sensation, we say he has a low 'difference-threshold' - his mind easily steps over it into the consciousness of the differences in question. And just so we might speak of 'pain-threshold,' a 'fear-threshold,' a 'miserythreshold,' and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying too high in others to be often reached by their consciousness" (James [1902] 1982: 144). We might speak ofan error-threshold detennined by the (hyper)critical

and illusionary

impressions and (in)flexible

projection of knowledge of the maker(s) and the utterer(s). This focus simultaneously announces cathexis value, as understood in Freud'. Briefly, cathexis is the strength of urging forces, in response to which the ego or superego prevents the patient from doing the desired activity, also called privation and deprivation so as eventually to gain inner control. The conflict between cathexis and anti-cathexis values can be called the threshold value. Later in this essay we will discuss Peirce's balance of power between doubt and belief, a balance that draws on the power of the same psychic energy between "uneasiness ... a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand" and its solution "a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers" (James (1902] 1982: 484, James' emphasis, see further there). Following Peirce, the concept of threshold includes the vital force which characterizes the semiotic sign to refer to an object and creatively produce an interpretant which gives certain answers but never gives final answers. For Peirce (see further CTN: 2: 202), the sign signifies and thus survives, because it possesses some quality or distinctive property (the force of the sign) which turns it subliminally to some mind into a semiotic sign or representamen. This implies that a sign must be "somehow" puzzling, interesting, intriguing, or otherwise arouse special curiosity in the minds of quasi-interpreters or quasi-minds, awakening those minds to a sudden sense of the threshold of Peirce's processuality. Unlimited semiosis or open-ended sign-interpretation yields three degrees of hardness of beliefs: first comes "maybe" (or "maybe not," second "actually is" and third "must be,'' yet with non-ultimate rule of action. 23

Colapietro speaks of Peirce's "committment to some form of spiritualism (theism?)" as dealing with

"some harsh blows to the individual self' (1989: 63). 24

This idea that Thirds might involve Seconds and Firsts and that Seconds might involve Firsts was

included marginally in Gorlee 1994: 93 footnote 12. This idea is repeatedly stressed by the later Peirce:

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On Translating Signs

"... a symbol, if sufficiently complete always involves an index, just as an index sufficiently complete involves an icon" (NEM: 4: 256 from c.1904, cf. CP: 2.293 from c.1902 and CP: 2.248 from 1903). The reverse ··namely that Seconds may also involve Thirds, as seems to be suggested by Peirce - is to my knowledge a new and unexplored proposition, which is certainly worth pursuing. The key to this problem may be found by starting from the following, earlier quotation, where it appears to be affirmed or denied: "The category of first can be prescinded from second and third, and second can be prescinded from third. But second cannot be prescided from first, nor third from second" (CP: 1.353). Peirce claimed pointedly that everything "must have some non-relative element; and this is Firstness. So likewise it is possible to prescind Secondness from Thirdness. But Thirdness without Secondness would be absurd" (MS 478: 37-38). Awaiting further categorial treatment is the notion that, "though it is easy to distinguish the three categories from one another, it is extremely difficult accurately and sharply to distinguish each from other conceptions so as to hold it in its purity and yet in its full meaning" (CP: 1.353 ). See also my article on degenerate signs, Gorlee 1990. 25

See Jung (l 964). The genesis and history of Jung's archetypes from a semiotic viewpoint (including

all semiotic theories) is certainly a subject for further investigation. 26

See Larsen's earlier article ( 1980). On the interpretation-translation from Freud's German common

sense and scientific phrases and Viennese dialect to (American) English, see Mahony 1982 and Orston 1992. Freud used the term Ohersetzung ( 1) as the equivalent of "verbalization"; more importantly, (2) neuroses and symptoms are for him translations of unconscious material; and (3) the analyst's interpretations are also translations; thereby implicitly referring to Jakobson's third category of intersemiotic translation, as well as implying that psychoanalytic treatment must be equated with the process of semiosis (quoted from Gorlee 1994: 22 footnote 22 and 147 ff.). On metaphorical and metonymical uses of the term "translation" in poetry and prose that tend to depart from reality, see Shands and Meltzer who argue as follows: "He [the psychiatric patient] 'translates' or transforms patterns into different forms of expression, almost in the way in which mathematical problems may be solved at different levels of abstraction. Of particular interest is the translation from (a) a schizophrenic rendering to (b) an 'acting-out' rendering to (c) one manageable in a relatively standard psychoanalytic context. With each successive 'translation' the patient demonstrates a considerable gain in 'reality testing'. The luck this patient had in avoiding serious conflict with legal authorities is also remarkable" (1973: 69 and 74-75). 27

MS L 75 consists of five draft versions and a final version of Peirce's application to the Carnegie

Institution. Our material includes paged MS L 7 5 from the Peirce Edition Center in Indianapolis, the version published in NEM: 4 (1976, edited by Carolyn Eisele) and in Joseph Ransdell's internet transcription project (1998). The memoir is called OfFallacies and On Fallacies. For references, see

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Trial and (T)error: Peirce's Fallibilism and Semiotranslation

the bibliography for this chapter, and also Peirce's biography (Walther 1898: 282 ff.). On Peirce's concept of contractuality, see Gorlee 1994: 202 ff. 28

Peirce's I, It and Thou are not coextensive with Freud's triad id, ego and superego.

29

"During this period (1869-1908), The Nation combined in its pages what is only to be found in

several different types of journal: commentary on recent political events; reflective articles on current intellectual issues; notices and reviews of specialized books and articles. Peirce primarily reviewed scientific and philosophical literature, though occasionally he had an opportunity to indulge his interest in intellectual biography and even reviewed some books on wine .... There is plenty of evidence that Peirce looked upon his reviewing as hack work, that he felt restrained in what he would say, and that his reviews were severely edited. But at the same time, Peirce could use his reviews for exploring some intricate problems" (Bernstein in Peirce CTN: I: 17). It is significant that these problems necessarily had to abstract from his own theory of signs and his doctrine of categories, both of which were unfamiliar to the audience of The Nation. 30

See further in the previous chapter on semiotranslation, the subchapter on "Image, model,

metaphor." 31

This procedure is also followed in translation of religious or theological texts. In translation-

theoretician Nida's tradition (1962) discusses the fidelity of the religious message and its influence on new receivers, that is, fidelity to historical, ethnic, social, and other characteristics in the target milieu. On the semiotic approaches to hermeneutics, see Gebauer ( l 986). 32

Initial, preliminary, and operational norms are analyzed and studied in Toury's later work, but are

unmentioned in House (1998: I 98), Toury's work is also discussed in Chesterman (1993), an excellent and well documented article on professional norms and expectancy norms. See further the report by Baker on norms ( 1998: I63-165) and an MA thesis on norms in Toury's works, which I directed at the University of Groningen (Dijksterhuis l 993). 33

See further on equivalence from Peircean semiotics, Gorlee 1994: I 70ff.

34

Textual expression and impression will be discussed in semiotics later in this chapter, in reference to

immediate and dynamical object. " See further Koller (1997: 81-82) and particularly Chesterman (1993: 11 ff.) on the gap between "ought" and "is."

230

On Translating Signs

36

See previous chapters on structuralism and abduction. House adopts Halliday's sociolinguistic and

social-semiotic

focus (from interactional

communication

a

la Buhler) to analyze

functional

approaches. House uses for her idealization a threefold method (not Peirce- and not Morris-linked): lexical, syntactic and textual means of the profile of original and target texts (see figure House 1997: 108 and its discussion in chronological overview in Munday 2001: 92-95). 37

Chesterman wrote that "good translations and bad translations are nevertheless both translations"

(1993: 3, Chesterman's emphasis). See further on translational-contractual semiosis, Gorlee 1994: 197223. 38

See the articles (under the aegis of UNESCO) in Delisle and Woodworth (eds) (1995).

39

This vision returns to the parable of the valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37: 1-14). The meaningless

Firsts, old bones thrown together in a grave as the corpses of penniless refugees, are infused with new life by a forceful breeze and put on new flesh and new clothes (to give them an extensive function, their Seconds) to reign supreme as a significant army to edify believers: to strengthen or intensify their Thirds, which they lack. See Peirce's reference CP: 6.429, mentioned above. Peirce alludes to the valley of the dry bones, the latter being "clothed with all the warm flesh" (Peirce 1998: 381 taken from MS 283). 4

° Cloning,

as an evolutionary subject, is vital in future semiotics and translation studies. For

biotranslation, see Kull and Torop (2003) and Gorlee (forthcoming 2004, 2004a). 41

Peirce suggests that Ernst Mach's ( 1838-1916) views on philosophy of science within the principles

of airflow in analytical mechanics can metaphorically be persuasive or convincing "to those who by 'homilies' and 'catechism' are engaged in propagating a 'religion of science"' (CTN: 1: 187). 42

Peirce continued thus: "Belief that could not be false would be infallible belief and Infalllibility is an

Attribute of Godhead. The fruit of the tree of knowledge which Satan told Adam and Eve was to make them equal with God was precisely the doctrine that there is some kind oflnfallible belief' (PW: 72). 43

For an explanation of Shakespeare's "glassy essence," see Singer who explains the title of his book

Man's Glassy Essence: Exp/orations in Semiotic Anthropology as follows: "Scholars do not all agree in in their interpretation of Isabella's speech about man's 'glassy essence' in Measure fiir Mearnre. Some have suggested that 'glassy' usually means 'brittle' in Shakespeare, although it is difficult in this particular context to interpret a 'brittle essence.' A more common suggestion is that 'glassy essence' means 'mirrorlike' or 'reflecting,' and a philosopher has recently discussed ths interpretation of Shakespeare's lines around the notion that man is a mirror of nature" (Singer 1984: 1). Singer (1984:

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Trial and (T)error: Peirce's Fallibilism and Semiotranslation

202-213) provides bibliographical references to Rorty (1979) and Grabes (1975), but not to Eco's essay Mirrors, published in 1984, the same year in which Singer's study was appeared in print. 44

Here we focus on written signs, and set aside the problem of original speech signs, in ordinary and

Biblical life or in theatre performances. 45

Contours of the categories can have differential fallacies, as Peirce tells us: "Since we are always

able, subject to more or less certainty, to arrange feelings in order of succession, it follows that they are capable of being measured, with probably errors smaller or greater, such as belong to all measurements" (CTN: 3: 191 ). 46

The philosophical demonstration from Zeno of Elea ( 490-430 BC) is called the paradox of Achilles

and the turtle (or tortoise); see further Vlastos (1967). This paradox is discussed by Peirce CP: 2.27, 2.665, 5.181. 47

Turley asks the following questions: "The unlimited community of the Achilles' Heel of this theory?

how can we be sure that investigation will go on forever? moreover, even if it does, what assurance is there that agreement will ever be reached? Peirce was aware of these difficulties and it would seem that his final answer was that we must hope for the continuance of investigation and its ultimate agreement ( 5.407)" (1977: 113 note 15). We hope to be able to count on the continued existence of the community of translators now, tomorrow, and in the internationalized future. Concerning Peirce's "ultimate agreement" (CP: 5.407) see Randell's definition of objective inquiry in a Peirce's sense, with an anthropological flavor, as a "communal hunt: "Hey, everybody' I think it went that way! Look; here are the signs. Now I interpret them to mean that ... " But it is really no metaphor. Human beings were hunters before they were warriors or growers even, and we will always be on the hunt for something. Objectivity is the form of the communal hunt for the truth, and it seems to me that this is what scientific should be construed to mean as well" (Ransdell I 986a: 238, Ransdell's emphasis). 48

In Hindu occultism studies, "the heel forms the centre of one of the plexuses in esoteric lore, and

bears a relation to the balance and tensions of the body. When in contact with the ground the heel emphasizes the body's associations with gross and practical things. Conversely a posture with the heels raised from the ground signifies aspiration godwards, ambition, hubris and imbalance" (Walker I 977: 151). 49

For translation as a game, see further Gorlee 1994: 67-85. In Lev)''s generative, structural process

the minimax strategy happens amidst the opposition between "purists and non-purists" (1967: 2: I 1801181 ).

232

On Translating Signs

50

Rescher speaks here on effective hardware and software for productive inquiry; see further Rescher

1995. Peirce wrote on "the question of free-will and fate in its simplest form, stripped of verbiage, is something like this: I have done something of which I am ashamed; could I, by an effort of will, have resisted the temptation, and done otherwise?" (W: 3: 267). 51

Peirce's essay The Fixation of Belief will be read, cited and interpreted according to the

extensive reading in the Collected Papers (CP: 5.358-5.387). It contains Peirce's 1877 article as well as the footnotes which he added later, in the years 1893, 1903, and c.191 O; the notes are especially interesting in as much as they shed light on the development of Peirce's thought. The Fixation ofBelief in the Writings (W: 3: 242-257), contains only the 1877 article.

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239

Name Index* A

Brent, Joseph 171 Brill, Abraham Arden l 75f.

Aarseth, Espen J. 26f., 29, 83

Brinker, Klaus 21

Abrams, M.H. 69, 133, 138

Broden, Thomas F. 88

Adam, Jean-Michel 88

Brooks, Peter 17 5

Aesop 83

Bruss, Elizabeth W. 88

Allais, Alphonse 56

Biihler, Karl 231

Allen, Sture l 9f.

c

Almeder, Robert 225 Anderson, Douglas R. 127f., 137f. Anderson, Myrdene 10, 133

Capote, Truman 215

Aristotle 58, 85

Capra, Fritjof 18

Augustine, St. 99

Carnap, Rudolf83f., 185

Austin, J. L. 38

Castafiares, Wenceslao 135

Ayim, Maryann 135f.

Charsley, Simon 225 Cherry, Colin 28

B

Chesterman, Andrew 132, l 93f., 225f., 230f. Chomsky, Noam 31, 35ff., 41, 43ff., 48, 53,

Baker, Mona 230 Barthes, Roland 10, 33, 49ff., 53, 75ff.

84, l l 6f., 135 Colapietro, Vincent M. 137, 170, 228

(chapter "Text and Interdisciplinary

Colby, Benjamin 33

Texture")

Confucius 194, 205

Basho 99

Courtes, J. 19, 29, 46., 49, 72, 90

Baxtin (Bachtin), Michail M. 42, 51, 84

Cummings, E.E. 99

Beaugrande, Robert de 23f., 29, 34, 39 Berenda, Carlton W. 155

D

Bernstein, Richard J. 187, 230 Bertinetto, Pier Marco 24

Darcy, Laura Louise 27f.

Bloom, Harold 176

Darwin, Charles 160, 162, l 75f., 202,

Bohm, George 13 7

226f.

Bonaparte, Napoleon 62, 166

Descartes, Rene 118

Boston, Louise 27f.

Deely, John 12, 18

Brend, Ruth M. 85

Deledalle-Rhodes, Janice 10

' References in the Name Index do not include bibliography.

Name Index Delisle, Jean 231

Gibbon, Edward 215

Den Ouden, Bernard D. 135, 225

Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von 63, 114

Derrida, Jacques 49

Gorlee, Dinda L. 11ff.,42, 55, 75, 83, 86, 89,

Descartes, Rene 118

IOlff., 105, 107, 132, 134f., 137f., 147,

Douglas, Mal)' 225

155, l 83ff., 190, 209, 226, 228f., 230f.

De Tienne, Andre 226

Gould, Stephen Jay 74, 160, 227

Dijk, Teun A. van 25, 35f., 84f.

Grabes, H. 232

Dijksterhuis, Fokko 230

Gray, Bennison 83, 214ff.

Dreiser, Theodore 215

Greenlee, Douglas 60

Dressler, Wolfgang U. 23, 34, 39

Greimas, A.-J. 19, 29, 46, 49, 71 ff., 75,

E

Gunn, Giles 20

Eco, Umberto 32, 55ff., 74, 84f., 89, 102,

H

88ff.

138,232 Einstein, Albert 176

Haack, Susan 225

Eisele, Carolyn 181, 229

Halliday, Michael 22, 35, 231

Esposito, Joseph L. 10, 13 7, 225

Harris, Zellig S. 34, 42ff. Hartmann, P. 34

F

Harweg, Roland 34 Hasan, Ruqaiya 22, 35

Fay (Peirce), Harriet Melusina 10

Hatim, Basil 194

Fillmore, Charles J. 43, 46

Hausman, Carl R. 114

Fisch, Max H. 60ff., 147, 223

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 189

Fizeau, Armand Hyppolyte 151

Henle, P. 133

Flannel)', Tim 227

Hen!)', Patrick 65

Fodor, J. A. 37

Hermans, Theo 105

Foster, Bel)'! 10

Hertum, Jorrit van 13

Foucault, Jean Bernard Leon 151

Hibben, John Grier l 88ff.

Foucault, Michel 50

Hirsch, William 86

Frank, Anne 30

Hjelmslev, Louis 43f., 46

Frege, Gottlob 84

Hoffmann, Ernst 54

Freud, Sigmund 82, 167, l 74ff., 205, 228f.

Holowka, Theresa E. 185, 225

Froissy (Peirce), Juliette Annette 171

Hookway, Christopher 164

Fromm, Erich 13

House, Juliane l 92ff., 225, 230f. Houser, Nathan 84, 150, 186

G Gardin, Jean Claude 38, 135

Hutchinson, John A. 227

I

Gebauer, Gunter 230 lhwe, Jens 36

242

On Translating Signs Ivanov, V. V. 52, 54

Levi, Isaac 161

Ivir, Vladimir 133

Levy, Jifi 9, 2 l 7f., 232

Izutsu, Toshihizo 100

Levi-Strauss, Claude 46, 49, 7 l, 73, 85,

J

Lieb, Hans-Heinrich 20

Jakobson, Roman 17, 28, 32f., 37, 43, 51, 61,

Liszka, Jakob 75, 88

88,225 Lissajous, Jules Antoine 152 73ff.,88,99, 105, 107, 122, 134, 138,229 James, William 86, 123, 137, 166, 185, 226, 228 Johansen, Jorgen Dines 109, 133, 138, 227

Logue, Christopher 112 Lotman, Jurij 51 ff., 73f., 85 Louis, Anne Marie l l 3 Lucid, Daniel P. 73

Johnson, Mark 134 Jones, Royce 135

M

Jung, Carl G. l 74f., 176, 229 MacDonald, Audrey L. 155, l 72

K

Mach, Ernst 23 1

Katz, J. J. 37

Maier, John R. 195

Mahony, Patrick 229 Kerckhove, Derrick de 28

Malinoski, Bronislaw 46, 85, 225

Kloesel, Christian J.W. 150, 186

Marmaridou, A. Sophia S. 133f

Knaus, Rodger 33

Marx, Karl 41, 50, 77, 82, 205

Kolenda, Konstantin 225

McGinn, Colin 199, 227

Koller, Werner 124ff., 192, 225, 230

McLuhan, Marshall 28

Kommissarov, Vilen N. l 14f.

Meltzer, James D. 174, 229

Komter, Aafke 23, 225

Merrell, Floyd I Sf., 28f., 89, 133, 196,

Kosinski, Jerzy 89 Kovala, Urpo 134

214,224 Milton, John 58

Kristeva, Julia 49, 73, 76

Montague, Richard 43

Krolokowski, Walter P. 9

Morris, Charles 21, 24, 41, 186, 231

Kull, Kalevi 231

Munday, Jeremy 231 Murphy, Murray G. 182

L

N

Lacan, Jacques 50, 82 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de 88

Nabokov, Vladimir 191, 222f.

Lakoff, George 134

Nergaard, Siri 57

Larsen, Svend Erik 88, 229

Nef, Frederic 89

Leech, Geoffrey 146

Nerval, Gerard de 57

Lefevere, Andre 111 f., 134

Newton, Isaac 176

Lehrer, Adrienne 225

Nida, Eugene A. 99, l 12f., 138, 168, 192f., ! 97f., 225, 230

243

Name Index Noth, Winfried 12, 84

Raposa, Michael L. 12, 155 Rauch, lnnengard 73

0

Rayar, Louise I 0 Reiss, Katharina 193

Orange, Donna 156, 225

Rescher, Nicholas 132, 138, 219f., 233

Orston, Darius Gray 229

Rieser, Hannes 35, 38, 41, 84, 116 Robin, R.S. 155, 226f.

p

Rollins, C.D. 152 Rorty, Richard 23 2

Parmentier, Richard J. 86 Peirce, Charles Sanders 9ff., 17, 21, 29f., 38, 40f., 42, 47f., 54f., 56f., 59ff. (entire

Royce, Josiah 227

s

chapter "Semiotranslation and Abductive Translation"), IOOff., 145ff.

Santaella, Lucia I 0, 172

(entire chapter "Trial and (T)error:

Saporta, Sol 43

Peirce's Fallibilism and

Saussure, Ferdinand de 21, 35, 42ff., 48,

Semiotranslation")

51, 54f., 58, 67, 73f., 85, 88, 174, 176

Pelc, Jerzy 84

Savan, David I 0 I, 107, 220, 225

Petiifi, Janos S. 25f., 29, 33, 35ff., 41, 47

Scheffler, Israel l 97f.

Pharies, David A. 86

Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von 111

Pike, Kenneth L. 38, 44ff., 85, 112, l 16f.

Schmitt, Peter A. 225

Pirkova (Jakobson), Svatava 88

Scheffcyzyk, A. 138

Pjatigorski, A. M. 53

Schnelle, Helmut 43

Plato 171

Scholes, Robert l 7f., 83

Plett, Heinrich F. 39

Searle, John R. 38

Popovic, Anton 11, 17, 191

Sebeok, Thomas A. 5, 12, 18, 41, 43, 64, 73,

Potter, S.J., Vincent G. 155, 183, 227

135

Prior, Arthur N. 9

Shakespeare, William 58f., 21 Off., 231

Propp, Vladimir 46, 49, 88

Shands, Harley C. 114, 135m 174, 229

Proust, Marcel 149, 225

Shapiro, Michael 74

Pym, Anthony 194

Shewmaker, Kenneth 155

Q

Shukman, Ann 52f.

Short, Charles 127

Queneau, Raymond 57

Simmel, Georg 225 Singer, Milton 85, 23 l f. Snow, C.P. 40 Spinks, Jr, C.W. 136f.

R

Spinoza, Baruch 176

Ransdell, Joseph 69, 145, 153, 181, 229, 232

244

Steiner, George I26f. Stolze, Radegundis l 92f., 225 Svartvik, Jan 146

On Translating Signs

T

Wilss, Wolfram 115, 120, 135, 193 Withalm, Gloria IO

Tasca, Norma 209

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 38, 56

Thom, Rene 12, 195

Woodworth, Judith 231

Tohen, G.F. 225

Wundt, Wilhelm 136

Todorov, Tzvetan 73, 88

z

Tolstoy, Aleksey N. 113 Toporov, N. 52, 54

Zajonc, R.B. 136

Torop, Peeter 231 Towy, Gideon 100, 105, 120ff., 125f., 133,

Zaliznjak, A. A. 52 Zeman, J. Jay 134

193,230

Zeno ofElea 137, 232

Turley, Peter T. 232 Tursman, Richard 121, 129, 218 Tzara, Tristan 56

u UexkOll, Jakob von !Sf. Umiker Sebeok, Jean 13 U spenskij, B .A. 54

v Vermeer,HansJ.193 Virtanen, Tuija 83 Vitacolonna, Luciano 83 Vlastos, Gregory 232 Voigt, Vilmos 51 Voltaire 111

w Walker, Benjamin 232 Walther, Elisabeth 226, 230 Waugh, Linda R. 73 Weinberger, David 27 Weinrich, Harald 22f. Welby,LadyVictoria9,61,87,

147, 185,

227 Wilson, Woodrow 188

245

Subject Index* A

Cathexis 228 Certainty (truth) (of translation) 100, 102, 131, 223

Abduction 9, 38, 48, 80ff., J 17ff., J 35f.: see Reasoning Abducti ve translation J 20ff. (entire chapter

Chance-heredity-environment 120, 175 Community, Peirce's 164, 179, 186, 189, 224f.

"Semiotranslation and Abductive Translation") Achilles and the turtle, paradox of213ff.,

D

216f.,232 Alcove, Freud's secrets of the 174f.

Degenerate signs I !Of., 119, 133, 137,

Agape (evolutionary love) 13, 150, 172

Alien world (comparativism) 51, 78f., 99f., 114

17!, 183, 188, 229

DeJa

vu 225

Dry bones, parable of 231

Aliquid stat pro aliquo 99f.

Archetypes, Peirce's and Jung's l 73f., 229

E

Art-business-transmission l 96f. Assurance of instinct-experience-form 182, 211

Equivalent (analogous) signs 103, 123, 193 Esthetics/ethics/logic 184

B

Error (fallacy) (quasi-error, quasi-fallacy) 11, 54, 124, 145, 152, 158,

170, l 77ff.

Backtranslation 109, 133

(entire chapter "Trial and (E)rror:

Beauty-goodness-truth 201

Peirce's Fallibilism and

Bible 18, 157, 169, 210, 231 Bible translation l 68f., 21 Of., 214, 230 Binary (dyadic) oppositions 68ff., 157ff., 194: see Triadic thought Biotranslation 202, 231 Black box (in translation) 104, 124, 186

Semiotranslation") Error of Achilles 213, 217, 232 Ethics, Shakespeare's 21 Off. Etic-emic, Pike's 85 Eureka (in translation) l 14ff., 119, 129,

131, 136 Experiments (in translation) 159, 199, 210,

c

206,224

Categories, Peirce's: see FirstnessSecondness- Thirdness

• References in the Subject Index do not include bibliography.

Subject Index

F

Image-model-metaphor (in translation)

Fallibilism (infallibilism) (Peirce's and in

Inquiry 12, 129, 136, 159, 163, 167, 176,

I 08ff. 187,223,232

translation) 11, 54, l 49ff. (entire chapter "Trial and (T)error: Peirce's Fallibilism

Interpretant (in translation) 63ff., 89, I 02f., I 05ff., 132, 182, 186

and Semiotranslation") Final translation 132, 184, 199,

220

Interpreter (quasi-interpreter) 66f., 145, 147f.,

Firstness-Secondness-Thirdness (Peirce's

17~

17~205,208,212

categories) 29, 60f., 75, 79f., 107ff.,

Instinct 118f., 135f.

Ill, 125ff., 149, 153ff., 175, 186, 188,

Interlingua 36, 131, 138

196f., 198f.,200,207f.,211,222,228f.

Jntralingual-interlingual-intersemiotic translations I 02, 129, 135f., 197

Fixation of belief 132, 204, 216, 219, 221 Force, vital 119, 145f., 151, 159f., 175,

Intuition (in translation) 47f., l l 4f., l l 7f., 129, 135

179,2!9f.,227f.,233 Force-continuity-evolution 159 Futurology I 04f.

J

G

Judge (quasi-judge) (in translators) l 98f., 200,224

Game (of translation) 130, 138, 182, 199, 20lf.,213,232 Generality IOI, 145f.

K

"Glassy essence," man's 85, 209, 23 lf.

Katharsis 131, l 38f.

Growth IOI, 103, 162, 196, 205, 214

Knowledge (of translators) 103, 115, 119,

Growing tree 102, 123, 137, 231

H

129, 149, 195,

197f.,214,217

L

Habit 63f., 87, 120, 153, 160ff., 172f.,

Laboratory (of translators) 151, 211, 216, 221 f.

195,20lf.,212,219,223,226 Haiku 30, 99f. Hesitancy-opinion-judgment 220

M

Historization-modemization (in translation) I 06f. Hubris (pride) 205, 217

I

Manipulation (of translation) 105ff.,

I I !ff., 120 Man-mind JOO Man-word 179 Man-woman 9f., 170, 225

Ideology (of translation) 105, 107, 197

Metacreation 11

I-It-Thou 182f., 230

Metatextuality 17, 107, 190

248

On Translating Signs Methods of tenacity-authority-a priori-

R

science 221 f. Minimax strategy (in translation) 217, 232

Reasoning (abduction-induction-

Moodscape-worldscape-mindscape 114

deduction) 67ff., 80ff., 118, 121, 136,

Musement I Of., 119, I 30f., 135

150f., 167, 194: see Abduction Reality ("reality")71, 99, 116, 132, 146,

N

150f., 153f., 163, 186,222,224 Refraction (in translation) 111 f. Religious studies 152, I 54ff., 164, 166,

Noise 54, 131, 138 Norm (rule, code) 52f., 67ff., 74, 83, 102,

168f., 172 Reviews, Peirce's 181f., 185, 188ff., 227,

112f., 132, 193,226,230

230

0

Riddle of the sphinx I 0

Object (immediate and dynamical) 109,

s

165f., 178, 199,207ff.,213,230 Semiosis 12, 64ff., 99, 122, 137, 145,

p

159,

175,223,228

Peirce Edition Project 226

Semiosphere 12

Percussivity 145, 158f.

Semiotics 13, 20, 32f., 41f., 105, 112, 118,

Perfect sign (in translation) 123, 200,

150, 162,228 Semiotranslation 11 ff., 99ff. (entire chapter

204ff., 213f.. Pragmatism, Peirce's 69f., 82f., 108, 132,

"Semiotranslation and Abductive

139, 150, 152, 173, 187 Probability-likelihood-plausibility

Translation"), 198 203,

215 Pseudotranslation 109, 120, 133 Psychoanalysis, Freud's I 74ff., 229

Sign (nonsign) 21, 59ff., 100, 102, 105, 118, 145f., 158, 167, 228 Skepticism (unskepticism) 151, 164, 195, 198,201 "Somehow" l45ff. (entire chapter "Trial and (T)error: Peirce's Fallibilism and

Q

Serniotranslation")

Quasi-mind 66f., 87, 129f., 137, 148 Quasi-sign 145, 147, 195 Quasi-thought 145, 203ff., 206ff., 214, 217ff.

Sop to Cerberus, Peirce's 147ff., 200 Source-target (in translation) I 06, 108, 110, 120, 125f., 138, 147, 149,

192ff.,

198 Stream of consciousness, James 's 123 Summum bonum 132, 154, l63f., 173, 200, 206, 211 Supertask (of translation) 195, 218 Synechism 150, 167, 17lff., 196

249

Subject Index

T Text (textuality, texture, discourse) l 7ff. (entire chapter "Text and Interdisciplinary Texture"), 100, 105, 108ff. Text-linguistics (text-grammar) 33ff., l 16f. Textology, Baxtin's 42, 84 Text semiotics 40ff., 48ff., 66, 178 Text-word-sentence 42ff. Theism 155, 228 Threshold 170, 228 Traduttore traditore 100 Traducement (in translation) l 90f., 195 Transdisciplinary (interdisciplinary) studies 20, 30ff., 188 Translatability (untranslatability) 124 Translation studies 13, 103f., 114, 146, 149, 190,210 Translator (quasi-translator) 114, 130f., 134, 159, 169, 185, l 97ff., 208f., 217

190f., 192, 194ff.,

Triadic thought 72f., lOOf., 157ff. (entire chapter "Trial and (E)rror: Peirce's Fallibilism and Semiotranslation"): see Binary (dyadic) oppositions Triadomania l 53f. Trial and error l 75f., 224 True and false signs 151, 156, 165, 177, 189, 199,215,225

v Vocabulary-phraseology-textology 197f.

w Web, semiotic 18f.., 55, 123

250

159,