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A Childish Delight

Mead, Margaret 1969. From Intuition to Analysis in Communication Research. Semiotica 1(1): 13-25. DOI: 10.1515/semi.1969.1.1.13

The idea of pattern in culture grew out of a marriage between a rather gross trait analysis of cultures, which resulted in the idea of a universal pattern found in all human cultures, and a consideration of the way in which each culture expressed this universal pattern - as exemplified in Wissler's Man in Culture published in 1923, and from the analysis of style, particularly in art and folklore, of which Boas' analysis of Northwest Coast art was an outstanding example (Boas 1897). (Mead 1969: 13)

Man and Culture is available on archive.org

Meanwhile it seems worthwhile to review why it is that there seem to be fewer of those who work with pattern recognition. Specialization is undoubtedly one answer. Students begin specializing as undergraduates and few of them now have the kind of broad liberal arts training in literature, history and philosophy which was characteristic of pre-World War II education. The separation between the arts and the sciences has been accentuated and fewer students of semiotics are aspirant poets or painters or musicians, playwrights or dancers (Holt 1967). (Mead 1969: 19)

Reminiscent of the lament of the philologist, that students these days are not taught classical language (Greek and Latin).

But the post war generation has been reared in a world cracked open by the bomb, by world wide communication, by simultaneous translation and simultaneous TV. Where we slowly expanded our knowledge of the world around us, through carefully selected books which had stood the test of time, and which were read by all of us and so serves as a [|] medium of communication, they have been exposed, almost from their cradles, to a barrage of images from every part of the world, of a world which most of the adults with whom they come in contact find frustrating and bewildering. Where no pattern has been crystallized by literature and artistic selectivity, and ideological interpretation of history, and where there are no adult guides through the confusing maze, with rare exceptions, the young anthropologist, linguist, semioticist, today does not yet have in his or her own person the kind of sense of pattern which the previous pattern-seeking generations had. (Mead 1969: 19-20)

Something similar could be written about our new generation of researchers who are native to the world wide web and partake of a privatized online culture incomprehensible to previous generations. For me, this has to do with the inability to grasp the total cultural pattern, as pointed out in "The Consequences of Literacy".

Pelc, Jerzy 1969. Meaning as an Instrument. Semiotica 1(1): 26-48. DOI: 10.1515/semi.1969.1.1.26

Such semiotic concepts as the functional approach to language analysis and the approach to speech as an instrument of action, concepts which seem to be most modern, are to be found in all those works. This is true, but in all the authors quoted above it is language which occurs as an instrument, whereas I, as the title of this paper indicates, want to analyse the instrumental nature of meaning. (Pelc 1969: 27

Thus, not how to do things with words, but how to do things with meaning.

This classification of the theories of meaning coincides in part with the non-disjunct classification in which distinction is made between the referential concepts of meaning on the one hand, and the contextual or operational, concepts of meaning on the other. The former partly correspond to the theories of the meaning of names, and the latter to those of the meaning of sentences. In the former, the meaning of an expression is seen to be either in an extralinguistic referent of that expression, that is in the Designatum, denotatum, descriptum, nominatum, or denominatum, or in the relation between the expression and its referent. In the latter, meaning is identified with the use or the usage of an expression, especially of a sentence analysed in its linguistic and situational context; in this connection language is treated as an instrument, and speech, as a kind of operation performed by means of linguistic instruments, that is as a language game. (Pelc 1969: 31)

Perhaps the theories of meaning held by Malinowski and Jakobson are so incompatible because the latter's is referential and the former's is contextual/operational.

The ideational theories, most common in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, in modern times found their typical representative in John Locke, who wrote: "The use [...] of words is to be sensible marks of ideas; and the ideas they stand for are their proper and immediate signification." The origin of these ideas goes far back. Aristotle said that words are natural signs (semeia) of mental modifications and can refer not only to things (a 'something'), but also to 'qualifications', 'substance of a qualification', and 'quality' or modus. (Pelc 1969: 32)

Alas, E. R. Clay discusses "mental modifications" after Aristotle, or, at the very least, after the Aristotelian Society.

Wittgenstein's recommendations in his Philosophical Investigations were: "Don't look for the meaning, look for the use." "Look at the sentence as an instrument, and at its sense as its employment." What he was concerned with was the use of words, [|] or rather sentences, not only for the purpose of information, but for the purpose of action through language, such action being conceived in its broadest sense. (Pelc 1969: 34-35)

Very close to Malinowski's pragmatic theory of meaning. A sign of the times, perhaps.

At any rate the operational theories made a step forward by linking the problem of the meaning of expressions with the conditions imposed by the context. This has been hailed by the linguists, who used to accuse logicians and philosophers of too isolationist tendencies in the analysis of language. Moreover, the field of analysis has been broadened by the inclusion of the wide range of emotive meanings, which has proved particularly fruitful in the field of ethics, aesthetics, literary theory, and art theory. These problems brought to the field of the theory of meaning, still more than previously, the issues of pragmatics, the third section of semiotics (after semantics and syntax). (Pelc 1969: 36

These two aspects are indeed at the core of Malinowski's pragmatic approach to speech and language, though he tends to treat emotive meanings very superficially, and I'm not even sure if his attention to context is all that satisfactory, as it consists of the context of the situation, rather than, the linguistic and ideational context meant by Jakobson.

Torop, Peeter 1998. Semiotics in Tartu. Sign Systems Studies 26: 9-19.

We should remember that the Tartu-Moscow School was like an invisible college without any fixed institutional relations. The name of the school does not express all its essential characteristics. Historically we [|] should speak about the Moscow-Tartu School, as the birth of the school can be rightfully connected with the 1962 conference in Moscow and the 1964 conference in Tartu. In the academic sense it would be even more correct to use the name Tartu-Moscow-Leningrad School. For example, in B. Uspenski's opinion, the success of the school relied on combining the linguistic tradition of Moscow and the literary tradition of Leningrad (St Petersburg) (Uspenski 1987: 20-21). For Lotman, at whose birth the city was called Petrograd and during his studies Leningrad, the latter tradition associated, besides formalists, also with V. Propp, V. Zhirmunski, G. Gukovski, O. Freidenberg, and to some extent with M. Bakhtin (Lotman 1991: 91). As the names of several predecessors of the school were in disgrace, the members of the school considered it essential to determine their task as tying up the broken threads in the history of scholarship in Russia. Later, D. Segal called this principle semiotic historicism (Segal 1993: 32). (Torop 1998: 9-10)

The "invisible college" is mentioned in Waldstein's The Soviet Empire of Signs (2008). As to the literary tradition, some of Lotman's theachers were even translated into Estonian during the Soviet Era. Primarily on the subject of aesthetic philosophy, though.

The curriculum of the Department of Semiotics is entitled Semiotics and Theory of Culture. This shows that our interests are concentrated on the borderlines between semiotics and culture. As the cultural semiotics of the Tartu-Moscow School can be defined as "the study of the functional correlation of different sign systems" (Theses 1973: 1), we decided to unify the title of the publication in all the languages. The title Sign System Studies [sic] should be the best to express our wish to participate in the development of theoretical thought sa well as to deal with concrete empirical analyses. Ad hoc theories and theorising on the basis of material have always been the tradition of this series. The structure of the present collection should reflect the same attitude. (Torop 1998: 12)

I've never thought of this, but the plurality of sign systems does hint towards this aim.

The existence of the Department of Semiotics has also depended on another dialogue - on the dialogue with Maecenases. A great part of our books and technological equipment has been received thanks to help of G. Soros and the understanding attitude of the Open Estonia Foundation. (Torop 1998: 13)

What. George Soros: financier, philanthropist – and hate figure for the far right. What a nugget this is. Gets your noggin joggin.

Sebeok, Thomas A. 1998. The Estonian connection. Sign Systems Studies 26: 20-41.

The International Association for Semiotic Studies was founded in Paris on Januari 21, 1969. Lotman, in absentia, was elected one of its four Vice-Presidents. I was elected Editor-in-Chief of the newly created journal, whereupon I promptly moved to carry Lotman over to our new international Editorial Committee (Sebeok 1974: 230-231). On this he served until his death, that is, through no less than ninety-eight volumes. He himself published six articles in Semiotica (one in collaboration with A. M. Piatigorsky, another with B. A. Uspensky). (Sebeok 1998: 23)

Clarifying the role Lotman had in Semiotica's editorial committee (this has always baffled me, since locals don't discuss it). I've read some of his own contributions, but in due time will read them all.

Throughout my teaching career, I attempted to persuade my students, my colleagues, anyone who would listen, that it is important for us all to comprehend what the eminent University of Chicago psychologist Csikszentmihalyi has recently delineated under rubrics he identifies - and discusses at great length, with many examples - as domains and fields. Creativity, he defined (1997: 6), "results from the interaction of a system composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognize and validate innovation." (Sebeok 1998: 24)

This model makes a lot of sense in the Jakobson-Lotmanian model of culture with its center and periphery, and the shifting prestige yielded to various genres and styles.

I was quizzed at length about conditions, particularly job opportunities, in several major Western capitals and in the U.S. One of those present declared his interest in coming to Indiana University. It later became possible for me to arrange that he come to Bloomington for an interview, and even, on receiving favorable mention on the part of Roman Jakobson (who was coincidentally also here at the time), to offer him a permanent faculty appointment in semiotic studies. To Jakobson's fury and my own disappointment, this giften young man declined our offer for the flimsiest of reasons. Reputedly living in Paris, he has since vanished from the academic scene. (Sebeok 1998: 29)

A valuable addition to an inchoate short story about a time-travelling semiotician who haggles Jakobson in Norway, attends the 1962 Moscow conference, and - now - turns down Sebeok and Jakobson for Paris.

The title having caught my attention, I obtained a copy from the library, found that it was a 1926 translation of a German book published in 1920, and that it was beyond doubt over my head. Not until some thirty years later did I come to realize that this judgment was premature as well as very wide of the mark. The English translation had in fact been carried out "wretchedly [...] under Ogden's eccentric auspices" (Sebeok 1991b: 104). In the mid 1960s, when at last I read the authentic German version, I came to believe that Ogden, the very animator of Anglo semiotics in the 20th century, had either known little or no German or, with all his polymathic gifts, had faild to understand what Theoretische Biologie was really about: not biology, not psychology, not physiology, but semiotics. (Sebeok 1998: 32)

Odd, since Ogden is known for translating Hans Vaihinger's The Philosophy of 'As If' from German.

Lenzen, Victor F. 1965. Reminiscences of a Mission to Milford, Pennsylvania. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 1(1): 3-11.

Dr. Costello began his lectures with a discussion of language, and the first heading in my notes is "Janet's Theory of Language." The second is "Peirce's Theory of Signs." Costello stated Peirce's definition of a sign as anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in the same way, the interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum. Then followed Peirce's threefold classification of signs. Subsequently, in a review of theories of induction, Costello set forth Peirce's theory that induction is probably inference based upon the selection of fair samples from a collection. (Lenzen 1965: 3)

Pretty convoluted right off the bat. A sign determines an interpretant, which is becoming another sign, to refer to the same thing as the first sign. Here I can see how Jakobson might have conflated semiosis with translation, as the essence seems to be one sign bestowing its meaning unto another.

Professor Royce explained that Russell's theory, in which mind and object were related by a dyadic relation, was a dyadic theory of knowledge, whereas Peirce's theory, which involved the concept of interpretation, was a triadic theory. Royce agreed with Peirce that the process of cognition is a social one. (Lenzen 1965: 4)

Profound, if unsubstantiated. On the whole, the implication is that the dyadic version of "the mind's embrace on an object" is intuitive, that is, unmediated, whereas Peirce sees it as a mediated affair.

Mrs. Peirce was a slight woman of brunette complexion with a thin face and high cheek bones. She received me cordially, and we went into the room at the entrance. I have read that Peirce had a study above the ground floor in which he worked. Mrs. Peirce had prepared for my task by bringing all the manuscripts and books to be packed and shipped into this one room. There were several tables stacked with manuscripts. There were also stacks of books: philosophical, scientific, and editions of Latin authors. One thing that especially struck me was the great number of elementary books on arithmetic. I could not understand what Peirce could want with such elementary texts. From the researches of Professor Carolyn Eisele, however, I now realize that he was engaged in writing elementary texts in mathematics. (Lenzen 1965: 6)

Completely understandable, at least from what I've seen in his Collected Papers.

Mrs. Peirce was angry at Henry, son of William James, who sought to help the Peirces, because he suggested that the Peirce books be sold at auction. She viewed this proposal as cruel, barbarous, a dagger in the heart. (Lenzen 1965: 6)

Is this the same son of William James who messed up E. R. Kelley's name and made it into Clay? Sounds like a dunce.

Murphey, Murray 1965. On Peirce's Metaphysics. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 1(1): 12-25.

So much of Peirce's writing is so bizarre that the reader tends to cling to dear life to those few doctrines which, like pragmatism, have an aura of reasonableness [|] about them. Viewed from the standpoint of modern philosophy, what Peirce has to say about the categories is not reasonable. This is partly due to the fact that Peirce believed in a type of philosophy which is no longer fashionable. It is also partly due to the fact that Peirce changed his mind about the categories from time to time. And it is furthermore partly due to Peirce's deliberate obscurantism. Peirce took a childish delight in formulating his ideas in an arcane fashion which often converts a perfectly reasonable doctrine into something which seems utterly outrageous. (Murphey 1965: 12-13)

Maybe I have read too little of Peirce himself (will correct this soon with the previous author's reading list).

Peirce's position in these early papers is therefore an odd sort of conceptualism. Peirce himself calls it phenomenalism (8.15), but it is a phenomenalism without a non-conceptual given. Even such seeming givens as color qualities Peirce holds to be concepts. Peirce does admit of course that some concepts are less abstract than others and "nearer to sense" - indeed, he holds that no matter what concept we choose another concept can be found which is less abstract (5.263) - but we can never find any thought which is directly given. So whether Peirce calls himself a phenomenalist or an idealist, it remains true that his system is correctly called conceptualism. And this fact is of fundamental importance with respect to the categories, because what guarantees the universality and necessity of the categories is the fact that all concepts are signs, and that the categories are involved in signhood itself. Every sign must stand for some object to some interpretant in some respect or upon some ground. And since all we know is signs, the categories are involved in all knowledge. There is no problem of the application of the categories to the non-conceptual given of experience, because there is no non-conceptual given in experience. (Murphey 1965: 14)

If I'm not mistaken, this is treading on pan-semiotism, or the idea that everything is made of signs. Bricks? (Ducasse 1939)

Hume also divides impressions and ideas into simple and complex, the simple being individual qualities and the complex being combinations of simple qualities. What distinguishes a simple impression from a simple idea is only the "force and violence" with which they strike us - that is, their Secondness. Apart from their Secondness, they cannot be distinguished from ideas, so that, as Peirce remarks, "the actual world cannot be distinguished from a world of imagination by any description" (3.363). So on Hume's account perception gives us two sorts of elements: phenomenal qualities and insistency. (Murphey 1965: 16)

Insistency is a word I need, it is the quality of that poetic "phatic man". In the next paragraph, insistency is usefully defined as "an experienced compulsion".

That we do directly experience continuity Peirce seeks to show with respect to time. For time is a continuum, and we are immediately conscious not only during an interval but of the interval, so that we do directly perceive time as continuum (6.107-112, 8.123n20). Thus Thirdness too is experienced, and so all the categories have material aspects. (Murphey 1965: 17)

Of course he treated time-consciousness. Why wouldn't he? Recording these for a possible comparison with E. R. Clay and his "specious present".

What thychism asserts is that in the beginning anything was possible. The doctrine of haecceity asserts that the actualization of the possible is arbitrary. So we can explain neither chance nor existence, nor really can we explain regularity, except by regularity - that is, except by postulating the rule of induction as a law of habit formation, which is itself explicable only as a chance result (1.409). (Murphey 1965: 23)

Recording this because it's beautiful. I've known what these words mean for half a decade but only now learned how to pronounce tychism and haecceity.

The conclusion of Peirce's ontology is that what there is is feeling, will, and habit, and that habit is generated from feeling through the will. Habit is thus an organization of action and feeling and so conforms to the definition of a personality. For, as such phenomena as multiple personality had already shown, personality is an organization of behavioral responses, and therefore diverse personalities can exist in the same biological individual. Peirce generalized this [|] result into the principle that every organization of feeling and will is a personality, so that for him the culture is a superorganic person, and the coincidence of personality and biological individual is the exception rather than the rule. We ourselves thus become personal subsystems within greater personal systems, all of which are embraced within an over-all personal system which is the universe itself. (Murphey 1965: 23-24)

Again, profound. This is perhaps the most convincing argument towards something like collective consciousness, though not in the Durkheimian sense but closer to Lotman's semiotics where the collective habit is culture.

Barbieri, Marcello 2008. What is Biosemiotics? Biosemiotics 1(1): 1-3. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-008-9009-1

The idea that animals have feelings, psychologies and even minds has been entertained in various ways throughout the centuries, but for a long time is has been taken almost for granted that only man is a semiotic animal, i.e. that only man makes use of signs. (Barbieri 2008: 1)

Some still don't believe. I've had discussions on reddit about this, and the goalpost ultimately got shifted to animals don't have metacognition. Humans still want to feel special and in some metaphysical sense non-animal.

Today, there are at least two basic principles, or postulates, that are accepted by most biosemioticians and that represents a sort of 'minimal unity' in biosemiatics.
  1. The first postulate is the idea that semiosis is unique to life, i.e. that it does not exist in inanimate matter. This sharply differentiates biosemiotics from pansemiotics, the doctrine that accepts the existence of semiosis even in the physical world. And it also differentiates it from physicalism, the doctrine that denies the existence of semiosis both in the physical world and in the organic world.
  2. The second postulate is the idea that semiosis and meaning are natural entities. This sharply divides biosemiotics from the doctrine of 'intelligent design', and from all other doctrines that maintain that the origin of life on Earth was necessarily the product of a supernatural agency.
Today, the main challenge of biosemiotics is the attempt to naturalize not only biological information but also biological meaning, in the belief that codes are fundamental components of the living world. (Barbieri 2008: 2)

In this sense, though, as the above paper on Peirce's metaphysics shows, Peirce might have been a pansemiotist - but this comes across from a rather convoluted discussion of various supraindividual systems, and I may have misunderstood Murphey.

Petrilli, Susan and Augusto Ponzio 2008. A Tribute to Thomas A. Sebeok. Biosemiotics 1(1): 25-39. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-008-9007-3

Sebeok dubs the semiological tradition in the study of signs the 'minor tradition'. Instead, the tradition as represented by John Locke and Charles S. Peirce as well as by the ancient physicians, Hippocrates and Galen and their early studies on signs and symptoms, de dubs the 'major tradition,' and this is the tradition he promotes. IN line with the 'major tradition' in semiotics, Sebeok's global approach to sign life presupposes his critique of anthropocentric and glottocentric semiotic theory and practice. (Petrilli & Ponzio 2008: 26)

I'm on board with this. Why reduce signs to language and similar social conventions?

Sebeok's distinction between 'language' and 'speech' according to which 'language' is primarily modelling - capable of constructing multiple worlds and is therefore the condition for the evolution of humanity - and 'speech,' the capacity for [|] verbal communication, has nothing in common with the distinction postulated between 'language' and 'speech' at the foundation of linguistics for over a century. In fact, 'language' as traditionally understood by this discipline means 'verbal linguistic system' and corresponds to what Saussure calls langue, and 'speech' signifies the act of the word, discourse, what Saussure calls parole. Instead, in Sebeok's terminology 'language' designates the mute species-specific modelling capacity which hominids have been endowed with since their appearance on the planet, the capacity to invent different worlds through to the current worlds invented by homo sapiens sapiens. Instead, speech refers to articulate, verbal language. Human beings for a very long time communicated in different ways before they knew how to communicate verbally. (Petrilli & Ponzio 2008: 28-29)

The century-old distinction is the one most forcefully insisted upon by Alan Gardiner. With Sebeok's distinction I have no problems, if only that "endow" has the unwelcome connotation of human capabilities being "the product of a supernatural agency" (Barbieri, above).

From the point of view of the interpretant and, therefore, of sign-interpreting activity or the process of inferring from signs, semiosis may be described in terms of interpretation. Peirce specifies that all 'signs require at least two Quasi-minds; a Quasi-utterer and a Quasi-interpreter' (CP 4.551). The interpreter, mind or quasi-mind, 'is also a sign' (Sebeok 1994b: 14), exactly a response, in other words, an interpretant: an interpreter is a responsive 'somebody'. (Petrilli & Ponzio 2008: 30)

Interesting stuff. Is this the same passage that Heiskala pointed out as Peirce's most explicit treatment of communication? The suggestion itself is very productive, though how to reconcile it with other aspects of interpretation, such as conferring the object to different signs, I do not yet know.

  1. The ethical aspect. Under this aspect, the unifying function of semiotics concerns proposals and practical orientations for human life ni its wholeness (from the overall point of view of its biological and socio-cultural aspects). The focus is on what may be called the 'problem of happiness'.
Concerning the third aspect of the unifying function of semiotics, particular attention is paid to recovering the connection with what is considered and experienced as separate. In today's world, the logic of production and the rules that govern the market, where anything may be exchanged and commodified, threaten to render humanity ever more insensitive to nonfunctional and ambivalent signs. These may range from vital signs forming the body to the seemingly futile signs of phatic communication with others. Reconsideration of these signs and their relative interrelations is absolutely necessary in the present age for improvement of the quality of life. (Petrilli & Ponzio 2008: 33)

A reminder that Petrilli is a marxist. Is it capitalism that makes us insensitive to phatic communion? I would argue, on this specific point, that phaticity was constructed as a futile and nonfunctional ordeal by Malinowski himself.

For Sebeok no aspect of sign life must be excluded from semiotic musings, just as no limits are acceptable in semiotics itself, whether contingent or deriving from epistemological conviction. Contrary to first impressions, however, Sebeok's work does not claim the status of scientific or philosophical omniscience, or the ability to solve all problems indiscriminately. (Petrilli & Ponzio 2008: 35)

Again, on board, for similar reasons as before. Though isn't the first unifying principle of Barbieri (above) a limit? This paper mentions cyborgs, but it doesn't get into it more than that.

Oakley, Todd 2007. Attention and Semiotics. Cognitive Semiotics 1: 25-45. DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2007.1.fall2007.25

The general logic of signs pursued in this study is that they present us with a mental resonance of the "remembered present" that helps us attend to the here-and-now as suggesting to us what is the case. Signs disclose to us hypostatic scenarios. They likewise give us the means of elaborating on presentations through imaginative variations that reference the three-and-then, allowing past and future variable aspects of this presentation, aspects that could change, and suggesting to us what would happen if such-and-such were the case. Signs disclose to us hypothetical scenarios. Signs also provide us with the means of enacting hypostatic and hypothetical scenarios as-if they were unfolding in the present moment - the experience of the interacting Holbein portraits being a juicy example. Signs disclose to us hypotyposic (or fictive) scenarios. Such is the general logic of signification pursued in this article. (Oakley 2007: 27)

More clearly in the abstract: "I argue that the attention and semiosis conspire to construct meaningful scenes and scenarios (also known as mental spaces), whether hypostatic (what is), hypothetical (what if), or hypotyposic (as if)."

The bio-anthropological perspective. Signs may be studied as adaptations, behavioral routines that emerge from the interaction of an organism with its environment. Organisms build models of reality as a basic survival tactic. In the human context, representations are constitutive of all experience, especially communication. Biologists, neuroscientists, evolutionary anthropologists, and evolutionary psychologists can be placed within this tradition of inquiry (even those who would abjure the title, "semiotician"), as they define sign relatinos as comprising an organism's umwelt, or subject-world. The bio-anthropological perspective is most identified with the ethological theory of Jakob von Uexküll [|] (1956[1937]), and with the philosophical anthropology of Ernst Cassirer (1944), for whom symbolic forms are to be understood as collective coping devices. (Oakley 2007: 28-29)

Weston La Barre, with his amalgamation of biology and anthropology (and psychoanalysis), falls into this camp, as he views culture as a collective coping mechanism.

Still, the radical postmodernists do offer a global insight (dare I say "truth") pertinent to any contemporary semiotic theory. Much of the world is awash in signs. We westerners in particular dwell in iconically, indexically, and symbolically saturated landscapes, so saturated that it would probably be incomprehensible to the likes of Aristotle, St. Augustine or Erasmus and vertiginous to the likes of Locke, Hobbes, or even Peirce and Saussure. The radical postmodernists point this out more forcefully than do partisans of the other perspectives. (Oakley 2007: 31)

Another way of putting this is that, unlike the ancients or even as recent scholars as Peirce, we live in an increasingly interconnected world in which any piece of information is near-immediately accessible, practically in a constant state of informational overload.

The theory of signs inspired by Peirce and outlined here starts from the idea that signification operates along three dimensions: the presentation dimension of the sign vehicle, the representation dimension of the sign object; and the interpretation dimension of sign affect. Together these three dimensions of the sign comprise the semiotic substrate for building hypostatic, hypothetic, and hypotyposic scenarios. (Oakley 2007: 33)

Very triadic stuff. Not sure how well this would hold in light of the rest of Peirce's semiotic. How what is, what if, and as if relate to these categories remains obtuse.

Frick's conceit, as I fancy calling it, can be understood as a lamination of three semiotic layers. The first later corresponds to the vehicle of paint in which emerges an iconic resemblance to its object, in this case the living person, Sir Thomas More in 1527. (Oakley 2007: 40)

Knowing now that one can laminate any number of layers of plastic, and that common food packages are indeed multilayered, I find this metaphor exceedingly evocative.

Brandt, Per Aage 2007. On Consciousness and Semiosis. Cognitive Semiotics 1: 46-64. DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2007.1.fall2007.46

The subjective attitude of intending is thus technically a matter of attending to such causal signs. The relation from Subject to Object opens a semiotic window in the wall of presence-space. The typical action schema of the relation Subject-Object (S-O1) would be one of accessing/'taking'/incorporating or otherwise 'holding'. (Brandt 2007: 49)

Writes Peirce (in Baldwin's dictionary): "intentio [is] in classical writers an act of attention".

Perception has to be periodical, rhythmical. It cannot constantly process the same sensory flow but has to rhythmically scan and 'update' previously processed percepts, both in terms of surrounding space changes and Object-related states of affairs. Even if the rhythm is as fast as, or faster than, a sequence of E. Pöppel's basic temporal 'windows' of fully conscious presence (Pöppel 1997), approximately 3 seconds long, it has to connect percepts already processed and new percepts that 'update' the former, and in this sense, it has to constitute both a remembering and a "remembered present" (Edelman 1989). How would this view of perception as a process of immediate, spontaneous, [|] automatic revision of our 'memories of here-and-now', so to speak, translate into functions of consciousness as semiosis? (Brandt 2007: 50-51)

These 3 second "windows" I know from experiences of altered states of consciousness. A popular recreational drug that messes with short-term memory will make one experience these windows firsthand, constantly re-remembering the present moment.

Seeing oneself through Others seeing oneself, and remembering this alloscopic vision, is essential to consciousness on higher levels. (Brandt 2007: 52)

The looking glass self?

Calling for help is inviting for giving. Giving binds the giver and the receiver to each other, creating lasting representations of 'owing' in the receiver (cf. the phenomenon of 'gratitude'), and 'status' in the giver. Not giving is, correspondingly, being 'bad' or even 'evil'; the person who refuses to give, refuses to establish 'bonds'. Politeness can be understood as behavior that signifies a disposition to be 'good' and accept the 'goodness' of Others. In this communication, the self of the Subject thus acquires yet another aspect: an ethical dimension. (Brandt 2007: 53)

Phatic communion reinterpreted through Malinowskian or Maussian theory of gift.

The use of language presupposes the ethical, loving, aesthetic, and either generous or malignant attitude to forms in conscious content. Language tells stories that serve the urge to imitate, stimulate, steal beauty or redirect love: slander, gossip, is apparently a grounding function of language use in all cultures; but these stories can also serve the 'law', the restoration of truth, the project of justice, the maintenance of respect, etc. - all against the (presupposed) malignant tendency. (Brandt 2007: 59)

This "apparently" is important. Mahaffy and, after him, Malinowski also presuppose that gossip is a human universal. It seems reasonable enough. If it speaks, it gossips.

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