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A Paraphrase Set

Hiż, Henry 1969. Referentials. Semiotica 1(2): 136-166. DOI: 10.1515/semi.1969.1.2.136

These connections, les renvois, are felt intuitively by everybody who understands the text, though the exact indication of the reference relations may leave some room for dispute (e.g., the just stated tacit phrases of them may be felt to be somewhat artificial.) The word reference is also used by many authors for a relation between a name and the thing named. Quine translates Frege's Bedeuting as reference. But here I use the term reference in a more linguistic manner, as when one says that an asterisk refers to a footnote or when one speaks about cross references. To avoid confusion and to stress that a referential refers only to an occurrence of a phrase in the text, what I call here referentials should perhaps be called cross referentials. (Hiż 1969: 136)

Perhaps these "cross referentials" should instead be called indexes or another equivalent from Peircean nomenclature?

We use the term referend for an occurrence of a phrase referred to by the referential. One should not confuse it with any supposed object or entity denoted by or indicated by the referential or by other phrases having Bedeutung. Those supposed extra-linguistic entities may be called referents. (Hiż 1969: 138)

By this token Jakobson, with his referential function that refers to other phrases in the same verbal context, whether one's own previous utterances or those of another, is really discussing referends instead of referents, as Bühler did (the referent being an object, as opposed to context).

Semantic concepts used in grammar are not only those of paraphrase and of consequence. On the basis of these elementary concepts (actually only on the basis of the concept of consequence, since the concept of a paraphrase is definable by the concept of a consequence), grammar constructs - and uses - other semantic concepts: a paraphrase set (a set of texts which are paraphrases of each other), a truth model (a set of sentences arbitrarily considered true), an interpretation of a text in a truth model, a set of pairs of texts with a constant semantic difference between the relation of one member of the pair to a truth model, and the relation of the other member of the pair to the truth model is always the same), etc. (Hiż 1969: 142)

Neat. The variations in Phatic Notes constitute a paraphrase set.

As a matter of fact, the best way to say something precise about the relation of language and "reality" is to speak about truth; what texts are true and what are the formal properties of truth. The semantic position taken here is aletheism (άλήθεια 'truth'); all semantic concepts reduce to truth and those which do not are illegitimate. (Hiż 1969: 147)

Jakobson frequently bemoaned the widespread identification of semantics with truth-values.

Lieb, Hans-Heinrich 1969. On Explicating "Language" for Linguistics. Semiotica 1(2): 167-184. DOI: 10.1515/semi.1969.1.2.167

Let me point out at once that I am not concerned with "language" as it occurs in, say, "language and speech" or "the human capacity for language". My starting-point will be "language" as a class name, denoting the class of all languages (whatever entities 'languages' may be). Basing my investigation on a certain linguistic usage of the term, I shall consider a certain possibility of defining it, again for the purposes of linguistics. (Lieb 1969: 167)

These are the exact two usages pointed out by others (e.g. Petrilli & Ponzio 2008: 28-29).

In Chomsky 1967a: 75, a natural language is considered as a 'specific sound-meaning correspondence' (cf. also Chomsky 1967b: 405). A means of communication is indeed a relation between 'sounds' and 'meanings'; it corresponds, however, not to a language but to an idiolect (at a certain time). (Lieb 1969: 172)

Jakobson has an oddly similar term: the phono-semantic knot. But in his writings it is not a definition of language, merely part of it.

A system of a means of communication may 'correspond' to a certain part of the speaker during a certain time, in the case of a human speaker to a part of his brain, which forms an 'internal basis' for the means of communication. (Lieb 1969: 173)

That is, language is inside the speakers in some sense, or, more specifically, "in the head" (or brain). The concept might be useful for specifying the "internal basis" of phatic communion, i.e. the gregarious instinct and the like.

There is another sense of "continuity" that might be considered in the case of languages: A historical language 'continues by tradition', and during its existence there is no 'break' in its intelligibility. (Lieb 1969: 177)

A phraseological finding for describing Malinowski's archaism. In effect there is a break in the intelligibility of his technical language, as instinct and sentiment psychology fell out of favour and "bonds" lost the variety it had in his usage ("marital bonds" and "friendship bonds" remain, but other versions are no longer used).

Tarasti, Eero 1998. On post-colonial semiotics. Sign Systems Studies 26: 115-135.

Moreover, no community is so small and subordinated that it would not, in its turn, become the colonizer (for example, consider the Finnish in the Baltic countries and Carelia, and the Estonians towards the inkeriläiset and setukaiset). (Tarasti 1998: 116)

Kas me koloniseerime võrokaid?

In fact, every semiotic act - at the same moment one identifies, delimits and fixes the relationship of signifier/signified - such an act includes within itself the relationship of dominant/dominated. Knowing this helps us to peer into the hidden power mechanisms of those non-verbal discourses that represent so-called "tacit" knowledge. (Tarasti 1998: 117)

Much like Randviir's statement that every sign system is ideological, these kinds of blanket statements are suggestive but empty. It might work in the "minor tradition" of Saussurean semiology with its backwards (dyadic) view of signs but makes absolutely no sense in the more realistic Peircean semiotics.

For we naturally do not want to adopt the values of colonizing discourse when expressing our innermost experiences. The answer is, One has to leave space around every subject and society, a space which transcends words, gestures, signs and objects. That space must be, first of all, empty; it is not the same as the semiosphere, which is already filled with signs and signifying units. Therefore, liberation from the sign relations of dominant/dominated starts as early as with the creation of an empty space, in which signs can be detached from their earlier, fixed signifying relations. Consequently, the first semiotic act is not that of signifying. Rather, it is an event that has already taken place before the subject grasps the sign. A semiotic act is the negation of the signified, an abandonment the ready-made meaning. Thus, it is also an existential moment, it is choice, it is a breaking free from the power of the signified and the creation of a new (transcendental) space. (Tarasti 1998: 118)

Reminiscent of the leftist jargon parodied in The Simpsons: "[some moral transgression] creates a space for violence to happen". Not only does this type of discourse turn the spacial metaphor into a vacuous exercise but it may become a justification for completely garbled and illogical discourse, marred further by lofty implications of systematicity; e.g. the recent redefinition of racism as a systemic problem (while retaining the attractive option to call specific people racist).

The real problem is that the world of communication has attained such an exaggerated position that one has forgotten the other side of the semiotic project, that of signification, from which entirely new theoretical avenues are opened. (Tarasti 1998: 118)

With this I agree, and have documented cases of "communicationalization", when some phenomena is needlessly framed as an act of communication (the communication model is an easy go-to for a lazy theoretician).

According to another writer in the anthology, Homi K. Bhabha, colonialism does not simply refer to a "person", to a power struggle between self and the Other, or to a distinction between a mother culture and alien cultures. The trace of a disapproved culture is not repressed but repeated as something different, as a mutation, a hybrid (the Derridean différance, which indicates both "differing" and "deferring", applies to this situation). This view parallels those of the cultural semiotic school around Yuri Lotman, whose scholars speak about the integration of such completely "different" elements (representing the non-culture) into the culture in the proper sense: those elements must remain "exotic" in order to fulfill the function of non-cultural counter-force, by which the culture properly speaking can measure or be seen to constitute its own sameness. (Tarasti 1998: 121)

I've met the argument that mainstream hip-hop is so debased, violent, and off-putting because the powers that be want to portray the American blacks as inherently faulty, e.g. the van Dijkian "that's just the way they are". It's an appealing argument but falls somewhat flat when one faces the very real and invested audience of such music.

Stephen Slemon equates post-colonial discourse and postmodernism, and quite rightly, since the postmodern thesis that everything has been said" is only a variant of colonialism's view that nothing new can exist outside of the dominant culture, beyond the prevailing systems of communication. No new meaning can emerge from the process of signification. There is no freshness of Firstness for postmodern man. (Tarasti 1998: 125)

I know some would protest to such conflations (e.g. "postmodern marxist", and the like), and that is not how postmodernism is framed at the moment; the popular (if outside-looking-in and thus faulty) view of postmodernism is that "there is no more truth". With everything having already been said I agree to a point, though I wouldn't know how to measure that point.

If one thinks of the dominant and dominated as juxtaposed subject positions, they could be easily identified with sender and receiver. For a seed of subordination is latent in any communication, nurtured by the fact that the sender forces the receiver to "read" his/her message. And yet the situation is not so one-sided. That is to say, the dominant could be the receiver and the dominated the sender. If I say, "Your Excellency is so kind; do allow me to add cream to your coffee", then I am a sender who, by the content of the message, tries to show that he considers the receiver to be of a higher status than himself. (Tarasti 1998: 126)

Why communicationalize it? This "force" is dubious; at best there is "insistency", nourished by curiosity. Not all communication is a power-game.

In the religious dimension, the semiotic act can be realized in communication as a cult or prayer. But in signification it appears as the "illumination" of the world in relationship to what is called "pleroma". In that case the objective of such an act is the experience of a particular grace attained by realizing the plenitude of being; i.e. experiencing that one has not been thrown into the emptiness of being, but that being is carried on by a plenitude greater than oneself. (Tarasti 1998: 130)

The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon in action - I just learned of this term (cf. Bruni 2008: 118).

The concept of act always carries the idea of a certain energy invested in the act by the actor. (Tarasti 1998: 130)

Hence the natural connection between Malinowski's treatment of (meaningless) speech as a mode of action and the Peircean energetic interpretants. Will come to this in due time when treating Malinowski's pragmatics.

Johansen, Jørgen Dines 1998. A semiotic mapping of the study of literature. Sign Systems Studies 26: 274-298.

In a verbal dialogue the sign will be instanced as a token emitted by the utterer, but to understand it the interpreter must identify it as a replica of a type and this involves an interpretation connecting it with object and interpretant. If the understanding between the parties is perfect (at least with regard to the purpose of the dialogue, and meaning implies reference to a purpose, cf. Peirce 5.175), utterer and interpreter will identify the token as an instance of the same type, the immediate object, or 'idea' referred to would (for the purpose) be sufficiently similar, among the possibilities offered by the immediate interpretants the interpreter would choose the one intended by the utterer, and each of them would understand and recognize their respective roles within the semiosis and accept them as persons. (Johansen 1998: 275)

Nearly the Peircean version of Jakobson's "cryptanalytic" model of communication wherein the sender has the code and constructs the message (here, possesses replicas to instance as tokens) while the receiver has the message and must reconstruct the code (here, possesses the tokens and must identify the types).

Classical rhetoric was seen as the art of persuasion, and according to Aristotle, the means of persuasion are three:
Now the proofs furnished by the speech are of three kinds. The first depends upon the moral character of the speaker, the second upon putting the hearer into a certain frame of mind, the third upon the speech itself, in [|] so far as it proves or seems to prove. (Aristotle 1926: 17, Book I, ii, 3, 1355b-1356a)
Since rhetoric deals with the probable, not with certain knowledge, the trustworthiness of the speaker becomes important. (Johansen 1998: 287-288)

These are, respectively, the original basis for the conative, the emotive, and the referential function. Source is Art of Rhetoric translated by J. H. Reese (London: Heinemann). The paragraph ends with another version: "cf. rhetoric's general precept that the office of the speech is to teach, to please, and to move", without giving a citation for where to see rhetoric's general precepts.

Testimonies to the complex relationship between author and text are the following two passages that are both exemplary, but pointing in different directions. Concerning his play, The Father, Strindberg writes to Axel Lundegård on Nov. 12, 1888, letter 1460: "It seems as if I were a sleepwalker, as if fiction and life merged. I don't know whether The Father is a play or whether my whole life is one." (Strindberg 1958: VI, 298 my translation). (Johansen 1998: 291)

I've had this experience. Once I spent a month in bed with melatonin supplements, dreaming away a world in which cognitive enhancements (e.g. "wetware") were developed. Leaving my dark-blinded room for a cigarette was surreal because I briefly returned to the real world, which at that point seemed irrelevant, even made up.

Genres such as joking, for instance are extremely vulnerable to the resistance and refusal of the interpreter. According to Freud, the utterer of a joke needs the laughter, and thereby approval, of the interpreter in order to enjoy his own joke and to release his own laughter. This is especially important, if the joke is tendentious, obscene or aggressive, directed against a third party (see Freud 1905). In such cases the interlocutor may easily destroy the joke simply by refusing to take upon him the role of the presupposed addressee. In doing so he or she will, implicitly or explicitly, question the standards according to which the utterance is supposed to be witty. And since values and morals change rather dramatically in and throughout time and space, such redefinitions are going on all the time. (Johansen 1998: 292)

I don't know where I read it but it burned into my retinas: humour is supposed to lighten the ugly and dangerous. That is, all proper humour is tendencies, obscene or aggressive by default. Or, that its function is not to appease the listener's want for wit but to confront, in a light and witty manner, that which we do not wish to face IRL.

Martin, Richard M. 1965. On Peirce's Icons of Second Intention. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 1(2): 71-76.

Two recent commentators have discussed certain features of Peirce's work in logic rather closely. Both of these pay fundamental attention to the paper of 1885, "On the Algebra of Logic - A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation" (3.359-403). This paper is certainly one of Peirce's most important. (Martin 1965: 71)

A bold claim.

Precisely what terms of "second intention" are and what "second-intentional logic" is, are not too clearly drawn. It seems fairly certain, however, that Peirce is here anticipating the modern distinction between first- and second-order logic. (Martin 1965: 73)

Should I continue studying logic, I might return to this.

Broyles, James E. 1965. Charles S. Peirce and the Concept of Indubitable Belief. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 1(2): 77-89.

It might seem puzzling that explicit acknowledgement of the doctrine of Critical Common Sensism by name does not occur until after the turn of the century. After all, Peirce refers to it as a doctrine he had defended as early as 1868 (5.439). The truth seems to hinge on the fact that common sensism, like much of Peirce's philosophy, underwent considerable evolution. (Broyles 1965: 77)

I was just recently wondering how to turn "common sense". This tidbit is extremely valuable for comparing Peirce (and his critical common sensism) with Clay (and his common sense realism).

His objections to universal doubt are based on an early theory about the continuity of knowledge. Peirce held that every conclusion rests on previous cognition.
At any moment we are in possession of certain information, that is, of cognitions which have been logically derived by induction and hypothesis from previous cognitions which are less general, less distinct, and of which we have a less lively consciousness. These in their turn have been derived from others still less general, less distinct, and less vivid: and so on. (5.311)
It follows that we cannot divest ourselves of all our beliefs simply because such a process of doubting would be interminable. (Broyles 1965: 80)

This is indeed a common sense presupposition: there is a continuity of knowledge because at no point is a person without any kind of knowledge, no matter how vague. It also hints towards the growth of signs: cognitions become more general and more distinct, employed with more lively consciousness.

A new foundation for common sensism was needed and Peirce began to develop the relationship between common sense and the doctrine he sometimes called "conditional idealism." This was the view that truth and reality are based upon the ultimate agreement of investigators (5.494). As early as 1871 in a review of Berkeley, Peirce maintains that conditional idealism is
[...] a highly practical and common-sense position. Whenever universal agreements prevail, the realist will not be the one to disturb the general belief by idle and fictitious doubt. For according to him it is a consensus or common confession which constitutes reality. What he wants, therefore, is to see questions put to rest. (8.16)
In the famous pragmatic articles in Popular Science Monthly of 1877-78 this suggestion is incorporated in a psychological account of inquiry. The fixation of belief is seen as the goal of inquiry. The function of doubt is to act as a stimulus to investigation. (Broyles 1965: 81)

Peirce the social constructionist (cf. also Durkheim the social constructionist). In the end, it is the circle of society or community of inquirers that decide the final interpretant.

The character of Peirce's later use of "indubitable" can be brought out by contrast with that of Thomas Reid, the dean of the Scottish school of common sense. Reid held that common sense beliefs were self-evident. These beliefs were indubitable in the sense that they could directly be seen to be true. Thus it was at least in theory possible to certify and list them once and for all. But "indubitability" for Peirce is not an inherent characteristic of the belief or believer, in isolation. We don't simply see that the belief is true. Rather, given our present knowledge, we don't see that the belief is open to question. We have no reason to question it. It is quite possible that a belief may be at one time indubitable and at a later time very doubtful or even known positively to be false. Common sense beliefs are indubitable only relative to a certain depth of knowledge and range of experience. (Broyles 1965: 85)

The fact that Clay followed Reid may ease the comparison of respective approaches to doubt. I recall Clay terming indubitables axioms: "According to this definition, axioms and objects of perception are evident, - contain evidence of their own truth, - are self-evident." Peirce's alternative is more reminiscent of the way power silences some issues (as in Steven Lukes 'radical view').

Farina, Almo 2008. The Landscape as a Semiotic Interface between Organisms and Resources. Biosemiotics 1: 75-83. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-008-9006-4

In order to fill this epistemological gap, we introduce the hypothesis that landscape is not only a geo-ecological space but a perceived entity that functions like a semiotic interface between resources and organisms. According to this perspective, most of the principles described by the landscape ecology discipline (Risser et al. 1984; Turner et al. 2001) become inadequate or insufficient for understanding the communication "habit" in the environmental context. As a consequence, additional paradigms and investigative tools, not fully available or developed within the disciplinary domain of landscape ecology, have to be brought into play. (Farina 2008: 76)

Landscape as a semiotic interface. Are other organisms included as resources (e.g. prey)? The communication paradigm in such cases can turn pretty odd, as when a poisoned waterbody communicates dissent when it gives swimming children skin irritations (cf. Low 2008).

Sign processes reduce the uncertainty to which an organism could be exposed and it seems an evolutionary short-cut common to the animal realm. When this theory is extended to the landscape paradigm, the landscape could be considered a semiotic interface between resources, where organisms function as interpreters. (Farina 2008: 77)

Confusing "signs" and "information"?

This theoretical body explains the mechanisms by which a physiological (e.g. hunger, thirst) or a psychological (e.g. safety, happiness) necessity is satisfied through the transformation of a perceived signal into a sign vehicle, and finally into a meaning. In a continuous switch (on/off and vice versa) of functions, we expect a continuum of sign processes that fires like an extended brain from the surroundings that could depend either on the internal status of organisms or on the availability of resources in the surroundings. (Farina 2008: 80)

Sounds like the digital-analogical consensus described by Bruni (2008: 126-127).

Favareau, Donald 2008. The Biosemiotic Turn. Biosemiotics 1: 5-23. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-008-9010-8

For as biosemioticians will later go on to convincingly argue, this transparent and under-appreciated ability to apprehend and understand the extra-mental existence of a world that does not reduce to our own sensational experience of it is one of the distinguishing characheristics of our species-specific human form of cognition - and it, too, must be scientifically accounted for in time (Hoffmeyer 1996; Deacon 1997; Emmeche 2002; Favareau 2008, and many more). (Favareau 2008: 7)

In other words, an ability to apprehend and understand "the non-conceptual given of experience" (Murphey 1965: 14).

Thus, by the time of the Upanishads, the earliest of which is said to date as far back as ninth century BCE, we find that the assumption of a fundamental dichotomy between reality (Brahman) and the world of experience (maya) is already being posited as the essential human condition - anticipating Plato, to say nothing of the modernists, by centuries and millennia, respectively. (Favareau 2008: 7)

Wikipedia defines Brahman as "the Ultimate Reality in the universe". A point of comparison for "pleroma (the physical world)" (Bruni 2008: 118).

For both Plato and Aristotle, however - and for the majority of their disciples over the course of the next two millenia - the notion that a reliably traversable bridge between mind-dependant experience and mind-independent reality is impossible for human being, even in principle, is an unacceptable absurdity (e.g. Parmenides 135b-c, De anima iii 3-5). Instead, the serious consideration of this most counter-intuitive idea by a majority of contemporary theorists is a most characteristically modern notion - and the one most responsible for bringing the research agenda of biosemiotics into being in the second half of the twentieth century. For it is biosemiotics that will insist that, in the study of biological organization and agency of every kind, it is precisely the naturalistic establishment of sign relations that bridge subject-dependent experience (such as we find both in animal sensations as well as in human 'mindedness') with the inescapable subject-independent reality of alterity that all organisms have to find some way to successfully perceive and act upon in order to maintain themselves in existence that secures the realism of sign relations. (Favareau 2008: 8)

Mind's embrace of an object is vicarious, not intuitive. In other words, signs mediate reality. Though the breadth of that bridge is dubious: in the Peircean framework do we really grasp the object or merely arrive at a consensus about its nature?

Yet the broader understanding that 'signs' are, in their first and most fundamental sense, relations holding over objects as apprehended by some perceiver ("Signum est res praeter speciem quam ingerit sensibus, aliud aliquid ex se faciens in cogitationem venire") ['A sign is something which, offering itself to the senses, conveys something other than itself to the intellect.' De doctrina christiana II 1, 1963, 33 (trans. Meier-Oeser 2003 o.l.).] was first articulated in the West by Augustine of Hippo (354-430), who is thereby generally credited with developing the West's first true theory of signs qua signs. (Favareau 2008: 9)

Against this definition, Peirce's index does not "offer itself to the senses" but forcefully insists itself upon the senses.

Signa naturalia, for Augustine, are those signs that, 'apart from any intention or desire of using them as signs, do yet lead to the knowledge of something else' [1963] - one might think of the relations of physical contiguity, such as the relation of smoke to fire, or the relation of a fossil to the animal's body that left it. 'Given signs' (signa data), on the other hand, are 'those [signs] which living beings mutually exchange in order to show, as well as they can, the feelings of their minds, or their perceptions, or their thoughts' - phenomena such as, talk and gestures and the marks on this page on Augustine's Confessions. (Favareau 2008: 10)

Ekman and Friesen's (1969) category of "information" and Peirce's index (cf. Goudge 1965) come to mind.

For the result of the ever-widening bifurcation in the scholastic period between the investigations of bio-logic and the investigation of semeio-logic resilted in the assumption that it is what the scholastics called the [|] 'mental word' (verbum interius) - or what we might designate more precisely today as 'linguistically mediated experience' - that was to be the natural starting point and, eventually, the exclusive focus of 'sign' study. (Favareau 2008: 13-14)

For semeio-logic see Peirce's semeiotics. The mental word must be the medieval equivalent of Saussure's "signified".

Something like this can be seen to have happened to the development of the sign concept during the Middle Ages, when, having only Boethuis' (480-525) translations of and commentaries upon Aristotle's linguistic and logical treatises, the medieval scholars inherited, from Boethius' Aristotelian commentiaries, the notion of the 'ordo orandi' (or 'order of speaking') wherein the hierarchy of knowledge is: the things of the external world (res) are signified by mental concepts (intellectus) which are then signified by spoken words (voce) and these are, in turn, signified by written characters (scripta) (Magee 1989: 64-92) - supporting the first principle that: 'at the fundament of written and spoken discourse there is a mental speech (oratio mentis) in which thinking is performed' (Meier-Oeser 2003: o.l.). (Favareau 2008: 15)

Much of semiotics is still "locked in" to this schema, sometimes excluding the external world (e.g. Saussure and his dyadism), or downplaying the role of spoken words (e.g. Lotman and his textualism).

Taking such ideas to their logical (if ultimately futile) extension, the publication of Thomas of Efurt's (c. 1280-1350) Grammatica Speculativia at the beginning of the fourteenth century, inspired whole schools of 'modist grammarians' to seek to find the ways in which the modal syntactic and morphological characteristics or words (modi significandi) must somehow derive from the correspondingly modal conceptual representations of the intellect (mody intelligendi), which, in each case, is structured in the way that it is because it has passively been shaped so by its interactions with the modalities proper to the external thing represented (modi essendi). (Favareau 2008: 16)

How is this different from Peirce's representamen, interpretant, and object?

And so too did the many of the now-forgotten scholars of Latinity discover at last that the unique property of the sign (a misleading term of reification for what is in every instance a sign relation) is that it, as a subset of the genuine form of existential being called 'relation' per se, likewise 'holds over' and exerts a uniquely organizing influence upon the relata involved in that sign relation (e.g., a word and its meaning, or a symptom and its cause) for the agent to whom such relata reveal (or have imposed upon them) such a relation at all. (Favareau 2008: 19)

I have a vague recollection that Lotman viewed signs in their "organizing" aspect, of turning chaos into order in some sense. (This may reach back to Saussure, I suspect, though the Russian formalists likewise probably wrote about the "organization of the text".)

Waller, Sara 2007. Dolphin Signature Rhythms and the Non-Cacophonous Coyote: Rhythm, cognition and the animal umwelt. Cognitive Semiotics 1: 102-110. DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2007.1.fall2007.102

Animal cognition is often considered to be fairly independent of signified meaning. That is, we often think about the animal umwelt in terms of 'non-conceptual cognition' and 'non-propositional content.' Bermudez (2003) suggests that thought and reasoning can occur without what we ordinarily think of as propositionally-based beliefs; Hauser (2000) offers the position that, if animals have beliefs at all, they neither understand that other animals have them nor have any insight into their own, and thus, their behaviors are not heavily based on propositional thought. Such non-verbal, asemiotic, uncategorized cognizing might still find itself exemplified in such activities as music and dance, rhythm and song. In music we find expression, but not of concepts (or at least not of typical, abstract concepts such as justice or pi). (Waller 2007: 102)

Whereas the Peirceans may find that "there is no non-conceptual given in [human] experience" (Murphey 1965: 14), some think that animal experience is completely non-conceptual.

For the purpose of this paper, I will take the essential features of rhythm (that we care about in the study of cognition) to be the intentional construction of sound events in temporal patterns, and/or some recognizable behavioral response to sound events in temporal patterns. This definition fits Donald's well enough to ensure that no question is begged against the position, and defines the terminology such that we do not talk past one another. (Waller 2007: 104)

In a course on the semiotics of the city we had to write about rhythm in architecture or city planning. Back then I could have used this definition, in which only "sound" must be abnegated and "temporal" replaced with "spatial".

Tursiops truncatus dolphins (the stars of the popular television show "Flipper") were reported to produce a specific, identifying whistle pattern repeatedly when separated from others in their pod by the Cladwells in the early 1960s (Caldwell & Caldwell 1965). Signature whistles are, simply defined, temporally regulated, repeated frequency patterns used in a variety of contexts that seem to serve the purpose of self-and-other identification among dolphins. (Waller 2007: 105)

Something phatic in dolphin communication. Bateson, though, did not include identification in his "communication about relationship" (written in relation with dolphin communication).

Østergaard, Svend 2007. The Dynamics of Interaction and Consciousness. Cognitive Semiotics 1: 111-122. DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2007.1.fall2007.111

This paper is about the neuro-cognitive precondition for the development of the kind of consciousness that is implied in choice making or in a situation where an agent fails in doing some task and therefore has to change behavioural strategy. The assumption in this paper is that major properties of human cognition are system inherent in the sense that they develop as a consequence of the local interaction between the agents of a larger population. From an evolutionary perspective, this means we cannot consider the development of consciousness, language and other meta-cognitive abilities as isolated phenomena; instead these abilities develop dynamically as a result of changes in the local behaviour displayed by the individual when meeting other individuals. (Østergaard 2007: 111)

Is phatic communion a "behavioural strategy"? If so, is it an outcome of this kind of dissemination? Specific techniques, certainly; but the overall phenomenon appears innate or inherent so far as anyone can see.

It is generally the case for all species that when two individuals meet they modify each other's behaviour. If the population is large, then this local dynamic between two individuals can spread and have a rather large effect on the global structure, this is what in catastrophe theory is normally called the emergence of structure in a dynamic system. (Østergaard 2007: 112)

In Jakobson's structural linguistics this is "code switching", or trying to find verbal means to make yourself intelligible to the other. On the whole "modifying behaviour" is part of a classical ethological definition of communication (e.g. in Wilson).

One of the cornerstones in Tomasello's theory of culture is the human disposition to imitate at all levels of human interaction, starting with neonates' tendency to imitate facial expressions and later shown in two-year old children's imitation of observed behavioural strategies relative to a goal. Imitation is different from mimicry in Tomassello's theory, since imitation is based on a conceptual understanding of the imitated behaviour, in contrast to mimicry. This is a bit similar to human's use of force as based on an "understanding" of force, in contrast to a behaviour that is based on an experienced correlation between forces accomplished through trial and error. (Østergaard 2007: 116)

Humans "understand" what they're doing, is the short summary here. The distinction between imitation and mimicry is something I need to remember.

Any expression is interpreted as information about a mental state and likewise the interpreter imitates this by expressing her own mental state in a similar manner. This mechanism might be transferred to symbolic artefacts. Paintings, decorations etc. are aspects of expressive behaviour. When people of the same tribe meet they exchange expressive signs just to mark that they are part of the same community and share the same fate. Likewise, symbolic artefacts may be exchanged and shared in the comunity in order to symbolize that the members are part of the same community and have access to each other's mind. (Østergaard 2007: 121)

This is phatic identification on the group level (as opposed to the individual level of introducing yourself by name and background).

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