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A Fresh Volatility

Morawski, Stefan 1970. Mimesis. Semiotica 2(1): 35-58. DOI: 10.1515/semi.1970.2.1.35

Semiotics has invested esthetic discourse not only with a new terminology but also with new problems. The semiotic character of the art-work, the interaction between signifiant and signifié, are questions which have been thrust into the foreground and have become the focus for discussion of such issues as the linguistic or quasi-linguistic nature of the artistic message; the autonomous structure of the art-work and its referents, if any, outside its own reality; the denotative and connotative function of a message; or the relationship between 'form' and 'content'. It can be seen from this checklist alone that the semiological set in esthetics has by no means banished its traditional concerns; if anything it has given them a fresh volatility, extending the area of argument still further through the addition of a new perspective, as the controversies over the connections between art and language in the strict sense, their similarities and differences, have made all too evident. (Morawski 1970: 35)

The "quasi-linguistic" hits close to home, e.g. the problematic of Lotman's "continuous text". The "artistic message" is an outcome of communicationalizing aesthetics (cf. Tarasti 1998: 118).

The three great traditions in European esthetics - the Platonic (representation of appearances, or of what is sensually given in reality itself), the Aristotelian (representation of the essence of things), and the Democritean (representation of the actions of nature) and still current today. (Morawski 1970: 36)

Very concise. Is Democritus a competitor to Plato and Aristotle on other issues as well?

In the twenties, Dijga Vertov, editor of Kinopravda and author of Kinoglaz preached the supremacy of documentary over dramatic-psychological art - among other things on the grounds of its maximum objectivity. But if we look at his first manifesto, We (1922), we will at once see that the creational factor stole to the forefront of his thinking, in his call for a cinema which set its sights on "the new heroes" and penetrated revolutionary processes. His paean to "dynamic geometry" also betrayed a specific cast of thought. By 1926 he was openly advocating the editing of selectively observed facts, while in 1930 he recollected in an interview for Kinofront that he had practiced a patently slanted and rhetorical art, that he had been interested not in imitation of the fortuitous but in the "enthusiasm of facts". (Morawski 1970: 40)

Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian novel, We was completed in 1921. Must be a sign of the times (turbulent political upheaval after the bolshevik revolution).

If art can indeed be illusion of communing with reality itself, it is here at its most potent and complete. From what has been said, it will be understood that this illusion is not produced merely by the camera's ex tempore recording of the hurly-burly of life but in equal measure by the controlling hand of the artist. However self-effacing, his presence is revealing in the camera angles, the casting, the organization of takes and sequences, etc. In short, he transforms - in Ingarden's phrase - the material for a work into the material of a work. (Morawski 1970: 41)

An odd, but not incorrect, use of the word "communion" as a verb instead of a noun.

But if we go further and allow mimesis to embrace fantastic images of reality, are we not committing a violation of reason as well as terms? Surely no: fantasy and fable do not float entirely free of reality: the stones and flowers in my example are not make-believe, nor is what passes between them or the course of the action; what is startling - and inclines the adult mind metaphorwards - are the properties invested in the stones, and it is this that produces the distortion of mimesis. Here we approach a new problem which I can only mention in passing, that of symbolism strictly so-called. (Morawski 1970: 45)

*Applauds*

Every act of knowing is governed by at least three things: the object on which it fastens, the subject in the sense of the generic capacities for apprehending the world, and the current state of knowledge. There is a fourth point - individual modification - which, crucial thought it is to an account of the creative process and the esthetic response, can be passed over here. (Morawski 1970: 46)

Indeed many interpretations of Peirce boil down to this kind of schema because the "interpretant" can be taken for "interpreter". Also note that Peirce as-if identifies knowledge and its modification much in line with the datum that every act of remembering is rewriting the memory. The term "modification" is also loaded with historical context ("mental modification" appears in Clay and his contemporaries and perhaps as far back as Aristotle; cf. Favareau 2008: 16)

The work of Mukařovsky, an active disciple of the structuralist school, is instructive on this score. Ever since his report to the 8th Philosophy Congress, one of the cornerstones of his esthetic views has been that every work performs two functions simultaneously: one autonomous, one communicative. Out of this comes the special tension in the structure of the work and its perception. On the communicative level, he has placed all the story elements (umeni tematická obsahová). In his studies of poetic language, particularly that of fairy-tales, he has emphasized that not only the semantic whole, but also its components, have as much a connotative as a denotative strain. Each elements of the work appears in relation to another and in consequence the meanings cumulate, though each word and sentence points to a reality outside it. (Morawski 1970: 48)

I've been using "autonomy" in this sense for so long that I've forgotten that it was Mukařovsky, not Jakobson, who gave it substance.

Mimesis, being an integral element of the whole artistic structure, can be separated out only in the abstract. If the work is representational, mimeticism subsists in its entirety; indeed the formal and expressive elements through which mimesis has been achieved become, as it were, transparent. In consequence there is generated a twofold dimension: (a) between the semiotic situation in itself and the semiotic situation which points outwards to non-artistic reality, and (b) between the pattern of formal elements which commands separate attention and the overall artistic structure which resorbs and neutralizes it. The first antinomy has been the subject of frequent and perceptive analysis by Mukařovsky. Recently it was brought out by J. Lotman, who interpreted the art-work as a structure of dialectic opposites: the virtuality of the world as represented in the object contrasting with the real entity which it at the same time is, the resemblance to something real with the status of fiction, the syntax of specific elements building up an inward rhythm with the semiotic design which appeals outwards to author and recipient. (Morawski 1970: 54)

Reference to Lotman's Lektsyu po strukturalnoy poetikye (1964). I will have to revisit this when I attempt to read it in full (I've only read excerpts).

Wykoff, William 1970. Semiosis and Infinite Regressus. Semiotica 2(1): 59-67. DOI: 10.1515/semi.1970.2.1.59

Aside from Roman Jakobson, Uriel Weinrich, and Rulon Wells, not many linguists have made the effort to understand the sign theory of Charles Sanders Peirce. This is unfortunate, for as Rulon Wells has recently pointed out, Peirce was attempting to construct a logic of discovery, which in many ways goes far beyond the current Chomskyan empiricist-rationalist controversy. (Wykoff 1970: 59)

Wells also wrote De Saussure's System of Linguistics, which is on my radar.

The only ultimate interpretants which Peirce was willing to accept as universal are the most general laws of physics which operate throughout the universe both before and after man discovers them. (Wykoff 1970: 59)

Are these Clay's axioms?

Alston is typical of those who seek the final logical interpretant outside semiosis in Peirce's notion of "habit of action". The same mistake was earlier committed by Dewey, and Peirce was quick to notice the fallacy as early as 1904. Dewey assumed that such generalized habits arose out of human action or inquiry. Peirce wrote to Dewey saying that logic or rules of inquiry are not merely the result of the natural history of human experience. These habits were real long before man articulated them, [|] and it is likely that man, at any given time, has only articulated them imperfectly - just as the law of falling bodies operated long before man learned to formulate it. (Wykoff 1970: 61-62)

Thus a term like "habit-formation" may be unsuitable - the habits may be pre-formed.

Contrary to Gentry, Peirce did not indicate that "habit" could be reduced to sign coding processes in their biophysical relations, as a "scientific empiricist" might maintain, although there are undoubtedly parallel processes in speech and neurons. A label has even been designated recently for this phenomenon - neurolinguistics. The geneticist, H. Kalmus, finds evidence that communication systems operating throughout the biological realm all exhibit common properties of symmetry, meaning, arbitrariness, and style whether the message is coded in language, hormones, or DNA molecules. (Wykoff 1970: 64)

This is Kalmus, H. 1962. Analagies of Language to Life. Language and Speech 5: 15-25. Sounds like something similar to Katz (2008).

Sánchez, Manuel Cáceres 1999. Scientific thought and work of Yuri Lotman. Sign Systems Studies 27: 46-59.

Anyway, when we refer to semiotics in Lotman, we should bear in mind that it is about an heterodox semiotics with a heterogeneous research interest, a solid semiotics, yet, always ready for a change as we will see below. (Sánchez 1999: 46)

One could also talk about Lotman's "ad hoc semiotics", with reference to "Ad hoc theories and theorising on the basis of [empirical] material" (Torop 1998: 12).

Mihhail Lotman also distinguishes two phrases in the evolution of the ideas of his farther and the Tartu school seen from the point of view of philosophy: the first phase, the one of the 1960s in which the Kantianic basis of his postulates about "the statics of semiotic systems" stands out; and the second one, that of the 1970s, has a different philosophic basis (M. Lotman cites the autocrescent logos in Heracleitus) the dynamics of semiotic systems being regarded as a "cornerstone" of his studies now (M. Lotman 1995: 34). (Sánchez 1999: 47)

The typologies of culture would be static and the semiosphere would be dynamic.

In the same way that atomic physics has demonstrated that, on the atomic scale, the observation of a phenomenon modifies in an unpredictable way the phenomenon itself, Lotman proposes a revision of the communication scheme of Roman O. Jakobson. In contrast with the Jakobsonian scheme of communication conceived of as direct transmission of a message already elaborated, Lotman is known to have understood the act of communication as an act of transformation, as an act of translation, through what "the text transforms the language to the [|] addressee" and the text itself transforms, "stops being identical to itself" (M. Lotman 1995: 34): [↩] "Thereby, the communication act [...] has to be considered not as simple transfer of a certain message that keeps coinciding with itself, from the conscience of the sender to the conscience of the addressee, but as a translation of a certain text from the language of my 'me' to the language of your 'you'" (Lotman 1997b: 54-55). (Sánchez 1999: 51-52)

I'm not sure if Jakobson's scheme of communication implies a one-to-one transfer as claimed here, since the receiver has to decode the message by selecting compatible equivalents from his own registers. So there's a "C-space" there (cf. Violi 2007: 70).

His essay O roli sluchainyh faktorov v literaturnoi evolutsii (On the Role of Fortuitous Factors in Literary Evolution), published for the first time in German in 1987 and afterwards, in 1989, in the Semeiotiké of Tartu, was written and presented at the Semiotic Seminar of the University of Tartu in 1985. (Sánchez 1999: 54)

Труды по знаковым системам - Σημειωτικη.

According to Lotman, culture is known, for generating information, for constituting a "thinking device"; but he observes that in order to make a text to produce new messages it is necessary to "make another text to go through it, as it happens in practice when to a text 'connects' a reader who preserves in the memory some previous message", in other words, "there has to be created a semiotic situation, presupposing an explosive transition from the state of Nature to the state of Culture" (Lotman 1981a: 211-212). (Sánchez 1999: 54)

Personally, this idea jibes well with my current project of reading papers simultaneously from five different (semiotics) journals; here and there I appear to compare and contrast ideas from the 1960s (Semiotica and Transactions) with those of the 2000s (Biosemiotics and Cognitive Semiotics), with SSS in between, closer to the latter.

Danesi, Marcel 1999. The dimensionality of metaphor. Sign Systems Studies 27: 60-87.

However, in my view, the ever-burgeoning literature on what has come to be known as conceptual metaphor theory (henceforward CMT) (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Lakoff 1987; Johnson 1987) still lacks a synthetic semiotic framework for interpreting the diverse, multiform manifestations of metaphor in human symbolic and communicative behavior. The purpose of this paper is to provide such a framework, drafted from Peircean theory, called dimensionality theory (DT), which I proposed as a target for discussion in a previous study (Danesi 1998). (Danesi 1999: 60)

It is easy enough, I think, to "draft" something from Peircean theory; it is much more difficult to get a firm grasp of Peirce's theories. This is partly so because even those who invest time and energy into reading Peirce neglect his contemporaries, his native community of inquirers, set against whom he actually makes sense.

A firstness metaphor is one that is constructed with concrete vehicles (i.e. with vehicle referring to concrete referents), a process which produces a conceptual metaphor, as it is called in the relevant literature (e.g. Fauconnier 1985, 1997; Sweetser 1990; Croft 1991; Deane 1992; Indurkhya 1992; Fouconnier and Sweetser 1996). In this paper, a conceptual metaphor will be renamed a metaform, for it is in essence a form made up of a signifier referring to an abstract concept in terms of a concrete signified (Sebeok and Danesi forthcoming). The formula [thinking = seeing], for example, is a metaform because it is made up of an abstract signifier, [thinking], that is conceptualized in terms of forms, structures, categories, etc. that involve the concrete signifieds associated with [seeing]. (Danesi 1999: 61)

Isn't the exact point of firstness that it isn't concrete (e.g. "fuzzy feeling")? Also, shouldn't a metaform be "form about form"?

In both philosophy and psychology, the term concept is used to designate a general strategy for referring to things that are perceived to subsume some general pattern, feature, etc. Concept-formation can thus be characterized as a pattern- or feature-inferencing process. A concrete concept can now be defined as the process of referring to a pattern, feature, etc. that is demonstrable and observable in a direct way, and an abstract concept as the process of referring to something that cannot be demonstrated or observed directly. So, for example, the word car refers to a concrete concept because one can always demonstrate or observe the existence of a car in the physical world. The word love, on the other hand, refers to an abstract concept because, although love exists as an emotional phenomenon, it cannot be demonstrated or observed directly (i.e. the emotion itself cannot be demonstrated or obsreved apart from the behaviors, states of mind, etc. that it produces). (Danesi 1999: 66)

In other words, concrete is specific, identifiable, and perceivable (cf. Adamson 2007: 90), and abstract is not. I still like the part/whole explanation better.

The two points to be made here are: (1) that highly abstract notions are built-up from meta-metaphorms (cultural models) which coalesce into a system of abstract meaning that holds together the entire network of associated meanings in the culture, and (2) that since this system is constructed intuitively (abductively) it can be changed at any time to suit new needs. (Danesi 1999: 75)

I have an inkling that Peirce would object to identifying "intuition" and abduction; and on the whole the principle of generation here leads from concrete to abstract whereas Peircean categories appear to lead from chaos to lawfulness.

It is also the conceptual source for the fact that illumination is emphasized by religions (Ong 1977; Wescott 1978; Hausman 1989). So-called "visionary" or "revelatory" experiences are regularly portrayed in terms of dazzling sensations of light. (Danesi 1999: 75)

Kirgastumine. Wescott, Roger W. 1978. Visualizing Vision. In: Randhawa, B. and W. Coffman (eds.), Visual Learning, Thinking, and Communication. New York: Academic Press, 21-37. (archive.org)

For example, the [human personality = perceived physical features of animals] metaform is the source of such symbolic activities as the use of animals in totemic codes, in heraldic traditions, in the creation of fictional characters for use in story-telling to children, in the naming of sports teams, and in the creation of surnames, to mention but a few. (Danesi 1999: 76)

I wanted to protest, because this seems like a rather simplified vision of totemic codes, but the old man backs it up: "They feel within them an animal or vegetable nature, and in their eyes, this is what constitutes whatever is the most essential and the most excellent in them. So when they assemble, their first movement ought to be to show each other this quality which they attribute to themselves and by which they are defined. The totem is their rallying sign; for this reason, as we have seen, they design it upon their bodies; but it is no less natural that they should seek to resemble it in their gestures, their cries, their attitude." (Durkheim 1915: 358)

Meyers, Robert G. 1967. Peirce on Cartesian Doubt. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 3(1): 13-23.

According to Peirce, Descartes' methodological doubt violates Peirce's basic rule that inquiry must begin with real doubt. In Peirce's words:
Some philosophers have imagined that to start an inquiry it was only necessary to utter a question whether orally or by setting it down upon paper, and have even recommended us to begin our studies with questioning everything! But the mere putting of a proposition into the interrogative form does not stimulate the mind to any struggle after belieg. There must be a real and living doubt, and without this all discussion is idle. (5.376)
[|] The central question here is the meaning of 'doubt.' For we cannot very well tell whether a given inquiry is genuine or not unless we know the criteria of "real and living doubt." (Meyers 1967: 13-14)

Accordingly, when writing a paper, one should begin with a real and living doubt. In my case this would be, firstly, quite simply: "What is phatic communion?"

Fortunately, there is another, more adequate conception of doubt in Peirce. Put crudely, this other conception is that doubt is the blocking of a habit of action, or, as Peirce says, doubt is "the privation of a habit" (5.417). (Meyers 1967: 14)

Another point of comparison between Peirce and Clay: "Doubt is privation of certitude as regards a thesis that makes some pretension to belief, - one supported by some incentive to belief." (Clay 1882: 42)

The most that can be maintained is, that we seek for a belief that we shall think to be true. But we think each one of our belief to be true, and, indeed, it is a mere tautology to say so. (5.375; italics Peirce's.)
According to Peirce, this principle even applies to perceptual judgments (5.180 ff.). Briefly, Peirce's view is that propositions framed on the basis of percepts and past experience are the only cognitive parts of perception, for only they can be true or false and communicated. Hence, when we perceive an object, we do not have direct knowledge of that object. Rather, we believe a proposition about the percept. Hence, our view of reality as given in perception is what we believe reality to be and not necessarily what reality actually is. (Meyers 1967: 15)

I believe that the piece of yellowish substance in front of my nose is in fact "cheese" (cf. Adamson 2007: 89).

A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. (5.265)
The important point here, as Broyles has pointed out, is that doubt must be based on a "positive reason." That is, the investigator must be able to justify his inquiry by clearly stating the ground on which the belief being examined as inadequate. Doubt justifies inquiry because doubt is the awareness of an incompatibility between two beliefs. Hence, when challenged to justify his inquiry, the investigator can point to the contradictory beliefs in the system of knowledge. (Meyers 1967: 17)

The obverse of indubitables "which are indubitable only because there is no positive ground which could stimulate a doubt" (Savan 1965: 40). In the case of phatic communion, the positive reason stems from good principles of conversation and the peripatetic/apophatic paradoxes.

Cheng, Chung-Ying 1967. Charles Peirce's Arguments for the Non-Probabilistic Validity of Induction. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 3(1): 24-39.

Peirce gives his general definition of the truth in the following terms:
The opinion which 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. (5.407)
As truth requires ultimate agreement of all scientific investigators, it is defined in terms of social and inter-subjective confirmability. (Cheng 1967: 27-28)

The final, but not ultimate, interpretant.

Battail, Gérard 2008. Genomic Error-Correcting Codes in the Living World. Biosemiotics 1(2): 221-238. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-008-9019-z

Some definitions of words or concepts may lack at their first appearance, but they can be found later in the text. A more logical presentation, defining everything before it is used, would resilt in most of the paper consisting of preliminaries, the original statements being concentrated at the very end of the paper. (Battail 2008: 222)

Clay's The Alternative: A Study in Psychology is a good example of a study that defines its terms rigorously but then isn't able to employ them in any meaningful way.

The destination is usually at a distance from the source in space, but the paradigm also applies when they are separated by a time interval. Due to the separation of the source and the destination, a channel must be provided between them in order to convey the message from the former to the latter. The channel is the seat of propagation phenomena for communication in space, or consists of some physical medium on which the message symbols are written and then read later [|] for communication in time. The destination has no other means to know the message than observing the channel output. (Battail 2008: 222-223)

A very technical definition of a channel.

We saw that Shannon's paradigm is general enough to apply as well to communication at a distance (telecommunication) as to communication in time (we could refer to it, a bit pedantically, as chronocommunication). The two fundamental main quantities, namely the source entropy and the channel capacity, are defined the same way and are equally relevant in both cases. A main difference between them is that devices intended to communication-in-time cannot use a feedback which would violate causality, while feedback can be (and is often) used in telecommunication. (Battail 2008: 224)

I have made a similar pedantic differentiation between synchronic and diachronic metacommunication, the latter being, in my opinion, metaphorical (exactly because there is no feedback in writing a text about a text).

Information theory dramatically illustrates this difficulty as it enables computing the capacity of DNA as a channel for communicating through time or, more precisely, an upper bound on this capacity (Battail 2006a). (Battail 2008: 224)

The communicationalization of life.

Associating a species with a genome then implies that a new species may originate in a regenerator error, so our main hypothesis directly hints at evolution proceeding by jumps, i.e., being saltationist. It explains many important facts, including the radiative character of evolution, the Cambrian explosion, and the frequent lack of continuity in fossil records. (Battail 2008: 225)

"In biology, saltation (from Latin, saltus, "leap") is a sudden and large mutational change from one generation to the next, potentially causing single-step speciation. This was historically offered as an alternative to Darwinism. Some forms of mutationism were effectively saltationist, implying large discontinuous jumps." (Wiki)

Nualláin, Seán Ó. 2008. Subjects and Objects: Metaphysics, Biology, Consciousness, and Cognition. Biosemiotics 1(2): 239-251. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-008-9016-2

Freeman (2005b) introduces several other leitmotiven. Globally coherent brain activity may be an objective correlate of consciousness through preafference. Preafference, in turn, enters once the more veridical notion of circular causality is substituted for the stimulus-response act. Briefly, once an action is lined up, the brain prepares the system for the sensory consequences of this action in the preaffecence process. The consequences for consciousness qua process are enormous. [↩] Essentially, Hume was right; there is no conscious will, but there does exist a conscious "won't". Agency as a concept needs to be correspondingly attenuated; when the intending of an act presents itself to consciousness, it is experienced as a cause; consciousness of the consequences thereof are experienced as effects. This vastly consequential idea is revisited below in the context of the late Benjamin Libet's (1994) classic work. (Nualláin 2008: 240)

Adding some merit to Peirce's "self-control" as one of the primary functions of consciousness (cf. Potter 1966: 11).

The Vedanta tradition in Hinduism is monist to the point of apparent folly. There is one entity, the Self, which is synonymous with Being, Reality, and consciousness. Adepts in Vedanta are trained to change their habits of proprioception to experience [|] their bodies as continuous with the physical world outside. (As it happens, of course, our body image is quite malleable along these lines. See Ramachandran and Blakeslee 1998). Vedantins are similarly encouraged to view their minds, as if from outside, as a set of disconnected thoughts given spurious unity by a pseudo "I". Again, contemporary cognitive science can countenance this (Gazzaniga 1995); we go through the day narrating to ourselves a set of fictions about what is happening to us that posits ourselves inappropriately as chief protagonist in events which are far beyond our control. (Nualláin 2008: 240-241)

Is this analogous to Peirce's theory of mind and his view of selfhood? ("I regard a man's naïve notion that he exists as being in the main a delusion and a vanity" - in Holmes 1966: 125-126.)

An understandable reaction [to Descartes] is to fight fire with fire, and to attenuate the disincarnate subject. This can be done by asserting that many so-called mental contents are "out there" in the external world, to be picked up as affordances (Gibson 1979). In this vein, Merleau-Ponty (1942/1963, 1945/1962) attempts to describe subject/object relations at a "coupled" level, to use the terminology in Ó Nualláin (2000). (Nualláin 2008: 246)

I think this is what all those authors do who emphasize the diffuse nature of consciousness as "a distributed property of the wider semiotic field" (Violi 2007: 82).

Deacon, Terrence W. 2008. Shannon - Boltzmann — Darwin: Redefining information (Part II). Cognitive Semiotics 2: 169-196. DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2008.2.spring2008.169

Consider, for example, a typo in a manuscript. It can be considered a reduction of information because it reflects a lapse in the contraint imposed by the language and necessary to convey the intended message, and yet it is also information about the proficiency of the typist, information that might be useful to a prospective employer. (Deacon 2008: 172)

Or information about layout, sa the typos made with qwerty and dvorak are noticeably different.

Information, as it is understood commonly (as opposed to the more technical Shannon informaion), is a difference in something that is interpreted to refer to, or mean, something else for some interpretive purpose for some interpreter. This might suggest that at some point in our discussion we will need to introduce mentalistic concepts to cross the threshold into semiosis. (Deacon 2008: 173)

Again, are "information" and "sign" interchangeable? (cf. Farina 2008: 77)

For example, we tend to think of word-reference in positive terms, i.e. as a correspondence relationship between a term and some concept and between both and a selected set of objects, events, or [|] properties of things in the world. Arguments in the field have for this reason often focused on trying to define the nature of this correspondence, the problem of locating or specifying the ontology of the 'content' of information, or determining the status of the objects of reference (e.g. whether a class, a general concept, or individuals). But many of these issues can be usefully reframed in contraint terms. (Deacon 2008: 188-189)

Term = representamen; concept = interpretant; object = object. Collecting similar, if not completely matching, schemes (cf. e.g. Favareau 2008: 16).

In many ways, iconic and symbolic relationships are less and more than informational, respectively, and only indexical relationships directly provide information. One might characterize icon relationships as presenting the possibility of being used to acquire information, though not being a source of information, and one might characterize symbolic relationships as exemplifying relationships between forms of information. (Deacon 2008: 191)

Another instance of the affinity between these categories (information and indexicality), traceable to Augustine's signa naturalia (cf. Favareau 2008: 10).

Emergent meanings and unprecedented referential relationships are constantly being generated in everyday language usage, some like the metaphoric extensions noted above, but others like the technical reuse of the term 'energy' that has now become a ubiquitous fixture in modern folk physics. The penumbra of representational possibilities that is left available is a critical prerequisite for the emergence of new meanings and the adaptability of language. Much of this generativity is accounted for by the incredible combinatorial use of prior representations, but even this depends on the openness of referential possibility implicit in its function-based foundation. So attempts to coin new terms succeed best if they borrow meanings, functions, and connotations from other words or morphemes (e.g. from ancestral languages such as ancient Greek) and thus take advantage of the undifferentiated possibilities that they embody. To invoke a term coined by the psychologist James Gibson, the constraints generated by this selection history do not pre-determine possible uses, they instead create affordances. (Deacon 2008: 193)

Malinowski was thus quite clever to take up a Greek word in his terminological invention.

This superficially reasonable account does not, however, distinguish the special nature of this relationship and what might distinguish it from other merely physical relationships. So, to use a classic example, the wax impression left by a signet ring is only wax, except for the mind that interprets it to represent the ring, the office of its bearer, and its bearer. But the wax impression is just wax and the ring is just a metallic form and their conjunction at a time when the wax was still warm and malleable was just a physical event, like so many other physical events where one object alters another when they are brought together. Something more makes the wax impression a sign that conveys information: it must be interpreted. Unfortunately, within this obvious answer a vicious regress hides. What we invoke with an interpreting mind is just what we hope to explain. The process we call interpretation is the generation of mental signs interpreting extrinsic signs, and we are left with the same problem inside as outside the mental world. The problem of specifying how a specific absent content inheres in some way in these components of the interpretive process is no better grounded in neurological processes than it is outside of brains. (Deacon 2008: 170)

Returning to record this passage because it made me realize something significant. This is essentially what the Russian Formalists called "defamiliarization" (cf. Shklovsky 1917), and it is also operative behind Malinowski's phatic communion, which is essentially a defamiliarization of everyday communication, highlighting the bare "fact of communicating" (e.g. "the fact that the speaker has said something to the hearer more than on exactly what has been said" - Žegarac & Clark 1999: 329). This is why Austin and La Barre both reduce phaticity to bare vocalization - as if seen, with reference to Shklovsky, from the perspective of a horse (or some other non-human agent).

Holenstein, Elmar 2008. Semiotics as a Cognitive Science. Cognitive Semiotics 3: 6-19. DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2008.3.fall2008.6

Cognitive science is comparable to intellectualistic psychology of the late 19th century as far as its claims are concerned. It soon turned out that this also applies to its fate. Like intellectualist psychology, cognitive psychology is remarkably successful in a narrow field. What it explains so successfully is regarded by its critics as merely the tip of the "iceberg" of psychological processes. (Holenstein 2008: 8)

Is Clay included? I would posit him in "philosophical psychology" or "rational psychology", but it may amount to the same. His self-descriptive "reconstructive psychology", as far as I know, stands alone.

Today, or for someone who grew up in a different scientific and cultural tradition, it may sound perverse that one of the psychologists who helped to introduce the "cognitive turn", Jerome Bruner, writes in his autobiography about "the liberating effect of the computer on the psychologist's image of what is humanly possible" (1983: 104). But that was indeed the first effect that the artificial intelligence of the computer had on the natural intelligence of the human being. [↩] Similarly S. M. Kosslyn (1983: 22): "The first precise way to conceptualize how the mind works came from an unexpected corner, technology. [...] What made the computer so important for psychology was that it was a well-understood example of how a machine - a physical device - could process information". (Holenstein 2008: 11)

By analogy, would cultural semiotics benefit, instead of the discourse on artificial intelligence, from the discourse on computer networks?

There are many people who see the significance of the familiar "linguistic turn", which was initiated by philosophy between the two world wars under the influence of behaviourism, in the dismissal of such problematical phenomena [|] as ideas. "Idea" seems to be a term related to a heterogeneous class of fuzzy constructs that are both empirically and conceptually dubious; "language", by contrast, is deemed to be a term with which something intersubjectively observable and logically analysable is meant. In the course of the past decades, linguists and logicians have become more reserved. "Language", too, increasingly seems to be the title for a completely hybrid entity. (Holenstein 2008: 12-13)

"Ideas, if attainable at all, are the result of long and toilsome search on the part of philosophers." (Gardiner 1932: 44)

As early as the 18th century, A. G. Baumgarten (1739: §349) presented hermeneutics as a sub-discipline of the Scientia signorum or Characteristica (his "universal art of signs") together with heuristics (which deals with the invention of signs) and mantics (the specific subject matter of which is prognostic signs). According to Baumgarten, Hermeneutica universalis (the [|] "universal art of interpretation") deals "de cognoscendis signorum signatis" (withe the knowledge of what the signs signify). (Holenstein 2008: 14-15)

Why is this the first I'm reading of this? Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten evidently wrote in Latin and German. "For many years, Kant used Baumgarten's Metaphysica as a handbook or manual for his lectures on that topic" (Wiki). An English translation of Metaphysics appeared in 2013.

To my knowledge, the first person to make the overdue cognitive revision of Morris's tripartition of semiotics into syntax, semantics and pragmatics was a chemist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Hans Primas, who, when writing a textbook on quantum mechanical chemistry, felt obliged to reflect on the philosophy of science. According to Primas (1981: 19ff.) every science can be regarded as a semiotic system. As such a scientific theory has to fulfil three criteria corresponding to the three branches of semiotics. In syntactic respect, a good theory is logically coherent, in semantic respects it is empirically verified and in pragmatic aspects it is understandable. For Primas, intuition is a centerpiece of understanding: "A good theory is consistent, confirmed, and intuitable". (Holenstein 2008: 15)

Damn it, Holenstein, don't drop so much good stuff on the reader! Primas' Chemistry, Quantum Mechanics and Reductionism: Perspectives in Theoretical Chemistry is available on libgen (9783642693670). On substantive points, it appears that Malinowski's phatic communion is empirically confirmed, intuitively understandable, but logically inconsistent.

The fact that all theory is also intuition-dependent is gradually gaining wider recognition under the influence of cognitive science. "When scientists hold a theory, they hold a particular mode of imagery as well", reads a new key proposition (Miller 1984: 312). (Holenstein 2008: 16)

Very much the stuff I've been working on under the title of "intuitionism", alongside Burke's trope of "representative anecdote".

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