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A Phase of Decision

Sarles, Harvey B. 1970. An Examination of the Question - Response System in Language. Semiotica 2(1): 79-101. DOI: 10.1515/semi.1970.2.1.79.

The problem of relating language and culture, or of using the language as an entree into the inspection of nonlinguistic, cultural systems has various roots in both linguistics and anthropology. This theme was succinctly stated by Malinowski in the following form: "I submit that the linguistics of the future, especially as regards the science of meaning, will become the study of language in the context of culture" (1944: 5). The problems inherent in using the structure of language as an inroad to the study of culture are reflected in the works of Sapir, Whorf, and their students (Hoijer 1954). Whorf considers the grammar as molding cultural systems: "[...] that the linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language [...] is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual's mental activity" (1932: 5). Sapir claimed that "'The grass waves in the wind' is shown by its linguistic form to be a member of the same relational class of experiences as 'The man works in the house'" (Mandelbaum 1949: 10). (Sarles 1970: 80)

McRaspberry (Gellner 1985: 7) being as insightful as ever.

'Wrong' questions also occur; i.e., questions are also embedded in larger contexts. What we usually mean by wit includes the clever use of 'slightly wrong' questions. Obviously this implies that larger verbal (or nonverbal) units form part of an interactional behavior. It may well be, for example, that the main 'function' of questions is to help maintain an interaction and has very little to do with information exchange in most situations. (Sarles 1970: 83)

"The asking of questions is obviously a masterly shortcut for the establishment of "phatic communion." (Burke 1937: 234-235)

In any actual situation, much of this is never expressed, since it is clear in context and would be redundant. But is it always implicit, and points to the likelihood that a 'program' is pretty much in effect in any Q-R situation - there are probably a small number of possibilities which may occur situationally. This sets up the possibilities for many types of joking or teasing behavior - and when this is examined it may yield more insight into how 'situational boundaries' are defined. It is quite devastating to be asked, for example, When are you leaving?, when you have no idea you were expected to leave. (Sarles 1970: 98)

Another way to introduce "unpleasant tension" into the situation.

Stanosz, Barbara 1970. Formal Theories of Extension and Intension of Expressions. Semiotica 2(1): 102-114. DOI: 10.1515/semi.1970.2.1.102

For the traditional and in many ways faulty concepts of extension (denotation) and intension (meaning, connotation) of expressions, a number of various concepts is proposed as their explicata in contemporary semantics. Each of these concepts seems to be a precisely equivalent of one of the meanings of the explicated word. (Stanosz 1970: 102)

Interestingly, connotation is identified with meaning, as in "The connotation of a word is the conception it conveys" (Langer 1956[1942]: 52), as opposed to "extended meaning" (Danesi 1998: 52).

The concept of intension with this property corresponds, no doubt, to one of the meanings in which the term 'meaning' commonly is used; namely, to this meaning in which, for example, it is sometimes claimed that an expression is the most meaningful to a person the more he knows about the object which the expression names. (Stanosz 1970: 106)

Here, extension refers to semantic knowledge and intension to total knowledge.

Sonesson, Göran 1999. The life of signs in society - and out of it: Critique of the communication critique. Sign Systems Studies 27: 88-127.

Cultural semiotics, as conceived by the Tartu school, seems to be concerned mainly with obstacles to communication; something which is a "text" in the culture (or non-culture) of the sender becomes a "non-text" in the culture of the receiver; or it becomes a text only being read by means of another "code" which, at least initially, leaves it deformed. (Sonesson 1999: 88)

It may have something to do with the Formalist idea of artistic texts being more difficult and offering more resistance to the reader than prosaic messages in practical language. New information is borne out of this difficulty - it's a way of creating a "C-space" in Eco's nomenclature (cf. Violi 2007: 70).

This practice has produced at least two symmetrical, equally negative, consequences: by reducing all kinds of semiosis to the mass media kind, in particular to that employed by radio and telegraphy, we become unable to understand the peculiarity of more direct forms of communication; and by treating all semiosis as being on a par, we deprive ourselves of the means to understand the intricacies added to direct communication by means of different varieties of technological mediation. Taken together, this means that we dispose of no way of explaining the effects of the multiple mediations having accrued to the immediately given world of our experience in the last century. Beyond this, we may even discover a third, even more serious consequence: by projecting the communication model onto each and every form for conveying meaning, we lose sight of that which is really common to all kinds of semiosis. (Sonesson 1999: 89)

This is exactly what I call communicationalization. In recent readings I have documented it in the realms of film (Worth 1969: 283) and DNA (Battail 2008: 224), including a similar remark about its harmfulness in this journal (Tarasti 1998: 118).

The identification of communication with transport is probably suggested by the spatial layout of the diagram itself, rather than by the media modelled. Or it may have some even deeper source, as suggested by Reddy's (1979) well-known analysis of the "conduit metaphor" (which, if we are to believe McNeill's (1994) study of the relevant gestures, only occur in Western countries). Interestingly, the transport model of communication was criticised already in 1929 by Voločinov (1986), well before it was embodied in the mathematical theory of communication. (Sonesson 1999: 90)

The identification is much older and perhaps even etymological, e.g. water and rail communication (cf. Neuman & Nave 2008: 101).

Curiously, in Bakhtin's own texts, and in many passages of the Voloshinov texts also, dialogicity implies very little activity, or at least an activity of a very one-sided kind: one person quoting (and often qualifying) something said by another, normally in written form, which leaves very little possibility for one quoted to react. (Sonesson 1999: 91)

Thus, Bakhtinian dialogicity (at least from I gather here) is a form of meta-communication (in the diachronic sense employed frequently in Tartu) or "chronocommunication" (Battail 2008: 224).

In order to make sense of dialogicity (not necessarily Bakhtin's sense), we have to think of communication, not as a single, delimited act, close to a specious present, but as an extended stretch of behaviour, in which several acts take place and are reacted to, and meaning is continuously renegotiated. It is precisely because we accept too easily this view of meaning as a single, short act of give and take, that examples such as Voloshinov's "Well" (1983a) and "H'm" (1983b: 124ff), [|] Grice's (1989: 93ff) 43 cents at the tobacconist's and Sperber & Wilson's (1983: 55) smell of gas seem to make nonsense of the rules-governedness of communication and establish meaning as something ineffable. (Sonesson 1999: 96-97)

Two points. Firstly, "specious present" is Clay's most famous terminological invention (cf. Clay 1882: 168-169), which appears in odd places (e.g. Priest 2018: 152). Secondly, could Voloshinov's "Well" be the reason Jakobson chose Dorothy Parker's "Newlyweds" to illustrate the phatic function? Voloshinov, Valentin Nikolaevich 1983a. Discourse in life and discourse in poetry. Bakhtin School Papers. Russian Poets in Translation. Oxford, 5-30. (GB) Also, rule-governedness is unwellformedness.

The temporal presupposition entails another one: before the moment of sending, there is a subject making a decision to send. This is very clear in the case of the telegraph and other technological means: one must decide to go to the telegraph station or to open the Fax software on the home computer. There is much less clearly a preparatory stage, a phase of decision which can be separated from the act of sending, in ordinary verbal conversation, gesture, and so on. But can a subject not making the decision to send before sending properly be called a sender? (Sonesson 1999: 97)

A phrasal synonym for Eco's "C-space".

Quite apart from the distinction between machines and man, however, we really need to have more instances, not less, in order to account for the complexities of sending and receiving. Several subjects are involved in the sending of a book: the writer, the editor, the editorial board, the proof-reader, the typesetter (nowadays largely identical with the writer in front of his computer), the enterprise doing the distribution, the critique, the bookseller, the one who buys the book as a present, etc. (Sonesson 1999: 98)

One of my personal hypotheses as an avid reader of historical texts (throughout the 20th century, at least) is that the overall quality of writing has diminished significantly ever since this intermediary was lost. The proof-reader may notice some errors, but so did typesetters, who had the parse the text from scratch before considering it finished. IMO all academic writings have become more error- and typo-prone ever since the advent of computerized text editors, with which a text written up once is basically finished. Also, note that this whole chain of communication can be added/appended to that of Jakobson's overhearing a couple on board a train and then passing the message on in writing.

Dan Sperber (1982) has taken exception to these parallels: while circulation is a constitutive factor of the kinship system, it is only an accidental property of language, which is essentially a repertory of messages; and when information has circulated for a sufficient time, we will all be in possession of it, but a woman or a horse which is exchanged is lost for the donor; and while language signifies by means of a code, women only acquire meaning by means of the attention being directed to them. (Sonesson 1999: 101)

kek

The distinction between temporally bound and temporally free types is not identical to the one which Goodman (1968) makes between autographic and allographic arts. Among the temporarily bound typicalities previously mentioned, the verbal text is allographic, whereas the visual work of work is traditionally autographic; in other words, the art work, but not the work of literature, is defined as to its identity as well as its value by our inherited social practice by means of its temporary association to the first exemplar created by a certain individual. This is why we do not have to queue up in front of the Stockholm National Library to read the only exemplar of "Röda Rummet" written by Strindberg, while a similar conduct is expected of us in the case of a work of visual art. (Sonesson 1999: 106)

Just recently learned of "alloscopic vision" (Brandt 2007: 52). Henceforth recording such auto- and allo- distinctions. From: Goodman, Nelson 1968. Languages of Art. London: Oxford University Press.

So we can postulate some kind of Ursituation in which the leaders of the tribe decided (probably not very explicitly) to wear their cloths in such a way that they are differentiated [|] from members of other tribes. (Sonesson 1999: 109-111)

Didn't know I needed this word, but I do. "The stranger" sequence in phatic communion is an "Ursituation".

The point is not whether Morris understood Peirce correctly. The problem really begins when Morris's tripartition is taken over by Carnap: the third part becomes what Bar-Hillel has characterised as "the pragmatic waste-basket", the place where you put problem you cannot or will not resolve. It seems to me that, even today, after Grice and Searle, pragmatics essentially remains as "waste-basket". In order to get rid of this overflowing waste-basket, however, we may have to tolerate a little more disorder on the desktop. (Sonesson 1999: 112)

My hope is that reading enough Transactions will yield a coherent sense of Peirce's pragmatics/pragmaticism, but this may be in vain. On the other hand I don't see how semantics and syntactics, as such, are less "waste-basket-y" than pragmatics.

The first example offered by Voloshinov (1983a: 10ff; cf. 1986) involves two persons sitting together in the room in silence, whereupon one of them utters the single word "Well", without receiving any answer from the other. Taken in isolation, Voloshinov claims, this utterance is completely void and meaningless. Even if we add that the intonation of the word was indignantly reproachful, but softened with a touch of humour, we are not much advanced. In order to interpret the utterance, we have to acquire knowledge about the spatial purview common to both speakers, as well as of their common knowledge and [|] understanding of the circumstances, and their evaluation of those circumstances. In this case, it so happens that they are seated in front of a window, and that when looking out of it they discover that it is snowing. They both know that it is May, which, in Russia, means that they are in their right to expect spring to begin. Finally, they are both longing for the beginning of spring and they are sick and tired of winter. Given these circumstances, Voločinov maintains, the meaning of the utterance becomes completely clear. (Sonesson 1999: 116-117)

Alas, there is a connection between the "Well" and the classical example of a linguistic utterance - "It rains." (in Bühler and Gardiner, for example.)

Kull, Kalevi 1999. On the history of joining bio with semio: F. S. Rothschild and the biosemiotic rules. Sign Systems Studies 27: 128-138.

When discovering Jakob von Uexküll for the field of semiotics, T. Sebeok has called him a cryptosemiotician. This is a class fo semiotists, "who need themselves to become aware of the perspective that semiotic affords or whose work needs to be by others reclaimed and re-established from within that perspective" (Deely 1990: 119-120; Rauch 1983). Can we say that now we have a similar situation with Rothschild? Seemingly not, since he knew semiotics and applied it; there was simply no information exchange between him and other biosemioticians. Accordingly, we need to add a fourth class (in addition to the proto-, crypto- and ordinary semioticians) to Rauch's (1984) classification - the endemic semioticians. This is a branch of normal good scientists, about whom nobody in the field knows. Or a [|] small scientific group, who are developing the field of their own, publishing in journals which are not read by their colleagues in other countries. (Kull 1999: 129-130)

Define: endemic - "regularly found among particular people or in a certain area"; "native or restricted to a certain place".

A conference "The Psychology of the Self", held by the New York Academy of Sciences in 1961, included a paper by Rothschild, in which he directly uses the semiotic approach of Ch. Morris, and introduces the term 'biosemiotic'. In semiotics, he sees the way to a non-cartesian approach: "The concept of the symbol shows the way to overcome René Descartes' partition of man into the self as res cogitans and the body as res extensa. In the symbol psychological meaning and physical sign appear as a unit" (Rothschild 1962: 774). (Kull 1999: 131)

Rotschild, Friedrich Salomon 1962. Laws of symbolic mediation in the dynamics of self and personality. Annals of New York Academy of Sciences 96: 774-784. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1962.tb50161.x

Shields, Allan 1967. F. C. S. Schiller: An Unpublished Memorial by John Dewey. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 3(2): 51-54.

Schiller's first noteworthy essay in logic showed his sensitiveness to contemporary intellectual movements. The idea that axioms are postulates, are resolutions and demands, rather than self-evident truths or necessary first truths, has become since he wrote more or less of a commonplace. Its recognition among professional philosophers was a novelty when Schiller first put forward his essay. (Dewey 1937; in Shields 1967: 52)

Schiller, thus, opposed the view held by Clay, for example: "According to this definition, axioms and objects of perception are evident, - contain evidence of their own truth, - are self-evident" (Clay 1882: 50). For some extra context, see also Broyles 1965: 85, Werner 1969: 332; and Wykoff 1970: 59.

The canon of the necessity of context is fundamentally a derivative from his conviction that pure form is meaningless; that form is always the form of a subject-matter. The negative phase of his criticism is that purely formal logic is [|] condensed to inconsistency since it defines judgment and propositions in terms of truth-falsity while "truth" and "falsity" are meaningless apart from subject-matter. Its positive expression is the significance of relevancy. The two phases are, of course, necessarily connected. As Schiller wrote, "The central doctrine of the most prevalent logic still consists in a flat denial of Relevance and of all the ideas associated with it." (Dewey 1937; in Shields 1967: 52-53)

Is the pragmatic Relevance Theory (cited in Žegarac & Clark 1999) a reaction to (positivist) logic?

Megill, Kenneth A. 1967. Peirce and Marx. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 3(2): 55-65.

Perhaps the most significant result of the new interpretation of Peirce has been to show that the pragmatic position is inextricably tied up with a radical kind of realism. In order to make sense out of Peirce's cosmology, theory of signs and even his logic, it is essential that we accept a radical realism. Realism involves the assertion that there is a reality indepnedent of the human consciousness, but in Peirce's radical formulation a true realism also requires asserting that man lives in community. (Megill 1967: 56)

This evaluation is quite a long ways away from the previous one, stating that Peirce's philosophy was in the main "an odd sort of conceptualism" (Murphey 1965: 14).

Only in community with others can the true individual be found for only in a community can the alienation be overcome which is present in modern society.
Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being [Gattungswesen, or communal man] and when he has recognized and organized his own powers as social powers so that he no longer separates the social power from himself as political power. (EW, p. 31)
For Marx, the crude materialists and the utopian socialists had insisted on making the community into an ideal which was to be striven for but which had no real force in the world. (Megill 1967: 57)

This is eerily reminiscent of something C. Wright Mills wrote in The Sociological Imagination, on the topic of individual problems being simultanously public problems: "to remain independent, to do one's own work, to select one's own problems, but to direct this work at kings as well as to 'publics.' (Mills 2000[1959]: 181).

A similar position is expressed by Marx, with particular clarity in his earlier writings. In true communism science becomes concrete and man becomes a scientific being.
Natural science will then abandon its abstract materialism, or rather idealist, orientation, and will become the basis of a human science, just as it has already become - though in an alienated form - the basis of actual human life. One basis for life and another for science is a priori a falsehood. (EW, p. 164)
Communism "as a fully developed naturalism is humanism and as a fully developed humanism is naturalism" (EW, p. 155). (Megill 1967: 59)

Modern biosemioticians would probably nod in agreement.

Lowrey, Christopher H. and Priya Venkatesan 2008. Making Science Accessible: A Semiotics of Scientific Communication. Biosemiotics 1(2): 253-269. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-008-9017-1

Contributions have stipulated that scientific communication does not "meet the public" due to its complexity and to the inherent self-organizing principle of society that engenders a hyper-reflexive mode of organization (Leydesdorff 1993). Leydesdorff elaborated on a proposal for a sociological theory of communication in order to define more clearly the interface between science and the public and he maintained that the specialized sciences communicate 'truth' in a jargon that cannot be communicated to a larger audience without previous translation (Leydesdorff 1993: 352). Mediators, it has been argued, are necessary for communication between science and the public. (Lowre & Venkateson 2008: 254)

I've participated in casual conversations about this problem. Should scientists start communicating more with the public and not fear simplifying their findings to convey a more accurate picture than mediators are able?

However, current explanations for why the methods of science are not understandable to the public do not address why literary fuction, for the most part, reaches the literate public on cognitive, social and emotional dimensions, even though a fictional novel can sometimes be as obscure as the most dry of scientific texts (consider the fiction of William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett); and, literary criticism rarely delves into an analysis of the potential inaccessibility of literature or the public understanding of literary texts. (Burns et al. as much articulated that science communication is effective if it inspires as does reading a great book, or entertains as listening to a fine piece of music.) (Lowre & Venkateson 2008: 255)

"Keeltemaja trepil kehtasin oma kunagist filosoofiaõppejõudu Rem Blumi, kes mõistis kohe mu seisundit ja pakkus üllatavat lohutust. Ta väitus, et ka kõige parema loengu informatsiooniline väärtus läheneb nullile. Ainul, mis üliõpilases püsima jääb, on õppejõu suhtumine ainesse." (Torop 1999: 365)

If one can proffer the thesis, as stated earlier, that language is a system of values established by pure difference, semiotics can offer a perspective that can distill the apparent complexity of the paper. (Lowre & Venkateson 2008: 263)

While well-meaning, the authors employ the designation, "semiotics", when the proper designation would be "semiology" - Saussure and Greimas represent, as Sebeok dubbed it, the "minor tradition" of the study of signs (cf. Petrilli & Ponzio 2008: 26).

Riese, Thomas 2008. On the Real Possibilities of Continuity. Biosemiotics 1(2): 271-279. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-008-9013-5

Intuitively, we would usually conceive our contemporary logic as "symbolic logic". So it is quite surprising that the "diagrams" in the title of the book prove to be central and fundamental structures of Peircean semiotics. Diagrams are an iconic type of signs and icons function as signs due to some sort of similarity between themselves and their objects. Diagrams, in turn, are a special sort of iconic signs, which represent the internal structure of their objects in terms of interrelated parts. [↩] Why diagrams, unexpectedly, play such a prominent role, is explained by Peirce in a likewise amazing way: icons are the only kind of signs that can impart evidence. Diagrams thus prove to be key features not only for an understanding of Peircean logical realism, but, still further, of the very foundations of Peirce's thinking in general. (Riese 2008: 271)

Professor Heiskala spoke of this (and the ongoing process of bringing Peirce's diagrammatical logic to the general public) a few years ago when he visited Tartu. I shall keep a keener eye on the role of icons and diagrams henceforth when reading the Transactions.

Originally the notion of form was introduced within the context of the medieval universalia dispute by John Duns Scotus (1266-1308) in order to defend his position of scholastic realism. Formal distinctions are entia rationis and as such intermediate conceptions "more than logical but less than real". Together with an admitted existence of "real possibilities" they are shown by Stjernfelt to be essential keys for Peircean realism which in turn proves to be decisive for the connection of his "true continuity" with diagrammatical iconicity. (Riese 2008: 272)

Good to know for the next time the form/content distinction or something like it comes up.

The true import of Peirce's "diagrammatical reasoning" far surpasses mere rule-based transformations. This is put into a surprisingly clear light in Hintikka's discussion of Peirce's distinction of "corollarial" vs. "theorematic" reasoning. Corollarial reasoning refers to immediate, fixed rule based consequences, whereas theorematic reasoning requires the introduction of objects that are not explicitly referred to in the premises. (Riese 2008: 272)

First I'm reading about these distinctions, but then again Peirce had so many distinctions. Is corollarial reasoning based on the leading principle? (cf. Cheng 1966: 86-87)

As an aside I would like to add a reference to Hans Vaihinger's "Philosophy of As If" as a Neo-Kantian version of the idea of theorematic reasoning. Vaihinger demonstrated in numerous instances the important function of fictions in reasoning. This is insofar interesting as Vaihinger shows that auxiliary constructions may even be deliberately so chosen as to be 'known to be false'. There is certainly a kinship to Pragmatism here and maybe, as an interesting field for further research, there might even found some connections to Peirce's idea that reasoning processes prove to be self-correcting. (Riese 2008: 272)

Also the first reference to Vaihinger I've met in my readings; he has thus far only come up because Ogden translated The Philosophy of 'As If' (cf. Sebeok 1998: 32).

Hénaff, Marcel 2008. The Mythologiques: Between linguistics and music. Cognitive Semiotics 3: 20-35. DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2008.3.fall2008.20

Something that he never formulates explicitly, nor even seems to consider, and which yet constitutes the foundation of his new approach. What then? The following: the proposed identification between myth and music considered the mythical narrative as a symbolic device, i.e. as an operating device which aimed at producing an effect, and not as a discourse aiming at formulating an utterance. It is this implicit choice that is confirmed by Lévi-Strauss' own hypothesis, according to which myths are in a reciprocal relation of transformation (in the specific sense that he attributes to this concept) and that, just like variations in music, they interpret each other - or translate each other - by producing new versions. (Hénaff 2008: 21)

An affinity between Lévi-Strauss' myth and Lotman's text: both generate new meaning/information.

He dismissed the psychological explanations, according to which myths were expressions of our fundamental feelings and of our inner conflicts, as well as the purely sociological explanations, which assumed that myths only reflect the conditions and contradictions of a social group (even if this can make up one of the dimensions of myths), or even the symbolist interpretations, which claimed that myths express archetypes of human nature. He refused just as much the rationalist reductions, which turn myths into imaginal and somewhat naive transposotions of natural phenomena. Finally, he strongly questioned the functionalist theories, according to which myths would first and foremost translate the material needs of individuals and groups. (Hénaff 2008: 22)

Aren't these descriptions reductions of the approaches they are supposed to signify?

Between the two forms, however, there is a fundamental difference of application: "Just as music makes the individual conscious of his physiological rootedness, mythology makes him aware of his roots in society. The former hits us in the guts; the latter, we might say, appeals to our group instinct. And to do this, they make use of those extraordinarily subtle cultural mechanisms: musical instruments and mythic patterns. (Hénaff 2008: 29)

Spencer and his contemporaries argued about the social instinct. What this group instinct is supposed to be, I do not know.

Sørensen, Jesper 2008. Magic among the Trobrianders: Conceptual mapping in magical rituals. Cognitive Semiotics 3: 36-64. DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2008.3.fall2008.36

The Intellectualist understand magic as an intellectual and rational procedure based on wrong premises. In Sir James Frazer's version, mafic is the misapplication of the association of ideas, expressed in the law of similarity and the law of contagion (Frazer 1993[1922]). That is, magic is the erroneous connection of entities based on similarity and contagion. As will be evident, there is a clear connection from this proposition, over Roman Jakobson equation of similarity to metaphor and contagion to metonymy (Jakobson & Halle 1956), to current cognitive theories of metaphor and metonymy. (Sørensen 2008: 37)

I wonder if the assumption that communication must be about the transfer of ideas can be called intellectualist?

Malinowski made his field study between 1915 and 1918, and the present analysis uses this material without considering possible cultural changes. The paper will use "the ethnographic present tense" as referring to the population and their culture at that time. (Sørensen 2008: 52)

Should a similar device be employed when treating the anthropological theories from that time? (A (meta-?)theoretical present tense?)

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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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A Higher Happiness

Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua 1969. Review of Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics by John Lyons. Semiotica 1(4): 449-459. DOI: 10.1515/semi.1969.1.4.449

May I start with quoting myself (from one of the Forum talks, ibid., p. 16):
Who does not know that one has to distinguish betwen a sentence, qua abstract linguistic entity, and an utterance of it, qua concrete physical product of some linguistic act, or even between a sentence and the set of all its actual and potential utterances? (One does not have to make this distinction by using these terms, of course; anything will do, so long as it is realized that one has to deal here with two entities which are different under any name.) But are you really sure that you know how to avoid the trap of regarding (as has been done quite often in the past) this distinction as being of the well-known type-token kind or of the class-member kind? And are you really sure that you will know how to make this distinction when making it is crucial? I could give you hundreds of quotations, including recent ones from leading linguists, where it is obvious that the distinction was not made in places where it hurts.
Now, Lyons is one of the few linguists who insist that "a distinction must be made between 'utterances' and 'sentences'" (p. 52) and that "this distinction [...] is fundamental in most modern linguistic theory", being a distinction between units of langue vs. instances of parole. (Bar-Hillel 1969: 450)

Turns of sentence/utterance follows the speech/language distinction. Pointing out the fundamental nature of this distinction I would term Gardinerismus (with intended Germanicism?) since he appeared to take pleasure in pointing out who does and who does not follow this distinction.

Lyons seems to miss the point here and thereby to create an unnecessary confrontation. What Chomsky and other linguists have in mind is that whether a sequence of words is grammatical is, at the pretheoretical level of the explicandum, (trivially) independent of any particular system [|] of rules, while it becomes (trivially) dependent on such systems, at the theoretical level of the explicatum. Linguists will then differ (as will ordinary people) when attempting to clarify the explicandum 'grammatical' and will differ on the adequacy of a proposed explication, but they will hardly differ on the question whether according to some given set of rules a particular sequence of words will be generated or not. (Bar-Hillel 1969: 454-455)

The rules of grammar are unconscious and become conscious when they are broken. Does this apply on other sign systems, which are sometimes defined as rule-based?

The appropriate place for probabilities is in the rules of correspondence (or interpretation, etc.) that connect linguistic theory with linguistic behavior (language with speech, competence with performance). (Bar-Hillel 1969: 456)

Is language... linguistic theory?

Shands, Harley C. 1970. Momentary Deity and Personal Myth: A Semiotic Inquiry Using Recorded Psychotherapeutic Material. Semiotica 2(1): 1-34.

Over the more recent past, evidence (much of it derived from respected scientific inquiry) gives strong support to a different notion, namely, that communicative techniques necessarily affect the subject matter communicated. The emerging study of patterned communication has been termed semiotics, and perhaps its primary supposition is that of the transactional nature of the relation involving signifying and signified. This view suggests that there is a myriad of 'realities' each of which is significantly related to its appropriate modality of patterned communication (Cassirer 1923: 356). (Shands 1970: 1)

How do the means of communication condition the reality communicated about?

The central importance of these states is the possibility that it is only in such states that truly meaningful influences can be exerted on the one by other persons, usually on a novice by another in the role of preceptor. The specific subdivision of this general problem is that of the psychotherapeutic relation, in which the preceptor-therapist is assigned the task of helping the novice-patient learn more successful techniques of human relatedness. (Shands 1970: 2)

Preceptor is a teacher or instructor. In "informative" communication models, it is implied that the sender is a quasi-preceptor and the receiver a quasi-novice.

On the other hand, there are two other kinds of acute, conscious human experience obviously of intense formative importance; these are falling in love and religious conversion. In both instances we regularly observe at first or second hand that the elevation of a state of human relatedness to the 'transcendent' level of romantic love or of intense religious ecstasy is powerfully influential in changes in behavior or in character in human beings. (Shands 1970: 3)

Sometimes these go hand in hand.

The transcendent experience serves to unify those sharing it into a group bound together by a common experience and so differentiated from the common run of humanity. The claim validly made by those who have passed through the experience is that no one who has not done so can 'know' the experience - usually this idea gets expanded into the less tenable notion that no one who has not had the experience can know 'the truth', but this idea seldom survives the test of relativity. (Shands 1970: 4)

"The process called communization exposes people to similar experiences and although they do not transmit to each other feelings or thoughts, they know that the other person has some understanding because of the common experience" (Ruesch & Prestwood 1972[1950a]: 327).

In the contemporary scene, in sharp contrast, we find in an increasingly secular age that the search for transcendent experience is no longer a matter of religious belief. Instead, the search involves the use of drugs (LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, marijuana). [...] The interesting common feature appears to be that through the use of drugs, it is much easier to reach transcendent levels of feeling, with at least temporary feelings of uniting, "of oneness with this other person and a oneness with all the world" (Bowers et al., 1967). (Shands 1970: 5)

Today this is common knowledge. Bowels, Malcolm; A. Chipman, A. Schwartz and O. T. Dann 1967. Dynamics of Psychedelic Drug Abuse. Archives of General Psychiatry 16: 560-56.

What these trends in their various contexts of origin suggest - to a [|] rather mundane interpretation - is that the human condition is one in which the primary gratification and feeling of strength comes from a sense of union with his group; on the converse, all of the negative feelings of the human being have close relations with isolation and alienation. In another place in the same essay, Cassirer discusses the mechanism suggested by Usener as a primary source of religious feeling and by implication as a primary method of binding a group together through the use of a consensually shared belief system. (Shands 1970: 5-6)

That's a pretty bold correlation, though on first sight seems to bear scrutiny in relation with the universal emotions (cf. Ekman & Friesen 1969).

The problem of free-floating attention is faced not only by the patient in the therapeutic situation but as well by any creative artist attempting principally to express some significant emotional experience in words or on canvas. Unless he can allow himself to be sufficiently 'loose', as many art teachers prescribe, he cannot allow himself to be the executor of his own imagination. (Shands 1970: 12)

This has become popular recently in terms of diffuse consciousness, i.e. why good ideas come to people when they shower - unconsciously formed ideas can manifest themselves when the mind is not focused on anything. In the next paragraph, same page: "The rationale sometimes offered is that only when conscious direction is relaxed can one see the results of the kind of 'unconscious' structuring which reveals what is ordinarily automatically concealed."

Torop, Peeter 1999. Cultural semiotics and culture. Sign Systems Studies 27: 9-24.

In his theses "Art among Modeling Systems" Lotman defined model through the analogue of an object perceived and the language of a modeling system or the notion of analogue of language. Correspondingly he used the notion of secondary modeling system to describe the functioning mechanisms of systems using natural language as material (Lotman 1990: 8-9). In the framework of this treatment, the status of a secondary modeling system is obtained by poetic language in relation to written language, or the language of pictorial arts in relation to the language of consciousness, i.e. natural language into which it is translatable or by which it is describable. According to this logic, natural language is the primary modeling system in relation to reality, and the secondary modeling system, as a language of description, relates to all other languages of art and in wider sense languages of culture (mythology, religion, behavioral norms, etc.). (Torop 1999: 10)

What is the language of consciousness?

Eco viewed Lotman's extralinguistic attitude to the code as leaving borders of structuralism: "Lotman still understood that looking at text as a message produced on the basis of linguistic code is not at all the same as viewing the text (or set of cultural texts) as a code. Because he was aware of the fact that there is no historical period with one cultural code (although the modelhood constructed can be efficient abstraction), and that in every culture diverse codes exist simultaneously. [...] In the course of his studies Lotman still reached the conclusion that a code identified in culture is much more complicated than the one that can be identified in language, and his analyses became more and more witty and obtained the background of bright and complicated historical knowledge" (Eco 1994: 600-601). (Torop 1999: 11)

Highlighting the importance of Jakobson's permanent dynamic synchrony for cultural semiotics, where "subcodes" can be nonlinguistic (encompassing all artificial sign systems?).

Culture, in turn, is also describable through the description of three levels: a level of subtextual meanings, a level of culture as a system of texts, and a level of culture as a set of functions serving texts (Lotman 1970: 73-77). By the beginning of the 1980s, the symbiosis of text and culture has taken place, and the text as a monolingual foration has become into multilingual and semiotically heterogeneous formation that, all the more, has intellectual capabilities and memory. Besides recording and transmitting a message, the text is also concerned with the creation of new information. (Torop 1999: 13)

Is this not a personification of "text"? How dynamic can a fixed series of signs be?

Thus the most important notion of semiosphere is the boundary. Once Lotman needed the notion of framedness in order to confine the text. New it is boundary what frames the semiosphere, but the entanglement of boundaries inside semiosphere is just as important: "the boundary of semiotic space is the most important function and structural position of this space that determines the essence of the semiotic mechanism of it. Boundary is a bilingual mechanism that translates external messages into the internal language of semiosphere and vice versa. So it is only through the boundary the semiosphere can be in contact with the non-semiotic and alien semiotic space." (Torop 1999: 18)

I wonder if "transduction" wouldn't be a more accurate term for the translation on the boundary of the semiosphere (cf. Hoffmeyer 2008: 176).

Portis-Winner, Irene 1999. The dynamics of semiotics of culture; its pertinence to anthropology. Sign Systems Studies 27: 24-45.

Among the agenda coming to the fore In the spirit of such semiotically oriented scholars as Charles Sanders Peirce, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman Jakobson, Jurij M. Lotman, V. V. Ivanov and B. A. Uspenskij are the following: the close relations between verbal and non-verbal realms; an emphasis on ambiguity and dynamics in place of static structures; the integration as well as tension and factions within and between cultural units; the search for the inner point of view including memory; the significance of culturally specific versions of history and their relations to official accounts, and the fefect of the anthropologist upon the group studied. (Porti-Winner 1999: 24)

"Peirce and the Russians" might be a suitable band name.

Innis finds that the position of Peirce, Bühler, and Cassirer "arrive at the same conclusion: the theory of perception must necessarily advert to the sign-functions of the sense data found in it" (Innis 1994: 4-5). Innis also notes Vološinov's argument that "not only does 'expression organize experience' but 'there is no such thing as experience outside of embodiment in signs'" (1994: 5, citing Vološinov 1933). (Porti-Winner 1999: 26)

Above, language was defined as linguistic theory (Bar-Hillel 1969: 456), which makes a bit of sense with regard to stuff like "theory of mind" (ToM), but here it seems that the object- and meta-level have gotten confused: how can a theory of perception (not itself perception) "advertise" its data to semiosis? Weird. I'd like to agree that a semiotics of perception is a significant part of Peirce's semiotic theory (can't yet speak for Bühler and Cassirer) but at the moment I'm going to slap this with Austin's "signs of cheese" (cf. Adamson 2007: 89).

Importantly, Peirce sees two kinds of objects, which may be verbal or nonverbal, the immediate object and the dynamical object. Peirce's object is anything with which the sign presupposes an acquaintance in order to convey some further information concerning it. Peirce also held that there are various interpretants, the immediate, the dynamical and the final or logical. (Porti-Winner 1999: 27)

From what I've gathered, the "object" is a rather common term in 19th century philosophy. I think Peirce is sometimes gratuitously praised for introducing "the real" into the semiotic equation (where Saussure seems to lack it) when he in fact seems to follow the common sense (philosophy) of the time. The syntax, here, is again confusing for me: are signs "acquainted" with objects? (I would say, with Clay, that signs are the means for a mind to "embrace" the object, but this is no less metaphorical.)

Since "every thought is a sign" and "life is a train of thoughts [...] (this) proves that man is a sign; so that every thought is an external sign, proves that man is an external sign. Thus, "when we think we are at that moment a sign [...] the man and the sign are identical" (CP 5.314). (Porti-Winner 1999: 27)

I can't help thinking this is where logic gets ya. Jam is an existent; man is an existent; hence man is jam. Surely the whole of life is not summarised by "thoughts", lest we limit life to organisms with central nervous systems sufficiently complex to be considered "thinking"; likewise, a man's insides are indeed filled with colourful goo that's tasty to carnivores, but jam is not all we are. I think this is an example of Peirce's "odd sort of conceptualism" (Murphey 1965: 14).

In its Theses (1929) the Prague Circle adopted Buehler's three functions for the verbal message, the referential, the emotive, and the conative. And the Theses added a fourth, the poetic (later broadened to the aesthetic) function focused on the message for its own sake, [...] (Porti-Winner 1999: 28)

"The phenomena of the Inextended Mind are usually comprehended under three heads:" Feeling, Volition, and Thought. Bühler merely translated a commonplace in philosophical psychology into his linguistic psychology. Because of this, I think he is sometimes treated as inventing the system, which appears in fact to reach back to Aristotle, i.e. "the ancient triad of ideals, the true, the beautiful, and the good" (Potter 1966: 14).

In 1960 Jakobson defined two more functions of the message, the phatic and the metalingual. Both have parallels in Bakhtin's program and for Lotman the meta conception is fundamental for all semiotics. (Porti-Winner 1999: 28)

What is Bakhtin's take on or equivalent to the phatic function?

Now, the factual similarity which typifies the icon finds its logically foreseeable correlatie in the imputed similarity which specifies the artifice, and it is precisely for this [|] reason that the latter fits into the whole which is now forever a four-part entity of semiotic modes (Jakobson 1987: 451-452).
It is not clear, I believe, that we need a fourth semiotic mode, the artifice, since may already be accounted for by Peirce's hypoicon and degenerate index. Nor can we necessarily distinguish factual and imputed similarity for they blend into each other in index and symbol. (Porti-Winner 1999: 28-29)

Adept criticism. Exactly what I was thinking when reading the passage. I'd retain that there might be some heuristic advantage to Jakobson's artifice but essentially it's a blend of Peircean categories with continental linguistic thinking, which don't mesh as well IMO as Jakobson thought. Peirce, as far as I know, did not operate with similarity and contiguity in this way. But I get what Jakobson was going for, I intuit it as placing the poetic sign above the common symbol; in a sequence of complexity, the artifice creates a higher-order similarity, i.e. something like Susanne Langer's "formulated feeling" (cf. Freeman 2008: 103).

Madden, Edward H. 1966. James H. Fairchild and the Oberlin Philosophy. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 2(2): 131-144.

Fairchild's teleological view of moral judgment emerges early in his Moral Science. He writes that duty and obligation depend upon the prior notion of good. He admits that there is a moral use of the word "good" which is exhibited in sentences like "John has a good character"; but he has in mind a non-moral use of "good" exhibited in sentences like "John had a good time." (Madden 1966: 132)

Yes, yes, but why is this paper in this journal?

Since in fact everyone is motivated only by prospects of his own happiness, he must, in order to be a moral agent, find this happiness in acting benevolently - a "higher happiness." Fairchild called this view alternately "the selfish system" and "utilitarianism." He called it the selfish system because it claims that everyone is motivated only by prospects of his own happiness and utilitarianism because it holds that one should act benevolently, for the well-being of all. His criticism of it is skillful and devastating. (Madden 1966: 134)

I'm getting flashbacks to a particular bar scene in A Beautiful Mind, where glasses-wearing Russell Crowe works out the math on every man in the bar scoring a chick, or something like that..

Fairchild, however, quickly runs into difficulty in his efforts to reduce all virtues to the single one of benevolence. A difficulty appears immediately in his analysis of gratitude. A person bears a special relation to his benefactor; he cherishes the well-being of his benefactor because of that special relationship and not simply because he cherishes indiscriminately the well-being of all. If he cherished the well-being of a benefactor because of his love of being in general there would be nothing unique in his attitude to [|] count as gratitude. The same point is true of patriotism. A person bears a special relationship to his fellow countrymen; he cherishes their well-being because of that special relationship and not simply because he cherishes indiscriminately the well-being of all. If he valued the well-being of his countrymen because of his love of being in general there would be nothing unique in his attitude to count as patriotism, nothing to distinguish it from his benevolent attitude toward foreigners. Fairchild was not aware of this problem for he wrote that "in the nature of the case, those with whom we are associated have claims upon us which others have not." "We are specially responsible for their interests," he said, because we have "special ability to serve them." But he missed the point of the special claims. True to form, he gave a teleological analysis of this special relation. We have special obligation to our countrymen because we have greater means to implement their well-being. The point is rather that our special relations determine the nature of our benevolence, making it distinct from all other manifestations of benevolence. (Madden 1966: 136-137)

Turns out that benevolence towards others is dependent upon our association with them. The argument here is utilitarian: in these relationships you can be more benevolent because it's possible; whereas I feel that one is more benevolent in such cases because one desires to benefit friends, acquaintances and the in-group.

Unlike most of his peers, Fairchild spent considerable time analyzing the concept 'wrong' as well as 'right.' He believed that wrong is always pursued for selfish reasons and never for its own sake. "The wrong course is pursued in spite of its wickedness," he wrote, "and not for the sake of it." (Madden 1966: 139)

Made me recall this tidbit: "[...] in my last stages of believing that there was a God, I had real hatred for the fact that he could permit evil and at the same time insist upon the goodness of man... This was related to my feelings that perhaps Dr. S. is completely wrong - perhaps the answer lies in being totally evil..." (in Shands 1970: 17).

Weiner, Philip P. 1967. A Soviet Philosopher's View of Peirce's Pragmatism. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 3(1): 3-12.

Melvil admits that "In Marxist literature Peirce is almost an unknown," and offers the excuse that little was known about Peirce anywhere during the first third of this century. Students of Peirce, of course, did not have to wait until the 1930's to know that William James's public acknowledgement of Peirce as the founder of pragmatism was made in 1897. Mrs. Ladd-Franklin, one of Peirce's students at The John Hopkins University, paid tribute in 1916 to Peirce's logic of relations, only two years after Peirce's death. Morris R. Cohen surely brought Peirce's philosophy to the attention of the philosophic world in the early 1920's, as did John Dewey in 1922, in a special number devoted to American philosophy in the Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale. It is true that European philosophers knew much more about William James's writings than of Peirce's, perhaps because of the more graphic style of James's essays, and because James was hailed by Bergson and others as a pioneer psychologist; the United States was not expected to produce any noteworthy philosophers. (Weiner 1967: 4)

I had similar, if less informed, objections (cf. Melvil 1966). Also, for future reference, here is the special edition on Peirce in The Journal of Philosophy, containing papers by Royce, Dewey, Ladd-Franklin, Cohen, and others.

Of course, for Soviet philosophers, the only sound logic and methodology must be based on dialectical materialism. Hence, Peirce with his remarkable contributions to the logic and philosophy in Melvil's view of science is an "unusual phenomenon in bourgeois philosophy," and can only be explained as "the typical contradiction of a scientist living in a capitalist country." Why is there no such contradiction in the scientific writings of Marx and Engels, Lomonosov and Pavlov, who also lived in a capitalist society? Evidently revolutionary thinkers and prerevolutionary Russian scientists are exempt from the contradictions which afflict bourgeois scientists. (Weiner 1967: 5)

I believe this is what the modern bourgeois call "a burn".

Despite Peirce's severe and penetrating criticism of Berkeley's and Mill's nominalism, of Mach's and Pearson's sensationism and of James's psychologism, Melvil insists on branding Peirce's pragmatism as "subjective idealism." (Weiner 1967: 6)

Perhaps a point of connection (even if one of criticism) between Peirce and Malinowski, as the latter was a student of E. Mach (cf. Thornton 1985).

Witzany, Guenther 2008. The Viral Origins of Telomeres and Telomerases and their Important Role in Eukaryogenesis and Genome Maintenance. Biosemiotics 1(2): 191-206. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-008-9018-0

Biosemiotics investigates rule-governed, sign-mediated interactions both within and among cells, tissues, organs and organisms. It also investigates genetic sequences as codes/texts that rae coherent with the laws of physics and chemistry but, in addition, follow a complementary mix of combinatorial (syntactic), context-sensitive (pragmatic, content-specific (semantic) rules (Witzany 2000, 2007). (Witzany 2008: 191)

One of my goals is to write up a biosemiotic approach to the cultivation and use of the nootropic plant Bacopa monnieri. The obstacle is finding concrete manifestations of these aspects of sign-mediation.

The gap at the donor site is repaired in a cut-and-paste transposition or filled up with a copy of the transposon by a gap repair technique (Slotkin and Martienssen 2007). Transposons can also integrate themselves in phages and plasmids, and are transferred with them into other cells (Frost et al. 2005). This is evidence for a self/non-self differentiation competence. (Witzany 2008: 194)

A fundamental indicator of "purpose", self-protection. Arguably, the secondary metabolites called bacosides in BM are part of the plant's immune system; deduced from the fact that the contents of these secondary metabolites is very low in an intact plant (cf. Sharma et al. 2015b: 746).

To understand the evolutionary emergence of the eukaryotic nucleus with its key features such as telomeres and telomerases in the eukaryotic replication process, it could be useful to reconstruct the natural genome-editing competences of viruses (Witzany 2006). Recent research in microbiology, based on comparative genomics and phylogenetic analyses, has demonstrated that life must be viewed from the [|] perspective of the crucial role played by viruses (Forterre 2001, 2002, 2005, 2006a, b; Kroonin 2006; Villarreal 2005; Tran et al. 2004). [↩] This contradicts former concepts which focused on viruses in the framework of (1) escape theories, i.e. viruses are intact or deformed genetic praasites which escaped from cellular life, or considered that viruses (2) evolved from cellular ancestors or (3) that they are not living beings because they cannot live without cellular life. From these perspectives, viruses could not play crucial roles in the evolution of cellular life. [↩] Interestingly, phylogenetic analyses do not support the former concept of RNA and DNA viruses descending from cellular life. These analyses also show that DNA viruses and RNA viruses most probably did not have a common ancestor but evolved independently. Viruses probably have to be placed at the very beginning of life, long before cellular life evolved (Villareal 2005). (Witzany 2008: 197-198)

An earlier paper in this journal briefly made the same point but in more condensed form. Nice to have this made explicit.

Persistent endogeneous agents competent in both natural genetic engineering and natural genome editing apparently prefer a special kind of habitat characterized as non-coding DNA sectors. They use a syntax mainly consisting of repeats. They colonize analogous DNA genomes by inserting their sites between coding elements; then they use these coding elements for different needs. This developed to the point that, in the human genome, only 3% of coding regions remained. The remaining 97% serves as a habitat for persistent viral operators that orchestrate a highly sophisticated division of labour. (Witzany 2008: 201)

Viruses edit or "junk DNA"?

Kleiner, Karel 2008. The Semantic Morphology of Adolf Portmann: A Starting Point for the Biosemiotics of Organic Form? Biosemiotics 1(2): 207-219. DOI: 10.1007/s12304-008-9014-4

Adolf Portmann developed an original approach to the phenomenon of life, with special emphasis on its representational aspects (Portmann 1960a, 1960b, 1969). This paper re-introduces and elaborates his basic ideas, in the belief that they can be a source of inspiration for modern biosemiotics. The evolution of particular constituents of the body may be driven, not only by selective pressures that increase their functional utility, but also by their ability to interact with the umwelten of other living beings in a meaningful and contextual way. This is to say that without these interactions, the functioning of any sexual display, mimicry or deceptive behavior can hardly be understood. Organs of display (i.e., semantic organs) act through the meaning that they acquire during umwelt-specific interpretations. (Kleiner 2008: 207)

If organs of display are semantic organs, are organs of functional utility "pragmatic organs"?

Organic form can be explained by two kinds of causes: extrinsic and intrinsic. Reasoning from extrinsic causation emphasizes the influence of various forms of selective pressures caused either by other organisms or by environmental conditions. This way of reasoning is entirely at the service of survival. Every part of an organism must be formed in such a way as to fulfill its life-sustaining function; from this it follows that reproduction is the sole and ultimate purpose of all formal-structural representations of life. Consequently, reproduction in the sole referential frame that is adequate to explain all manifestations of life. [↩] On the other hand, reasoning from intrinsic causation accents the importance of the inner potentialities of organisms that generate a particular form. (Kleiner 2008: 208)

Live to breed. See, for example, "the selfish gene" and the idea that life consists primarily of self-replication.

The uniqueness of Adolf Portmann's approach may be found in his explanation that organic form is in itself something valuable. Portmann acknowledged that the external surface of an organism has its own formal value and a certain kind of autonomy over other life-sustaining functions. He was convinced that this outermost aspect of an organism opens a way to the innermost dimensions, because surface manifestation reflects inner self-experience and the very selfhood of every organic being, thus bringing us closer to understanding the existence of living creatures (Portmann 1969: 315). For these reasons he developed a terminology, or rather a conceptual framework, specific to such a purpose. (Kleiner 2008: 209)

"And, not coincidentally, the skin and the brain both originate from the same germ material, i.e., from the embryo's ectoderm layer" (Hoffmeyer 2008: 171).

This attempt stemmed from Portmann's idea that the opaque surfaces of organisms represent a new specific kind of organ, and not merely a mechanical barrier that binds together inner structures and metabolic processes in order to protect them from external influences. Presumably, the appearance of ornamented opaque surfaces is associated with the origin of vision. It is highly probable that prior to the emergence of vision, most organisms had a semitransparent surface, not dissimilar from the milky whitish semitransparent coloring of vertebrate embryos. A certain comeback of such neutral and indistinct surface colorations is apparent in organisms dwelling in a dark environment, especially in parasitic forms or in inhabitants of caves or of the earth underground. On the contrary, some organisms have developed incredible transparency; consider the naturally transparent frog Hyalinobatrachium bergeri (Castroviejo-Fisher et al. 2007). (Kleiner 2008: 213)

BBC - Earth - The bizarre beasts living in Romania's poison cave: "Despite a complete absence of light and a poisonous atmosphere, the cave is crawling with life. There are unique spiders, scorpions, woodlice and centipedes, many never before seen by humans, and all of them owe their lives to a strange floating mat of bacteria. [...] Many are born without eyes, which would be useless in the dark. Almost all are translucent as they have lost pigment in their skin. Many also have extra-long appendages such as antennae to help them feel their way around in the darkness."

Brandt, Per Aage and John Hobbs 2008. Elements in Poetic Space: A cognitive reading. Cognitive Semiotics 2: 129-145. DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2008.2.spring2008.129

According to Larsen (1996) and Brandt (1995), human representations manifest distinct but connected versions of an imaginary space, which unfolds canonically into three phenomenologically basic forms: the bio-imaginary, the socio-imaginary, and the phantasmic imaginary. (Brandt & Hobbs 2008: 129)

An eerily familiar trichotomy: natural, cultural, and non-cultural (Lotman); phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and ethogenetic (Harré & Secord 1976). Most generally, the biological, the sociocultural, and the idiosyncratic.

The guiding principle is that the experienceable spaces are articulated by the natural elements into contrasts between proximal and distal sections, and that the bodily experience of 'near' and 'far' is further connected to thymic opposition of euphoric and dysphoric values assigned to figurative content. (Brandt & Hobbs 2008: 129)

Define:thymic - "relating to the thymus gland or its functions". While I've wondered long how to call this opposition (Grammarly doesn't recognize "dystopian" as a word), I'm not sure if the connection with thymus gland is accidental or intentional. Footnote on p. 132 explains: "The term is used as in Greimas & Courtés (1979)."

The inquiry into the semantics of the imaginary as such, or the 'imaginative mind' (Roth 2007), is a new enterprise in cognitive poetics, whereas it has many resonances in modern literary criticism. (Brandt & Hobbs 2008: 129)

This is Roth, Ilona 2007. Imaginative Minds. I wonder if it could be used to elaborate upon the role of imagination in "body language in literature" (which I have ill-termed somatoception).

Presence and proximity are evaluated as euphoric, whereas absence and distance are evaluated as dysphoric. The paradigm now carries a system of 'phoric' or thymic values. In this version or register, which is called the bio-imaginary (Larsen 1996), the proximity of the other is euphoric, while distality is dysphoric. Objects and Others will circulate between these opposite zones in the bio-imaginary. (Brandt & Hobbs 2008: 132)

"[...] the human condition is one in which the primary gratification and feeling of strength comes from a sense of union with his group; on the converse, all of the negative feelings of the human being have close relations with isolation and alienation" (Shands 1970: 5-6).

In keeping with Wordsworth's well-known theory of poetry-writing as motivated by "emotion recollected in tranquility" rather than immediate experiences (Bate 1991: 344), he describes how visual memories of the daffodils repeatedly "flash upon that inward eye", apparently prompting him to write the poem some two yars later. (Brandt & Hobbs 2008: 142)

Poetry, in this sense, is an outcome of "free-floating attention" (cf. Shands 1970: 12).

Tsur, Reuven 2008. Comparing Approaches to Versification Style in Cyrano de Bergerac. Cognitive Semiotics 2: 146-168. DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2008.2.spring2008.146

Since the first publication of my book Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics (1991), many scholars adopted the term "Cognitive Poetics", and it is now widely used - in quite different senses. For instance, there is a difference to be observed between, on the one hand, the understanding informing certain approaches based on cognitive linguistics and, on the other hand, my own understanding of Cognitive Poetics. (Tsur 2008: 146)

Indeed Cognitive Poetics should be the name of this journal because thus far it has touched very little on semiotics. Semiotics is more general than linguistics, including nonverbal sign-processes, and poetics is more specialized than linguistics, only focusing on the aesthetic use of language. From Wikipedia I gathered that Tsur formed his "Cognitive Poetics" approach in 1971 in the U.K., which makes a lot of sense - "cognitive", as a signifier for approaches that have very little to do with cognitive theory, was popular at the time (see Cicourel's Cognitive Sociology).

Sweetser adopts the venerable Form-Content dichotomy; I adopt Wellek and Warren's more recent notion (1942) of "Materials" and "Structure". And, as I said, we are working within a meaning-oriented and a gestalt-oriented theory, respectively. (Tsur 2008: 148)

I don't ride cars; I ride automobiles.

Articulateness and Requiredness are two sides of the same coin; they are aspects of breaking up a whole into segments. When we speak of articulateness, we imply that a whole has been broken into parts, and that this facilitates perception of the whole. When we speak of requiredness, we imply that each part is essentially to the whole: when a part is omitted, there is an acute feeling of incompleteness, of imbalance. Articulateness and requiredness depend on the relative strength of the whole. Requirednesse is possible only where the whole is highly organised. If the integrity of the whole is not felt, then deficiently cannot be felt either. (Tsur 2008: 151)

Unwellformedness.

Actually, lustres ('chandeliers') need not be of a low register; after all, it is a decorative appliance, typically hung from the ceiling of some large, imposing building. Third, the words luster and illustres are opposed as part of speech (noun vs. adjective), reinforcing the dissimilarity of meaning, in spite of the etymological relation. (Tsur 2008: 159)

Sadly this post already has a title. I know of only one instance when a chandelier has become a functional poetic device: "He [A. Kruchonykh] would scream out the first word while covering his mouth with his hand in order to direct his voice toward the ceiling, toward a real chandelier that would begin to tremble and resonate" (Pomorska 1983: 175).

In some of my recent publications, I introduced the notion of "relative finegrainedness" in critical discourse. (Tsur 2008: 164)

Unwellformedness.

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