1. The first anthology or 'reader' to attempt to define the current situation from this point of view, Frontiers in Semiotics (Deely, Williams, and Kruse 1986), is built on the advice of Margaret Mead (1964: 287): "In this situation"—to wit, the establishment of semiotics among the traditional specialized perspectives of the sciences and humanities—"cooperation is the crucial condition for success."
2. That is to say, in our terms, that our ideas are in the first place objects rather than signs. How this seemingly innocent assumption conflicts with and impacts upon the possibilities of semiotic understanding of conceptions and experience we will see at some length in chapter 5.
3. Dicisigns or "propositions", that is to say, signs that both represent and make an assertion, positive or negative, about what is represented, in contrast both to represigns, "rhemes", or "terms" (isolated linguistic elements whether simple or complex that represent without asserting anything about what is represented) and to suadisigns or "arguments" (complex linguistic forms that give reasons for accepting or rejecting something asserted about what they represent). This terminology taken from Peirce I expand and develop in full in a book now almost complete, Logic within Semiotics (Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
4. "As the spider spins its threads, every subject spins his relations to certain characters of the things around him, and weaves them into a firm web which carries his existence" (J. von Uexküll 1934: 14).
5. The relation between anthroposemiosis and zoösemiosis thus is an intimate one. In the evolution of life, the human Umwelt, or Lebenswelt, developed out of, and as a speciesspecifically unique variation on, an Umwelt or structure of experience common more or less to any anthropoid and, in differing ways, to all animal forms. Nonetheless, not only because our concern here is with the basic concepts considered in a cenoscopic way, but also for the reason stated by von Uexküll (1934, 48: "the real problem, in all its implications, can only be analyzed in man"), it will be necessary for us to proceed the other way around. We will derive the basic notions of objective world from the side of human experience. These in hand, we are then in a position to construct the Umwelt of zoösemiosis analytically by subtracting the species-specific experience of stipulatability from the structure of human experience, and taking the remainder in its possible being as further specifiable—that is, able to be determined in this or that way—according as it is subsumed under this or that organismic structure within biology, such as idioscopic research shows to be required in each specific case.
The required procedure here has no generally recognized name in philosophical tradition, as far as I know. The basic procedure, as far removed from anthropomorphism as possible, nonetheless depends expressly on avoiding the mistake of behaviorism in American psy-chology. The biological inheritance of the human observer must itself be accounted for in the observer-observed equation as an interpretant in the semiosis. It is a question of recognizing the difference between naive and participant observation (T. von Uexküll 1982; Williams 1982).
I was first made aware of the requirements of the problem as an undergraduate, in a more obscure form and under a more unlikely label. My then-professor Ralph Austin Powell used to insist that a correct reading of the De Anima of Aristotle required interpreting the living world by way of what he called humanesque analogy, that is to say, by an analytical comparison from within our own experience of being alive. The term never caught on, and, as far as I know, Powell gradually abandoned the effort to make it clear in the abstract context of his philosophical conceptions.
Had Powell been a more empirically minded thinker, and familiar in particular with the work of J. von Uexküll, he would have found needed exemplifications readier to hand for effectively communicating the nature of the so-called "humanesque analogy".
Sebeok (1989b: 81), himself a student of J. von Uexküll in this regard, summarizes the semiotic dimension of the observer-observed problem, where the observer is of the human species and the observed is of another grouping of life rather than a conspecific: "what may constitute a 'sign' in the Umwelt of the observed organism is inaccessible to the observer. The solution to this seemingly intractable dilemma, according to J. von Uexküll, presupposes that the would-be observer of the behavior of another organism begin by analyzing her own Umwelt before she can undertake productive observations of the behavior of speechless creatures. It is by way of such a comparative analysis that we are led back straight into the heart of semiosis in our human world."
Hence, we combine our initial treatment of zoösemiosis with that of anthroposemiosis and, subsequently, of physiosemiosis with phytosemiosis. The latter two, for all their differences, have in common that they are the levels at which the possibility of an objective world is rendered actual; whereas the former two, for all their differences, have in common that they are the levels at which objective worlds in their irreducible "reality" are constituted and diversified.
6. Thus, it is a matter of semiotics idioscopically pursued—pursued, that is to say, with all the panoply of special investigations and instruments science brings to bear—to say with regard to any given animal species, especially the more removed the forms are from the human (such as mollusks, balloon flies, etc.), how this common structure is actually determined and enhanced or diminished in the multiply species-specific patterns or ways of life actually found in the environment.
7. The contrast between objective being and the subjective order of physical existence was noted early in the development of an explicitly semiotic consciousness, for example, in the work of Cajetan (1507). But its centrality to the doctrine of signs only gradually came into view. Like the geological fault presaging major changes in the lay of the land, the inherent difference between objective and physical existence at the heart of being made it inevitable that dynamical interactions, overall, would give rise to directional changes, and with them to transformations of crude atomic structures to the point where semiotic animals would wander where once cosmic dust and random interactions obtained. But this takes us too far from the simplicity of our example and the fundamental point it makes for the doctrine of signs.
8. It is for this reason that I have resisted the temptation of tying the basic categorial concepts and terminology of biosemiosis to the latest biological theories which have, for solid reasons (e.g., see Sagan and Margulis 1987, Margulis and Sagan 1986, 1986a), replaced the traditional two kingdoms with five (not unlike the manner in which the traditional five external senses provide a cenoscopic framework of discussion for psychology within which idioscopic research is able to demonstrate that there are actually more refined discriminations which validate recognition of a greater number of sensory channels). At the same time, the intrinsically semiotic character of the new divisions, resting as they do on the introduction of symbiosis and reciprocity into the heart of the evolutionary process along with the selection of mutations, makes of these new concepts an extremely fertile ground for the further development of semiotic consciousness, and an inevitable frontier that semiotic theory cannot for long delay exploring.
Nonetheless, because these results are idioscopic rather than cenoscopic (as Sagan and Margulis 1987 put it, "Although many plant and animal symbionts are known, symbiosis and its fundamental role in evolution really become conspicuous in the microcosm"), and because the divisions of semiosis pertain to the objective order directly and to the physical order indirectly (the very opposite of the divisions of organismic types traditionally sought by biology as a natural science), a detailed attempt to incorporate these theories seemed to me premature for the project of the present work. As we noted in our collaborative "manifesto" of 1984 (Anderson, Deely, Ransdell, Sebeok, T. von Uexküll: 42-43), even though, "with the fivekingdom classification, 'plants' and 'animals' return through the looking glass to become strictly folk taxa once more", it does not follow that what is called for is to "simply reparcel semiosis according to the putative five kingdoms, not only because these are provisional, as we noted above, and will doubtless remain so for some time, but because, more fundamentally, they may not even be interesting or significant in sorting out different types of semiosis".
From the point of view of basic semiotics as something to be achieved first cenoscopically and established as equally important for the understanding of the literati and the scientisti, what is essential is first to grasp macroscopically the difference cognition makes within the order of living things, and, within cognition, the proper role of language within experience of the universe with its natural, social, and cultural elements as these bear on "the difference between a naive and a participant observer".
The realization that the latter is not so much, as Thure von Uexküll puts it (1982: 12), a "choice" as it is the actual situation of our species (within which the illusion of the naive observer arises) is what a grasp of semiotic fundamentals makes unavoidable. This realization, as he well says (ibid.), "will determine our understanding of animals, plants, and human beings", along with the physical surroundings of life, all the way to the stars.
Within this basic perspective, not only is there all the room in the world for the further refinements and adjustments of idioscopy of whatever kind, but such refinements and adjustments become inevitable, beginning with the redistribution of biological life forms according to new requirements and discoveries of research which bring out, in the manner of the new views in biology, the essentially semiotic character of the organismic development of all the plants and animals. It is not only the "self", as Sebeok has pointed out, that is a semiotic phenomenon: the "other" is no less semiotic, making of the biosphere in its totality "a flowing pointillist landscape where each dot of paint is also alive" (Sagan and Margulis 1987: 33).
Thus, the temporary bypassing of detailed discussion of the latest perspectives in evolutionary biology here is tactical, not strategic. Far from obviating the need to integrate the sciences no less than the humanities into the theoretical texture of semiotic development, the present work intends to make that need all the more evident and pressing, as chapter 6 in particular will show. (And it hardly bears reminding that, in modem times, the stance of the naive observer and the population of scientists have tended to be roughly coextensive or, in linguistic terms, synonyms.)
9. Peirce's way of putting this is obscure, outside the framework of his technical semiotic: thirdness, he says, always presupposes the brute interactions of secondness which also always presupposes the dream world which secondness differentiates, firstness. Thus, on the basis of his "recognition of ten respects in which Signs may be divided", Peirce concludes (1908b: 8.343; see also 1904) that "since every one of them turns out to be a trichotomy, it follows that in order to decide what classes of signs result from them, I have 310, or 59049, difficult questions to carefully consider". For present purposes, and following the example of Peirce himself at this point (who did "not undertake to carry [his] systematical division of signs any further", but left that "for future explorers"), clarification of this technical way of phrasing the situation may safely be left to the exegetes of the Peircean texts. The aim here is to reach a more general audience.
10. In current parlance, it is the vehicle of the sign, rather than the sign itself formally, that, for example, can be washed away in a flood, fall over on something passing by, or, at another leave, "produce a sense impression", and so forth.
11. That is to say again, as was mentioned in the previous chapter, that all in the sign pertaining to secondness and dyadic interaction pertains to the sign by reason of its foundation or fundament whence the sign relation arises or might arise. The sign-vehicle, rather than the sign itself formally, is what, for example, "produces a sense impression", or falls over on a passing car, or is hit by a bullet, etc.
12. "Relation does not depend on a subject in quite the same way that other determinations of being do", Poinsot observes (1632a: 89/13-17), "but stands rather as a third kind of being consisting in and resulting from the coordination in time of two extremes". Whence he concludes (89/18-20): "and therefore, in order to exist in the nature of things, the relation continuously depends on the fundament coordinating it with the terminus, and not only on a subject and a productive cause."
13. Poinsot expands on this technical but crucial point of difference as follows (1632a: 89/32-90/9): "The exercise or rationale of a relation according to the way something must be expressed in discourse is not purely to respect a terminus, but to exercise something else whence a relation could follow. And for this reason St. Thomas well said (c. 1252-1256: 2. dist. 1. q. 1. art. 5. reply to obj. 8) that these, the transcendental relatives, involve a fundament and a relation, whereas what are relative according to being express only a relation, as can be gleaned from the readily seen fact that transcendental relatives bear on a terminus rather by founding a relation than by actually respecting, and for that reason do not respect the terminus in question in its pure character as a terminus of a relation but according to some other rationale, such as that of a cause, or of an effect, or of an object, or the like. So a relation according to the way being must be expressed in discourse is constantly distinguished ... from relation according to the way relation has being in that the principal significate of an expression conveying a relation according to the way a subject must be expressed in discourse is not a relation, but something else, upon which a relation follows. But when the principal significate of some expression is the relation itself, and not something absolute, then there is a relation according to the way what is signified has being."
14. Here I follow the tradition of Aquinas and Poinsot, wherein the term "physical" extends to the entire order of beings able to exist independently of human thought, from the humblest material entities to the loftiest of supposed spirits, including even the divinity in its proper life (see, for example, Poinsot 1637: 38). As noted in Deely 1988: 97, reviews of my 1985 edition of Poinsot's Tractatus de Signis (Furton 1985, Henry 1987, and others) demonstrated the widespread ignorance in contemporary scholarship of this technical but important point of late Latin philosophical usage. Reviewers repeatedly criticized the translation of realis as "physical" on the ground that, for the medievals, realis applied to spiritual beings (what Henry calls "theological entities") as well as to natural and material beings; whence they assertedwrongly—that physicum and its derivates are not applicable in such a context.
15. This unique feature of intersubjectively relative being explains why the odd case of a self-relation, "Jones ate with Jones", where the Jones eating and the Jones eaten with are the same Jones—that is, Jones ate alone—was regarded by the scholastics as the paradigm case of a purely objective relation, despite the identity status (in Peircean terms) of both subject and terminus (cf. Peirce c.1890: 1.365 p. 190). For the requirement for a relation that its foundation be distinct from its terminus is here met only through the rational activity of the mind itself reduplicating its object through a relation which, outside of thought, i.e., physically, cannot obtain as a relation but only as a subjective mode of being, i.e., Jones' being himself. Poinsot puts it thus (1632a: 70/43-71/10): "In the case of mind-dependent relations, their actual existence consists in actually being cognized objectively, which is something that does not take its origin from the fundament and terminus, but from the understanding. Whence many things could be said of a subject"—either as a physical given in the environment independently of the discourse wherein the objective relation is formed, or as a strictly objective subject to begin with (such as that a given word is an adjective, contains five letters, is used substantively, or is identical with itself, etc.)—"without the resultance of the relation" either supervenient upon the subject in physical existence or the relation in which the signification of a linguistic element consists—"because this does not follow upon the fundament itself and the terminus, but upon cognition; whereas in the case of mind-independent or physical relations, since the relation results automatically from the fundament and the terminus, nothing belongs in an order to a terminus by virtue of a fundament except by the medium of the relation".
16. Thus the notion of "relative being" is rendered synonymous with the notion of finite being, and subdivides into the order of subjectivity as intrasubjectively relative being, which embraces individuals and all their inherent characteristics or modifications, and the order of intersubjectivity or intersubjectively relative being, which embraces all and only those pure beings-toward which arise over and above but dependent upon individuals with their inherent characteristics, uniting them in a network or web of communication of various levels and types. The characterization of the transcendental relation as intrasubjective, which I adopt here (in contrast to the ontological relation as intersubjective), was suggested by Julio Pinto in a mini-course we jointly conducted on the campus of the Pontificia Universidade Católica de São Paulo during the week of 22-26 May 1989 for the Associação Brasileira de Semiótica: Regional São Paulo.
17. Notice that the terms "denotation" and "connotation" are used in their proper traditional Latin sense and not in the corrupted sense introduced by Mill. The sense of the terms introduced by Mill as a "tax upon credulity" (in Peirce's colorful denunciation, 1867a: 2.393) and which yet remains popular in both logical and (especially) literary circles today is, as Peirce rightly says, objectionable and deserving of being abandoned.
18. The causality or action of signs may in this way intersect with and, if so, objectively channel anything of final causality that might be at work in the physical environment. But the action proper to signs remains extrinsic to and objectively distinct from this final causality. Ralph Powell's demonstration of the confusion in this regard in Peirce's writings (Powell 1986, 1988) should, therefore, be regarded as a guidepost in contemporary development of the doctrine of signs, demarcating one of the major areas in which textual exegesis needs to be clearly subordinated to fundamental research and analysis of the requirements of the problems involved.
19. As an additional exercise, but one not requisite for grasping the discussion to follow, the reader may profit from trying to envisage the situation in light of the following text from Poinsot(1632a: 388/38-46), commenting on an analogous situation: "And that a previously merely potential relation should spring from a fundament actually, or that a relation therefrom already in existence would be extended or expanded by applying itself to a newly posited terminus as pertaining to the already existent relationship as such, is something intrinsic to the being proper to relation taken ontologically as such—namely, to tend and to be determined in act toward that in respect of which the relation was already tending virtually, and only for want of an existent terminus was not anchored in being independently of being cognized." Those interested in the full details of these technical doctrinal points are referred to the more specialized discussion in Deely 1988: 56-87, esp. 56-68.
20. Edward T. Hall (1976: 57) remarks that "language is not (as is commonly thought) a system for transferring thoughts or meaning from one brain to another, but a system for organizing information and releasing thoughts and responses in other organisms. The materials for whatever insights there are in this world exist in incipient form, frequently unformulated but nevertheless already there in man. One may help to release them in a variety of ways, but it is impossible to plant them in the minds of others. Experience does that for us instead . . .". What we are asking is what must the construction of experience be in order to provide the materials of insight language is exapted to release in others?
21. This is the formula Jakobson employs (1979) as providing "a retrospective glance over the development of semiotic". It is an excellent formula, capturing the essence of the late Latin formula ("id quod repraesentat aliud a se potentiae cognoscenti") rejecting the ancient Stoic and Augustinian linkage of the sign to a sensible content as its vehicle ("signum est quod praeter species quas ingerit sensui, aliud facit in cognitionem venire"), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, capturing too the essential openness of semiosis to non-cognitive virtualities.
22. A semiotic approach to language pursued along this line, thus, would support Peirce's contention (c.1902a: 1.250) that "the question of the origin of language" is one "which must be settled before linguistics takes its final form", as against the Linguistic Society of Paris which adopted as the second article of its founding Statuts (1868: 3) that no communication concerning the origin of language be admitted into discussions of linguistic science.
23. Sebeok (1989b: 83), resuming in effect an ancient controversy of the greatest interest for the doctrine of signs (cf. Poinsot 1632a: Second Preamble, esp. 102/23-25 and 102/36-105/13; Appendix C, esp. 380/23-381/40), observes, presumably against an idealist formulation that has become current in the wrong ways among semiotic literati, that "semiosis is by no means unlimited (save perhaps in a metaphysical sense)." But what cannot happen in a semiosis either virtual or simply exercised is precisely what happens in a semiosis signified in its very actuality-that is to say, in the making of a text: relations as such are made to found other relations (and, of course, there is nothing to prevent the physicist in particular, thanks to the anthroposemiosis through which physics and the mathematics on which it depends modally exist, from hypothecating and consequently asserting the opposite).
It is thus that semiotics explains infinite generability in the sphere of anthroposemiosis and of sentences within language in particular, without having to postulate (Chomsky 1968) a separate "faculty of language", distinct from intelligence.
24. This is also the meaning of "intelligent life" in the sense of what radio astronomers earnestly search for among the physical stimuli rendered objective by their remarkable (if no doubt remarkably primitive) instruments. It is improbable that such a lifeworld—a radically flexible and open Lebenswelt such as Husserl showed at the base of the sciences and the humanities, in contrast with the Umwelten at best partially flexible and finally encapsulated wholes of other species—has evolved only once and at one place in the physical totality of the prejacent surroundings. Be that as it may, it is from within the Umwelt of such a species, a species able to mark for subsequent contemplation physically objective protrusions into its sphere, that the understanding of the sign, in contrast to its bare use, begins.
25. Hjelmslev's remarks à propos of naive realism pertain here (1961: 22-23): "Naive realism would probably suppose that analysis consisted merely in dividing a given object into parts, i.e., into other objects, then those again into parts, i.e., into still other objects, and so on. But even naive realism would be faced with the choice between several possible ways of dividing. It soon becomes apparent that the important thing is not the division of an object into parts, but the conduct of the analysis so that it conforms to the mutual dependences between these parts, and permits us to give an adequate account of them. In this way alone the analysis becomes adequate and, from the point of view of a metaphysical theory of knowledge, can be said to reflect the 'nature' of the object and its parts.
"When we draw the full consequences from this, we reach a conclusion which is most important for an understanding of the principle of analysis: both the object under examination and its parts have existence only by virtue of these dependences; the whole of the object under examination can be defined only by their sum total; and each of its parts can be defined only by the dependences joining it to the other coordinated parts, to the whole, and to its parts of the next degree, and by the sum of the dependences that these parts of the next degree contract with each other. After we have recognized this, the 'objects' of naive realism are, from our point of view, nothing but intersections of bundles of such dependences. That is to say, objects can be described only with their help and can be defined and grasped scientifically only in this way. The dependences, which naive realism regards as secondary, presupposing the objects, become from this point of view primary, presupposed by their intersections."
Poinsot (1632: 270/39-43, and elsewhere passim), applying a formula from Cajetan 1507, established within his semiotic the ground for Hjelmslev's point: "The differences of things as things are quite other than the differences of things as objects and in the being of object; and things that differ in kind or more than in kind in the one line can differ in the other line not at all or not in the same way."
26. An interpretant in general is the ground on which an object functions as a sign. Interpretants exist, consequently, at those points in semiosis where objects are transformed into signs or signs are transformed into other signs. Ideas are interpretants, but not all interpretants are ideas: interpretants as such are indifferently physical or even mental. They define the points of innovation in semiosis at the level of objective representation, as we explained in chapter 3 above. Logical interpretants define the points of innovation in intellectual semiosis, that is, developing understanding.
27. This is the term introduced by Gould and Vrba (1982) to designate the secondary adaptation whereby an organ or function originally developed within evolution for one purpose is then put to another use entirely: in this case, human language, originally developed as a unique modeling system, is then further deployed through real relations to communicative purposes precisely according to what is unique about it.
28. "The invasion of codes", Eco remarks (1977: 27), "means that we are not gods: we are moved by rules. But we ought to decide (and here the epistemologies of code are in disagreement) whether we are not gods because we are motivated on the basis of rules which historically we give ourselves, or if we are not gods because divinity is precisely the Rule (the Code of Codes) which stands behind us."
Eco sees the choice as between the historical and the mechanistic; but this seems to overstate the situation. The question is whether codes are not a finite mediating ground between nature and culture, wherein the "Code of Codes" is neither immutable nor wholly freely chosen from within culture. The choice, then, is not between a frame of reference either historical or mechanistic but between seeing culture as a semiotic phenomenon cut off from nature by linguistic coding or seeing culture as founded in while transforming at its own level—that is to say, through the semiotic modalities characteristic of anthroposemiosis—the "natural" Umwelt.
29. The situation is well described by Bakhtin (1963: 202): "For the word is not a material thing but rather the eternally mobile, eternally fickle medium of dialogic interaction. It never gravitates toward a single consciousness or a single voice. The life of the word is contained in its transfer from one mouth to another, from one context to another context, from one social collective to another, from one generation to another generation. In this process the word does not forget its own path and cannot completely free itself from the power of these concrete contexts into which it has entered.
"When a member of a speaking collective comes upon a word, it is not as a neutral word of language, not as a word free from the aspirations and evaluations of others, uninhabited by others' voices. No, he receives the word from another's voice and filled with that other voice. The word enters his context from another context, permeated with the interpretations of others. His own thought finds the word already inhabited. Therefore the orientation of a word among words, the varying perception of another's word and the various means for reacting to it, are perhaps the most fundamental problems for the metalinguistic study of any kind of discourse, including the artistic."
Barthes (1970) speaks similarly of code as "so many fragments of something that has always been already read, seen, done, experienced; the code is the wake of that already".
But the code is more than a wake of the past: it is at the same time a wave of the future as it is taken up, modified, and given life anew by the individual appropriating an old understanding or forging a new one within the Lebenswelt. The code provides not a prisonhouse (Jameson 1972) but a clearinghouse, wherein the most prominent item is not the past but the colorful "fact that words have a capacity for learning" (Johansen 1985: 240) and an orientation towards the future. Bakhtin (1963: 166) has a beautiful answer to Peirce's inquiry "whether meaning does not always refer to the future" (c. 1902: 24): "Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future".
30. The most startling example of mistaking semiotics from within is provided by the late notes of Bakhtin, who seems never to have recovered from his youthful conception of semiotics as of a piece with Russian Formalism (Bakhtin 1970-1971: 147): "Semiotics deals primarily with the transmission of ready-made communication using a ready-made code. But in live speech, strictly speaking, communication is first created in the process of transmission, and there is, in essence, no code".
This conclusion, especially to scholars steeped in Bakhtin, is inscrutable. I interpret "there is, in essence, no code" to say that "prejacent to and independent of the anthroposemiosis itself there is no actual code". This is suggested to me by the fact that the fragment containing the quotation in question ends abruptly in the middle of a tantalizing sentence, posing "The problem of changing the code in inner speech ...". This, however, is only a guess.
What seems clear to me is that, in setting his own work (unmistakably and centrally semiotic in our terms) over against semiotics as he does, Bakhtin himself illustrates the prevalence as well as the seriousness of the misunderstanding behind the pars pro toto fallacy whereby a linguistic or literary semiotics comes to fancy itself as autonomous.
31. Ransdell (1977: 163) points out that Peirce expressly "thought of semiotic as precisely the development of a concept of final cause process and as a study of such processes", a fact that his would-be commentators so far have treated as "an embarrassment, a sort of intellectual club foot that one shouldn't be caught looking at, much less blatantly pointing out to others"—which explains "why the topic of final causation is so strangely absent in criticisms and explanations of Peirce's conception of semiotic and semiosis" despite its centrality in Peirce's own reflections and explanations. For Poinsot, too, the question of final causality arises in the context of semiotic (1632a: Book I, Question 4, and editorial notes 10-12 thereon, pp. 174-178) but as expressly distinguished from the causality specific to the sign (see esp. 174/18-178/7), which is restricted neither to the order of actual existence nor to the order of intention (to signs as bearing an intention) and is operative even in chance events that signify as well virtually independently of any processes involving intention or cognition.
32. While retaining my earlier reservations about Sebeok's stand from the strict perspective in which they were conceived (the origins of fully actual semiosis in cognition), I again find it necessary not merely to repeat but to expand upon and deepen the broad-gauge adjustments to that restricted perspective I had already introduced (Deely 1982a) in first considering systematically the notion of phytosemiotics introduced by Krampen in 1981.
In my first round of criticism (1978a), I considered Sebeok's then-singularly large view of semiotics too grand.
In my second round of criticism (1982a), I called it perhaps not grand enough.
Now I would like to strike out the "perhaps" and let it go at that, for the reasons developed in this chapter.
33. The qualification is a crucial one, for only a very limited range of the notions associated historically with the notion of "final causality" retain any claim to critical consideration today. See the discussion of this point in the editorial notes to Book I, Question 4 of the Tractatus de Signis (Poinsot 1632a).
34. As Powell wrote to me (letter of 16 December 1988): "the extension of extrinsic formal causality from specifier of vital powers, active and passive (Poinsot 1632a: Book I, Question 4), to specifier of categorial relations (Appendix C: 382/14ff.) concerns precisely physiosemiosis. For the specification of categorial relations extends to the universe at large .. .".
Concerning this Appendix C, we had already explained in 1985 (p. 450) that we had added it to the Books of Poinsot's Treatise with a view to the questions of research strategies, "but in a very specific way. It is provided to ground in Poinsot's text the Peircean idea of extending semiotic understanding beyond the sphere of cognitive phenomena to the whole of nature itself as a network virtually semiosic in character .... The discussion in this Third Appendix ... extends and completes the discussion of objective causality in Book I, Question 4, of the Treatise on Signs."
Moreover, in Peirce's work a tendency toward what is set forth in Book I, Question 4, specifically as completed by the ideas of the editorially added Appendix C, is definitely marked, inasmuch as Peirce groped in the direction of a distinction between "ideal" and "final" causality, along the lines Poinsot had earlier established for semiotics under the rubric of "objective" or "extrinsic formal" causality. See the remarks in the next chapter, where Peirce is considered in the context of the history of semiotics.
35. Peirce 1908b: 8.343: "it is necessary to distinguish the Immediate Object, or the Object as the Sign represents it, from the Dynamical Object, or really efficient but not immediately present Object. It is likewise requisite to distinguish the Immediate Interpretant, i.e., the Interpretant represented or signified in the Sign, from the Dynamic Interpretant, or effect actually produced on the mind by the Sign; and both of these from the Normal Interpretant, or effect that would be produced on the mind by the Sign after sufficient development of thought... I do not say that these divisions are enough." Cf. 1909: 8.314; 1904.
36. Poinsot (1632a: 382/4-26) extends extrinsic formal causality, that is, the objective causality of semiosis, from specification of vital powers to categorial or physical relations as such, in the following manner: "distinction has to be made between the terminus understood most formally in the rationale of an opposed terminus, and the terminus understood fundamentally on the side of the subjective being founding this rationale of terminating. In the former way a terminus concurs in a specification purely terminatively, but not by causing that specification, because so considered it is a pure terminus and simultaneous by nature and in cognition with the relation; therefore as such it is not a specifying cause, because a cause is not naturally simultaneous with but prior to its effect. If it is considered in the latter way, the terminus stands as an extrinsic formal cause and specifies in the manner of an object, and in this way a single specifying rationale of the relation arises from the foundation and terminus together, inasmuch as the foundation contains the terminus within itself by a proportion and power; for it is not relative to a given terminus unless it is a specific fundament, and conversely. In this way, to the extent that they are mutually proportioned, terminus and foundation together bring about a single rationale specifying a relation which postulates both a specific foundation and a specific terminus corresponding thereto. "From these remarks one can further gather what a formal terminus is in the rationale of something specifying. For although specifically different relations can be anchored to the materially same terminus, yet they cannot be anchored to the formally same terminus. But the formal specifying rationale in a terminus is understood in accordance with a correspondence and adequate proportion to its fundament.... Wherefore, as regards the specifying of any relation, in just the way that the fundament is understood under the final rationale of the grounding of the relation, so the terminus of the relation is understood under the proportion and correspondence of the terminating." See further in Index 4 to the Treatise (the Index Rerum/Index of Terms and Propositions) the entries under "Object", pp. 552-554, beginning with no. 4, referring the whole text to extrinsic formal causality. Also see the entries for "Foundation", p. 539.
37. Likewise unnecessary was his desperate earlier resort to panpsychism as a ploy for introducing thirdness into the realm of inorganic matter (1892: 6.158, 1892a: 6.268), which yet failed to solve the problem of experienced thirdness (c.1909: 6.322) as required by the sign for its proper and formal being.
38. I say that physiosemiosis looks to the future only in a comparatively accidental or tangential way, inasmuch as, in the case of inorganic agents, which cause only as they are moved, "from the very movement that they undergo they are ordered to producing effects. And similarly in all cases where a good of any kind accrues to the cause from the effect" (Aquinas c.1265-1267: q. 7. art. 10), such as Powell's example (1986: 297) of the senselessness of saying that "the causal relation whereby one cat scratches out the eye of the other is specified by a final cause". For even though "one and the same motion is a 'good blow' for the one scratching out and a 'disaster' for the one losing its eye", the good (and the "disaster") pertains directly to the individual circumstances of the cats, not to their specific natures as belonging to a determinate biological population.
39. Furthermore, in the case of anthroposemiosis, the preservation and generation of culture is future-oriented beyond mere biological propagation, a point that completes the grand view of a progression through past-future relations from physiosemiosis to anthroposemiosis. This is a progression, however, in which the successive levels of transcendence do not fully leave behind, but rather contain and continue according to varying requirements, the previous levels.
40. If the power of Henderson's arguments was outweighed by their unorthodoxy in the scientific community of his day, that is rapidly ceasing to be the case in the age of Gaia (Lovelock 1979), where the recognition at last of delicate interdependencies within our own planetary ecology and between that ecology and the solar and cosmic radiation through which our planet moves have begun at long last to become themselves objectified as well as physical.
41. By relying on Kantian notions of fixed formal a-prioris to explain the difference between goal and plan in nature, J. von Uexküll deprived himself of a philosophical framework containing the dynamic notion of objective causality as specificative of physical interactions in nature. This helps to account for the fact that, throughout his life, he remained anachronistically opposed to the idea of evolution, sometimes even justifying this historically idiosyncratic conceptual opposition on the thin semantic grounds of etymology.
42. "Il me semble, quand je suis à Fontainebleau, que je sympathise de toutes mes forces avec la vitalité puissante des arbres qui m'entourent. Quant à réproduire jusqu'à leur forme, je suis sans doute trop encroûté dans la mienne pour cela; mais, en y réfléchissant bien, il ne me parait pas deraisonnable de supposer que toutes les formes de l'existence dorment plus ou moins profondément ensevelies au fond de chaque être; car sous les traits bien arrétés de la forme humaine dont je suis revêti. Un oeil un peu perÇant doit reconnaitre sans peine le contour plus vague de l'animalité, qui voile à son tour la forme encore plus flottante et plus indécise de la simple organisation: or l'une des determinations possibles de l'organisation est l'arbortété, qui engendre à son tour la chênèitè. Donc la chênéité est cachée quelque part dans mon fond, et peut être quelquefois tentée d'en sortir et de paraitre à son tour dias in luminis oras, bien que l'humanité, qui a pris les devants sur elle, le lui défende, et lui barre le chemin."
43. Liber II, lect. 9, n. 347: "Definit ipsam primam animam, quae dicitur anima vegetabilis; quae quidem in plantis est anima, in animalibus pars animae. ... Ad cuius definitionis intellectum, sciendum est, quod inter tres operationes animae vegetabilis, est quidam ordo. Nam prima eius operatio est nutritio, per quam salvatur aliquid ut est. Secunda autem perfectior est augmentum, quo aliquid proficit in maiorem perfectionem, et secundum quantitatem et secundum virtutem. Tertia autem perfectissima et finalis est generatio per quam aliquid iam quasi in seipso perfectum existens, alteri esse et perfectionem tradit. Tunc enim unumquodque maxime perfectum est, ut in quarto Meteororum dicitur (8), cum potest facere alterum tale, quale ipsum est. Quia igitur iustum est, ut omnia definiantur et denominentur a fine, finis autem operum animae vegetabilis est generare alterum tale quale ipsum est, sequitur quod ipsa sit conveniens definitio primae animae, scilicet vegetabilis, ut sit generativa alterius similis secundum speciem."
44. The theoretical attempt that I made (1978a, 1982a) to restrict semiosis to the cognitive order brought everything under the rubric of semiotics inasmuch as all things are in principle knowable: anything can become an object of awareness, and any object of awareness can come to function as a sign. The basis for attempting theoretically to restrict semiosis to the order of actual cognition, thus, was the consideration that only cognition renders anything actually signifying this way or that way here and now.
But any attempt to restrict semiosis to cognition falls short at the level of theory for the reason that nature and culture mutually penetrate one another in the constitution of experience, so that the objects of experience also reveal themselves more suited to some significations than to others in any given context of inquiry. The objective sphere reveals itself as neither closed nor closable upon itself absolutely. The subjectivity both of the knower and of things known (with all their respective virtualities that exceed the actual semiosis of any given moment or case and moreover surround and exert an influence upon even the actual semiosis here and now) seeps into and permeates the objectivity of experience. The full semiosis of experience, thus, is never merely actual, but is suffused at every moment with elements and factors passing in and out of varying degrees of actuality and consciousness through the virtualities that remain in their own right semiosic (whether rooted primarily in the psychic or the physical side of subjectivity).
45. Sebeok 1974a: 108-109: "le fond du problème de l'analogie entre code génétique et code linguistique est en réalité très différent quand on le prend d'un point de vue linguistique. Le langage est un mécanisme très particulier, organisé de manière hiérarchique. Cette organisation hiérarchique est généralement désignée sous le nom de dualité, mais en réalité ce terme prête à confusion car il signifie essentiellement que l'on a un ensemble de soussystèmes, et que le sous-système de base comporte un répertoire universel de traits binaires. C'est ce que les linguistes appellent des traits distinctifs (distinctive features), traits qui sont en eux-mêmes dépourvus de signification, mais à l'aide desquels on peut fabriquer un nombre infini de phrases, lesquelles forment un autre sous-système. Pour ce qui est de l'ensemble des systémes de communication des organismes, ceci constitue un phénomène unique, car nulle part ailleurs dans le monde animal on ne trouve trace d'une telle organisation hiérarchique. Le code génétique, si je le comprends bien, fonctionne de manière analogue. On a quatre unites de base qui sont en elles-mêmes dépourvues de signification, mais qui se combinent en des unites plus grandes, lesquelles se combinent en unitès encore plus grandes qui, finalement, donnent lieu à un nombre infini de suites. C'est là le coeur de l'analogie, mais Jakobson est allé encore plus loin et a trouvé des analogies beaucoup plus fines, et je suis un peu gêné de devoir ajouter qu'il se réfère là explicitement à Monod."
46. An analogous idea is expressed in what T. von Uexküll (1982: 7) calls "the specific anthroposemiotic process of envelopment. Only man can add to what he sees, hears, feels, and smells something that he knows. With this knowledge, I do not mean just memories of former experience which one can find also with animals and even with plants—but, as Piaget shows impressively, socially-established and socially-controlled ideas about an objective world, its natural objects and proceedings. This objective world is a construct of our imagination. We cannot see it, nor hear it, nor feel or taste it. It belongs to a realm which passes all sensoric conception. But we project it into our sensoric conceptions, and into that which we see, hear, feel, or taste. "We have learned and practiced this complicated intellectual construction of an objective world with objects and proceedings as the signified contents of our anthroposemiotic signs since childhood within the social environment in which we grow up. It is therefore not astonishing that we share this result—just this objective world—with all people who have learned and practiced the same intellectual process of construction for anthroposemiotic sign processes. This does not mean, however, that we share our objective world with all men, and even less that we share it with all living beings". We have seen this in chapter 5.
"The objective worlds in which Indian clans in the tropical forests of the Amazon or Australian aborigines live differ considerably from the objective world of Americans or Europeans of the industrial age."
The point is (p. 13) that "the human world is an observer's world. But we must choose and we can choose between a world of naive or of participant observation; this choice will determine our understanding of animals, plants, and human beings".
This choice will also determine our understanding finally of the physical universe conceived environmentally in general. For it is always perforce from within experience that the totality of the universe forms in our conception, including our notion of "thing": it is not a question of a naive or misleading belief "that neutral objects exist independently of signs and sign systems", but of what the signs indicate about the objects they systematically reveal, to wit, whether or not they exist in subjective as well as objective ways, or objectively only, and so forth.
47. Miller (1979) makes a strong argument in fact that Hume's skepticism was rooted in a kind of radically vitiated semiotic wherein the content of experience was reduced to the skein of its structure. Hume, "for reasons of his own, fails to make explicit", Miller avers (p. 43), "that the causal relation, as he describes it, is essentially what the philosophical tradition had understood as a sign relation". Along this line, Miller is able to suggest a semiotic interpretation for the British tradition as a whole "between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries" (p. 51): "the relation of cause and effect is reduced to what previously had been understood as a sign relationship", but without ever having been radically thought through in what is proper to it or clarified in its ground. On this interpretation, modern idealism itself would have been a consequence of the failure of modern philosophers to explore the semiotic option Locke called for belatedly and little-noticed.
48. The centrality of semiotic was something which came to be realized only gradually, and by later students of Peirce's thought. Only gradually were the perceptions imposed by the pre-established perspectives brought to the study of Peirce's own thought (such as realism, idealism, and, in particular, "pragmatism", to name a few) overcome, by the requirements of the thought itself. Arguably, it is as an effect of this situation in particular that all of the earlier publications concerning Peirce, including notably the Collected Papers, have been relegated to the status of provisional enterprises.
But it may also be (see particularly Kent 1987), as suggested in his breakdown of philosophy into Phenomenology (the categories), Normative Science (esthetics, ethics, and semiotics), and Metaphysics (first philosophy), that Peirce himself did not finally realize how radical semiotics is as a form of knowledge vis-à-vis the established disciplines ("First Philosophy" in particular, as I have pointed out in 1987 and 1988a), in which case he remains in this particular primus inter pares among the moderns in view of semiotics, rather than, as I think (for example, see c.1909: 6.322), the contemporary pater semioticorum.
Given the complexity of the Peircean writings and the increasing interest in their exegesis, we may safely leave this question for future resolution by the exegetes. Our interest here is not in anyone's texts as such, but in the basics of semiotics, as we have said.
49. As happened in the case of Harley Shands in the context of medicine, or more recently to Martin Esslin in the context of drama, according to his own report (1987: 10): "This semiotic approach is, basically, extremely simple and practical. It asks: how is it done? and tries to supply the most down-to-earth answers, by examining the signs that are used to achieve the desired communication.
"There is, of course, nothing radically new here, except that the enterprise is systematic and methodical rather than ad-hoc and impressionistic. When I first came across the beginnings of the new scholarly literature on the semiology and semiotics of the theatre and film I felt rather like Molière's M. Jourdain who was surprised to discover that he had been talking 'prose' all his life."
50. Of the two alternatives, the first is preferable by far, but it is available only to present and future workers, just as this second alternative is the only one available in the task of bringing within the perspective of semiotic works whose creators belong irrevocably to the past. The second alternative defines the requirements of semiotic historiography, which has, as one among its several tasks, to "assess the contributions of a host of 'neglected' giants". It was in this context that Sebeok (1976a: x) coined the term "cryptosemiotician".
51. In this respect, Jakob von Uexküll's role in semiotics has some important structural isomorphisms with the role of Frege in the development of analytic philosophy or of Brentano in the development of phenomenology (see Deely 1975).
52. Schiller (1957: xiii), for example, refers to the difficulty of rendering von Uexküll's key terms outside the German—especially Umwelt but also the related terms "by which von Uexküll seeks to represent the relations between the objective world and the world as it appears to the animal". Here, the term "objective" retains entirely its presemiotic content where it is a misleading synonym for the prejacent physical being of the environment, which being, we have seen, is in fact a form of subjectivity, equally with the knower as organism forming part of the physical surroundings. Since she was undertaking her work of translation against this radically presemiotic interpretive horizon, it was fortunate indeed that she decided to retain Umwelt in her translation and to allow the new English context to give this technical term a new sense beyond the explicit choices of a translator. (Perhaps she was sufficiently warned by MacKinnon's "translation" of von Uexküll 1920, which left everything in the dark: better at least to bring one term, the central one, into the light of day!)
53. It is worth asking why, if von Uexküll's key terms within German have only an explicitly Kantian sense, have they been so widely misunderstood also by German speakers who know quite well the Kantian philosophy? Our reappropriation from the modern context of the term "object" and "objective", as deployed in the present work, seems to me necessary to make sense of the very title von Uexküll gives to a main section in one of his key essays (1934: 73), "The Same Subject as an Object in Different Umwelten". In reality, the problem is more doctrinal than linguistic: von Uexküll's terms are also original in German, although their novelty there is hidden behind the pre-existing verbal forms. The problem, as I have recently had occasion to argue at length in relation to other thinkers (Deely 1986e, 1988), is more radical and also systematic. The problem is one of perspective: the perspective of semiotic is not assimilable to the previous perspective of an idealism any more than of a realism.
54. Von Uexkll's work can be regarded from this point of view as an indirect demonstration, through an inadvertent reductio, that the elaborate constructive work that Kant had attributed to human reason as such, first of all and primarily belongs rather to perceptual and sensory apprehension in what of it contrasts essentially with the apprehension distinctive of the understanding which, in its proper act, is constructive secondarily rather than primarily. The primary act of distinctively human intelligence is intuitive, rendered existential through its continuity with sensation, and, at the same time, constructive through its dependence upon perception and species-specific biological heritage as well as past experience. But its primary act in its own order, at each moment, would seem to be to see and to recognize within the very constructions of objectivity the problem of other as other—that is, as revealed within the constructions as also more than and aspectually disengageable through analysis from the constructions—whence arise all the further problems of justice on the one hand ("morality") and science on the other. As we saw in chapter 5, it is a question of the sort of apprehension required for objects to possess within experience the extrinsic denomination of stipulability.
55. Those interested in the linguistic peculiarities of the maxim's formation grammatically considered should consult the Foreword to the Semiotics 1987 Annual Proceedings Volume of the Semiotic Society of America, page v in particular.