The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  Behavioral scientists are uncomfortable with the normative because natural science has traditionally had nothing to do with norms. As a consequence, behavioral scientists are usually content to yield the field, to leave true-or-false propositions to logicians, bad sentences to grammarians, metaphors to poets.

  Yet sentences are items of behavior and these items have normative dimensions. Therefore a behavioral account of sentence utterances must give an account of these norms.

  Behavioral scientists need not have made themselves so miserable. For the fact is that the normative dimension of language behavior is not an awkward addendum to be stuck onto the elegant corpus of behavioral science. No, the normative dimension of sentence utterance is a fundamental property of the coupling of the elements of the sentence, whether the sentence be a true-or-false proposition or a good-or-bad work of art.

  A sentence utterance is not like other world events and is not isomorphic with the world event or relation the sentence is about. A world event or relation is generally either an energy exchange (sodium reacting with water) or a real relation (China being bigger than Japan). But a sentence is a coupling of elements by a coupler. It is bothersome to call a world event or relation good or bad. What is good or bad about sodium reacting with water or China being bigger than Japan? But, since a sentence is a coupling of elements by a coupler, these elements can be coupled well or badly.*

  World events and relations are neither true nor false but sentences can be. Yet true-or-false is only one normative dimension of sentences.

  Here are some others.

  Clouds are fleece is false as a literal statement, true in a sense as a metaphor, bad in the sense of being a trite metaphor.

  That is a sparrow may be a true assertion of class relationship but it may also be perfunctory, a bored assignment of a commonplace object (English sparrow) to a commonplace class.

  That is a dusky seaside sparrow may assert a similar relationship, yet it may be uttered with all the excitement and sense of discovery of a bird-watcher coming upon an occasional species.

  Even nondeclarative sentences have normative dimensions.

  Patient says to therapist, “Don’t you dare plot against me!” An imperative sentence and therefore neither true nor false but inappropriate because, let us stipulate, the therapist harbors no such plot.

  Said Emperor Henry IV to Pope Gregory VII at Canossa, “I apologize.” A performative sentence, hence neither true nor false but possibly sincere or insincere.

  Patient to therapist: “I see what you mean.” It is possible that the norm in question here is not whether the patient is telling the truth but whether he is uttering a sentence or a nonsentence, i.e., making a polite sound.

  2. The receiver of a sentence can take or mistake the sentence.

  Note that an organism cannot in this sense be said to make a mistake in responding to a stimulus in its environment, unless the word mistake is used in an analogical sense.

  But can’t a bass be said to make a mistake in taking an artificial lure? Yes, but the bass does not mistake the lure except in a trivial analogical sense, however tragic the consequences for the bass. For the bass responds to the lure willy-nilly according as the lure resembles what the bass has learned or been wired to respond to.

  An organism responds to a stimulus Sn according as it has learned to respond to S, a class of stimuli. The probability of response to Sn can be expressed statistically by a bell curve. The response to Sn is the more likely as Sn resembles S.

  If, however, you say to me, “The Russians are coming!” it can happen that I can perfectly understand the sentence according as I have learned to understand English syntax and semantics. Yet I can utterly mistake your sentence. I may understand you to be reporting an invasion, whereas in truth you are reading a movie marquee.

  In this use of the word mistake, I also exclude other errors, for example, slips, misconceptions, lies, false propositions.

  A Freudian slip might be described as a dyadic irruption of unconscious forces into triadic behavior and as such does not concern us here. A slip is intrapsychic. A mistake is interpersonal. A mistake is a miscoupling of sentence elements in which I couple the elements of your sentence in some fashion other than the way you coupled them. If you say to me, “I enjoyed beating you” instead of “I enjoyed meeting you,” no mistaking of sentences has occurred. I understand you well enough. What has occurred is an irruption of your feelings into your polite triadic behavior. Such an event is interesting enough but is not germane to a study of triadic behavior as such.

  If I see a piece of paper in the woods, take it for a rabbit, and say, “Look, there’s a rabbit,” haven’t I made a mistake?

  Also, isn’t a lie a mistake? Suppose I did in fact see a rabbit but do not want you to shoot it and accordingly say, “Oh, that’s just a piece of paper.” Wouldn’t you be telling the truth if you replied, “You are mistaken”?

  Perhaps these are mistakes and perhaps it is true enough to say that a bass mistakes an artificial lure for a minnow.

  Rather than argue the semantics of the word mistake, let us simply define the word for our present purposes. We shall understand the word in its root sense of taking amiss. More specifically, a mistake is the coupling of a sentence by its receiver in some fashion other than its coupling by its utterer. I wish, in short, to set apart triadic mistakes, the taking amiss by one person of another person’s utterances.

  2.1. A sentence may be mistaken by mistaking any one of the parameters of the sentence. A parameter of a sentence utterance is a variable which is constant for a particular discourse but may vary from one discourse to another.

  Some of the parameters of sentence utterances are: the mode of coupling of its elements, the community of discourse, the medium of communication, the world to which the sentence refers, the placement of utterer and receiver of the sentence vis-à-vis its world, the normative mode (true-false, stale-fresh, appropriate-inappropriate, crazy-sane, etc.).

  2.11. The receiver of a sentence can mistake it by miscoupling its elements, that is, by coupling the wrong elements or by coupling the right elements in the wrong mode or parameter.

  Wrong elements:

  Wittgenstein’s Worker A: “Five slabs!” (meaning, send up five slabs).

  Wittgenstein’s Worker B (a new man who, unaccustomed to A’s orders, supposes that A is taking inventory and is reporting that he has five slabs): “Very good! I’ll check them off!”

  Wrong parameter:

  NASA scientist on Wallops Island to native islander: “Look, the sky is violet!”

  Islander, receiving the sentence as an ordinary world-news item, whereas in truth the scientist is making an observation which confirms the success of an experiment—the discharge by rocket of strontium chloride into the upper atmosphere: “Yes, it’s a lovely sunset.”

  2.111. The receiver of a naming sentence can receive the name correctly and look at the same object the namer looks at yet nevertheless mistake the sentence by making the wrong world-slice (abstraction) of the class of objects named.

  Father (pointing to a half dollar with an eagle on it): “That’s a half dollar,”

  Child (later, pointing to chicken): “Half dollar!”

  2.112. There is an interface between scientist and layman such that a sentence uttered by the former is subject to characteristic miscouplings by the latter.

  Professor of medicine on grand rounds approaching the bed of a patient and picking up the chart: “Hm, a case of sarcoidosis.”

  The sentence—[This is] a case of sarcoidosis—is coupled one way by its utterer, another way by a medical student who hears it, and yet another way by the patient himself. A proposition asserting class membership, logically speaking, the sentence is so understood by the three persons. Yet, triadically speaking, each understands it differently.

  Professor’s coupling: This is a case of sarcoidosis. Which is to say, this patient is a man who has something wrong with him, a disorder of unkn
own etiology and uncertain course but with sufficient signs and symptoms and pathology in common with other such cases to warrant the class name sarcoidosis, a name however which serves as nothing better than a shorthand method of speaking of an ill-defined illness.

  Medical student’s coupling: This is a case of sarcoidosis. Which is to say, the patient is assigned to the disease-class sarcoidosis Platonically. The patient is understood to participate in a higher reality than himself, namely, his disease. Later the student will refer to the patient by some such sentence as “I have a case of sarcoidosis on the third floor.”

  Patient’s coupling: This is a case of sarcoidosis. I have been invaded by an entity, a specter named sarcoidosis.

  2.1121. The lay-science interface often leads to a reversal of roles wherein the scientist-therapist “laicizes” his sentences, while the layman-patient “scientizes” his, with characteristic miscouplings attendant upon both.

  Patient: “I’ve been looking forward to our beating—er, meeting today.”

  Therapist: “You were thinking of beating me?”

  Patient: “Well, I have been reacting negatively lately.”

  Therapist: “I wonder who is beating up on who.*

  Freud of course would have been concerned with the slip and the intrapsychic mechanism which produced it. In Peircean terms he was interested in the dyadics which irrupted into triadic behavior. But what increasingly interests us is how patient and therapist talk about the slip and how one understands or misunderstands the other.

  Perhaps no one trait of patient-psychiatrist talk is more commonplace than this lay-science reversal, the patient Platonizing his sentences by a Good Housekeeping psychological jargon (“reacting negatively”), the therapist vulgarizing his (“who is beating up on who”) in the reverse expectation that the real is to be found in the common tongue. In a kind of minuet, patient and therapist change places. The question is, How does the switch work? What kind of a scientist does the layman become by his Platonizing? Does the common tongue bring the real closer for the therapist?

  Freud was thinking about unresolved and disabling conflicts within the psyche. But what is beginning to dawn on us is that the very technique designed to probe and resolve such conflicts may in itself loom so large for the patient, be offered with such dazzling credentials, that he may fall prey to a technique and be further impoverished. In speaking of the earlier transaction, the Freudian slip, one is accustomed to using a traditional dyadic language: conflict, intrapsychic dynamism, repression, cathexis, resolution, etc. In the later transaction across the lay-science interface one finds oneself using such expressions as: falling prey to, impoverishment, loss of sovereignty, inauthentic, etc.

  2.12. The receiver of a sentence can mistake it by mistaking the world to which it refers.

  Thus it is not enough for the receiver to “know what the sentence means,” in the sense that a professor can write a sentence on the blackboard and every student can explain its syntax and semantics, that it is a declarative sentence, etc. One must also know whether it is a report, a story, an account of a dream, a joke, a quotation.

  Salesman to boss: “There was this traveling salesman who met a farmer’s daughter—”

  Boss: receives sentence as the beginning of a joke whereas in truth it is a report, the salesman’s seriocomic explanation of how he happened to lose an account.

  By its very nature classical psychoanalysis with its encouragement of the analysand to “say what comes to mind” is peculiarly susceptible to sudden and uncued shifts of contexts and attendant misunderstandings. Miscouplings of sentences are more apt to occur here because parameters are more apt to become variables. The patient can shift “worlds” and communities at his pleasure. Indeed he is obliged to.

  Therapist (after a long silence): “What comes to mind?”

  Patient: “The center does not hold.”

  Is the patient misquoting Yeats, describing his mental health, talking about the state of the union, or doing all three? Is the sentence uttered seriously or in a playful allusive way? It is the analyst’s business to know—that is, to catch on to the world mode of the sentence.

  2.13. The receiver of a sentence can mistake it by mistaking the placement of the utterer vis-à-vis the world of the sentence.

  Scene: a room under the University of Chicago stadium in 1943, during the early days of the Manhattan Project.

  Fermi’s assistant: “Dr. Fermi, the radiation count of the pile is two forty-two!”

  Fermi: “Very good!”

  The assistant is uttering an alarm, calling attention to danger to life and limb. The sentence calls for appropriate behavior: turn the pile off, let’s get out of here. Other such sentences, might be “Vesuvius is about to erupt,” or “The safety valve is stuck.”

  Fermi, however, receives the sentence as having been uttered, not in the ordinary world of predicaments, but rather as a confirmatory report of a pointer reading.*

  If one diagrammed each triadic event, Fermi’s coupling and his assistant’s coupling, one could depict the assistant speaking to Fermi within the world and calling his attention to an imminent threat from one sector of the world. Fermi’s reading of the sentence, however, would place both Fermi and the assistant outside this world in a transcending abstracted posture from which world events are read as data for theory.

  Similarly:

  Therapist (after a long silence): “What comes to mind?”

  Patient: “I’ve decided to break off the analysis.”

  Therapist: “Tell me about it.”

  Instead of replying, the patient rises, shakes hands, and leaves.

  The therapist mistakes the placement of the patient vis-à-vis the world of the sentence I’ve decided to break off the analysis. He, the analyst, assumes that the patient has uttered one more sentence in the language game of analysis, i.e., a game where sentences are reports of data to be examined rather than announcements of actions to be taken. Whereas in truth the patient has shifted the world of discourse from the language game of analysis to the language of the everyday world, where, when one announces his departure, one departs.

  2.14. A sentence can be mistaken in its normative mode, that is, by being received in a normative mode other than that in which it was uttered.

  Therapist (after a long silence): “What comes to mind?”

  Patient (seeing the curtain at the window stir in the breeze): “There’s a rat behind the arras.”

  Therapist: “Who’s the rat?”

  Patient: “Polonius.”

  Therapist: “Don’t forget that Hamlet mistook Polonius for the king.”

  Patient (agitated): “You mean—it’s oedipal? Hm. No. Yes. It is!”

  Note that it is impossible to characterize the sentence There’s a rat behind the arras by the conventional propositional norm of true-or-false. There is no rat behind the curtain. But neither patient nor analyst supposes that the sentence asserts anything about a rat. The sentence is rather, like so much of the talk in analysis, an allusive ambiguous assertion with more than one referent. It is, let us stipulate, (1) a playful allusion to the circumstance that both patient and analyst saw a performance of Hamlet the night before, (2) a reference to a dream, (3) a surfacing of unconscious oedipal feelings.

  A mistake in the triadic sense can occur here if the therapist mistakes one of the parameters of the patient’s sentences, e.g., a normative parameter: suppose he had taken the sentence about the rat as a true-or-false proposition and gotten up to look for the rat. Or suppose he took the sentence as no more than an allusion to last night’s playgoing when in truth it may refer to far more serious matters.

  Up to this point we have not diverged from the conventional analytical quest: the decoding of the patient’s sentence toward the end of identifying and resolving unconscious conflicts. One does not dispute the validity of this enterprise. But we have other fish to fry. We want to observe this conversation not through the analyst’s eyes, which see the patient as
a psychic malfunction, but through a zoom camera which zooms back in order to see the encounter as it occurs, between two sentence couplers, in a world, in an office where a certain language game is played, next to a street where other language games are played.

  Through such a zoomed-back camera, we fancy we can see things a bit differently. Thus, instead of seeing the patient through the analyst’s eyes as a dyadic creature whose distress may be traced to “repression” and “resistance” to the disclosure of unconscious contents, we see a certain sort of educated lay person who is very much aware of the language game being played here, very much aware of the analyst’s theories, very much aware of the difference between being in the world of the analyst’s office and being in the world of the street outside.

  We suspect by the same token that the agitation manifested by the patient in the last sentence of the conversation may have a very different source than the dyadic distress ordinarily attributed to him. Conventionally the patient is supposed to resist the attribution to him of oedipal feelings. But is it not possible that in this case what was thought to be dyadic misery may turn out to be triadic delight? So that, far from being like one of Freud’s Victorian patients who “resisted” the disclosure of such unconscious contents, this patient may be a horse of an entirely different color, namely, late-twentieth-century man who likes nothing better than to exhibit the proper pathology, in this case the central pathology of the Master himself. “It’s oedipal!” exclaims the patient with every sign of delight.

  Our business is to say what is right and what is wrong here. What is right is that Freud was right and that the patient does indeed do well to confront his oedipal feelings. What is wrong is a certain loss of sovereignty by the patient. We must trace out the connection between valid theory and falling prey to valid theory. For is it not true that the patient’s chief claim to humanity here rests on the honorable credentials of his pathology? “Hurray!” he is saying. “I am certified human after all! I have oedipal feelings!”