The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  The basic structure of the scientific situation is an intersubjective confrontation of a world event and its construing by a symbolic assertion. The general structure of any symbolic cognition is tetradic, as diagrammed in Figure 7, as contrasted with the triadic structure of significatory meaning (sign-organism-thing).

  What should be noticed is that there is a difference between the sort of thing we, Scientist1 and Scientist2, understand the world to be (a nexus of secondary causes, event C → event E), and the assertion by which we express this understanding (E =f (C)). One is a dynamic succession of energy states, the other is an assertion, an immaterial act by which two entia rationis are brought into a relation of intentional identity. Both these elements, world event and symbolic assertion, are provided for in the scientific method but it is a topical provision such that a symbolic assertion, S is P, E =f (C), is admitted as the sort of activity which takes place between scientists but is not admitted as a phenomenon under observation. A scientific assertion is received only as a true-or-false claim, which is then proved or disproved by examining the world event to which it refers. The symbolic assertion cannot itself be examined as a world event unless it be construed as such, as a material event of energy exchanges, in which case its assertory character must be denied.

  At the subcultural, subassertory level of phenomena (physics, chemistry, biology), no antinomy occurs because the distinction between world event and intersubjective assertion is not violated. Physics lends itself without exception to the nonradical discipline in which you and I construe the world as a series of events expressible by assertions which are generically different from the events they assert.

  At the cultural level, however, a further task is required of the method. It is required that an assertion be accepted not only as a true-or-false claim between scientists, to be proved or disproved, but as a phenomenon under investigation, to be ordered to other phenomena in the corpus of scientific knowledge. It is required that the assertions S is P and E =f (C), be fitted into the scheme of world events, event C → event E.

  This is an impossible requirement however. An assertion is a real event but it is not a space-time event. The attempt must have one of two consequences: (1) The cultural assertion S is P (myth, language, science) is actually construed as a world event and its assertory character denied. (2) The cultural assertion S is P is accepted as an assertion, but not as a world event, as rather a true-or-false claim about world events.

  The final result is an antinomy with scientists interpreting the same event in a contradictory fashion, as a world event and denying its assertory character, as an assertory event, a true-or-false claim, but refusing to examine it as such.

  TOWARD A RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

  When Socrates met Phaedrus on the banks of the Ilissus, the latter asked him if this was not the spot where, according to the myth, Boreas carried off fair Orithyia. Socrates replied that it was; when asked whether he believed it, he replied that he did not. Questioned further, he refused to speculate about the symbolic meaning of the myth, as the Sophists and Rhetoricians did when they theorized that the myth was in a sense true because she might have been blown off the cliff, and Boreas being the north wind, etc. “But I have no leisure at all for such pastimes, and the reason, my dear friend, is that as yet I cannot, as the Delphic precept has it, know myself. So it seems absurd to me that as long as I am in ignorance of myself, I should concern myself about such extraneous matters.”

  Socrates might well have made the same objection to modern culturology. Cassirer, who quotes the above incident with approval, then goes on to do just what Socrates declines to do: search for meaning in the symbolic forms of myth. Indeed, Cassirer explicitly rejects the Delphic motto and so rules out the possibility of a radical anthropology. In Cassirer’s view, it is hopeless to attempt to fathom the human source of the symbolic forms of culture. “Philosophy has no choice but to reverse the direction of inquiry. Instead of taking the road back (to the nature of man), it must attempt to continue forward. If all culture is manifested in the creation of specific image-worlds, of specific symbolic forms, the aim of philosophy is not to go behind these creations, but rather to understand and elucidate their basic formative principle.”

  As David Bidney has said, anthropology is divided into two main disciplines, physical anthropology, “which takes up such problems as the evolution and comparative anatomy of races …” and ethnology, which, “on the other hand, is said to be the study of human customs, institutions, artifacts, and products of mental exercise. The science of culture as practised is the study of these impersonal, superorganic, historical products of society and the ‘laws’ of their development.”

  Put more bluntly, modern anthropology deals with man as a physical organism and with the products of man as a culture member, but not with man himself in his distinctive activity as a culture member. Ethnology has only recently gotten around to the study of man as personality affecting culture and being affected by culture.* Modern anthropology has been everything except an anthropology.

  How may we deal scientifically with man considered precisely in those activities which distinguish him as a culture member? It is a perfectly legitimate scientific pursuit to study the material elements of culture as objective phenomena: the tools, the products of tools, the sounds of language, hunting, warfare, food gathering, the behavior of chiefs and shamans. It is perfectly legitimate to classify and study objectively languages, religions, societies. It is perfectly legitimate to write a sympathetic study of an island culture viewed from within as a way of life, an aesthetic pattern of existence. It is perfectly legitimate to write straight cultural history. But may we not also require of anthropology, the science of man, some assessment of that creature himself who makes culture possible?

  The question which cannot be put off forever is not what is the nature of culture and what are the laws of culture but what is the ontological nature of the creature who makes the assertions of culture? How may we apply the scientific method in all its rigor and fruitfulness to man considered as a creature of culture? If one refuses to answer this question, one can hardly be called an anthropologist, perhaps anthropometrist or ethnographer, but not the scientist whose business it is to know man as such. A biologist, after all, is not afraid to speak about organisms.

  The answer, I think, is not to be found in, a limitation or compromise of the scientific method but rather in making it a more radically useful instrument. To return to the tetradic structure of the scientific enterprise: a radical science must be willing to admit as eligible phenomena all real events, not merely space-time linkages. It must deal with assertory behavior as such; it cannot disqualify as a datum the very phenomenon of which it is itself a mode.

  Such a requirement stems not from an “extra-scientific” position but from the exigency of the scientific method itself. The method must be able to give an account of its own elements and structure.

  The functional method of the sciences is a nonradical method of knowing because, while it recognizes only functional linkages, it presupposes other kinds of reality, the intersubjectivity of scientists and their assertions, neither of which are space-time linkages and neither of which can be grasped by the functional method. Therefore, when the functional method is elevated to a total organon of reality and other cognitive claims denied, the consequence must be an antinomy, for a nonradical instrument is being required to construe the more radical reality which it presupposes but does not understand.

  In order that progress be made toward a more radical science, it is necessary to take into account the framework within which the scientific method is mounted. In the case of anthropology, for example, it is necessary to realize that the “properties” of its subject, man, are of a more radical order of being than the operation of the functional method. Indeed, it is one of these “properties,” the assertory act of symbolization, which makes the scientific method possible. The assertory behavior of man, whether true or false, mythic or sc
ientific, is on the same ontological plane as the inter-subjective enterprise of scientists. It is in the last analysis absurd to explain this activity entirely within the intersubjective framework, as not itself an intersubjective assertion but a space-time linkage grasped by an assertion. The attempt to account for cultural phenomena, language, myth, science, art, as events which are onto-logically “below” the activity of the theorist can only fall into an antinomy.

  A radical anthropology must take account of ontological levels more radical than the scope of the functional method. Its subject, man, is not merely an organism, a social unit, a culture member (though he is all of these), but also he who, even as the scientist, makes assertions, is oriented not merely on a biological scale of need-satisfactions (though he is so oriented) but on a polar scale of truth-falsity, right-wrong, authenticity-inauthenticity, as well. A radical anthropology must be a normative science as well as a classificatory and functional science. This normative character, moreover, is not to be understood in the usual sense of “cultural values” lately acquired and relatively assessed but rather as constituting in the most radical sense the very mode of existence of the asserting creature of culture. The culture member is he who lives normatively.

  Anthropology must be willing to accept not only functional criteria: what social and biological purpose is served by this or that cultural element; or aesthetic criteria: whether or not a cultural element conforms to the prevailing cultural pattern and contributes to “cultural integration,” but a normative criterion as well. It must not be afraid to deal with the fact that a man may flourish by one scale and languish by another—that he may be a good organism and an integrated culture member and at the same time live a trivial and anonymous life. As Bidney has expressed it, “In evaluating a given culture, the essential problems are how it is integrated and for what is it integrated, not is it integrated.”

  It is not enough to study a culture element with only the objective of discovering its immanent role in a culture. It is also necessary to judge it according to whether it does or does not contribute to the development of the potentialities of human nature. This does not imply ethnocentrism; it does imply a recognition of a common human nature with the attendant possibilities of development and deterioration. It is not enough, for example, to study the function of the Kula among Trobriand Islanders, the complex system of exchanging beads and shell bracelets (though Malinowski’s study is magnificent and one sympathizes with his attack on those who refuse to enter into the inner spirit of a culture). One cannot defer indefinitely a normative decision about the Kula—would or would not the islanders be better occupied doing something else? A chemist or a biologist is not faced with a normative variable in his data; the behavior of an organism or a compound always coincides with its potentiality and the opportunities for realization; it is no more nor less. But a man may fall short of the potentialities offered by his culture—and he may transcend them.

  Our objection to cultural relativism need not be mounted on religious grounds and certainly not on the ground of ethnocentricity. It is sufficient here to note the interior contradictions which such a view entails and its manifestly antiscientific consequences. For if one takes seriously the position of the cultural relativist, that there is no reality but a cultural reality, that “even the facts of the physical world are discerned through an enculturative screen so that the perception of time, distance, weight, size, and other ‘realities’ are mediated by the conventions of a given group”—if we take this seriously, we can only conclude that science itself, even ethnology, is nonsense, since it is at best only a reflection of the culture within which it is undertaken.

  In sum, it is high time for ethnologists and other social scientists to forgo the luxury of a bisected reality, a world split between observers and data, those who know and those who behave and are “encultured.” Scientists of man must accept as their “datum” that strange creature who, like themselves, is given to making assertions about the world and, like themselves, now drawing near, now falling short of the truth. It is high time for social scientists in general to take seriously the chief article of faith upon which their method is based: that there is a metascientific, metacultural reality, an order of being apart from the scientific and cultural symbols with which it is grasped and expressed. The need for a more radically scientific method derives not merely from metaphysical and religious argument but also from the antinomy into which a nonradical science falls in dealing with man.

  * Some contemporary philosophers have denied that hypotheses are propositions, since, unlike direct observations, they express a generalization and their meaning is always indirect. As Braithwaite observes, however, “such a limitation is inconvenient, since hypotheses as well as propositions in the limited sense obey the laws of propositional logic, are capable of truth and falsity, are objects of belief or other cognitive attitudes, and are expressed by indicative sentences; they thus satisfy all the usual criteria for being a proposition.”

  The argument which follows prescinds from an explicit philosophy of science. It does not matter for the argument what one believes the ontological character of the scientific statement to be, as long as one admits it to be a statement. Even if one holds with many positivists that a hypothesis is an arbitrary convention in a calculus which is to be interpreted as an applied deductive system and as not having a meaning apart from its place in such a calculus, what is significant is that the hypothesis and the deductions which follow are acknowledged to be assertions.

  * “But when the intellect begins to judge about the thing it has apprehended, then its judgment is something proper to itself—not something found outside in the thing.”

  * This gross classification by naming would correspond roughly with Lotze’s “first universal,” a primitive form of objectivization prior to logical abstraction. Ernst Cas-sirer, Philosophy of the Symbolic Forms.

  † We are not concerned here with the logical form of the copula. Let us admit with Peano that the “is” here means “is a member of. “ ft is only necessary to understa’nd that whatever the form of predication, the word “is” also asserts that the predicate holds, that this particular grass plant does in fact belong to the family Graminae.

  * Cf. Cassirer’s distinction between the scientific statements of quantum physics, between “statements of the first order” relating to definite space-time points, and physical law of the form, “ifx then y.”

  † Here again we are not concerned with the controversies over the predicate form: (1) whether the subject-predicate form is a “relation of monadic degree”; (2) whether the subject-predicate form is the expression of a universal ontological state or only a linguistic form imposed by the Indo-European language family. Whorf holds that some languages convey meanings without predicates. For example, a flash of light occurs which we would report as “A light flashed.” The Hopi language reports the flash with the single verb rehpi: “flash (occurred).” “There is no division into subject and predicate, not even a suffix like the Latin -t in tona-t, ‘it thunders.’ “ But surely the burden of proof rests with Whorf to show that in saying rehpi, the Hopi is not saying a one word pointing-at-and-naming sentence like the American child who points at the earth and says “Grass.”

  In either case, however, whether the predicate is a “relation of monadic degree” or whether it is a Hopi grammatical form, something is being asserted.

  * As Susanne Langer says, we may, if we like, interpret language as a sequence of events entailing signs, sounds in the air, vibration of ear drums, nerve excitation, brain events, responses, and so on. All this does happen. But something has been left out and it is the most important thing of all. It is that the symbol symbolizes something. There is a qualitative difference between a dog’s understanding of the sound ball as a stimulus to search for the ball, and a man’s understanding of the sound to “mean” ball, one of those round things.

  I use the word “sign” as synonymous with C W. Morris’s “sig
nal,” to mean an element in the environment directing the organism to something else. It is thus a segment of a space-time sequence, sign-organism-response-referent.

  But a symbol is an element in an assertion, in which something is symbolized, in which two elements are paired, the symbol and that which is symbolized.

  † H. D. Veatch: “Indeed I think it can be shown that all of the three main logical instruments of knowledge—concepts, propositions, and arguments—are really nothing but just such relations of identity. For instance, a concept or universal (an unum versus alia) such as ‘tree’ is simply a relation of identity between a ‘what’ and possible individual trees, and likewise with an affirmative proposition….Indeed, to say that S is P is not to assert that S is included in P, or is a number of P, or is equal to P, or is an argument of the function P; instead it involves nothing more or less than the identification of the predicate concept (the ‘what’) with the subject (the ‘it’). “

  ‡ It is revealing that those philosophers who hold that knowledge is altogether an affair of electrocolloidal brain events must also deny that there are such things as assertions. Thus, Russell says that the word “is” in the sentence A is yellow means nothing, that a logical language will express the same meaning by saying yellow (A).

  Russell can leave out the “is” if he likes. But the fact remains that when we see the logician’s symbols, yellow (A), we must know whether he has put them on the blackboard as an exercise in logical possibility, or whether he means that such is indeed the case, that A is in truth yellow.

  Similarly, a scientist must make a distinction between real and possible pointer readings. His assistant, whose job it is to call off readings, may fall into a daydream and utter aloud all the numbers on the dial, “2.1, 2.2, 2.3,” etc. But the scientist must still know which of these is actually the reading at the moment.