The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

Semiotic uses as its basic frame of reference the meaning triad of Charles Peirce (Figure 8). Its three components are sign, interpretant, and object. The “interpretant” in man is equivalent to “thought” or “idea” or, in modern semiotical usage, to “takings-account-of.” The interpretant therefore implies an organism in which the interpretant occurs, the interpreter. The virtue of the triadic conception of the meaning relation is that it is conformable with the biological notion of stimulus-response, in which the sign is equivalent to a stimulus, the conditioned response to the interpretant, and the designatum to the object of the response.

  The triad can be looked at in either its biological (pragmatical) or its logical dimension. That is to say, it can be conceived either as a causal relation obtaining between natural existents and mediated by neural structures, sound waves, and so on; or it can be viewed syntactically-semantically. Thus, in the biological dimension, the buzzer (sign) has no direct relation to the object (food); whereas in the semantical dimension the word (sign) has the direct relation of designation with the object, precisely insofar as it is specified by a semantical rule to designate the object. Syntactics has to do with the logical relation which one sign bears to another.

  The semioticists, however, when they speak of the meaning relation as it is taken to occur among natural existents whether human or subhuman, regardless of whether they are speaking of the pragmatical or semantical dimension, always assume that it is a causal sequential event.* They are careful to use response instead of conception or thought or idea.† Even in Ogden and Richards’s variation of Peirce’s triad, in which the terms “symbol” and “thought” (or “reference”) and “referent” are used, it is stated that “between a thought and a symbol causal relations hold.”

  We may therefore express the basic semiotic relation in terms of the simple biological triad (represented in Figure 9).

  Between the sign and organism, organism and object, “real” causal relations hold. The line between sign and object is dotted because no real relation holds but only an imputed relation, the semantical relation of designation. A major doctrine of the semanticists is that most of the difficulties which thought encounters come about through the imputation of a real relation where only a semantical one exists.

  One knows at once what Ogden and Richards mean by real even though latter-day semioticists would avoid the term. Signification occurs as a material happening among natural existents, from the sound of the buzzer to an electrocolloidal change in the dog’s brain to glandular secretion. There is, however, no such “real” relation between sign and object.*

  Two considerations arise in connection with the semiotical theory of meaning. The first is simply this: If the semioticists insist on giving a biological account of the meaning relation as it is taken to occur among natural existents (human organisms, words, things), what account are they prepared to give in these terms of the imputed and logical relations which occur in semantics and syntax? If the semantical relation between sign and designatum is not “real,” then what is its status? Is its status settled by the nominal device of calling it an “imputed” relation? Is it simply “wrong” as one might gather from the semanticists? The answer is not forthcoming. One simply speaks in one breath of concepts as “responses” and in the next of the logical relations between concepts. This treatment is, as we have seen, ambiguous. Either it can mean that the semantical-syntactical relation stands in so obvious a continuity with sign behavior that nothing more need be said about it; or it may mean that of course it is “mental” and has nothing to do with sign behavior and that it goes without saying that the Cartesian dualism of res extensa and res cogitans prevails. In any case, it is unsatisfactory to be required to shift attention without further ado from the great corpus of natural science to an “unreal but imputed” relation. It would not seem unreasonable to ask what one is to make of this queer relation in terms of a “unified science.”

  The second consideration, and one which on investigation leads to such unexpected consequences, has been raised, not by a hostile critic of semiosis, but by an erstwhile symbolic logician. There is something wrong, writes Susanne Langer, about regarding the word symbol as a sign and a conception as a response. Since the notion of meaning as signification in the narrow sense, as a response, “misses the most important feature of the material,” what is this feature and what are its epistemological consequences?*

  What is this most important feature which is left out by a causal rendering of meaning? It is, of course, the relation of denotation as opposed to signification. To give something a name, at first sight the most commonplace of events, is in reality a most mysterious act, one which is quite unprecedented in animal behavior and imponderable in its consequences. The semioticists are obliged by method to render symbol as a kind of sign. Morris defines a symbol as a sign produced by its interpreter which acts as a substitute for some other sign with which it is synonymous. Thus, in a dog, hunger cramps can take the place of the buzzer in the control of the dog’s behavior: “Hunger cramps might themselves come to be a sign (that is, a symbol) of food at the customary place.” Although we may sympathize with Morris’s purpose, not to disqualify “mind,” but simply to advance semiotic as a science, the fact remains that this is an extraordinary use of the word symbol—certainly it has nothing to do with denotation. It is the relation of denotation, as Mrs. Langer points out, which has been completely overlooked. The question is this: Can denotation be derived by a refinement of behavioral reaction, or is it something altogether different? Can any elaboration of response issue in naming? Why is it, we begin to wonder, the semioticists refuse to deal with symbolization, excepting only as it is governed by semantical rules?

  That symbolization is radically and generically different from signification is confirmable in various ways. There is the sudden discovery of the symbol in the history of deaf-mutes, such as the well-known incident in which Helen Keller, who had “understood” words but only as signs awoke to the extraordinary circumstance that the word water meant, denoted, the substance water.* There are the genetic studies of normal children, as for example the observation of Schachtel, who speaks of the “autonomous object interest” of young children as being altogether different from the earlier need-gratification interest.† Symbolization can be approached genetically, as the proper subject of an empirical psychology, or it can be set forth phenomenologically, as a meaning structure with certain irreducible terms and relations.

  Let us first take notice of the gross elements of the symbol meaning situation and later of the interrelations which exist between them.

  THE SECOND ORGANISM AND THE RELATION OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY

  What happens, then, when a sign becomes a symbol; when a sound, a vocable, which had served as a stimulus in the causal nexus of organism-in-an-environment, is suddenly discovered to mean something in the sense of denoting it?

  It will be recalled that the relation of signification is a triadic one of sign-organism-object (Figure 9). This schema holds true for any significatory meaning situation. It is true of a dog responding to a buzzer by salivation; it is true of a polar bear responding to the sound of splitting ice; it is true of a man responding to a telephone bell;* it is true of little Helen Keller responding to the word water by fetching water. The essential requirement of signification is that there be an organism in an environment capable of learning by effecting an electrocolloidal change in the central nervous system and as a consequence responding to a stimulus in a biologically adaptive fashion.†

  It is important to realize that whereas signification often occurs between two or more organisms, it is not essential that it should, and that generically the sort of response is the same whether one or more organisms are involved. The action of a dog in responding intelligently to the bark or feint of another dog—Mead’s “conversation of gesture”—is generically the same sort of meaning relation as that in which a solitary polar bear responds to the sound of splitting ice. It is the environment
to which the organism responds in a biologically adaptive fashion, and the mode of response is the same whether the environment consist of other organisms or of inorganic nature.

  Only a moment’s reflection is needed to realize that the minimal requirement of symbolization is quite different. By the very nature of symbolic meaning, there must be two “organisms” in the meaning relation, one who gives the name and one for whom the name becomes meaningful. The very essence of symbolization is an entering into a mutuality toward that which is symbolized. The very condition of my conceiving the object before me under the auspices of a symbol is that you name it for me or I name it for you. The act of symbolization requires another besides the hearer; it requires a namer. Without the presence of another, symbolization cannot conceivably occur because there is no one from whom the word can be received as meaningful. The irreducible condition of every act of symbolization is the rendering intelligible; that is to say, the formulation of experience for a real or an implied someone else.

  The presence of the two organisms is not merely a genetic requirement, a sine qua non of symbolization; it is rather its enduring condition, its indispensable climate. Every act of symbolization, a naming, forming an hypothesis, creating a line of poetry, perhaps even thinking, implies another as a co-conceiver,* a co-celebrant of the thing which is symbolized. Symbolization is an exercise in intersubjectivity.

  A new and indefeasible relation has come into being between the two organisms in virtue of which they are related not merely as one organism responding to another but as namer and hearer, an I and a Thou. Mead’s two dogs quarreling over a bone exist in a conversation of gesture, a sequential order of gesture and countergesture. But a namer and a hearer of the name exist in a mutuality of understanding toward that which is symbolized. Here the terminology of object science falls short. One must use such words as mutuality or intersubjectivity, however unsatisfactory they may be. But whatever we choose to call it, the fact remains that there has occurred a sudden cointending of the object under the auspices of the symbol, a relation which of its very nature cannot be construed in causal language.†

  Is it possible, then, that an unprejudiced semiotic may throw some light on the interpersonal relation, the I-Thou of Buber, the intersubjectivity of Marcel? As things stand now, the empirical mind can make very little of this entity “intersubjectivity,” and the behaviorist nothing at all. Like other existential themes, it seems very much in the air. Yet an empirical approach to the genesis of symbolization is bound to reveal it as a very real, if mysterious, relation. Perhaps the contribution of a new semiotic will be that intersubjectivity is by no means a reducible, or an imaginary, phenomenon but is a very real and pervasive bond and one mediated by a sensible symbol and a sensible object which is symbolized.*

  We may therefore revise the sign triad as the symbol tetrad (see Fig. 9A).

  The “organisms” no longer exist exclusively in a causal nexus but are united by a new and noncausal bond, the relation of intersubjectivity.

  But a new relation has also arisen between the object and its symbol. What is the nature of the “imputed relation of identity”?

  THE INTENTIONAL RELATION OF IDENTITY

  Mead said that a vocal gesture (sign) becomes a symbol when the individual responds to his own stimulus in the same way as other

  people respond. Yet one cannot fail to realize that something is amiss in construing as a response Helen Keller’s revelation that this is water. And certainly it misses the peculiar representative function of language to declare that, when I ask you to do something, I also arouse in myself the same tendency to do it.

  What, then, is changed in the semiotic relation by Helen Keller’s inkling that this is water? Physically, the elements are the same as before. There is Helen; there is Miss Sullivan; there is the water flowing over one hand, and there is the word spelled out in the other. Yet something of very great moment has occurred. Not only does she have the sense of a revelation, so that all at once the whole world is open to her, not only does she experience a very great happiness, a joy which is quite different from her previous need-satisfactions (see Schachtel’s “autonomous object interest” above), but immediately after discovering what the water is, she must then know what everything else is.

  The critical question may now be raised. In discovering the peculiar denotative function of the symbol, has Helen only succeeded in opening Pandora’s box of all our semantical ills of “identification,” or has she hit upon the indispensable condition of our knowing anything at all, perhaps even of consciousness itself?* Is her joy a “hallucinatory need-satisfaction,” an atavism of primitive word-magic; or is it a purely cognitive joy oriented toward being and its validation through the symbol?

  It comes down to the mysterious naming act, this is water (the word spelled out in her hand). Here, of course, is where the trouble starts. For clearly, as the semanticists never tire of telling us, the word is not water. You cannot eat the word oyster, Chase assures us; but then not even the most superstitious totemistic tribesman would try to.† Yet the semanticists themselves are the best witnesses of the emergence of an extraordinary relation—which they deplore as the major calamity of the human race—the relation of an imputed identity between word and thing. Undoubtedly the semanticists have performed a service in calling attention to the human penchant for word magic, for reifying meanings by simply applying words to them. Gabriel Marcel frequently speaks of the same tendency of “simulacrum” formation, by which meanings become hardened and impenetrable to thought. Yet one wonders if it might not be more useful to investigate this imputed identity for what part it might play in human knowing, rather than simply deplore it—which is after all an odd pursuit for a “scientific empiricist.”

  To awake to the remarkable circumstance that something has a name is neither a response nor an imputed real identity. No one believes that the name is really the thing, nor does the sentence This is water mean this. Then what is the relation? It might clarify matters to eliminate the mysterious copula, leaving the sentence This: water. Or even more simply, eliminate the word this, leaving a pointing at and a naming (in semiotic language, an indexical sign plus a symbol). In its essence the making and the receiving of the naming act consist in a coupling, an apposing of two real entities, the uttered name and the object. It is this pairing which is unique and unprecedented in the causal nexus of significatory meaning. But what is the nature of this pairing? The two terms, it is clear, are related in some sense of identification, yet not a real identity. To express it in modern semiotical language, the water is conceived through the vehicle of the symbol. In Scholastic language, the symbol has the peculiar property of containing within itself in alio esse, in another mode of existence, that which is symbolized.* Helen knows the water through and by means of the symbol.

  The word is that by which the thing is conceived or known. It is, in Scholastic language, an intention. The Scholastics speak of concepts as “formal signs,” intentions whose peculiar property it is, not to appear as an object, but to disappear before the object. But here we are not dealing with concepts or mental entities. We are dealing with natural existents, the object and the vocable, the sound which actually trembles in the air. It is this latter which is in some sense intentionally identified with the thing. Or rather the thing is intended by the symbol. Perhaps much of the confusion which has arisen over the “identification” of the symbol with its designatum could have been avoided by an appreciation of the phenomenological (and Scholastic) notion of intentionality and by distinguishing real identity from the intentional relation of identity.

  An interesting question arises in connection with the intentional function of the symbol. Is it possible that the symbol is a primitive precursor of the concept or “formal sign” of the Scholastics? The latter contains its object in an intentional mode of existence, in alio esse. But so in an extraordinary fashion does the sensuous symbol. In cases of false onomatopoeia, the symbol is transformed intention
ally to imitate the thing symbolized (for example, crash, glass, limber, furry, slice, and so on). The word glass bears no resemblance to the thing glass. Yet it actually seems to transmit a quality of brittleness, glossiness, and so on. The fact is that a symbolic transformation has occurred whereby the drab little vocable has been articulated by its meaning.*

  The semanticists supply a valuable clue by their protestations. Confronted by a pencil, Korzybski says, it is absolutely false to say that this is a pencil; to say that it is can only lead to delusional states. Say whatever you like about the pencil, but do not say that it is a pencil. “Whatever you say the object is, well, it is not.” The pencil is itself unspeakable. True; but insofar as it remains unspeakable—that is, unvalidated by you and me through a symbol—it is also inconceivable. Clearly the semanticists are confusing an epistemological condition with a true identity.

  How does it happen, Cassirer asked, that a finite and particular sensory content can be made into the vehicle of a general spiritual “meaning”? And we know his answer. It is the Kantian variant that it is not reality which is known but the symbolic forms through which reality is conceived. Yet the empirical approach belies this. An empirical semiotic deals with natural existents and takes for granted a lawful reality about which something can be truly known. Even a strict behaviorist operates publicly in a community of other knowers and data to be known; he performs experiments on real data and publishes papers which he expects other scientists to understand. What account, after all, can Cassirer or any other idealist give of intersubjectivity? If it was, according to Kant, a “scandal of philosophy” in his day that no satisfactory solution could be found to the problem of intersubjectivity, is it any less a scandal now? But a broad semiotical approach can only bring one into the territory of epistemological realism. Since we do not know being directly, Wilhelmsen writes, we must sidle up to it; and at the symbol-object level, we can only do this by laying something of comparable ontological status alongside.