The Ship of Knowledge

In an illuminating metaphor, social scientist Otto Neurath compares humans as knowers to “sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry-dock and to reconstruct it there out of the best materials.”

— Martin Benjamin, Philosophy & This Actual World, 59

Can any guidance system be perfected? Can a life reach a state of fulfillment so that no niche in meaning space is left unoccupied?

There is no conceivable fulfillment of any rational life except progress towards further fulfillment.

— Peirce, CN 3:124 (quoted in Cobley 2010, 90)

Systemic topologies

All of science, philosophy and religion begins by supposing that the universe is intelligible, that what happens around here makes some kind of sense to somebody, or at least would make sense to an omniscient being or an ideal reader with unlimited time and energy to read it. The confirmation of this is that our anticipations often turn out to be accurate – often enough that we are surprised when they turn out to be wrong. Surprises confirm that our models are both functional and imperfect.

Thus it is not surprising that what kind of sense the universe makes to you depends on what kind of system you are. And if you belong to a symbolic species, it depends on the dynamics of the symbol system (the language) which is integrated with your guidance system. As Terrence Deacon points out, these dynamics are shaped by the ‘semantic topology that determines the way symbols modify each other’s referential functions in different combinations.’

In the study of complex systems, many researchers have recognized the critical formative influence of what might be described as topological universals. Boundary conditions of various sorts – spatial constraints, temporal parameters, connectedness of graphs and networks, recursive or re-entrant, causal or representational geometries, and mere finiteness of systems – can determine the characteristic patterns and stable attractor configurations of dynamical systems. Semiotic constraints affect the evolution of language in much the same way that boundary conditions affect the dynamics of physical systems.

— Deacon 2003, 103

This system of relationships between symbols determines a definite and distinctive topology that all operations involving those symbols must respect in order to retain referential power. The structure implicit in the symbol-symbol mapping is not present before symbolic reference, but comes into being and affects symbol combinations from the moment it is first constructed. The rules of combination that are implicit in this structure are discovered as novel combinations are progressively sampled. As a result, new rules may be discovered to be emergent requirements of encountering novel combinatorial problems, in much the same way as new mathematical laws are discovered to be implicit in novel manipulations of known operations.

Symbols do not, then, get accumulated into unstructured collections that can be arbitrarily shuffled into different combinations. The system of representational relationships, which develops between symbols as symbol systems grow, comprises an ever more complex matrix. In abstract terms, this is a kind of tangled hierarchic network of nodes and connections that defines a vast and constantly changing semantic space. … Whatever the logic of this network of symbol-symbol relationships, it is inevitable that it will be reflected in the patterns of symbol-symbol combinations in communication.… the symbolic use of tokens is constrained both by each token’s use and by the use of other tokens with respect to which it is defined. Strings of symbols used to communicate and to accomplish certain ends must inherit both the intrinsic constraints of symbol-symbol reference and the constraints imposed by external reference.… Because symbolic reference is inherently systemic, there can be no symbolization without systematic relationships.

— Deacon (1997, 99-100)

Genesis

The pattern that connects (Bateson) is also the pattern that creates, the sign that determines the form of existing things or systems. We discover these patterns by observing that similar beings have similar origins.

All natural classification is then essentially, we may almost say, an attempt to find out the true genesis of the objects classified. But by genesis must be understood, not the efficient action which produces the whole by producing the parts, but the final action which produces the parts because they are needed to make the whole. Genesis is production from ideas. It may be difficult to understand how this is true in the biological world, though there is proof enough that it is so. But in regard to science it is a proposition easily enough intelligible. A science is defined by its problem; and its problem is clearly formulated on the basis of abstracter science.

— Peirce, CP 1.227 (1902)

In biology, the genetic ‘idea’ is more recently called the genotype, and we now have a better understanding of its role in producing organisms classified by phenotype. But many biologists still do not see these as types in the Peircean sense, which here he calls ‘ideas’:

All classification, whether artificial or natural, is the arrangement of objects according to ideas. A natural classification is the arrangement of them according to those ideas from which their existence results. No greater merit can a taxonomist have than that of having his eyes open to the ideas in nature; no more deplorable blindness can afflict him than that of not seeing that there are ideas in nature which determine the existence of objects.

— Peirce, CP 1.231 (1902)

Meaning what you read

Facts or beliefs, once formulated, are in the public domain; but their actual meanings cannot be made public.

Only you personally can mean, at the moment, the sign you are reading. You can do that by investing in it your own experience of the object of the sign. That is the water of life which can revive the dry bones of a published text. But that’s a third-person view. From your point of view as reader, what you do is to let the text speak from experience. Without this ‘letting it mean’, the text is just a bag of tricks and traps – canned information, facts, opinions, stories and so forth. Reading those things into the text, rather than ‘letting it mean,’ is another kind of trap, though. For a maxim that might avoid both traps, try this: Let your body mean the text.

Real learning can occur only in dialogue with one’s body.

— Gendlin (1981, 160)

Gendlin’s ‘focusing’ technique requires the practitioner to let the answers to her questions come from her body, rather than getting caught in a repetitive verbal routine. The body, then – rather than some external authority figure, or some ‘visionary’ projection – is trusted as the source of revelation which can turn into new guidance. Once this has been grounded in the practice of attending to the immediately felt body, then the habitual boundaries we draw around what can be felt as ‘body’ can fall away. Perhaps it is only when the whole earth is your body that you can really learn from scientific inquiry. And only when precepts are realized in the practice of interaction with other earthlings can you really learn what they mean.

Spinning

In Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus (metaphorical son of the archetypal ‘artificer’) addresses himself as ‘weaver of the wind.’ Weaving and spinning (as threadmaking) are both handy metaphors for the construction of meaning. But there is another sense of “spin” (based on a different metaphor) that we need in any good account of how language works.

The metaphor of spin or bias refers vaguely to a speaker’s more or less subtle (and often unconscious) attempts to manipulate the emotional interpretant while maintaining some semblance of truth in the sign-object relation. When a word is used frequently with a special emotional overtone, the spin tends to stick to the word as an undertone persisting in other uses. Some examples:

“Progress,” as a noun, puts a positive spin on the idea of a progression, i.e. a forward motion: we generally use it in reference to a sequence in which later points (or states) are improvements over earlier points in the sequence. The same happens with “success”: it generally refers to a positive outcome of a succession of acts.

We see the same pattern in the evolution of “happy” in English. Things happen; if the outcome is positive for us, if our luck is good, then the events are “happy” or “lucky”; and we describe our own resulting state in the same terms. (In English, the usage of “happy” as referring to events rather than emotional states has almost disappeared, but we still use “lucky” both ways.) Similarly “fortune” can be kind or unkind, and someone who “tells your fortune” may bring good news or bad news, but if you are “fortunate,” that means the news is good.

Other words have gone in the opposite direction. “Fate” usually has ominous overtones, probably because it is beyond our control, and a “fatal” event, in current usage, is about as negative as anything can be.

A successful translation from one language into another would translate the spin of each phrase as well as its more “objective” reference – but the shifting relationships between sense and spin are rarely parallel across languages, and even differ between people. This is yet another reason why a perfectly “successful” translation is an ideal that can hardly be realized.

Do we understand one another?

Anything worth saying is worth saying in more than one way. There is no ‘best’ way of saying it, since the reader is going to interpret the utterance in ways that are not fully predictable.

Consider for instance Ray Jackendoff’s (1992) essay on ‘The Problem of Reality,’ which explains why ‘constructivist’ psychology is a more viable model of our relationship to external reality than analytical philosophy which tries to base meaning on ‘truth-conditions.’ (He does not consider the Peircean alternative that the sense of reality is grounded in a ‘dyadic consciousness.’) Toward the end of the essay he takes up an objection to the constructivist view, stated as a more or less rhetorical question:

If reality is observer-relative, how is it that we manage to understand one another? (This objection is essentially Quine’s (1960) ‘indeterminacy of radical translation,’ now applied at the level of the single individual.)

— Jackendoff (1992, 173)

Jackendoff gives two answers to this. Translating the first into my own terms: assuming that ‘we’ are both human, our common biological nature makes it a good bet that our meaning spaces are similar. (Jackendoff uses ‘combinatorial space’ where i use ‘meaning space.’)

The second answer to this objection is that we don’t always understand each other, even when we think we do. This is particularly evident in the case of abstract concepts. Quine’s indeterminacy of radical translation in a sense does apply when we are dealing with world views in areas like politics, religion, aesthetics, science, and, I guess, semantics. These are domains of discourse in which the construction of a combinatorial space of concepts is underdetermined by linguistic and sensory evidence, and innateness does not rush in to the rescue.

Since we are now at work in one of those domains of discourse, it is possible that Jackendoff’s ‘combinatorial space’ is more different from my ‘meaning space’ than i think it is. Investigating that possibility would involve exploring the context of each usage more fully, always guided by Peirce’s ‘maxim of pragmatism.’

Energetics of information

Use it or lose it, they say. Another side of this maxim is that if you try to keep too much “information,” you degrade its usefulness.

Howard Odum describes a version of the meaning cycle operating on a global level:

Because information has to be carried by structures, it is lost when the carriers disperse (second energy law). Therefore, emergy is required to maintain information.… So in the long run, maintaining information requires a population operating an information copy and selection circle …. The information copies must be tested for their utility. Variation occurs in application and use because of local differences and errors. Then the alternatives that perform best are selected, and the information of the selected systems is extracted again. Many copies are made so that the information is broadly shared and used again, completing the loop. In the process, errors are eliminated, and improvements may be added in response to the adaptation to local variations.

— H.T. Odum (2007, 88)

The information process, which is the ‘application and use’ of “stored” or potential information to actually inform the guidance system, is the crucial part of this copy and selection circle; ‘the ability to retrieve and use information is rapidly diluted as the number of stored information items increases. To accumulate information without selection is to lose its use’ (Odum 2007, 241).

Idiomatics

While there is no private language (Wittgenstein), every natural language abounds in idioms (from the Greek word meaning private) – expressions whose specific usage is not derivable from the logos of the language. In fact any particular usage of an expression may occupy any position along a spectrum running from fully public to fully private. Idioms, jargon and slang are perhaps signs of the propensity of cultures to articulate themselves as subcultures, and of people to identify themselves as members of a group by adopting the group’s articulation habits.

Looking at language itself is like looking at a mirror rather than at the reflection in a mirror, or looking at a window rather than through it: the phenomenon of language ceases to be transparent and we focus on its dynamics rather than those of “the world.” This can raise its automatic functions into consciousness and restore the immediacy of the habits we have taken for granted.

For instance, we can look at familiar idioms which we normally use automatically, and try to trace their peculiar logic back to the root. Consider the English expression “back and forth”: why is it not “forth and back”? Do we normally imagine that kind of motion as beginning with the return? Maybe we do: perhaps an irreversible “going forth” is the default kind of motion, as it were, and only when this is interrupted by a “coming back” do we notice a distinctive pattern – which we then call “back-and-forth.”

But then why do we say that someone tumbles “head over heels”? Taken “literally,” this expression would be equivalent to “upside up”; “upside down” (or “downside up”) would be better expressed as “heels over head.” Well, maybe the idiom is dominated by the dynamic (rather than the static positional) sense of over – as in “fall over,” “turn over” etc. – and we simply ignore the order of the nouns.

There’s an element of chance in any evolutionary process, including historical changes of word meaning; idiomatic and conventional expressions are full of ‘frozen accidents.’ Some accidents are more likely, more ‘motivated,’ than others (Lakoff 1987, Sweetser 1990), but all are unruly to some degree, as is life itself.

Transparency

When we say the meaning of the text is ‘clear,’ we are testifying to an experience described metaphorically as ‘seeing the meaning through’ the text. By this metaphor the text is transparent. This occurs when the act of reading is effortless, so that we are not conscious of the text as ‘coded’ or of interpretation as such. When we are conscious of the text as coded – usually because we are unable to decode it through an unconscious meaning process – we say that the text is opaque.

If someone points to a text that is transparent for you and asks you ‘What does this mean?,’ your first impulse may be to say that it means exactly what it says. But then you realize that such a response is not helpful for someone to whom the text is opaque; and only someone in such a predicament would ask such a question. In order to deal with this predicament you have to raise the decoding (meaning) process into consciousness somehow. And in doing this, you sacrifice the transparency of the text. This sacrifice is motivated by compassion. (And so is any genuine question about the meaning of the text – for the one asking the question is motivated by trust that the text is meaningful although it is still opaque to him.)

Even a text which has been transparent may lose its transparency if the reader notices an ambiguity in it. Perceiving an ambiguity entails having to make a conscious choice, and thus makes us conscious of the text as coded. If you manage to recover the transparency of the text without losing its ambiguity, the text has gained for you an added dimension of meaning. Thus the ‘fall’ from ambiguity into opacity is ‘redeemed’ by a deeper, richer transparency.