Author: gnox

A Dharma Hall Discourse of Dogen, EK 3.217:

Yunmen asked Caoshan, ‘Why don’t we know that there is a place of great intimacy?’ Caoshan said, ‘Just because it is greatly intimate, we do not know it is there.’

Suppose this were Eihei and someone asked me, ‘Why don’t we know that there is a place of great intimacy?’ I would just hit his face with my whisk and ask him, ‘Is this knowing or not knowing?’ If he tried to answer, I would hit him again with the whisk.

— (Leighton and Okumura 2004, 225)

Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer every one.

— Colossians 4:6 (RSV)

Identity is a phenomenon that emerges from the dialectic between individual and society.

— Berger and Luckmann (1966, 174)

Learning to mean, or to think or to know, is an intersubjective process, as John Dewey realized.

When the introspectionist thinks he has withdrawn into a wholly private realm of events disparate from other events, made out of mental stuff, he is only turning his attention to his own soliloquy. And soliloquy is the product and reflex of converse with others; social communication not an effect of soliloquy. If we had not talked with others and they with us, we should never talk to and with ourselves.

— Dewey 1929, 141

The Russian psychologist Vygotsky further developed this observation.

The major theme of Vygotsky’s theoretical framework is that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the development of cognition. Vygotsky (1978) states: ‘Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.’ … For example, in the learning of language, our first utterances with peers or adults are for the purpose of communication but once mastered they become internalized and allow ‘inner speech’.

— tip.psychology.org/vygotsky.html, c.2007

For an intelligence to function there must be another intelligence. Vygotsky was the first to stress: ‘Every higher function is divided between two people, is a mutual psychological process.’ Intelligence is always an interlocutor.

— Lotman (1990, 2)

But Lotman also stressed the role of ‘autocommunication’ within cultures. In ‘I-s/he’ communication, information coded in a text or message passes from one person to another or others; the text is a variable while the code is constant and shared between the interlocutors. But in the I-I mode of autocommunication, (including the situation where a culture addresses itself), the content of the text is constant while the code is variable – giving room for polyversity – and actual variation leads to self-discovery or transformation. In this case the message is addressed to one’s future self, as Peirce said, but the change to this new self is triggered by a crossing of ‘codes’ rather than ‘messages’: the object is fixed but the sign forks and the thought moves in a new direction. According to Lotman (1990, Chapter 2), the most viable cultures are those in which these two modes, ‘autocommunication’ and interpresonal dialogue, are in constant tension.

Human consciousness is heterogeneous. A minimal thinking apparatus must include at least two differently constructed systems to exchange information they each have worked out.

— Lotman (1990, 36)

Lotman (Chapter 3) finds a parallel between the organization of culture and that of the brain’s two hemispheres: the difference is between discrete and continuous (digital and analog) coding systems, exchanging information by means of rhetorical tropes (‘turns’) such as metaphor and metonymy.

The interrelationship between cultural memory and its self-reflection is like a constant dialogue: texts from chronologically earlier periods are brought into culture and, interacting with contemporary mechanisms, generate an image of the historical past, which culture transfers into the past and which, like an equal partner in a dialogue, affects the present. But as it transforms the present, the past too changes its shape. This process does not take place in a vacuum: both partners in the dialogue are partners too in other confrontations, both are open to the intrusion of new texts from outside, and the texts, as we have already had cause to stress, always contain in themselves the potentiality for new interpretations. This image of the historical past is not anti-scientific, although it is not scientific either. It exists alongside the scientific image of the past like another reality and interacts with it also on the basis of dialogue.

— Lotman (1990, 272)

The results of a simple algorithm, though regular and predictable if taken one at a time, can take on great complexity if the algorithm is many times reiterated with the result of each iteration becoming a factor in the next. A classic example of such a nonlinear process is the Mandelbrot set, which can produce an infinite variety of ‘fractal’ images, all generated by a relatively simple formula run recursively on an ordinary computer.

‘Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules’ (Gleick 1987). If the rules of life are always changing and always undiscoverable, as Bateson said, it’s probably because life is nonlinear. Semiosis is also nonlinear, especially in the form of dialogue or conversation between two people taking turns as speaker and listener.

As we communicate in language and gesture, we interpret and understand each other dialogically. This dialogic dynamic is not a linear or additive combination of two preexisting, skull-bound minds. It emerges from and reciprocally shapes the nonlinear coupling of oneself and other in perception and action, emotion and imagination, and gesture and speech. In this way, self and other bring forth each other reciprocally through empathy.

— Thompson (2007, 402)

This netbook documents an inquiry guided by the question How do you mean?. The root question is how meaning happens, or how semiosis works.

Writers, thinkers and scholars have been asking this kind of question for a long time, but their work doesn’t get a lot of attention because most of us are too busy committing our acts of meaning to reflect on how we do it, or don’t see the point of thus reflecting. A century ago, C. S. Peirce and Victoria Welby were both looking into the nature of meaning, but they didn’t learn of each other’s work until near the end of their lives. The correspondence between them began in 1903, and parts of it are among the clearest explanations of Peirce’s mature semiotics. Most of it was published in 1977 under the title Semiotic and Significs (cited as SS).

In one of his earliest letters to Welby, Peirce explained why the study of what we mean, important as it is, should not be taken too far:

I fully and heartily agree that the study of what we mean ought to be the … general purpose of a liberal education, as distinguished from special education, – of that education which should be required of everybody with whose society and conversation we are expected to be content. But, then, perfect accuracy of thought is unattainable, – theoretically unattainable. And undue striving for it is worse than time wasted. It positively renders thought unclear.

SS 11 (1903)

When a semiotic theorist like Peirce says that ‘perfect accuracy’ is theoretically unattainable, he is saying that it is unattainable because of the way semiosis works. The very logic of meaning guarantees that all language is necessarily vague to some degree. Here’s a fuller explanation of the point, written a year or two later (CP 5.506):

No communication of one person to another can be entirely definite, i.e., non-vague. We may reasonably hope that physiologists will some day find some means of comparing the qualities of one person’s feelings with those of another, so that it would not be fair to insist upon their present incomparability as an inevitable source of misunderstanding. Besides, it does not affect the intellectual purport of communications. But wherever degree or any other possibility of continuous variation subsists, absolute precision is impossible. Much else must be vague, because no man’s interpretation of words is based on exactly the same experience as any other man’s. Even in our most intellectual conceptions, the more we strive to be precise, the more unattainable precision seems. It should never be forgotten that our own thinking is carried on as a dialogue, and though mostly in a lesser degree, is subject to almost every imperfection of language. I have worked out the logic of vagueness with something like completeness, but need not inflict more of it upon you, at present.

Readers who want a more precise definition of vagueness, or a more specific definition of generality, might consult Peirce, EP2:350-53 (or CP 5.446-450, 1905).

When Peirce says that ‘no man’s interpretation of words is based on exactly the same experience as any other man’s,’ he is talking about what i call polyversity (in Chapter 2). In the earlier stages of writing this book, i collected quite a few examples of what i took to be statements of the same idea expressed in diverse ways. But there’s a limit to the usefulness of that, just as there’s a limit to how exactly you can say what you mean. Indeed, as Peirce said, ‘the multiplication of equivalent modes of expression is itself a burden’ (SS 20).

The exact logician holds it to be, in itself, a defect in a logical system of expression, to afford different ways of expressing the same state of facts; although this defect may be less important than a definite advantage gained by it.

— Peirce in Baldwin’s Dictionary (‘Exact Logic: Copula)

The present writer doesn’t claim to be an exact logician, but can hope that the reader gains some advantage from the polyversity of Turning Signs.

The element of ‘trust’ in genuine dialogue includes a willingness to let most of the meaning process work implicitly – trusting that it can become explicit, can bear the spotlight beam of attention, if that becomes necessary. Genuine dialogue requires a finely tuned sense of what needs to be explicated and what needs to work implicitly.

There’s no hard line between technologies and intimologies. We are not only social animals and expert manipulators but, as Andy Clark puts it, Natural-Born Cyborgs. Our lives are so thoroughly pervaded with ‘mind-expanding technologies’ that ‘it becomes harder and harder to say where the world stops and the person begins’ (Clark 2003, 7). Nothing is more natural for humans than these artificial extensions of ourselves.

It is because our brains, more than those of any other animal on the planet, are primed to seek and consummate such intimate relations with nonbiological resources that we end up as bright and as capable of abstract thought as we are. It is because we are natural-born cyborgs, forever ready to merge our mental activities with the operations of pen, paper and electronics, that we are able to understand the world as we do.

— Clark (2003, 6)

And, of course, that same characteristic enables us to wreak untold damage on the biosphere; to enclose ourselves in a cocoon of denial as we do; and, perhaps, to break out of that cocoon by recognizing that we are the biosphere. We are extensions of it just as technologies are extensions of us.

Peirce laid the groundwork for (what is now called) biosemiotics by devising a diagrammatic model of thought processes which not only clarified human ways of meaning but also aimed to ‘represent every variety of non-human thought’:

Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there. Consistently adhere to that unwarrantable denial, and you will be driven to some form of idealistic nominalism akin to Fichte’s. Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there. But as there cannot be a General without Instances embodying it, so there cannot be thought without Signs. We must here give ‘Sign’ a very wide sense, no doubt, but not too wide a sense to come within our definition. Admitting that connected Signs must have a Quasi-mind, it may further be declared that there can be no isolated sign. Moreover, signs require at least two Quasi-minds; a Quasi-utterer and a Quasi-interpreter; and although these two are at one (i.e., are one mind) in the sign itself, they must nevertheless be distinct. In the Sign they are, so to say, welded. Accordingly, it is not merely a fact of human Psychology, but a necessity of Logic, that every logical evolution of thought should be dialogic. You may say that all this is loose talk; and I admit that, as it stands, it has a large infusion of arbitrariness. It might be filled out with argument so as to remove the greater part of this fault; but in the first place, such an expansion would require a volume — and an uninviting one; and in the second place, what I have been saying is only to be applied to a slight determination of our system of diagrammatization, which it will only slightly affect; so that, should it be incorrect, the utmost certain effect will be a danger that our system may not represent every variety of non-human thought.

— CP 4.551 (1906)

If we identify ‘thought’ with teleodynamic process (as we do in Chapter 10), we can agree that at least the reference to crystals was ‘loose talk,’ since the growth of a crystal is only a morphodynamic process in Deacon’s terms. However, Thirdness is implicit in any process, though perhaps not as prominent as it is in semiosis. Peirce refers to the work of crystals, and Deacon (2011) shows that teleodynamic work can indeed be described in purely physical terms, so there is a definite connection between Peirce on ‘thought’ and Deacon on emergence. There could be a hint of this connection in the manuscript reading of ‘inorganic’ rather than ‘organic’ in the sentence above, which was printed as: ‘Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there.’ (See Houser 2005, ‘The Scent of Truth’.) This does not imply that everything existing or occurring in the physical universe is a sign, only that it has the potential to be read as a sign by an observer who recognizes it as participating in a process.