Category: Comminding

rePatch ·14

Remembrance

Remembrance Day, as we call it in Canada, is intended mainly for honoring the veterans of what we call the “World Wars.” To observe it properly, we ought to see those wars in their context – which is also the context of the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) now winding up (or down) in Glasgow. To give us a glimpse of it, George Monbiot “crudely summarized” the story of the past 500 years in his blog post yesterday. That history has brought us to the ecological, economic, energy and equity crises we face today, and living through them will be a far greater challenge than living through those wars, devastating as they were. We have less than a decade to turn that story around.

There’s another kind of remembrance that we ought to engage in every day. In Turning Signs i call it mindfulness.

We who live in the “wealthy nations” don’t have all the time in the world to mend our unjust and ruinous ways. But we have all the world in the time, if we live it mindfully.

In essence, all things in the entire world are linked with one another as moments. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being.

— Dogen, “Uji”

Consensus and community

I’ve finally completed my extensive revision of Chapter 8 of Turning Signs and you’re all invited to have a look at the updated version! Chapter 9 has also been refinished (it didn’t need as much work as Chapter 8). This means that i’m halfway home to a complete second edition of my one contribution to society. I’ve also updated the offline edition which you can download from the front page of the netbook. May you find it useful, maybe even entertaining!

Breaking news on breaking habits

I see that the Green Party of Canada has taken over the title of my previous blog post (minus the question mark) for the Green Cimate Action Plan (www.greenparty.ca/en/mission-possible). Of course I signed on right away, and if you’re wondering what practical measures can be taken in response to the climate emergency, I recommend considering the 20 specific steps outlined in it as viable components of humanity’s collective mission, or at least of a “Green New Deal.”

I hope this blog can contribute to that mission by carrying forward the inquiry into Turning Signs. Since I started posting about the Anthropocene crisis over a year ago, I’ve been trying to look at the situation in its longer-term context. This netbook has always been about ‘ecologies of meaning’, and now Jeremy Lent’s book on The Patterning Instinct has inspired me to dig into the archaeologies of meaning, to coin another phrase. This involves studying how cultures co-evolve with their languages and lexicons.

I’m doing this because I’m reasonably sure that the current ecological crisis is rooted in the bad habits of humanity. Therefore we need to know, at both personal and cultural levels, why we have taken on these habits and how we can drop them or transform them into habits more harmonious with Nature’s habits. This includes cognitive habits: some of the worst are core concepts of the globally dominant culture which is mainly responsible for the ongoing mass extinction and climate-change catastrophes. Jeremy Lent identifies two of these toxic concepts as pervasive metaphors: Conquering Nature and Nature as Machine. George Monbiot, in a recent blog post, says that the problem is captitalism, because in its current form it requires constant growth, meaning ever-increasing consumption of the Earth’s resources coupled with an ever-growing gap between the rich and poor.

My next blog post will begin to probe the concept of growth itself, not only in the economic sense but also in biological, psychological and semiotic senses. What do they have in common, and how does the core concept shape our habits? That question might take awhile to answer …

Type, sign and word

According to Chapter 13 of Turning Signs,

A niche in a meaning space is a type of meaning. A niche in a symbolic meaning space can only be occupied by a Legisign, ‘a law that is a Sign.… Every conventional sign is a legisign. It is not a single object, but a general type which, it has been agreed, shall be significant’ (— Peirce, EP2:291).

If we consider a language (such as English or Greek) as a semantic or meaning space, we might say that a niche in that space is occupied by a word. But we might say instead that a word, being a legisign or type and not a single object, is the meaning space, which is ‘occupied’ in actual linguistic practice by tokens of that type or instances of that word, as Peirce says (CP 4.537, 1906).

On the other hand, Peirce also says that ‘Man, homo, ἄνθρωπος are the same sign’ (MS 9), although we would not usually say that they are the same word. This would imply a cross-linguistic meaning space in which different words are instances of the same sign. This would still be a symbolic space, but we might call it a semiotic meaning space, as it is more inclusive than a linguistic one (constituted by a single language). Likewise in his fifth Harvard Lecture of 1903:

Take, for example, any proverb. “Evil communications corrupt good manners.” Every time this is written or spoken in English, Greek, or any other language, and every time it is thought of it is one and the same representamen. It is the same with a diagram or picture. It is the same with a physical sign or symptom. If two weathercocks are different signs, it is only in so far as they refer to different parts of the air. … “Evil communications corrupt good manners” and φθείρουσιν ἤθη χρήσθʼ ὁμιλίαι κακαί are one and the same representamen. They are so, however, only so far as they are represented as being so; and it is one thing to say that “Evil communications corrupt good manners” and quite a different thing to say that “Evil communications corrupt good manners” and φθείρουσιν ἤθη χρήσθʼ ὁμιλίαι κακαί are two expressions of the same proverb.

EP2:203

The distinction in that last sentence is essentially the distinction between a language and a metalanguage, or between use and mention – or between semiosis and semiotics.

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.