Category: Comminding

rePatch ·14

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.

Use and mention

To make anything explicit requires an entire code or symbol system to be functioning implicitly.

While a sign is functioning symbolically within your act of meaning – i.e. while it is in actual use – you can’t pay attention to, or even mention, its function. As Douglas Hofstadter put it (modeling his epigram after a familiar saying), you can’t have your use and mention it too. Likewise Michael Polanyi: ‘we cannot look at our standards in the process of using them, for we cannot attend focally to elements that are used subsidiarily for the purpose of shaping the present focus of attention’ (Polanyi 1962, 183). In scientific practice, you can’t make your measurement (observation) and describe your measuring device at the same time:

even though any constraint like a measuring device, M, can in principle be described by more detailed universal laws, the fact is that if you choose to do so you will lose the function of M as a measuring device. This demonstrates that laws cannot describe the pragmatic function of measurement even if they can correctly and completely describe the detailed dynamics of the measuring constraints.

— Pattee (2001)

Likewise in the realm of cognition or experiencing, of which science is the public expression: if the creative or forming power could emerge visibly from behind the forms which are its expression, then it could not be seen as a form; the seer would instead be ‘blinded by the light.’ As we have already heard from Thomas 83: ‘The light of the Father will reveal itself, but his image is hidden by his light.’ Or as Moses Cordovero put it, ‘revealing is the cause of concealment and concealment is the cause of revealing’ (Scholem 1974, 402).

Talking with the animals

Is the body language or vocal expression of, say, a wolf or a chimpanzee symbolic? It’s part of an instinctive habit-system, but its ‘terms’ have very little capacity for growth in either breadth or depth. Nor can they be combined, in the way that symbols can, to make reference more specific or more general. Wolves can talk (and listen) to us, but are not in the habit of talking about us in our absence, in the way that we are now talking about wolves.

From the human side, Farley Mowat communicated with wolves by pissing around his territory. But could he say anything to them about, say, astronomy? As a member of a symbolic species, he could even talk about things and situations that don’t exist, and about whether they could or should exist (modality). Whether this actually raises the level of conversation is debatable – but only in symbols.