Turning Signs

Does a universe, or a meaning space, begin vaguely and become more definite or more determinate by developing ‘habits’ (i.e. by self-organization)? Or does it begin with a perfectly orderly state which is gradually eroded by entropy, falling into chaos? As he usually did with metaphysical questions, Peirce based his answer on logical principles, and argued against the ‘prejudice’

that in thought, in being, and in development the indefinite is due to a degeneration from a primary state of perfect definiteness. The truth is rather on the side of the scholastic realists that the unsettled is the primal state, and that definiteness and determinateness, the two poles of settledness, are, in the large, approximations, developmentally, epistemologically, and metaphysically.

CP 6.348, c. 1909)

This pattern also appears in studies of how a meaning space is embodied in a developing brain (Chapter 13). In Walter Freeman’s ‘circular causality’ model, ‘the patterns of neural activity are self-organized by chaotic dynamics’ (Freeman 1995). But the circularity of the process implies that as meaning spaces and habits take on form, they tend to impose a more definite and determinate order on the chaotic dynamics of brain activity. Thomas Metzinger (2003) offers a model which places more emphasis on the ‘top-down’ aspects of the process.

As a matter of fact some of the best current work in neuroscience … suggests a view of the human brain as a system that constantly simulates possible realities, generates internal expectations and hypotheses in a top-down fashion, while being constrained in this activity by what I have called mental presentation, constituting a constant stimulus-correlated bottom-up stream of information, which then finally helps the system to select one of an almost infinitely large number of internal possibilities and turning it into phenomenal reality, now explicitly expressed as the content of a conscious representation.… Recent evidence points to the fact that background fluctuations in the gamma frequency range are not only chaotic fluctuations but contain information – philosophically speaking, information about what is possible. This information – for example, certain grouping rules, residing in fixed network properties like the functional architecture of corticocortical connections – is structurally laid-down information about what was possible and likely in the past of the system and its ancestors. Certain types of ongoing background activity could therefore just be the continuous process of hypothesis generation mentioned above. Not being chaotic at all, it might be an important step in translating structurally laid-down information about what was possible in the past history of the organism into those transient, dynamical elements of the processing that are right now actually contributing to the content of conscious experience.… Not only fixed network properties could in this indirect way shape what in the end we actually see and consciously experience, but if the autonomous background process of thousands of hypotheses continuously chattering away can be modulated by true top-down processing, then even specific expectations and focal attention could generate precise correlational patterns in peripheral processing structures, patterns serving to compare and match actually incoming sensory signals. That is, in the terminology here proposed, not only unconscious mental simulation but also deliberately intended high-level phenomenal simulations, conscious thoughts, personal-level memories, and so on can modulate unconscious, subpersonal matching processes.

— Metzinger (2003, 51-2)

This model translates easily into the Kabbalistic idiom, where the primary process of divine emanation is depicted as top-down in the standard ‘Tree of Life’ diagram. In Zohar 1:183a-b (Matt 1983, 80-83), for instance, dreams, visions and prophecy represent various levels of what Metzinger calls simulations. They are governed by the divine language but corrupted to various degrees (hence the ‘levels’) by the influence of ‘the body,’ i.e. the personal history, anxieties and limitations which darken the imagination. It is the interaction of the influences from above and below – from superpersonal and subpersonal levels, you might say – that generates phenomenal reality. Freeing the divine component from the corrupt requires interpretation, which then allows the creative power of ‘Speech’ to assume the prophetic guidance function:

every dream is from that lower level,
and Speech commands that level;
that is why every dream follows the interpretation.

— Matt (1983, 81)

It is the realization (or ‘fulfillment’) of the dream which ‘follows’ interpretation in the temporal order, and this happens because conscious experience is governed by (and thus ‘follows’) the meaning process. ‘Human interpretation is effective because its words activate the divine realm of Speech [Shekhinah], who then translates the dream into reality’ (Matt 1983, 230). Language (i.e. the symbolic order) thus acts as final cause of perception.

In the meaning cycle, of course, this ‘reality’ is followed by a new interpretation, which in turn modulates expectations and modifies practice, and so on. The top-down and bottom-up streams take turns modulating each other (though it’s all happening simultaneously in the time that is real to the system as a whole). What Metzinger (above) calls ‘fixed network properties like the functional architecture of corticocortical connections’ could be the biological substrate of meaning space, the essential structure whose finer details are determined in ‘real time’ by the incoming stream of sensory information. The structure itself has of course evolved over a much longer time scale.

We are hunters and gatherers of meaning, to the extent that we can attend to significant objects. In any given moment of perception, the significance of an object appears before the finer details of its appearance, and guides the selection of details for special attention. Hurford (2007, §4.3) argues that the way attention works is a powerful constraint on semiotic (and linguistic) structures. Specifically, he asserts the primacy of global attention over attention for details in the human cognitive process.

The general idea of the distinction between global and local attention is given by Treisman (2004, p. 541): ‘An initial rapid pass through the visual hierarchy provides the global framework and gist of the scene and primes competing identities through the features that are detected. Attention is then focused back to early areas to allow a serial check of the initial rough bindings and to form the representations of objects and events that are consciously experienced.’ The theory was pioneered by Navon (1977), whose title, ‘Forest before the trees,’ expresses the phenomenon vividly. He summarizes: ‘global structuring of a visual scene precedes analysis of local features’ (p. 353) and ‘global processing is a necessary stage of perception prior to more fine-grained analysis’ (p. 371).

— Hurford (2007, 104)

According to Chapter 7, a genuine symbol is one which actively and experientially connects an idea (or First) with some thing, event or fact (or Second), so that its Interpretant inhabits a more well-informed system. Peirce sometimes says that the symbol, ‘defined as a sign which is fit to serve as such simply because it will be so interpreted’ (EP2:307), is the ‘genuine sign,’ while the index is ‘degenerate’ and the icon doubly so (EP2:306). But he also sometimes distinguishes between genuine and degenerate symbols. In any case, the information conveyed by a symbol depends on the involvement of both icons and index in it.

A Symbol is a law, or regularity of the indefinite future. Its Interpretant must be of the same description; and so must be also the complete immediate Object, or meaning. But a law necessarily governs, or “is embodied in” individuals, and prescribes some of their qualities. Consequently, a constituent of a Symbol may be an Index, and a constituent may be an Icon. A man walking with a child points his arm up into the air and says, “There is a balloon.” The pointing arm is an essential part of the Symbol without which the latter would convey no information. But if the child asks, “What is a balloon,” and the man replies, “It is something like a great big soap bubble,” he makes the image a part of the Symbol. Thus, while the complete Object of a Symbol, that is to say, its meaning, is of the nature of a law, it must denote an individual, and must signify a character. A genuine Symbol is a Symbol that has a general meaning. There are two kinds of degenerate Symbols, the Singular Symbol whose Object is an existent individual, and which signifies only such characters as that individual may realize; and the Abstract Symbol, whose only Object is a character.

— Peirce (EP2:274-5)

The first step in cognition is the making of distinctions. It makes eymological sense, then, that discretion and discernment (each a variety of wisdom) depend on recognition (separation) of discrete things in (from) the flux of experience. All of these words spring from the same Latin root, although in English, discreet and discrete parted company in usage and spelling around the 16th century.

Cognition begins with perception, and perception begins by foregrounding something against what thereby becomes its background. Then it is identified by its difference from something else. In a cultural meaning space, ‘each unit acquires a semantic value only insofar as it is inserted into a semantic axis, and thus opposed to another unit’ (Eco 1976, §2.12.1). In a logical meaning space, ‘assertion always implies a denial of something else’ (Peirce, CP 1.357). The ‘opposition’ can be symmetric in a binary way, as between a pair of opposites, or multilateral as in the radial symmetry of a starfish, or asymmetric like figure against ground or text against context.

A unit, once distinguished within a universe of discourse, can be designated – not only with nouns but also with verbs, adjectives and so forth; a cultural unit is not necessarily a ‘thing.’ Once the name exists, it can be applied either to the node in the network of meaning space – the type – or to an individual instance of the type – a token. But the relationship between word (lexeme) and concept (node) becomes increasingly complex when we take intersemiotic relations into account. As Eco (1976, 122) points out, in reference to ‘Model Q’,

this model anticipates the definition of every sign, thanks to the interconnection of the universe of all other signs that function as interpretants, each of these ready to become the sign interpreted by all the others; the model, in all its complexity, is based on a process of unlimited semiosis. From a sign which is taken as a type, it is possible to penetrate, from the center to the furthest periphery, the whole universe of cultural units, each of which can in turn become the center and create infinite peripheries.

This depiction of ‘the whole universe of cultural units’ approaches the image of a sphere the center of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere – an image with a history traced by Borges (1952) from the pre-Socratic philosophers to Pascal. This sphere was identified with being, the universe, or God, while here it appears as the structure of the universe of discourse: another clue that the world is inside out (Chapter 5).

This model helps to explain why communication problems arise within a linguistic community: the repertoire (the lexicon) is in the public domain, while the meaning space internal to the individual is private. Eco, by designating the nodes as ‘cultural units,’ is clearly referring to a public meaning space (or semantic space, Eco’s own term). As he says, ‘we are looking for a semiotic model which justifies the conventional denotations and connotations attributed to a sign-vehicle.’ And indeed, symbolic communication only works to the extent that language users strive to conform their usage to an ideal correspondence between word and intended referent. Biologically, though, it is clear that this ideal can never be fully realized, since it is always the individual first person speaking, and her utterance can only be shaped by her internal models (of the ideal public meaning space and of the world), constructed through her own personal history.

Before the mind’s eye, whether in sleep or waking, came images that one was to discover presently in some book one had never read, and after looking in vain for explanation to the current theory of forgotten personal memory, I came to believe in a great memory passing on from generation to generation.… Our daily thought was certainly but the line of foam at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea.

— W. B. Yeats, Mythologies, 346 (1917)

Yeats called this ‘great memory’ anima mundi; but these images are phenomena of the human world, the world of the human imagination, passing on from generation to generation of humans. When they are meaningful, they are iconic signs occurring in various contexts and occupying human meaning spaces. Who knows what they would mean to other imaginations, to other animals? Yet we can’t help believing that they arise from much deeper in the bottomless lake of consciousness than the ephemeral chatter of ‘our daily thought’ – perhaps even from the deeper-than-human.

The meaning space of an organism is its Umwelt as distinguished from its environment (what appears to surround it from a human observer’s point of view). However, you can say this just as well by using ‘environment’ in place of Umwelt and ‘external world’ in place of environment. For instance, Richard Lewontin in his 1983 article on ‘Gene, Organism and Environment’:

How do I know that stones are part of the environment of thrushes? Because thrushes break snails on them. Those same stones are not part of the environment of juncos who will pass by them in their search for dry grass with which to make their nests. Organisms do not adapt to their environments; they construct them out of the bits and pieces of the external world. This construction process has a number of features:
(1) Organisms determine what is relevant. While stones are part of a thrush’s environment, tree bark is part of a woodpecker’s, and the undersides of leaves part of a warbler’s. It is the life activities of these birds that determine which parts of the world, physically accessible to all of them, are actually parts of their environments. Moreover, as organisms evolve, their environments, perforce, change.

— (Oyama, Griffiths and Gray 2001, 64)

Francis Cook explains the pragmatic meaning of the net of Indra:

When in a rare moment I manage painfully to rise above a petty individualism by knowing my true nature, I perceive that I dwell in the wondrous net of Indra, and in this incredible network of interdependence, the career of the Bodhisattva must begin. It is not just that ‘we are all in it’ together. We all are it, rising or falling as one living body.

— Cook (1977, 122)

Austin (1998, 499) identifies this experience with the absorption of samadhi. But something very much like the net of Indra appears to Christian visionaries as well.

Every nature, every modeled form, every creature, exists in and with each other. They will dissolve again into their own proper root. For the nature of matter is dissolved into what belongs to its nature. Anyone with two ears able to hear should listen!

— Gospel of Mary 2 (King 2003b, 13)

Blake’s vision of eternal meaning space – ‘Mutual each within others bosom in Visions of Regeneration’ (Jerusalem 21:45) – is based on Ezekiel but also features the mutually reflecting nodes of the Net of Indra:

the Four Faces of Humanity fronting the Four Cardinal Points
Of Heaven going forward forward irresistible from Eternity to Eternity

And they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic …

& they walked
To & fro in Eternity as One Man reflecting each in each & clearly seen
And seeing: according to fitness & order.

Jerusalem 98

Even in Peirce’s late definitions of ‘Sign’ emerges something very like the net of Indra, as a semiotic network in which the whole Sign is both context and object of each part, so that each part is a sign of itself as part of its own object.

The word Sign will be used to denote an Object perceptible, or only imaginable, or even unimaginable in one sense—for the word “fast,” which is a Sign, is not imaginable, since it is not this word itself that can be set down on paper or pronounced, but only an instance of it, and since it is the very same word when it is written as it is when it is pronounced, but is one word when it means “rapidly” and quite another when it means “immovable,” and a third when it refers to abstinence. But in order that anything should be a Sign, it must “represent,” as we say, something else, called its Object, although the condition that a Sign must be other than its Object is perhaps arbitrary, since, if we insist upon it we must at least make an exception in the case of a Sign that is a part of a Sign. Thus nothing prevents the actor who acts a character in an historical drama from carrying as a theatrical “property” the very relic that that article is supposed merely to represent, such as the crucifix that Bulwer’s Richelieu holds up with such effect in his defiance. On a map of an island laid down upon the soil of that island there must, under all ordinary circumstances, be some position, some point, marked or not, that represents qua place on the map, the very same point qua place on the island.

A sign may have more than one Object. Thus, the sentence “Cain killed Abel,” which is a Sign, refers at least as much to Abel as to Cain, even if it be not regarded as it should, as having “a killing” as a third Object. But the set of objects may be regarded as making up one complex Object. In what follows and often elsewhere Signs will be treated as having but one object each for the sake of dividing difficulties of the study. If a Sign is other than its Object, there must exist, either in thought or in expression, some explanation or argument or other context, showing how—upon what system or for what reason the Sign represents the Object or set of Objects that it does. Now the Sign and the Explanation together make up another Sign, and since the explanation will be a Sign, it will probably require an additional explanation, which taken together with the already enlarged Sign will make up a still larger Sign; and proceeding in the same way, we shall, or should, ultimately reach a Sign of itself, containing its own explanation and those of all its significant parts; and according to this explanation each such part has some other part as its Object. According to this every Sign has, actually or virtually, what we may call a Precept of explanation according to which it is to be understood as a sort of emanation, so to speak, of its Object. (If the Sign be an Icon, a scholastic might say that the “species” of the Object emanating from it found its matter in the Icon. If the Sign be an Index, we may think of it as a fragment torn away from the Object, the two in their Existence being one whole or a part of such whole. If the Sign is a Symbol, we may think of it as embodying the “ratio,” or reason, of the Object that has emanated from it. These, of course, are mere figures of speech; but that does not render them useless.)

CP 2.230 (1910)

Yuri Lotman (1990, 123 ff.) referred to cultural meaning space as the ‘semiosphere.’

Humanity, immersed in its cultural space, always creates around itself an organized spatial sphere. This sphere includes both ideas and semiotic models and people’s recreative activity, since the world which people artificially create (agricultural, architectural and technological) correlates with their semiotic models. There is a two-way connection: on the one hand, architectural buildings copy the spatial image of the universe and, on the other hand, this image of the universe is constructed on an analogy with the world of cultural constructs which mankind creates.

— Lotman (1990, 203)

Jesper Hoffmeyer extended the term to show that human culture is only one level of semiosis, grounded in much broader biological phenomena. Hoffmeyer’s own note clarifies the concept of ‘semiosphere’:

I have defined the semiosphere as ‘a sphere like the atmosphere, hydrosphere, or biosphere that permeates these spheres from their innermost to outermost reaches and consists of communication: sound, scent, movement, colours, forms, electrical fields, various waves, chemical signals, touch, and so forth – in short, the signs of life’ (Hoffmeyer 1996:46). The concept was originally introduced by the Russian-Estonian semiotician Yuri Lotman, who explicitly used it in comparison to Vernadsky’s idea of the biosphere. For Lotman (2000 [1990]: 125), the semiosphere remained a cultural concept: ‘The unit of semiosis, the smallest functioning mechanism, is not the separate language but the whole semiotic space in question. This is the space we term the semiosphere. The semiosphere is the result and the condition for the development of culture; we justify our term by analogy with the biosphere, as Vernadsky defined it.’ For more details about the origin of these terms, see Sebeok (1999). John Deely accepts my use of the word semiosphere and suggests ‘signosphere as a term more appropriate for the narrower designation of semiosphere in Lotman’s sense, leaving the broader coinage and usage to Hoffmeyer’s credit’ (Deely 2001a: 629).

(Cobley 2010, 398)

A felt meaning, to use Eugene Gendlin’s term, is an attractor in a meaning space. The more significant it is felt to be, the more it will attract thought-signs that can carry its significance, and immediate objects to which it can be applied. A newly experienced meaning especially will tend to increase the breadth of whatever sign conveys it, i.e. the sign will be applied to as broad a range of objects as possible. This is most obvious in the case of a child learning a new word, as John Dewey observed:

A newly acquired meaning is forced upon everything that does not obviously resist its application, as a child uses a new word whenever he gets a chance or as he plays with a new toy. Meanings are self-moving to new cases. In the end, conditions force a chastening of this spontaneous tendency. The scope and limits of application are ascertained experimentally in the process of application. The history of science, to say nothing of popular beliefs, is sufficient indication of the difficulty found in submitting this irrational generalizing tendency to the discipline of experience. To call it a priori is to express a fact; but to impute the a priori character of the generalizing force of meanings to reason is to invert the facts. Rationality is acquired when the tendency becomes circumspect, based upon observation and tested by deliberate experiment.

— John Dewey, 1925 (ED2:59)

Rationality then is a symptom of semiotic self-control, the key to learning from experience.

Willard Quine (1961, 41, 42): ‘our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body …. The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science.’ Karl Popper disagrees with Quine’s ‘meaning holism’ because ‘though every one of our assumptions may be challenged, it is quite impracticable to challenge all of them at the same time’; and ‘almost all of the vast amount of background knowledge which we constantly use in any informal discussion will, for practical reasons, necessarily remain unquestioned’ (Popper 1968, 322-3). But when any assumption is explicitly challenged, changes in the others may be implicit, and take time to unfold. Popper’s objection may be overlooking the continuity between consciousness and meaning space, which Peirce explained by means of a metaphor:

Consciousness is rather like a bottomless lake in which ideas are suspended, at different depths. Percepts alone are uncovered by the medium. The meaning of this metaphor is that those which [are] deeper are discernible only by a greater effort, and controlled only by much greater effort. These ideas suspended in the medium of consciousness, or rather themselves parts of the fluid, are attracted to one another by associational habits and dispositions,— the former in association by contiguity, the latter in association by resemblance. An idea near the surface will attract an idea that is very deep only so slightly that the action must continue for some time before the latter is brought to a level of easy discernment. Meantime the former is sinking to dimmer consciousness. There seems to be a factor like momentum, so that the idea originally dimmer becomes more vivid than the one which brought it up. In addition, the mind has but a finite area at each level; so that the bringing of a mass of ideas up inevitably involves the carrying of other ideas down. Still another factor seems to be a certain degree of buoyancy or association with whatever idea may be vivid, which belongs to those ideas that we call purposes, by virtue of which they are particularly apt to be brought up and held up near the surface by the inflowing percepts and thus to hold up any ideas with which they may be associated. The control which we exercise over our thoughts in reasoning consists in our purpose holding certain thoughts up where they may be scrutinized. The levels of easily controlled ideas are those that are so near the surface as to be strongly affected by present purposes. The aptness of this metaphor is very great.

— CP 7.554 (undated)

Any symbol which is relevant in the current situation implies, in a sense, the whole of its native meaning space; but its relevance at the moment consists in its focusing on the few ‘ideas’ that matter, and its leaving the rest in the background, in the deeper reaches of the ‘lake.’ Of the infinite number of statements which could be made at the moment, the symbol in question leaves many unsaid because they are too obvious to be worth saying, and many others unsaid because they would distract attention from the dialogic argument. The viable path of discourse or dialog avoids both the obvious and the irrelevant. But then, the various participants in the dialog may differ in their judgments of obviousness and relevance, and no one who has ears to hear will consider his own implicit judgments infallible.

A niche in meaning space insists on being filled if possible, and determines the form of its occupant, but not the actual existence of that occupant. It can only select something more or less vaguely resembling that form and actually existing in the universe where the system can find it; the act of meaning, the triadic action of a sign, involves its existence, its secondness.

There are different kinds of existence. There is the existence of physical actions, there is the existence of psychical volitions, there is the existence of all time, there is the existence of the present, there is the existence of material things, there is the existence of the creations of one of Shakespeare’s plays, and, for aught we know, there may be another creation with a space and time of its own in which things may exist. Each kind of existence consists in having a place among the total collection of such a universe. It consists in being a second to any object in such universe taken as first. It is not time and space which produce this character. It is rather this character which for its realization calls for something like time and space.

— Peirce, CP 1.433 (c. 1896)

In this sense, Secondness as individual existence ‘calls for’ continuity as Thirdness, while on the other side of the coin of meaning, the niche in meaning space ‘calls for’ its inhabitation. Semiosic determination, like the ‘imprinting’ of a new hatchling on its parent, is a reciprocal realization.

We know that the newborn chick looking for its mom actually relies on at least two different neural systems, one for orienting toward stimuli that are good candidates for being mom, and another for taking whatever it can get, for storing a memory of anything that the chick might be exposed to. The first system will choose an adult chick (or even a stuffed duck) over a box as its go-to-caregiver, but if there’s nothing else around, the second system will lead the chick to settle for the box.

— Marcus (2004, 104)

The first system here would correspond to the top half of the meaning cycle, the second system to the bottom half. Likewise, a reader looking for guidance in a turning sign or “scripture” will ‘seek until he finds’ and then use whatever he finds to guide his practice (including any further seeking); the niche in meaning space that yearns for fulfillment will be filled regardless of which text the seeker ‘finds.’