Turning Signs

Conversation is a matter of swapping texts. Dialogue includes as well the practice of providing contexts for each other’s texts. Dialog as inquiry aims at a common text suitable for the common experiential context, which is the system in which it lives.

All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.

— Wittgenstein (1969, #105)

Whole-body or enactive sign-turning involves (1) direct reference to experience, (2) context construction prompted by that experience, and (3) mutual illumination of conceptual space and current events. The currency of events is the continuity of time: Big Current of the cosmos, little current of consciousness.

A sentence can mean something to you consciously only in the context you can construct at the time of meaning. Its deeper meaning is beyond your consciousness to the extent that its wider context is beyond your construction.

On the other hand, we could also say that your context constructs you – that is, the self as a role in the biosocial ecosystem is constructed by the act of filling an ecological niche. The niche and its occupant, text and context, shape each other and co-evolve.

As the focal text is to its context, so body is to environment, model is to mind, and mind is to the reality beyond it, what Peirce calls The Truth.

Imagine, if you can, a mind without an external world to offer resistance to its intentions – a mind to which all phenomena were entirely internal. You might call it “the mind of God.”

Such a god would fit the description left us in the fragments that survive from the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Xenophanes. Here are the key points of his theology (translated by Kirk and Raven, 1957):

• One god … in no way similar to mortals either in body or in thought.
• Always he remains in the same place, moving not at all; nor is it fitting for him to go to different places at different times, but without toil he shakes all things by the thought of his mind.
• All of him sees, all thinks, and all hears.
• Sitting, he nevertheless at once accomplishes his thought, somehow, from his holy resting-place.

One way to make a unified sense of these fragments is to take ‘his holy resting-place’ as the universe itself, which of course does not go anywhere, as there is noplace else for it to go to. This universe is identical with the god’s body, while his ‘thought’ is identical with what happens in the universe, so there is no gap between the two (except in our minds, defined by their limitations). Now, clearly this god-thought cannot be conscious, nor can it include any kind of ‘plan,’ because those would involve some delay between thought and realization, and some effort; but this god at once accomplishes his thought without toil, and has no need of a ‘future.’ Consciousness and planning are signs of human (or ‘mortal’) limitations; god accomplishes his purpose (fulfills his intention, expresses his meaning, ….. ) without having to imagine it first as we do with ours. In this case our conscious planning, or purposing, or meaning (assuming they occur in the universe and not elsewhere) would constitute a minuscule part of the god’s mindbody. The god’s knowledge of events cannot be separate from the events themselves – not unless the god is out of his mind (i.e. external to the universe, which is none other than himself).

The upshot of this thought-experiment is that cosmic purposes or final causes, though they may be real, cannot be conscious purposes, nor can they be symbolized, recorded or stored externally. As Peirce remarked, ‘it is impossible ever actually to be directly conscious of thought’ (EP2, 269); consciousness of a thought requires another thought, and is therefore indirect.

Being an organism in an environmental context means that you need an internal model to guide your actions. A universal mind or will, however, having no context to contend with, no territory to navigate or map, has no model, no ‘inside’ or ‘outside,’ and no need (or possibility) to represent causality by inference as we do in the meaning cycle.

This thought-experiment has a parallel in physics. We begin with a classic scenario of thermodynamics: a closed container of two chambers filled with a gas at different temperatures, in which the gas can pass freely from one chamber to the other. The second law of thermodynamics predicts that the temperature gradient will dissipate itself: heat will distribute itself uniformly through the whole container, thus achieving equilibrium, which is equivalent to maximal disorder or ‘entropy.’ In 1871, James Clerk Maxwell imagined a way that this law could be violated: set up two containers connected only by a microscopic gate just big enough to allow passage of a single molecule at a time from one side to the other. Now suppose a tiny ‘demon’ can detect the speed of any particle and open the gate momentarily to let fast particles through in one direction only, and slow particles in the other direction only. This would increase the temperature gradient, and thus reverse the entropic process, without using any energy to do the work – supposing that the actual opening and closing of the gate uses no energy.

In 1922, however, Leo Szilard wrote a paper showing that in order to know enough about the particles to sort them out in this way, the demon would have to create at least as much entropy as was eliminated by the sorting process (Campbell 1982, 49). That’s because it takes work to assemble and represent the information needed by the demon in order to discriminate between fast and slow particles, and the amount of energy it takes to accomplish this knowledge of any particle is no less than the energy of the particle itself. So if we look at the whole system containing those representations (or symbols) as well as the particles being sorted, its entropy is increasing even as the smaller system inside the container is growing more orderly by creating a gradient.

Our scenario above is similar in that any explicit knowledge (or purpose, or meaning) of any entity or event in the universe (the god’s mindbody) would have to be another entity or event in the universe. This could add nothing to its ability to function implicitly, but something else would have to function implicitly in order to explicate (symbolize) the implicit function; and we can’t go outside the universe to find that something else, because the universe has no ‘outside’ (by definition). In short, there’s no room for explication apart from events themselves. On the whole, then, the only explication of the implicit purpose or meaning of events is the events themselves. In a more partial view, events may explicate or represent each other’s purposes – which is what happens in consciousness – but only at the cost of converting (dissipating) some of the implicit functioning to symbolic functioning, without which there can be no explication.

Our scenario, then, presents consciousness as a small part of the cosmic mind, arising from local limitations, which can therefore serve some cosmic purpose, though it can only guess at what that purpose is – for as Xenophanes also said, ‘No man knows, or ever will know, the truth about the gods and about everything I speak of: for even if one chanced to say the complete truth, yet oneself knows it not … ’ and ‘the gods have not revealed all things to men from the beginning; but by seeking men find out better in time.’ This sounds very much like the essentials of scientific method as Peirce and Popper saw it; and indeed Popper credited Xenophanes with the first clear formulation of ‘the true theory of knowledge’ (Popper 1968, 205).

The familiar ‘parable of the sower’ is all about context:

Jesus said, ‘Now the sower went out, took a handful (of seeds), and scattered them. Some fell on the road; the birds came and gathered them up. Others fell on the rock, did not take root in the soil, and did not produce ears. And others fell on thorns; they choked the seed(s) and worms ate them. And others fell on the good soil and produced good fruit: it bore sixty per measure and a hundred and twenty per measure.’

— Thomas 9 (Lambdin)

If the seed is a sign, the soil is the context in which its meaning appears (or fails to appear). The flower and the fruit are the life transformed or newly guided by that meaning. Thus the internal context – the guidance system of the sign’s interpreter – is essential to whatever guidance is communicated.

In the synoptic gospels, parables like that of the sower may be intended not so much to reveal spiritual truth as to conceal it from the unworthy.

And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables? He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive: For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear. For verily I say unto you, That many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them.

— Matthew 13.10-17 (KJV)

As Anthony Freeman (1999, 33) points out, this episode in Matthew ‘comes as something of a shock’ to those who assume that Jesus wanted to be understood by everyone. Here he seems to be punishing the gross of heart by casting pearls before them to increase their swinishness, or to widen the gap between those who have understanding and those who have not – ‘as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats’ (Matthew 25:32-3). The context here is a strongly dualistic sense of justice.

The universe is the only text without a context. Every particular mode of being is universe-referent, and its meaning is established only within this comprehensive setting. This is why this story of the universe, and especially of the planet Earth, is so important. Through our understanding of this story, our own role in the story is revealed. In this revelation lies our way into the future.

— Thomas Berry (2006, 23)

Gregory Bateson, commenting on one of his essays in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, writes that

it extends the notion of informational control to include the field of morphogenesis and, by discussing what happens in absence of needed information, brings out the importance of the context into which information is received.…
Message material, or information, comes out of a context into a context, and in other parts of the book the focus has been on the context out of which information came. Here the focus is rather upon the internal state of the organism as a context into which the information must be received.
Of course, neither focus is sufficient by itself for our understanding of either animals or men. But it is perhaps not an accident that in these papers dealing with non-human organisms the “context” which is discussed is the obverse or complement of the “context” upon which I have focussed attention in other parts of the book.
Consider the case of the unfertilized frog’s egg for which the entry point of the spermatozoon defines the plane of bilateral symmetry of the future embryo.
The prick of a hair from a camel’s hair brush can be substituted and still carry the same message. From this it seems that the external context out of which the message comes is relatively undefined. From the entry point alone, the egg learns but little about the external world. But the internal context into which the message comes must be exceedingly complex.
The unfertilized egg, then, embodies an immanent question to which the entry point of the spermatozoon provides an answer; and this way of stating the matter is the contrary or obverse of the conventional view, which would see the external context of learning as a “question” to which the ‘right’ behavior of the organism is an answer.

— Bateson (1972, 395-6)

Conversation degenerates when we lose sight of the polyversity of language, and of the ineluctable vagueness of our thoughts. According to Peirce, ‘No concept, not even those of mathematics, is absolutely precise; and some of the most important for everyday use are extremely vague’ (CP6.496, c. 1906). Genuinely informative communication depends on taking this necessary vagueness into account. Properly understanding any utterance requires you to interpret it with the degree of vagueness appropriate to the situational context. Every language user has to develop a sensitivity to context at an early age, though few are conscious of it.

The perspectival nature of linguistic systems means that as children learn to use words and linguistic constructions in the manner of adults, they come to see that the exact same phenomenon may be construed in many different ways for different communicative purposes depending on many factors in the communicative context.

— Tomasello (1999, 213)

To construe is to simplify, and to simplify is to generalize: a symbol, by referring to a type of experience, can thus refer to many tokens of it on various occasions, including future occasions. Even proper nouns (names of specific things, places, people etc.) are general signs, because each implies the continuity of its object through time: each momentary manifestation of the object is a token of that type, and some features of it may vary from one occurrence to another. (If you notice a difference in someone’s characteristic behavior, you might say, ‘It’s not like him to do that!’) And the more common a word is, the broader is its reference.

Things that you talk about, whether you perceive them to be in the external or internal world, are already construed, categorized and ‘framed’ by the time you mention them. But each actual reference to them can affect your framing habits; and these in turn affect your way of talking about them, or hearing others talk about them. Since everyone has a history of cycling through such loops countless times, and this history determines for each her ‘natural’ idiom, synchronizing reference between speakers is not always easy – hence polyversity.

The upshot of this in communication is that in trying to connect words with referents or experiences, ‘all sorts of risks are taken, assumptions and guesses made’ (Sperber and Wilson 1995, 19). This is the only practical way to reduce the many possible ‘construals’ of phenomena – or meanings of words – to the simplicity required for the maintenance of a conversation.

Sperber and Wilson take this as an argument against what they call ‘the mutual-knowledge hypothesis,’ but they are using the word knowledge here in an absolute sense, as equivalent to objective certainty (Sperber and Wilson 1995, 19-20). In reality, the common ground that people must have in order to carry on a conversation is a network of rather vague default assumptions. Actual conversation often consists of attempts to render some of the ‘mutual knowledge’ more precise, but in the actual context, there are pragmatic limits to this precision.

William James, in typically elegant fashion, gives a more psychologically realistic account of cognition as ‘virtual knowing.’

Now the immensely greater part of all our knowing never gets beyond this virtual stage. It never is completed or nailed down. … To continue thinking unchallenged is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, our practical substitute for knowing in the completed sense. As each experience runs by cognitive transition into the next one, and we nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere count as truth or fact, we commit ourselves to the current as if the port were sure. We live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path.

— James, ‘A World of Pure Experience’ (Kuklick 1172)

Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception takes a slightly different perspective:

My set of experiences is presented as a concordant whole, and the synthesis takes place not in so far as they all express a certain invariant, and in the identity of the object, but in that they are all collected together, by the last of their number, in the ipseity of the thing. The ipseity is, of course, never reached: each aspect of the thing which falls to our perception is still only an invitation to perceive beyond it, still only a momentary halt in the perceptual process. If the thing itself were reached, it would be from that moment arrayed before us and stripped of its mystery. It would cease to exist as a thing at the very moment when we thought to possess it. What makes the ‘reality’ of the thing is therefore precisely what snatches it from our grasp.

— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 271)

This is, in context, quite consistent with Peirce’s definition of ‘reality’:

I define the real as that which holds its characters on such a tenure that it makes not the slightest difference what any man or men may have thought them to be, or ever will have thought them to be, here using thought to include, imagining, opining, and willing (as long as forcible means are not used); but the real thing’s characters will remain absolutely untouched.

CP 6.495 (c. 1906)

In the process of inquiry or of learning, what James called ‘our sense of a determinate direction’ is a feeling that our knowledge of reality is becoming more precise, getting closer to the Truth. But semiotic experience teaches that our knowledge is never completely determinate.

No cognition and no Sign is absolutely precise, not even a Percept; and indefiniteness is of two kinds, indefiniteness as to what is the Object of the Sign, and indefiniteness as to its Interpretant, or indefiniteness in Breadth and in Depth.

— Peirce, CP 4.543 (1906)

Any knowledge that will prove useful as guidance into the future must be general, and thus indefinite in that sense.

Yet every proposition actually asserted must refer to some non-general subject …. Indeed, all propositions refer to one and the same determinately singular subject, well-understood between all utterers and interpreters; namely, to The Truth, which is the universe of all universes, and is assumed on all hands to be real. But besides that, there is some lesser environment of the utterer and interpreter of each proposition that actually gets conveyed, to which that proposition more particularly refers and which is not general.

CP 5.506

This ‘lesser environment’ is of course the more immediate context. Even if the dynamic Object of the sign is fully determinate, is The Whole Truth, the sign itself is still ‘indefinite as to its Interpretant,’ i.e. vague in that context.

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.

CP 5.506

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).

Sperber and Wilson (1995, 142) suggest that the goal of the comprehension process is

to maximize the relevance of any information being processed. … people hope that the assumption being processed is relevant (or else they would not bother to process it at all), and they try to select a context which will justify that hope: a context which will maximize relevance. In verbal comprehension in particular, it is relevance which is treated as given, and context which is treated as a variable.

This is another perspective on the process of ‘context construction’ described in Chapter 15. But context being holarchic, that process itself has a context. Relevance involves some relation to the known (or presupposed), but also some novelty; if i tell you what you already take for granted, that is not relevant. Relevance itself, then, is determined by context, i.e. by the ‘state of information’ (Peirce) in which the communication or ‘processing’ is situated – or in Peircean terms, in which the sign determines an interpretant.

Peirce in a 1906 text identified three kinds of interpretant:

In all cases, it includes feelings; for there must, at least, be a sense of comprehending the meaning of the sign. If it includes more than mere feeling, it must evoke some kind of effort. It may include something besides, which, for the present, may be vaguely called “thought.” I term these three kinds of interpretant the “emotional,” the “energetic,” and the “logical” interpretants.

EP2:409

Naturally it is the ‘logical interpretant, the conveyed thought’ (EP2:410) which is most crucial for a sign involved in a process of dialog or inquiry; and ‘the essence of the logical interpretant’ (EP2:412) is the habit which is established or modified by that semiosic process. Not all signs can have a logical interpretant, and even a sign which would have one if the semiotic process were completed may not produce it in an actual semiotic process, depending on the timing:

It is not to be supposed that upon every presentation of a sign capable of producing a logical interpretant, such interpretant is actually produced. The occasion may either be too early or too late. If it is too early, the semiosis will not be carried so far, the other interpretants sufficing for the rude functions for which the sign is used. On the other hand, the occasion will come too late if the interpreter be already familiar with the logical interpretant, since then it will be recalled to his mind by a process which affords no hint of how it was originally produced. Moreover, the great majority of instances in which formations of logical interpretants do take place are very unsuitable to serve as illustrations of the process, because in them the essentials of this semiosis are buried in masses of accidental and hardly relevant semioses that are mixed with the former.

EP2:414

What makes a semiosis ‘relevant’ or essential (rather than accidental) to the formation of a logical interpretant? To deal with this question, Peirce constructs a scenario of an inquiry process and conducts a thought-experiment to investigate how it works.

The best way that I have been able to hit upon for simplifying the illustrative example which is to serve as our matter upon which to experiment and observe is to suppose a man already skillful in handling a given sign (that has a logical interpretant) to begin now before our inner gaze for the first time, seriously to inquire what that interpretant is. It will be necessary to amplify this hypothesis by a specification of what his interest in the question is supposed to be.… unless our hypothesis be rendered specific as to that interest, it will be impossible to trace out its logical consequences, since the way the interpreter will conduct the inquiry will greatly depend upon the nature of his interest in it.

EP2:414

The inquirer’s ‘interest’ is part of the context of the inquiry – not the ‘context which is treated as a variable’ according to Sperber and Wilson, but the situational context which determines what is essential and what is irrelevant in the text.