Walker Percy - The Message in the Bottle - How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

The fact is that a man engaged in the business of building a logical calculus is doing a very different sort of thing from an animal (or man) responding to a sign, and it is a difference which is not conjured away by ignoring it or by leaping nimbly from res extensa to res cogitans as though there were no epistemological abyss in between. I cannot say it as well as Professor Crockett: “I do not know whether one should try to describe the universe or whether one should play games with marks arranged according to certain rules; but I do know that one should decide which of these vastly different kinds of activities one is engaged in and inform the reader accordingly.”

It is not my intention to make a case against either of the two major components of semiotic, symbolic logic, and behavioristics — the shortcomings of each are well known by now. Rather it is my hope to show that a true “semiotic,” far from being the coup de grâce of metaphysics, may prove of immense value, inasmuch as it validates and illumines a classical metaphysical relation— and this at an empirical level.

I think it will be possible to show (1) that the “unified science” of semiotic is a spurious unity conferred by a deliberate equivocation of the word sign to designate two generically different meaning situations (the sign relation and the symbol relation) and (2) that an open “semiotical” analysis of symbolization — that is, one undertaken without theoretical presuppositions — will encounter and shed light upon two metaphysical relations: the first, the cognitive relation of identity by which a concept, a “formal sign,” comes to contain within itself in alio esse the thing signified; the second, the relation of intersubjectivity, one of the favorite themes of modern existentialists. It may well turn out that the semioticist has good reason to ignore the symbol relation in view of his dictum that sign analysis replaces metaphysics, since an impartial analysis of symbolization can only bring one face to face with the very thing which the semioticist has been at all pains to avoid — a metaphysical issue.

Let us not be too hasty in surrendering the symbol to the symbolic logician or, as is sometimes done, to the mythist.* It is possible that a purely empirical inquiry into the symbol function, an inquiry free of the dogmatic limitations of positivism, may provide fresh access to a philosophy of being.

SYNTAX AND SCIENCE

Semiotic, the science of signs, is an attempt to bring together into the formal unity of a single science three separate disciplines: (1) the semantical rules by which symbols are applied to their designata, (2) the logical analysis of the relations of symbols as they appear in sentences, and (3) the natural science of behavioristics (to use Neurath’s terminology), in which organisms are studied in their relation to the environment as it is mediated by signs. It was soon discovered, as Sellars points out, that the limitation of scientific empiricism to logical syntax is suicidal; and so the semantical and biological study of signs was added under the guidance of C. W. Morris. According to Morris, these three disciplines may be regarded as three “dimensions” of the same science, the semantical dimension of semiotic, the syntactical dimension, and the pragmatic dimension.* This division is held to be analogous to the division of biology into anatomy, ecology, and physiology; a symbolic logician, a semanticist, and a behaviorist are said to be emphasizing different aspects of the same science. Physiology requires anatomy, and ecology requires both; all three conform admirably to the biologist’s conception of organism as a system reacting to its environment according to its needs of maintaining its internal milieu and reproducing itself. Physiology is complemented by anatomy; one flows into the other without a hitch. But how does syntactical analysis flow into behavioristics? One may make a syntactical analysis of the sentences written down by a behaviorist, or one may study the sign responses of a symbolic logician; but in what larger scheme may the two be brought into some kind of order? We find symposia written from either point of view, from the physicalist’s, who starts with matter and its interactions and tries to derive mind therefrom, or from the symbolic logician’s, who conceives the task to be the syntactical investigation of the language of science. Far from the one flowing naturally into the other, the fact is that one has very little use for the other. It takes the encyclopedist to bring them together.

It is well known that logical empiricism is without a theory of knowledge since it restricts itself to an abstract theory of the logic of language. It is equally well known — and perhaps one is a consequence of the other — that the history of logical empiricism is the history of wide fluctuations on the mind-body axis. Examples of the extremes are the solipsism of Mach, Wittgenstein, and the early Carnap of Der logische Aufbau and the physicalism of the American behaviorists and the later Carnap. But even in the more modern attempts at unity, one is aware of the tendency to construe the field exclusively from the logical or the physicalist point of view — and indeed, how can it be otherwise when the problem of knowing is ruled out of court? A semioticist can easily take the position that the only genuine problem, as Carnap claimed, is one of logical analysis; that is, the question of the formal relations among the concepts that describe the data of first-person experience, the concepts of physics, and those of behaviorist psychology. Or one can begin at the other end with the causal relations between signs and interpreters and derive mind and consciousness with never a thought for syntactical analysis. Anatomy is indispensable to physiology, but syntax can get along very well without neurology. Neither symbolic logicians nor behaviorists are constrained to make contact with each other, and it is perhaps proper that they do not. But it is the semioticists who have brought them willy-nilly together to form the new organon. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to expect that this metascience will provide a larger order. Perhaps, then, it is the semanticists who fill the gap. For semantics professes to deal with both the words of the logicians and the natural objects of the scientist.

We are destined to disappointment. Semantics, it turns out, abstracts from the user of language and analyzes only the expressions and their designata. Like syntax it operates from the logical pole in that it is chiefly concerned with formation of “rules” for the application of symbols to things. Korzybski, we discover, is not interested in how it is that words get applied to things, in the extraordinary act of naming, but only in our perverse tendency to use words incorrectly, and in making a “structural differential” so that one may use words with the full knowledge of the level of abstraction to which they apply. Or if we turn to Tarski’s classic paper on the semantic conception of truth with high hopes that at last we have come to the heart of the matter, we will find as the thesis of the article the following criterion of “material adequacy”: X is true if, and only if, p is true, which when interpreted yields: “S now is white” is true if, and only if, snow is white. I do not wish to deny the usefulness of Tarski’s criterion within the limits he has set; I only wish to point out that Tarski by his own emphatic asseveration is not concerned with the problem of knowing.*

If, in order to bring the twain together by the semiotic method, we strain forward to the furthest limits of behaviorism and backward to the earliest take-off point of semantics, we will find that the gap between them is narrow but exceeding deep. Logical syntax begins with the “protocol statement,” the simplest naming sentence; semantics is exclusively concerned with its rules of designation. In regard to the logical syntax of the language of science, Carnap wrote: “Science is a system of statements based on direct experience and controlled by experimental verification….Verification is based on protocol statements. ” Protocol statements are “statements needing no justification and serving as the foundations for all the remaining statements of science.”