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

† Nor should one be confused by the encyclopedists’ disavowals of determinism in favor of the probability approach, which is supposed to resolve the nomothetic-ideographic dichotomy of object-science and history. For, as becomes abundantly clear, the laws of probability are relied upon quite as heavily as strict causality. As Nagel insists, although laws connecting micro-states may be statistical in character, that does not mean that laws connecting macro-states are not strictly deterministic.

‡ For example, the methodological negation of mental entities and the inability to take account of Gestalt qualities.

* J. F. Anderson: “This is the last word of symbolism; it is the last word because symbolism moves in the order of univocal concepts, concepts which are merely given an ‘analogical’ reference by the mind; and through univocal concepts one can never acquire any proper and formal knowledge of reality as such, because reality as such is analogical. Follow the via symbolica as far as you like; follow it as far as it goes; it will never lead beyond agnosticism, either in metaphysics or theology.”

* “It will be convenient to have special terms to designate certain of the relations of signs to signs, to objects, and to interpreters. ‘ Implicates ’ will be restricted to Dsyn, ‘ designates ’ and ‘ denotes ’ to Dsem and ‘ expresses ’ to Dp. The word ‘table’ implicates (but does not designate) ‘furniture with a horizontal top on which things may be placed,’ designates a certain kind of object, denotes the objects to which it is applicable, and expresses its interpreter.”

Note the ambiguity of the term “expresses its interpreter.” “Implicates,” “designates,” and “denotes” are purely semantical-syntactical terms with no biological analogue. But what are we to take “expresses” to mean? Is it to be taken in the biological sense of a sign “announcing” its significatum to its interpreter or in the symbolic sense of “expressing a meaning”?

* For example, in answer to the charge that his “Snow is white” sentence seems to imply a naïve realism when it lays down the condition “if and only if snow is white,” he writes: “…the semantic definition of truth implies nothing regarding the conditions under which a sentence like (1) snow is white can be asserted. It implies only that, whenever we assert or reject this sentence, we must be ready to assert or reject the correlated sentence (2): the sentence ‘snow is white’ is true.

“Thus we may accept the semantic conception of truth without giving up any epistemological attitude we may have had; we may remain naïve realists, critical realists, or idealists — whatever we were before. The semantic conception of truth is completely neutral toward all these issues.”

† Nor does the Gestaltist, for that matter, take us an inch closer to the mysterious act of naming. By his concept of field forces and perceptual wholes, he can make sense of molar phenomena which escape the behaviorist. He can arrive at certain traits of configuration which apply alike to chickens and humans (see for example the Jastrow illusion in Koffka’s Gestalt Psychology), But neither the behaviorist nor the Gestaltist has anything to say, indeed does not wish to have anything to say, about the naming act. The very methodology of an object-science precludes its consideration of an object-sentence as such, perhaps for no other reason than that the object-science takes place within the very intersubjective nexus which attends language. (Cf. Marcel: “Without doubt the intersubjective nexus cannot in any way be asserted; it can only be acknowledged. … I should readily agree that it is the mysterious root of language.”

* Continuity “is the absence of ultimate parts in that which is divisible.” It is “nothing but perfect generality of a law of relationship.”

* I use the word “causal” unprejudicially, to mean whatever the reader would take it to mean in the context. It does not matter for the argument whether one interprets this cause as efficient causality or as a probability function.

† C. W. Morris: “…terms gain relations among themselves according to the relations of the responses of which the sign vehicles are a part, and these modes of usage are the pragmatical background of the formation and transformation rules. “

* It is irrelevant that in the case of thunder announcing rain, the thunder happens to have a real connection with the rain process. The same relation of signification could be made to take place in a deaf organism by using a blue light to announce rain. Thus, to use Saint Augustine’s nomenclature, whether the sign is natural or conventional, the mode of response is the same.

* If we hoped that Mrs. Langer would follow up the epistemological consequences of this most important insight into the noncausal character of symbolic meaning, we shall be disappointed. She drops it quickly, restates her allegiance to positivism, and goes on to the aesthetic symbol as the form of feeling.

* For example, she had understood the word water (spelled into her hand) but only as a sign to which she must respond by fetching the mug, drinking the water, and so on. The significance of her discovery that this is water may be judged from the fact that having discovered what water was, she then wanted to know what everything else was. (Cf. also the experiences of Marie Huertin, Lywine Lachance, and the well-authenticated account of Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, who discovered the symbol despite every attempt of his positivist teacher to present it as a sign of a want.)

† “These considerations cast some doubt on the adequacy of Freud’s theory of the origin and nature of thought…According to Freud thought has only one ancestor, the attempt at hallucinatory need-satisfaction…I believe that thought has two ancestors instead of one — namely, motivating needs, and a distinctively human capacity, the relatively autonomous capacity for object interest.”

* It is also true of a human responding to the shout “Firel” in a crowded theater (Mead’s example in Mind, Self and Society). Here, characteristically, the semioticist confuses symbol and sign by citing human significatory responses as illustrative of human meaning in general. One may indeed respond to a word and in this respect our understanding is similar to Helen’s understanding of signs prior to her discovery of the symbol and, in fact, generically the same as a dog’s response to a spoken command. But it is an altogether different situation when a father tells his child that this is fire, and the child awakes to the fact that by this odd little sound of fire his father means this leaping flame.

† It does not matter for the present purpose that some intelligent responses are acquired by conditioning and that others are congenital dispositions of the organism. The learned response of the dog to the buzzer and the innate response of the chick to the sight of grain are both explicable in physico-causal terms as an event in an electrocolloidal system.

* If there is a natural wisdom in etymologies, perhaps this is a case of it — for conceive, one suddenly realizes, means “to take with.”

† George Mead, the great social behaviorist, clearly perceived that language and mind are essentially social phenomena. We owe a great deal to his prescience that the interpersonal milieu is of cardinal importance in the genesis of mind, even though he felt compelled to render this relation exclusively in behavioristic terms for fear of “metaphysical” consequences (it is clear that by “metaphysical” he meant anything airy and elusive). It is typical of his integrity, however, that even with his commitment to behaviorism, he did not shrink from mental phenomena and consciousness, and in fact attempted to derive consciousness from social interaction.