SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

42. I Foundations of Peircean Semiotics Peirce's Concept of Semiotic Mediation I 43
sciousness and to the problem of how to account for the transmission of Form
from one moment of semiosis to the next. Throughout his life Peirce insisted on
the necessity of studying expressive forms or external representations rather than
attempting to examine thought itself through some kind of unmediated Cartesian
introspection (CP 1.551, 1867; Buczynska-Garewicz 1984). The transmission
of Form in the interprétant is likened by Peirce to metempsychosis: a soul
passes from one body to another body, but the notion of a soul without some
body is "simply an impossibility and an absurdity" (MS 1.98.11, c.1906); similarly
a sign must have some interprétant to receive its "soul" as the sign is translated
into another language. Peirce compares this translation to the act of pouring
"idea-potential" or Form from one vessel into another, in which the vessel
embodies but does not contribute to the determination of the Form (MS
283.102, 1905).
It is clear from these observations that Peirce's theory couples a notion of
the necessity of expression with a notion of the ideal transparency of semiotic
media, a goal of empirical semiotics since Aristotle's reflections on scientific language
(McKeon 1946:195). That Form requires embodiment in some kind of
expression does not imply that the quality of the embodiment contributes in any
way to the determination of the Form. In fact, Peirce's lifelong struggle was to
invent a form of logical notation that would be so iconically perfect that it would
represent all and only logical relations among signs. The system of Existential
Graphs he developed in the late 1890s is based on the need to translate the language
of speech into a more intelligible, atomistic, and manipulatable symbolic
medium (MS 637.30, 1909; MS 654.4, 1910). Yet Peirce was confident that the
choice of medium does not affect the thought or Form embodied:
Thinking always proceeds in the form of a dialogue—a dialogue between different
phases of the ego—so that, being dialogical, it is essentially composed
of signs, as its Matter, in the sense in which a game of chess has the chessmen
for its matter. Not that the particular signs employed are themselves the
thought! Oh, no; no whit more than the skins of an onion are the onion.
(About as much so, however.) One selfsame thought may be carried upon the
vehicle of English, German, Greek, or Gaelic; in diagrams, or in equations, or
in Graphs: all these are but so many skins of the onion, its inessential accidents.
Yet that thought should have some possible expression and some possible interpreter,
is the very being of its being. (MS 298.6—7, c.1906 = CP 4.6)
The requirements for Peirce's logical graphs are narrow and more stringent than
the requirements of natural languages, since logic deals only with fully symbolic
diagrams and is unconcerned with either indexical categories or individual embodiment
in sign tokens (MS 283.94, I 9°5)- Whereas natural languages serve a
multitude of functions—stating truths, commanding actions, expressing feelings—logical
graphs consist of purely propositional diagrams that are matched
only to a degree in grammar (CP 3.418, 1892). 12
And since logic deals with
whether or not an argument is true, not with how we think an argument (MS
449.58, 1903), a proposition never "prescribes any particular mode of iconization"
(MS 599.8, 1902), except that the signs employed accurately transmit to
the interprétant the same determination that the object transmits to the sign. To
the degree that a sign is "deceptive," it is not a sign (MS 637.36, 1909).
The combination of these two notions, the necessity of expression and the
transparency of medium, implies that while the quest for "naked thought itself"
is doomed to failure, since all thought is clothed in a "garment of expression"
(NEM 3.406, 1903), the empirical study of various existing or possible systems
of sign vehicles does not contribute to the goal of establishing an a priori and
therefore universal typology of signs. Only when signs themselves vanish by being
totally transparent to the logical relations of determination and representation
they mediate does the science of signs become transformed into the science of
thought. There is, in Peirce's position, no notion of the mutual delimitation of a
Saussurean level of signifier and signified, that is, of expressive form and meaningful
content, since there can be no such proportionality when the sign qua signifier
is a medium of communication that does not meddle with what is being
communicated. 13
Peirce finds the vanishing signifier even in natural conversational language:
A medium of communication is something, A, which being acted upon by
something else, N, in its turn acts upon something, I, in a manner involving
its determination by N, so that I shall thereby, through A and only through A,
be acted upon by N. We may purposely select a somewhat imperfect example.
Namely, one animal, say a mosquito, is acted upon by the entity of a zymotic
disease, and in its turn acts upon another animal, to which it communicates
the fever. The reason that this example is not perfect is that the active medium
is in some measure of the nature of a vehicle, which differs from a medium of
communication, in acting upon the transported object and determining it to a
changed location, where, without further interposition of the vehicle, it acts
upon, or is acted upon by, the object to which it is conveyed. A sign, on the
other hand, just in so far as it fulfills the function of a sign, and none other,
perfectly conforms to the definition of a medium of communication. It is determined
by the object, but in no other respect than goes to enable it to act
upon the interpreting quasi-mind; and the more perfectly it fulfills its function
the less effect it has upon the quasi-mind other than that of determining it as
if the object itself had acted upon it. Thus, after an ordinary conversation, a
wonderfully perfect kind of sign-functioning, one knows what information or
suggestion has been conveyed, but will be utterly unable to say in what words
it was conveyed, and often will think it was conveyed in words, when in fact
it was only conveyed in tones or in facial expressions. (MS 283.128—31, 1905;
emphasis added)
The perfect sign, then, resembles the mechanical translating machine Peirce envisioned
which translates from one language to another without going through