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