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
44 I Foundations of Peircean Semiotics the intervention of the human mind and which perfectly transmits the meaning from the first language into the second (MS 283.10z, 1905). Although he founded his semiotic philosophy on the notion of the mediation by signs of thought and reality, Peirce in the end reduced the role of signs to being blind vehicles for communication of meanings that they do not influence. PART II Signs in Ethnographic Context
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