Peirce, Semiotics and Conversation Theory
Carl H. Flygt
March 2007
A study of signs and meanings? How could such a thing be organized? How could we be assured we were thereby being led to some satisfactory outcomes on which others could be harmoniously laid, so that a progressive, future-oriented and living architecture in human consciousness and human relationships resulted, and not a subjective morass of literary structuralism and deconstruction? Clearly semantics and semiotics are vitally important areas in which to apply logic and metaphysical hypotheses, but by what general principles should an inquiry into the social reality of signs and meanings proceed? One recognizes clearly that signs and meanings, if nothing else, are always signs and meanings of human freedom. What could possibly raise inquiry into our freedoms to the level of science, where a community of experiment and justified belief renders the material content of our autonomous thought and perception not merely consistent and systematic, but undeniably True and Real?
I think the answer here must be through a theory of conversation, the medium and ground of human society and of all human experience. If we can truly say what conversation is and what it should be, then we can expect the signs given and received in any conversation to fall into some kind of order, and thereby to reveal aspects of consciousness and thought heretofore concealed by present cultural and political adaptations. Those aspects would include, for example, the living, breathing human soul, and its deep spiritual desire for freedom. When one reflects on the global trajectory toward which many of these worldly adaptations are tending – one thinks immediately of American consumptions patterns and global warming – the need to find a way to alter them intelligently becomes not merely interesting in a philosophical, aesthetic or spiritual sense, but somewhat pressing in a practical sense.
Semiotic pragmatism, that quintessential American response to Kantian metaphysics and the limits to knowledge, holds to some innovative and promising doctrines when a theory of conversation is contemplated. Speakers and listeners in conversation are in themselves signs, formal entities subsumed by certain categories and classifications that reflect different functions or possible functions in social reality. Not just the thoughts that occur subjectively in conversation, but the objective expressions and gestures, together with the status of the environment, the circumstances of linguistic use and evaluation and perhaps even moods and feelings are meanings, significant communications that make tangible determinations of the future as they sink into the actuality of the past. If free conversations could be conceived in detail as things that are broadly recognizable as significances, and expectations about those things accordingly adjusted to make people self-conscious and circumspect about them, then there is reason to think that they could be spontaneously and collectively controlled under certain circumstances and even put to positive use.
Conversation research is an extension of consciousness research, which has gained legitimacy in the last 20 or so years as technical advances in neuro-imaging and other recording techniques have made it appear feasible to attempt to discover the neural correlates of consciousness, the part of the brain responsible for experience in general. There is even now in its 14th year an academic and professional journal published in the UK called The Journal of Consciousness Studies. What distinguishes or should distinguish consciousness research from psychology, neuroscience and other disciplines attempting to throw light on the mind or the mind-brain relationship is the reliance in consciousness research on the investigator-subject, the first-person viewpoint on experience under experimental conditions. Consciousness research thus has an important methodological similarity to religion and religious practice. Consciousness research, like the Catholic confessional and the public communion of the faithful is committed in the long run, more or less by definition, to inverting normal background assumptions about the privacy of inner experience. The idea of consciousness research however represents a new version of the elimination of privacy. On the terms coming toward us from this new technical power, the inner world is or can be made just as public and just as objective as the outer world of common sense experience. It is subject to microanalysis of various sorts, to a new kind of status vis-a-vis criminal and civil law and in principle to external intervention and control.
Now such an orientation, as it starts to be applied scientifically by groups of investigators and investigator-subjects, will place some strong demands on our general social and moral ideas, particularly on our idea of freedom. People after all walk around in the world today with considerable portions of their psychological icebergs kept out of view, generally due to the desire to conceal personal weakness and fallibility. The trend toward consciousness research, when combined with an increasing sophistication in the various media through which social communication is effected points inexorably, it seems to me, to a world in which the contents of the collective unconscious, to say nothing of contents that may be subjectively conscious but that never see public display (impulses toward sado-masochism, for example) will all stand exhibited before us as signs. It is a well-known principle of semiotics and structuralist anthropology that social purposes are often strongly biased by the media in which those purposes are essayed. What kind of world will ultimately arise from a blending of hyper-intelligent media such as internet search engines and virtual realities with concerted intentions to solve age-old philosophical and spiritual puzzles such as the mind-brain problem, and to exploit those solutions, is difficult to imagine in much detail. Whatever it may be, a very strong conception of morality will undoubtedly be necessary to make it work.
For Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), logic is an application of morality. This strong conception coheres readily with the aims and methods of conversation theory. Right thinking in logic is on all fours with right thinking vis-a-vis others, and conversation theory (and correct conversational practice) applies the two indifferently through systematic attention to conversational signs. It is therefore essential that conversation theory presuppose correct moral and correct logical notions. These however are not hard to discover. Actions are good if and only if they are universally acceptable under conditions of free judgment. Logical inference likewise is only right and good if it is of the sort that anyone else will find acceptable if he (she) accepts the premises out of freedom and follows the argument by applying universal rules.
What is aimed at by way of conversation theory is a species of collective intelligence, a social phenomenon among human beings homologous to the behavior of flocks of starlings, for example, or of certain schools of fish. In human species this sort of phenomenon has appeared in the way proto-civilized societies have preserved tribal memories, and in the way feudal cultures have preserved aristocratic blood ties. But the social organisms of the human future will be grounded not in blood relations and the biological fields that seem to go along with these, but in free individuals applying semiotic intelligence and semiotic logic to situations with moral purport, i.e. to conversations aimed at the root and stem of human consciousness and self-consciousness.
Now we may begin to unpack Peirce’s conception of semiotics. Perhaps the primary notion is that of the Interpretant, the effect a sign has on a person’s mind (brain). This conception is notable in its difference from its analog in the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), the Swiss linguist responsible together with Peirce for introducing the study of signs as a general field. Saussure’s two-fold formula of what is signified by a signifier makes his system a static conception, whereas Peirce’s three-fold system of Object, Representamen and Interpretant is dynamic and process-oriented, and thereby better suited, one might suppose, to conversation theory and the principled practice of conversation. Both conceptions however are fundamentally abstract and idealistic. For Saussure, the sign is “psychological,” both the signifier and the signified consisting of form rather than substance. Similarly, Peirce’s entire pragmatic and ontological orientation is to the realm of ideas, concepts and the conceivable effects of concepts, and he allies his pragmatism closely, although with qualifications, with Hegelian absolute idealism .
Interpretants are discrete and determinate outcomes in consciousness. They are the senses we have of signs. An Interpretant however may then itself become a sign, and in this aspect it is called a Representamen. The Representamen is the form taken by a sign. If by “sign” we mean here “Interpretant,” that form may consist in an identical reproduction of that sign, or it may have something added or taken away, and thus represent a development of that sign. The progress of Interpretant to Representamen to new Interpretatant is unbounded and potentially infinite, and is intended to describe free associative thinking of all kinds, public or private, conscious or subconscious. It also is on all fours with Peirce’s synechism, a fundamental commitment to the continuity of consciousness and reality. It is moreover the kind of relational feature we notice in using a dictionary – all entries (Representamens) refer to other entries (Interpretants) in the lexicon, and are defined by them.
In conversation theory, the progress from Interpretant to Representamen is conceived intentionalistically, as states of consciousness with propositional content responding to an inferential semantics. The key ideas in intentionalistic analysis are satisfaction and causality – real objects cause and are causally affected by states of consciousness seeking biological satisfaction. Here we run into some complicated and even abstruse machinery, but for our purposes here I think the general notion of signs-in-conversation can be adequately handled with the concepts we now have, plus one additional. The central concept of conversation theory is a simplifying one – in ideal conversation, the content of each utterance is universally acceptable. Everyone is satisfied with it, and only if everyone is satisfied is the next content utterable. This condition is a matter of conversational law. To proceed with conversation in the absence of universal satisfaction, conversation theory tries to show, is both against morality and against logic. Thus if in conversation a Representamen materializes and is immediately converted by the imagination into an Interpretant, then that Interpretant is, by the definition of conversation, identical in each person. In each moment of conversation, one Interpretant is universally reproduced and everyone in some sense is in possession of the same thing. The states of consciousness attending that universalized effect, which are life-giving and ontologically satisfying, are the reason people incline toward conversation at all. That is the theory of conversation.
Of course, as a practical matter, ideal conversation is a guiding principle, not necessarily a concrete outcome. The bulk of conversation theory is occupied with describing what must be done when things fail to meet the central condition. If not everyone is satisfied by what was just uttered, what was just uttered must be reproduced until everyone is able to affirm satisfaction. As a practical matter, often it is necessary to exercise tolerance and affirm a superficial or nominal satisfaction with what was just said, but this does not show that ideal conversation is not possible, or that the ideal of conversation is not immanent in the conduct of all conversation. It only shows that people are often not up to ideal logical and moral conduct. The result of that general incapacity is what we call the real world.
Now the status of the Object in Peircian semiotics is truly abstruse, and leads to an elaborate and unfinished categorization of objects and universes that renders his entire project somewhat forbidding, at least in the absence of a workable frame whereby it may become possible clarify it. Peirce, one must remember, was largely ignored in his lifetime, and only with the discovery that his ideas had anticipated, among other things, the logic of computational circuits and relational databases, has his thought begun to assert itself. Objects for Peirce are themselves nothing but ideas, and are perhaps closest in his categorical conception to the notion of ground, the “self abstracted from the concreteness which implies the possibility of another.” Be that as it may, the hypostatic (and altogether legitimate) procedure which renders general predicates such as “sweet” into objects such as “sweetness” also produces, for Peirce, the important result that possible outcomes of inquiry, or “conceived conditional resolutions” are a species independent of any judgment and in themselves “of a real kind.” How these hypostatic objects and real possibilities and their categories will be handled in conversation theory will have to await some empirical results. It does however appear to be a fact that under actual conditions of collective intelligence and universalized mood, something like a hypostatic object can emerge. Possibility does indeed sometimes appear to be a real force. Elsewhere I have outlined how to make physiological measurements under these conditions.
For the purposes of this exposition, I think we should now turn from Peirce’s semiotics and its possible incorporation into intentionalistic accounts of conversational transactions to Peirce’s philosophical stance on inquiry, which again fits together with the reasons for framing conversation theory in the first place. Some of these reasons have been touched on here, having to do with coming cultural adjustments to pressures from science and technology, from environmental problems and from global communications. There are in addition, however, deep philosophical reasons for wanting to frame conversation theory. Generally speaking, philosophy is an enterprise of the human mind that wants to put the whole of reality into language. It wants to contact the reality of existence purely by means of ideas and the free expression of ideas. In a sense, the entire object of philosophy is conversation. Generally however, and to the dismay of pragmatic thinkers like Peirce, philosophers’ attitudes and methods tend, almost as a matter of principle, to condemn the work of most other philosophers as misdirected from beginning to end, rather than to cooperate systematically, to stand upon one another’s shoulders and to multiply incontestable results.
By way of contrast, the situation with science and scientific inquiry is much better. Here reality is incontestably contacted, albeit in miniscule proportions and specialized aspects. The chemist knows something about existence itself because he (she) is able to reach into matter with his ideas (his theories) and draw out actual results. He (she) also collaborates with other chemists likewise competent, and to a community of trained experimenters the true nature and staggering variety of matter is progressively revealed. This degree of ontological certainty is satisfying for many intelligent people because the sense is undeniable that through correct premises, correct methods and a consortium of effort, the reality of existence falls to some extent under human control. Ultimately all of reality, the scientist feels, may fall under such control, and that sense of collective progress and privileged knowledge is, for the scientist, philosophy enough.
It is this undeniable sense of ontological certainty in inquiry that both Peircian pragmatism and conversation theory seek to salvage for philosophy. Philosophy is a more human enterprise than mere science, seeking satisfaction not indirectly through the signs and outcomes of structured inquiry, but directly, through the signs of the living mind itself. If consciousness research, conversation theory and philosophical inquiry can come together technically, as I believe they must, I think we will get a scientific philosophy. I do not believe such an enterprise can fail to have consequences for the humanities and for the sciences alike, and inevitably for global culture as a whole.
References:
Ayer, A.J. The Origins of Pragmatism – Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper & Co., 1968.
Brandom, Robert. Making it Explicit – Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Flygt, Carl H. Conversation – A New Theory of Language. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2006.
Flygt, Carl H. “How to do Conversation Research.” 2006. Monograph with illustration, available at http://consciousconversation.com/Essays/Conversation_Research.html.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. “Issues of Pragmaticism.” in Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy, John J. Stuhr, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. p. 116-126.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. “On a New List of Categories” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 7 (1868) 287-298. Available at http://www.peirce.org/writings/p32.html.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. “The Categories and the Study of Signs.” in Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy, John J. Stuhr, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. p. 97-105.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. “What Pragmatism Is.” in Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy, John J. Stuhr, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. p. 105-115.
Rosen, Jeffrey. “The Brain on the Stand.” New York Times Magazine, March 11, 2007.
Saussure, Ferdinand de ([1916]): Course in General Linguistics. (trans. Roy Harris). London: Duckworth, 1983.
Searle, John R. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Sheldrake, Rupert. Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.. New York: Crown, 1999.
Sheldrake, Rupert. The Sense of Being Stared At and Other Unexplained Powers of the Human Mind. New York: Crown, 2003.
An up-to-date report on such trends is Jeffrey Rosen’s March 11, 2007 article in the New York Times Magazine, “The Brain on the Stand.”
Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX UK
Jeffrey Rosen’s descriptions of his recent experiences at Vanderbilt University’s new $27 million neuroimaging facility are a sign of things to come.
Peirce, “The Categories and the Study of Signs,” p. 104.
For descriptions and explanations of such animal behavior, see Sheldrake, 1999.
For convincing experiments and descriptions of these fields, see Sheldrake, 2003
See Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” p. 115.
For a description of what an inferential semantics might be, see Brandom, 1994.
Here the standard reference is Searle, 2003.
Searle’s notion of “causal self-reference” has not yet, to my knowledge, been satisfactorily analyzed.
“On a New List of Categories,” p. 4.
Properly speaking, hypostatic abstraction transforms a predicate of lower arity into a one of the next higher. Thus “Honey is sweet” is transformable into “Honey possesses sweetness,” and in predicate notation, Sweet(honey)→Possesses(honey, sweetness).
Issues of Pragmaticism, p. 122
Such measurements, if successful, should make it possible to make some guesses about the physical constitution of the hypostatic object. See Flygt, “How to do Conversation Research,” 2006
Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” p. 106
Not a philosophy of science. Rather, scientifically executed philosophical inquiry.