Abduction is the inferential process by which hypotheses are framed. It is the process of inference by which the rule that explains the fact is hypothesized through a relation of similarity (iconic relation) to that fact. This rule that acts as the general premise may be taken from a field of discourse that is close to or distant from that to which the fact belongs, or it may be invented ex novo. If the conclusion is confirmed, it retroacts on the rule and convalidates it (ab- or retro-duction). Such retroactive procedure makes abductive inference risky, exposing it to the possibility of error. At the same time, however, if the hypothesis is correct, the abduction is innovative, inventive and sometimes even surprising (cf. Bonfantini 1987).
According to Peirce:
Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea; for induction does nothing but determine a value, and deduction merely evolves the necessary consequences of a pure hypothesis.
Deduction proves that something must be; Induction shows that something actually is operative; Abduction merely suggests that something may be.
(CP 5.172)
The relation between the premises and the conclusion may be considered in terms of the relation between what we may call, respectively, interpreted signs and interpretant signs. In induction, the relation between premises and conclusion is determined by habit and is of the symbolic type. In deduction it is indexical, the conclusion being a necessary derivation from the premises. In abduction, the relation between premises and conclusion is iconic, that is, it is a relation of reciprocal autonomy. This makes for a high degree of inventiveness together with a high risk margin for error. Abductive processes are highly dialogic and generate responses of the most risky, inventive and creative order. To claim that abductive argumentative procedures are risky is to say that they are mainly tentative and hypothetical, leaving only a minimal margin to convention (symbolicity) and mechanical necessity (indexicality). Abductive inferential processes engender sign processes at the highest levels of otherness and dialogicality.
The degree of dialogicality (cf. Ponzio 1985, 1990a) in the relation between interpreted and interpretant is minimal in deduction: here, once the premises are accepted, the conclusion is obligatory. Induction is also characterized by unilinear inferential processes: identity and repetition dominate, though the relation between the premises and the conclusion is no longer obligatory. In contrast, the relationship in abduction between the argumentative parts is dialogic in a substantial sense. In fact, very high degrees of dialogicality are attained and the higher, the more inventive becomes reasoning.
Abductions are empowered by metaphors in simulation processes used to produce models, inferences, inventions and projects. The close relationship between abductive inference and verisimilitude is determined by the fact that, as demonstrated by Welby, ‘one of the most splendid of all our intellectual instruments’ is the ‘image or the figure’ (Welby 1985a [1911]: 13; cf. also Petrilli 1986, 1995a, 1998b). Given the close relationship among abduction, icon and simulation, the problem is not to eliminate figurative or metaphorical discourse to the advantage of so-called literal discourse, but to identify and eliminate inadequate images that mystify relations among things and distort our reasoning. As Welby states, ‘We need a linguistic oculist to restore lost focussing power, to bring our images back to reality by some normalizing kind of lens’ (Welby [1911] 1985a: 16). (SP)
See also DIALOGUE.
Peirce, C. S. (1955) ‘Abduction and induction’, in J. Buchler (ed.), Philosophical Writings of Peirce, New York: Dover.
Peirce, C. S. (1992) ‘Types of reasoning’, in K. L. Ketner (ed.), Reasoning and the Logic of Things: The Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sebeok, T. A. and Umiker-Sebeok, J. (1980) ‘You Know My Method’: A Juxtaposition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes, Bloomington, IN: Gaslight.
From a semiotic viewpoint, the concept of accent is particularly relevant not as a graphic signal to denote a stress, a stressed syllable, nor as pronunciation, as in the expression ‘he speaks with an American accent’, nor as a tone of voice, e.g. an angry tone. Considered semiotically, the accent is not merely a graphic or acoustic device, nor does it solely concern verbal signs. Insofar as it is engendered among individuals and is created within a social milieu, the accent refers to the evaluative accentuation present in human verbal and nonverbal signs. The verbal sign, both oral and written, is a sign in a strong sense, not just a signal, but is endowed with plasticity of meaning which enables it to respond to different ideological perspectives and different senses. By virtue of such qualities, the verbal sign above all not only has a theme and meaning in the referential, or content, sense of these words, but also a value judgement, a specific evaluative accent. There is no such thing as a word, especially a word used in actual speech, whether written or oral, which does not have an accent in terms of evaluative intonation (cf. Ponzio 1980a, 1992). Through a passage from Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer, which analyses the conversation of a band of six tipsy artisans, Vološinov (1973 [1929]: 103) shows how evaluations, thoughts, feelings and even trains of reasoning can be expressed merely by using the same noun with an accent that is different each time. (AP)
Alterity (or otherness) indicates the existence of something on its own account, autonomously, independent of the I’s initiative, volition, consciousness, recognition. Alterity is a synonym of materiality understood as objectivity. The world of physical objects is other with respect to the I. One’s own body, the body of each and every one of us, is other in its autonomy from volition and consciousness.
But the most other of all is the other person in his/her irreducibility, refractoriness to the I. Assassination is proof of the other’s resistance and of the I’s checkmate, his/her powerlessness. Of course we also have ‘relative alterity’ which Peirce classifies as secondness, but this is the alterity of the I, in one’s roles (of a father relative to his child, a student relative to his teacher, a husband relative to his wife, etc.). But the alterity of the other as other is ‘absolute alterity’.
Consequently, when a question of absolute and non-relative alterity arises (cf. Levinas 1961, 1974; Ponzio 1996, 1998a), the otherness of the other person can neither be reduced to the communitary ‘We’ of Heidegger’s Mitsein (being-with), nor to the Subject–Object relation of Sartre’s being-for. Alterity is located inside the subject, the I, in the heart itself of the subject, without being englobed by the latter. For this reason the subject cannot become a closed totality but is continually exposed to dialogue, is itself a dialogue, a relation between self and other. Contrary to Sartre and Hegel, the self of ‘being conscious of oneself’ does not coincide with consciousness nor does it presuppose it; rather, it is pre-existent to consciousness and is connected to it by a relation of alterity. The other is inseparable from the ego, the I, the Self (Même as intended by Emmanuel Levinas), but cannot be included within the totality of the ego. The other is necessary to the constitution of the ego and its world, but at the same time it is a constitutive impediment to the integrity and definitive closure of the I and of the world.
The relation to the other – as authors like Charles S. Peirce, Victoria Welby, Mikhail Bakhtin, Charles Morris and Levinas teach us – is a relation of excess, surplus, of escape from objectivating thought, it is release from the subject– object relation; on a linguistic level it produces internal dialogization of the word, the impossibility of ever being an integral word (cf. Bakhtin 1984 [1963]; Vološinov 1973 [1929]). (AP)
Levinas, E. (1989) ‘Time and the other’, in S. Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, Oxford: Blackwell.
Linguistics in America developed in a distinctive way in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A great deal of energy was spent on recording and classifying the indigenous languages of America, and linguists therefore looked for rigorous methods of collecting and analysing data. This involved a deliberate effort to break away from preconceptions based on European languages, and to treat each language in its own terms. The focus was on the sounds and the word structure of each language, as these were regarded as concrete and replicable; information about sentence structure was felt to be less dependable, and the meaning and use of language were seen as hard to catalogue reliably and were often given less attention.
Although it would be misleading to talk of a ‘school’, an emphasis on observable elements of structure underpinned much of the work during this period. It has been fashionable for many years to highlight the theoretical inadequacy of structuralist linguistics, but its descriptive achievements were enormous and reflect the great intellectual labour and pioneering dedication that gave rise to them. (RS)
See also BLOOMFIELD, HARRIS and SAPIR.
Fought, J. G. (1994) ‘American structuralism’, in R. Asher and J. Simpson (eds), The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Vol. 1, Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp. 97–106.
ANTHROPOSEMIOSIS see ANTHROPOSEMIOTICS
‘Anthroposemiotics’ is a name for the study of the human use of signs. It is one of the recent branches on the tree of terms that has grown out of Charles S. Peirce’s original coinage of the term ‘semiosis’ to name the action of signs. This usage was suggested to Peirce (Fisch 1986a) by reading Philodemus (i.54–40 BCE). Thus, the study of semiosis gives rise to the branch of knowledge that Peirce followed Locke in calling ‘semiotics’, or ‘the doctrine of signs’. So, just as semiotics is the name for the general study of the action of signs (or semiosis), so anthroposemiotics is the name for the specific study of the human use of signs (or anthroposemiosis). The other main branches on this tree of terms, to wit, zoosemiotics (the study of the communicative behaviour of animals that do not have language), phytosemiotics (the study of communicative behaviours in plants) and physiosemiotics (study of communicative behaviours in the physical universe at large), have all been tied to specific authors of the twentieth century (see Deely 2001a: Ch. 15); but precise authorship of the term ‘anthroposemiotics’ has, curiously, so far not been identified.
The first work devoted exclusively to the subject of anthroposemiotics (Deely 1994a) concentrated on the species-specifically distinctive features of anthroposemiosis. But the field is actually much broader than such a study would suggest, inasmuch as all the other systems of signs that are found outside the human species are also found at play, in one manner or another, within the human species, and so form a part, even if not the species-specifically distinctive part, of anthroposemiosis. In this way ‘anthroposemiotics’ may be said to revive within the doctrine of signs the ancient Stoic notion of the human being (‘anthropos’) as the microcosm wherein is summarized and concentrated all that is to be found in the cosmos or universe at large. So the field opened up under the designation of anthroposemiotics actually is vast, subsuming all the traditional studies of human life and culture but under a new focus or perspective, namely, the attempt to appreciate the role of the sign in making possible all that is distinctively human in the realms of life, action and knowledge. The traditional humanities, art, medicine, technology – all can be grouped under the heading of ‘anthroposemiotics’.
The reworking of traditional ideas of the human being under this perspective will eventually require nothing less than an encyclopedia wherein the traditional materials of the human sciences can be presented as they have been rethought in the perspective proper to the doctrine of signs. Such an enterprise will have the advantage from the outset of overcoming the split between ‘human’ and ‘natural’ sciences (Naturwissenschaften und Geisteswissenschaften) by virtue of the perspective proper to the sign, recognized to be, from its earliest systematization (Poinsot 1632), superior to the division between nature and culture, because inclusive of both. From the standpoint of anthroposemiotics, culture itself is a part of nature, albeit a species-specifically distinctive part, every bit as much as the human body. (JD)
See also BIOSEMIOTICS and STOICS AND EPICUREANS.
Deely, J. (1990) Basics of Semiotics, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Nöth, W. (1990) A Handbook of Semiotics, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Sebeok, T. A. (1985) Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs, with Foreword by B. Williams, Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Thomas Aquinas (1224/26?– 1274) was to the medieval Latin Age what Plato and Aristotle were to the ancient Greek epoch of philosophy, to wit, the thinker whose work set the standard for agreements and disagreements over the Latin centuries after him. As regards semiotic, Aquinas proved to be a transition figure from Augustine’s definition of sign, which applied only to material objects of perception, to the forging of a more general understanding which included percepts and concepts as essentially signs by reason of representing always objects other than themselves. Though Scotus after Aquinas would be the first thematically to focus on the notion of concepts as signs, and also anticipated Peirce’s distinction between interpretant and interpreter, along with the dynamics of signs as a system, it would not be till the early seventeenth-century Treatise on Signs of John Poinsot (1632), writing as a follower of and commentator upon Aquinas’s scattered discussion of signs, that the general notion of signs as having their being in relations triadic in character would become fully established (only to be forgotten by modern philosophy which turned attention elsewhere, opening the period Sebeok calls ‘cryptosemiotics’ where-in the approach to knowledge called ‘epistemology’ eclipsed and pushed underground the Latin development in which the work of Aquinas had been pivotal to the development of an initial semiotic consciousness) (Deely 2006c). Never himself focused thematically on sign as a question of systematic pursuit, thus, yet Aquinas left a corpus of writings both vast and treating of problems central to the eventual formation of a systematic doctrine of signs. This trail of tantalizing suggestions semiotically to be pursued runs from Aquinas’s earliest writings (1254) to those of his last days (1273). Three hundred and fifty-eight years after Aquinas’s death, Poinsot, as ‘the latest and the most mature of the geniuses who explained St Thomas’ (Maritain 1955: vi), follows exactly that trail to find that it leads to the demonstration of the existence of a unified subject matter for semiotic inquiry. (JD)
Deely, J. (2004) ‘The role of Thomas Aquinas in the development of semiotic consciousness’, Semiotica, 152(1/4): 75–139.
‘Arbitrariness of the sign’ is an expression that designates the non-founded, unmotivated relation, uniting, in the constitution of the sign, the plane of the signifier and the plane of the signified: ‘The link that unites the signifier to the signifying is arbitrary’(Saussure 1983: 67–68). It is not a philosophical debate concerning the link between the object and the name but truly a ‘linguistic principle’ given, as such, according to which a signifier, for example ‘tree’, is not linked to the signified ‘tree’ by any internal or ‘natural’ relation. What is the importance of this principle? Clearly, ‘no one challenges the principle of arbitrariness’, writes Saussure (Saussure 1983: 67–68). However, in the eyes of Saussure, those who see language as a convention incur the reproach he addressed to Whitney – none the less a conventionalist – of ‘not having been thorough enough’.
The manuscript sources for the Course in General Linguistics mention a ‘radically’ arbitrary link. This means that there is no causal relation between the signified and its signifier, and especially that there is no signified prior to the semiotic act, i.e. the semiosis, which constitutes the sign. On the contrary, it is precisely this arbitrary link that, as it gives birth to the created sign, creates correlatively the signifier and the signified. This principle, which, more than a hundred years after it was formulated, still appears paradoxical and anti-intuitive, lays in reality the foundation of the autonomy of language considered as form. Indeed, the Saussurean conception of language is that of an immanent structural organization, dominating speaking subjects who are thereby subject to its rule as a necessity: ‘Mass is linked to language (la langue) as it is’ (Saussure 1983:70). The establishment of a relation in between the plane of the signified and the plane of the signifier in no case rests on pre-established divisions and adjustments of these planes, implemented in relation to an immediate reality to be described. The establishment of this relation is ‘radically arbitrary’ as it rests exclusively on the totality of all the other relations presently in play in the system-language, with no privileged attachment of any single word to the extra-linguistic reality. The task of linguistics, for Saussure, is to describe this immanent system. It is up to other disciplines, amongst them philosophy, to raise questions about the adequacy of a given linguistic expression to the data of concrete experience. (AH)
Saussure, F. de (1983) Course in General Linguistics, trans. R. Harris, London: Duckworth,pp. 65–70.
A set of interdependent statements or beliefs where some, the premises, support a conclusion. In Peirce’s semiotics an argument is a sign of a lawful relation between premises and conclusion. There are three types of inference, or passage from premises to conclusion, depending on the argument form: deduction, or certain reasoning, induction, where general conclusions are drawn from select cases, and abduction, or intelligent guessing. (NH)
Greek philosopher (384– 322 BCE), one of the most respected authorities of the ancient world, and often referred to throughout the European Middle Ages simply as ‘the philosopher’. A pupil of Plato, he lectured on topics ranging from metaphysics and poetics to politics and biology. Although he left no work specifically devoted to the study of languages or grammar or etymology (as modern scholars understand those subjects), he laid the foundations of Western logic. Logic is arguably what he saw as the analysis of language at the level of abstraction necessary to make tenable generalizations about it. It is sometimes said that Western logic would have taken quite a different shape if Aristotle had spoken some other language than Greek. (RH)
AUGUSTINEChristian saint and theologian (354–430), bishop of Hippo in North Africa. He is generally regarded as perpetuating the Stoic theory of signs, and in particular as championing the distinction between natural and conventional signs, but his interest in these matters was dictated by his religious convictions and problems involving interpretation of the sacraments and the scriptures rather than by anything else. The same is true of Augustine’s pronouncements on translation, where his underlying motivation was to justify the early Church’s use of Latin versions of the Bible. He held that it was possible for words to share the same meaning in spite of belonging to different languages. Augustine’s account of how he learned his native language as a child was taken by Wittgenstein as typifying a common but extremely naïve view of how language works. (RH)
See also STOICS AND EPICUREANS.
John Langshaw Austin (1911– 1960) was Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University, where he was one of the prominent figures in a tradition known as the Oxford school of ‘ordinary language philosophy’. The tenets of this tradition, as well as Austin’s personal style, are captured nicely in the formulation of his philosophical goal as an attempt to discover
the distinctions men [sic] have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth making, in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any of you and I are likely to think up in our armchairs of an afternoon – the most favoured alternative method.
(Austin 1957: 24)
It is from this angle that Austin approached a wide range of traditional philosophical topics, such as the problem of truth, knowledge and meaning, or the problem of free will. His language-based philosophical method was presented as an antidote against a more popular logical empiricism.
His most influential and lasting contribution was made in the philosophy of language, where, not surprisingly, his method and object are made to merge. In How To Do Things with Words, the William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, published posthumously in 1962, Austin dwells on the observation of language as a form of action. Whenever something is said, something is done by or in saying it. From this point of view he questions the distinction between constative utterances such as ‘It is raining outside’ (in which something is said, and which are either true or false) and performatives such as ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’ or ‘I apologize’ (in which something is done, and which may be happy or unhappy depending on whether a number of conditions are fulfilled, e.g. in relation to the identity of the speaker who may or may not be the appointed person to christen the ship or his/her intentions which may or may not be appropriate to the act of apologizing). He observes that also constatives are subject to criteria of felicity unrelated to truth or falsity (e.g. ‘All John’s children are bald’ is neither true nor false in a context in which John does not have any children). Conversely, performatives are liable to a dimension of criticism closely related to truth and falsity (e.g. ‘I declare you guilty’ may be a verdict that was reached properly and in good faith; yet it matters whether the verdict was just or not). Thus rejecting the distinction, Austin then introduced a three-fold conceptual framework to capture different aspects involved in every type of utterance: the locution (the act of saying something with a specific phonetic and grammatical form and with a specific meaning), the illocution (the act performed in saying something, such as asserting, promising or ordering) and the perlocution (the act performed by saying something, such as persuading, deceiving or frightening). This framework became the basis of speech act theory, as developed further by John Searle and as adopted by numerous linguists from the 1960s onwards. (JV)
Austin, J. L. (1961) Philosophical Papers, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Austin, J. L. (1962) How To Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Second revised edition, 1975, ed. J. O. Urmson and M. Sbisà, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.)
Warnock, G. J. (1989) J. L. Austin, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
The concept of autopoietic system is crucial to Niklas Luhmann’s theory of the social as communication. The concept was originally invented by the Chilean professor of biology Humberto Maturana, and his student Francisco Varela, as a definition of life. Autopoiesis means self-creating or self-producing. It is a process whereby a living system – such as a cell – produces its and own organization and maintains and constitutes itself in a spatial environment. The living system’s components participate recursively in the same network of productions that produced them. Thus such self-organizing systems are operationally closedat the level of organization and the system’s basic distinction is between itself and the environment. There is no flow of information from the environment into the system in this bioconstructivist theory. All irritations are perceived as perturbations or noise with a possible destructive effect. Regular disturbances create a structural coupling, which is a systematic change in the inner organization with the purpose of conserving the system’s organization against the persistent disturbances in its drift in evolution and history. Thus its reaction may look like a causal stimuli–response reaction in information, but it is not. It is the autopoietic character of living systems that makes it possible for them to conserve structural couplings in the form of stable cognitive constructions of objects. Thus ‘to live is to know’. Computers are not autopoietic and therefore have no cognition and communication as such.
Luhmann also understood psychological and social – communicative systems as autopoietic. Contrary to the biological system working the medium of life, these operate in the medium of meaning. The psyche is a silent closed system of perception, emotions, thinking and volitions. It is not a self and it does not communicate. Only communication communicates. Luhmann views social systems as communicative autopoietic systems with human bodies and minds as their environment. (SB)
See also CYBERSEMIOTICS.