C
Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), a German philosopher and historian of ideas, formulated a programme for philosophy that turned it into a ‘philosophy of symbolic forms’, developed at great length in his trilogy by that name, and that led to a semiotics of cultural forms, culminating in his summary volume, An Essay on Man. This meant for Cassirer that philosophy was to study all the ways that meaning was embodied and appeared in human life. Cassirer saw that meaning was expressed on multiple levels and that the levels were to be distinguished by how close the sign and its meaning were connected. Such a way of thinking allowed him to distinguish expression, representation and pure signification as the three matrices or frames in which human meaning making occurred. Expression joined the sign and its meaning in the closest, inseparable fashion, giving us a realm of ‘symbolic pregnance’. Representation, exemplified first and foremost in natural languages, while wedded to intuition and labile perceptual and imaginal structures, is more flexible. It is the main reason that there is linguistic relativity, that is, alternative ways of interpreting the continuum of experience and making alternative, but not totally arbitrary, cuts in it. Pure signification ‘frees’ itself from its material and perceptual substrates so that the play of signs can focus on a world of pure relations. The main exemplifications of these frames of meaning are myth, language and science, the subjects of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1953–1957 [1923–1929]).
Cassirer had practically universal interests and he offers a powerful model for semiotic research. He was interested in the foundations of science (Substance and Function, 1923 [1910]), the importance of the German humanistic tradition for philosophy (Freiheit und Form, 1916), the semiotic analysis of technology (‘Form und technik’, 1930), the semiotic implications and roots of the Fascist myth of the state (The Myth of the State, 1946), and of the symbolic structures exemplified in the totality of cultural forms (An Essay on Man, 1944). (RI)
FURTHER READING
Cassirer, E. (1998) The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 4 vols,New Haven: Yale University Press.
Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) is an American linguist and political campaigner. Born in Philadelphia, Chomsky had nearly dropped out of university when he met Zellig Harris through a shared interest in left-libertarian Jewish politics. Harris encouraged Chomsky to study linguistics, and soon Chomsky won a fellowship at Harvard University. In 1955 he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, where he has been based ever since.
Chomsky put forward a new approach to the study of language, though he has often said that his work is a development of ideas that were commonplace in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. His starting point was profound dissatisfaction with the structuralist linguistics (see American structuralism) that flourished in America in the first half of the twentieth century. His forceful critiques of structuralism (Chomsky 1964) and the behaviourist psychology with which it was linked (Chomsky 1959) helped to build his reputation, though they also aroused enormous hostility which has continued to this day.
The structuralists’ emphasis on observable data had led them to regard a language as a set of utterances: thus the English language was everything that speakers of English said and wrote, taken as a whole. Chomsky had two practical objections to this view of language. First, this set is potentially infinite, and therefore, although it can be specified mathematically, it does not exist in the real world (in the same way that the set of positive integers does not exist in the real world). Second, this set includes errors, repetitions, false starts and similar things that linguists typically ignore when they describe a language.
A more fundamental objection to structuralism, in Chomsky’s view, was that it failed to capture the commonsense view of a language, which is tacitly assumed by all linguists. What speakers of a language have in common (and what a grammar of that language tries to describe) is a system of knowledge in their minds. Chomsky dismissed arguments by philosophers that knowledge is not something that can be investigated scientifically: on the contrary, he argued, if this knowledge exists in our minds, it must have a more tangible reality than a ‘language’ in the structuralist sense. In some way, the knowledge must have a physical existence in the neural circuits of the human brain. The term ‘knowledge’ is just an abstract way of referring to this part of our brains. This abstraction is just as legitimate as any abstract procedure in science: physicists, for instance, constantly use abstract models of the universe (involving perfectly straight lines, notions like ‘points’ which have location but no magnitude, and so on). The question is whether insight and understanding can be gained by using abstract models: condemning all abstraction out of hand is simply unscientific dogma.
Chomsky went on to argue that some aspects of this linguistic knowledge are innate, that is, they result from human genetic programming rather than being learned from experience. The main aim of his research programme is to specify these genetic properties of language, which he calls Universal Grammar. (RS)
FURTHER READING
Chomsky, N. (1996) Powers and Prospects, London: Pluto Press.
Cook, V. and Newson, M. (1996) Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction, 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell.
Salkie, R. (1990) The Chomsky Update: Linguistics and Politics, London: Unwin Hyman.
Clever Hans was a horse that belonged to a German schoolteacher Wilhelm von Osten and in the 1890s became famous for its cognitive skills. The horse was believed to understand German and be capable of giving correct answers to questions involving arithmetic calculations, time and the calendar. People asked questions verbally; Clever Hans gave answers by tapping with its hoof. In 1907 psychologist Oskar Pfungst conducted a study of the horse’s cognitive skills. The study revealed that Clever Hans was able to give correct answers only if it could see its master or questioner, and only if the person him/herself knew the right answer. The conclusion was that the horse observed and followed the minute changes in the human face and gestures.
The story initiated the concept of the Clever Hans phenomenon (also Clever Hans effect, Clever Hans fallacy) that denotes the effect of a researcher’s expectations on the results of the research conducted with animals (Sebeok 1981b: 162–167). The Clever Hans phenomenon stands also for the reports of other ‘thinking animals’ (mostly cats, dogs and apes): both popular stories and results of scientific research that have their roots in the over-interpretation and anthropomorphization of animal behaviour. To rule out the possibility of the researcher’s impact, blind tests are suggested where even the observer does not know the right solution.
There is, however, also a positive interpretation of Clever Hans’s story. The horse’s accomplishment was in the transposition of information from one sign system to another. Small changes in the human face were indiscernible to humans themselves, whereas hoof taps were clearly audible. The mistake of the humans was in not recognizing the source of knowledge, but that does not discredit the communicative skills of the horse. As such, the story falls in the same category with other cases where animals make hidden information available to humans, for example dogs that search for chemical substances or elephants that warn their owners against earthquakes. (TM)
FURTHER READING
Sebeok, T. A. (1981) The Play of Musement, Advances in Semiotics, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Before the appearance of Umberto Eco’s essays on the aesthetics of the open work (Opera aperta, 1962; The Open Work, 1989), it was generally assumed that there were no such things as completely open or closed texts (especially literary ones). Such a distinction today takes into consideration Eco’s definition of what constitutes openness and consequently considers as closed any text that sets clear constraints on the reader’s possible interpretations. In short, the author has intentionally constructed (if it is possible) a text as a fixed system, completed, with no ambiguities or implications, and with no operative choices or open-ended possible readings.
This must not be confused with the notions of ‘limits’ that are outlined in Eco’s The Limits of Interpretation (1990), where the same author, who with his notions of ‘open work’ may have been partly responsible for having shifted the authority on the possible meanings foreseen by an author, first to the text and then to the reader (as we see with deconstructionists), nearly three decades later insists that, even though there may not be a set number of possible interpretations of a text, most certainly one cannot make a text say what it has no intention of saying.
Unlike scientific texts, it is difficult to conceive that literary works could have only one possible level of reading/ interpretation. By closed texts it is assumed that we are referring to a text structured in such a way that not only does it not elicit a reader’s inventiveness or his free play of interpretive cooperation in finding possible meanings/conclusions, but that it actually regulates our reading by pointing to specific messages, or pieces of information, that the author wishes to convey. A closed text is exhausted by its reading because it does not call for mental or psychological interaction with the author. In general, closed texts are associated with conveying information and messages rather than meaning and cultural awareness. (RC)
See also OPEN TEXT.
FURTHER READING
Eco, U. (1979) The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Communication is classically described as an exchange of meanings that are represented by signs. Coding is the process of representing meanings systematically. Communicators can be said to encode their meanings into particular sequences of signs (e.g. strings of sounds, marks on paper, or visible gestures); recipients can be said to decode such meanings from the sign sequences they receive.
A code itself is therefore the set or system of rules and correspondences which link signs to meanings. Potentially, any one meaning can be represented by any sign, arbitrarily chosen. As Saussure indicated, there is no inherent link between the meaning of the word ‘ox’ and the shape of that word (phonetic or graphic) in English, or between that meaning and the French word ‘b
uf’. The only general requirement is that the coding rules are known and followed by the relevant community of code users.
The coding of meaning in human languages is multi-dimensional. Jakobson distinguished paradigmatic from syntagmatic dimensions of linguistic organization, as underlying coding principles. That is, the coding conventions of any human language need to specify paradigms from which meaningful signs have to be chosen, to fill our specific ‘slots’ in a sequence of signs. An example is choosing a noun from a set of possible nouns, to convey a selected meaning. The conventions also require language users to build chains of ‘syntagms’, according to specified combination rules. For example, some types of modifiers must appear before others in English (‘large’ must appear before ‘steel’ in ‘a large steel bridge’). At the level of word morphology (the construction of words out of meaningful parts), adjectives are quite regularly formed by adding certain suffixes to verbs in English – ‘watch-able’, ‘kiss-able’. Similarly, verbs are formed by adding suffixes to nouns or adjectives – ‘item-ize’, ‘regular-ize’. But grammatical and lexical coding rules of this sort must be accompanied by further rules for representing grammatical sequences in speech, writing or some other medium. For example, in standard English pronunciation the suffix morpheme ‘-able’ is coded as the neutral vowel called ‘schwa’ plus ‘b’ plus ‘l’. The suffix ‘-ize’ is coded as the sound sequence ‘ai’ (the diphthong) plus ‘z’ (the voiced sibilant).
Coded realizations of meanings can themselves be re-coded. For example, speech is often seen as the primary code for a human language, with conventional written (orthographic) forms as secondary or overlaid representations. In turn, written forms of a language can be re-coded into binary digital strings to be stored and exchanged in computing applications. Earlier technology allowed written languages to be re-coded and transmitted as Morse code. Morse code or digitized written English can be further re-coded by rules that encrypt it – that is, render it unintelligible to everyone who does not have access to the decoding rules.
Non-linguistic representation also involves coding. Music and pictures, for example, have their own means of representing semantic information and semantic relations. Kress and van Leeuwen give the example that some meanings conveyed by locative prepositions in English are realized in pictures by the formal characteristics that create the contrast between foreground and background (1996: 44). Gestural communication is coded, although for most people only a relatively small range of gesture signs will have firmly agreed, specific significance within a community. Sticking out one’s tongue might denote mild deprecation of a target person, whereas distending one’s cheek with one’s tongue might have no codified meaning. It might signify that the speaker has a particle of food lodged between two teeth, but nothing of focused, interactional significance. Turning the palms of one’s hands upwards while speaking might suggest that the speaker is dismayed, or uncertain, but these meanings are not strictly codified. A clear exception is gestural signing among hard-of-hearing users, where the level of formal specification is the same as with spoken or written codes. We must therefore distinguish between formal and informal coding, and degrees of codification.
Sociocultural norms and conventions can, rather generally, be thought of as codes, such as dress codes, politeness codes and institutional codes of practice. Once again the implication is that communities of people will agree on rules prescribing (and outlawing) sets of behaviours in specific circumstances, such as revealing more of their bodies on beaches than in churches. Codes of etiquette can prescribe event sequences (syntagms) too, such as what one eats first at a formal dinner, or the coordinated timing of drinking a toast. Cultural and sub-cultural groups may in fact be defined by their shared adherence to codes of this sort. Outside of anthropological analyses, or reflexive commentaries in cultural narratives, cultural codes will generally be tacit understandings rather than explicitly codified rules, but no less influential and constraining for that.
While the notion of coding is therefore a core one for semiotics, it nevertheless risks oversimplifying some facets of communication. Culturally endorsed associations between forms or signifiers and signified meanings are rarely as neat as the coding model implies they are. In the case of human language, meanings can rarely be defined as the precise denotata of specific words or expressions. Certainly across cultural groups, there can be a significant variation between the meanings of apparently equivalent forms. Even in Saussure’s example of ‘ox’ and ‘buf’, this is clearly the case. These words do not encode identical meanings in English and French. Benjamin Lee Whorf’s principle of linguistic relativity points out how social realities are categorized differently by different communities. The implication is that coding, even linguistic coding, is a more active and variable process than is often assumed.
A further, fundamental point is that we should not overstate the extent to which human communication is accurately to be described as a sequence of encoding and decoding operations. Studies of discourse processing, such as Sperber and Wilson in their work on relevance theory, argue convincingly that meaning making is more of an inferential process than a coding process. That is, speakers do not simply encode meanings which listeners, who share an understanding of the code, can directly recover. Rather, speakers deploy signs on the understanding that listeners will find them relevant. The precise relevance, however, remains to be established through the active search procedures listeners activate. The direction and result of inference cannot be guaranteed by speakers in advance. Meanings are not ‘there to be discovered’, coded into utterances, as much as they are actively constructed by listeners on every occasion of social interaction. (NC and AJ)
See also GESTURE and SPEECH COMMUNITY.
FURTHER READING
Geertz, C. (1993) ‘Thick description’, in The Interpretation of Cultures, London: HarperCollins.
Kress, G. R. and van Leeuwen, T. (2006) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, 2nd edn,London: Routledge.
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1995) Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell.
The word ‘cognitive’ means ‘having to do with thinking’, so cognitive linguistics can be understood broadly as the study of language in connection with thought. This connection can, however, be understood in several different ways.
Chomsky describes his approach to linguistics as forming part of what he calls the ‘cognitive revolution’ which took place around the middle of the last century. For Chomsky, the central feature of this revolution was a new belief that knowledge was amenable to scientific investigation. Linguistic knowledge is only one type of knowledge, but it can be studied empirically and hypotheses can be formulated about the structure of linguistic knowledge in the human mind. Chomsky distinguishes knowledge of a particular language, which is described by a generative grammar of that language, from knowledge of language in general, which is covered by Universal Grammar.
Linguistics is thus in Chomsky’s view part of cognitive psychology, but it employs methods which look very different from those usually used by psychologists. Despite its cognitive foundations Chomsky’s methods are strictly linguistic, though the hypotheses put forward are influenced by their cognitive foundations: the development known as principles and parameters theoryis a clear example. Chomsky has nothing to say about how linguistic knowledge is used: in other words, he does not try to link language with the active process of thinking.
Other linguists have tried to explore the relationship between thinking and language, and would see their work as part of cognitive science. The assumption behind this work is that human beings are essentially machines, and that the functioning of the human mind can be described in the same way as the functioning of a computer (note that Chomsky is not committed to this assumption, which he explicitly rejects). Computers are machines that process information, and cognitive scientists have tried to analyse language in the same way. One aim has been to program computers to understand and use language, an aim that has had only partial success up to now.
A third strand of research is called cognitive grammar, and is committed to the view that the structure of language is strongly influenced by the way the mind works (another assumption that Chomsky rejects). The key names in cognitive grammar include Ronald Langacker and George Lakoff, and they regard grammar as essentially ‘symbolic’, its role being to structure and symbolize the conceptual content of language. Unlike Chomsky, cognitive grammarians refuse to make a sharp distinction between linguistic knowledge and other types of knowledge. Their work in semantics tries to look at meaning in a broad perspective, going beyond simple dictionary-type definitions of words and attempting to identify the whole range of mental experience associated with words and sentences when they are used in specific contexts.
Cognitive linguistics thus covers a number of frameworks, with radically different assumptions about the relationship between language and the mind. What they have in common is the belief that an exclusive concern with language is less useful than research which links language and other aspects of human experience: but the nature of that link remains contentious. (RS)
FURTHER READING
Johnson-Laird, P. (1993) The Computer and the Mind: An Introduction to Cognitive Science, 2nd edn, London: Collins.
Langacker, R. (1986) ‘An introduction to cognitive grammar’, Cognitive Science, 10: 1–40.
Salkie, R. (1990) The Chomsky Update: Linguistics and Politics, London: Unwin Hyman.
COGNITIVE SEMANTICS see LAKOFF
The category of ‘cohesion’ deals with the formal elements and principles which make a collection of sentences into a text. These range from pro(nounor sentence) forms such as ‘these’ (at the beginning of this sentence), ‘this’ (as in the preceding two words) and ‘therefore’; text-organizing elements such as ‘however’; the repetition and/or substitution of lexical elements to form lexical chains; to the uses of syntax to fit a sentence (or part of a sentence – as in this parenthesis just now) to its specific place in the unfolding text. (GRK)
The Latin root of ‘communication’ – communicare – means ‘to share’ or ‘to be in relation with’ and is related to the words ‘common’, ‘commune’ and ‘community’, suggesting an act of ‘bringing together’. The notion of communication has been present and debated in the West from pre-Socratic times. Hippocrates and his followers, for example, produced a corpus of symptoms, ‘bringing together’ the signs of a disease or ailment with the disease itself for the purposes of diagnosis and prognosis. In contemporary semiotics, however, it is considered that a fundamental form of communication is to be found in the semioses that occur between cells (see semiotic self).
The understanding of communication in the twentieth century has generally proceeded from the flow of
Sender |
|
Message For Shannon and Weaver (1949), famously, an information source with a message uses a transmitter to produce a signal, which is received by a receiver, which delivers a concomitant message to a destination. At the interface of the sent signal and the received signal is likely to be ‘noise’. Such ‘noise’ might corrupt the implicit integrity of the message as a product during the process of transmission, the prime example being several conflicting signals in the same channel at once.
Observing developments in media in the twentieth century, ‘Medium theorists’ stressed that media are, in the phrase made famous by the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, ‘extensions’ of humans. Like tools, media extend the capabilities of humans to reach out into a broader world of communication and interaction. However, as a corollary of this, the media transform humans’ apprehension of the world and produce a consciousness that is tied to particular modes of communication, for example orality and literacy. As such, all the major media of communication have entailed ‘paradigm shifts in cultural evolution’ (Danesi 2002).
In the West, the bias towards understanding communication in terms of media has been notable and longstanding: classic works of Greek philosophy set the agenda, largely because they were produced at the transition between oral and literate societies. Oral communication, because it could not store information in the same ways and amounts as writing, evolved mnemonic, often poetic, devices to pass on traditions and cultural practices, such as dialogues or narratives of human action to be retold in relatively small public gatherings of people. Communication, in this formulation, was necessarily a locally situated process. Literate societies, on the other hand, involved communication resulting in a ‘product’ to be stored, distributed and used as a reference for scientific analysis, critique and political organization. After 1450, the introduction of print – like orality and literacy, another ‘extension’ – has been seen as crucial in defining communication because of the ways it facilitated widespread communication of messages that might be deemed educational or seditious, ultimately enabling confrontation (as in the Reformation) as well as specialization (sciences building on the Renaissance), and promoted a more private, individual communication centred on the self. With the emergence in the twentieth century of new communications technologies – in particular, photography, film, radio and television – a fully fledged ‘communication theory’ consolidated the definition of communication as embodied in media.
Yet, developing alongside institutionalized communication theory, semiotics shed further light on communication because of its focus on signs assigns, whether they are part of communication in films or novels, the expressions of animals, or the messages that pass between organisms or cells. The nonverbal signs that are exchanged between animals communicate, of course, as do the verbal and nonverbal signs passed between humans. Frequently, because of the glottocentrism enshrined in investigations into communication, nonverbal messages are not recognized, ignored or repressed, even when the focus of study is human message transfer. It is hardly surprising, then, that in addition to the neglect of nonverbal communication in humans and animals the nonverbal signs that occur in components of organisms or plants receive little or no attention in communication theory. The concept of intrahuman and interspecies – as well as interhuman – message transfer amounts to a major re-orientation of the understanding of communication, one in which human affairs constitute only a small part of communication in general.
Furthermore, while definitions of communication often assume successful contact and interaction, semiotics has been concerned to pay close attention to non-communication (or mis-communication). This includes ambiguity, misunderstanding, lying, cheating, deception and unconscious and wilful self-deception. The famous case of ‘Clever Hans’, involving a horse whose abilities ‘proved’ that animals could think and speak, but in fact was responding to a number of nonverbal cues emitted by his ‘interlocutor’, illustrates well the vicissitudes of communication (Sebeok and Rosenthal 1981). Similarly, the over-valuing of verbal communication has tended to encourage neglect of nonverbal communication, a fact well understood by magicians and others practised in deception. Lying is also central to communication, particularly as lies are often necessary to the project of human interaction (Ekman 2001). Nor is this exclusively a matter of human communication. In the animal world, too, lying is widespread (Sebeok 1986a). Indeed, the reliance of communication on signs to substitute for something else which ‘does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment that a sign stands in for it’ (Eco 1976: 7) suggests the fraternity of communication with lying. (PC)
FURTHER READING
Cherry, C. (1966) On Human Communication: A Review, a Survey and a Criticism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cobley, P. (ed.) (2006) Communication Theories,4 vols, London: Routledge.
Sebeok, T. A. (1991) ‘Communication’, in A Sign is Just a Sign, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
A person’s knowledge of a particular language, as opposed to performance, the actual use of a language in concrete situations. Someone who is competent in a language can normally speak and understand the language, but disability such as deafness may permanently impair or prevent some aspects of performance, and other factors (emotion, background noise, food in the mouth, etc.) may temporarily obstruct performance. It is a person’s competence in a language which makes their use of that language possible, and which is fundamental in linguistics.
When we say ‘the English language’, then, we normally mean ‘the particular system of linguistic knowledge that certain people have acquired, called English’. Dictionaries and grammars of English aim to describe this competence accurately and explicitly, leaving aside performance factors as irrelevant. The distinction between competence and performance is very similar to Saussure’s separation of langue and parole, though Saussure puts more emphasis on the shared, social aspects of langue. It has sometimes been said that competence is mysterious and that only performance is concrete and observable: Chomsky argues, however, that competence is a straightforward notion and that explaining performance may be impossible in principle. (RS)
One of the six fundamental functions given in the Jakobsonian speech act, determined by the addressee factor of the speech act. When the focus of the utterance is on the addressee, more salient forms of the conative function occur phonemically, grammatically or syntactically. Examples include vocative case and the imperative mood. (EA)
A putative ‘second-order meaning’, often a ‘cultural’ one, complementing denotation. An apple is called ‘green’ because that is its colour when it is unripe. When ‘green’ is used of a person because he or she is unripe/immature, it has been used as a metaphor; it has been extended beyond its core meaning. Such uses lead to a ‘penumbra’ around the word, indicating its connotations. The distinction between denotation and connotation is especially associated with the work of Barthes and Hjelmslev. (GRK)
Consciousness is a quality of mind that includes self-awareness, subjectivity, perception, feelings and conscious will. It is the quality of ‘how it feels like to be you or me’ and therefore also the ability for empathy and mutual understanding through communication. It also produces existentiality and therefore questions like: ‘Who am I?’, ‘What is the purpose of life?’, ‘What is right and what is wrong?’ Consciousness also contains the intentionality of perception, semiosis and thinking. The role and necessity of consciousness in communication and language is highly debated. Do you need to be aware in order to communicate? In much cybernetic information science, communication – as the transfer of information – is the basic process independent of any awareness or even life. Many linguistic theories see the generative rules of language as buried deep underneath conscious awareness. We do not speak with language, language speaks with us. Wittgenstein, for example, considered us to be living within language. It is said that we do not know what we mean before we have heard what we are saying. Normally, speaking is a flow where we do not consciously plan our sentences before we speak; but still we do produce them from an intention of expressing something within our awareness. On the other hand, there is also general agreement that it is language that creates the human self-aware type of consciousness that sets us apart from other animals. We are an animal ‘infected’ with language and thereby culture, an artificial product and therefore linguistic cyborgs. Still we also know that we can use our consciousness to control language especially when we write it down and read from a manuscript. We can also plan speech in our own deliberations ‘inside’ our consciousness. It is also clear that the meaning of words comes from our conscious experiences and interpretations of perception and our general ability to make sense of experiences. (SB)
See also CYBERSEMIOTICS, MODELLING SYSTEMS THEORY, QUALIA and Petrilli and Ponzio.
FURTHER READING
Slatev, J. and Menary, R. (eds) (2008) ‘Consciousness and language’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15(6).
In the contrast constative– performative, the term ‘constative’ is used to describe declarative utterances or statements which can be said to be true or false. It was because of their dimension of truth or falsity that constatives formed the focus of attention for most philosophers of language before the advent of speech act theory. J. L. Austin showed, however, that just like performatives a constative or statement of fact can also be ‘infelicitous’ in ways unrelated to truth. For instance, ‘All John’s children are bald’ violates the presupposition that John has children if pronounced in a context where John does not, in fact, have children. Similarly, ‘The cat is on the mat’ violates the implication that the speaker believes the cat to be on the mat if stated by someone who does not in fact hold such a belief. Finally, ‘All the guests are French’ entails that it is not the case that ‘Some of the guests are not French’ and would violate this entailment if followed by that second statement. (JV)
FURTHER READING
Austin, J. L. (1963 [1958]) ‘Performative– constative’, in C. E. Caton (ed.), Philosophy and Ordinary Language, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 22–54.
The origins and much of current practice in Conversation Analysis (CA) reside in the sociological approach to language and communication known as ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1974). Ethnomethodology means studying the link between what social actors ‘do’ in interaction and what they ‘know’ about interaction. Social structure is a form of order, and that order is partly achieved through talk, which is itself structured and orderly. Social actors have common-sense knowledge about what it is they are doing interactionally in performing specific activities and in jointly achieving communicative coherence. Making this knowledge about ordinary, everyday affairs explicit, and in this way finding an understanding of how society is organized and how it functions, is ethnomethodology’s main concern (Garfinkel 1967; Turner 1974; Heritage 1984).
Following this line of inquiry, CA views language as a form of social action and aims, in particular, to discover and describe how the organization of social interaction makes manifest and reinforces the structures of social organization and social institutions (see, e.g., Boden and Zimmerman 1991; Drew and Heritage 1992).
Hutchby and Wooffit, who point out that ‘talk in interaction’ is now commonly preferred to the designation ‘conversation’, define CA as follows:
CA is the study of recorded, naturally occurring talk-in-interaction … Principally it is to discover how participants understand and respond to one another in their turns at talk, with a central focus being on how sequences of interaction are generated. To put it another way, the objective of CA is to uncover the tacit reasoning procedures and sociolinguistic competencies underlying the production and interpretation of talk in organized sequences of interaction.
(Hutchby and Wooffit 1998: 14)
As this statement implies, the emphasis in CA, in contrast to earlier ethnomethod ological concerns, has shifted away from the patterns of ‘knowing’ per se towards discovering the structures of talk which produce and reproduce patterns of social action. At least, structures of talk are studied as the best evidence of social actors’ practical knowledge about them.
One central CA concept is preference, the idea that, at specific points in conversation, certain types of utterances will be more favoured than others (e.g. the socially preferred response to an invitation is acceptance, not rejection). Other conversational features which CA has focused on include: openings and closings of conversations; adjacency pairs (i.e. paired utterances of the type summons–answer, greeting– greeting, compliment–compliment response, etc.); topic management and topic shift; conversational repairs; showing agreement and disagreement; introducing bad news and processes of troubles-telling; and (probably most centrally) mechanisms of turn-taking.
In their seminal paper, Sacks et al. (1974) suggested a list of guiding principles for the organization of turn-taking in conversation (in English). They observed that the central principle which speakers follow in taking turns is to avoid gaps and overlaps in conversation. Although gaps do of course occur, they are brief. Another common feature of conversational turns is that, usually, one party speaks at a time. In order to facilitate turn-taking, which usually takes place in ‘the transition relevance places’ (Sacks et al. 1974), speakers observe a number of conventionalized principles. For example, speakers follow well-established scripts, as in service encounters, in which speaker roles are clearly delineated. They fill in appropriate ‘slots’ in discourse structure, e.g. second part utterances in adjacency pairs, and they anticipate completion of an utterance on the basis of a perceived completion of a grammatical unit (a clause or a sentence). Speakers themselves may signal their willingness to give up the floor in favour of another speaker (who can be ‘nominated’ by the current speaker only). They can do this by directing their gaze towards the next speaker and employing characteristic gesturing patterns synchronizing with the final words. They may alter pitch, speak more softly, lengthen the last syllable or use stereotyped discourse markers (e.g. you know or that’s it). (NC and AJ)
FURTHER READING
Hutchby, I. and Wooffitt, R. (1998) Conversation Analysis, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Schegloff, E. A., Ochs, E. and Thompson, S. A. (1996) ‘Introduction’, in E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff and S. A. Thompson (eds), Interaction and Grammar, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ten Have, P. (1999) How to Do Con versation Analysis, London: Sage.
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a strand of critical linguistics comprising a loose set of tools and techniques for analysing the linguistic choices contained in texts allowing the analyst to reveal the broader discourses that are signified by them. These discourses are treated as models defining events, actors and sequences of action. CDA seeks to reveal what kinds of social relations of power are present in texts and the kinds of inequalities and interests they seek to perpetuate, generate or legitimate. It is criticized for its form of analysis that abstracts texts from broader production and reception contexts. (DMac)
See also DISCOURSE ANALYSIS, SOCIOLINGUISTICS and SOCIOSEMIOTICS.
FURTHER READING
van Leeuwen, T. (2008) Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis, New York: Oxford University Press.
‘Cybernetics’ was defined by the mathematician Norbert Wiener, in the title of one of its founding books (Wiener 1961 [1941]), as ‘the science of control and communication, in the animal and the machine’, a definition seen as foundational by one of cybernetics’ developers, Ross Ashby (1957: 1). The etymological derivation of cybernetics stems from the Greek kybernetes, pilot, steersman. Cybernetics is a theory of the behaviour of machines, organisms and organizations. It does not ask ‘what is this thing?’ but ‘what does it do?’ Cybernetics is concerned with scientific investigation of systemic processes of a highly varied nature, including such phenomena as regulation, information processing, information storage, adaptation, self-organization, self-reproduction and strategic behaviour.
Cybernetics started by being closely associated in many ways with physics, but it depends in no essential way on the laws of physics nor on the properties of matter. Cybernetics deals with all forms of behaviour insofar as they are regular, or determinate, or reproducible. The materiality is irrelevant, and so is the adherence or not to the ordinary laws of physics. Cybernetics has its own foundations as, first, a science of self-regulating and equilibrating systems. Cybernetic systems are goal-seeking systems, like thermostats, physiological regulation of body temperature, automatic steering devices, and economic and political processes. These were studied under a general mathematical model of deviation-counteracting feedback networks. Systems that are open to energy but closed to information and with control-systems that are information tight, as the governor on a steam engine, were the primary objects of study. Because numerous systems in the living, social and technological world may be understood in this way, cybernetics cuts across many traditional disciplinary boundaries and thus developed a metadisciplinary language of information and goal-oriented self-organized behaviour through negative feedback that works on differences and uses feedback/feed forward mechanisms to home in on the target. Thus we see the new information concept’s interaction with the idea of the von Neumann computer, based on the concept of the bit carrying the information in computing. The research programs of artificial intelligence and machine translation of human language, game and decision theory are among other things developed on this basis. These are also the subject areas where the limited definitions of cognition, intelligence, language and communication have become obvious because they lack the theory of signification that Peircean semiotics offers.
Applications of cybernetics are found in computer and information sciences, and in the natural, social and communicative sciences, and cybernetics has been fairly compatible with structuralist semiotics and, therefore, to some extent influential in the French tradition. Within the general cybernetic approach theoretical fields such as systems theory and communication theory – combined and further developed by Niklas Luhmann – have developed. Thus, cybernetics, like semiotics, has been concerned with flows of distinctions and their consequences. Semiotics shares with cybernetics the aim of understanding communicative systems in relation to their environment. From the 1950s – particularly as a result of Sebeok’s early collaboration, contact and interest with cybernetics’ key figures (including Wiener, von Foerster, Bateson, Wilden and Meystel) as well as the cybernetic theory of culture developed by Lotman and his collaborators in the late 1950s and early 1960s – the two fields have pursued broadly similar objectives. Their points of convergence are to be found, especially, in Umwelt theory, cybersemiotics and modelling systems theory. ‘Second order cybernetics’ investigates cybernetics with the awareness that the investigator and the investigation are, in fact, part of the system (see von Foerster 1980), making the observation itself a cybernetic system. Accordingly, it seeks to account for this often in a radical constructivist form often using the theory of autopoiesis of Maturana and Varela. (SB)
See also BATESON, BAUDRILLARD, CONSCIOUSNESS, POSTHUMANISM, QUALIA and UEXKÜLL, J.
FURTHER READING
Ashby, W. R. (1956) An Introduction to Cybernetics, London: Chapman & Hall (now available electronically at: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf).
Foerster, H. von (1974) Cybernetics of Cybernetics, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
A set of classic/seminal cybernetics papers are available on the Web at Principia Cybernetica: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/LIBRAPAP.html
Transdisciplinary science framework, developed by Søren Brier (editor of the interdisciplinary journal Cybernetics & Human Knowing), that integrates biosemiotics with the cybernetic information science of Norbert Wiener and Gregory Bateson as well as the second order cybernetics of Heinz von Foerster and Niklas Luhmann’s autopoietic theory of society as communication. In the making of a transdisciplinary theory of signification and communication encompassing living, human, social and mechanical systems, semiotics is in competition with the information processing paradigm of cognitive science that is based on systems and cybernetics. Life can – from a chemical point of view – be explained as auto-catalytic, autonomous, autopoietic and systemic; but that does not say much about how individual awareness appears in the nervous system and how it feels to be a living being. Brier found it necessary to add a semiotic foundation in order to encompass both nature and machine in a theory of signification, cognition and communication that encompasses the sciences and technology as well as the humanities’ aspect of communication in order to include signification and interpretation. As Peirce’s semiotics is distinguished by dealing systematically with non-intentional signs of the body and of nature at large, it has become the main source for semiotic contemplations of the similarities and differences of sign types of inorganic nature, signs of living systems (biosemiotics), and the cultural and linguistic signs of humans living together in a society. The cybersemiotic approach integrates a semiotized version of Luhmann’s triple autopoietic theory of communication combined with pragmatic theories of embodied social meaning. Combining this with a general systems theory of emergence, self-organization and closure/autopoiesis, it is an explicit theory of how the inner world of the organism is constituted in semiosis as a material discursive system through evolutionary development. (PC)
See also CONSCIOUSNESS and CYBERNETICS.