P
Technical term in neo-Saussurean linguistics, but one which Saussure himself did not use. It often replaces Saussure’s série associative (‘associative series’), which is a set of signs linked by partial resemblances, either in form or in meaning. Saussure described such sets as being established ‘in the memory’ and the items thus associated as forming a ‘mnemonic series’. Substituting paradigmatic for associative seems to place the emphasis rather on the notion (which Saussure discusses) of sets of items related by the possibilities of substitution in a particular position. The flexional paradigm familiar from Latin grammar (dominus, dominum, domini, etc.) is cited by Saussure as just one type of example of an associative series. (RH)
See also SYNTAGM.
Saussurean technical term for the linguistic level at which individual speech acts occur. Two persons talking to each other constitute the minimum ‘speech circuit’ (circuit de la parole). The speech act (acte de parole) is entirely under the control of the individual, unlike la langue. (RH)
Charles Sanders Peirce (Cambridge, MA, 1839–Milford, PA, 1914), an American scientist, historian of science, logician, mathematician and philosopher of international fame. He founded contemporary semiotics, a general theory of signs which he equated with logic and the theory of inference, especially abduction, and later with pragmatism, or as he preferred, pragmaticism. Peirce graduated from Harvard College in 1859 and then received an MSc from Harvard University’s newly founded Lawrence Scientific School in 1863. His thirty-one-year employment as a research scientist in the US Coast and Geodetic Survey ended in 1891. Apart from short-term lectureships in logic and philosophy of science at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (1879–1884), at the Lowell Institute in Boston (1866), and at Harvard (1865, 1869–1870, 1903, 1907), as well as at private homes in Cambridge (1898 and in other years), Peirce worked in isolation, outside the academic community. He had difficulty publishing during his lifetime. A selection of published and unpublished writings were eventually prepared in the Collected Papers, the first of which appeared in 1931. But an anthology of his writings edited by M. R. Cohen and entitled Chance, Love and Logic had already been published in 1923. His works are now being organized chronologically into a thirty-volume critical edition under the general title Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition (Indianapolis, IN: Peirce Edition Project), the first volume having appeared in 1982. In a letter to Victoria, Lady Welby (1837–1912) of 23 December 1908, Peirce, who was nearly seventy, conveys a sense of the inclusive scope of his semiotic perspective when he says:
it has never been in my power to study anything – mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic.
(in Hardwick 1977: 85–86)
As anticipated in a paper of 1905, ‘Issues of pragmaticism’ (Peirce 1998c [1905]), in Peirce’s conception the entire universe, the universe of existents and the universe of our conceptual constructions about them, that wider universe we are accustomed to refer to as truth of which the universe of existents is only a part, ‘all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs’ (CP 5.448, n. 1).
While developing a general model of sign, Peirce was particularly interested in a theory of method. His research focused specifically on the sciences and therefore on the search for a scientific method. However, in the perspective of Peircean pragmatism, knowledge understood in terms of innovation and inventiveness is not conceived as a purely epistemic process. Knowledge presupposes ethical knowledge, responsiveness to the other, which the self listens to both as the other from self and as the other self: for there to be an interpreted sign, an object of interpretation, there must be an interpretant, even when we are dealing with cognitive signs in a strict sense. The sign as a sign is other; in other words it may be characterized as a sign because of its structural opening to the other and therefore as dialogue with the other. This implies that the sign’s identity is grounded in the logic of alterity. Consequently, learning, knowledge, wisdom, understanding and sagacity in their various forms are situated in a sign situation which, in the last analysis, is given over to the other, is listening to the other. Cognitive identity is subject to the other and as such is continually put into crisis by the restlessness of signs that the appeal of the other inexorably provokes. Therefore, insofar as it is part of the sign network by virtue of which alone it earns its status as sign, the cognitive sign is placed and modelled in a context that is irreducibly ethical. (SP)
See also ARGUMENT, DICENT, GROUND, HABIT, ICON, INDEX, LEGISIGN, QUALISIGN, REPRESENTAMEN, RHEME, SINSIGN, SYMBOL and Houser.
FURTHER READING
Brent, J. (1998) Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, rev. and enlarged edn, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Peirce, C. S. (1998) The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 2, ed. Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Peirce, C. S. (1992) The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 1, ed. N. Houser and C. Kloesel, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
The actual use of a language in concrete situations, as opposed to competence, the knowledge of a language. Although grammars and dictionaries describe competence, the study of performance is increasingly important, both for scientific reasons (sometimes performance has systematic features which do not directly reflect competence) and for practical reasons, since second language learners need help to perform authentically. (RS)
In the contrast constative–performative, ‘performative’ refers to a category of utterances (such as ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’, ‘I apologize’, ‘I welcome you’, ‘I advise you to do it’) which do not just say something but which serve to perform an action (e.g. baptizing a ship, apologizing, welcoming or offering advice). Performatives cannot be said to be true or false (even if a dimension of truth may be involved, as when someone is judged to be guilty of a crime), but they are liable to a dimension of criticism based on criteria of ‘felicity’. Thus ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’ is felicitous only if the speaker has the proper authority to baptize the ship (otherwise the act is ‘null’ or ‘void’), or ‘I apologize’ is felicitous only if the speaker intends to express regret (otherwise the utterance is ‘abused’).
J. L. Austin (1962) introduced a distinction between primary and explicit performatives. In contrast to primary performatives (such as ‘I’ll come tomorrow’), explicit performatives (such as ‘I promise to come tomorrow’) contain an explicit indication of the act that is being performed, e.g. a performative verb used in the first person singular indicative active (‘promise’ in this case). Often the term ‘performative utterance’ is reserved for the narrower category of ‘explicit performatives’ (e.g. in Searle 1989). (JV)
See also SPEECH ACT.
FURTHER READING
Verschueren, J. (1995) ‘The conceptual basis of performativity’, in M. Shibatani and S. Thompson (eds), Essays in Semantics and Pragmatics, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 299–321.
In the terminological framework introduced by Austin (1962) to cope with the multi-functionality of all utterances (locution–illocution–perlocution), perlocution is reserved for the act performed by saying something. In Austin’s words:
Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons: and it may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing them.
(ibid.: 101)
Arguing that such consequential effects are not part of the language system or that they are too random, unstable and unpredictable to be handled as constitutive properties of types of speech acts, Searle (1969) decided to leave perlocutionary aspects largely undiscussed. Others have tried to preserve the role of the notion ‘perlocution’ in speech act theory by considering that all illocutionary act types must have certain effects that are typically associated with them even though their actual emergence is not predictable. Thus assertives are typically intended to inform an audience of a state of affairs, questions are typically intended to elicit answers and promises are typically intended to generate trust in the speaker’s future course or action, just like directives are typically intended to make the hearer do something (which would even be regarded as their illocutionary point). (JV)
FURTHER READING
Austin, J. L. (1962) How To Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2nd rev. edn, 1975, ed. J. O. Urmson and M. Sbisà, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.)
Peter of Spain (Petrus Hispanus) was born in Lisbon sometime before 1205. From 1220 to 1229 he studied at the University of Paris, a famous centre for studies in logic, philosophy and theology. He studied medicine in Salerno or Montpellier and graduated c. 1235. He had already written his Summule logicales or Tractatus (critical edn 1972), the work which gained him fame (‘e Pietro Ispano/lo qual già luce in dodici libelli’, Dante, Paradise, XII, 134– 135), some years before, in the early 1230s, presumably while living in the north of Spain. He taught medicine at the University of Siena, from 1245 to 1250. In 1276 he became Pope under the name of John XXI. He continued his pursuit of scientific studies in an apartment equipped for the purpose built alongside the Papal Palace at Viterbo, where he met his tragic death in 1277 when the roof of his study collapsed in on him.
In the Tractatus, Peter of Spain systematized and explained logic as it had developed so far, in depth and with originality. He locates the sign within the complex process of semiosis identifying its fundamental aspects. His model of sign anticipated that of Charles S. Peirce (cf. Ponzio 1990c; Ponzio and Petrilli 1996). The correspondences that emerge are indicative of the orientation of the Tractatus and his anticipation of Peirce: vox significativa = representamen; significatio or rapresentatio = interpretant; res significata or representata = immediate object; acceptio pro = to stand for; and aliquid (the referent of acceptio) = dynamic object. This explains Peirce’s interest in Peter of Spain whom he cites on numerous occasions. (AP)
See also SEMIOTICS.
FURTHER READING
Ponzio, A. (1990) ‘Meaning and referent in Peter of Spain’, in Man as a Sign, trans., ed., intro. and appendices S. Petrilli, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Susan Petrilli (b. 1954), Australian–Italian semiotician based in the ‘Bari School’. Theorist of semioethics, dialogue, global communication and alterity, she has also been instrumental in promoting her maitres de penser: Peirce, Charles Morris, Sebeok, Rossi-Landi and, especially, through formidable archival scholarship, Victoria, Lady Welby, whom Petrilli has reinstated as semiotics’ ‘founding mother’.
In general, Petrilli’s work (in consonance with Sebeok) promotes a global (or ‘holistic’) semiotic per spective on phenomena, eschewing glottocentrism and monologism. She observes that globalization is commonly understood as a socio-economic phenomenon, but asserts that it is also a semiotic phenomenon with reference to the synthesis of Peircean sign theory, Bakhtinian dialogue and biosemiotics. Recently, drawing on the collaborative formulation of the idea of the ‘semiotic animal’ (see Deely et al. 2005), she presents an outline of ‘semioethics’ – an imperative that is not merely discursively constructed but, instead, is the result of the ‘concrete’ demands of the other (Levinas, as well as Bakhtin, is a key figure, here). Furthermore, for her, otherness is not just a matter of explicit requests from our co-habitants on earth; rather, it is thoroughly grounded in the sign, both in communication and non-communication.
One impediment to the realization of a ‘true’ dialogue has been the prevailing liberal notion of dialogue as the result of an initiative to be taken in discourse. Without announcing a programme, Petrilli shows that semioethics entails not just the constant demands of the other but, also, a perspective that reaches beyond the glottocentrism of liberal dialogue to embrace the semiosis of the entire semiosphere. Petrilli’s semioethics delineates not just a ‘limited responsibility’ but an ‘unlimited responsibility’ to ‘all of life throughout the entire planetary ecosystem, from which human life cannot be separated’ (Petrilli and Ponzio 2005: 534).
Putting responsibility into practice in the sphere of intellectual life, Petrilli has been open to her fellow scholars, promoting collaborations, inviting participations, organizing conferences and colloquia and editing and co-editing numerous scholarly volumes and journals. Her publications include collaborations with Sebeok, Marcel Danesi, Jeff Bernard, John Deely and, most frequently, her Bari colleague, Augusto Ponzio. Her single-author publications include Significs, semiotica, significazione (1988), Materia segnica e interpretazione. Figure e prospettive (1995c), Che cosa significa significare? Itinerari nello studio dei segni (1996), Su Victoria Welby. Significs e filosofia del linguaggio (1998a), Teoria dei segni e del linguaggio (1998b), Percorsi della semiotica (2005), Sign Crossroads in Global Perspective (2008) and Signifying and Understanding: Reading the Works of Victoria Welby and the Significs Movement (2009).
In 2008, Petrilli was made the seventh Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America. (PC)
FURTHER READING
Petrilli, S. (2008) Eight essays on the theme ‘Sign Crossroads in Global Perspective’, Sebeok Fellow Special Issue of The American Journal of Semiotics, 24(4).
Petrilli, S. (2009) Signifying and Understanding: Reading the Works of Victoria Welby and the Significs Movement,Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Petrilli, S. and Ponzio, A. (2005) Semiotics Unbounded: Interpretative Routes through the Open Network of Signs, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
One of the six fundamental functions given in the Jakobsonian speech act, determined by the contact factor of the speech act. When the main goal of the utterance is to initiate, terminate or check the channel of communication, the phatic function may dominate. The only function to be shared by humans and birds. (EA)
Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology is the study of consciousness, both as regards the nature of its acts and as the essence of the objects it intends.
Husserl’s pathbreaking work, the Logical Investigations (2001 [1900– 1901]), has deeply influenced linguistics and the theory of meaning throughout the twentieth century. It had immediate bearings on the development of structural linguistics in general and Roman Jakobson’s structuralist theory of meaning and language in particular (besides being a recurrent reference in Karl Bühler’s Theory of Language). In the Fourth Investigation, which aims at laying down a pure universal grammar, Husserl establishes language as a general abstract entity governed by ideal principles of meaning construction, sustaining any possible, empirical grammar. Husserl thus claims the existence and establishes the nature of the ‘ideal scaf-folding’ inherent in and constitutive for language as such. This notion precedes both Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of langue and Jakobson’s definition of the object of linguistics in terms of a structured whole, governed by immanent laws, i.e. a systematic pattern of relations. The purely syntactical aspects of Husserl’s outline of a universal grammar also appears to be a clear anticipation of Noam Chomsky’s universal linguistic competence.
Husserl’s theory of parts and wholes, developed in the Third Investigation, and applied to language in the Fourth, constitutes the categorical grounds on which Jakobson dev elops his notion of structure within phenomenology: namely in terms of relations of mutual or unilateral dependency (cf. his phonological laws of implication).
Husserl did not only develop an objective phenomenology of language proper, but also a phenomenology of language use. Key to this analysis – developed in the First and partially in the Fourth Investigations – is the question of how linguistic structure is bound up with the structure of our mental acts. To the extent that language serves the function of expressing meaning intentions, or cognitive representations, it must be capable of faithfully specifying the structure of our experiences and the way in which we intend the objects of our experiences. In this respect, linguistic structure is founded on prelinguistic structure. Husserl thus considers language a cognitive subsystem characterized by its relations to other cognitive subsystems (notably vision) and the intentionality of consciousness in general. Consequently, an essential task – only very rudimentarily undertaken by Husserl himself – consists in systematically elucidating the way in which prelinguistic, intentional structures of experience are grammatically and semantically specified in language.
As regards this task, evidence for the actuality of Husserl’s phenomenology of language is today given by cognitive linguistics, i.e. the research programme in linguistics in which the foundation of language structure on preconceptual, perceptual or experiential structure is a pivotal claim. Key concepts in cognitive linguistics, such as image schema and trajector/landmark, are intended to capture the exact way in which linguistic semantics is bound up with mental acts and the structure of mental meaning construction.
Phenomenology of language marshals the idea that language reveals something essential about the mind; however, not because the mind is structured like a language, but on the contrary because language faithfully specifies the intentional, preconceptual, prelinguistic structures of the mind. Language is in this respect considered a window to the mind. (PB)
FURTHER READING
Bundgaard, P. F. (2004) ‘The ideal scaffolding of language: Husserl’s fourth Logical Investigation in the light of cognitive linguistics’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 3(1): 49–80.
Husserl, E. (1973 [1939]) Experience and Judgment, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Husserl, E. (2001 [1900–1901]) Logical Investigations, London: Routledge.
As distinguished from linguistics, the term philology is usually applied to a more traditional form of language study, based on texts (particularly of bygone periods). Comparative philolology in the nineteenth century established the relationships between languages of the Indo-European family before the emergence of modern linguistics. (RH)
The fundamental unit of sound in any language. For Saussure and others, differences between phonemes are crucial in generating value. A simple example of this is the difference between the sounds in the words tin and kin in English. The distinction of the phonemes designated by k and t enables different meanings to be engendered by each word. The study of such units is the subdomain of linguistics known as ‘phonemics’ (as opposed to phonetics). (PC)
The study of speech sounds: how they are produced by the organs of speech (articulatory phonetics), how they are perceived by the ear (auditory phonetics) and their physi cal properties (acoustic phonetics). Phoneticians have also developed systems for writing down the sounds of any language, the most widely used being the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). In IPA the word phonetics is written [f
netIks]. (RS)
See also PHONEME.
The study of the sounds and sound patterns of particular languages. Phonologists list the sounds that each language has (for instance, English has the sound h as in hat, but French does not), and how the sounds are structured (English h is only found at the beginning of a syllable). (RS)
PHYSIOSEMIOSIS see SEMIOSIS
Kenneth Lee Pike (1912–2000), a long-time contributor to the Summer Institute of Linguistics, remains best recognized for his coinage (1954) and defence (Headland et al. 1990) of the terms ‘emic’ (culture-bound) and ‘etic’ (culture-free), derived from ‘phonemic’ and ‘phonetic’, respectively, and for his adventurous deployment of metaphor in methodology and theory, e.g. ‘particle, wave and field’ (1959). An eclectic, Pike has published widely in all realms of linguistics. (MA)
John Poinsot, contemporary with Galileo and Descartes, lived at a time of major revolution in intellectual culture. It was the moment in human history when ideoscopy – that is to say, science in the modern sense of specialized experimental discovery of new phenomena, in contrast to cenoscopy as the sort of science that is founded upon the common experience of all humans – began fully to take root, and gave rise to that period of intellectual euphoria called ‘The Enlightenment’, when it was possible to dream that the new sciences would eventually displace the whole of human knowledge as heretofore attained. But, as Peirce and other late moderns came to realize, ideoscopy presupposes cenoscopy; for if common experience has no independent validity as a source of knowledge, neither could the special experiences give any purchase on reality. Even special experience takes its origin from the senses and human understanding as initially unaided by instruments and mathematics! Poinsot was wholly a man of the cenoscopic past, but paradoxically, this very circumstance guaranteed his role in the future of thought beyond modernity (Sebeok 1982). For not only does ideoscopy depend upon cenoscopy, but the broadest and most fundamental of the cenoscopic sciences is precisely the doctrine of signs, or semiotics (Peirce 1998d [1908]; CP 8.342–379, EP 2: 478–483), a systematic demonstration of which Poinsot had the privilege first to work out. In showing that triadic relation provides the being common to all signs, Poinsot provided the first demonstration of a unified subject matter for semiotic inquiry. Eclipsed in his own day by the scientific work of Galileo and the philosophical work of Descartes (the former depending upon semiosis, but incognizantly; the latter blinding modern philosophy to the hard-won Latin achievement of semiotic consciousness), Poinsot nonetheless was historically the first to give thematic substance to Augustine’s turn of the fifth-century proposal that sign be regarded as a mode of being transcending the differences between nature and culture. By this achievement, Poinsot established himself as a harbinger of postmodernity in philosophy (Deely 1994b, d), to remain a figure of seminal importance long after the epistemologies inspired by Descartes would prove to entail the dead-end of solipsism. Poinsot performed this intellectual feat of establis ing semiotics as the doctrine of signs by seizing upon two earlier achievements, and combining them with the contemporary realization (Araújo 1617) that signs are irreducibly triadic. He seized first upon Boethius’s translation of Aristotle’s problem in distinguishing between substances as subjectivities requiring to be understood relative to their environment (‘transcendental relatives’), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, pure relations (‘onto-logical relatives’) having being only as suprasubjectively linking the substantial subjectivities. Poinsot then seized upon Aquinas’s realization (1266: q. 28) that pure relations as identified by Aristotle, in transcending their subjective ground, are, among the modes of being which are mind-independent, singularities, for relations alone remain unaffected in their positive being when changed circumstances make them mind-dependent. Whence, as suprasubjective, relations (‘ontological relatives’, in contrast to the subjectivity of ‘transcendental relatives’) render semiosis as a transcendence of the limits of finite subjectivity possible in the first place, and constitute ‘experience’ as a tapestry or ‘semiotic web’ (Sebeok 1975) woven precisely from pure relations, linking subjectivities and objectivities alike because terminating at ‘the other’ than the knower grounding them. (JD)
FURTHER READING
Bains, P. (2006) The Primacy of Semiosis. An Ontology of Relations, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Deely, J. (2001) Four Ages of Understanding. The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the End of the Twenty-First Century, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Poinsot, J. (1632) Tractatus de Signis, subtitled The Semiotic of John Poinsot, arranged in bilingual format by J. Deely in consultation with R. A. Powell, 2nd edn, South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press, 2010. First edition available also in electronic form, Charlottesville, VA: Intelex Corp., 1992.
A means of showing courtesy, deference, consideration and social position in language. Politeness can consist of key words added to a freestanding utterance such as ‘please’. It can also consist of words already coded as polite forms, for example the formal second person Lei in Italian as opposed to the informal tu. Because of the contextual factors which politeness embodies so commonly and so acutely, the phenomenon has been the object of considerable scrutiny in pragmatics. (PC)
Term introduced by Bréal (1897) to refer to the capacity of signs or texts to have numerous meanings. The word ‘crack’, for example, is an instance of onomatopoeia (an icon of a specific sound) both as a verb(‘the fireworks began to crack’) and as a noun(‘a loud crack’). It is also a verb to do with breakage (‘I decided to crack it open’) and a noun (‘the money fell into the crack’). It is a noun referring to sardonic remarks (‘he made a crack about the prime minister’s poor performance’) or even as a verb designating the same (‘he started to crack wise again’). In colloquial usage it refers to highly potent cocaine crystals (‘crack’), to the join between the buttocks and, sometimes, to the vagina. In Ireland ‘craic’ (pronounced ‘crack’) often has a far more benign meaning to do with having a good time. These are just some of its possible decodings.
When extended to the level of larger texts and discourse, polysemy undoubtedly becomes more complex. In these cases, specific understandings of texts’ potential meanings might be the result of a restriction of polysemy by speech communities or by the particular kinds of composition of texts (for example, a closed text or a text from a given genre). (PC)
See also ILLOCUTION, OPEN TEXT and UNLIMITED SEMIOSIS.
FURTHER READING
Eco, U. (1979) The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Augusto Ponzio (b. 1942), philosopher of language, linguist and semiotician at the University of Bari. Ponzio is a celebrated theorist, in particular of dialogue, alterity, subjectivity and global communication. He is well known for his collaborations and friendships with, as well as his presentations of the work of, Schaff, Levinas, Barthes, Kristeva, Bakhtin, Sebeok and Rossi-Landi. He has also written about Peirce, Wittgenstein, Marx and Peter of Spain. He has collaborated with numerous scholars including Julia Ponzio, Cosimo Caputo, Massimo Bonfantini and, especially, Susan Petrilli.
Despite his towering achievement in his many fields of interest, it is possible to argue that, at the very core of his thinking, there lies a single concept: dialogue not as an initiative but as a constant demand. It is a conception of dialogue which, in going beyond the liberal notion of meeting others halfway, negotiating and compromising, actually opposes such agentive programmes, recognizing in dialogue a compulsion and demand rather than self-identified goodwill. Such a framing of dialogue is to be found, too, of course, in Bakhtin; as Ponzio and Petrilli succinctly state:
For Bakhtin, dialogue is not the result of an initiative we decide to take, but rather it is imposed, something to which one is subjected. Dialogue is not the result of opening towards the other, but of the impossibility of closing.
(Ponzio and Petrilli 1998: 28)
Yet, it would be a mistake to imagine that dialogue after Ponzio is merely a gloss on Bakhtin and Levinas. And as Ponzio puts it, dialogue should not be seen in the service of mere self-affirmation:
On the contrary, as formulated by Levinas, dialogue is passive witness to the impossibility of escape from the other; it is passive witness to the fact that the other cannot be eluded, to the condition of involvement with the other apart from initiative taken by the subject who is called to answer to the other and for the other. The ‘I’ is constitutionally, structurally dialogic in the sense that it testifies to the relation with otherness, whether the otherness of others or the otherness of self.
(Ponzio 2006c: 11)
For Ponzio, then, dialogue provides the crucial means for addressing the communication–ontology relationship, especially in the phase of global communication.
What global communication has made clear is that, in touting the inclusiveness of capitalism, it has reached a crisis point in the latter’s own palpable logic of exclusion. What capitalism represses – and it does so in many forms – is the very compulsion of dialogue that his work describes.
Taking his cue from Thomas A. Sebeok, Ponzio views semiosis in a ‘global’ perspective which is not fixated on anthroposemiosis alone, despite the fact that, in his formation ‘communication-production’, the profit-making imperative of global communication has assumed a crucial position and has become, potentially, disastrous for the planet. Where theory is concerned, Ponzio demonstrates that there is a need to adhere to the larger picture of semiosis. In Semiotica dell’io (Sebeok et al. 2001), inspired, principally, by Sebeok’s observations on the semiotic self, Ponzio does not stop at mere societal observation. Rather, his ‘depth’ analysis sees sign processes at work across all practices and across all species, in the process of communication where dialogue is repeatedly stymied. Although he proceeds from the tyrannies of global communication and its inculcation in ‘communication-production’, he also identifies the general repression of dialogue in deriving from the denial of communication beyond the verbal.
Ponzio’s critique of the category of ‘Identity’ (see Ponzio 2006c) demonstrates that ‘care of the self’ can only realistically proceed from a dialogic ‘care of others’, where ‘others’ must mean the entirety of the semiosphere. It is in this sense that Ponzio has been compelled to map the contours of a future semioethics. (PC)
FURTHER READING
Ponzio, A. (1990) Man as a Sign, ed. S. Petrilli, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ponzio, A. (1993) Signs, Dialogue and Ideology, ed. S. Petrilli, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ponzio, A. (2007) The Dialogic Nature of Sign, Ottawa: Legas.
Name of a famous educational Jansenist foundation in seventeenth-century France, where Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694) and Claude Lancelot (1615–1695) produced an innovative French grammar, the Grammaire générale et raisonée (1660), based on radical pedagogic principles. The ‘rationality’ of the method was based on the assumption that certain principles applied to all languages and that all languages could give expression to certain universal operations of the human mind. Arnauld and Pierre Nicole (1625– 1695) co-authored an accompanying Art de penser, commonly referred to as ‘The Port-Royal Logic’. These works are often taken to epitomize the thesis that the structure of thought determines the structure of linguistic expression. (For the opposite thesis, see Saussure.) (RH)
POSITIVISMThe philosophical approach or movement, originating with Henri Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and Auguste Comte (1798–1857), which stressed the importance of basing knowledge on positive facts deriving from direct experience. Many features of the positivist programme can be found in the work of earlier empiricists, including Hume and Kant, but positivism distinguished itself by its strict adherence to the methods of the exact sciences and by its sharp hostility to metaphysics and religion.
The proponents of positivism (positivists) were strongly opposed to basing knowledge claims on speculative beliefs and insisted that no hypothesis can be admitted for serious consideration unless it is capable of verification by direct observation. Positivists were much enamoured with the successes of experimental science and were convinced that scientific method was the only route to truth for inquiry of any kind. The positivists wanted to remake philosophy and the social sciences in the image of the hard sciences.
Though hostile to traditional religion, positivism was promoted as a sort of secular religion, a religion of humanity. Human progress was described as the movement from a theological base, involving belief in the supernatural, through a metaphysical phase, involving much speculation and appeal to abstractions, to a final positive stage where metaphysical abstractions (e.g. final causes) are dismissed, and all knowledge is derived from experience and known scientific laws. As positivism developed after Comte, for example in the work of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and Ernst Mach, it ceased to be promoted as a secular religion, but it continued to be concerned with the advancement of society and the well-being of humankind. Positivists typically believed that the way to a better world is through mastery of nature, which can only be achieved through a sufficient increase in scientific knowledge.
Through related movements and programmes, positivism was spread throughout philosophy. In Vienna a group of philosophers known as the Vienna Circle expanded on the ideas of Ernst Mach to develop logical positivism. This version of positivism continued to be staunchly opposed to metaphysics, but focused mainly on the process of verification by which knowledge claims can be justified. The Tractatus Logico-philosophicus of Ludwig Wittgenstein was a key text for logical positivists, among whom could be counted Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Felix Kaufmann, Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank and Rudolf Carnap. Key members of the Vienna Circle emigrated to the United States in the early 1930s and, with Charles W. Morris, formed the Unity of Science Movement, dedicated to establishing a comprehensive empirical philosophy based on a rigorous scientific methodology guided by formal logic. Morris introduced semiotic principles to the members of this movement, in particular the important tripartite division of semiotics into syntactics, semantics and pragmatics. In psychology and the philosophy of psychology, behaviourism incorporated the main principles of positivism. Through these and other outgrowths, positivism exerted an enormous influence on analytical and linguistic philosophy in the twentieth century.
Pragmatism, too, with its emphasis on scientific method and on practical consequences, and with its mission to improve society, bears some resemblance to positivism. But pragmatists never wanted to dismiss metaphysics wholesale, hoping, rather, to purify it, and in other ways deviated from positivism. Peirce believed that positivism was fatally nominalistic and he noticed that its insistence on verification by direct observation precluded historical knowledge (Peirce 1984: 45, n. 8). Other pragmatists, in particular John Dewey, and many contemporary philosophers, object to the many dichotomous distinctions positivists espoused, for instance the distinction between metaphysics and science, facts and values, the analytic and the synthetic, and the verifiable and the non-verifiable. Recent philosophy has been, to a large extent, an undoing of the ill effects of positivism and a rethinking of its achievements. The international movement toward a Peircean brand of semiotics is largely a movement away from positivism. (NH)
FURTHER READING
Ayer, A. J. (1946) Language, Truth and Logic, rev. edn, New York: Oxford University Press.
Kremer-Marietti, A. (1998) ‘Comte, Isidore-Auguste-Marie-François-Xavier’, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, London: Routledge.
Peirce, C. S. (1984) ‘Critique of positivism’ (1867–1868), in Writings of Charles S. Peirce, Vol. 2, ed. E. C. Moore, M. H. Fisch, et al., Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Posthumanism refers to a body of thought seeking to go beyond the legacies of humanism – its maskings of political, sexual, racial and species exclusions under discourses of universality. Posthumanism is the philosophical counterpart of the visionary notion of the posthuman, a conceptual trope conveying images of biotechnological or cybernetic systemic couplings, especially as these are taken to comprise an evolutionary vector beyond the human (sometimes called transhumanism). Posthumanism is also to be distinguished from antihumanism, a stance of negation or misanthropic rejection of humanist ideals more properly associated with modernist firebrands like Filippo Marinetti or Wyndham Lewis. From a semiotic perspective, the implication of posthumanism is that the production and processing of semiosis pervades the non-human cosmos as well as the human world.
As a philosophical idea, posthumanism elicits primary anticipatory strands of poststructuralist and postmodernist thought. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch is perhaps the archetype of posthumanist figures. Michel Foucault echoes Nietzsche in his famous prediction at the end of The Order of Things, that ‘man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (Foucault 1973: 387). This line of philosophical reflection on the evanescence or contingency of the humanist subject ranges from Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as that focuses on notions of becoming-other and heterogenesis.
While texts such as Robert Pepperell’s Posthuman Condition (2002) lean to the technoid side of posthumanism, the recent work of Neil Badmington, Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter has delineated a ‘critical posthumanism’ (Badmington 2007) that stresses the range of the concept beyond the cyborgian imaginary. For instance, Cary Wolfe presents an ethical posthumanism that rethinks the humanist rejection of non-human or animal subjectivity. Wolfe draws on Jacques Derrida and Niklas Luhmann to observe how, if pressed upon, the metaphysics of humanism self-deconstruct. In sum, posthumanism at its most productive is not the rejection but the deconstruction of humanism. (BC)
FURTHER READING
Wolfe, C. (2009) What is Posthumanism?, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Definitions of poststructuralism are infrequently found: this is partly because the phenomenon described by the term is so nebulous; partly because, as an intellectual current, it is especially difficult to periodize; and partly because many of its proponents purport to eschew definitions. Undoubtedly, it has a relation to ‘structuralism’, but it is an uneasy one.
While structuralism might be said to embody the notion of a system of signs in which humans can collectively participate – derived from the ‘functionalist’ aspect of Saussure’s concept of langue – poststructuralism envisages a fundamentally different relation between signs and humans. Structuralist approaches to cultural phenomena benefited from analyses which often took signs isolated from their contexts as the object of discussion. Poststructuralism, by contrast, stresses not only how signs are related to other signs but also how the human subject always apprehends signs in the plural, in chains, as discourse. As Silverman insists, ‘signification occurs only through discourse … discourse requires a subject and … the subject itself is an effect of discourse’ (1983: vii). Put another way, signification is not embodied in the ‘meaning’ of one sign but in a sign as it is related to other signs; signification also has to be related to the human or humans who use the signs at a given moment; and, crucially, the sign user is not outside the discourse, using it in a perfectly controlled way, but is instead caught up in it, to the extent where s/he is actually a product of that discourse. These propositions are virtually axiomatic, albeit in nuanced ways, for all the major poststructuralists: Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari.
However, the immediate Saussurean roots of the poststructuralist perspective actually pre-date those currents of thought in the humanities called structuralism which became popular in France in the 1950s and 1960s and in parts of the Anglo-Saxon intellectual world in the 1970s and 1980s. The father of poststructuralism was the French linguist Emile Benveniste, whose writings of the 1940s made possible the critiques of Saussure and structuralism by Lacan in the late 1950s and Derrida in the 1960s.
Chiefly, Benveniste drew attention to some anomalies in Saussure’s assertion of the arbitrary nature of the sign. That the sign was ‘bipartite’, made up of a signifié, concept, and a signifiant, sound image (frequently translated in a misleading way which has become the norm as ‘signified’ and ‘signifier’ – for a corrective, see Harris 1987 and Introduction, above, pp. 8–9), was accepted. However, Benveniste located the arbitrary nature in signification; that is, in the relation between the sign and the reality (or, to use other terms, referent or object). The relations in the Saussurean sign, both parts being mental, were rather to be seen as necessary: the sound image and the concept were so close as to be almost one.
What Benveniste showed was that sign and signification were highly susceptible to conflation. The knowledge that the word cat only refers to the feline quadruped in an arbitrary way is omnipresent because it is clear that there are other ways of referring to the animal in different national languages: chat, gatto, etc. But the sign used for this purpose is composed of a relationship so strong and so close that its arbitrary nature in referring to reality can only be revealed ‘under the impassive regard of Sirius’ (Benveniste 1971 [1939]: 44). In short, for the habitual user of the sign the way it refers feels unquestionably natural.
So, a linguistic sign might have value by virtue of its difference from other signs in a system (langue), and this might be recognized through abstract thought. But the existence of this foundation for arbitrariness in signification is customarily overlooked because of the close, necessary relations in the sign. As a result, humans are subject to a system which they ultimately know to be constructed and arbitrary; in order to take their place and communicate with others they have to subscribe to a representation of the world which, however much they might feel it to be natural, is actually constructed. To use a typical poststructuralist trope, the subject is ‘always already’ constituted by the system.
The reverberations of this reorientation of the sign were to be felt throughout the manifestations of poststructuralism. Notions such as ‘deconstruction’, ‘the decentring of the subject’, ‘interpellation’ and ‘simulation’ are all in some way derived from Benveniste’s deflection of the aims of semiology.
Poststructuralism was never a movement recognized within its ‘native’ France (Easthope 1988: xxiii) and its success in parts of the Anglo-Saxon intellectual milieu was always unlikely to be mirrored within semiotics. On its home ground of anthroposemiotics the totalizing cultural pessimism which was characteristic of many brands of poststructuralism was already countered by the social semiotics which followed the work of Halliday. The very fundamentals of the latter, itself distantly related to the early critique of Saussure by Vološinov but largely based on empirical work, stressed conflict between sign systems and delineated a space for human resistance to pre-existing structures. On different grounds, poststructuralism was to fare even less well. The comprehensive version of the sign derived from Peirce which took hold outside of France and the United Kingdom in the closing decades of the twentieth century, coupled with the growing awareness of the importance of biosemiotics, only served to further reveal poststructuralism’s semiological bias and anthropocentric limitations. (PC)
FURTHER READING
Benveniste, E. (1971) Problems in General Linguistics, trans. M. E. Meek, Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press.
Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lacan, J. (1977) Écrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan, London: Tavistock.
The term ‘pragmaticism’ was introduced in 1905 by Charles S. Peirce to distinguish his own conception of pragmatism from that of William James and Ferdinand C. S. Schiller (CP 5.414– 415). Peirce rejected the idea of ‘Doing’ as ‘the Be-all and the End-all of life’ (CP 5.429). Differently from vulgar pragmatism, meaning is a general law of conduct independent from the particular circumstances of action. As such, it is always general and communal. (SP)
In Charles Morris’s theory of semiosis, the pragmatical dimension of the functioning of signs pertains to ‘the relation of signs to interpreters’ (1938: 6) and the study of this dimension is called pragmatics. In linguistics, pragmatics has often been treated as a waste basket to which problems were referred that could not be dealt with in syntax and semantics. As a result, in part of the pragmatic literature, its domain looks like a random selection of topics, in particular: deixis, presuppositions, implicatures, speech acts and conversations (see Levinson 1983). It may be more useful, however, to go back to Morris’s original definition and to view pragmatics as a general functional (i.e. cognitive, social and cultural) perspective on language and language use, aimed at the investigation of processes of dynamic and negotiated meaning generation in interaction. Language use is then viewed as a form of action with real-world consequences and firmly embedded in a context. (JV)
See also AUSTIN, CONSTATIVE, GRICE, ILLOCUTION, LOCUTION, MEANING, PERFORMATIVE, PERLOCUTION and RELEVANCE THEORY.
FURTHER READING
Verschueren, J. (1999) Understanding Pragmatics, London: Edward Arnold/New York: Oxford University Press.
Pragmatism is a set of doctrines and methods elaborated by Charles S. Peirce and William James and continued above all by G. H. Mead, C. I. Lewis, Charles Morris and John Dewey. ‘Pragmatism’ makes its official entry into philosophical literature in 1898 when James held his conference ‘Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results’, at G. H. Howinson’s Berkeley Philosophical Union. But pragmatism was expounded for the first time in a series of six articles by Peirce, published in Popular Science Monthly between 1877 and 1878 in the series ‘Illustrations of the Logic of Science’ (cf. CP 5.358–387, 5.388–410, 2.645– 660, 2.669–693, 6.395–427, 2.619– 644). However, as a thought system it may be traced back to an original nucleus of three writings by Peirce of 1868 (CP 5.213–263, 264–317, 318– 357), subsequently developed in his writings of 1877–1878. In his search for the origins, Peirce considers Nicholas St John Green as the ‘grandfather’ of pragmatism (implicitly reserving the title of ‘father’ for himself). The latter, in turn, evoked the Scot, Alexander Bain, author of The Emotions and the Will (1859), urging the importance of applying his definition of belief as ‘that upon which a man is prepared to act’ (CP 5.12).
In general, pragmatism re-evaluates the importance of action in cognitive processes in the light of discoveries in biology, psychology and sociology traceable to Charles Darwin. Chauncey Wright, who was a member of the ‘Metaphysical Club’, also recalled Darwin and it was in the meetings which took place between the end of 1871 and the beginning of 1872 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that Peirce (cf. ‘The Doctrine of Chances’, CP 5.12) situated the birth of pragmatism. The ‘Metaphysical Club’ meetings were organized both in his and in James’s study with the participation of scientists, theologians and lawyers. The influence of Darwinian biologism is obvious in Peirce’s essay ‘Fixation of Belief’ (1877) where he states that logicality in regard to practical matters might result from the action of natural selection (cf. CP 5.366).
According to pragmatism, mind (or spirit or thought) is not a substance, as in Cartesian dualism, nor is it a process or act as understood by idealism, nor a set of relations as in classical empiricism, but rather it is a function exercised by verbal and nonverbal signs. The study of signs and of verbal language in particular is therefore the condition for understanding mind (cf. Morris, Six Theories of Mind, 1932). Pragmatism is also a theory of meaning understood as the practical verifiability of the truth of an assertion. In ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’ (1878), Peirce intended to demonstrate:
how impossible it is that we should have an idea in our minds which relates to anything but conceived sensible effects of things … It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.
(CP 5.401–402)
This aspect was taken up but significantly modified by James who transformed pragmatism into a theory of truth. James interpreted pragmatism in terms of instrumentality and, therefore, of the dependency of knowledge on the needs of action and emotions (The Will to Believe, 1897). For James that which has satisfying practical consequences is true. Consequently he emphasizes the practical value of religious faith, of the will to believe, of the reasons of the heart (cf. also James’s Pragmatism, 1907). Dewey also insisted on this aspect which he vigorously developed into his own version of pragmatism denominated ‘experimentalism’ or ‘instrumentalism’. In Italy, pragmatism was developed along Peircean lines by Giovanni Vailati and Mario Calderoni and along Jamesian lines by G. Papini and G. Prezzolini. Ferdinand C. S. Schiller (cf. Studies in Humanism, 1907) oriented his approach in James’s direction asserting the relativity of knowledge to personal or social utility.
Peirce returned to pragmatism in his set of seven conference-lessons held at Harvard at the initiative of James (cf. CP 5.14–40, 5.180–212), in which he identified pragmatism with the logic of abduction and with the theory of inquiry and implicitly, therefore, with logic and semiotics. In his Monist articles of 1905 (CP 5.411–437, 5.438– 463, 4.530–572), Peirce established his distance from pragmatism as conceived by James and Schiller, identifying his own position with the substitute term pragmaticism. (SP)
FURTHER READING
Morris, C. (1937) Logical Positivism, Pragmatism and Scientific Empiricism, Paris: Hermann.
Murphy, J. P. (1990) Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Peirce, C. S. (1907) ‘Pragmatism’, in Peirce (1998) The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 2, ed. Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington,IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 398–433.
Originally known as the Prague Linguistics Circle (PLC), founded in 1926 by V. Mathesius, B. Havránek, J. Mukarovský, R. Jakobson, N. Trubetzkoy and S. Karcevskij. Dedicated to the study of Slavic languages and literature, poetics, phonology and morphology. According to Waugh and Monville-Burston (1990: 6), it was Jakobson who coined the term ‘structuralism’ for the group. The first detailed presentation of the PLC programme occurred at the First International Congress of Slavists in 1929 in Prague. Also initiated in 1929 was the series Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague. For a clear statement of the fundamental propositions of the PLC, see ‘Thèses’ (with Bally, Jakobson, Mathesius, Sechehaye and Trubetzkoy, originally presented April 1928 and reprinted in Toman 1995).
According to the official by-laws of the PLC (dated 1 December 1930, translated and reprinted in Toman 1995: 265), the primary purpose of the PLC ‘is to work on the basis of functional-structural method toward progress in linguistic research’. Roman Jakobson was Vice-President of the PLC until 1939 when he was obliged to leave as the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. In post-war years, the membership of the PLC changed considerably, in particular due to the absence of Jakobson and Bogatyrëv and the death of Trubetzkoy and Mathesius. In some accounts, the PLC is said to have ceased to exist in 1939. However, Mukarovský and others continued to lecture and conduct research. The post-Soviet era witnessed a revival of the Prague School in the 1990s. (EA)
FURTHER READING
Galan, F. W. (1985) Historic Structures: The Prague School Project, 1828–1946, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Steiner, P. (ed.) (1982) The Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929–1946, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Winner, T. G. (1995) ‘Prague structuralism: Neglect and resulting fallacies’, Semiotica,105(3/4): 243–276.
Propositions differ from sentences and speech acts in that different sentences or speech acts (e.g. ‘The cat is on the mat’, ‘Is the cat on the mat?’ and ‘Cat, on the mat!’) may contain the same proposition, consisting of a reference (an expression identifying any thing, process, event or action) and a predication (what is ‘predicated’ or said about a thing, process, event or action identified by means of a referring expression). It is propositions, not sentences or speech acts, that are true or false. Assertive speech acts can nevertheless be said to be true or false because it is the nature of their illocutionary force to present a state of affairs as true or false. Thus one and the same sentence form (e.g. ‘Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo’) has different truth conditions associated with it, depending on the precise proposition it expresses (which will vary in relation to, for example, the reference of ‘Napoleon’ which may be the name of a historical figure or the speaker’s dog). (JV)
See also MEANING.
FURTHER READING
Lyons, J. (1995) Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
As suggested by Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory, human understanding of a token’s membership of a category is not defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Rather a category is considered as possessing a radial structure with prominent or salient members close to its core and gradually less representative members toward the periphery. Membership is therefore assessed in terms of prototypicality. A prototype of a category is a core instance which possesses most or all of the basic features of that category. Therefore a sparrow is experienced as a prototypical instance of the category BIRD, whereas an ostrich is a peripheral member. (PB)
Where kinesics refers to bodily movement in communication, proxemics is concerned with communication derived from the distances and territorial occupation of communicating agents. As part of his investigations into nonverbal communication, the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall considered proxemics in the distance regulation and crowding habits of animals, perceptions of spaces (including cultural phenomena such as cities) and in the complex interactions that make up the everyday life of contemporary humans (see, especially, Hall 1969). Proxemics has been of immense importance in environments such as zoos, circuses and wherever there is human interaction with other animals: it helps identify the line where an animal might feel under attack, dominated, vaguely intimidated or comfortable with the presence of another. It has obvious applications to human/human communication, too, since it allows a delineation of body space in interactions. Additionally, it may be instrumental in defining the semiotic self which Sebeok (1979c) sees as arising somewhere between the skin of an animal and a ‘bubble’ identified by Hediger as a non-material extension of the body. (PC)
See also BIOSEMIOTICS, BIRDWHISTELL and ZOOSEMIOTICS.
FURTHER READING
Hall, E. T. (1974) Handbook for Proxemic Research, New York: Society for the Anthropology of Visual Communication.
The study of lan-guage and the mind, or the psychology of language. The mechanisms for producing and understanding language are a central concern of psycholinguists. Another is the way language might be stored in the brain. Many experimental methods have been devised to investigate these matters: they include measuring the time it takes for people to understand or respond to speech that has been distorted in various ways, and observing the speech errors that people make in different circumstances.
Another important concern of psycholinguists is the acquisition of language by young people. Acquisition of all languages seems to follow regular stages: infants produce single words first, followed by two-word sequences and then longer utterances with the beginnings of syntax. Speech and language pathology are related areas that have an important practical dimension. They also raise difficult issues about the relationship between language and other aspects of the mind, such as memory, general intelligence and emotion. A young person who has difficulty in learning to talk, or who later is slow at learning to read at school, may have a purely linguistic problem; often, though, there may be a link with other psychological problems that a young person is experiencing. (RS)