The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  The trouble is that we are face to face with a phenomenon which we can’t express by our ordinary phenomenal language. Yet we are obliged to deal with it; it happens, and we cannot dismiss it as a “semantical relation.” We sense, moreover, that this phenomenon has the most radical consequences for our thinking about man. To refuse to deal with it because it is troublesome would be fatal. It is as if an astronomer developed a theory of planetary motion and said that his theory holds true of planets A, B, C, and D but that planet E is an exception. It makes zigzags instead of ellipses. Planet E is a scandal to good astronomy; therefore we disqualify planet E as failing to live up to the best standards of bodies in motion.

  This is roughly the attitude of some modern semanticists and semioticists toward the act of naming. If the relation of symbol to thing symbolized be considered as anything other than a sign calling forth a response, then this relation is “wrong.” Say whatever you like about a pencil, Korzybski used to say, but never say it is a pencil. The word is not the thing, said Chase; you can’t eat the word oyster. According to some semanticists, the advent of symbolization is a major calamity in the history of the human race. Their predicament is not without its comic aspects. Here are scientists occupied with a subject matter of which they, the scientists, disapprove. For the sad fact is that we shall continue to say “This is a pencil” rather than “This object I shall refer to in the future by the sound pencil.”

  By the semanticists’ own testimony we are face to face with an extraordinary phenomenon—even though it be “wrong.” But if, instead of deploring this act of naming as a calamity, we try to see it for what it is, what can we discover?

  When I name an unknown thing or hear the name from you, a remarkable thing happens. In some sense or other, the thing is said to “be” its name or symbol. The semanticists are right: this round thing is certainly not the word ball. Yet unless it becomes, in some sense or other, the word ball in our consciousness, we will never know the ball! Cassirer’s thesis was that everything we know we know through symbolic media, whether words, pictures, formulae, or theories. As Mrs. Langer put it, symbols are the vehicles of meaning.

  The transformation of word into thing in our consciousness can be seen in the phenomenon of false onomatopoeia. The words limber, flat, furry, fuzzy, round, yellow, sharp sound like the things they signify, not because the actual sounds resemble the thing or quality, but because the sound has been transformed in our consciousness to “become” the thing signified. If you don’t believe this, try repeating one of these words several dozen times: All at once it will lose its magic guise as symbol and become the poor drab vocable it really is.

  This modern notion of the symbolic character of our awareness turns out to have a very old history, however. The Scholastics, who incidentally had a far more adequate theory of symbolic meaning in some respects than modern semioticists, used to say that man does not have a direct knowledge of essences as do the angels but only an indirect knowledge, a knowledge mediated by symbols. John of St. Thomas observed that symbols come to contain within themselves the thing symbolized in alio esse, in another mode of existence.

  But what has this symbolic process got to do with the “is” I mentioned earlier, with the unprecedented affirmation of existence? We know that the little copula “is” is a very late comer in the evolution of languages. Many languages contain no form of the verb “to be.” Certainly the most primitive sentence, a pointing at a particular thing and a naming, does not contain the copula. Nevertheless it is a pairing, an apposing of word and thing, an act the very essence of which is an “is-saying,” an affirming of the thing to be what it is for both of us.

  Once we have grasped the nature of symbolization, we may begin to see its significance for our view of man’s place in the world. I am assuming that we share, to begin with, an empirical-realistic view of the world, that we believe that there are such things as rocks, planets, trees, dogs, which can be at least partially known and partially explained by science, and that man takes his place somewhere in the scheme. The faculty of language, however, confers upon man a very peculiar position in this scheme—and not at all the position we establish in viewing him as a “higher organism.”

  The significance of language may be approached in the following way. In our ordinary theoretical view of the world, we see it as a process, a dynamic succession of energy states. There are subatomic particles and atoms and molecules in motion; there are gaseous bodies expanding or contracting; there are inorganic elements in chemical interaction; there are organisms in contact with an environment, responding and adapting accordingly; there are animals responding to each other by means of sign behavior.

  This state of affairs we may think of as a number of terms in interaction, each with all the others. Each being is in the world, acting upon the world and itself being acted upon by the world.

  But when a man appears and names a thing, when he says this is water and water is cool, something unprecedented takes place. What the third term, man, does is not merely enter into interaction with the others—though he does this too—but stand apart from two of the terms and say that one “is” the other. The two things which he pairs or identifies are the word he speaks or hears and the thing he sees before him.

  This is not only an unprecedented happening; it is also, as the semanticists have noted, scandalous. A is clearly not B. But were it not for this cosmic blunder, man would not be man; he would never be capable of folly and he would never be capable of truth. Unless he says that A is B, he will never know A or B; he will only respond to them. A bee is not as foolish as man, but it also cannot tell the truth. All it can do is respond to its environment.

  What are the consequences for our thinking about man? There are a great many consequences, epistemological, existential, religious, psychiatric. There is space here to mention only one, the effect it has on our minimal concept of man. I do not mean our concept of his origin and his destiny, which is, of course, the province of religion. I mean, rather, our working concept, as our minimal working concept of water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen.

  An awareness of the nature of language must have the greatest possible consequences for our minimal concept of man. For one thing it must reveal the ordinary secular concept of man held in the West as not merely inadequate but quite simply mistaken. I do not refer to the Christian idea of man as a composite of body and soul, a belief which is professed by some and given lip service by many but which can hardly be said to be a working assumption of secular learning. We see man—when I say we, I mean 95 per cent of those who attend American high schools and universities—as the highest of the organisms: He stands erect, he apposes thumb and forefinger, his language is far more complex than that of the most advanced Cebus azarae. But the difference is quantitative, not qualitative. Man is a higher organism, standing in direct continuity with rocks, soil, fungi, protozoa, and mammals.

  This happens not to be true, however, and in a way it is unfortunate. I say unfortunate because it means the shattering of the old dream of the Enlightenment—that an objective-explanatory-causal science can discover and set forth all the knowledge of which man is capable. The dream is drawing to a close. The existentialists have taught us that what man is cannot be grasped by the sciences of man. The case is rather that man’s science is one of the things that man does, a mode of existence. Another mode is speech. Man is not merely a higher organism responding to and controlling his environment. He is, in Heidegger’s words, that being in the world whose calling it is to find a name for Being, to give testimony to it, and to provide for it a clearing.

  8

  TOWARD A TRIADIC THEORY OF MEANING

  IT IS A MATTER for astonishment, when one comes to think of it, how little use linguistics and other sciences of language are to psychiatrists. When one considers that the psychiatrist spends most of his time listening and talking to patients, one might suppose that there would be such a thing as a basic science of listening-and-talking, a
s indispensable to psychiatrists as anatomy to surgeons. Surgeons traffic in body structures. Psychiatrists traffic in words. Didn’t Harry Stack Sullivan say that psychiatry properly concerns itself with transactions between people and that most of these transactions take the form of language? Yet if there exists a basic science of listening-and-talking I have not heard of it. What follows is a theory of language as behavior. It is not new. Its fundamentals were put forward by the American philosopher Charles Peirce three-quarters of a century ago. It shall be the contention of this article that, although Peirce is recognized as the founder of semiotic, the theory of signs, modern behavioral scientists have not been made aware of the radical character of his ideas about language. I also suspect that the state of the behavioral sciences vis-à-vis language is currently in such low spirits, not to say default, that Peirce’s time may have come.

  If most psychiatrists were asked why they don’t pay much attention to the linguistic behavior, considered as such, of their patients, they might give two sorts of answers, both reasonable enough. One runs as follows: “Well, after all, I have to be more interested in what the patient is saying than in the words and syntax with which he says it. “ And if, like most of us, he has been exposed to the standard academic behavioral sciences, he might add, again reasonably enough: “Well, of course we know that conversation is a series of learned responses, but these are very subtle events, occurring mostly inside the head, and so there is not much we can say about them in the present state of knowledge.”

  Both explanations are familiar, reasonable, and dispiriting. But what is chiefly remarkable about them is that they are contradictory. No one has ever explained how a psychiatrist can be said to be “responding” to a patient when he, the psychiatrist, listens to the patient tell a dream, understands what is said, and a year later writes a paper about it. To describe the psychiatrist’s behavior as a response is to use words loosely.

  Charles Peirce was an unlucky man. His two most important ideas ran counter to the intellectual currents of his day, were embraced by his friends—and turned into something else. William James took one idea and turned it into a pragmatism which, whatever its value, is not the same thing as Peirce’s pragmaticism. Peirce’s triadic theory has been duly saluted by latter-day semioticists—and turned into a trivial instance of learning theory. Freud was lucky. The times were ready for him and he had good enemies. It is our friends we should beware of.

  What follows does not pretend to offer the psychiatrist an adequate theory of language sprung whole and entire like Minerva from Jove’s head. It is offered as no more than a sample of another way of looking at things. I hope that it might either stimulate or irritate behavioral scientists toward the end that they will devise operational means of confirming or disconfirming these statements—or perhaps even launch more fruitful studies than this very tentative investigation. What follows is adapted freely from Peirce, with all credit to Peirce, and space will not be taken to set down what was originally Peirce and what are the adaptations. Here again Peirce was unlucky, in that his views on language were put forward as part of a metaphysic, i.e., a theory of reality, and in a language uncongenial to modern behavioral attitudes. To say so is not to put down Peirce’s metaphysic. But the problem here is to disentangle from the metaphysic those insights which are germane to a view of language as behavior.

  First I shall give a brief statement of what I take to be Peirce’s theory of language considered as a natural phenomenon, i.e., not as a logic or a formal structure but as overt behavior open to scientific inquiry. There shall follow a loose list of postulates which I take to be implied by Peirce’s triadic theory of signs. These “postulates,” unlike the arbitrary postulates of a mathematical system, are empirical statements which are more or less self-evident. From them certain other statements can be deduced. Their value will depend both on the degree to which the postulates are open to confirmation and the usefulness of the deduced statements to such enterprises as the psychiatrist’s understanding of his own transactions with his patients.

  Peirce believed that there are two kinds of natural phenomena. First there are those events which involve “dyadic relations,” such as obtain in the “physical forces…between pairs of particles.” The other kind of event entails “triadic relations”:

  All dynamical action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects…or at any rate is a resultant of such action between pairs. But by “semiosis” I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.

  If A throws B away and B hits C in the eye, this event may be understood in terms of two dyadic relations, one between A and B, the other between B and C. But if A gives B to C, a genuine triadic relation exists. “Every genuine triadic relation involves meaning.” An index sign is part of a dyadic relation. An index refers to the object it denotes by virtue of really being affected by that object. Examples of indexes: a low barometer as an index of rain, the cry of warning of a driver to a pedestrian. A symbol, however, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. “The index is physically connected with its object…but the symbol is connected with its object by virtue of…the symbol-using mind.”

  Dyadic events are, presumably, those energy exchanges conventionally studied by the natural sciences: subatomic particles colliding, chemical reactions, actions of force-fields on bodies, physical and chemical transactions across biological membranes, neuron discharges, etc.

  Triadic events, on the other hand, characteristically involve symbols and symbol users. Moreover, a genuine triadic relation cannot be reduced to a series of dyadic relations. Peirce seems to be saying that when a symbol user receives a symbol as “meaning” such and such an object, we may not understand this event as a sequence of dyadic events or energy exchanges even though dyadic events and energy exchanges are involved: sound waves in air, excitation of sensory end-organ, afferent nerve impulse, electro colloidal synaptic event, efferent nerve impulse, muscle contraction, or glandular secretion.

  Peirce’s distinction between dyadic and triadic behavior has been noted before, but so pervasive has been the influence of what might be called dyadic behaviorism that Peirce’s “triadic relation” has been recognized only to the degree that it can be set forth as a congeries of dyads. Morris, for example, interprets Peirce’s triad as implying that in addition to response and stimulus there is a third factor, a “reinforcing” state of affairs. This is like saying that Einstein’s special theory will be accepted only to the degree that it can be verified by Newtonian mechanics. Like Newtonian mechanics, dyadic theory can account for perhaps 98 per cent of natural phenomena. Unfortunately the phenomenon of talking-and-listening falls in the remaining 2 per cent.

  What would happen if we took Peirce seriously? That is to say, if we retain the posture of behavioral science which interests itself only in the overt behavior of other organisms, what are we to make of observable behavior which cannot be understood as a series of dyadic energy transactions? What has happened in the past is that we have admitted of course that there is such a thing as symbol-mongering, as naming things, as uttering sentences which are true or false, as “rules” by which names are assigned and sentences formed. We have admitted that such activity is a natural phenomenon and as such is open to scientific investigation. But what kind of scientific investigation? We have gotten around the difficulty by treating the products of symbol-mongering formally, by what Carnap calls the formal sciences (logic, mathematics, syntax), while assigning the activity itself to a factual science, in this case learning theory, which has not, however, been able to give an account of it. It is no secret that learning theorists will have no truck with symbols and meaning. Most textbooks of psychology do not list the word symbol in their indexes. Indeed, how can learning theory, as
we know it, give an account of symbolic activity? If we are to believe Peirce, it cannot. For the empirical laws of learning theory are formulations of dyadic events of the form R =f(O), in which R = response variables and O = stimulus variables.*

  The question must arise then: If triadic activity is overt behavior and as such is the proper object of investigation of a factual behavioral science and is not formulable by the postulates and laws of conventional behaviorism, what manner of “postulates” and “laws,” if any, would be suitable for such a science? Or is the game worth the candle? For, as George Miller says, whenever the behavioral scientist confronts language as behavior, he is generally nagged by the suspicion that the rule-governed normative behavior of naming, of uttering true and false sentences, may somehow be beyond the scope of natural science. Shall we as behavioral scientists accordingly surrender all claim to language as a kind of behavior and yield the field to formalists, logicians, and transformational linguists? Have we not indeed already settled for a kind of tacit admission that there exists a behavior for which there is no behavioral science?

  To give some simple examples:

  Two events occurred in Helen Keller’s childhood. One can be reasonably well understood by learning theory. The other cannot.

  Helen, we know from Miss Sullivan, learned to respond to the word cake spelled in her hand by searching for a piece of cake.

  Even though we were not present and could not have seen the events inside Helen’s head if we had been, we nevertheless feel confident that learning theory can give a fairly adequate account of the kind of events which occurred. B.F. Skinner would have no difficulty explaining what happened and most of us would find his explanation useful.