Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  The embarrassment occurs, as I say, when the natural sciences, so spectacularly successful in addressing the rest of the cosmos, address man himself. I am speaking of such sciences as psychology, psychiatry, linguistics, developmental anthropology, sociology.

  Something odd happens. It is not merely, as the excuse sometimes runs, that the subject matter, man, is complex and difficult. So is the cosmos complex and difficult. But in the case of the cosmos there is the sense that the areas of ignorance are being steadily eroded by the advance of science. In the case of the sciences of man, however, the incoherence is chronic and seems to be intractable.

  Take a familiar example, psychology, Psych 101, the college survey course we all took. Here’s what one studies or at least hears about—and I mention only those items most familiar to sophomores: neurones, signals, synapses, transmitter substance, central nervous system, brain, mind, personality, self, consciousness, and later such items as ego, superego, archetypes. We all remember, but what about it?

  What is remarkable—to a Martian visitor or a college freshman who doesn’t know any better—is that there seem to be two sorts of things, very dissimilar things, named in the list. The words early in the list refer to things and events which can be seen or measured, like neurones, which are cells one can see through a microscope, or signals, which are transmissions of electrical energy, which one can measure, along a nerve fiber. The later words, like “self,” “ego,” “consciousness,” refer to items which cannot be seen as things or measured as energy exchanges. They can only be described by some such words as “mental” or “mind.”

  Here again, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, and here again you might ask, so what? For is it not a commonplace and in fact the very nature of the beast that in psychology we deal with “mental” and “physical” entities, with mind and matter? And I will not quarrel with however you wish to define matter, as stuff or things or electrons and protons in motion. And is it not also the nature of science, the assumption that goes without saying, that yes, the gap may be there, but yes, the gap is being closed or is in principle closable?

  But is it not also the nature of the beast, something that we all know in our heart of hearts, that no, the gap is not being closed, and, further, that no, the gap is not in principle closable—that is, not by the present regnant principles? How, even in principle, can mind be connected up with matter?

  In fact, in speaking of the “mental” and the “physical,” of the psyche and the brain, and with however much hope and sophistication we wish to phrase it, are we not admitting that we are still hung up on the horns of the ancient dualism of Descartes, however much we wish to believe we had gotten past it? Descartes, if you recall, divided all reality between the res cogitans, the mind, and the res extensa, matter. God alone, literally, knew what one had to do with the other.

  Could it be true, by the way, what Tocqueville said of Americans years ago: that Americans are natural-born Cartesians without having read a word of Descartes?

  But in natural science we do not like to admit that we are still split by a three-hundred-year-old dualism. Nor should it be the case.

  Might we not, in fact, reasonably expect that the appropriate scientists, psychologists in this case, can tell us what one has to do with the other, or how to get from one to the other, from “matter” to “mind”? If they are not going full steam ahead on bridging this peculiar gap, they must at least have some inkling.

  As a matter of fact, as far as I can tell, they are not and do not. In Psych 101, the problem of the ancient dualism is usually dismissed in a sentence or two—like Reagan dismissing the national debt. Or the solution is not sought but declared found. Here are some samples:

  Mind is a property of the organization of neurones, their circuitry and the neurotransmitters between them.

  Or: The relation of brain to mind is analogous to that of computer to its software.

  Or: Both brain (and its mind) and computer are information processors.

  Or: The only difference between us and the Apple computer is complexity.

  But here’s the best statement I’ve come across of such awkward things as mind and consciousness. It is from a textbook, Physiology of Behavior by Neil R. Carlson. “What can a physiological psychologist say about human self-awareness? We know that it is altered by changes in the structure or chemistry of the brain. We conclude that consciousness is a physiological function, just like behavior.” These statements are something less useful than truisms. To say that mind is a property or function of the organization of the brain is like saying that Raphael’s Orléans Madonna is a property of paint and color.

  These uneasy little sentences can be read in two ways. Either they are saying this: Everybody knows that Cartesian dualism is insurmountable, so the best we can do is a quick semantic fix of the mind/body problem by writing a “brain” sentence and a “mind” sentence, like hopping back and forth through Alice’s looking-glass. Or we can treat it as a pseudo-problem, a matter of bad semantics, ignore it, and go about our business.

  I refer to this gap in scientific knowledge as an incoherence, from the Latin incohaerere, a not-sticking-together. By this word I mean that we are not talking about an ordinary area of ignorance which is being steadily eroded by advancing knowledge—like the tremendous advances in cosmology or in the physics of subatomic particles. No, this gap is incoherent and intractable, at least from the present posture of natural science. That is to say, no amount of effort by “brain” scientists and “mind” scientists can even narrow the gap. It is not like tunneling under a river from both sides and meeting in the middle. It is more like ships passing in the night.

  Can anyone imagine how a psychology of the psyche, like Freud’s or Jung’s, however advanced, can ever make contact with a Skinnerian psychology of neurones, however modified and elaborated it is, for example, by some such refinement as Gestalt and “cognitive” psychology?

  There are similar incoherences in other sciences of man. Sociology and cultural anthropology have to do with groups and cultures, with people; this is to say, human organisms. But sociology deals with such things as self, roles; anthropology with such things as sorcery, rites. But how do you get from organism to roles and rites?

  Linguistics is about the sounds people make. Many organisms make sounds to attract attention in courtship, to scare off predators, to signal to other creatures the finding of food, to call their young, and so on, So do human organisms. But they, human organisms, also make sounds which form sentences which tell the truth about things, lie, or don’t make any sense at all. How did this come to pass?

  I can draw you a picture of an organism responding to a stimulus. Can you draw me a picture of an organism asserting a sentence?

  Even the great scientist Darwin, who connected up everything else, had trouble when he came to this peculiar activity.

  Here’s how Darwin went about it. The mental act, Darwin claimed, is essentially of the same nature in an animal as it is in man. How does he know this? He writes: “When I say to my terrier, in an eager voice (and I have made the trial many times), ‘Hi, hi, where is it?’ she at once takes it as a sign that something is to be hunted, and generally first looks quickly all around, and then rushes into the nearest thicket, to scent for any game, but finding nothing, she looks up into any neighboring tree for a squirrel. Now do these actions not clearly show that she had in her mind a general idea or concept that some animal is to be discovered and hunted?”

  This is a charming account, and it is not necessary to comment on it except to note that later scientists would probably smile and shrug, but some of them might add: “Well, maybe not dogs, but what about dolphins or chimps?”

  Both Darwin and Freud were great men, maestros of the organism and the psyche, made huge contributions, but nowadays no one would claim that either had bridged the gap. Darwin addressed himself to one side of it in his study of the origin of species through the struggle of spontaneous vari
ations. Freud treated a very different though hardly less savage struggle, the warfare between the id and superego. Darwin and Freud were true revolutionaries and were accordingly accused by their enemies of being too radical. When in truth, as it now appears, they were not radical enough. For neither can account for his own activity by his own theory. For how does Darwin account for the “variation” which is his own species and its peculiar behavior—in his case, sitting in his study in Kent and writing the truth as he saw it about evolution? And if Freud’s psyche is like ours, a dynamism of contending forces, how did it ever arrive at the truth about psyches, including his own?

  Freud, in fact, did exempt himself and his truth-telling from the sexual dynamics of other human psyches.

  Perhaps the oddest thing about these incoherences is that we do not find them odd. We do not find it odd to jump from the natural science of the biology of creatures to a formal science of the utterances of this particular creature without knowing how we got there. We do not find it odd that there is only one science of chemistry and neurology but at last count more than six hundred different schools of psychotherapy, and growing. We accept the explanation that, after all, the mind is vastly more complicated than a molecule of sodium chloride or even a nerve cell. That may be true, but it doesn’t explain why the physical sciences are converging whereas the psychic “sciences” are diverging; that is, getting nuttier.

  In what follows, I wish to call your attention to the work of an American scientist who, I believe, laid the groundwork for a coherent science of man, and did so a hundred years ago. Most people never heard of him. But they will.

  II

  The man I speak of is Charles Sanders Peirce, scientist, logician (he gave us symbolic logic), philosopher, and founding father of semiotics, the science of signs, a discipline in high fashion these days. He was a difficult, eccentric man. One of his peculiar accomplishments was that he could write down a question which was bothering him with one hand and with the other simultaneously write the answer.

  Although I speak here of Charles Peirce’s “discovery,” it was not altogether original with him, stemming as it did from the realism of the medieval Scholastics. By realism he meant that there is a real world and that it is possible in a degree to know it and to talk about it and be understood. Not only are material things and events real. So are the ideas and words by which we think and talk about them. As Peirce put it, “there are Real things out there whose characters are independent of our opinion of them.” Although this may seem a commonplace to us, just ordinary common sense, this connection between things and words and knowledge has been under attack for three hundred years—by Descartes, who split off mind from matter, and by the English nominalists, who even now split off words and ideas from things. One made knowledge unexplainable. The other made it impossible. And this is to say nothing of the European materialism and idealism of Peirce’s time, the first of which set out to explain everything by the doctrine of matter in motion, the other by various immersions in Kantian subjectivity, such as Hegelian idealism. One put everything in one box, the box of things, the other in the mind box, with no accounting of how to get from one to the other.

  Fortunately, modern scientists have taken none of these still regnant philosophies seriously—whether nominalism, materialism, or idealism. If they had, there would have been no Newton or Einstein or Darwin. For if the world is not real, or if it cannot be known, why bother with science?

  Despite bad philosophies, science—the physical and biological sciences—has advanced spectacularly. Yet, as we have seen, they, the scientists, are still trapped in the ancient dualism and still can’t explain what the mind box has to do with the thing box—much to the detriment and confusion of the social sciences.

  The great contribution of Charles Peirce was that he was a rigorous scientific realist and that he preserved the truth, as he saw it, of philosophical realism from Aristotle to the seventeenth century, salvaged it from the medieval language of the Scholastics, which is now all but incomprehensible to us, and recast it in terms familiar to scientists, to the most simpleminded empiricist, and even to us laymen. It, Peirce’s realism, cannot now be escaped or fobbed off as Scholastic mumbo jumbo.

  Peirce saw that the one way to get at it, the great modern rift between mind and matter, was the only place where they intersect, language. Language is both words and meanings. It is impossible to imagine language without both.

  In a word, he said, and unlike the abstruse propositions of the Scholastics—like Being is Essence and Existence—it is as easily demonstrated as two plus two equals four; he said that there are two kinds of natural events in the world. These two kinds of events have different parameters and variables. Trying to pretend there is only one kind of event leads to all the present misery which afflicts the social sciences. And even more important, at least for us laymen, it brings a certain cast of mind, “scientism,” which misplaces reality and creates vast mischief and confusion when we try to understand ourselves.

  Peirce said: “There is not one but two kinds of natural events in the world.” One he called dyadic, the other triadic. Dyadic events are the familiar subject matter of the physical and biological sciences: A interacting with B; A, B, C, D interacting with each other. Peirce called it a “mutual action between two things.” It can apply to molecules interacting with other molecules, a billiard ball hitting another billiard ball, one galaxy colliding with another galaxy, an organism responding to a stimulus. Even an event as complex as Pavlov’s conditioned dog salivating at the sound of a bell can be understood as a “complexus of dyads”—the sound waves from the bell, the stimulation of the dog’s auditory receptors, the electrical impulses in the efferent nerves, the firing of the altered synapses in the brain, the electrical impulses in the efferent nerves to the salivary glands, and so on—the whole understandable as a sequence of dyadic events. The entire event, complex as it is, can be represented quite adequately by a simple drawing which shows structures (dog, neurones, axones, glandular cells) and arrows connecting them (energy exchanges, sound waves, electrical impulses). Such is the dyadic model.

  Such events, indeed, are the familiar subject matter of the natural sciences, from physics and chemistry to biology and to Psych 101.

  But there is another kind of event, quite as real, quite as natural a phenomenon, quite as observable, which cannot be so understood; that is, cannot be construed by the dyadic model. It is language. The simplest example I can think of—and it is anything but simple—is the child’s early acquisition of language, an eighteen-month-old suddenly learning that things have names. What happens here is the same sort of thing that happens when a lecturer utters a complex sentence about the poetics of T. S. Eliot.

  What happens when the child suddenly grasps that the strange little sound “cat,” an explosion of air between tongue and palate followed by a bleat of the larynx followed by a stop of tongue against teeth, means this cat, not only this cat but all cats? And means it in a very special way: does not mean: look over there for cat, watch out for cat, want cat, go get cat—but: That is a cat. Naming is a new event. And, of course, soon after this naming “sentence” appear other primitive sentences: There cat. Cat all gone. Where cat?

  As Peirce put it, this event cannot be explained by a dyadic model, however complex. Words like “cat” he called symbols, from the Greek symballein, to throw together, because the child puts the two together, the word and the thing. A triadic model is required. For even though many of the familiar dyadic events are implicated, the heart of the matter is a throwing together, one entity throwing together two others; in this case, cat the creature and cat the sound image.

  This event is a piece of behavior, true enough, but any behavioristic reading of it as a sequence of dyads will miss the essence of it.

  He, Peirce, was particularly interested in using the dyadic-triadic distinction to understand communication by a discipline which he called semiotics, the science of signs. He distinguished be
tween an index and a symbol. A low barometer is, for a human, a sign, an index, of rain. The word “ball” is, for my dog, an index to go fetch the ball. But if I say the word “ball” to you, you will receive it as a symbol; that is, look at me with puzzlement and the suspicion that sure enough he’s gone over the hill, and perhaps say, “Ball? What about it?” The difference between the two, variously and confusedly called index and symbol, sign and symbol, signal and sign, was perhaps most dramatically illustrated by Helen Keller’s famous account: her first understanding of words spelled in her hand, like “cup,” “door,” “water,” to mean go fetch cup, open door, I want water. Then the memorable moment in the pump house when it dawned on her that the word “water” spelled in one hand meant the water running over the other. It was nothing less than the beginning of her life as a person.

  The triadic event, as Peirce would say, always involves meaning, and meaning of a special sort. The copula “is,” spoken or implied, is nothing less than the tiny triadic lever that moves the entire world into the reach of our peculiar species.

  This strange capacity seems to be unique in Homo sapiens. And even though there is nothing unscientific about assigning a “species-specific” trait to this or that species, if the evidence warrants, many scientists, including Darwin, find this uniqueness offensive. We are all familiar with the heroic attempts in recent years by psychologists and primatologists to teach language to primates other than Homo sapiens, particularly chimpanzees, using ASL, the sign language of the deaf, the premise being that the only reason chimps don’t speak is that their vocal apparatus does not permit speech. The most famous chimp was Washoe, whom the Gardners claimed to have taught language; that is, the ability not only to understand and “utter” “words,” the common nouns of language, but to form these words into sentences. But we are also familiar with the discrediting of these claims, mainly due to the work of Herbert Terrace. Terrace adopted a chimp, which he named Nim Chimpsky, with every expectation of teaching Nim language as one would a human infant. What he learned was that Nim, though undoubtedly as smart as Washoe, was not really using language. What Nim and Washoe were really doing was responding to small cues by the trainer to do this or that, the appropriate behavior rewarded by a banana or whatever. The trainers were, doubtlessly, not acting in bad faith. What Washoe and Nim Chimpsky were exhibiting, however, was not the language behavior of the human two-year-old but the classical reinforced response of the behaviorists. As Peirce would say, both Washoe’s and Nim’s “language” can be understood as a “complexus of dyads.”