Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[Mike Frentz <mfrentz AT bbn.com>]

Dear All,

A belated chiming in.  A reference that I found very illuminating on this
topic is a book called "the Symbolic Species  -- The Co-evolution of Language
and the Brain" by Terrence Deacon, Norton 1997.  Briefly, he gives a very
lucid (and Peircean, no less..) breakout of symbolization as a hierarchy
of indices and icons, that is key in his explanation some of the results/non-results
of decades of language research (Deacon comes out strongly on the side of
much of the animal "language" research (whether cetacean or primate) as being
quixotic, at least in retrospect).

Paraphrasing Deacon a bit:  Symbolic relationships are different because
words also represent other words.  We do not lose the indexical associations
of words because the possibility of this link is maintained implicitly in
the stable associations between words.  It is by virtue of this sort of dual
reference – to objects and to other words – that a word conveys the information
necessary to pick out objects of reference (sense and reference).  Words
point to objects (reference) and words point to other words (sense), but
we use the sense to pick out the reference, not vice versa.

I highly recommend this reference, FWIW. 

Happy New Year to All (to all following the Gregorian calendar, at least!)


Mike


James Piat wrote:

 

 

I'm not sure what you mean above, Ken.  Peirce speaks of three kinds of triadic signs  --icons, indexes and symbols.  He speaks of all three as representations.  He differentiates them partly on the basis of the type of association between the object and the sign. Icons are based upon a similarity between the object and the sign, indexes on a spatial temporal correlation between the object and sign and symbols upon a convention.   Using Peirces classification of signs into icons idexes and symbols are you saying that only humans use symbols but that animals may use icons and indexes.  Or do you want to go further and say that the comunnication signals that animals use are not triadic at all? Thay they are simply some sort of mechanical behvior that does not participate in what it means?  If so,  I would like to hear more of what you mean by symbols participating in what they mean.  It sounds interesting to me Ken but I'm not sure what it means.   

 

And maybe a word or two about "meaning" itself.  I take meaning to be the known consequences of behavior.  By consequences I mean the effects the behavior has upon the ongoing goal directed behavior of the community of shared language users.   Consequences are meaningful only to the extent that they are known.  They have effects whether they are known or not  -- but the effects don't "mean" anything to us unless we can conceive, symbolize or know them.  Adam and Eve were certainly naked before the fall but being naked only meant embarrassment to them after they knew the consequences and implications of not having any clothes on.