>It is important to understand that when one uses the Peircean doctrine of
>signs, one need not (in fact, one should not) reify signs. Peirce, after
>all, was the father of American pragmatism.
>
>cheers,
>
>Martin Lefebvre
>
You make a strong argument. I just want to make a couple of points...
In one of the "Hitchhiker" books, Douglas Adams tells a story about the
people of the forest on a faraway planet. They live between the people of
the plains and the people of the mountains. To the people of the forest,
life is filled with signs. To paraquote:
When there was a falling star, that was a sign.
If the rains came, that was a sign.
If there was an eclipse, that was a sign.
If nothing out of the ordinary happened, this too was often a sign.
And all the signs meant the same thing, they meant that the people of the
plains and the people of the mountains were going to go to war again, which
wouldn't be such a problem if they didn't do it the forest.
He goes on to make some interesting textual points about a time travelling
poet who writes the original of his famous epic by copying from a later
edition, but thats another story...
Point being, yes, if viewed that way, everything is a sign. But do we mean
that everything IS a sign or that inferences can be drawn from data? Which
means that, as you say, semiotics becomes a theory of mind...
I guess my point is that at one level, the model airplane is a three
dimensional blue-print for a bigger airplane, but at another level, it is a
little plane, and that these are two different things.
as Boris Said:
<But, to return to the discussion started by John and Martin, the points I
would like to make are: a) all systems of symbols are not language(s); b)
the use and/or the context determines when something could and should be
understood as a symbol (such as John's model of an airplane and most of the
pictures in the film); c) mental images, just as many other mental
processes, are not neccessarily symbols, as long as they do not have
strictly verbal/linguistic form.
If I imagine climbing the mountain, part of it would be verbal (ie.
symbolic), but part of it not. This non-symbolic part would consist of
mental images that wouldn't correspond to anything outside my brain (I
wouldn't think of exact configuration of the terrain, shapes of rocks, size
of the trees etc. that would have any referent in the *outside world*). And
the exact memory of some previous mountain-climbing is out of the question
- it is impossible to store all the various experiences (*real* and
symbolic alike) in brain. So, even if memory and learning are based on
symbolic activity of the brain, mental images, in my opinion, can be
non-symbolic.>
Of course, meme theory has some interesting points to add to this:
"There is an important book by Terrence Deacon _Symbolic Species: The
Co-evolution of Language and the Human Brain_. Appart from a substantial
explanation of the evolution of the brain, it also tries to explain the
development of the language using Peirce's sign theory. The bottom line is:
human beings' intellectual leap was possible because of the new way of
conceiving the world, i.e. through use of symbols, most importantly language."
There is also an important (IMHO) book by Susan Blackmore _The Meme
Machine_ in which she posits that the evolution of the brain is based on
memetic evolution.
Meme's are replicators in a different way than genes are. They are
replicated through behavior, through imitation. Blackmore suggests that the
ability to imitate is much more complex than most people assume, based on
the fact that no animals have the ability to imitate each other to the
extent that human beings do (one exception being bird songs, which she
discusses). Once imitation becomes an important behavior, the brain begins
to grow to make room for all the new memes that arise, and to emphasize
imitative capacity.
"The thesis of this book is that what makes us different is our ability to
imitate."
Now one interesting thing about that is that it connects to one of the
cognitive theories of film emotion and the close-up. The theory goes that
when you see someone smile, you tend to smile, and that imitating their
facial expression tends to produce a similar emotion in you. This is true
for a set of universal expression, including happiness, anger, and sorrow.
The exact mechanism is unclear.
Memetically, the mechanism is the meme... to imitate is to aquire the meme
"I am sad."
This transfer is not symbolic... you don't make the expression to symbolize
the emotional state, the emotional state is a direct RESULT of the
expression!
Now whether this is true or not, the point is that there is a competing
theory of knowledge that is compatible with a cognitive framework (I think,
I'm still working on this) but that is not based in symbolic
representations within the mind.
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