Dear J. Daigle,
You're a hard man to convince. Your examples, however, are indeed all
interesting. Let's take them one by one.
First of all we need to agree that no worldly object or thing is per se a
sign. Not even a word. Things become signs (acquire sign-function) when
they are interpreted as standing for something else (according to the age
old definition "Aliquod stat pro aliquo") in some context. Words become
signs when we use them to stand for something that they are not. Can
memories be signs ? Surely they can -- and there are many precedents for
considering the products of memory as signs (i.e.,in their function as
signs). Think of the role memory played in classical rhetoric (as one of
its 5 parts) or of the artes memoriae of Antiquity or those of the
Renaissance. These were very complex semiotic systems by which someone
could remember something and even (in the case of the memory systems of the
Guilio Camillo or Robert Fludd) very powerful means for understanding the
world and semiotically constructing it through "imagistic" or "imaginistic'
representations. Frances Yates has written a beautiful book on the matter
(_The Art of Memory_) and in _The Limits of Interpretation_, Umberto Eco
discusses Renaissance artes memoriae as a case of semiosis (he refers to
them as examples of "Hermetic Semiosis"). The Scholastics (following
Cicero) envisaged memory in relation to Prudentia ("prudence"); while for
Aristotle memory gives access to knowledge, in that it MEDIATES (as do
signs) between sensation and knowledge. The memory I have of burning my
hand on a hot stove as a child is a sign (a mental representation if you
will) which I use to avoid repeating that behaviour. It works as a premis
in an inference. In your post, you yourself admit that your mountain
climbing memory is a representation -- it is a way you have of reviving a
past experience, but it does not coincide with that (past) experience
(which was not a memory but a real experience). In as much as something
stands (in some respect or capacity) for something else (and this implies a
context where x is used as standing for y), then it is a sign.
Now let's consider the scar. In a forthcoming article the Italian
semiotician Constantino Marmo discusses medical conceptions of the sign
during the 13th and 14th centuries. He mentions that Galen, in his _Ars
Parva_ had, centuries before, made a distinction that eventually became
common between diagnostic (or indicative), mnemonic or anamnestic (or
commemorative), and prognostic signs. In each case, notes Marmo, "the
signified object [...] is posited in a different time location: present,
past, or future." According to this distinction a scar can be interpreted
as a commemorative (or mnemonic) sign since it shows (points to) the prior
existence of a wound. A doctor, upon seeing your scar might inquire as to
the injury that produced it (in fact, I should say: the injury that
produced the wound which later became a scar). The doctor would then use
the scar as a sign. Peirce would call this kind of sign an index.
What about the model. First we can say simply that a model is always a
model of something on which (for which) it is modeled. Therefore it can act
as a sign of that thing. In your example the small scale plane model stands
for something that has not yet been built. (Peirce would call it an icon,
in that the small place is used as a sign on the basis of its resemblance
to its object). Drawings by architects can also be seen as signs of a
future building (in as much as someone uses them as standing for -- in some
respect or capacity -- the finished building, whether or not the finished
building is ever realized). Things become signs when used such in a given
context.
Finally, what about mental models (such as those dicussed by P.
Johnson-Laird, for instance, or even Shank's Scripts, MOP's, meta-MOP's,
etc.) ? They are also signs in that they constitute a form of interface
between mind and world. This is what signs are: interfaces (or relations if
you will) that make what is absent present. Mental models make the world
present to our mind. Just like the scar "makes present" the past injury or
wound, mental models make present the world to our mind. It may help you to
think of representation as a sort of translation. A sign is an interface
through which a object gets translated. And of course, mental models do
just that.
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
********************
Martin Lefebvre
Associate Professor
Editor RECHERCHES SÉMIOTIQUES/
SEMIOTIC INQUIRY
Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema
Concordia University
FB 319
1455 de Maisonneuve, West
Montreal (Quebec), Canada
H3G 1M8
tel. (514) 848-4676/FAX. (514) 848-4255
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