notes-meta-semiotics

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html

Modality and Representation

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem02a.html

some thought-provoking excerpts (these excerpts are not intended to summarize, or to capture the most important parts of the text at that link; they are just things i am making note of because they connect up with some of my other projects):

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/Images/kennedy.gif

"John Kennedy showed children a simple line drawing featuring a group of children sitting in a circle with a gap in their midst (Kennedy 1974). He asked them to add to this gap a drawing of their own, and when they concentrated on the central region of the drawing, many of them tried to pick up the pencil which was depicted in the top right-hand corner of the drawing!"

" The confusion of the representation with the thing represented is a feature of schizophrenia and psychosis (Wilden 1987, 201). 'In order to able to operate with symbols it is necessary first of all to be able to distinguish between the sign and the thing it signifies' (Leach 1970, 43). However, the confusion of 'levels of reality' is also a normal feature of an early phase of cognitive development in childhood. Jerome Bruner observed that for pre-school children thought and the object of thought seem to be the same thing, but that during schooling one comes to separate word and thing (Bruner 1966). The substitution of a sign for its referent (initially in the form of gestures and imitative sounds) constitutes a crucial phase in the infant's acquisition of language. The child quickly discovers the apparently magical power of words for referring to things in their absence - this property of displacement being a key 'design feature' of language (Piaget 1971, 64; Hockett 1958; Hockett 1960; Hockett 1965). Helen Keller, who became blind and deaf at the age of eighteen months, was gradually taught to speak by her nurse (Keller 1945). At the age of nine whilst playing with water she felt with her hand the motions of the nurse's throat and mouth vibrating the word 'water'. In a sudden flash of revelation she cried out words to the effect that 'everything has a name!'. It is hardly surprising that even in middle childhood children sometimes appear to have difficulty in separating words from what they represent. Piaget illustrates the 'nominal realism' of young children in an interview with a child aged nine-and-a-half:

      "Could the sun have been called 'moon' and the moon 'sun'? - 'No.' 'Why not?' - 'Because the sun shines brighter than the moon...' 'But if everyone had called the sun 'moon', and the moon 'sun', would we have known it was wrong?' - 'Yes, because the sun is always bigger, it always stays like it is and so does the moon.' 'Yes, but the sun isn't changed, only its name. Could it have been called... etc.?' - 'No... Because the moon rises in the evening, and the sun in the day.'
      (Piaget 1929: 81-2) 

Thus for the child, words do not seem at all arbitrary. Similarly, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole found that unschooled Vai people in Liberia felt that the names of sun and moon could not be changed, one of them expressing the view that these were God-given names (Scribner & Cole 1981, 141).

The anthropologist Claude Levy-Bruhl claimed that people in 'primitive' cultures had difficulty in distinguishing between names and the things to which they referred, regarding such signifiers as as an intrinsic part of their signifieds (cited in Olson 1994, 28). The fear of 'graven images' within the Judeo-Christian tradition and also magical practices and beliefs such as Voodoo are clearly related to such a phenomenon. Emphasizing the epistemological significance of writing, David Olson argues that the invention (around 4000 years ago) of 'syntactic scripts' (which superceded the use of tokens) enabled referential words to be distinguished more easily from their referents, language to be seen as more than purely referential, and words to be seen as (linguistic) entities in their own right. He suggests that such scripts marked the end of 'word magic' since referential words came to be seen as representations rather than as instrinsic properties or parts of their referents. However, in the Middle Ages words and images were still seen as having a natural connection to things (which had 'true names' given by Adam at the Creation). "

" representations (signifiers), ideas (signifieds) and things (referents). Scholars now regarded signifiers as referring to ideas rather than directly to things. Representations were conventionalized constructions which were relatively independent both of what they represented and of their authors; knowledge involved manipulating such signs. Olson notes that once such distinctions are made, the way is open to making modality judgements about the status of representations - such as their perceived truth or accuracy (Olson 1994, 68-78, 165-168, 279-280). "

e.g. the word sun, the idea of the sun, the actual sun

so referents are kant's trancendental "things in themselves"? but we never know anything about those, so the modality judgements don't make sense there. or do they?

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Whereas Saussure saw the signifier and the signified (however arbitrary their relationship) as being as inseparable as the two sides of a piece of paper, poststructuralists have rejected the stable and predictable relationship embedded in his model. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wrote of 'the incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier' (Lacan 1977, 154) - he argued that there could be no anchoring of particular signifiers to particular signifieds - although this in itself is hardly contentious in the context of psychoanalysis. Jacques Derrida refers also to the 'freeplay' of signifiers: they are not fixed to their signifieds but point beyond themselves to other signifiers in an 'indefinite referral of signifier to signified' (Derrida 1978, 25). He championed the 'deconstruction' of western semiotic systems, denying that there were any ultimate determinable meanings. Whilst for Saussure the meaning of signs derives from how they differ from each other, Derrida coined the term différance to allude also to the way in which meaning is endlessly deferred. There is no 'transcendent signified' (Derrida 1978, 278-280; Derrida 1976, 20). These notions were anticipated by Peirce in his version of 'unlimited semiosis', although he emphasized that in practice this potentially endless process is inevitably cut short by the practical constraints of everyday life (Gallie 1952, 126). Unlike Peirce, postmodernist theories grant no access to any reality outside signification. For Derrida, 'il n'y a riens hors du texte' ('there is nothing outside the text') - although this assertion need not necessarily be taken 'literally' (Derrida 1976, 158, 163). For materialist marxists and realists, postmodernist idealism is intolerable: 'signs cannot be permitted to swallow up their referents in a never-ending chain of signification, in which one sign always points on to another, and the circle is never broken by the intrusion of that to which the sign refers' (Lovell 1983, 16). Some theorists note that an emphasis on the unavoidability of signification does not necessitate denying any external reality. David Sless comments that 'I am not suggesting that the only things in the universe are signs or texts, or that without signs nothing could exist. However, I am arguing that without signs nothing is conceivable' (Sless 1986, 156). "

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We might posit three key historical shifts in representational paradigms in relation to Peirce's differential framing of the referential status of signs:

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