Abstract
In an attempt to codify the tenets of logical positivism in a manifesto of the Vienna Circle, mathematician Hans Hahn (1879–1934), political economist Otto Neurath (1882–1945) and philosopher Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) proclaimed “We have characterised the scientific world-conception essentially by two features:
Charles Morris (1901–1979)
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- 1.
Morris draws a box to surround the words sign vehicle in the original, but here I follow the precedent of Nöth (1990: 50) and Posner (1998: 567), in depicting the locus where these dimensions meet, and in so doing, comprise a semiotic triad, as a triangle.
- 2.
Anderson et al. (Chapter Twelve, this volume) argue that it was precisely such pars pro toto misunderstandings that ascended to dominance in academia in the latter half of the twentieth century – in good measure, and to the detriment of Morris’s project and career.
- 3.
A sure sign of this is when the author claims a four-part definition of the sign that includes a foundational interpreter responsible for bringing together the “sign” relation – for this is where Morris most fundamentally diverges from Peirce, and why John Dewey (1859–1952) deemed Morris’ semiotics “a complete inversion of Peirce” (Morris 1971: 444).
- 4.
“On the basis of the unanalyzed terms,” Petrilli explains, “the analyzed terms of the science in question can be either completely analyzed (or ‘defined’), as when we state the necessary and sufficient conditions for their application; or they can be only partially analyzed (or [‘characterized’]), as when the sufficient but not necessary conditions for their application are asserted” (2005: 180). Morris felt that it is prudent to proceed only from the latter kind of analysis with regards to the key term “sign” at this early stage of the science’s development.
- 5.
Editor’s note: These first two paragraphs constitute the opening passage of Morris’s 1964 volume Signification and Significance. I have included them here as an introductory aperçu of Morris’ biosemiotic project. [DF]
- 6.
“Semantics” is perhaps the most widely accepted name for the discipline which studies signs. “Semiotic,” the term here chosen, was used by the Stoics, John Locke, and Charles Peirce. In the medieval period the term “scientia sermocinalis” was frequently employed. Linguists and logicians restrict “semantics” to a part of the whole field, namely the part which deals with the significata of signs. Hence we use “semiotic” as the general term; “semantics” will be employed for that part of semiotic which deals with significata. Later we show how semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics are the main subdivisions of semiotic.
- 7.
Because of this vagueness and ambiguity a number of scientists have proposed to discontinue the use of the term “sign.” Of course behavioristics can be developed without the use of the term; no sign is indispensable. But since the term is in such frequent usage in ordinary language and in writings of semioticians and behavioristicians it has seemed advisable to continue the term but to use it in a more precise manner than is customary. Whether this usage is to be incorporated into behavioristics itself must be left to specialists in the field.
- 8.
See Karl Zener, “The Significance of Behavior Accompanying Conditioned Salivary Secretion for Theories of the Conditioned Response,” American Journal of Psychology, 50, 1937, 384–403. These experiments make clear the differences in the response of the dog to situations in which the sign is present and those in which it is not present.
- 9.
The notion of preparatory-stimulus seems to be in harmony with Mowrer’s conception of the “warning” stimuli involved in “implicit conditioning.” Speaking of the augmentation of the rat’s jumping to a shock when it is preceded by a sound he writes: “This augmentation of the reaction to the unconditioned stimulus, by virtue of its being preceded by a warning, or conditioned, stimulus (which does not, however, produce a gross, overt response in its own right), is here termed “implicit conditioning” (“Preparatory Set (Expectancy) – Some Methods of Measurement,” Psychological Monographs, 52, 1940, 27). It is further related to what K. S. Lashley calls a “conditional reaction” – i.e., a reaction to something which is determined by the stimulus character of something else (see “Conditional Reactions in the Rat,” Journal of Psychology, 6, 1938, 311–324); to K. A. William’s conception of signs as stimuli to preparatory responses ( “The Conditioned Reflex and the Sign Function in Learning,” Psychological Review, 36, 1929, 481–497); and to what B. F. Skinner calls a “pseudo-reflex (The Behavior of Organisms, 1938). In the usage of the present account it is not necessarily implied that a preparatory-stimulus is always learned (though it may always be), nor that all preparatory-stimuli are signs. The explanation of the functioning of such stimuli is a problem for behavioristicians. C. L. Hull has suggested that they may be explained in terms of his conception of temporal patterning.
- 10.
This notion of behavior-family is similar to, and indeed a part of, C. L. Hull’s conception of the habit-family hierarchy (see Psychological Review, 41, 1934, 33 ff.). I have not attempted to probe the problems connected with the terms “need” or “behavior.” “Need” is taken as roughly synonymous with “motivating organic state” and not with “what is necessary for survival”; so used an organism may have needs which in fact are fatal to its survival. These two common uses of “need” must be distinguished. On the problem of defining “need” in behavioristics see the monograph by Else Frenkel-Brunswik, “Motivation and Behavior,” Genetic Psychology Monographs, 26, 1942, 121–265; S. Koch, “The Logical Character of the Motivation Concept,” Psychological Review, 48, 1941, 15–38, 127–154. As for the term “behavior,” it might be possible to identify it with “response-sequence” or “behavior-family.” We use “behavior” as a narrower term than “response” and as a wider term than “sign-behavior.” Other uses of the term are, however common. For a discussion of the situation see the paper by Egon Brunswik in the forthcoming monograph, Theory of Behavior (International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, 1(10)). See also the “Symposium on Psychology and Scientific Method,” Brunswik, Hull, Lewin, Psychological Review, 50, 1943, 255–310.
- 11.
For an analysis of the term “disposition” as applied to signs, see C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language, pp. 46–59.
- 12.
I owe the suggestion of giving only sufficient conditions for saying that something is a sign, instead of giving a definition (that is, sufficient and necessary conditions), to Alfred Tarski. This procedure seems advisable at the present state of the argument, since premature definitions may rule out other phenomena which we may later wish to include. The consequence of the present procedure is that for the moment our statements about signs are limited to signs as identified by the criteria here proposed or by any other criteria which imply these criteria.
- 13.
Many of the points mentioned in this section are dealt with more fully in the Appendix, “Some Contemporary Analyses of Sign-Processes.”
- 14.
For a striking illustration see James K. Senior, “On Certain Relations Between Chemistry and Geometry,” Journal of Chemical Education, 15, 1938, 464–470.
- 15.
Husserl, Gätschenberger, Dewey, Mead, Langer, Kecskemeti, Ogden and Richards, Pavlov, Hunter, Yerkes, Korzybski, Whetnall and many others operate with some such distinction, some contrasting “sign” and “symbol,” while some contrast “signal” and “symbol.” The bases for the distinction differ widely.
- 16.
Chimpanzees, a Laboratory colony, p. 177.
- 17.
The example is from Jules Masserman, Behavior and Neurosis, p. 59. It might of course be the case that the light was a substitute for a more primitive sign, such as the sight of the food box used in the experiment. But since in this case the animal only obtained food when the light was on, the sight of the box was not itself a sign of food.
- 18.
[Philosophy in a New Key, pp. 57–58.]
- 19.
[Ibid., pp. 60–61]
- 20.
[Ibid., p. 61]
- 21.
John Dewey makes a similar distinction, though his explanation of the difference is not put in terms of concepts but in terms of language: signs are “evidence of the existence of something else” while a symbol is “a meaning carried by language in a system” (Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, pp. 51–52).
- 22.
This is the commonly held view. See A. L. Kroeber, “Sub-Human Culture Beginnings” (Quarterly Review of Biology, 3, 1928, 325–342); J. A. Bierens de Haan, “Langue humaine; langage animal” (Scientia, 55, 1934, 40–49); Robert M. Yerkes, Chimpanzees: a Laboratory Colony. Yerkes differs from Kroeber in believing that there is some evidence of slight cultural heredity in chimpanzees, but agrees that “there is no single system of signs-vocal, gestural, or postural-which may properly be called a chimpanzee language” (op. cit., p. 51). Alfred E. Emerson links language and social heredity as giving the unique features of man: “Instead of the usual mechanism of heredity through genic patterns in the chromosomes which determines relatively stereotyped development by means of enzyme chains, the human species is the only organism which has developed a substitute mechanism for such biological heredity... The development of human social heredity through learned language symbols is of such importance that this human attribute would seem to indicate the valid division line between the social and the biological sciences. It is what the sociologist means when he says that man is unique in the possession of a culture” (“Biological Sociology,” Denison University Bulletin, Journal of the Scientific Laboratories, 36, 1941, 148–149).
- 23.
One central problem here is whether sub-human animals have symbols (as distinguished from signals). References to symbols are common in the literature about sub-human animals, especially in discussions of delayed reactions (see the summary of the work of Nissen, Riesen, Crawford and others in R. M. Yerkes, Chimpanzee: a Laboratory Colony, Chapter 10 (“Language and Symbolism”)). But J. F. Markey (The Symbolic Process, p. 112) is skeptical about there being any symbolic behavior which is not social-vocal in origin; and Hull and the gestaltists give other and divergent interpretations of the delayed reaction experiments from those in terms of symbolic processes. Part of the differences lies in different uses of the term “symbol”. All accounts agree that symbolic processes (if they occur at all) are very infrequent in animals as compared with men.
- 24.
A. Kaplan and H. Reichenbach have, among others, used such terms as “pragmatical sign.” This extension, which I regard as unwise, is perhaps in part due to my Foundations of the Theory of Signs. For in this work a distinction was made between the pragmatical, semantical, and syntactical “dimensions” of sign-processes themselves; this, coupled with the fact that that work did not sufficiently distinguish the modes of signifying nor the difference between the signification and use of signs, might suggest such expressions as “pragmatical sign” and “syntactical sign” – expressions which the present analysis avoids.
- 25.
R. Carnap makes the distinctions in the case of syntactics and semantics but not with respect to pragmatics; thus on p. 6 of his Foundations of Logic and Mathematics he writes that “pragmatics is an empirical discipline.” But in pragmatics too we can distinguish between formative and lexicative ascriptors, and so generalize the distinction between pure and descriptive semiotic. The present volume neglects in the main the important work which has been done in syntactics; see Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language, and The Formalization of Logic. On our position, any kind of discourse can be studied syntactically. Hence syntactics includes Carnap’s “logical syntax” as the pure syntactics of the language of science. By the same token any type of discourse (such as mathematical discourse) can be studied semantically.
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Favareau, D. (2009). Excerpts from Signs, Language and Behavior . In: Essential Readings in Biosemiotics. Biosemiotics, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9650-1_4
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