Abstract
According to Charles Peirce’s theory of meaning, known as pragmaticism, the meaning of signs is in the habitual practices and activities according to which we acquire information that connect signs with other signs and their objects. In The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (henceforth SS, Deacon, 1997), Terrence Deacon takes meaning to be explicated by the uniquely human capacity for symbolic reference. The evolution of language is couched in adaptive co-evolution that overcomes the symbolic threshold by increased social selection pressures. Peirce, on the other hand, understood evolution “agapastically”: it is not the selective mechanisms that direct the adaptation, say, of neural structures, but the growth of habits of action that are in continuous interaction with one another. I argue that Deacon’s and Peirce’s positions on the meaning of signs and the evolution of linguistic meaning share some similarities but also differ in a couple of fundamental respects.
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Notes
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This account concerns Peirce’s mature theory of meaning, which differs in some crucial respects from his early 1878 theory. On these points as well as on the general proposal for a reconstruction of Peirce’s late proof of pragmatism, see Pietarinen and Snellman (2006).
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Pietarinen (2005) is a study of Peirce’s theory of meaning, which was presented in a conference on evolutionary epistemology. It is surprising how little of Peirce, let alone Baldwin, have been acknowledged in the works of those propounding that evolutionary approach to epistemological issues.
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I should mention that Peirce did keep an eye on the neurosciences of the day. At one point, he learned about Broca’s groundbreaking discovery of 1860 – that Broca’s and Wernice’s areas are connected with the abilities to speak – and mentions it in relation to religious questions concerning immortality in Answers to Questions Concerning My Belief in God (MS 845, c.1906; CP 6.520). He believed that the dependence of mental action upon the brain had been demonstrated by Broca’s finding, and noted how lesions in Broca’s area greatly affect the use of language: “when Broca’s convolution is much diseased we always find the use of language is greatly affected” (MS 845: 5–6). In the same context, he remarked on the brain’s plasticity: “When a part of the brain is extirpated we find the result is that certain faculties are lost. But after a time they are recovered. How can this be? The answer given is that other parts of the brain learn to perform those functions” (MS 845: 6).
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This point turns on the Wittgensteinian question of whether Robinson Crusoe can have a language. Peirce inevitably thinks he can. On this point, see the appended dialogue in Pietarinen 2006b, chapter 9: “Dialogue Foundations and Informal Logic”.
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Lewis (1969) was an influential treatise on the origins of conventions, with its own origins in Erik Stenius’s work on ‘gardening games’ (Stenius, 1968). Guldborg Hansen (2007)’s paper in the collection Game Theory and Linguistic Meaning (Pietarinen, 2007b) is a convenient survey of the status of Lewis-type signalling games throughout the contemporary scene. Lewis’s theory is nevertheless nominalistic in ways interestingly similar to those accounts for symbols criticised by Peirce in his theory of signs for missing their general, habitual character.
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Stjernfelt (2007) is a multi-disciplinary treatise accentuating the ubiquity of diagrammatic forms of representation in human culture, and comments on Deacon’s theory in at length. Pietarinen (2009a) studies Otto Neurath’s vision of the Isotype system as an anticipation of the ‘visual revolution’ which is currently changing the very foundations of human communication.Think of the use of emoticons in online chats, for example: they are certainly vaguer, milder, and much more roundabout forms of putting forth assertions than what is achieved with the symbolic, written or spoken, means of expression. Such kinds of pictures certainly do not communicate the exactly same propositional content and speaker’s meaning as the linguistic expressions, such as “I love you!”, “I am happy because of what you said”, or “I am crying now…”.
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And the idea of a Universal Grammar which Deacon attacks is, of course, equally un-Peircean.
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A great deal of overlap and continuity naturally exists between the three parts, and Peirce certainly did not embrace the trichotomy of syntax-semantics-pragmatics – unlike Morris and others later incorrectly supposed (see Pietarinen, 2006b).
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My quibble is that Deacon presumably here means to write “referent” instead of “reference”.
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Deacon briefly mentions the important meta-theoretical aspect of self-control in the context of self-awareness or self-consciousness (SS: 451), but he does not link that with Peirce’s self-controlled habits of action, which are needed for most interpretations of symbols.
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Similar ideas on how to accommodate learning and creative effects into Darwin’s evolutionary theory were suggested those times by several others besides Baldwin. Conwy Lloyd Morgan (1896) applied a similar principle of “organic selection”. They both regarded the Darwinian way of explaining the creative force of evolution in terms of natural selection as an unacceptably negative and mechanistic type of a force. A middle course that sought for a mode of evolution that would require neither natural selection nor inheritance of acquired characters was proposed by Henry Fairfield Osborn (1896) in his “coincidence selection” model. The term originates from John Thomas Gulick’s work on ontogenetic selection processes (Hall, 2006) which Baldwin later acknowledges. Morgan’s and Osborn’s works built and commented on August Weismann’s (1893) “germinal selection” model, which likewise calls for a new kind of positive and creative force as the one directing the adaptations. Much of these improvements and modifications on Darwin’s theory of natural selection were at the same time rejoinders to Herbert Spencer’s theory, which these men saw as an utterly mechanistic and Lamarckian stripe of evolution that no longer would fit in with the prevailing scientific conceptions. Peirce accompanies Osborn’s public criticism of Spencerianism in an anonymous piece in the New York Times in 1890 entitled “‘Outsider’ Wants More Light” (W6: 402).
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More research is needed to establish the exact influences between Baldwin and Peirce which no one seems to have carried out so far; let us recall the multiple articles authored and co-authored, some of them with Baldwin himself, in Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology by Peirce in 1901–1902; as well as a number of critical reviews of Baldwin’s articles and books which Peirce published in the Nation in 1895–1908. Peirce did not review or comment much upon Baldwin’s article “A New Factor in Evolution” but he wrote a commentary on his book Mental Development in the Child and the Race (1895). It is in that book what Baldwin in the much better known article of Baldwin (1896: 451) called the “new factor” and the “influence of organic selection” first appeared, though they did not mean quite the same as in his follow-up work. As we can observe, all of Baldwin’s writings on this matter nevertheless appeared right after the publication of Peirce’s Evolutionary Love. On the other hand, these topics were discussed by several other authors around the same time as well, and some of the discussions took place even before 1893 (see the previous note).
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A brief justification for thinking of Agape as cooperation comes from the ancient history of ideas: In Homer’s Odyssey some derivations of the word ‘agape’ mean that which creates contentment or affection with the speaker. We may take this meaning coming close to modern principles that aim at accounting for conversations as rational activities, such as Paul Grice’s principle of cooperation in his theory of communication or Donald Davidson’s principle of charity in his theory of interpretation.
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The last point is equally true of those who have recently taken up the topic of Baldwinian evolution under revived scrutiny. One concept has disappeared from the discussion, the generalizing tendency to act according to habits, though we might see it as being reinstated through the backdoor of evolutionary theory of games in its use of stable strategies as the solution concept. For the connections between Peirce’s theory and the stable strategies of EGT, see Pietarinen (2006c).
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Acknowledgments
Supported by the University of Helsinki “Excellence in Research” Grant (2023031: Peirce’s Pragmatistic Philosophy and Its Applications, 2006–2008, Principal Investigator A.-V. Pietarinen). I wish to thank the organisers and participants of the First Symbolic Species Conference in Copenhagen in 2006 as well as the reviewers of the earlier version of the present paper for comments.
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Pietarinen, AV.J. (2012). Peirce and Deacon on the Meaning and Evolution of Language. In: Schilhab, T., Stjernfelt, F., Deacon, T. (eds) The Symbolic Species Evolved. Biosemiotics, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2336-8_4
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