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Seeking Speaker Meaning in the Archaeological Record

  • Thematic Issue Article: Symbols, Signals and the Archaeological Record II
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Abstract

Communication in archaeological artifacts is usually understood in terms of signs or signals, fleshed out under many guises. The notions of signs or signals that archaeologists employ often draw from Saussurean or Peircean semiotic theories from philosophy and linguistics. In this article I consider the consequences of whether we understand archaeological signals in terms of the Saussurean or Peircean framework, and highlight the fact that archaeologists have not always been precise in their use of relevant philosophical machinery. I will argue further that interpretation of archaeological artifacts should be supplemented by a notion of meaning that goes beyond signals and leads us to understand meaning in terms of a specific creator’s communicative intention—which may deviate from how some signal was ordinarily used. This is what I call speaker meaning, drawing from philosophy of language. I then present specific examples from Egypt circa 1300 BC and 3500 BC and from France circa 12,000 BC that I argue are best treated with the proposed notion of speaker meaning. In the course of this discussion I consider questions that arise for current accounts of signals and metaphor in archaeology. Finally, I conclude by considering how my proposal relates to our understanding of decoration and style, humor, the advent of spoken language, and the nature of art.

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Notes

  1. At the same time, there are, of course, creations that are the result of the intentions of a number of individuals working together. Peter Hiscock (2004) discusses a case of stone knapping that involves one man knapping the stone and another man making the choice of which of the resulting flakes are suitable as knives, with much communication between the two along the way. Group intentions have received a great deal of attention in philosophy (Gilbert 1990; Searle 1990), especially in discussions of legislation in philosophy of law (Marmor 2011), where the output of some act of creation is almost always a result of a number of agents working together. Although the creators will not share all goals, in such endeavors they work along the areas of agreement, and we can look for a coherent group intention from those areas of overlap.

  2. Such use of the theory of semiology in often called “structuralism” in archaeology, which Margaret Conkey describes as “a body of ideas about how human culture and the human mind work” with “explicit origins in linguistics and the study of language” according to which theorists assume imagery encountered “was generated from a set of underlying cultural premises that are structured like language” (Conkey 2001, p. 274).

  3. I am speaking very generally; there are many pragmatic theories and traditions but their nuances and differences are not relevant for this discussion.

  4. There is much active debate today about which features of Grice’s original theory ought to be maintained (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 2015; Schiffer 1989; Neale 1992; Neale forthcoming). However, for our purposes here I will make use of just a few features of Grice’s original theory and will remain agnostic with respect to the details.

  5. Further, drawing on work defending a Gricean line (Donnellan 1968; Neale 1992, forthcoming), I will note that contra certain objectors (Searle 1969; Saul 2002) tying meaning to intentions does not lead to the conclusion that some speaker meaning can be tied to any word meaning. The formation of some particular meaning-intention is constrained: you cannot form an intention to mean p by uttering r if you know there is no chance your hearer will take you to thereby mean p.

  6. This point is even stronger when considering certain types of archaeological artifacts, such as hieroglyphs and Egyptian art, where the line between the linguistic and non-linguistic is even harder to draw (Wilkinson 1994).

  7. This is a looser notion than Grice’s spelling out of meaning intentions, which for Grice requires that the recognition of this intention provides at least part of the reason for the hearer to come to believe that p. A number of theorists working in the Gricean tradition advocate for this looser treatment of Grice even in the linguistic cases (Neale 1992; Sperber and Wilson 1986).

  8. Some of the earliest available sources of spells and literature show evidence of speaker meaning in the form of metaphor and hyperbole. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead there is a spell to protect the dead from being harmed by crocodiles in the afterlife that includes a crocodile saying, “My teeth are a knife, my tusks are Viper Mountain” (Taylor 2010, p. 184; see also Goldwasser 2005 for metaphor in hieroglyphs). The Iliad, perhaps the earliest source of what we might today call literature (Ross 2005) is rife with speaker meaning in the form of metaphor and hyperbole. In the first few pages of the Iliad, Agamemnon is described rising in anger: “His heart was black with rage and his eyes flashed fire as he scowled on Calchas” (Homer [1925]1999, p. 3). In some of our earliest written records we see uses of speaker meaning. Moving back from the time of the Book of the Dead and the Iliad, we can consider how far back we find this sort of speaker meaning.

  9. Of a similar painting from the time of King Amenhotep III, Gay Robins writes, “…the king’s footstool is decorated with images of prostrate foreigners, a visual rendering of the common royal phrase: ‘all foreign lands are under your sandals’” (Robins 1997, p. 137). This seems to support Carter’s interpretation.

  10. More details on implicature and the search for speaker meaning can be found in Grice (1989); Neale (1992, Forthcoming); and Johnson (2016).

  11. For example, Ian Hodder (1991) goes through such a case when he discusses having heard what he thought was the phrase “indoor pain.” It was, in fact, the American pronunciation of “endure pain.”

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the participants of the 2015 “Symbols and Communicative Behaviour in Pleistocene Hominins (Symbols II)” workshop at the University of Sydney and especially Jesse Prinz, Noel Carroll, Ronald Planer, Graham Priest, Mary Stiner, and Katherine Eaton for their feedback on and support of the paper. I would like to thank Peter Godfrey-Smith for his continued support of the project and Peter Hiscock and Kim Sterelny for their organizing work and helpful comments on the article. Travel support was provided by the Tom Austen Brown Endowment at the University of Sydney; completion of the paper was supported by fellowships from the City University of New York Graduate Center Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies and the American Society for Aesthetics. I am very grateful to these organizations and the people behind them. Lastly, I should note that any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the American Society for Aesthetics.

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    Marilynn Johnson

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Johnson, M. Seeking Speaker Meaning in the Archaeological Record. Biol Theory 12, 262–274 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-017-0285-3

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