1. Love
and Logic of Identity in Peirce and Welby
2. Bakhtin and Welby in (Imaginary ) Dialogue
3. Morrisian
Behaviorism and Peircean Pragmatism
4. Rossi-Landi Interpreter of Morris
II. Confrontations
1.
Love and Logic of Identity in Peirce and Welby
The theory of personal identity as conceived by Peirce
is developed across at least three fundamental stages: 1) in his writings from
the years 1867-1868 published in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy,
and characterized by its semiotic interpretation of human consciousness: "whenever
we think, we have present to the consciousness some feeling, image, conception,
or other representation which serves as a sign" (CP 5.314); 2), five
articles published in the journal The Monist as beginning from 1891.
Peirce here introduces his doctrines of tychism, synechism and agapism, his
evolutionary cosmology while continuing his work in this context on his theory
of the human person; and 3) his more recent writings on pragmaticism which unite
the developments of his cosmology and his theory of semiotics.
Peirce opposes the concepts of "personality",
"personal self", "individual self" which theorize a finite
self to the concept of self in communion with other selves. The finite self or
"personal self" is an "illusory phenomenon", but to the
extent that human beings are egotistical they believe they can live and flourish
separately from others, from the human community they in fact belong to. And to
the extent that they believe this, they are creating the conditions for such
illusory forms of isolation. In reality, self can never be wholly divided or
separated from the other. As Peirce teaches, human existence completely isolated
from the other is not possible nor is isolatedness a guarantee of the uniquess
or singularity of a single individual person, of self's specificity, of its
otherness with respect to the otherness of others. To be a self involves being a
possible member of a community, so that what counts and should be theorized is
not "my" experience but "ours" (cf. CP 5.402 n.2). In
any case, of great interest is how Peirce associates the social and communitary
character of the self with such values as the self's uniquess, singularity,
signifying otherness. The capacity for signifying on one's own accout beyond and
apart from references to anything else is theorized with recourse to the
category of firstness. This implies that self's uniquess, its irreducibility to
a referent, is unveiled and developed in the relationship with the other.
A fundamental role is attributed to the body in the
development of consciousness to the point that in a Peircean semiotic
perspective consciousness is incarnated consciousness. The body is a condition
for the full development of consciousness and, therefore, of the human person as
a sign or symbol. Peirce establishes a relationship between the man-symbol and
the word-symbol to the end of avoiding oversimplification from a symbolic
viewpoint–self is not a thing (CP 7.591)–while at the same time
underlining the materiality or corporeity of signs.
Such an approach to subjectivity not only concerns the
intellectual sphere but also the ethic and the affective. And in his discussion
in semiotic terms not only of the functioning and development of cognition and
will but also of emotion, desire, feeling, Peirce states that "there is no
reason for supposing a power of introspection; and consequently, the only way of
investigating a psychological question is by inference from external facts"
(CP 5.249). As she states in her unpublished manuscripts (available in
the Archives at York University Library, Special Collections, Ontario, Canada)
dedicated to the probem of Subjectivity, Victoria Welby, too, is strongly
critical of the concept of introspection and its implications for the
construction of human identity as theorized and practiced in her time (cf., for
example, I and Self, Nov. 23rd. 1907, Box Subjectivity). In
Peirce's view a fundamental aspect of the interpersonal relationship is one's
sympathy for the other, one's sentiment for the other, the condition of feeling
for one another, of being in communion with the other while at the same time
maintaining one's own specificity or singularity as a unique individual.
According to Peirce, sentimentalism is the "doctrine that great respect
should be paid to the natural judgements of the sensible heart" (CP
6.292), and is strictly related to Peirce's interrelational and intersubjective
approach to self and knowledge. And particularly interesting is the importance
he places on such values for the successful development of scientific research,
whose consequences are drawn out with his "agapistic theory of evolution"
(CP 6.295).
In a paper entitled "Evolutionary Love", 1893
(the last of a series of five published in the journal The Monist, and
now included in the volume Chance, Love and Logic, 1923) Peirce
distinguishes between three distinct but strictly interrelated modes of
development regulating evolution in the cosmos: tychastic evolution or "tychasm",
a term used to indicate development regulated by the action of chance,
"evolution by fortuitous variation", says Peirce; anancastic evolution
or "anancasm" which is dominated by the effect of necessity, in
the words of Peirce "evolution by mechanical necessity"; and agapastic
evolution or "agapasm" which is orientated by the law of love,
that is "evolution by creative love". The name of the doctrines that
elect these three evolutionary modes as their object of analysis are
respectively "tychasticism", "anancasticism" and "agapasticism";
while at a lower level of discourse the terms "tychism", "anancism"
and "agapism" name "the mere propositions that absolute chance,
mechanical necessity, and the law of love are severally operative in the cosmos"
(CP 6.302). Evoking the language of geometry, Peirce describes tychasm
and anancasm as "degenerate forms of agapasm", in other words the
latter englobes the former two as its degenerate cases (cf. CP, 6.303).
Tychasm shares a disposition for reproductive creation
with agapasm, "the forms preserved being those that use the spontaneity
conferred on them in such wise as to be drawn into harmony with their original".
This as Peirce continues "only shows that just as love cannot have a
contrary, but must embrace what is most opposed to it, as a degenerate case of
it, so tychasm is a kind of agapasm". Differently from tychastic evolution,
which procedes by exclusion, in genuine agapasm advance takes place by virtue of
a "positive sympathy", says Peirce, that is, by virtue of attraction
or affinity among the "created", let us read "interpretants",
"springing from continuity of mind" (or synechism) (cf. CP 6.
304), in other words, from open-ended interpretive processes constituting the
semiotic material of the universe. The concept of continuity involves that of
regularity. As emerges from her own philosophy of the signifying processes
permeating the entire universe, Welby too believes that development is beaten
out and articulated in a structure and, furthermore, that continuity presupposes
relational logic grounded in otherness, a sort of dia-logic. The overall
orientation of anancasm is regulated by "an intrinsic affinity for the good",
says Peirce, and from this viewpoint it is similar to the agapastic type of
advance. But as close to agapasm as it may come, anancasm lacks in a determinant
factor for evolution, that is, the factor of "freedom" that instead
characterizes creative love and subtends tychism (cf. CP 6.305).
Understood as development by virtue of the forces of
affinity and sympathy and referring to one of Peirce's most important
tripartitions of the sign, we could say that agapasm is strongly iconic
(the other two terms correlated with the icon are notoriously the index
and the symbol). Agapastic evolution alludes to evolution regulated by
the law of love, creative and altruistic love, as Welby would say, love oriented
toward others; though foreseeing the action of chance and necessity as well, in
agapastic evolution the forces of attraction, affinity and freedom prevail and,
therefore, iconicity in the relationship among interpretants in the continuous (synechetic)
flow of unlimited semiosis.
On her part, Welby too identifies three principal modes
in the development of the universe: the "planetary", the "solar"
and the "cosmic" which indicate three levels of increasing complexity
and signifying power according to the model proposed by her meaning triad with
its tripartition into "sense", "meaning" and "significance"
(cf. Welby 1893, 1896, 1983). The universe develops and is amplified through the
generation/interpretation of signs in a continuously expanding network as signs
and senses multiply. In such a context evolutionary development is not only
achieved by describing objective facts, the effectual, that is, what effectively
happens in the external world, among the created, but beyond this by
hypothesizing future developments, possible or simply imaginative worlds, by
accepting the challenge of the "play of musement" (a concept taken
from Peirce and developed particularly by Thomas A. Sebeok) as the various
planes of existence, sign activity and discourse interweave.
In another series of unpublished manuscripts written at
the beginning of the twentieth century, Welby elaborates her original concept of
mother-sense, subsequently replaced by the term primal sense and
its variant primary sense (Box 28, Subject File 24). This concept
plays a central role in the processes of signification and interpretation as she
conceives them and, therefore, in the construction of worldviews. Welby
distinguishes between "sense" and therefore "mother-sense",
on one hand, and "intellect" and therefore "father-reason",
on the other. And with this distinction it is her intention to indicate the
general difference between two main modes–that in fact cut across sexual
differences–in the generation/interpretation of sense, hypothetically
isolatable at the level of theory but strictly interrelated in praxis or sense
producing practices ("sense" being here understood in a broad sense as
inclusive of "meaning" and "significance").
Mother-sense is the generating source of sense and of
the capacity for criticism, says Welby; it is subtended by the logic of
otherness and as such corresponds to the capacity for knowing in a broad and
creative sense through sentiment, perception, intuition, and cognitive leaps;
thinking of Peirce, we could say that it is the idea intuited before it is
possessed or before it possesses us. As the capacity for knowledge, which we may
also intend in the Peircean sense of agapic or sympathetic comprehension and
recognition, or in the Bakhtinian sense of answering comprehension,
mother-sense belongs to the human race in its totality, "an inheritance
common to humanity", says Welby, without being limited to a particular
sexual gender, the female, even though on a socio-historical level the woman may
emerge as its main guardian and disseminator given the course of events in the
development of culture and society.
With the term "intellect" as understood by
Welby we are on the side of inferential processes of the inductive and deductive
type, that is, where the logic of identity dominates over alterity. With "mother-sense"
we are on the side of signifying processes dominated by alterity and, with
reference to Peirce's renown classification of signs into symbol, index and
icon, by the iconic dimension; mother-sense, or "racial sense", as
Welby also calls it, alludes to the creative and generative forces of sense
resulting from the capacity to associate things which would seem distant from
each other but which in reality are attracted to one another, and, therefore,
from the capacity for analogy and homology; from the viewpoint of argumentation
"mother-sense" rests on the side of logical procedures of the
abductive type insofar as they are regulated by the values of otherness,
creativity, dialogicality, freedom and desire. Furthermore, "mother-sense"
includes "father-sense" (even if latently), while the contrary is not
true. For this reason both mother-sense and intellect need to be recovered in
their original condition–both on a philogenetic and ontogenetic level–of
dialectic and dialogic interrelation.
Logic as intended by Welby is logic where the broader
and generative dimension of sense, the original level, the primal level,
mother-sense, racial sense, the "matrix" interweaves with rational,
intellectual life in a relationship of dialectic interdependency and reciprocal
enrichment. According to Welby, logic to classify as logic must always be
associated with primal sense. And, indeed, one of the major goals of significs
is to recover the relationship among signs of "answering comprehension",
to say it with Bakhtin, or of "agapic or sympathetic comprehension",
to say it with Peirce, and therefore of reciprocal empowering between primal
sense and rational life. This relationship is necessary for a full development
of critical sense and, therefore, of the maximum value, meaning and purport of
experience in its totality. Welby's concept of logic may also be associated with
Peirce's when the latter describes the great principle of logic in terms of
"self-surrender" while clarifying that this does not mean that self is
to lay low for the sake of an ultimate triumph, and even though this may come
about, it must not be the governing purpose of behavior (cf. CP 5.402,
note 2).
In a letter to Peirce of January 21st. 1909, Welby
significantly agrees with the former's observation that logic is the "ethics
of the intellect", which supports our description of her position
concerning what we may call the "ethics of criticism". Scientific
rigor in reasoning, to be worthy of such a description must rise from agapastic
logical procedures, from "primal sense", and, therefore, from the
courage of admitting to the structural necessity–for the evolution of sign,
subject and consciousness–of inexactitude, instability and crisis (cf. Welby/Peirce
January 21st. 1909, in Hardwick 1977: 91)
In Welby's description and similarly to Peirce, the
human being is a community of parts distinct from each other but not separate.
Far from excluding each other these parts, or selves, are reciprocally dependent
on each other, that is, they are founded on the logic of otherness and of
unindifference among the differences which excludes the possibility of
undifferentiated confusion among the parts, of leveling the other on self. As
says Welby, to confound is to sacrifice distinction (ibid.). Therefore,
to the extent that it represents an excess with respect to the sum of its parts,
the I or "Ident", another neologism introduced by Welby in her
unpublished manuscripts, is not the "individual" but the "unique"
(cf. "I and self", June 1907). Here we may interpret what Welby
understands by "unique"–which has nothing to do with the monadic
separatism of Stirner's conception of the unique, of singularity–with the
concept of "non relative otherness" as understood by Lévinas.
Love is directed to the concrete, and not to
abstractions, to persons, one's neighbour not necessarily in a spatial sense,
locally, but in the sense of affinity, a person "we live near [...] in life
and feeling": love is a driving force where iconicity, abduction and
creativity are clearly operative. Applying the lesson learnt from St. John, with
Peirce we may infer that the mind and the cosmos develop through the power of
love understood as orientation toward the other, as care for the other. And
recalling his essay of 1892, "The Law of Mind", he reminds his readers
that the type of evolution foreseen by synechism, the principle of continuity,
is evolution through the agency of love whose prime characteristic, as we have
already pointed out, is that it puts us into a position to recognize the germs
of loveliness in the hateful and make it lovely (cf. CP 6.287-289).
Peirce polemically contrasts the "Gospel of Christ"
according to which progress is achieved by virtue of a relationship of sympathy
established among neighbours, with the "Gospel of greed" which he
describes as the dominant tendency of the times consisting in the assertion of
the individual and, therefore, of one's own individuality or egoistic identity
over the other (cf. CP 6.294). Here we may draw a parallel between
Peirce's critique of the supremacy of the individual and Welby's developed in
terms of her analysis of the dynamics between I and self, and of her critique of
the self's tendency to transform selfness into selfishness or selfism. Darwin's Origin
of Species (1859), the idea of natural selection, the survival of the
fittest, the struggle for existence are examples of the translation of this
concept of the indivual from nineteenth century political economy to the
sciences of life, from economic development to the development of the living
organism. On his part, Peirce chooses the agapastic theory of evolution and in
fact considers his own strong attraction for this doctrine as possible proof of
its truth (cf. CP, 6.295).
Recalling Henry James, Peirce distinguishes between
self-love, love directed to another insofar as s/he is exactly like self, and
creative love directed to what is completely different, even "hostile and
negative" with respect to self, love directed to the other insofar as s/he
is other. On this basis we could develop a typology of love passing from a high
degree of identity to a high degree of alterity. But truly creative love, as
both Welby and Peirce teach us, is love regulated by the logic of otherness,
love for the other, directed to the other insofar as s/he is other. We could
claim that the logic of otherness is an agapastic logic and that otherness,
dialogicality, love and abduction together constitute the generating nucleus of
signs, sense and worlds that are real, possible, or only imaginary (cf. CP
6.287).
If we consider Peirce in the perspective proposed in
this paper, and bearing in mind the titles of two volumes that collect his
writings in Italian translation, La semiotica cognitiva and Caso amore
e logica, we could maintain that to study Peirce today is to push beyond him
considered in a cognitive perspective in the direction of what we propose to
call teleosemiotics. This is the task we have presently set ourselves and
in such a perspective certain aspects of Peirce's work, similarly to Welby's,
can no longer be ignored.
II. Confrontations
2.
Bakhtin and Welby in (Imaginary ) Dialogue
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) and Victoria Welby
(1837-1912) belong to different countries, Russia and England respectively, to
different historical periods and to different socio-cultural and political
backgrounds. However, despite such chronotopic diversity, and despite the fact
that such diversity was never bridged by any form of direct or indirect contact,
Bakhtin and Welby rnay be related on a theoretical level in what we may envisage
as an imaginary dialogue.
The sign model traceable in the theories of Bakhtin and
Welby is an open model based on the value of dialogic otherness and signifying
excess. This implies that categories are required capable of accounting for the
specific signifying quality of signs, particularly enhanced in verbal signs,
including: "dialogism", "answering comprehension", "otherness"
(both internal and external), and "excess."
Like Bakhtin, Welby's interest in problems of meaning
initially began with her studies on religious, theological and exegetical issues
and more specifically with problems arising from the textual interpretation of
the Bible. These studies found early expression in a book of 1881, Links and
Clues. At the time, Welby had already identified problems that were to
become central in her later studies on meaning: these included her concept of
the linguistic conscience, her criticism of plain, common-sense and obvious
meaning, of so-called "linguistic traps", her attention for the
essential ambiguity of signs in general and of verbal signs in particular, her
concept of textual interpretation based on awareness against the temptation of
reassuring monologism, of the semantic pliancy and polylogism of signs, and of
the potential multiplicity of interpretive itineraries with respect to a single
text.
Aware of the dialogic plurilingualism and changeability
of the semantic value of verbal signs, Welby advocated the necessity of
developing a more acute discriminating linguistic conscience in the formulation
of truths and dogmas. In a section entitled "Words" in her 1881 book,
Welby wrote that we "survey the same expanse of truth from as many 'points'
as possible", attributing many of the problems arising in relation to
exegetic interpretation, dogma and orthodoxy to the failure of doing just this,
to the lack of awareness of the ambiguity of words and their equivocation.
Therefore, those aspects of signification which in her more mature work were to
be covered by her theory of the "plasticity" of language, were already
present in her writings of 1881.
For Bakhtin also, who was brought up in the Russian
Orthodox tradition and remained a believer all his life (cf. Clark-Holquist
1984: 120-145), religious concerns were of central importance (especially in the
early stages of his work). Bakhtin advocated the need to view religious issues
in relation to the other spheres of human investigation, in relation to science
and philosophy. Religion thus considered emerged as a system of ideas
interacting dialogically with other systems of ideas in a continually changing
world. Such an attitude contradicted methodogical monism, the unquestioning
acceptance of dogma and received truths. Both Bakhtin and Welby reviewed
religious issues in relation to language, in the perspective of the ethics of
terminology, of critical awareness and interpretive discernment. Being conscious
of the polylogic and polyphonic nature of reality, of the coexistence of
different viewpoints, Bakhtin, similariy to Welby, conceived the flux of life as
a polyphonic interrelation of differences in continual transformation.
Without being subservient to linguistics both Welby and
Bakhtin maintain that linguistic material is common to all human cultural
expressions. The specificity of human culture lies in its linguistic-idedogical
value (Bakhtin) or linguistic-psychological value (Welby). Consequently,
language analysis is not only necessary in dealing with problems of a strictly
linguistic order, but with human experience at large given that in the last
analysis it is rooted in language.
For both Bakhtin and Welby, the reality of signs and
their meaning is the product of dynamic, dialectic, and dialogic interaction
among speakers. Signs are not abstract and private entities relevant to the
meaning intention of the individual, subjective consciousness, but, on the
contrary, they are concrete expressions, at any given moment, of the experience
of plural, social consciousness, of the social context with which the single
individual continuously interacts. And analogously to a living organism, the
sign is subject to change, renewal and enrichment through the acquisition of new
voices, knowledge and experience. The word as it is received and elaborated by
the speaking community is the sign of meanings which from a diachronic viewpoint
have accumulated during the process of historical development, are co-present at
the moment of use by the individual speaker, and as Welby avers, are subject to
transformation at the very moment of utterance when, indeed, they acquire a
fresh imprint, a new accentuation as Bakhtin would say. Thus when managing words,
we are not dealing with entities that are anonymous, fixed once and for all and
devoid of their own configuration, but rather with historical products endowed
with the signifying intentions of others, with their own ideological consistency
and capacity for further elaboration.
Welby and Bakhtin take their distances from the
objective empiricism of positivistic thought. Bakhtin is critical of the
mechanistic and predialectic type of materialism and, therefore, of the
positivistic description of empirical data in terms of the non-dialectic, fixed,
stable, precisely delimited and undisputable. This stance finds resonance in
Welby's criticism of "hard dry facts". Indeed, for both Welby and
Bakhtin facts and data are part of sign mediated reality: as the object of
interpretation they emerge as signs endowed with meaning pregnant with the
interpretive experience of others.
By contrast with nonverbal signs, verbal signs do not
exist outside their sign function. The word is completely absorbed by its sign
function and as such is the fullest expression of social relations: the word is
uniquely ideological signifying reality. As expressions of social communication,
cultural systems and the ideology that fashions them are best studied through
analysis of the word, the ideological phenomenon par excellence. Verbal signs
have the greatest potential for semantic and ideological plurality. According to
Weby, "thought is not merely 'clothed' in language", but rather
thought and language belong to the common process of interpretation. Mental life
is rooted in language, and therefore, as Bakhtin says, the science of psychology
must be rooted in verbal-ideological theory, or to say it with Welby, in
language theory. The reality of the human psyche is
linguistic-cultural-ideological reality, therefore sign reality. Consequently
for both Bakhtin and Welby, problems connected with human psychic life are best
dealt with through a sign interpretation approach. In this perspective, the
problem of the relation between the individual psyche and cultural ideological
expressions at large is also that of specifying and distinguishing between the
notions of "indivual" and "social", "inner' and "outer"
within the common context of sign life.
The individual as a person and not merely as a
biological entity is a social product. The content of the human individual
psyche is social as is the language of which it is made. Bakhtin identified the
specificity of the individual psyche in the union between the biological
organism and the system of socio-economic and cultural conditions which enable
that organism to subsist and develop as a human person. The individual organism
and outer experience meet in the sign. The individual consciousness is
fundamentally social consciousness. The relation between thought and external
reality is a sign mediated relation for both the individual and the collectivity:
"the inner psyche is not analyzable as a thing but can only be understood
and interpreted as a sign" (cf. Voloshinov 1929, Eng. trans. 1973: 25-26).
Welby's position runs parallel to Bakhtin's
notwithstanding inevitable differences in terminology. In a pamphlet entitled The
Use of the "Inner" and the "Outer" in Psychology: Does the
Metaphor Help or Hinder? (1892), Welby gave abundant evidence of the
detrimental effect on ideas of the misuse of figurative language. She critically
analyzes, for example, the pairs of opposites used in relation to mental life:
"Inner and outer," "inside and outside," "interior and
exterior," "within and without," "Self anc Not-self,"
and observes that such dichotomies have fostered the erroneous conviction of a
clear-cut distinction between mental life and material life:
"Mind" and "matter", "thought"
and "thing," embrace all that is, all reality, all that has meaning
and therefore importance or consequence (ibid.: 4).
After all what do we rightly want to do in
describing the mental or physical world as Inner and the material or physical
world as Outer? Do we not want to emphasize distinction while preserving
continuity or even identity; to give intension in the one case and extension in
the other? Cannot these be equally secured by more abstract terms, like
subjective and objective? (ibid.: 6)
Similarly to Bakhtin for Welby too the aim should be to
construct an objective psychology, where "objective" may be read as
"socio-semiotic" and, therefore, to define inner experience, the
subjective consciousness, in terms of objective, outer experience. This does not
mean to accept behaviorism in its mechanistic version, openly criticized by
Bakhtin (Voloshinov 1929), but as understood by Morris (1964) who was influenced
by George H. Mead.
Popular culture is a major issue for both Welby and
Bakhtln. As emerges in his books on Dostoevsky and Rabelais, Bakhtin's theory of
literature rests on philosophy of language that takes into account the
expressive reserve of folklore tradition. Bakhtin theorizes carnival, the
reversal of hierarchical relations, the elimination of social distances,
profanation and joyful relativity, all of which are useful in highlighting the
potential polyphony of linguistic life. Welby too focused on the creative
expressiveness of popular culture and its effect on cultural regeneration and
renewal at large. She often pointed to the unconsciously philosophical, popular
instinct of the "man in the street", symbolized by the question "What
does it mean?", or "what does it signify?", as a model for the
treatment of language problems at the theoretical level. She stressed the
particolar "significal" pregnancy of his idiom, particularly as it
found expression in folklore tradition and narrative:
[...] both slang and popular talk, if
intelligently regarded and appraised, are reservoirs from which valuable new
currents might be drawn into the main stream of language–rather armouries from
which its existing powers could be continuously re-equipped and re-enforced. (Welby
1985: 38-39)
The question "What does it mean?" or "What
does it signify?", brings Welby to the question of the moral or ethic
aspect of speech life and signifying processes in general, to the practical
bearing and ethical value of signs. According to Welby, it is important that
speakers develop a critical awareness of the value and "true significance
of ambiguity", that they realize the value of experience through reflexion
on the value of signs. Similarly to Bakhtin and coherently with interpretation
semiotics and the sign model it proposes, sign value, according to Welby, must
be looked for beyond the limits of intentional communication: it is neither
founded on the logic of exchange value nor of use value, but on the logic of
otherness and signifying excess, it is identified by Welby and Bakhtin
respectively in "significance" and "theme". In the words of
Bakhtin (-Volosinov):
Theme is a complex, dynamic system of signs that
attempts to be adequate to a given instant of the generative process. Theme is
reaction by the consciousness in its generative process to the generative
process of existence. Meaning is the technical apparatus for the implementation
of theme (Voloshinov 1929, Eng. trans. 1973:10).
The boundary between "theme" and "meaning"
is not clear-cut and definitive for the two terms interact and cannot subsist
independently of each other: the "meaning" of the utterance is
conveyed by transforming it into an element of the "theme," and vice
versa, the "theme is necessarily based on some kind of fixity of meaning if
communicative interaction is to be realized at all. In Welby, "sense"
beyond is sensorial signifying implications, concerns the way the word is
understood according to the rules of conventional use, it concerns the word in
relation to the circumstances of communicative interaction, to the universe of
discourse and never in isolation (this is the dialectic described by Bakhtin
between "meaning" and "theme"). Welby's "meaning"
refers to the precise communicative intention of the user, her "significance"
designates the import, implication, the overall and ideal value of the utterance.
There is, strictiy speaking, no such thing as the Sense of a word, but only the sense in which it is used–the circumstances, state of mind, reference, "universe of discourse" belonging to it. The Meaning of a word is the intent which it is desired to convey–the intention of the user. The Significance is always manifold, and intensifies its sense as well as its meaning, by expressing its importance, its appeal to us, its moment for us, its emotional force, its ideal value, its moral aspect, its universal or at least social range. (Welby 1983:5-6)
We may relate Bakhtin's "meaning" to Welby's
"sense"; his "theme" to her "meaning" and "significance".
Such correspondences can of course only be approximate, given that, among other
things, the concepts in question represent different attempts at breaking down a
unitary totality which in reality is indivisibie. Indeed, theoretical
distinctions are always made by way of abstraction and serve to focus on
particular aspects of signs. Let us remember, however, that not only do signs
exist as whole entities, but that they act in relation to each other, finding in
each other their specificity and significance in dialectic and dialogic
signifying processes.
This parallel between Welby and Bakhtin is an attempt
at appreciating their respective thought systems more fully, by translating
Welby's discourse into Bakhtin's and viceversa, enabling them to shed light on
each other. But more than this it is hoped that their relevance to semiotic
discourse has sufficiently emerged for the reader to be aware of the eventual
contribution that may come from these authors for a more comprehensive treatment
of current problems in language and communication theory. In such a perspective,
the cultural and chronotopic distance that impeded dialogue in real life ends up
being an advantage for the realization of dialogue at the level of theoretical
confrontation.
II. Confrontations
3.
Morrisian behaviorism and Peircean pragmatism
Pragmatism and logical empiricism are the two main
trends in American thought taken up by Charles Morris and united in a doctrine
called scientific empiricism at the time of his adherence to the project of
Unified Science as envisaged by the supporters of logical positivism. It was
within this perspective that Morris' behaviorism was to be gradually delineated
as his research proceeded. Applied to psychology, the physicist thesis
underlying the Unity of Science Movement found expression in American
behaviorism, which generally consisted in rejecting the notions of mind and
consciousness (refusal of mentalism) and in limiting investigation to the
observable behavior of organisms. On his part, Morris had already dealt with the
problem of sign within the framework of his discussion of mentalism and
behaviorism in his early 1927 article, "The concept of the symbol".
Morris' association of the study of signs with behaviorism initially occurred
with reference to the latter as it had been formulated by K. Koffka and by A. P.
Weiss. In addition to this, Morris was even more strongly influenced by the
behaviorism of his master, George H. Mead, who in 1922 had already published an
article entitled "A behaviorist's account of the significant symbol".
For a study of Morris' relation to the American
pragmatists and behaviorists during the years of his intellectual formation, of
fundamental importance is his 1932 survey of the various trends in American
philosophy, Six Theories of Mind. In this volume Morris examines diverse
stances from Plato to Russell and Whitehead in the light of the epistemological
relation between mind and world. Furthermore, this volume proposes a discussion
of the pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey with references also to Mead,
whose influence on Morris was more direct. Working in the same direction,
another significant volume is Logical Positivism, Pragmatism and Scientific
Empiricism (Morris 1937), a collection of five articles originally published
between 1934 and 1936. Here Morris examines logical positivism in its
formulation by the Vienna Circle, together with other trends in European
philosophy (of which he had had direct experience during his stay in Europe in
1935) in relation to the American tradition of thought.
In 1938, besides Foundations of the Theory of Signs,
Morris also published "Scientific empiricism" as well as "Peirce,
Mead, and pragmatism". In the latter he insisted on the affinity between
Peirce and Mead, or more precisely between Peirce's "original pragmatism"
(or "pragmaticism") and Mead's more recent formulation of it. These
two scholars had many points in common, including: the importance attributed by
both to the social factor, and to the theory of signs; the thesis of the
inseparability of thought and semiosis; and the thesis of the connection between
thought and action. Moreover, for both Peirce and Mead such aspects as finalism,
chance, and creativity played an important role in the relation between mind and
world. Morris identified a fundamental distinguishing element between the two
scholars in his attribution of a metaphysical vision to Peirce and the
altogether different "contextual or situational" approach
characterizing Mead–a difference he traced back to Peirce's belief in "isomorphism
between signs and things". We shall not dwell on this problem now, though
it is doubtless worth observing that the current return to Peirce's philosophy,
evident in Italy as well, would seem to contradict Morris' interpretation, at
least in part. Here we shall simply observe that both Morris' acceptance of
Mead's behaviorism and his recognition of the numerous points in common with
Peirce's pragmatism is an indication that Morris' behaviorism is a special sort
of behaviorism largely coincident with Peircean pragmaticism (more so than with
the pragmatism of James, even though Morris did not fail to acknowledge his debt
to the latter in a paper entitled "William James today", cf. Morris
1942).
In "Signs about signs about signs", Morris
(1948) made a point of clarifying that he was mostly interested in behaviorism
as it derived from Mead, as well as from Tolman and Hull. Indeed, far from
applying a theory of psychology as elaborated in the study of rats in the
laboratory (as stated by one of Morris' critics) to human beings, Mead, Tolman,
and Hull aimed at elaborating a general theory of behavior capable of explaining
the behavior of both men and rats while at the same time accounting for the
differences. The most interesting part of this 1948 paper by Morris is his reply
to Bentley, who, in his review of SLB and with reference to Dewey's criticism of
FTS, concentrated on the relation between Morris and Peirce. On considering
Morris' use of the key concepts "interpreter" and "interpretant",
Dewey accused the former of having "overturned Peirce". On his part
and quoting from SLB, Morris replied that "as much as his orientation does
not derive directly from Peirce", his position was in fact "an attempt
at carrying out in resolute fashion his [Peirce's] approach to semiotics".
On the other hand, Morris explains that his own form of behaviorism is a direct
derivation from Mead, while only later was he to reckon with Peirce, as with
Ogden and Richards, Carnap, Russell, and only subsequently with the behaviorists,
Tolman and Hull. On replying to Bentley Morris also dealt with the criticism of
Dewey, who was mainly concerned with the notions of "interpreter" and
"interpretant" as adapted from Peirce. Dewey was unaware of the close
connection established by Peirce between these two concepts, given that–at
least in the text where he accused Morris of having misinterpreted Peirce–he
viewed the relation between sign and interpretant as internal to the sign
system, consequently leaving aside the relation between sign and interpretation
and, therefore, the role of the interpreter in the process of semiosis in which
something functions as a sign. There is no such thing as a sign without an
interpretant or an interpreter, given that the interpretant is the effect of the
sign on the interpreter; indeed, since the interpreter cannot exist as such if
not as a modification caused by the sign in an open chain of interpretants, the
interpreter is also an interpretant and therefore a sign. Peirce himself
explained this coincidence between man and sign, interpreter and interpretant in
"Some consequences of four incapacities" (CP 5. 264-317), while
clarifying at the same time that far from eliminating any one of the two terms
forming such pairs, each evidences a different aspect of the same process.
Another interesting point in Morris' discussion is his
specification that Peirce used the term "interpretant" with different
meanings: it is common knowledge that he in fact distinguished between immediate
interpretant, dynamical interpretant, and final interpretant. Dewey's criticism
of Morris was based on a misunderstanding which arose because of the different
ways in which Peirce himself understood the term "interpretant", and
despite Morris' own efforts at reducing the ambiguity of this term by
introducing another, "significatum" ("designatum" in FTS)
alongside it to indicate "the circumstances in which a person could respond
because of a sign". Dewey used the term "interpretant" with the
meaning of "significatum" as defined by Morris without realizing that
for Morris, instead, the term "interpretant" indicated the effect of a
sign on the interpreter. However, despite such misunderstanding and quoting from
Dewey's Logic, in which he speaks of a preparatory disposition to act in
a certain way toward the sign, Morris underlined how even Dewey in other
contexts stressed this same aspect of the concept of sign.
It should now be clear that the sort of behaviorism
supported by Morris was different from the mechanistic behaviorism of Watson,
and from other approaches such as that of Bloomfield (who ousted the concept of
meaning from the study of language) or Skinner, whose mechanistic conception as
expressed in 1957 was heavily criticized by Chomsky (1959), among others.
In his 1964 book, Signification and Significance: A
Study of the Relation of Signs and Values, Morris at last united the two
main areas of his lifelong research: he had worked on values almost as much as
he had worked on signs, and he rejected the idea that the mere fact of working
on signs gave one the right to judge about values. A large part of his research
had been dedicated especially to the problem of ethical and esthetic value
judgments; in fact, after Foundations of a Theory of Signs and Signs,
Language and Behavior, where such topics were already proposed within a
semiotic framework, and almost ten years before Signification and
Significance, Morris had already focused specifically on the theory of value
in his 1956 book, Varieties of Human Value.
In Signification and Significance, Morris
analyzed the two senses in which the expression "to have meaning" may
be understood: that is, as having value and of being significant on one hand,
and of having a given linguistic meaning, a given signification on the other.
The term "meaning" is doubled into "signification", the
object of semiotics, and "significance", the object of axiology. In
considering signs and values together, Morris faced the problem of identifying a
direct link between semiotics (signification) and axiology (significance)
insofar as the two are concerned with different aspects of the same process (human
behavior), as well as the problem of rediscovering the semiotic consistency of
the signifying process to which the very ambiguity of the term meaning testifies
(cf. 1964a: vii).
In Signification and Significance Morris
introduced terminological innovations relative to the identification of the
components of semiosis. He listed five:
– Sign (or better, sign vehicle). This term
refers to the object acting as a stimulus to sign behavior.
– Interpreter. This term indicates any
organism acted on by the sign vehicle. Such an extension of the concept of
interpreter to include any organism whatever, and therefore, any kind of sign
behavior beyond the human, gave semiotics the possibility of not limiting itself
exclusively to the social behavior of man, and therefore of reaching beyond the
limits established by semiologie of Saussurean matrix. This kind of
orientation in semiotic studies was to find original development in the research
of one of Morris' direct successors, Thomas A. Sebeok.
–Interpretant. This term covers the
disposition to respond to a certain type of object as the result of a sign
stimulus.
–Signification. The object to which the
interpreter responds through an interpretant–that is, the signified object
which as such, specifies Morris, cannot function simultaneously as a stimulus.
Signification here replaces what Morris had variously called denotatum
(1938) and significatum (1946), while the concepts of interpreter and
interpretant remain constant. That the object of signification cannot function
as a stimulus does not mean, explains Morris, that what gives itself over to
direct experience cannot be signified. The point is, rather, that only a part of
such objects can be perceived directly; and it is this part that functions as
the stimulus or sign vehicle. The part that is not fully perceived functions
instead as the signified object, as the object of signification. When we say
"this is a desk", we do so on the basis of our limited experience of
the object in question, of that part that is perceived directly and interpreted
as a sign of the fact that we are dealing with a desk on the basis of the
hypothesis (with all the risks of possible error) that there exist parts we do
not actually see; the back of the desk, its underside, the drawers, etc.
–Finally, Context. This term refers to the set
of circumstances in which semiosis takes place.
Another important specification in this section on the
identification of the fundamental components constituting semiosis concerns,
albeit indirectly, the role of definition in the cognitive process. Morris
explains that it was not his intention to give a definition of sign, but to
establish the situations in which something may be recognized as a sign. Such an
operational or pragmatic attitude toward the cognitive object serves to
demystify the role generally assigned to definition. In fact, it is not a
question of defining the object as the condition of its knowability, but of
describing situations in which we deal with signs. Authors like Welby and
Vailati, who criticize the excessive trust in the cognitive import of definition,
had already worked in a similar direction.
In his effort to establish a link between the
axiological dimension and the sign dimension of behavior, Morris began by
describing signification as designative, prescriptive and appraisive,
respectively exemplified with the terms "black", "ought" and
"good". Following Mead, he then classified action as perceptual,
manipulatory and consummatory. These three types of action and signification
were then made to correspond reciprocally in the order indicated. Morris'
research on the relation between signs and values is turned to identifying
correspondences between notions established in the context of sign theory and
notions established in the context of action analysis (Mead) and value theory.
Such correspondences relate the two faces of the same process as though we were
looking at the correspondences in writing on the two sides of the same sheet of
paper. Morris' research concerns a fact of communication: communication among
the order of signs and of values, and therefore, among the practitioners of
fields concerned with such aspects of behavior.
Let us recall then Rossi-Landi's conclusion in its
definitive formulation as expressed in his 1978 essay, "On some
post-Morrisian problems": it states that Morris' behaviorism is best
understood as a form of "social behavioristics" in which everything
designated as "behavior" may be interpreted in terms of "social
practice".
II. Confrontations
4.
Rossi-Landi Interpreter of Morris
In Italy the only monograph on Charles Morris is that
by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi in its two editions of 1953 and 1975; the latter
reproduces the 1953 monograph without modifications, with the addition of a
revised Italian version of "Signs about a master of sign". Therefore,
the first part of the 1975 edition covers Morris up to 1946, and the second part,
beyond observations concerning WGTS, returns to examining certain fundamental
concepts in Morris' theory, as formulated in 1938 and 1946, in the light of more
recent developments in twentieth century semiotics and of Rossi-Landi's own
research. On the other hand, the novelty of this volume lies in the fact that it
presents a complete bibliography of Morris' works, prepared by Rossi-Landi with
the aim of offering a more comprehensive view of Morris' research itineraries.
Between these two editions of his monograph,
Rossi-Landi published two major papers on Morris (in addition to the
introduction to his translation of Foundations):
(a) His 1958 essay (written in 1956), "Universo di
discorso e lingua ideale in filosofia" is dedicated to a confrontation
between Gustav Bergmann and Morris. This paper continued to focus on Morris' two
books of 1938 and 1946, though his new research was also mentioned–on the
basis of information Rossi-Landi received from Morris through their
correspondence (cf. Petrilli 19??)–with the expectation of new and original
developments. Furthermore, Rossi-Landi announced the imminent publication of the
long-awaited and important Varieties of Human Value (1956), the result of
the "new empirical research on values, on which Morris has been working for
more than a decade".
(b) His "Presentazione" of Morris' writings
on esthetics, which he had translated into Italian for Nuova corrente in
1967; this piece was subsequently republished in 1972 in Semiotica e
ideologia under the title "Sul modo in cui e stata fraintesa la
semiotica estetica di Charles Morris". Here we simply wish to observe that
in this paper Rossi Landi once again stresses the importance in Morris of value
theory, reminding us of its presence in his work as far back as his 1939 essay
on esthetic semiotics. At the time Morris had distinguished between three
primary types of discourse: scientific, esthetic, and technological. According
to Morris, any discourse proposing valuations was classifiable as technological
discourse; consequently, insofar as it involved value judgments, esthetic
criticism required not only a theory of signs (sufficient for esthetic analysis)
but also a theory of values.
Finally, concerning Rossi-Landi's updated
interpretation of Morris with respect to his 1953 monograph, we must return to
his most recent essay on Morris, "On some post-Morrisian problems"
first published in English in 1978, followed by German and Italian editions in
1981 and 1988, respectively. Though interesting from the viewpoint of the
relation between Morris and Rossi-Landi, this essay is substantially a reworking
of the English and Italian versions of Rossi-Landi's 1975 paper "Signs
about a master of signs" in which Morris' concept of behavior is developed
in relation to Rossi-Landi's own concepts of social reproduction and
communication. Rossi-Landi underlines the importance of value theory in
semiotics in this paper as well, both in Morrisian semiotics (given that Morris
"dealt with values at least as much as he dealt with signs") and in
semiotics at large as it was emerging in those years. In the section entitled
"Signs and values", after recalling Morris' 1939 essay and his "Science,
art and technology", published in that same year, and after mentioning his
books Paths of Life (1942), The Open Self (1948), Varieties of
Human Value (1956), and Signification and Significance (1964),
Rossi-Landi makes the following observation:
Morris was thus placing values beside signs and
opposing the idea that the mere study of signs could give any right to judge
about values. Present-day discussions on the limits of structuralism, on the
differences between analysis and evaluation, and on the relations between
systems of signs and systems of values or ideologies tend to indicate that no
semiotic system, and the more so no text, can be completely understood and
properly assessed unless the values it necessarily springs from, and conveys,
are also taken into account. (1978: 9)
In his 1953 monograph on Morris, Rossi-Landi criticized
the behavioral framework of SLB, which made of Morris' semiotics not only a
theory of signs but also a biological science as distinct from philosophy.
Rossi-Landi maintained that the reduction of semiosis to behavior, and therefore
of semiotics to the study of sign behavior–where behavior is limited, in
accordance with the dominant American tradition, to observable behavior–was
already implicit in FTS.
In Rossi-Landi's view such a biological ring
constituted the very limit of Morris' semiotics. He summed up his criticism in
three propositions: (1) the science of behavior is founded on observation; (2)
the condition of being a sign cannot be studied as the property of a thing that
has become a sign; (3) there is no single criterion permitting a univocal
distinction between nonsign behavior and sign behavior. Proposition (2) is
further elaborated with another three propositions: (a) the property of being a
sign can be attributed to anything whatsoever; (b) it is a property of
investiture; (c) it is a property that comes in pairs. All this clarifies that a
sign cannot be explained observationally. Rossi-Landi followed up the three main
points of his criticism with another three specifications: (4) this does not
mean accept ing the mentalistic alternative; (5) it still remains to be seen
whether a technique of sign activity is possible insofar as it is
non-observational; (6) within certain limits it is possible to develop a sort of
natural history of sign behavior on an observational basis. Expressed in more
discursive terms, Rossi-Landi's criticism consisted in underlining the fact that
the property of being a sign may be applied to physical objects and their
representations as much as to such things as memories or sentiments: anything
may become a sign. For sign property to be obtained a relation must be
established between a thing and a significatum; but on his part Morris lost
sight of this relation when he articulated sign behavior into response sequences.
Rossi-Landi much preferred FTS to SLB from this viewpoint as well: in fact, in
FTS Morris spoke of signs as "properties of things in their function of
serving as signs" (Morris 1938c: 4), thereby recognizing that nothing is
intrinsically a sign and that semiotics may study anything that participates in
the process of semiosis. In his introduction to the Italian translation of FTS,
Rossi-Landi (see 1954d) substantially repeated his critical assessments as they
had been formulated in his 1953 monograph.
A step forward in Rossi-Landi's research on Morris is
represented by his 1958 essay "Universo del discorso e lingue ideale in
filosofia". Here Rossi-Landi's discussion of Morris' thought system and
confrontation with Gustav Bergmann opens the way to questions that were to find
a thorough theoretical treatment in Rossi-Landi's 1961 volume, Significato,
comunicazione e parlare comune. In fact, the problem of the relation between
behaviorism and sign theory is treated with reference to the question of the
relation between "common speaking" and the "historical flux of
language" on one hand, and to the historical languages and ideal or
technical languages on the other. Morris' semiotics in 1946 proposed a technical
language, and as such it was considered to be distinct from philosophy. On his
part, instead, Gustav Bergmann had developed a philosophical conception of
language which recalled certain aspects, subsequently abandoned, of Morris 1938.
The limits of Morris' biologism largely stemmed from his "excessive
trust" in the possibility of constructing a technical language. Though
Rossi-Landi was substantially in agreement with Morris concerning the
non-philosophical character of semiotics, to Morris he juxtaposed the more
cautious approach of Bergmann, who posed as a problem–a philosophical problem
also–the relation between "common speech" and ideal language. In
short, in this essay of 1958 Rossi-Landi attempted an interpretation of the two
principal phases of Morrisian semiotics in terms of "special", or
"technical" or "ideal" languages specifically constructed to
talk about signs, as well as in terms of the universe of discourse to which such
special languages belong.
In his "Premessa" to the Italian translation
of Morris' three pieces (see Morris 1967a) published in Nuova corrente,
Rossi-Landi took a stand against the widespread equivocation concerning Morris'
esthetic semiotics, specifying the following: (1) To speak of "semiotic
esthetics" (and worse still given its even more reductive nature, of
semantic esthetics) is a distortion. Rather, we should speak of "esthetic
semiotics", or of a sign theory that is applicable to esthetics as well.
(2) As anticipated above, esthetic criticism deals with both signs and values,
and must therefore involve the two fields theorized by Morris, semiotics and
axiology. (3) Finally, Morris' tripartite division of semiosis into syntax,
semantics, and pragmatics should not be considered as a real distinction: on the
contrary, it is the result of abstraction and is functional only for analysis.
Bearing in mind that certain theoretical trends still maintain the ontological
character of this distinction, the latter is the most important specification
today.
In his 1975 essay, "Signs about a master of signs",
Rossi-Landi discussed the historical-philosophical matrix of the three
dimensions of semiotics theorized by Morris. In fact, if we consider the genesis
of Morrisian semiotics, says Rossi-Landi, going back at least to Morris' booklet
of 1937, Logical Positivism, Pragmatism, and Scientific Empiricism, it is
immediately clear that Morris was projecting the unification of methodological
rationalism, radical empiricism, and critical pragmatism–three components that
correspond to the three dimensions of semiotics: methodological rationalism is a
syntactic inquiry; radical empiricism a semantic inquiry; critical pragmatism a
pragmatic inquiry. Rossi-Landi adds:
All this may be surprising to anyone coming to
semiotics without a taste of philosophico-historical culture, and accepting the
tripartition of semiotics as a mere result of objective investigation carried
out on signs. Instead, such "objective" investigation would not have
been possible without the described confluence of different currents of thought.
Objectivity is always a complex result, even if afterwards it may present itself
to us as simple. (1975b: 161)
In this same essay, Rossi-Landi returned to the problem
of the relation between sign and behavior, and did so within a sort of
self-critical theoretical framework. Having said, in 1953, that it was not
possible to distinguish between sign behavior and nonsign behavior on the basis
of bio-psychological behavioristics, Rossi-Landi realized that so expressed the
implication then was that such a distinction was in any case possible. Instead,
in 1975, he clearly asserted the impossibility of distinguishing tout cours
between sign behavior and nonsign behavior–the fundamental reason being that
we cannot have behavior without communication. Furthermore, in this paper,
Rossi-Landi repeated his conviction that Morris' Foundations deserved
consideration more than his Signs, Language and Behavior, and that the
foundations of semiotics, especially as an eminently social science, could
possibly be located in behavioristic psycho-biology.
Rossi-Landi often returned to Morris, developing his
thought system in relation to his own theoretical works. Indeed, as stated by
the same Rossi-Landi (1988), his interests and studies with respect to such
authors, beyond Morris, as Ryle, Wittgenstein, and Vailati have always been of a
theoretical order, while his books and papers have always dealt with specific
problems. Rossi-Landi's
references to Morris recur in his 1961 book, Significato, comunicazione e
parlare comune. He returned in particular to
certain problems that had already been treated in his 1958 essay, and precisely
to the concept of "universe of discourse", reporting a personal
communication–the exchange of letters of December 27, 1955 and January 10,
1956 (cf. Petrilli 1992c)–in which Morris specified the three significations
according to which the notion of universe of discourse might find application:
(1) Delimitation of an area of the Universe which is to be talked about; (2)
delimitation of the language to be used; (3) a combination of the above two (cf.
Rossi-Landi 1998: 65).
Rossi-Landi developed this problem still further in
1961 with his proposal to push ahead with respect to what Morris himself had
succeeded in grasping of the signifying process (1998: 193), while at the same
time taking up two fundamental points from the master: (1) that meanings are not
entities detached from the real processes of communication and interpretation
(1998: 177); and (2) that the three dimensions of the signifying process or of
semiosis identified by Morris are inseparable.
After complete silence on Morris in his book of 1968 Language
as Work and Trade, Rossi-Landi continued working on him in his 1972
collection of essays Semiotica e ideologia, in which he uses Morris as a
major reference point for the development of his own sign model as well as in
determining the boundaries of the semiotic field generally. Morris' contribution
was invaluable to Rossi-Landi for the distinction between semiotics and its
reductive identification with semantics, as well as in supporting his material
and dialectical interpretation of the Peircean sign model, which in the words of
Rossi-Landi "is taken up and proficuously simplified by Charles Morris"
(1994: 305). In Semiotica e ideologia, Rossi-Landi (1994: 116) also
referred to Morris' master, George H. Mead, with the intention of granting him
the merit of having already studied merchandise in communicative terms in his
early 1934 book, Mind, Self, and Society (edited by Morris in a new
edition of 1965). In addition, Rossi-Landi (1994: 197) also granted Mead the
further merit of having understood that mind must be explained in terms of signs
rather than explaining signs in terms of mind ontologically intended.
The republication of his 1953 monograph in a new
edition of 1975 testifies to the renewal of Rossi-Landi's interest in Morris,
whose name also reappeared in his more recent papers as collected in his book of
1985, Metodica filosofica e scienza dei segni. In this volume, Rossi
Landi brings our attention to Morris in relation to the concepts of interpretant
and denotatum . His ongoing dialogue with the "master of signs"
never fails to be both critical and constructive, as when, for example,
Rossi-Landi (1985a: 152) introduces the terms signans and signatum
to talk about signs, observing that Morris, like Saussure, had fallen prey to a
misunderstanding concerning the relation between signans and signs, he had
confused a part of the totality with the totality itself.
In Rossi-Landi the study of signs was to be more and
more characterized as the study of social reproduction, with respect to which
the concept of social practice is fundamental. Here we shall limit ourselves to
underlining that though the notion of social reproduction was originally derived
from Hegel and Marx, behaviorism as intended by both Mead and Morris was also to
play an important role in Rossi-Landi's theories, if only because the notion of
"social practice" has, as clearly stated by Rossi-Landi himself
(1978), a certain Morrisian flavor.
In the words of Rossi-Landi (in Morris 1938, It.
trans.: xix): "After his Foundations, Morris' research developed in two
different directions. One consists in elaborating the notion of sign and a
general sign theory [... ]the other deals with the problem of value"
(trans. from Italian by S.P.).
Rossi-Landi continued his "dialogue" with
Morris in his 1978 essay, "On some post-Morrisian problems", which, as
mentioned, for the most part repeats his viewpoint as expressed in "Signs
about a master of signs". However, in 1978 he proposed a particularly
important novelty which deserves special attention: his reinterpretation of
Morris' behaviorism in terms of "social practice", a concept on which
Rossi-Landi worked throughout his lifelong research.