If, in order to bring the twain together by the semiotic method, we strain forward to the furthest limits of behaviorism and backward to the earliest take-off point of semantics, we will find that the gap between them is narrow but exceeding deep. Logical syntax begins with the “protocol statement,” the simplest naming sentence; semantics is exclusively concerned with its rules of designation. In regard to the logical syntax of the language of science, Carnap wrote: “Science is a system of statements based on direct experience and controlled by experimental verification….Verification is based on protocol statements.” Protocol statements are “statements needing no justification and serving as the foundations for all the remaining statements of science.”
Behavioristics, even taken at its own estimation, brings us to a point considerably short of the relation of denotation and the protocol sentence. It deals with the sign behavior of animals and man according to the method of natural science — that of discerning empirical regularities and later attributing them to a causal function, a =f (b). An organism’s response to a stimulus is resolvable into a sequential series of commotions mediated by structures, beginning with an air vibration and ending with an efferent nerve discharge into a glandular end-organ.†
An object-science of behavior can only make sense of language by trying to derive it from some refinement of sign response. As Susanne Langer has pointed out, when the naming act is construed in these terms, when the situation in which you give something a name and it is the same for you as it is for me, when this peculiar relation of denotation is construed in terms of stimulus response, one has the feeling that it leaves out the most important thing of all. What is left out, what an object-science cannot get hold of by an intrinsic limitation of method is nothing less than the relation of denotation—a name above all denotes something. If you say “James” to a dog whose master bears that name, the dog will interpret the sound as a sign and look for James. Say it to a person who knows someone called thus, and he will ask, “What about James?” That simple question is forever beyond the dog; signification is the only meaning a name can have for him.
The upshot is, even if we go no further than Mrs. Langer, who is otherwise in sympathy with the positivism of the semioticists, that in semiotic symbol analysis and the science of sign behavior are brought willy-nilly together into a unity which has no other justification than that both have something to do with “sign.” No larger sanction can be forthcoming because of the dictum that sign analysis replaces metaphysics. To say to a semioticist that he is confusing the logical with the real is unacceptable to him because of the “metaphysical” presuppositions involved. One might nevertheless expect that, within the limits of the semiotical method, some attempt might be made to achieve the continuity so highly prized by semioticists since the time of Peirce.* Failing this, one cannot help wondering whether to do so, to explore the gap between pragmaticsmatics and symbol analysis, will not run squarely into an “extrasemiotical” relation — not as a “metaphysical presupposition” or a “naive realism” but as an issue which is precisely arrived at by the semiotical method itself.
SIGN AND SYMBOL
Semiotic uses as its basic frame of reference the meaning triad of Charles Peirce (Figure 8). Its three components are sign, interpretant, and object. The “interpretant” in man is equivalent to “thought” or “idea” or, in modern semiotical usage, to “takings-account-of.” The interpretant therefore implies an organism in which the interpretant occurs, the interpreter. The virtue of the triadic conception of the meaning relation is that it is conformable with the biological notion of stimulus-response, in which the sign is equivalent to a stimulus, the conditioned response to the interpretant, and the designatum to the object of the response.
The triad can be looked at in either its biological (pragmatical) or its logical dimension. That is to say, it can be conceived either as a causal relation obtaining between natural existents and mediated by neural structures, sound waves, and so on; or it can be viewed syntactically-semantically. Thus, in the biological dimension, the buzzer (sign) has no direct relation to the object (food); whereas in the semantical dimension the word (sign) has the direct relation of designation with the object, precisely insofar as it is specified by a semantical rule to designate the object. Syntactics has to do with the logical relation which one sign bears to another.
The semioticists, however, when they speak of the meaning relation as it is taken to occur among natural existents whether human or subhuman, regardless of whether they are speaking of the pragmatical or semantical dimension, always assume that it is a causal sequential event.* They are careful to use response instead of conception or thought or idea.† Even in Ogden and Richards’s variation of Peirce’s triad, in which the terms “symbol” and “thought” (or “reference”) and “referent” are used, it is stated that “between a thought and a symbol causal relations hold.”
We may therefore express the basic semiotic relation in terms of the simple biological triad (represented in Figure 9).
Between the sign and organism, organism and object, “real” causal relations hold. The line between sign and object is dotted because no real relation holds but only an imputed relation, the semantical relation of designation. A major doctrine of the semanticists is that most of the difficulties which thought encounters come about through the imputation of a real relation where only a semantical one exists.
One knows at once what Ogden and Richards mean by real even though latter-day semioticists would avoid the term. Signification occurs as a material happening among natural existents, from the sound of the buzzer to an electrocolloidal change in the dog’s brain to glandular secretion. There is, however, no such “real” relation between sign and object.*
Two considerations arise in connection with the semiotical theory of meaning. The first is simply this: If the semioticists insist on giving a biological account of the meaning relation as it is taken to occur among natural existents (human organisms, words, things), what account are they prepared to give in these terms of the imputed and logical relations which occur in semantics and syntax? If the semantical relation between sign and designatum is not “real,” then what is its status? Is its status settled by the nominal device of calling it an “imputed” relation? Is it simply “wrong” as one might gather from the semanticists? The answer is not forthcoming. One simply speaks in one breath of concepts as “responses” and in the next of the logical relations between concepts. This treatment is, as we have seen, ambiguous. Either it can mean that the semantical-syntactical relation stands in so obvious a continuity with sign behavior that nothing more need be said about it; or it may mean that of course it is “mental” and has nothing to do with sign behavior and that it goes without saying that the Cartesian dualism of res extensa and res cogitans prevails. In any case, it is unsatisfactory to be required to shift attention without further ado from the great corpus of natural science to an “unreal but imputed” relation. It would not seem unreasonable to ask what one is to make of this queer relation in terms of a “unified science.”