The second consideration, and one which on investigation leads to such unexpected consequences, has been raised, not by a hostile critic of semiosis, but by an erstwhile symbolic logician. There is something wrong, writes Susanne Langer, about regarding the word symbol as a sign and a conception as a response. Since the notion of meaning as signification in the narrow sense, as a response, “misses the most important feature of the material,” what is this feature and what are its epistemological consequences?*
What is this most important feature which is left out by a causal rendering of meaning? It is, of course, the relation of denotation as opposed to signification. To give something a name, at first sight the most commonplace of events, is in reality a most mysterious act, one which is quite unprecedented in animal behavior and imponderable in its consequences. The semioticists are obliged by method to render symbol as a kind of sign. Morris defines a symbol as a sign produced by its interpreter which acts as a substitute for some other sign with which it is synonymous. Thus, in a dog, hunger cramps can take the place of the buzzer in the control of the dog’s behavior: “Hunger cramps might themselves come to be a sign (that is, a symbol) of food at the customary place.” Although we may sympathize with Morris’s purpose, not to disqualify “mind,” but simply to advance semiotic as a science, the fact remains that this is an extraordinary use of the word symbol—certainly it has nothing to do with denotation. It is the relation of denotation, as Mrs. Langer points out, which has been completely overlooked. The question is this: Can denotation be derived by a refinement of behavioral reaction, or is it something altogether different? Can any elaboration of response issue in naming? Why is it, we begin to wonder, the semioticists refuse to deal with symbolization, excepting only as it is governed by semantical rules?
That symbolization is radically and generically different from signification is confirmable in various ways. There is the sudden discovery of the symbol in the history of deaf-mutes, such as the well-known incident in which Helen Keller, who had “understood” words but only as signs awoke to the extraordinary circumstance that the word water meant, denoted, the substance water.* There are the genetic studies of normal children, as for example the observation of Schachtel, who speaks of the “autonomous object interest” of young children as being altogether different from the earlier need-gratification interest.† Symbolization can be approached genetically, as the proper subject of an empirical psychology, or it can be set forth phenomenologically, as a meaning structure with certain irreducible terms and relations.
Let us first take notice of the gross elements of the symbol meaning situation and later of the interrelations which exist between them.
THE SECOND ORGANISM AND THE RELATION OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY
What happens, then, when a sign becomes a symbol; when a sound, a vocable, which had served as a stimulus in the causal nexus of organism-in-an-environment, is suddenly discovered to mean something in the sense of denoting it?
It will be recalled that the relation of signification is a triadic one of sign-organism-object (Figure 9). This schema holds true for any significatory meaning situation. It is true of a dog responding to a buzzer by salivation; it is true of a polar bear responding to the sound of splitting ice; it is true of a man responding to a telephone bell;* it is true of little Helen Keller responding to the word water by fetching water. The essential requirement of signification is that there be an organism in an environment capable of learning by effecting an electrocolloidal change in the central nervous system and as a consequence responding to a stimulus in a biologically adaptive fashion.†
It is important to realize that whereas signification often occurs between two or more organisms, it is not essential that it should, and that generically the sort of response is the same whether one or more organisms are involved. The action of a dog in responding intelligently to the bark or feint of another dog — Mead’s “conversation of gesture”—is generically the same sort of meaning relation as that in which a solitary polar bear responds to the sound of splitting ice. It is the environment to which the organism responds in a biologically adaptive fashion, and the mode of response is the same whether the environment consist of other organisms or of inorganic nature.
Only a moment’s reflection is needed to realize that the minimal requirement of symbolization is quite different. By the very nature of symbolic meaning, there must be two “organisms” in the meaning relation, one who gives the name and one for whom the name becomes meaningful. The very essence of symbolization is an entering into a mutuality toward that which is symbolized. The very condition of my conceiving the object before me under the auspices of a symbol is that you name it for me or I name it for you. The act of symbolization requires another besides the hearer; it requires a namer. Without the presence of another, symbolization cannot conceivably occur because there is no one from whom the word can be received as meaningful. The irreducible condition of every act of symbolization is the rendering intelligible; that is to say, the formulation of experience for a real or an implied someone else.
The presence of the two organisms is not merely a genetic requirement, a sine qua non of symbolization; it is rather its enduring condition, its indispensable climate. Every act of symbolization, a naming, forming an hypothesis, creating a line of poetry, perhaps even thinking, implies another as a co-conceiver,* a co-celebrant of the thing which is symbolized. Symbolization is an exercise in intersubjectivity.
A new and indefeasible relation has come into being between the two organisms in virtue of which they are related not merely as one organism responding to another but as namer and hearer, an I and a Thou. Mead’s two dogs quarreling over a bone exist in a conversation of gesture, a sequential order of gesture and countergesture. But a namer and a hearer of the name exist in a mutuality of understanding toward that which is symbolized. Here the terminology of object science falls short. One must use such words as mutuality or intersubjectivity, however unsatisfactory they may be. But whatever we choose to call it, the fact remains that there has occurred a sudden cointending of the object under the auspices of the symbol, a relation which of its very nature cannot be construed in causal language.†
Is it possible, then, that an unprejudiced semiotic may throw some light on the interpersonal relation, the I-Thou of Buber, the intersubjectivity of Marcel? As things stand now, the empirical mind can make very little of this entity “intersubjectivity,” and the behaviorist nothing at all. Like other existential themes, it seems very much in the air. Yet an empirical approach to the genesis of symbolization is bound to reveal it as a very real, if mysterious, relation. Perhaps the contribution of a new semiotic will be that intersubjectivity is by no means a reducible, or an imaginary, phenomenon but is a very real and pervasive bond and one mediated by a sensible symbol and a sensible object which is symbolized.*