We may therefore revise the sign triad as the symbol tetrad (see Fig. 9A).
The “organisms” no longer exist exclusively in a causal nexus but are united by a new and noncausal bond, the relation of intersubjectivity.
But a new relation has also arisen between the object and its symbol. What is the nature of the “imputed relation of identity”?
THE INTENTIONAL RELATION OF IDENTITY
Mead said that a vocal gesture (sign) becomes a symbol when the individual responds to his own stimulus in the same way as other
people respond. Yet one cannot fail to realize that something is amiss in construing as a response Helen Keller’s revelation that this is water. And certainly it misses the peculiar representative function of language to declare that, when I ask you to do something, I also arouse in myself the same tendency to do it.
What, then, is changed in the semiotic relation by Helen Keller’s inkling that this is water? Physically, the elements are the same as before. There is Helen; there is Miss Sullivan; there is the water flowing over one hand, and there is the word spelled out in the other. Yet something of very great moment has occurred. Not only does she have the sense of a revelation, so that all at once the whole world is open to her, not only does she experience a very great happiness, a joy which is quite different from her previous need-satisfactions (see Schachtel’s “autonomous object interest” above), but immediately after discovering what the water is, she must then know what everything else is.
The critical question may now be raised. In discovering the peculiar denotative function of the symbol, has Helen only succeeded in opening Pandora’s box of all our semantical ills of “identification,” or has she hit upon the indispensable condition of our knowing anything at all, perhaps even of consciousness itself?* Is her joy a “hallucinatory need-satisfaction,” an atavism of primitive word-magic; or is it a purely cognitive joy oriented toward being and its validation through the symbol?
It comes down to the mysterious naming act, this is water (the word spelled out in her hand). Here, of course, is where the trouble starts. For clearly, as the semanticists never tire of telling us, the word is not water. You cannot eat the word oyster, Chase assures us; but then not even the most superstitious totemistic tribesman would try to.† Yet the semanticists themselves are the best witnesses of the emergence of an extraordinary relation — which they deplore as the major calamity of the human race — the relation of an imputed identity between word and thing. Undoubtedly the semanticists have performed a service in calling attention to the human penchant for word magic, for reifying meanings by simply applying words to them. Gabriel Marcel frequently speaks of the same tendency of “simulacrum” formation, by which meanings become hardened and impenetrable to thought. Yet one wonders if it might not be more useful to investigate this imputed identity for what part it might play in human knowing, rather than simply deplore it — which is after all an odd pursuit for a “scientific empiricist.”
To awake to the remarkable circumstance that something has a name is neither a response nor an imputed real identity. No one believes that the name is really the thing, nor does the sentence This is water mean this. Then what is the relation? It might clarify matters to eliminate the mysterious copula, leaving the sentence This: water. Or even more simply, eliminate the word this, leaving a pointing at and a naming (in semiotic language, an indexical sign plus a symbol). In its essence the making and the receiving of the naming act consist in a coupling, an apposing of two real entities, the uttered name and the object. It is this pairing which is unique and unprecedented in the causal nexus of significatory meaning. But what is the nature of this pairing? The two terms, it is clear, are related in some sense of identification, yet not a real identity. To express it in modern semiotical language, the water is conceived through the vehicle of the symbol. In Scholastic language, the symbol has the peculiar property of containing within itself in alio esse, in another mode of existence, that which is symbolized.* Helen knows the water through and by means of the symbol.
The word is that by which the thing is conceived or known. It is, in Scholastic language, an intention. The Scholastics speak of concepts as “formal signs,” intentions whose peculiar property it is, not to appear as an object, but to disappear before the object. But here we are not dealing with concepts or mental entities. We are dealing with natural existents, the object and the vocable, the sound which actually trembles in the air. It is this latter which is in some sense intentionally identified with the thing. Or rather the thing is intended by the symbol. Perhaps much of the confusion which has arisen over the “identification” of the symbol with its designatum could have been avoided by an appreciation of the phenomenological (and Scholastic) notion of intentionality and by distinguishing real identity from the intentional relation of identity.
An interesting question arises in connection with the intentional function of the symbol. Is it possible that the symbol is a primitive precursor of the concept or “formal sign” of the Scholastics? The latter contains its object in an intentional mode of existence, in alio esse. But so in an extraordinary fashion does the sensuous symbol. In cases of false onomatopoeia, the symbol is transformed intentionally to imitate the thing symbolized (for example, crash, glass, limber, furry, slice, and so on). The word glass bears no resemblance to the thing glass. Yet it actually seems to transmit a quality of brittleness, glossiness, and so on. The fact is that a symbolic transformation has occurred whereby the drab little vocable has been articulated by its meaning.*
The semanticists supply a valuable clue by their protestations. Confronted by a pencil, Korzybski says, it is absolutely false to say that this is a pencil; to say that it is can only lead to delusional states. Say whatever you like about the pencil, but do not say that it is a pencil. “Whatever you say the object is, well, it is not.” The pencil is itself unspeakable. True; but insofar as it remains unspeakable — that is, unvalidated by you and me through a symbol — it is also inconceivable. Clearly the semanticists are confusing an epistemological condition with a true identity.
How does it happen, Cassirer asked, that a finite and particular sensory content can be made into the vehicle of a general spiritual “meaning”? And we know his answer. It is the Kantian variant that it is not reality which is known but the symbolic forms through which reality is conceived. Yet the empirical approach belies this. An empirical semiotic deals with natural existents and takes for granted a lawful reality about which something can be truly known. Even a strict behaviorist operates publicly in a community of other knowers and data to be known; he performs experiments on real data and publishes papers which he expects other scientists to understand. What account, after all, can Cassirer or any other idealist give of intersubjectivity? If it was, according to Kant, a “scandal of philosophy” in his day that no satisfactory solution could be found to the problem of intersubjectivity, is it any less a scandal now? But a broad semiotical approach can only bring one into the territory of epistemological realism. Since we do not know being directly, Wilhelmsen writes, we must sidle up to it; and at the symbol-object level, we can only do this by laying something of comparable ontological status alongside.