Existence is attained immediately in the judgment; but judgments necessarily entail the use of phantasms, and, except in direct judgments of existing material things, the phantasms employed are symbolic. The philosopher must go through phantasm to reach being.
Perhaps it would be truer, genetically speaking, to say that the primitive act of symbolization, occurring as it does prior to conception and phantasm, consists in the application, not of the phantasm, but of the sensuous symbol to the existing thing. A being is affirmed as being what it is through its denotation by symbol.* Is it not possible that what I primarily want in asking what something is is not an explanation but a validation and affirmation of the thing itself as it is — a validation which can only be accomplished by laying something else alongside: the symbol?
We might therefore reverse Korzybski’s dictum: It is only if you say what the object is that you can know anything about it at all.
The symbol meaning relation may be defined as not merely an intentional but as a cointentional relation of identity. The thing is intended through its symbol which you say and I can repeat, and it is only through this quasi identification that it can be conceived at all. Thus it is, I believe, that an empirical and semiotical approach to meaning illumines and confirms in an unexpected manner the realist doctrine of the union of the knower and the thing known. The metaphysical implications of semiotic are clear enough. Knowing is not a causal sequence but an immaterial union. It is a union, however, which is mediated through material entities, the symbol and its object. Nor is it a private phenomenon — rather is it an exercise in intersubjectivity in which the Thou serves as an indispensable colleague. Both the relation of intersubjectivity and the intentional relation of identity are real yet immaterial bonds.
To render human cognition physico-causally can only end in the hopeless ambiguity of current semioticists who must speak in two tongues with no lexicon to translate, the language of the scientist who deals with signs as natural existents and the language of the formal logician who deals with the syntactical relations between signs.
The intentional relation of identity is not only the basic relation of logical forms, as Professor Veatch has pointed out; it is also the basic relation of symbolization. No wonder, then, that the symbolic logician has no use for it — for once the intentional character of knowing is recognized, “so far from being independent of metaphysics or first philosophy, [it] necessarily presupposes it.”
* C. W. Morris: “Languages are developed and used by living beings operating in a world of objects, and show the influence of both the users and the objects. If, as symbolic logic maintains, there are linguistic forms whose validity is not dependent upon nonlinguistic objects, then their validity must be dependent upon the rules of the language in question.” Characteristically, semioticists do not find it remarkable that sign-using animals should have developed symbolic logic “whose validity is not dependent on non-linguistic objects.” It is therefore not worth investigating how this could have come about but only necessary to note that it has and to define this unusual activity as the “syntactical dimension” of semiotic.
† Nor should one be confused by the encyclopedists’ disavowals of determinism in favor of the probability approach, which is supposed to resolve the nomothetic-ideographic dichotomy of object-science and history. For, as becomes abundantly clear, the laws of probability are relied upon quite as heavily as strict causality. As Nagel insists, although laws connecting micro-states may be statistical in character, that does not mean that laws connecting macro-states are not strictly deterministic.
‡ For example, the methodological negation of mental entities and the inability to take account of Gestalt qualities.
* J. F. Anderson: “This is the last word of symbolism; it is the last word because symbolism moves in the order of univocal concepts, concepts which are merely given an ‘analogical’ reference by the mind; and through univocal concepts one can never acquire any proper and formal knowledge of reality as such, because reality as such is analogical. Follow the via symbolica as far as you like; follow it as far as it goes; it will never lead beyond agnosticism, either in metaphysics or theology.”
* “It will be convenient to have special terms to designate certain of the relations of signs to signs, to objects, and to interpreters. ‘Implicates’ will be restricted to Dsyn, ‘designates’ and ‘denotes’ to Dsem and ‘expresses’ to Dp. The word ‘table’ implicates (but does not designate) ‘furniture with a horizontal top on which things may be placed,’ designates a certain kind of object, denotes the objects to which it is applicable, and expresses its interpreter.”
Note the ambiguity of the term “expresses its interpreter.” “Implicates,” “designates,” and “denotes” are purely semantical-syntactical terms with no biological analogue. But what are we to take “expresses” to mean? Is it to be taken in the biological sense of a sign “announcing” its significatum to its interpreter or in the symbolic sense of “expressing a meaning”?
* For example, in answer to the charge that his “Snow is white” sentence seems to imply a naïve realism when it lays down the condition “if and only if snow is white,” he writes: “…the semantic definition of truth implies nothing regarding the conditions under which a sentence like (1) snow is white can be asserted. It implies only that, whenever we assert or reject this sentence, we must be ready to assert or reject the correlated sentence (2): the sentence ‘snow is white’ is true.
“Thus we may accept the semantic conception of truth without giving up any epistemological attitude we may have had; we may remain naïve realists, critical realists, or idealists — whatever we were before. The semantic conception of truth is completely neutral toward all these issues.”
† Nor does the Gestaltist, for that matter, take us an inch closer to the mysterious act of naming. By his concept of field forces and perceptual wholes, he can make sense of molar phenomena which escape the behaviorist. He can arrive at certain traits of configuration which apply alike to chickens and humans (see for example the Jastrow illusion in Koffka’s Gestalt Psychology), But neither the behaviorist nor the Gestaltist has anything to say, indeed does not wish to have anything to say, about the naming act. The very methodology of an object-science precludes its consideration of an object-sentence as such, perhaps for no other reason than that the object-science takes place within the very intersubjective nexus which attends language. (Cf. Marceclass="underline" “Without doubt the intersubjective nexus cannot in any way be asserted; it can only be acknowledged. … I should readily agree that it is the mysterious root of language.”
* Continuity “is the absence of ultimate parts in that which is divisible.” It is “nothing but perfect generality of a law of relationship.”
* I use the word “causal” unprejudicially, to mean whatever the reader would take it to mean in the context. It does not matter for the argument whether one interprets this cause as efficient causality or as a probability function.
† C. W. Morris: “…terms gain relations among themselves according to the relations of the responses of which the sign vehicles are a part, and these modes of usage are the pragmatical background of the formation and transformation rules. “