I wish to call attention, without pretending to have determined their entire role in the act of consciousness, to two characteristics of the symbol meaning-relation, as they are empirically ascertainable, which distinguish it from the sign relation and which have the utmost relevance for the topics under consideration.
The first is a unique relation between the “organisms” involved in the symbolic meaning-structure, a relation which can only come about through a radical change in the relations which obtain in the sign-response. Signification is essentially and irreducibly a triadic meaning-relation, whereas symbolization is essentially and irreducibly a tetradic relation. The three terms of the sign-response are related physico-causally.* The schema, sign — organism — significatum, has so persistently recommended itself as the ground of meaning, human and subhuman, because it deals with physical structures and with causal relations and energy exchanges between these structures. Thus, no matter whether we are considering a solitary polar bear responding to the sound of splitting ice, or a bee responding to the honey dance of another bee, or a human responding to the cry of Fire! in a theater, each case is understandable as a sequential stimulus-response action acquired or inherited according to the exigencies of biological adaptation: sign → sound waves → sensory end-organ → afferent nerve impulse → cortical pattern → efferent nerve impulse → motor (or glandular) activity with reference to significatum. Whether we are trying to understand the behavior of a solitary organism in an inorganic environment (polar bear) or a society of organisms (bee hive), the behavior in each case is understood as a response of an organism to its environment. In one case the environment is inorganic (splitting ice), in the other case organic (other bees). But the central concept in both cases is that of an organism-in-an-environment responding and adapting through the mediation of signs.
The symbol meaning-relation is radically and generically different. It is a tetradic relation in which the presence of the two organisms is not merely required as an irreducible minimum but in which the two are themselves co-related in an unprecedented fashion. Denotation, the act of naming, requires the two, namer and hearer. My calling this thing a chair is another way of saying that it “is” a chair for you and me. (Mead’s “conversation of gestures” between two boxers or two dogs would seem also to require the two. However, the boxer or the dog responding to his opponent’s gestures is not generically different from the polar bear responding to splitting ice.) It is inconceivable that a human being raised apart from other humans should ever discover symbolization. For there is no way I can know this “is” a chair unless you tell me so. But not only are the two a genetic requirement of symbolization — as the presence of two is a genetic requirement of fertilization—it is its enduring condition. Even Robinson Crusoe writing in his journal after twenty years alone on his island is performing a through-and-through social act. Every symbolic formulation, whether it be language, art, or even thought, requires a real or posited someone else for whom the symbol is intended as meaningful. Denotation is an exercise in intersubjectivity. The two are suddenly no longer related as organisms in a nexus of interaction but as a namer and hearer of a name, an I and a Thou, co-conceivers and co-celebrants of the object beheld under the auspices of a common symbol.
It is something of a fool’s errand to attempt to derive intersubjectivity by theorizing about interactions among organisms, responses to responses. Physico-causal theory is formed entirely within the intersubjective milieu and cannot of its very nature transcend it. A physical function, a = f (b), is a saying of one scientist to another, an I to a Thou, that such and such a quantifiable relation obtains among the data before them. It does not say anything about the behavior of the scientists themselves because they are practicing intersubjectivity in their uttering and understanding of their causal function. They are co-knowers and co-affirmers of the function a =f (b), but their co-knowing and co-affirming cannot itself be grasped by this particular instrument which they have devised between them. If we wish to study the knowers themselves, the I-Thou relation, we must use some other instrument, speak some other language, perhaps an ontological one rather than a physico-causal.*
Symbolization can only occur by a radical shift in the elements of the old meaning structure of sign-organism-significatum. I do not know whether it is more proper or fruitful to speak of this new state of affairs as a social emergent or as a mode of being, but in any case there has come into existence a relation which transcends the physico-causal relations obtaining among data. This relation is intersubjectivity. It is a reality which can no longer be understood in the instrumental terms of biological adaptation.* The “organisms” implicated are no longer oriented pragmatically toward their environment but ontologically as its co-knowers and co-celebrants. Intersubjectivity may not be construed as an interaction. It requires instead a suitable phenomenology which takes due notice of its most characteristic property, a polarity of authenticity-unauthenticity. Here a normative terminology is unavoidable. One must take account of the authentic I-Thou relation and the deteriorated I–It of Buber. The problem is how such a phenomenology may be related to the great corpus of objective-empirical science. I believe that an impartial empirical analysis of the extraordinary act of symbolization will bridge the gap between the behavioristics of Mead and the existentialia of Marcel.
SYMBOL AND CONSCIOUSNESS
The selective and intentional character of consciousness has been stressed by empiricists and phenomenologists alike. The conscious act is always intentionaclass="underline" One is never simply conscious, but conscious of this or that. Consciousness is, in fact, defined by the phenomenologist as noematic intentionality in general.† But quite as essential to the act of consciousness is its symbolic character. Every conscious perception is of the nature of a recognition, a pairing, which is to say that the object is recognized as being what it is. To amend the phenomenologist: It is not enough to say that one is conscious of something; one is also conscious of something as being something. There is a difference between the apprehension of a gestalt (a chicken perceives the Jastrow effect as well as a human) and the grasping of it under its symbolic vehicle.* As I gaze about the room, I am aware of a series of almost effortless acts of matching: seeing an object and then knowing it for what it is. If my eye falls upon an unfamiliar something, I am immediately aware that one term of the match is missing. I ask what it is — an exceedingly mysterious question. Marcel has observed that when I see an unfamiliar flower and ask what it is, I am more satisfied to be given a name than a scientific classification, even though the name may mean nothing to me. May this satisfaction be dismissed as a residue of name-magic, or is there a radical epistemological need of a something of comparable ontological weight (the sensuous symbol) to lay alongside the object in order that the latter be known? It is the pairing in the act of perception which must not be overlooked. It is a relation, moreover, which goes far deeper than the attaching of a label to something already known, as the semanticists suggest. Rather is it the pairing or formulation itself, as Cassirer has said, which comprises the act of knowing.† Each conscious recognition may be regarded as an approximation, a cast of one thing toward another toward the end of a fit. Thus, if I see an object at some distance and do not quite recognize it, I may see it, actually see it, as a succession of different things, each rejected by the criterion of fit as I come closer, until one is positively certified. A patch of sunlight in a field I may actually see as a rabbit — a seeing which goes much further than the guess that it may be a rabbit; no, the perceptual gestalt is so construed, actually stamped by the essence of rabbitness: I could have sworn it was a rabbit. On coming closer, the sunlight pattern changes enough so that the rabbit-cast is disallowed. The rabbit vanishes and I make another cast: It is a paper bag. And so on.* But most significant of all, even the last, the “correct” recognition is quite as mediate an apprehension as the incorrect ones; it is also a cast, a pairing, an approximation. And let us note in passing that even though it is correct, even though it is borne out by all indices, it may operate quite as effectively to conceal as to discover. When I recognize a strange bird as a sparrow, I tend to dispose of the bird under its appropriate formulation: It is only a sparrow (cf. Marcel’s “simulacrum”).