On Minds and Symbols: The Relevance of Cognitive Science for Semiotics [Reprint 2012 ed.] 9783110903003, 9783110138665

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Semiotics and cognition
1.1. Introduction
1.2. Critique of pure semiotics
1.3. Just how pure is pure semiotics?
1.4. Morris and Peirce on mentalism
1.5. Mentalism reconsidered
1.6. John Deely on signs and ideas
2. Cognition in the wake of the linguistic turn
2.1. Introduction
2.2. The linguistic turn
2.3. Antimentalism and formalism within the analytic tradition
2.4. Reasons for the cognitive shift
2.5. Problems with cognitivism: the language of thought and the formalist stance
2.6. The second phase of cognitivism
2.7. Connectionism and the multiplicity of mind
3. Beyond traditional mentalism
3.1. Introduction
3.2. General Principles of Cognitivism
3.3. Cognitivism and objections to traditional mentalism
3.4. The language of thought and computational theories of mind
4. Prelude to a cognitive theory of symbols
4.1. Introduction
4.2. Truth conditions, conventions, and cultural units
4.3. On symbols and indices
4.4. Symbols reconsidered
4.5. Conclusion
5. Steps towards a theory of representations
5.1. Introduction
5.2. Criteria for evaluating cognitive theories
5.3. Preliminaries for a theory of representations
5.5. Dretske's model of elementary behavior
6. Functional autonomy and the arbitrariness of symbols
6.1. Introduction
6.2. Perception and understanding
6.3. Functional autonomy
6.4. Functional autonomy and the relation of signification
6.5. Functional autonomy and cross-modal transfers
6.6. Functional autonomy and imagination
6.7. Functional autonomy and the evolution of symbolic communication
7. The development of symbolic communication in children
7.1. Introduction
7.2. Piaget’s sensorimotor period and the child's first words
7.3. Intentions in young children
7.4. The child's conceptual system
7.5. Pure performatives and functional autonomy
7.6. Cognition and social development
7.7. Conclusion
Afterword
Notes
References
Index of Names
Subject Index

Citation preview

On Minds and Symbols

W

Approaches to Semiotics 117

Editorial Committee Thomas A. Sebeok Roland Posner Alain Rey

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

On Minds and Symbols The Relevance of Cognitive Science for Semiotics

by Thomas C. Daddesio

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

1995

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.

© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication-Data

Daddesio, Thomas C., 1951 — On minds and symbols : the relevance of cognitive science for semiotics / by Thomas C. Daddesio. p. cm. — (Approaches to semiotics ; 117) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and indexes. ISBN 3-11-013866-2 1. Semiotics - Psychological aspects. 2. Cognition. I. Title. II. Series. P99.4.P78D33 1994 302.2-dc20 94-23217 CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek —

Cataloging-in-Publication-Data

Daddesio, Thomas C.: On minds and symbols : the relevance of cognitive science for semiotics / by Thomas C. Daddesio. - Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1994 (Approaches to semiotics ; 117) ISBN 3-11-013866-2 NE: GT

© Copyright 1994 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printing: Ratzlow Druck, Berlin. — Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following people who, in one way or another, gave me valuable assistance over the years: Myrdene Anderson, Paul Bouissac, Donald Cunningham, John Deely, Floyd Merrell, Michael Opitz, Charls Pearson, François Rigolot, Gary Shank, C. W. Spinks. I am also grateful to Mary Neidenfuer, at the College of St. Benedict, who was extremely helpful in the middle stages of the preparation of my manuscript and to Margaret Saunders, at Walter de Gruyter, who patiently guided me through the arduous process of preparing camera ready copy. Special thanks go to my wife, Eva Tsuquiashi for weathering the many storms that this project brought with it. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Ralph and Jane Daddesio, for having taught me the importance of leading a balanced life.

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Semiotics and cognition 1.1. Introduction 1.2. Critique of pure semiotics 1.3. Just how pure is pure semiotics? 1.4. Morris and Peirce on mentalism 1.5. Mentalism reconsidered 1.6. John Deely on signs and ideas 2. Cognition in the wake of the linguistic turn 2.1. Introduction 2.2. The linguistic turn 2.3. Antimentalism and formalism within the analytic tradition 2.4. Reasons for the cognitive shift 2.5. Problems with cognitivism: the language of thought and the formalist stance 2.6. The second phase of cognitivism 2.7. Connectionism and the multiplicity of mind 3. Beyond traditional mentalism 3.1. Introduction 3.2. General Principles of Cognitivism 3.3. Cognitivism and objections to traditional mentalism 3.4. The language of thought and computational theories of mind . . . 4. Prelude to a cognitive theory of symbols 4.1. Introduction 4.2. Truth conditions, conventions, and cultural units 4.3. On symbols and indices 4.4. Symbols reconsidered 4.5. Conclusion 5. Steps towards a theory of representations 5.1. Introduction 5.2. Criteria for evaluating cognitive theories 5.3. Preliminaries for a theory of representations 5.5. Dretske's model of elementary behavior 6. Functional autonomy and the arbitrariness of symbols

ν 1 17 17 17 25 27 35 40 45 45 47 50 52 55 57 69 79 79 80 84 92 103 103 104 109 113 122 125 125 126 134 141 145

Vili 6.1. Introduction 6.2. Perception and understanding 6.3. Functional autonomy 6.4. Functional autonomy and the relation of signification 6.5. Functional autonomy and cross-modal transfers 6.6. Functional autonomy and imagination 6.7. Functional autonomy and the evolution of symbolic communication 7. The development of symbolic communication in children 7.1. Introduction 7.2. Piaget's sensorimotor period and the child's first words 7.3. Intentions in young children 7.4. The child's conceptual system 7.5. Pure performatives and functional autonomy 7.6. Cognition and social development 7.7. Conclusion Afterword Notes References Index of Names Subject Index

145 146 149 162 165 170 172 179 179 181 185 186 192 200 209 211 217 243 257 261

Introduction This book is intended to be a provisional charting of a largely unexplored territory, the cognitive dimension of semiosis. The assertion that this area is unchartered can, surprisingly, give rise to two diametrically opposed reactions. The first would consist in attempting to refute this claim by pointing to the role accorded to thought and ideas in the formulations of Poinsot, Locke, Peirce, Saussure, and other pivotal figures in the history of semiotics, while the second would insist that such neglect is quite deserved for there is no place within semiotics for talk of mental entities. Although detractors might attribute the disparity of these two reactions to the inability of semioticians to agree upon the basic nature of their discipline, I would suggest that this difference in perspective is instead the product of historical circumstance, since, at the precise moment—the beginning of the twentieth century—when semiotics became first conceptualized "as a field in its own right, rather than through its adjacency with other lines of immediate investigation" (Deely, 1988 133), the conception of signs in terms of ideas was replaced by a conception of ideas in terms of signs. It would seem then that mentalist approaches to signs would solely be worthy of interest as an episode in the history of semiotics but would be excluded from present and future explorations of this realm. However, before we rush to this conclusion, we must consider a second implication of this situation. If the antimentalism which characterizes contemporary semiotics is the product of the intellectual climate that accompanied and nourished its emergence as a self-conscious field of inquiry, then this stance would not follow necessarily from the very nature of the semiotic enterprise but rather would constitute a contingent, historical one. This circumstance makes it possible to entertain the possibility that cognition is not intrinsically antithetical to the study of signs. I hope to show that although traditional mentalism 1 has proven incompatible with the theory of signs, there is no overwhelming reason to rule out all reference to mental entities within semiotic inquiry. The present book will constitute an extended reflection on this very possibility. It is my belief that a cognitive account of semiosis is a goal eminently worth pursuing; the pressing task is to establish this line of inquiry on firm grounds, to suggest what sort of problems this field will investigate and to provide a glimpse at the type of solutions we can expect to achieve. I am not unaware of the difficulties attending to such a project, but I have chosen

2

Introduction

to confront them convinced that little is to be gained by endlessly putting off the discussion of important questions. My project will pursue two complementary objectives. The first part of this book will be concerned with overcoming the obstacles presently standing in the way of a cognitive approach to signs and with developing a view of cognition that is not vulnerable to standard criticisms of traditional mentalism. In the second part I will attempt to demonstrate both the feasibility and the utility of a cognitive approach to semiosis by setting forth a cognitive theory of symbols, which I will then apply to a particularly difficult area of inquiry, the development of symbolic communication in children. As a first step toward elaborating a cognitive framework within semiotics, I will examine the reasons for the present exclusion of mental processes from the theory of signs. Although there is significant overlap between them, I will, in order to streamline their exposition, treat separately those factors specific to semiotics (Chapter 1) and those that characterize the general intellectual climate in which semiotics developed as a distinct field of inquiry (Chapter 2). I will begin my discussion of the former by suggesting that the current resistance to a cognitive approach to signs is linked to a deep-seated tendency to exclude from the scope of semiotics the psychological and neurological processes that mediate signs. This view is based on the assumption that to take into consideration such processes would require us to transgress the disciplinary boundaries of semiotics. I will argue, however, that no inherent feature of the study of meaning and communication binds us to this position. Moreover, I will attempt to demonstrate that, despite their claims of having ridden semiotics of all reference to such mediating processes, semioticians make implicit appeal to a theory of cognition and perception in their formulation of the basic principles of the discipline. After having situated the antimentalistic stance of contemporary semiotics within this broader framework, I will examine relevant passages from Charles Morris (1938) and Charles Sanders Peirce (1931-1958) to determine the major arguments which have been invoked in support of this exclusion. They are: 1) mental categories are less scientific than behavioral ones; 2) the meaning of a proposition is the ensemble of its effects and not the idea that comes to mind when we produce or decode an utterance; 3) reference to mental entities reveals nothing more about semiosis than that which can be obtained from attention to signs themselves. I will then attempt to

Introduction

3

demonstrate that either these arguments fail to hold up under closer scrutiny or that they do not necessarily rule out the type of cognitive theory I am proposing. Finally, I will discuss John Deely's (1982) formulation of the link between semiosis and cognition, his three levels of cognition, and his distinction between words and ideas. The import of Deely's discussions for the present project is that he has shown that it is possible to talk about the cognitive processes which mediate signs and still maintain a distinctly semiotic perspective. Deely's work, thus, opens the door for the type of approach to semiosis I have in mind. In Chapter 2 I will expand further the scope of my discussion by suggesting that antimentalism in semiotics is not an isolated phenomenon but is instead of a piece with the general distrust of mental entities that has dominated Western thought for most of the twentieth Century. This distrust can be traced to the linguistic turn which has put language at the center of our epistemological horizons and relegated mental processes to the status of ghostly entities that have no place within serious inquiry.2 Although little note has been taken of such changes within semiotics, the past thirty years have seen a dramatic revival of talk about cognition in psychology and philosophy. Such a profound shift in perspective makes it imperative, I believe, to reconsider prevailing attitudes in semiotics toward mental processes. To gain a foothold on such questions I will present a short history of the development of the linguistic turn and the emergence of cognitivism which I consider to be a tenable form of mentalism. Regarding the latter I will be suggesting that we recognize two distinct phases in the development of the cognitivist perspective. During an initial phase of this movement, conceptualizations of the mind tended to take the form of a "language of thought" (Fodor 1975), a formulation that had, I will contend, the distinct disadvantage of using language and especially syntax as the primary model for mental processes. Thus, although these formulations did entail a rejection of the antimentalism of the linguistic turn, they did not fully escape from the assumptions which were characteristic of this movement. My own approach to cognition will be derived largely from a series of theoretical frameworks that depart more sharply and more completely from the assumptions of the linguistic turn. The first of these is Michael Arbib's (Arbib and Hesse (1986; Arbib, Conklin and Hill 1987) theory of schémas which has the distinction of being a computational theory of mind that

4

Introduction

draws heavily from Piaget's reflections on sensorimotor intelligence. In great part due to Piaget's influence Arbib's theory avoids many of the shortcomings of mainstream forms of artificial intelligence. I will also turn to the research of Elizabeth Bates (1976, 1979, 1988) and Catherine Nelson (1985, 1986) on the development of symbolic communication in children. In Chapters 5 and 6 my discussion of the notion of functional autonomy will rely heavily on the findings of Bates and Nelson. Finally, I will call upon the work of Johnson and Lakoff (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987). Their critique of prevalent views in cognitive science3 and the steps they have taken toward a sensorimotor view of cognition will figure as major contributions to the present endeavor. I discovered Johnson and Lakoff s research quite late in the development of this project, long after the principal parts of my theoretical framework were already in place. Their work forced me to rethink many issues I thought I had resolved, however, in most instances it supported the views that I had arrived at and provided me more general and more compelling arguments to defend these views. Having thus expressed my considerable debt to these researchers, I must now acknowledge that they do not represent the mainstream of cognitive science: in fact they depart in important ways from the approaches which are most prevalent in this discipline. I was drawn to these views because they avoided many of the limitations I observed in the prevailing conceptions of cognitive science and because they seemed to offer deeper insights into the cognitive mediation of symbols. In the pages to follow I hope that it will come clear just how closely related these two factors are: the limitations that I find in mainstream cognitive science are precisely the result of assumptions that turn this field away from questions of semiotic relevance. However, the fact that these views do not belong to the mainstream does in no way imply that their concepts and findings are any less reliable or rigorous. It is my opinion that these efforts usher in a second phase of the cognitivist movement, 4 a series of developments that retain what was right about earlier work, yet address the defects of these approaches. It is particularly important that this new phase has come to see the importance of meaning, metaphor, and narrative for the study of cognition, a realization which brings cognitive science much closer to the concerns of semiotics. 5 My next task will be to set forth the case that cognitivism makes for the

Introduction

5

inclusion of mental events within the scope of serious inquiry. The principal thesis of this view is that to construct an adequate account of intelligent behavior it is necessary to postulate a set of internal representations upon which appropriate transformations are performed. After fleshing out this general characterization, I will attempt to refute several objections which could be raised against the attempt to explain semiotic phenomena in cognitive terms. To this end, I will address the dangers of dualism, the homunculus problem, epistemological foundationalism and the social dimension of meaning and communication. Before proceeding any further it is perhaps useful to spell out some positions that recourse to a theory of mental representation does and does not commit us to. First, such recourse does not entail acceptance of the claim that computers are, or someday might prove to be, capable of thought; we only have to accept that computer simulations can model certain nontrivial aspects of intelligent behavior. Furthermore, we are not committed to the belief that the entire range of human thought can be reduced to or explained by computer simulations; all we have to do is acknowledge the necessity of postulating at least as much cognitive machinery to explain human behavior as is necessary to account for the operation of computers. In this formulation, it is important to emphasize the expression "at least" because one of my principal claims will be that to account for symbol use, it will be necessary to supplement the theories of representation proposed by cognitive scientists with the notion of functional autonomy. In the second part of this book I will pursue my remaining goal: to demonstrate both the feasibility and the utility of a cognitive approach to semiosis by exploring a particular area, the ability to communicate by means of symbols. In current scholarly parlance, the term symbol can have any number of technical meanings; it can be construed as a special type of literary device, a token in a formal system or a motivated sign, just to mention the more common usages. For my part I will use this term with its Peircean sense as a sign which can stand for its object by virtue of a conventional relation. A word of any natural language would constitute a simple example of this conception, but any one of the countless vehicles of meaning that are mediated by rales or cultural conventions would be an equally valid illustration. As the above examples suggest, symbols display an unrivaled ubiquity in human culture and enjoy an immense though sometimes unrecognized importance, for most of the greatest achievements

6

Introduction

of the human spirit, philosophical systems, scientific theories, literary works, are complex symbol systems. However, as important as these achievements might be, they will not be at the center of my reflections. Instead I will focus on the cognitive processes that make communication by means of symbols possible. To use a phrase which is popular in psychological circles, I will be adopting a bottom-up approach which will be concerned with the emergence of symbol use from simpler forms of cognition. By proposing such an approach I am not suggesting that existing theories of symbols be abandoned. To a large extent my approach will complement the ways we presently have of talking about the meaning of symbols; my hope is that attention to the emergence of symbol use will yield insights into the nature of symbols that are not available from other vantage points. As a first step toward this end, I will discuss the differences between my views and other approaches to the link between symbols and their objects such as truth-conditional accounts, Lewis' (1969) analysis of conventions, and Eco's (1976) notion of cultural codes. I will then examine the received views on symbols and indices within semiotics. I will argue that D. S. Clarke's (1987) reflections on the internal inconsistencies of the traditional semiotic category of natural signs need to be taken into account, if we wish to draw a clear and consistent distinction between symbols and indices. It is my belief that to develop a cognitive theory of symbols we need to unpack the concept of arbitrariness which is often used to explicate symbolic communication. The criterion of arbitrariness is a structural one: it recognizes a specific sort of relationship linking a sign and its object. It was formulated to account for symbols as they appear in human symbol use and performs well when it is applied to this domain of semiosis. However, it is an entirely different matter, when we turn our attention to the development of symbolic communication in children or to the question of symbol use in nonhuman species. It will be suggested that only a cognitive account can provide the criteria necessary for dealing systematically with such marginal cases. I will argue that in practice it is impossible to distinguish between indices and symbols without considering the cognitive equipment of the organisms that are communicating. One possible objection to this formulation turns on the suggestion that the only thing that guarantees successful transmission of messages is not some elusive identity between my mental representations and yours, but rather the cultural

Introduction

7

conventions we both share. A cognitive approach does not deny the cultural foundations of meaning; the point to be made is that even if meaning is essentially cultural in nature, cultural conventions must be represented internally, otherwise they would have no effect at all upon our behavior. Thus, the view I will be defending is that the specific form that symbol systems take is predominantly cultural, but that the ability to communicate at all by means of symbols depends to a large extent on having the proper cognitive machinery. In keeping with the principles of cognitivism outlined in Chapter 3, the first step toward a cognitive account of symbols is the elaboration of a theory of mental representations. As I suggested earlier, when I turn to ideas developed within cognitive science I will do so with a critical eye. We need a theory of representations, but not any one will do: we need a theory adapted to the level of complexity of the questions raised here. We will see in the coming chapters that the question of symbol use places special demands on theories of cognition. While it would seem wise to adopt the most rigorously formulated theory of representations available, there is a very real danger (Claxton 1988) that this theory would be too specialized, being limited to a particular domain of cognition, such as perception or grammatical competence. For instance, if the theory being considered had been specifically designed to simulate perception, it is unlikely that it would be capable of handling the complexity of the phenomena which are being explored here. If, on the other hand, the domain of application of the theory was the syntax of natural languages, it would most likely take these phenomena for granted. The problem of the cognitive mediation of symbols falls somewhere between perception and grammar and the theory of representations that we adopt should have applications at that level of complexity. Ideally, such a theory could be applied to perception, grammar, and to the uncharted area that lies between them. I will begin developing such an account by drawing upon Michael Arbib's (Arbib and Hesse 1986; Arbib, Conklin and Hill 1987) conceptualization of schémas and Fred Dretske's (1988) model of elementary behavior. In Chapter 6 I will take on the task of making room for talk of mental representations within a semiotic framework by expanding upon John Deely's (1982) distinction between perception and understanding. I will then argue that, although the conceptions of mental representations developed by

8

Introduction

Arbib and Dretske provide an indispensable starting point for the present undertaking, they do not go far enough to account for the fundamental differences between symbols and indices. I will develop the notion of functional autonomy to fill this lacuna. This notion is derived from concepts such as "stimuli bound" and "context dependent" developed by students of the linguistic development of children; the originality of the notion of functional autonomy is that it brings together and systematizes a series of phenomena which were thought to be disparate. To put matters succinctly I will use the term "functional autonomy" to designate mental representations that a given organism can manipulate independently of its current sensory input, affective states, or motor activity. The particular claim that I will be making is that symbols are mediated by such functionally autonomous representations. In Chapter 7 I will provide further illustration of the notion of functional autonomy and test its explanatory power by applying it to the development of symbolic communication in children. To this end I will draw upon the work of Bates (1976, 1979, 1988), Nelson (1985) who have provided detailed accounts of this aspect of the child's development. After presenting a general introduction to the field, my discussion will focus on instances of infant communication that, for crucial reasons, fall short of the arbitrariness which characterizes symbol use. I will argue that in each case one or more of the relevant components of functional autonomy (sensory, motor, or affective) are missing. Thus, of the many possible instances of symbol use, I will devote the greatest attention to what is arguably a marginal case, the communication of young children, where the central question is to determine if and when their utterances can be considered symbols. At this lower threshold of symbol use there is a sizable grey area where presymbolic and symbolic communication stubbornly defy any strict classification on the sole basis of the presence or the absence of an arbitrary link between the sign and its object. It is my contention that attention to cognitive factors can help us make critical distinctions. In the following pages, I will devote considerable effort to constructing a theoretical framework for exploring these matters. I am well aware that there is a tendency within semiotics to concentrate on the study of the many varieties of adult human communication and there is little interest in such rudimentary symbol use like that of young children. However, I would argue that not only does the study of the development of

Introduction

9

symbol use in children possess intrinsic merit, but that it has particular relevance for semiotics. An obvious reason is that if semioticians pretend to offer a general theory of signs, then they must be prepared to furnish a systematic account of phenomena that, though they might be peripheral to the interests of many scholars in the field, clearly fall within the scope of semiotics broadly construed. A theory which is only equipped to deal with adult human communication, which just one part of the broad range of semiotic activity, cannot be considered adequate. In the case of symbolic communication, we need a theory that can account for the earliest stages in the emergence of symbol use as well as its more complex manifestations in the form of symbol systems such as myth, literature, religion and science. An additional reason for this study is that quite often the consideration of so-called marginal cases leads to fundamental advances within disciplines. Since the study of the emergence of communication in infants forces us to examine carefully issues which are taken for granted when we limit ourselves to the study of the adult human semiosis, it holds the potential of leading to a deeper understanding of the nature of symbol use. Thus, the challenge presented to semiotics by the development of symbolic communication in children can be salutary because it can lead to the development to a more powerful and more inclusive theory. At this point it is appropriate to qualify the picture of semiotics I have been sketching. Although contemporary semiotics is still characterized by a deep-seated resistance to the study of the cognitive dimension of semiotics, there are nonetheless important signs of change. I have already alluded to the work of John Deely who has made a significant contribution to the effort to include questions of cognition within the scope of semiotics and I will discuss at some length his views in Chapters 1 and 6. Another important development within semiotics in recent years has been, due largely to the efforts of Thomas A. Sebeok, the increasing use of Jakob von Uexküll's notion of the Umwelt. In von Uexküll's view, each organism lives in a world, an Umwelt, that is determined by its capacity, as a member of a particular species, to apprehend its surroundings. Although in his formulation von Uexküll focuses primarily on the sensory mechanisms of the organism, we have good reason to construe this capacity to apprehend things and events in the environment in a broad sense which would also include the cognitive endowment of the organism: In addition to being dependent on the sensitivities of the sensory organs upon which stimuli

10

Introduction

impinge, perception also involves the cognitive processes which actively transform sensory information. If we push von Uexküll's principle to its natural conclusion, it becomes apparent that the types of semiosis in which an organism can participate are similarly determined by the interaction between sensory and cognitive mechanisms. This link between von Uexküll's ideas and the cognitive study of signs receives further support from his notion of the Innenwelt, which refers to the cognitive map or internal representation that each organism constructs from its interaction with its surroundings. The Innenwelt is thus the necessary cognitive correlate of an organism's Umwelt. We will return to these matters later; I would nonetheless like to note, before moving on to other topics, that, in addition to justifying a cognitive approach to semiosis, the adoption of the notions of Umwelt and Innenwelt will lead us to further revise the conception of mind proposed by mainstream cognitive science. A third significant development is that the last few years have seen a marked increase in interest among semioticians in advances in the cognitive sciences and Artificial Intelligence. To mention the most prominent indications of this phenomena, Meaning and meaning representations, edited by Eco, Santambrogio, and Violi (1988) has made available to semioticians the views of many of most influential cognitivists and the journals Semiotica (77-1/3 1989) and Recherches Sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry (81/2 1988) have devoted special issues to the work of scholars seeking to bridge the gap between semiotics and the cognitive sciences. These are welcome developments and have established promising paths of inquiry for the incipient cognitive theory of signs. The present work seeks principally to provide additional support for this general undertaking, but I will also critically assess some of the positions adopted. To give the reader an idea of how my own approach relates to those of the authors 6 that figure in these volumes, I believe that we need to confront directly the difficulties involved in bringing semiotics and the cognitive sciences together within a coherent conceptual framework. In both semiotics and the cognitive sciences, there are significant tendencies that resist their rapprochement. As I have already argued, we need to examine the reasons for the resistance to a cognitive approach which characterizes semiotics and adopt a view of cognition that is semiotically viable. To achieve this latter goal, it is imperative to revise certain notions from cognitive science before applying them to questions of semiosis. I will contend that the aforementioned efforts to explore the

Introduction

11

cognitive dimension of semiosis have not seriously addressed these difficulties. We can now address several misunderstandings to which my project might give rise. In limiting myself to the cognitive mediation of semiosis, it could be construed that I am proposing a substantial restriction of the very broad scope of application of the theory of signs advocated by Peirce and more recently by John Deely (1990). To use Deely's classification my position would seem to entail limiting the scope of semiotics to anthroposemiotics and zoosemiotics while excluding physiosemiosis and phytosemiosis from its purview. However, I am not proposing that the study of semiosis should be limited to instances where cognition is involved. There are many intriguing semiotic phenomena, such as the genetic code, chemical communication among plants, etc., where cognition does not play a noticeable role and I am not suggesting that we banish them from the theory of signs. I have chosen to focus on cognitive semiosis because, as I have been arguing, I feel that it constitutes an important area of semiotics that has been unjustly neglected in contemporary developments of the discipline. Let us grant the point that it behooves us to have at our disposal a general theory of signs which makes no specific reference to the minds of potential sign users. We would still want to allow for the existence of specialized sub-fields that would adopt a narrower conception of semiosis to describe and understand with a higher degree of precision the phenomena under study. Thus we might wish to cultivate a very general theory of signs which could be applied whether or not a cognizing agent is involved in a particular instance of semiosis and at the same time, in instances where there is no question that cognizing agents are implicated, be able to turn to a model that would recognize this very fact as an essential component of the phenomena to be explained. However, this position does not entail a future exclusion of noncognitive semiosis. The present project also has the goal of opening semiotics more explicitly to empirical concerns than has been the case. This goal raises the question of the status of semiotics as either a conceptual or an empirical discipline. Most semioticians would consider it a conceptual discipline, one occupied with ideas rather than facts. This, of course, is not surprising since, historically, the principal developments of semiotics have, in the work of Poinsot, Locke, Peirce and others, taken place within a philosophical framework. Furthermore, as it is currently practiced, semiotic research

12

Introduction

consists of developing a coherent set of concepts which can be used to analyze the different sign systems found in nature and culture. Thus, rather than being interested in experimentation and testable hypotheses, semioticians are primarily concerned with the interpretation of signs. My commitment to the empirical grounding of semiotic concepts suggests that I have a very different conception of semiotics in mind. Much has been made of the potential of the theory of signs to be applied in all fields dealing with problems of signification and communication. Rather than conceiving the theory of signs as a conceptual framework that can be perfected without consideration of the constraints of empirical findings and then exported to other disciplines, the view of semiotics being developed here requires that such constraints be acknowledged at all stages of the construction of sign theory. Given the resistance within semiotics to a cognitive approach, a great deal of my energy will be devoted to arguing in favor of this way of looking at signs. However, it should be noted at this time that a view in which semiotics would simply take its place along other empirical disciplines does not necessarily follow from this commitment. The view of semiotics I will be proposing is that of an irreducibly hybrid discipline which would be, to borrow a phrase from Jerry Fodor, "both conceptually disciplined and empirically constrained" (1975: vii). Under this conception, semiotics would be characterized by a broadly construed division of labor with both its empirical and conceptual branches having appropriate roles to play, each one informing and guiding the other. Despite my commitment to empirical concerns, I will nonetheless indulge in a significant amount of speculation about the workings of the minds of humans and animals. Here my project risks provoking the wrath of hard-nosed empiricists who would consider many of the topics I will be dealing with as simply too messy to merit serious inquiry. In my defense, the case can be made that in all instances my speculations offer plausible accounts of mental phenomena. While it is not always possible, given presently available empirical methods, to verify the psychological reality of all the processes that I postulate, I maintain that my proposals are consistent with relevant data. I have sought a compromise solution that would achieve a balance between a desire to pose significant questions and a need to offer answers with as solid an empirical grounding as possible. The reader will have to decide how successful I have been. It is also important to add that the framework that will be presented here

Introduction

13

is not intended to replace currently existing paradigms within semiotics. By putting aside the complexities of cognition as such paradigms do, it is indeed possible to draw a great many valuable distinctions that a cognitive approach cannot now and may never be able to match. This, however, does not constitute grounds for simply dismissing a cognitive approach to signs, for I will be making the case that such an approach can yield insights into semiosis that are not available from other perspectives. Rather than suggesting that a cognitive approach should replace the received approaches, I dare to think that this kind of approach will prove to be compatible with the frameworks semioticians already employ. If I present a convincing enough case, certain changes in our basic conceptions of the different types of signs will perhaps follow. Such occurrences, however, are part and parcel of the standard dialogue that takes place within disciplines and would not imply a cognitive takeover of semiotics. Moreover, both semioticians and cognitive scientists will undoubtedly find intolerable simplifications and hasty generalizations in my synthesis. If semiosis and cognition are inseparable as John Deely (1982) has urged, and I believe they are, revisions of the basic scheme that I am proposing should be able to iron out most of these defects. During the course of these investigations I will return often to the question of parsimony. In that I will be suggesting that the currently accepted concepts used by semioticians need to be supplemented by reference to the cognitive mechanisms of sign users, I will be obliged to face the inevitable caveat that such stipulations merely add a series of unnecessary hypotheses to a parsimonious theory. To anticipate and summarize my response to this line of criticism, I will argue that the parsimony of a theory must be weighed against its explanatory power. A cognitive approach to semiosis, though less parsimonious than the currently available frameworks, can be justified if it can provide a better account of particular questions that fall within the scope of semiotics. I will argue that this is the case, because present accounts of symbol use are susceptible to grievous errors when they are applied to instances where it must be determined whether the organism is truly capable of communicating by means of symbols. We also need to consider the possible objection that the attempt to elaborate a cognitive theory of signs is futile for the simple reason that cognitive processes fall outside the "natural" boundaries of semiotics and

14

Introduction

therefore they could only be included within the doctrine of signs at the risk of compromising its disciplinary integrity. From this vantage point, the problem is not to be found in particular flaws of traditional mentalism; no matter how it may be construed, the argument would go, cognition is the proper object of study of the psychologist and not that of the semiotician. In order to see that this argument is not ineluctable, and that it involves a deplorable distortion of the semiotic perspective, we need to take a closer look at the question of the natural boundaries of a discipline. One formulation of this question can be found in Eco's (1979: 5-6) distinction between the "natural" and the "political" boundaries of semiotics. In Eco's view, the natural boundaries of semiotics "are determined by the very object of the discipline," while its political boundaries "must be posited by purely transitory agreement." At first glance, nothing is more obvious than the adequation between a discipline and its object of study: semioticians and chemists ask significantly different questions not due to the whims of individual researchers, but because they are inquiring respectively into signs and into the composition of matter. However, for the semiotician matters cannot be so simple, because if we adopt a truly semiotic view of semiotics and acknowledge that it, like other disciplines, is a system of signs or an immensely complex cultural construct, then the very notion of a "natural boundary" of semiotics becomes suspect. Such a notion assumes that the object of study of semioticians, that is, signs, possesses an immutable "nature" that has persevered during the historical development of the discipline. This assumption is difficult to sustain in light of the important modifications that the conception of the sign has endured over the past two millennia. Philosophers often speak of carving nature at its joints, but if we adopt the Peircean principle that the "real" is that which the community of scholars agrees to be the case, we must recognize that the joints of nature are of our own making. In the example that we are examining, it should not escape our notice that Eco's (1976) mapping of the natural boundaries of semiotics, which allegedly marks off a line of demarkation between semiotic and nonsemiotic phenomena, proceeds from a discussion of the definitions of the sign offered by Saussure and Peirce. If the "natural" boundaries of semiotics are in the final analysis dependent on the definition of the sign that we are willing to accept, then the boundaries so drawn are not "natural" in any meaningful sense of the term, but are instead the result of

Introduction

15

cultural conventions. One can only wonder what could possibly constitute the "nature" of signs apart from such consensual decisions. The distinction between natural and political boundaries of semiotics becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, to maintain when we have to acknowledge that the very object of our study is determined in important ways by the community of semioticians. The conclusion that I would like to draw from this discussion is that the conception of semiotics as a discipline concerned with particular questions and employing particular methods is a product of a series of conventions recognized by the community of semioticians at a given moment of its history. From this vantage point, it becomes apparent that the boundaries currently separating semiotics from adjacent disciplines are matters of convention and do not derive from some immutable order of the universe. The fact that semioticians have, for the last several decades, chosen to exclude mental entities from the purview of semiotics does in no way commit the discipline to this position in the future. Like that of many other disciplines, the initial phase in the development of semiotics involved the delimitation of an autonomous field of study. Since disciplines generally justify their right to existence by laying claim to a segment of the epistemological landscape that has not been treated satisfactorily by existing disciplines, the scope of an emerging discipline does not necessarily correspond, if such a thing were conceivable, to some objective structure of the world. For an emerging discipline the kiss of death is to be perceived as merely reduplicating the efforts of an established science. Thus to a certain extent this process of appropriating and constituting a proper object of study involves the severing of ties with adjacent disciplines. It is my hope that semiotics is now entering a more mature phase of its development and that it can open itself without risk to issues that, though excluded from its scope at the present, are essential to a comprehensive understanding of signs. If semioticians can be convinced that semiotics, as it is presently conceived, suffers from this exclusion and that mental entities can be studied in a systematic way, then cognitive semiotics can assume a legitimate place within the semiotic panorama. Finally, it is only with a great deal of caution that I propose a new subfield within semiotics. During the past 25 years, semiotics has been characterized by extremely rapid growth that has resulted in the proliferation of sub-fields within the framework of a general theory of

16

Introduction

signs. Without any intent to provide an exhaustive list, visual semiotics, empirical semiotics, architectural semiotics, zoosemiotics

and literary

semiotics come immediately to mind. This proliferation of sub-fields is undoubtedly a sign of vitality and of the broad range of applications of semiotics. However, these indications of the health and well-being of the patient should not blind us to the potential dangers of the condition. Each specialized field within a discipline tends to develop its own methods and terminology, a process that threatens to produce a Tower of Babel effect whereby communication would only be possible within the confines of narrowly delimited areas. Such a fate for semiotics is to be avoided at all costs for two reasons. First, since semiotics is the study of signification and communication, a breakdown in communication within this field would constitute an especially painful failure, one that could cast serious doubts upon its legitimacy as a scholarly discipline. Second, semiotics is widely believed to offer the possibility of overcoming the rampant fragmentation that plagues contemporary knowledge. If semiotics were unable to control the centrifugal forces within itself, it certainly could not pretend to play the decisive interdisciplinary role that many of its proponents would ascribe to it. For these reasons the addition of another sub-field to semiotics is not a matter that I take lightly. I will attempt, however, to convince the reader that the import of cognitive semiotics outweighs these risks.

1. Semiotics and cognition 1.1. Introduction A major obstacle that stands in the way of any attempt to construct a cognitive theory of signs is the uncompromising resistance to all appeal to mental entities that characterizes most of contemporary semiotics. Although, during the past 25 years, the antimentalistic stance has been subjected to sharp criticism in philosophy and the social sciences, nothing similar has taken place within semiotics. It is not easy to determine exactly where individual contemporary semioticians stand on this issue, because it is difficult to find a semiotician that addresses it directly, a circumstance that would seem to suggest that we are dealing with a question that is thought to have been decisively resolved. The antimentalistic stance within semiotics is largely taken for granted and there appears to be no pressing need to either formulate or defend it. The unspoken consensus 7 seems to be that both Peirce and Morris argued persuasively against the appeal to mental entities and that consequently, mental talk has no place within the study of signs. If pressed, most semioticians would not so much deny the existence of such entities as assert that ideas, mental representations and the like are to be avoided because they are not accessible to public scrutiny in the way that signs are and because even if we had a way to study them rigorously they would not tell us any more about semiois than would the analysis of signs themselves. Thus, from this perspective, the attempt to shed light on semiosis by appealing to the study of cognition is not only risky, it is unnecessary, a critique that, if it could be sustained, would in the end prove more damaging. 1.2. Critique of pure semiotics A simple fable can perhaps help us to see that this position is not inevitable. In a far distant galaxy there is planet named Epistemia. This planet is inhabited by a species whose civilization is quite advanced technologically, but its truly distinctive feature is that all other activities are subordinated to the pursuit of knowledge. Goods are produced and wealth is accumulated not as ends to themselves but with the sole goal of affording each Epistemian the necessary leisure to pursue his or her scholarly interests. In addition to attempting to uncover the basic laws of the universe, some Epistemians specialize in the study of the science and

18 1. Semiotics

and

cognition

thought of other species. They pursue this interest not in the hope of uncovering some until now unknown fact, which is quite unlikely, but in the pure desire of knowing every possible form of belief. In this spirit, a group of Epistemians are sent to Earth with the task of surveying the intellectual pursuits of the human race. Before leaving Epistemia the members of this select team are provided with basic information about the field that they will be probing. For example, the Epistemian chosen to study semiotics learns that this field is concerned with the systematic study of signs and that semioticians consider a sign anything that can stand to someone for something else, a simple but accurate assessment. Based on this information our Epistemian attempts to anticipate what the discipline she will encounter will be like. She reasons that semiotics must be concerned with the different types of signs, both actual and virtual, from two particular vantage points. The first of these would consist in exploring the relations that can obtain between the various components of signs. The second perspective would inquire into the sort of capabilities that the organisms involved in semiosis bring to the task. Upon arriving on Earth the Epistemian converses at length with prominent semioticians and studies representative work within the field. She quickly discovers that her expectations were somewhat mistaken: the first perspective that she anticipated is very widespread, while the second one is all but nonexistent. What she learns is that semioticians on Earth are primarily concerned with the relations that hold between sign, object and interprétant or some terminological variant of these notions. Reluctant to abandon her preconceptions, she queries semioticians about developments in the understanding of the faculties that enable sign users to encode and decode messages. Much to her dismay, her interlocutors invoke either Occham's razor, the natural purview of semiotics, or the imperative of construing signs qua signs, and then quickly change the subject. Since the goal of Epistemians is not to change the course of local developments, but merely to record, our visitor leaves Earth without making known her reservations. One might riposte that such excursions into science fiction do not actually prove anything, but I would resist the suggestion that the reaction of our hypothetical Epistemian is unreasonable. The point that this fable seeks to establish is that there is nothing intrinsically nonsemiotic about the appeal to cognitive events, a point that I will pursue in the remainder of this chapter by more conventional means. The construal of semiotics that our

1.2. Critique of pure semiotics

19

Epistemian encountered is what I will be calling the pure semiotics position. To put it bluntly I will be arguing that the majority of contemporary theorizing in semiotics rests on the assumption that it is possible and necessary to construct a theory of signs without consideration of the neurological and psychological 8 processes that mediate semiosis. This position is rarely explicitly formulated or justified by semioticians. It is apparently viewed as so central to the semiotic enterprise that there is no need to explore its foundations and implications, as if rejection of this principle would compel one to cease doing semiotics. At the heart of this conception is the distinction between the structural relations that hold between the different elements that make up a sign, i.e., sign, object and interprétant, and the faculties that sign users must possess in order to encode and decode specific signs. The former properties are deemed to be unique to signs and are therefore thought to form the proper object of study of semiotics, while the latter are considered nonsemiotic and, consequently, are relegated to other disciplines. As a result of this distinction, semiotic theorizing focuses largely on the internal structure of signs and excludes from its scope the processes that mediate semiosis. Since this conception of semiotics suggests that an adequate theory of signs should be cleansed of all nonsemiotic impurities, I will refer to this conception by the term "pure semiotics." 9 It is my contention that the resistance to a cognitive conception of the sign that I have alluded to is just one part of a broader resistance to recourse to all the processes that mediate signs. Thus my attempt to establish a cognitive approach to semiosis must first question the theoretical basis of the pure semiotics position. The point that I will attempt to make is that the complete exclusion of so-called nonsemiotic phenomena from the study of sign behavior is impossible and that the pretense of doing pure semiotics can only lead us into making serious errors. Before undertaking this task, I would like to make clear what I mean by the mediation of signs. The idea of mediation is familiar to semioticians for Peirce speaks frequently and at length of the mediatory role of signs. However, the sort of mediation that I have in mind is quite different since it concerns the mediation of signs themselves by other entities or processes. By mediation, I mean the processes that support signs, make them possible or even confer meaning on them. Perhaps the best way to explain this notion is to give some examples. There are, I believe, three basic forms of mediation of human semiosis. The first type of mediation is biological and

20 1. Semiotics and cognition

is constituted by the genetic and neural mechanisms that make different instances of semiosis possible. Signs are also mediated psychologically by the mental representations that a given organism can construct of itself and its environment and by the cognitive transformations that such representations can undergo. The assumption that is being made here is that specific types of representations and cognitive mechanisms are necessary for the encoding and decoding of different sorts of signs. Finally, we must recognize the sociocultural mediation of semiosis that includes the processes by which social organization and cultural systems shape the development and the working of signs. To make this presentation a bit more specific, we can say that, at the biological level, a symbol, for instance, would correspond to a complex interplay of neuronal firings and biochemical reactions. At the psychological level, the same symbol would correspond to mental representations of the sign, its object and interprétants while at the sociocultural level, it would involve a conventional relation between the aforementioned representations. With this conception in mind, we can resume our exploration of pure semiotics. This position rests on two principal assumptions. The first holds that the elaboration of a set of concepts designed to analyze and classify signs is logically independent of our views concerning the nature of the processes that mediate such signs. Given this principle, an adequate theory of signs would be perfectly reconcilable with radically different accounts of how a sign can stand for something other than itself. For instance, you might believe that signs are ultimately patterns of neuronal firings and that they can therefore be completely specified in physical terms, while I might believe that the true essence of signs is immaterial and that they can only be understood by means of mystical intuition, but under the assumption of pure semiotics, our disagreement would have no substantial impact on our work in semiotics. An example of this assumption can be found in the Foundations of a Theory of Signs when Charles Morris writes, As a last comment on the definition of sign, it should be noted that the general theory of signs need not commit itself to any specific theory of what is involved in taking account of something through the use of a sign. Indeed, it may be possible to take mediated-taking-account-of as the single primitive term for the axiomatic development of semiotic (1971: 21).

1.2. Critique

of pure semiotics

21

Here Morris implies that it is possible to develop an adequate theory of signs without any agreement upon how semiosis is actually mediated and how sign users are able to encode and decode signs. If we accept the assumption of the logical independence of sign theory, then, there is no reason to investigate mediating processes and, consequently, the internal structure of the sign becomes the sole focus of interest for the semiotician. It is tempting to attribute this view to Morris' behaviorism and to the belief that sign behavior can be understood without recourse to mentalistic terms. However, the pure semiotics position is advocated by semioticians whose philosophical stances are quite different from that of Morris. A case in point is Umberto Eco, who begins his Theory of semiotics by stating, The aim of this book is to explore the theoretical possibility and the social function of a unified approach to every phenomenon of signification and/or communication. Such an approach should take the form of a general semiotic theory, able to explain every case of signfunction in terms of underlying systems of elements mutually correlated by one or more codes. (1979: 3) This passage illustrates the second assumption of the pure semiotics position, which I will call, to borrow an expression from Parret (1983: 30), the refusal of any external foundation for semiotics. As Eco formulates it, this assumption imposes the need to account for sign behavior solely in terms of the internal structure of signs. There is, therefore, no need to appeal to factors that are external to the sign; a theory of signs can and should be constructed without reference to such nonsemiotic entities. This principle is actually a corollary of the principle of the logical independence of semiotics, since if one assumes that we can develop an adequate theory of signs without a specific theory of their mediation, it is but a simple step to conclude that signs can be fully accounted for by specifying their internal structure. As one might suppose, these assumptions do not result from arbitrary fiat, but instead respond to a precise set of concerns. A very powerful constraint on semiotic theorizing has been the desire to avoid mentalistic formulations. Since we have no direct access to mental processes, we have to infer them from overt behavior, and, as contemporary philosophers (Flanagan 1984) warn us, such inferences are radically underdetermined by the data they are derived from. By radical underdetermination, it is meant that for any set of

22

J. Semiotics

and

cognition

data there exists an infinite number of hypotheses that are compatible with it and that, therefore, could be said to account for the observed data. Mental ascriptions are thought to be particularly prone to this defect because, it is argued, there are no independent criteria that would enable us to choose among the possible hypotheses. This antimentalistic stance is clearly evident in Morris' explicit behaviorism, but it also makes itself felt in Eco's attempt to avoid mentalism by basing his conception of semiotics on the notion of cultural code. Under this view, it is thought that we can have direct access to the internal structure of signs and that, therefore, a conception of semiosis centered on these internal relations would avoid the problems associated with radical underdetermination. I will return to this question later. A closely related concern is the legitimate goal of developing a parsimonious theory of signs. The principle of parsimony is applied in all realms of inquiry to assure that, given two theories of equivalent explanatory power, the theory that can do the job while postulating the fewest entities will be adopted. In semiotics, this principle manifests itself in the belief that if we can thoroughly specify the different varieties of signs "in terms of underlying systems of elements mutually correlated by one or more codes" (Eco 1976: 3), then all reference to extra-semiotic mediation would be simply superfluous and could be excised by Occham's razor. Given the difficulties linked to the ascription of mental states, it is generally thought that a parsimonious theory of signs should be unencumbered by reference to such elusive entities. A second series of considerations that appear to motivate the pure semiotics position follow from the need to delimit a unique and homogeneous set of phenomena to be studied by semiotics. In the development of any discipline, it is imperative to agree upon what is to be included within the scope of inquiry and what is to be excluded. For advocates of pure semiotics, the line between that which constitutes their proper object of study and that which belongs to other disciplines maps quite faithfully onto the distinction between the relationships that link the components of signs and the processes that mediate them. Along the same lines, there is a sentiment among semioticians of this persuasion that what sets modern semiotics apart from the long tradition of reflections on the nature of the sign is that semiotics now places the sign at the center of inquiry rather than addressing it from the perspective of a previously

1.2. Critique of pure semiotics

23

established metaphysical or epistemological system (Deely 1982: 3). Of course, this position is not in and of itself problematic. Semiotic inquiry must focus on the sign, but this principle in no way settles the further question of what aspects of semiosis are to be considered the proper domain of semiotics. I would argue that the pure semiotics view commits the fallacy of limiting the scope of semiotics to the relations that link the elements of the sign and of relegating the study of the mediation of signs to adjacent disciplines. Implicitly, the suggestion is that the principal shortcoming of prior formulations of sign theory was the failure to clearly demarcate and to focus unequivocally on the properties that are unique to signs. Now that modern semiotics has made such a demarcation, tenants of the pure semiotics position feel that we can finally develop a coherent theory of signs. From this perspective, any attempt to include the processes that mediate signs within the scope of semiotics would constitute a regrettable step backwards. 10 Despite the present ascendancy of these views, I am convinced that there is no inevitable link between the assumptions of the pure semiotics position and the general theory of signs. The move toward pure semiotics can be challenged on several grounds. First, the idea that a theory of signs can be logically independent of our views regarding the nature of the processes that mediate semiosis runs counter to the principal thrust of contemporary philosophy of science. If there is a lesson to be learned from the work of Kuhn (1972), Suppe (1977), Laudan (1977), and others, it is that our presuppositions regarding phenomena to be studied will have a powerful impact on eventual findings. No matter how hard we try to eliminate such implicit assumptions, our thinking is invariably guided by what we take to be the nature of the processes that mediate semiosis. In fact, I would contend that much of the disagreement that opposes semioticians of different camps is directly attributable to diverging assumptions on this question. There is little chance that we will ever be able to agree upon the central concepts of semiotics as long as we hold substantially different and unanalyzed assumptions regarding the mediation of signs. The belief that it is possible to develop a neutral theory of signs that would be applicable no matter what one's presuppositions happen to be is a Utopian illusion that, unfortunately, stands in the way of the development of semiotics. If we hope to one day construct a truly general theory of signs, we must come to terms with the problems raised by the mediation of signs.

24 1. Semiotics and cognition

Secondly, it is erroneous to think that semioticians actually deal with signs in purely semiotic terms without postulating nonsemiotic entities. Although it is assumed that we should limit ourselves to the consideration of the internal structure of signs when proposing theories, the principle of the refusal of external foundations is not rigorously observed, since implicit appeal to extrasemiotic factors is often made at crucial moments in the construction of sign theory. For instance, despite Eco's proclaimed intention of constructing an "abstract theory of the pure competence of an ideal signproducer" (Eco 1976: 28), his conception of the sign is ultimately based upon a socially recognized correlation, which is, I would contend, no less an extrasemiotic entity than are mental processes. This tendency is manifest when Eco writes, "Every time there is a correlation of this kind, recognized by ahuman society, there is a sign" (the emphasis is ours) (1979: 48). This theoretical move is of extreme importance to the present argument because I would argue that, in adopting this view, Eco steps outside the sphere of pure semiotics to suggest that there is something that is not part of the internal structure of the sign, i.e., society, that ultimately confers on each sign its unique nature and its meaning. To formulate this idea in slightly different terms, we can say that the codes that link the elements of a given sign are, in Eco's formulation, irreducibly cultural. This position is thus an explicit recognition of the necessity of taking into consideration, what I called earlier, the sociocultural mediation of signs. It is also important to note that this position rests on the implicit assumption that such codes are somehow more readily available to direct observation than are mental processes, but the case can be made that cultural codes must be inferred from behavior or artifacts in essentially the same fashion as mental processes. The notion of cultural code yields valuable insights and it is not my intention to challenge its validity. The point that I wish to make is that it is not altogether clear why cultural codes would be more distinctly semiotic than psychological processes. In each case, we are obliged to leave the restricted sphere of pure semiotics. A further consequence of this move is that by equating semiosis with conventional codes, Eco effectively collapses the semiotic web, limiting inquiry to the consideration of adult human semiosis. The theoretical purity of "cultural codes" becomes a moot point when we have to deal with cases like that of the communication of children or of members of our species where the applicability of the notion of a cultural code becomes questionable. We will have more to say about

1.3. Just how pure is pure semiotics?

25

this issue later; for the moment I would just like to register it as another unfortunate consequence of the pure semiotics position. 1.3. Just h o w pure is pure semiotics? One of the cardinal theses of this project is that any theory of signs that purports to have the slightest degree of relevance and utility for the study of human semiosis contains at least implicitly a theory of perception and cognition. It is a simple and undeniable fact that in order to interpret something as a sign one must possess at the very least some mechanism for identifying the appropriate perceptual pattern as a token of a particular sign type. This, however, is a fact that semioticians have been reluctant to acknowledge and to take seriously into account in their theories. At this point I wish to examine the extent to which semioticians, despite their claims of having ridden semiotics of all reference to cognitive processes, make implicit appeal to a particular theory of cognition in the formulation of the basic premises of their endeavor. One example of the difficulty of attaining a semiotic theory that is independent of possible minds can be found in a paper by Max Fisch (1983) entitled "Just how general is Peirce's theory of signs?" In his presentation of Peirce's views, Fisch discusses the case of fossils of long extinct marine animals that can function as signs to a paleontologist because they enable him to determine the level of the sea at some particular moment in the far distant past. Fisch goes on to affirm that, although only a small number of such fossils may actually be discovered and interpreted, this does not prevent all the uncovered fossils from being signs. The view that Fisch is advocating is that the fossils already possess the necessary properties to signify and do not need an interpreter to become signs. This might be considered a parsimonious formulation in that it provides an account of such signs without any reference to the mental processes of the receiver, but I am not convinced that this is really the case. While it is true that Fisch's account makes no explicit reference to the cognitive processes of the person who decodes the signs, his formulation implicitly assumes an ideal interpreter who would possess the capacity to interpret the fossils as signs. In order to claim that the marine fossils possess the potential to signal the level of the sea millions of years ago, the semiotician must assume the existence of an interpreter possessing the specialized knowledge to infer such information from the fossils. Breaking down this assumption further I would say that Fisch's formulation requires that the interpreter of these signs must possess

26 1. Semiotics and cognition

not only the general capacity to organize reality by means of symbols but also knowledge of a very specialized set of symbolic codes in the form of the relevant scientific theories that establish the correlation between rock strata and geological time. Here, we have reason to conclude that although Fisch does not explicitly postulate mental processes, his conception of the sign rests implicitly on such processes. Now despite these considerations we might be tempted to continue to speak of some inherent potential or power (Ransdell 1980) that signs would possess independently of and prior to their interpretation. There are, however, several reasons that militate against such a position. First if we assent to Charles Morris' principle that "Semiotics ... is not concerned with the study of a particular kind of objects, but with ordinary objects insofar (and only insofar) as they participate in semiosis" (Morris 1938: 4), we have to be wary of attributing an inherent semiotic power to objects. If objects or events become signs when and only when they take part in semiosis, that is when they allow someone to become aware of something else, their semiotic "power" would be a function of the specific semiotic acts in which they participate. Furthermore, how are we to determine the inherent semiotic power of a given sign without implicitly invoking an entity that would be capable of interpreting it and how could we determine the range of such power, that is, the limitless array of interpretations that over time a sign may give rise to? To return to Fisch's example, can we be sure that our present knowledge of these fossils exhausts their semiotic potential? Let us imagine that a team of cognitively superior beings came to earth and was able to infer information from the fossils that we at present cannot even conceive. How would we account for this increase in the fossils' semiotic power? The response that I would suggest should be quite apparent from my general line of argument. I would claim that the meaning that particular signs possess is in part dependent on the cognitive processes of the organisms that interpret them and that the signs in question mean different things for the average person, the trained paleontologist and for the cognitively superior alien. We can also make this point by adopting the perspective that von Uexküll assumes when he speaks (1982: 29-31) of the roles that an object can play within the Umwelten of different species. The general principle that Von Uexküll formulates in these pages is that objects are meaningless until a living organism imprints meaning on them. He illustrates this notion by

1.4. Morris and Peirce on mentalism

27

discussing the role a flower stem would play in the Umwelten of a young woman picking flowers, an ant, a cicada-larva, and a cow. Von Uexkiill suggests that in the Umwelt of the young woman the flower plays the role of an ornament, in that of an ant a path, in that of a cicada-larva an extraction-point and in that of a cow a nutriment. We can also imagine that additional meanings could be imprinted on this object by still other species. In light of such a proliferation of possible meanings, the very notion of signs possessing some particular meaning prior to specific acts of interpretation is seriously weakened. To return to Fisch's example and to further pursue its implications, I would argue that the semiotician desirous of holding on to the notion that signs possess a signifying power that is independent of interpretation can only proceed by saying that the meaning that our visiting alien apprehended was already present in the marine fossils, but that we lacked the cognitive skills necessary to infer this information from them. However, such a riposte would only achieve success by conceding the very point that I am attempting to make, namely the importance of the cognitive processes of sign users in the definition of what constitutes a sign, what sort of sign it is and what meaning it can convey. Finally, even if we found it necessary, although I do not believe that there are any compelling arguments to do so, to grant that it is legitimate to speak in the abstract of the inherent semiotic power of signs, we would need to come to grips with cognitive questions when we are dealing with actual signs. In conclusion, I would contend that although Fisch does not explicitly postulate mental processes, his conception of the sign rests implicitly on such processes. Here, as with Eco's conception of the sign in terms of cultural codes, there is an explicit refusal of any external foundation for semiotics, but, in practice, this principle is violated by the tacit appeal to nonsemiotic processes. What is particularly important in this context is that, if semioticians do not consistently observe the principles of pure semiotics, these principles lose any force that they might possess intrinsically, a situation that weakens seriously the case for excluding the study of mediating processes from the scope of semiotics. 1.4. Morris and Peirce on mentalism In the previous section, while portraying it as part of a much broader refusal to admit inquiry into mediating processes within the general theory

28 1. Semiotics and cognition

of signs, I touched on certain aspects of the antimentalistic spirit of semiotics. I now intend to take a closer look at this tendency by examining the views of Charles Morris and Charles Peirce on cognition. I will argue that these two thinkers, who have figured so prominently in the modern development of semiotics, took respectively eliminative and reductive stances toward mental processes. I will conclude this chapter by discussing some recent developments within semiotics that, in my mind, have begun to clear the way for a cognitive approach. I will be especially interested in the work of John Deely because he is the contemporary semiotic theoretician who leads us furthest down the road toward a cognitive theory of semiotics. No major semiotician has rejected mentalism as completely nor as explicitly as Charles Morris. Morris' repudiation of mentalism is, of course, perfectly consistent with his avowed behaviorism. Morris did not deny the existence of mental entities, but maintained that semioticians should scrupulously avoid all reference to mentalistic categories. In that he considered it imperative to rid semiotics of all such "nonscientific" concepts, his stance toward mental processes was eliminative. At the same time, Morris was acutely aware that theories of signs had been traditionally formulated in a mentalistic idiom, but he contended that the repeated failures of mentalistic approaches over the centuries compel us to question their validity. To this point, Morris affirmed that "The fact that the theory of signs has for thousands of years been couched in such terms without attaining a scientific status should raise strong doubts about their continued use as primitive terms for semiotic." (1971: 103) Of course what Morris was urging was for semioticians to turn to the reigning scientific methodology within the social sciences—behaviorism—for a suitable framework for a rigorous theory of signs. Although mentalism had the weight of tradition on its side, behaviorism, at least in Morris' day, could lay a greater claim to scientific orthodoxy. To those who were attached to tradition and felt that his theory of signs was incomplete due to its failure to incorporate "ideas" or "thoughts," Morris responded that: The issue is not between 'mentalism' and 'behaviorism', but is solely a methodological problem: are such terms as 'idea', 'thought', 'mind' more or less precise, impersonal, and unambiguous than such terms as 'organism', 'stimulus', 'response-sequence' and 'disposition to response'? In choosing the latter terms we but express the belief that

1.4. Morris and Peirce on mentalism

29

they are the more suitable for scientific advance (1971: 103). Despite Morris' protests to the contrary, the question is in the final analysis whether mentalism or behaviorism is a more suitable stance for understanding human activity. His elimination of mental processes from the purview of semiotics derives precisely from a criterion for distinguishing between science and nonscience that is part and parcel of behaviorist doctrine. We must recall that Morris' reason for denying scientific legitimacy to mentalistic terms is that "terms whose reliability cannot be checked by observation cannot appear in any science, behavioral or otherwise" (1971: 105). This consideration plus the past failures of mentalism made behaviorism a more progressive research strategy in his eyes. However, there is nothing in Morris' assertion that would compel us to view that mentalism is somehow foreign to the semiotic enterprise. The preference of behaviorism over mentalism and the subsequent elimination of mental entities from the theory of signs is based on a conception of science that would place behavioristic terms within the realm of scientific orthodoxy and would exclude mentalistic terms, and on the belief that a behavioristic conception of signs would succeed where mentalistic approaches had failed. As long as behaviorism could be considered a progressive research program, it would be reasonable to apply its premises to the study of signs and eschew appeal to mental entities. However, given that behaviorism is no longer considered a tenable epistemological position, Morris' exclusion of mental processes from the scope of semiotics has lost the compelling force that it once had. As a final argument against mentalism, Morris contends that such an approach would not tell us anything that we could not discover from a behaviorist perspective, an idea that, as we shall see, is closely related to Peirce's pragmatic maxim. On this matter Morris wrote Unless the term 'concept' (or 'idea' or 'meaning') is itself so defined that one can tell when concepts are or are not present, the term offers no help to semiotic. It is more promising to start with an objective approach and then to correlate if possible results so obtained with the reports of self-observation concerning the presence of concepts. (1971: 128) This is perhaps the most telling objection to a mentalistic approach to semiosis. Whereas the previous objections could be seen as the product of

30 1. Semiotics and cognition

a particular historical conjuncture, this caveat places the burden of proof on the advocate of mentalism to show that the discussion of signs in terms of ideas or thoughts can yield novel insights that not only would be of interest to adjacent disciplines, such as psychology, but would possess specifically semiotic import. In this passage Morris departs somewhat from the strict eliminative stance that followed from his behaviorism and adopts a position more akin to Peirce's reductive view toward mental entities, a circumstance that makes this an appropriate moment to turn to the latter's position. As usual Peirce's views on these matters are quite complex and nuanced. Some of Peirce's positions are extremely hostile to a cognitive approach to semiotics, while others appear to be compatible, especially in his early writings where he made substantial use of mentalistic terms. For instance, there are several pages of his paper "Some consequences of four incapacities" (5.264-317) that would not seem too far out of place in an anthology of contemporary cognitivism. Despite the appearances that he championed an early version of cognitive semiotics, my reading of Peirce is that to the extent that he made use of mentalistic terminology, he did so primarily in order to make his notions understood to contemporaries familiar with that idiom. Peirce was faced with the problem of any thinker who seeks to set forth a radically new view of the world: the only vocabulary that could be used to articulate this new view was that of the old framework. Under these circumstances the sole manner of proceeding was to use received concepts to explain novel ones with the intent that once the new framework was completed the old notions could be discarded. It is safe to say that, ultimately, Peirce's goal was to replace the mentalistic framework of the philosophers that preceded him with a semiotic one and that his use of mentalistic terms was designed, in the end, to make these terms unnecessary. To get a firmer idea of this general strategy, a good place to start is with three of Peirce's early papers "Questions concerning certain faculties claimed for man" (5.264-317), "Some consequences of four incapacities" (5.264-317) and "How to make our ideas clear" (5.388-410) where he formulates and motivates several of the ideas that would serve as a foundation for his later work. A common theme running through these papers is his opposition to the tenants of Cartesianism. Specifically, Peirce challenges the methodological principle of universal doubt, the faculties of introspection and intuition, and the notion that there can be thought without

1.4. Morris and Peirce on mentalism

31

signs. This frontal attack on Cartesianism also marked a number of telling points on the mentalistic doctrines of the day. However, for our purposes, we need to focus directly on Peirce's conception of thought in terms of signs. In his "Questions concerning certain faculties claimed for man," Peirce wrote If we seek the light of external facts, the only cases of thought which we can find are of thought in signs. Plainly, no other thought can be evidenced by external facts. But we have seen that only by external facts can thought be known at all. The only thought, then, which can possibly be cognized is thought in signs. But thought which cannot be cognized does not exist. All thought, therefore, must necessarily be in signs. (5.251) In this passage, the juxtaposition of the terms "signs" and "thoughts" might seem to suggest that Peirce allows for the interaction between cognition and semiosis and thereby makes room for mental entities within his conception of semiotic.11 This and other passages have led some Peirce scholars (Oehler 1979) to speak of Peirce's cognitive semiotics. However, before we conclude that Peirce welcomed mental events into his theory of signs with open arms, we need to take a closer look at what really was at stake. We can begin by noting Peirce's refusal to follow Descartes and grant introspection a privileged epistemic status. Peirce opposes a double semiotic mediation to the Cartesian notion of immediate access to our thoughts. First, he argues that our knowledge of ourselves is the product of a complex series of inferences and that the self is ultimately a semiotic construct. Our knowledge of our own thoughts is mediated in a second way in that the only valid evidence for thought comes from our observations of its effects in the outside world. Robert Innis formulates these basic points in slightly different terms when he asserts that Peirce's makes a case for believing that "self-knowledge comes not from introspection, from an inquiry into a putative inner world' of autonomous consciousness and sense-constituting acts—key themes in Husserlian phenomenology and 'critical' philosophy—but from reflection upon the field of expressions in which one finds oneself, individually and socially. The self is semiotically' defined as well as semiotically accessible" (1985: 2). For Peirce, then, the knowledge that we have of ourselves does not derive from direct, privileged access. The only valid evidence for this knowledge

32 1. Semiotics and

cognition

comes from our observations of the effects of our thoughts on the outside world. We have no unmediated access to thoughts: we can only know of thoughts through signs and, similarly, thoughts can only manifest themselves by means of signs. What Peirce is advocating is nothing less than a substitution of signs for thoughts or ideas. In his view, thoughts are signs and a corollary of this principle is that cognition can be understood in semiotic terms. However, there is no indication that the converse, semiosis being conceived in terms of cognition, would be tolerated. Peirce's goal was not to develop a cognitive theory of semiosis, but to bring many traditional concerns about mind within semiotic and to show that such concerns cease to be problematic once formulated in semiotic terms. Instead of making room for cognition within the theory of signs, Peirce's move constitutes a displacement of the role mental states played within prior conceptions of the self and knowledge and their replacement by a semiotic conception. My point is not to dispute the validity of this move, ramifications of which extend far beyond the problems to be raised herein. I would simply like to suggest that Peirce's view constitutes what I would call a domestication of thoughts: his intent was to replace talk of thoughts by talk of signs and not to include thoughts within his conception of signs. We should also note that this reduction of thoughts to signs is consistent with Peirce's general strategy of substituting private criteria of meaning, knowledge, and experience for public ones. We can further explore Peirce's thinking on the relationship between thoughts and signs by examining the pragmatic maxim that he enunciated in "How to make our ideas clear" (5.394-402) and on which he bases his theory of doubt and belief. Given that the crucial property of belief is that "it involves the establishment in our nature of a rule of action, or, say for short, a habit" (5.397) and that all distinctions among beliefs coincide with different dispositions to act with such dispositions resulting in observable effects, Peirce concludes12 that "it appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object " (5.402). The principal consequence of this maxim is that it identifies the notion of meaningfulness with that which has an observable effect in the world of experience. While Peirce had much more ambitious aims in mind when he

1.4. Morris and Peirce on mentalism

33

formulated this maxim, let us limit ourselves to its consequences for mentalism. To suggest that the meaning of a proposition is its sensible effects must be understood, first and foremost, as a rejection of the Lockian notion that the meaning of a sign is the image or mental idea that comes to mind when the sign is presented to us. To speak of the meaning of a term, we have to look not to the contents of our own minds or to those of the minds of others, but instead to the tangible effects that are accessible to all. Thus, in moving away from "ideas" toward "sensible effects" Peirce is replacing a private criterion of meaning with a public one. Furthermore, Peirce argues that since we can only know of ideas by inferring their existence from behavior, appeal to mental entities does not provide us with any knowledge that is not already available in the behavior we observe. Thus, the pragmatic maxim would seem to constitute a decisive repudiation of mentalism and, given the central role of meaning within the theory of signs, it would seem to close the doors to all recourse to cognitive categories in accounts of semiosis. Another example of Peirce's rejection of mentalism is his "sop to Cerberus." To appreciate the thrust of this argument, we must back up a bit. When Peirce defines a sign as "something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity" (2.228), it is tempting to invest this formulation with a mentalistic spirit. As I argued at the beginning of this chapter, this definition suggests that in the same way that the respect to which the sign stands for its object is of crucial importance to semiotics, the cognitive faculties of the "somebody" who is involved in a particular instance of semiosis would also need to be specified. It would thus seem that the interpretation of a sign would depend in a nontrivial sense on the faculties possessed by the interpreter. Analogously, Peirce's notion of the interprétant also lends itself to a mentalistic acceptation. However, this way of viewing his concepts is repudiated by Peirce himself in a famous letter to Lady Welby. He wrote, I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interprétant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former. My insertion of 'upon a person' is a sop to Cerberus, because I despair of making my own broader conception understood (1977: 80-81).

34 1. Semiotics and cognition

This broader conception of the sign was nothing less than a scheme that included a classification of the sciences, an extensive doctrine of the categories, a metaphysics and a cosmology. As was mentioned earlier, not only did Peirce attempt to resolve the problems that had puzzled philosophers for centuries, he also sought to create a new framework for future reflection. Since semiotic was to play a central role in this vast enterprise, it had to possess a sufficient degree of abstraction so as to be applicable to this wide range of questions. Returning to my present concerns, this move had the consequence of expelling mentalism from the doctrine of signs because a specification of signs in terms relevant to a particular type of cognizing beings, such as humans, would have rendered the notion of sign too narrow to perform the varied tasks that Peirce had in mind. At this point I would like to stress that Peirce's attempt to replace talk of ideas by talk of signs is a reductionist gesture. Given the negative connotations that the term has acquired in some circles, this qualification of Peirce is bound to raise a few eyebrows. I will thus attempt to explain exactly what I have in mind when I make this claim. Reduction 13 is usually attempted when theory A is deemed problematic in some sense and when one suspects that theory A can be formulated in its entirety in the terms of theory Β but would avoid the alleged defects of the latter. Thus theory A and theory Β are not simply equivalent frameworks possessing comparable scope and rigor; theory Β is claimed to offer a superior account in that it would retain that which was valuable in theory A but would not be vitiated by its shortcomings. In Peirce's scheme the reducing theory would be formulated in terms of signs, while the reduced theory would be one that posits mental entities. The challenge that a successful reduction must meet is to account for all the relevant properties of the domain covered by theory A. Yet it would certainly not be expected that theory Β explain those properties posited by theory A that were considered problematic and which led to the desire for reduction in the first place. When I speak of Peirce's theory of signs being reductionist toward mental entities, I mean that Peirce thought that everything useful that could be predicated about mind could be couched in semiotic terms, thereby preserving what was right with previous theories, yet avoiding the dangers of traditional forms of mentalism. Although Peirce's reductionist stance toward the mental was much more tolerant than Morris' eliminative position and was designed to capture all

1.5. Mentalism reconsidered

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that which was worth retaining from the mentalist tradition, in its own way it made the study of mental entities unnecessary for semiotics. 1.5. Mentalism reconsidered In the preceding sections I have attempted to make explicit the grounds on which semioticians base the widely held belief that there is a fundamental incompatibility between the semiotic approach and the appeal to mental entities. Semioticians are well aware that there is a long tradition of theories of sign that had an undeniable mentalistic leaning, but most would argue that to establish semiotics as an autonomous discipline, it was necessary to eschew all reference to the mind. Given that modern semiotics came into existence at just that moment in our intellectual history when the mentalistic doctrines of Descartes and Locke were being decisively refuted, it is understandable that an antimentalistic sentiment would be deeply embedded within contemporary conceptions of the sign. However, this very fact raises the possibility that the rejection of mentalism in contemporary semiotics is an accident of its historical development rather than an essential characteristic of the discipline. This circumstance does not prove that current views toward mentalism are mistaken, but it should make us aware that such views are not inseparably linked to the very "nature" of the semiotic enterprise. Although the previous discussion of the stances of Peirce and Morris would lead one to conclude that there is no way for a cognitive approach to gain a foothold within semiotics, I would like to disagree with this conclusion and argue that mentalism, at least in the way that I will be construing it, is not antithetical to the semiotic endeavor. One can identify four major objections to mentalism that Peirce and Morris raise. They are: 1) mental categories are less scientific than behavioral ones; 2) the meaning of a proposition is the ensemble of its effects and not the idea that comes to mind when we hear or make an utterance; 3) reference to mental entities reveals nothing about signs that is not available to the careful scrutiny of the signs themselves and 4) certain mentalistic turns of phrases found in the writings of Peirce should not be taken literally; they are, as it were, merely figures of speech used to evoke an abstract theory of signs that need not refer to particular cognitive beings. As we saw above, the argument that mental categories lack the rigor and objectivity that make for good science was formulated by Morris. If we

36 1. Semiotics and cognition

return to the passage where he advanced this assertion, we will notice that he contends that his disdain for mental categories is based solely on methodological grounds and does not hinge upon the debate between behaviorism and mentalism. Matters, however, are not quite this simple. The methodological criteria that Morris invokes take their force from the conception of science, which both behaviorists and logical positivists endorsed and according to which science should only be concerned with observables. This is a view that few would take seriously nowadays. Philosophy of science has come to recognize that reputable disciplines such as physics and biology find it necessary to postulate entities that are not observable in the positivistic sense and cognitivist philosophers (Fodor 1981; Flanagan 1984) argue persuasively that, in this respect, cognitive science is no different from such disciplines. In the following chapter we will take a closer look at these arguments, but for the time being I would like to attempt a Peircean defense of the scientificity of properly construed mental entities. For Peirce, knowledge is attained not by the individual but by the community of inquirers. If a community of inquirers comes to hold the belief that it is not only possible to postulate mental process when attempting to explain complex behavior but that an approach that fails to do so is fundamentally incomplete, then the burden of proof is on the skeptic to demonstrate that the methodology of cognitive scientists is truly incompatible with the standards observed in other sciences. Without such a demonstration, we lack grounds for believing that the methods of cognitive scientists are not consistent with those used in other sciences. Next we have to confront Peirce's contention that his sometimes mentalistic turns of phrase were merely a "sop to Cerberus" and that a "quasi-necessary" doctrine of signs should not appeal to such categories. I would like to challenge this position by pointing out that within any discipline theories and methods must respond to the particular demands of the questions that they are designed to raise and answer. In semiotics, like in any other field of inquiry, we should expect a certain division of labor in which the conceptual tools that one uses are adapted to the questions being raised. The nature of Peirce's extensive goals led him to formulate a series of constructs that would be appropriate for all known instances of semiosis, but this does mean that specific domains should not require additional sets of constructs. For example it is not at all unreasonable to suggest that a literary semiotician will have to develop categories and

1.5. Mentalism reconsidered

37

distinctions that the student of animal communication will have little use for. Peirce's work can provide a general framework for all investigations of sign behavior without the necessary generality of this framework precluding whatever additional postulates are needed to account for specific types of semiosis. Thus, our quest for a general theory of signs that make no reference to cognition does not preclude us postulating cognitive processes whenever they help to account for specific acts of communication. However, we must be careful not to overestimate the import of this line of argument; even if this point is granted, it does not follow that semiotics needs a cognitive branch. This argument merely establishes that Peirce's general conception of semiotics does not necessarily rule out a cognitive approach. Moving now to the two prongs of the pragmatic maxim, let us first consider the thesis that this principle would lead us to eschew mental entities. If we extend the scope of this maxim from the question of the meaning of an individual proposition to the entire situation of signification and communication, it would seem to disallow reference to abstract constructs that are not verifiable. However, in a paper entitled "Peirce on Meaning" Robert Almeder (1983) has argued that the pragmatic maxim does not lead automatically to this conclusion. First, Almeder notes that Peirce himself on occasion appealed to abstract entities that could not be verified in the required fashion. To support this contention, he cites Peirce's discussions of the existence of God and that of the Absolute Mind. Almeder concludes that "... in every case where Peirce committed himself to belief in the existence of an abstract entity, it was simply because he felt that the purposes of an adequate explanation required it, that proceeding on purely physicalist grounds did not in fact succeed, and, moreover, that what exists is what exists in an adequate explanation" (1983: 334). In further consideration of Almeder's point, we can ask whether it is really possible to do semiotics while eschewing all recourse to abstract constructs. 14 For instance when we postulate cultural conventions to account for observed changes in conduct, are such conventions verifiable in the stipulated sense? Eco would seem to assert that such is not the case, when he writes that "Every attempt to establish what the referent of a sign is forces us to define the referent in terms of an abstract entity which moreover is only a cultural convention" (1979: 66). Here Eco is speaking specifically about the referent of a sign, but notice that, in his view, the referent is a cultural convention,

38

1. Semiotics

and

cognition

which he acknowledges to be an abstract entity. This assertion supports my view that semioticians do indeed have commerce with abstract entities. That recourse to abstract entities is common practice within semiotics is not surprising; one would be hard pressed to imagine what semiotics would be like and what purpose it would serve if all such entities were rejected. However, one has to wonder on what grounds could semioticians ban the consideration of mental processes, if appeal to other types of abstract entities is standard procedure within the discipline. Almeder's second objection is equally telling. He argues that construal of the pragmatic maxim so as to eliminate all abstract entities would commit us to the narrow verificacionist position adopted by the Vienna Circle in their early days. One reason that this position is untenable is that it fails to account for the physical sciences where, especially in particle physics, reference to abstract entities is relatively common. A second reason has been formulated succinctly by John Deely when he contends that "in order to verify a proposition, the proposition must first be understood. But, if it can be understood independently of being verified, it must have some other meaning' than that which depends on verification—some meaning, indeed, that makes verification thinkable and possible in the first place" (1990: 11). However, a strong verificationism does not necessarily follow from the pragmatic maxim. According to Almeder, the crucial distinction between Peirce and the logical positivists is that "Unless one holds that belief in the existence of abstract entities has no observational results that could count for verifying the belief, there is nothing in the pragmatic maxim which implies that statements about abstract entities are meaningless" (1983: 333). The following remark by Peirce would seem to confirm Almeder's interpretation: "We can admit no statement concerning what passes within us except as a hypothesis necessary to explain what takes place in what we commonly call the external world" (5. 266). This concession is all that a cognitive approach to semiosis would require. As long as the abstract principles that we appeal to have observable effects, there is no a priori reason for rejecting them. We should note as well that Peirce adopts this principle in specific reference to the question of postulating mental entities, a circumstance that further supports the case for cognitive semiotics. Let us flesh out this argument by examining a concrete example. Semioticians postulate arbitrary relationships that link symbols to their objects. While a case could be made that the causal relations that underlie

1.5. Mentalism reconsidered

39

indices and the relations of resemblance that mediate icons are directly observable, there is no question that arbitrary relations must be inferred from observable behavior. Despite this appeal to inference, semioticians feel quite comfortable speaking of symbols as signs mediated by conventions. Ultimately, the reason we feel compelled to attribute shared conventions to groups of individuals is because we cannot imagine how they could possibly interact the way they do in the absence of such conventions. I would argue that it is equally difficult to imagine individuals behaving as they do without having the ability to represent mentally things, events, people, and ideas. There does not seem to be any principled reason for according this privilege to cultural conventions while denying it mental representations. One might object that quite often people, upon questioning, can identify the conventions that guide their behavior, but it must be noted that confirmation of this sort rests ultimately on reliable introspection by the individual. This argument is of little help to opponents of mentalism because one aspect of this doctrine that is being challenged is precisely the notion of privileged access to one's own mental states. However, if appeal to introspection for the purpose of providing evidence for mental events is rejected, we would have no reason to accept introspective accounts as proof of the existence of conventions. 15 I wish to point out that my argument here does not hinge on Almeder's interpretation of the pragmatic maxim being correct. If Almeder is wrong and Peirce's pragmatic maxim entails in fact a strong verificationism that would effectively ban mental entities from semiotics, semiotics might be protected from mentalism, but other difficulties would arise. I will not rehearse here the well-documented failings of verificationism; I will simply point to the broad consensus that such a doctrine is untenable. Thus, if we insist on deriving a strong verificationist position from Peirce's pragmatic maxim to keep mentalism at bay, the price will simply be too high. If, on the other hand, we are willing to take a moderate verificationist stance, we will find that an enlightened mentalism can be perfectly consonant with it. Therefore, on either view mentalism within semiotics, if properly construed, would be alive and well. A third possibility might be to modify the pragmatic maxim so that it would escape the defects of Vienna Circle verificationism, but would have more bite than Almeder's moderate reading of Peirce. We cannot rule out this possibility, but, lacking a convincing case that this position is tenable, we need not take account of it here. In my

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mind the principal difficulty in finding a way to exclude statements that refer to mental entities is to do so while preserving what is presently done in semiotics. The danger of attempts to place stronger constraints on what claims can be considered meaningful within semiotics is that such constraints might make a great deal of what we presently say about signs problematic. Again I am thinking of the cultural conventions that Eco and others posit in order to account for the meaning of signs. My suspicion is that if the pragmatic maxim is construed so as to be able to dismiss mental entities, it would condemn cultural conventions to a similar fate. In other words, the cure threatens to be more deleterious than the malady. I thus have serious doubts that a stronger form of the pragmatic maxim can succeed in banning reference to mental process without endangering the very existence of semiotics. The preceding discussion has been intended to clear the way for a cognitive theory of semiosis; I have presented the case against the view that talk of mental processes is antithetical to the semiotic endeavor. However, the arguments presented so far do not show convincingly that a cognitive approach would have a useful role to play within the theory of signs. To make this case, we have to confront the final objection to mentalism raised by Peirce and Morris, namely that reference to mental entities does not reveal anything that is not already observable in the organism's behavior. If we adhere to the interpretation of the pragmatic maxim that Almeder urges, we would be justified in postulating mental entities if and only if they were necessary to account for observed behavior. This interpretation would seem to support the contention that a mentalistic account does not contribute anything to a purely behavioral account. However, if we return to the statement of Peirce quoted earlier, we should notice that hypotheses concerning inner events are authorized when they are necessary to explain external events. We can infer from this that such hypotheses are necessary in cases where a strict behaviorist approach has proven unsatisfactory. This conclusion will take on its full relevance in later chapters when we examine the reasons for the demise of behaviorism and the emergence of cognitivism.

1.6. John Deely on signs and ideas Having thus challenged several objections to the appeal to mental entities within the theory of signs, I now want to consider the work of the contemporary semiotician who has taken the most decisive steps toward a

1.6. John Deely on signs and ideas

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cognitive approach to signs, John Deely. Interestingly, Deely, who is no stranger to contemporary debates on these matters, takes his primary inspiration not from current cognitive science but from a relatively obscure seventeenth century Iberian philosopher, John Poinsot. It would seem that it is his long fréquentation of the history of reflections of the sign that has enabled Deely to take a fresh approach to semiotic questions. In his Introducing sem iotic, Deely writes that "As such, cognition not only can be considered from a semiotic point of view, but must be so considered if we are to arrive at an adequate understanding of what is proper to it, insomuch as it is equivalent to a process of communication by signs, or semiosis" (1982: 94). There are two important facets to this formulation. The first is the equivalence between cognition and semiosis that Deely proposes. Throughout this chapter I have been arguing that there are no principled reasons for considering the study of cognition and the theory of signs antithetical pursuits. In this passage, Deely pushes one step further the point that I have been attempting to make. This equivalence is promising, but it should be noted that the explanatory chain that Deely proposes is unidirectional, i.e., cognition can be and must be understood in semiotic terms, but there is no indication that the converse is also true. Up to this point, Deely has not departed significantly from Peirce's position on these matters. However, in the next step of his analysis he stops "to consider how the function of signification is realized at the various levels of cognitive life" (1982: 94). The crucial realization here is that, despite retaining a core of general properties, semiosis takes on different forms at different levels of cognition. The corollary that can be drawn from this principle is that cognitive processes play an important role in determining the various modalities of signification. With this in mind, Deely distinguishes three levels of cognition: sensation, perception, and understanding (1982: 94-105). At the level of sensation, stimuli impinge on the sensory apparatus of the organism thereby allowing it to become aware of features and qualities of the environment. The information thus apprehended is essentially the same for all species. At the second level of cognition, perception, the data of sensation are transformed according to both the particular sensory equipment of the organism and its needs and desires. At the final stage of cognitive processing, understanding, there comes the realization that there is "more to objects than their relation to me, something there to be considered in its own right, something existing beyond the question of my

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experience of it and interest in it..." (1982: 103). This distinction between perception and understanding will constitute my starting point in Chapter 5 when I will attempt to lay the groundwork for a cognitive theory of symbols. Another crucial contribution of Deely to the construction of a cognitive theory of signs is his demonstration of the distinction between words and ideas. It should be noted that this demonstration is a response to criticism (Deely 1982: 131) of his use of this distinction, a circumstance that attests to the continued vigor of the rejection of mentalism in certain circles.16 After distinguishing between the linguistic sign as a physical mark and as a vehicle of meaning, Deely raises the question of what actually allows the physical mark to carry information. He proceeds by specifying the entities that are involved in this instance of semiosis: the linguistic expression (X), the object ( 0 ) to which this expression refers, both of which are external, and the intraorganismic factor (C) which is the organism's understanding of the linguistic expression. Deely summarizes the relation linking these three entities in a succinct formulation: "X functions as a sign of O on the basis of C, the intraorganismic factor whereby the language user apprehends 0 as object signified by X" (1982: 134). Deely makes the importance of C for any account of semiosis quite clear when he states "It is thus C, the intraorganismic factor, that holds, in the final analysis, the key to the analysis of meaning" (1982: 133). He qualifies this statement by acknowledging the value of studying both the cultural conventions that link X, 0 , and C and the behavior of the organism that is prompted by the decoding of X, a consideration that we will return to later. In my mind Deely's formulation has the merit of recognizing that both the intraorganismic factor C and the cultural conventions that hold the linguistic sign together are crucial for a comprehensive understanding of semiosis. This is an important point because semioticians and other scholars often proceed as if we were compelled to make an irresistible choice between these two perspectives. I will return to this question in Chapter 3; for the moment I will just summarize my views by saying that while the community of sign users determines to a large extent the meaning of signs, we must look to the cognitive capabilities of the individual if we are to understand how he or she is able to participate within a semiotic community. By introducing cognitive factors to his conceptual framework, Deely has provided the theoretical means to go beyond the either-or choice

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that is advocated by some scholars. Before concluding this section, we need to note that in recent years an extremely important influence on Deely's reflections has been the work of Jacob von Uexküll. Central to von Uexküll's scheme is the notion of the Umwelt which, as we saw in our Introduction, refers to the actual world of experience that an organism, given its sensory apparatus, has access to. For each specific species (including, of course, Homo sapiens), "reality" is merely that portion of the sum of all sensory data that the species is capable of apprehending. Consequently, the Umwelten inhabited by species endowed with distinct cognitive capabilities are dissimilar. The implication of this principle is that if the Umwelt of a species is determined by its perceptual and cognitive mechanisms, then the types of semiosis in which the species can engage is similarly determined. To make this point in slightly different terms, an organism can only interpret those signs that its sensory and cognitive mechanisms allow it to apprehend. Furthermore, as Deely's distinction between words and ideas demonstrates, there is an important difference between simply apprehending a group of stimuli and decoding those stimuli as a sign. 17 This difference is to a large extent due to the sensory and cognitive endowment of the organisms in question. From these notions, it would therefore follow that the study of cognitive capabilities can yield important insights into different instances of semiosis. Although this conclusion is not normally drawn, I believe that if we accept the relevance of the notion of the Umwelt to the study of signs, we commit ourselves to examining the contributions of cognition to semiosis. We can gain further support for a cognitive approach to signs by turning our attention to the Innenwelt which, in von Uexküll's conceptualization, is the necessary, though less frequently invoked, correlate of the Umwelt. An Innenwelt is the cognitive map or internal representation that each organism constructs from its interaction with its surroundings. The Innenwelt is nothing less than "the foundation or basis within the individual organism for that whole network or web of relations it sustains for purposes of interacting with and surviving within the physical world." (Deely 1985: 27) To put this a bit differently, the Umwelten that different organisms inhabit are dependent upon their Innenwelten. When I advocate the exploration of the contribution of cognition to semiosis, I am advocating the exploration of the Innenwelt. To conclude this section, I believe that Deely has provided a convincing

44 1. Semiotics and cognition

demonstration of the legitimacy of such concepts and that this demonstration lends crucial support to my contention that the positing of cognitive processes is indispensable for a comprehensive theory of signs. In addition to the specific proposals he has made, what makes Deely's discussions of cognitive levels and ideas especially important for the present project is that he has shown that it is possible to talk about the cognitive processes that mediate signs and still maintain a distinctly semiotic perspective. Of course the challenge will be to expand on his reflections without succumbing to the defects of traditional forms of mentalism. This is the challenge that I will attempt to meet in what follows.

2. Cognition in the wake of the linguistic turn 2.1. Introduction To put the matters raised in the previous chapter in their proper perspective, it is important to recognize that the reluctance of semioticians to conceive of signs in cognitive terms is not an isolated phenomena, but rather that it forms part of a general tendency that has tended to dominate Western thought during most of the twentieth century. Although the term is generally reserved for designating the analytic tradition in philosophy, the case (Sheriff: 1989 xiii) can be made that Western thought in its near entirety has taken within the past few generations a "linguistic turn". Not only has an extremely influential school of philosophy come into being on the premise that traditional problems could be dissolved by closer scrutiny of the ways we use language, but, in a series of analogous movements, psychoanalysts have spoken of the unconscious being structured like a language, anthropologists have borrowed the conceptual tools of phonology, certain Continental philosophers have undertaken a vast critique of the entire history of Western thought in the name of writing, historians have come to study the discursive dimension of their reconstructions of past events, and neuroscientists have sought to decode the languages of the brain, just to mention some of the more prominent examples. The ubiquity of language within the intellectual horizons of the present century strongly suggests that this movement possesses the breadth and depth of an episteme (Foucault 1970). It is certainly no coincidence that semiotics would emerge as an autonomous discipline and undergo extensive development precisely during this particular epistemological juncture. Although its scope is much broader in that it embraces all manifestations of communication and signification, semiotics would clearly seem to participate in this general preoccupation with the medium(s) that we use to gather, to organize, and to transmit knowledge. What makes this broadly-based linguistic turn particularly relevant to our present purposes is that the very same gesture that brought language to center stage relegated mental entities to the periphery of our schemes of knowledge. I would submit that the antimentalistic temper of contemporary semiotics is intimately linked to this movement that has accorded language a central position within virtually all fields of knowledge. To be sure, the exact role that language plays—metaphor, guarantee of certainty or intractable problematic—and the

46

2. Cognition

in the wake of the linguistic

turn

particular attitude taken towards mentalism differs from context to context, however, this diversity does not nullify the profound fascination that language has exercised on Western thought for the past one hundred years and the subsequent disdain for mental entities. All this is quite familiar and I have no intention to dwell on it inordinately. What will interest me is the particular form that the notion of the epistemological primacy of language has taken in the analytic tradition in philosophy. The decision to devote considerable attention to this movement might appear questionable, because many semioticians would tend to define their enterprise in opposition to the work of analytic philosophers or would view this work as largely irrelevant to semiotics. 18 There are, however, several reasons for this apparent digression. The first is that the analytical tradition, by carrying the fascination of our century with language to an extreme, presents a clearly drawn picture of how mental events came to be replaced by sentences. Moreover, the influence of this brand of philosophizing, especially within the English-speaking world, has been considerable. Symptomatic of the general preoccupation with language, the lucid and persuasive articulation of this view produced by analytic philosophers has contributed significantly to its diffusion to other disciplines. Another reason is that, although the theory of signs differs sharply from analytic philosophy on many issues, these two systems of thought are structurally analogous on the question that concerns us here. As I alluded to in my discussion of Peirce's views on signs and minds in the previous chapter, the notion of the sign functions within semiotics as a replacement for mental entities in much the same way that language does within analytic philosophy. Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that Peirce's reflections on signs were closely related to his work in logic, a development that parallels the role played by mathematical logic within mainstream movements of the linguistic turn. This, of course, is not to minimize the differences that separate and oppose these two traditions; it merely is to point out a profound agreement on the need to reject mentalism, that would seem to be the result of a shared intellectual heritage. A final reason for this survey of analytical philosophy is that certain aspects of this stance are important for understanding the view of cognition I will advocate in the remainder of this book. To anticipate and summarize what is to follow, I will be suggesting that we recognize two distinct phases of the development of cognitivism. The first phase, represented by Fodor,

2.2. The linguistic turn 47

Chomsky, Simon and Miller, just to mention the most influential thinkers, did entail a rejection of the antimentalism of the linguistic turn but, I will argue, did not fully escape from the assumptions that were characteristic of this movement. It is my belief that the recent work of Johnson, Lakoff, Putnam, and others constitutes a second phase of the cognitive shift and that their opposition to prevailing views within cognitive science is essentially a rejection of the legacy of the analytic tradition. 2.2. The linguistic turn Before proceeding any further it would be wise to indicate what I will and what I will not attempt to accomplish in this section. I will not seek to provide a detailed account of either the history or the concerns of the analytic movement. Others (Rorty 1967, 1979; Ayer 1982; Hacking 1975; Corrado 1975; Rosen 1980) have already treated these matters in a more thorough fashion than I could aspire to. My more modest aim is two-fold: to provide further illustration of my claim that the rejection of mentalism in our present century is of a piece with the notion that language, and not ideas or any other mental entities, should be the focus of inquiry in the human sciences, and to outline those aspects of the linguistic turn that will later constitute its legacy within the first phase of cognitivism. Although it is always difficult to determine exactly when such paradigm shifts begin, it is generally acknowledged (Clarke 1987: 1) that Peirce's rebuttal of Cartesianism and Frege's critique of psychologism in logic19 played a decisive role in setting this movement in motion. As a general rejection of mentalism, the linguistic turn can be seen as the culmination of a complex series of moves away from the privileging of the first-person perspective (Scruton 1981: 33-34) that Descartes' cogito had established. With the replacement of this philosophy of the subject by a philosophy of language, the principal casualty was the first-person perspective that Descartes had favored. What needs to be stressed here is how intimately linked these two movements were, a point that Ian Hacking makes quite cogently when he writes: Ideas were once the objects of all philosophizing, and were the link between the Cartesian ego and the world external to it. Connections between ideas were expressed in mental discourse, and formed representations of reality in response to changes in the ego's experience and reflection. In today's discussion, public discourse has replaced

48 2. Cognition in the wake of the linguistic turn

mental discourse. An unquestioned ingredient of all public discourse is the sentence (1975: 159). In Hacking's account of this shift from ideas to sentences, Frege's development of the concept of sense was of decisive importance. In what is now a familiar argument, Frege held that the meaning of a word could not be the idea that it evokes in each of us, because there is no way to ascertain whether the idea that a word elicits in different individuals or even in the same individual at different moments is in each instance the same. Since such an unstable and irremediably subjective entity could seemingly never be the basis for reliable communication, Frege countenanced sense, a publicly available construct that captures the principal semantic features of words. From the standpoint of the history of mentalism, a certain irony can be detected in this turn of events. Whereas for Descartes mental events were the most reliable source of knowledge by virtue of the mind's direct access to its own contents, for Frege and for the tradition that followed, the private and subjective nature of ideas was precisely what made them problematic. While Frege was undermining the mentalistic connection between ideas and meaning, Charles Sanders Peirce, as we saw in the previous chapter, was challenging the role held by introspection within Descartes' system. For Peirce, this doctrine was to be rejected for the simple reason that the immediacy of the self-knowledge that comes from our ability to inspect the contents of our own minds and the indubitability that Descartes had thought followed from it were simulacra. In Peirce's view, we gain knowledge of ourselves not by directing our attention inward but by means of inference from external events like our own words and actions of ourselves and those of others. The critique of introspection initiated by Peirce gained momentum when, with the rise of behaviorism in the social sciences, introspection was abandoned as a reputable method because it was perceived as being unable to provide the objective, repeatable observations that science requires. As long as it seemed reasonable—a circumstance that lasted roughly three hundred years—to believe that one could have privileged access to the contents of one's own mind, mental processes could be taken as foundational for both epistemology and accounts of human behavior. However, once this privilege came to be viewed as illusory, introspection was replaced by methods relying on a third-person perspective. From this new perspective, the access that individuals have to

2.2. The linguistic turn 49

their own thoughts could no longer be taken as a foundation for knowledge and, consequently, private events were replaced, in discussions of language, meaning, and reason, by events that were open to public scrutiny such as the behavior of others, the words they utter, and the uses to which they put words. On this view the mentalistic doctrines that had dominated philosophy from the time of Descartes were the result of the mesmerization of several generations of thinkers with "mirrors" (Rorty 1979) or were part of the "language game" (Wittgenstein 1953) that these thinkers unwittingly found themselves engaged in. Thus, in the later years of the nineteenth century and throughout most of the twentieth, mental entities, which had been, since the sixteenth century, at the center of the epistemological space constituted by Western thought, were banished to its periphery. With this displacement, mental entities ceased to be the point around which all other notions revolved and for the most part vanished from the list of epistemically reliable categories. As we have just seen, the rejection of traditional mentalism can best be viewed as a preference for public over private events. However, of all the publicly available aspects of human behavior, the linguistic turn, as well as related movements, has singled out language to occupy the privileged position within this new conceptual framework. 20 What makes language uniquely qualified for this role is its availability to unfettered inspection, a point that Quine makes quite succinctly in the following exposition of his notion of semantic ascent: The strategy of semantic ascent is that it carries the discussion into a domain where both parties are better agreed on the objects (viz., words) and on the main terms concerning them. Words, or their inscriptions, unlike points, miles, classes, and the rest, are tangible objects of the size so popular in the marketplace, where men of unlike conceptual schemes communicate at their best. (Quine 1960: 271-272) It is thus the tangibility of words 21 that makes them the ultimate guarantee of certainty. Whether the particular focus of discussion is speech acts, our use of language or the logical form of propositions, the epistemic accessibility of language seemed to make it an unproblematiç object of study. This consideration constituted a powerful motivation for proponents of the analytic position. However, the picture is a bit more complicated than this because one of the other important reasons for the attention to language

50 2. Cognition in the wake of the linguistic turn

is the commonly held view that many of the intractable problems that philosophers have run into occur when "language goes on holiday" (Wittgenstein 1953) and could therefore be dissolved by linguistic analysis. Thinkers such as Carnap concluded from this argument that ordinary language is irremediably flawed and that the only hope for certainty would be to limit ourselves to problems that could be expressed in the terms of formal logic. I will return to this latter view because it is important for understanding the first phase of cognitivism. For the time being it will suffice to note that for one side of this debate language is of interest because it is thought to provide the path to certainty, while for the other side it merits attention as a potent source of confusion, an opposition that gives some hint of the complexity 22 of the role of language in twentieth century Western thought. 2.3. Antimentalism and formalism within the analytic tradition In his assertion that the analytic tradition "started as the attempt to produce a nonpsychologistic empiricism by rephrasing philosophical questions as questions of 'logic'" (1979: 257), Richard Rorty has identified what are, from the present perspective, two crucial tendencies of the analytic tradition. The first is the resolute rejection of mentalism. Since I have already discussed at length the resistance to mentalism, I do not want to belabor this matter. I would, however, like to examine the link between the rejection of mentalism and behaviorism. The thinker within the analytic tradition who most thoroughly espoused behaviorism was Gilbert Ryle (1949). His solution to the mind-body problem was to suggest that talk of mental processes was ultimately talk about the dispositions of the organism to act and that the former could be reformulated in terms of the latter. Such a change in our speech habits would, Ryle argued, result in greater precision and clarity without any loss of explanatory power. Although there are now good reasons (Danto 1989; Rorty 1979) to doubt that we can adequately formulate what we need to say about the intentions, beliefs and desires of individuals in terms of dispositions, the history of analytic philosophy can be seen as a series of attempts (Rorty 1979: 165-311) to find a more adequate replacement. I would agree that it is quite possible to reject mentalism without resorting to Ryle's behaviorism or that of Skinner however, I want to suggest that there is a deeper commonality between these positions than is commonly recognized. To put matters succinctly, attempts to understand meaning, experience or knowledge without appealing

2.3. Antimentalism

and formalism

within the analytic

tradition

51

to internal processes typically, I believe, lead one to focus on some sort of observable or public "behavior" on the part of the organism. Perhaps it is too strong a statement to assert that all rejection of mentalism leads to behaviorism, however, antimentalism within the analytic tradition generally takes a form that bears strong resemblance to this doctrine. 23 The second tendency within the analytic tradition which is of interest to us here is what I will call the formalist stance24 because it centers on the belief that the techniques of logic or some other formalized system constitute a decisive remedy for the conceptual problems plaguing the disciplines that study human activity. We have seen that, beginning with the seminal work of Frege and Peirce, the antimentalistic stance in philosophy was closely related to the development of logic. What is of utmost importance for the present purposes is that not only did the linguistic turn place language at the center of the new paradigm, it also accorded formal logic a decisive role in determining how language was to be conceived and studied. The primary motivation for this change was the desire to make use of the rapidly developing field of mathematical logic25 to tackle the perennial problems of philosophy. It was assumed that once such problems were formulated rigorously, they could be dissolved. The most ambitious attempt to achieve this goal was that of Rudolf Carnap and the Vienna Circle, the aims and methods of whom are neatly summarized by the title of Carnap's (1959) paper "The elimination of metaphysics through logical analysis". Although Wittgenstein himself was uncomfortable with their interpretation of his ideas (Findlay 1985), Carnap and his colleagues saw themselves carrying out the program of the Tractatus (Wittgenstein 1922). Of particular interest is their attempt to distinguish between those philosophical questions that could be subjected to verification and thereby be proven either true or false and those that were idle metaphysical speculation. The criterion for such a distinction was whether or not such questions could be posed in formal terms. On this view, the "muddled" thinking of earlier philosophers was due to their failure to grasp the "logical syntax of language". The logical empiricist approach was later abandoned, but its influence on subsequent developments was such that a philosopher like Nelson Goodman (1972), who was hardly sympathetic to the movement, felt compelled to compare its potential importance to philosophy to that of the Euclidean deductive method to geometry. Although the theses of the Vienna Circle are rarely invoked nowadays as an epistemologica!

52 2. Cognition in the -wake of the linguistic

turn

model to be pursued, the point can be made (Gardner 1985) that a great deal of contemporary cognitive science is still, perhaps unknowingly, under the sway of the formalist stance of the Vienna Circle. 2.4. Reasons for the cognitive shift 2 6 In order to grasp the appeal of contemporary cognitivism 27 , it is necessary to examine the reasons why the antimentalistic stance has lost much of its appeal. As a first approximation, we can say that cognitivism grows from the sense that attempts to make do without reference to mental entities were unable to achieve what they proposed. When confronted with two theories of equivalent explanatory power, it is generally a sound principle to choose, the one that postulates fewer entities. However, there has been a growing awareness that the principle of parsimony does not necessarily tip the scales in favor of nonmentalistic accounts of meaning, language and reason, because they are simply unable to deal with important questions. There exists a solid consensus in philosophy and psychology that to achieve the metaphysical peace of mind that comes with eschewing mental events, we would have to give up entirely too much. In this light, the move toward cognitivism should not be seen as a full-scale replacement of the principles of the linguistic turn, nor should it be seen as a simple return to Cartesian or even Kantian mentalism: contemporary developments have restored respectability to the appeal to mental events in only some of the domains where mentalism once ruled. Furthermore, as we will see in the next chapter, many of the critiques of mentalism formulated by skeptics have been fully integrated within the cognitivist framework. The shift to cognitivism is the product of a very complex pattern of intellectual genealogies and disciplinary paradigms; I therefore will not attempt to do justice to this process. 28 In the admittedly simplistic picture of this evolution that I am sketching, I will discuss three important factors that undermined the antimentalistic spirit that had been prevalent: the failure of behaviorism, the Chomskian revolution in linguistics and the development of computational models of the mind. 29 The major point that I will attempt to make at this juncture is that the return of cognition to the intellectual scene was essentially a reaction against the antimentalist stance of the analytical tradition, but that this movement does not include a similar rejection of the formalist stance. Indeed what I will call the first phase of the cognitive turn is dominated by a view of cognition in linguistic or propositional terms, a view that places this movement in a direct line of

2.4. Reasons for the cognitive shift 53

descendence from the linguistic turn. I submit then that the first phase of cognitivism succeeded in reviving cognition as a reputable object of study, but only by construing it within the conceptual framework developed by the architects of the linguistic turn. We can deal with the first two of these factors concurrently because the paradigm that Chomsky's (1957, 1959, 1965) revolution overturned was behaviorism. Chomsky's work is sufficiently well-known to make a detailed exposition of his general theory of language unnecessary. For the present purposes it will suffice to recall those aspects of his program that ushered in a novel view of cognition, namely his appeal to covert, mental transformations of deep structures to account for the surface structure of utterances and his insistence that grammatical theories be "psychologically real", that is, in conformity with the actual cognitive processing that results in utterances. Not only did Chomsky achieve a radical transformation of linguistics, undermining the hold of Bloomfieldian behaviorism, he also played a major role in the changes that were to take place in psychology. Of utmost importance in this light was his famous critique (1959) of Skinner's Verbal behavior, a blow from which behavioral psychology never recovered. If, as Chomsky asserted in this paper, behaviorism was unable to provide an adequate account of language, then it would seem highly unlikely that such an approach would have significant insights to shed on the study of intelligent behavior in general. Such insights could simply not be obtained from a general theory of learning framed entirely in terms of stimuli-response sequences and reinforcement schedules. However, not only did Chomsky's work point out the extreme limitations of Skinnerian behaviorism, it also provided a positive model of rigor and generality for psychologists to emulate in theory building. Whereas behaviorist psychology had been an attempt to apply the standards of scientific rigor derived from the physical sciences, the Chomskyean paradigm offered a more appropriate model that seemed to show how the complexities of intelligent behavior could be accommodated within a rigorous framework. Finally, Chomsky provided psycholinguistics with a novel set of phenomena to investigate. Just to mention one example, the empirical search (Miller 1962; Fodor, Beaver, and Garrett 1974) for the transformations that Chomsky postulated led to an important regeneration of this field. Similar developments can be found in developmental psychology and other areas of psychology.

54 2. Cognition in the wake of the linguistic turn

Although less profound than its impact on psychology, Chomsky's work also had important ramifications in philosophy, especially within the analytical tradition. By placing questions of language in a prominent position within their disciplinary matrix, analytical philosophers accorded, by the very same gesture, a special relevance to conceptual and empirical advances in linguistics. Since they were committed to the view that attention to questions of language was the surest way to attain conceptual rigor, analytical philosophers could not afford to endorse views that were at odds with the scientific study of language. In the wake of Chomsky's persuasive demonstration that appeal to the tacit knowledge of language users was necessary to account for even the simplest utterances, it became increasingly difficult for opponents of mentalism in philosophy to defend their position. The irony here is that the linguistic turn began as a move away from mentalism, but this focus on language made mentalism all the more difficult to resist when it resurfaced in linguistics. Although there was general resistance among analytical philosophers to Chomsky's uncritical espousal of certain aspects of Cartesianism, the success of transformational linguistics helped make reference to mental processes respectable once again within philosophy. The other major influence on the emergence of cognitive science was the computer and the subsequent development of Artificial Intelligence. The initial contribution of these developments was to provide psychologists and philosophers with a rather sophisticated mechanical metaphor for the workings of the mind. In this sense, the computer is merely the most recent of a long series of such metaphors (Plato's lyre, Descartes' mechanical statues, the steam engine, the telephone exchange, etc.) that various thinkers have turned to in order to make sense of our mental faculties. However, unlike previous models, computers were actually capable of producing behaviors (playing chess, proving theorems, reading stories) that seemed unmistakably intelligent. But perhaps even more important for the turn to cognitivism was the argument that if computer scientists found it necessary to postulate inner representations to account for the workings of electronic devices, then similar appeal in psychology could not be deemed illegitimate. On the strength of this analogy, cognition became viewed as informationprocessing and psychological explanations began to take the form of flowcharts. However, the computer does not just provide a metaphorical model of the

2.4. Reasons for the cognitive

shift

55

mind, it also provides an instrument for testing psychological theories. Although many of the claims of the proponents of Artificial Intelligence have been excessive, ill-advised claims of "machines that think" should not lead us to overlook the genuine contribution of this field to the understanding of cognition. The difficulty of designing programs that simulate even relatively simple cognitive tasks, such as pattern recognition, has taught us that the mind is a much more complex system than was ever imagined. Moreover, computer simulations of intelligent behavior force students of the mind to specify with exhaustive detail exactly what the computer or the mind has to do in order to perform a particular task. 2.5. Problems with cognitivism: the language of thought and the formalist stance From the very beginning, cognitive science and particularly Artificial Intelligence have been criticized by philosophers and social scientists whose basic theoretical and methodological commitments were at odds with its premises. Quite often there was some truth to these criticisms, but the conclusion generally drawn was that cognitive science was fundamentally ill-conceived and that its practitioners should simply cease and desist. Needless to say such virulent attacks played at best a minor role in developments within the field itself. However, in recent years serious reservations have been expressed by workers30 who are in basic agreement with the need for a cognitive approach to human behavior but who reject the specific forms that mainstream cognitive science has assumed. To this point I have treated cognitivism as a bold step away from the premises of the linguistic turn; this assessment must now be qualified. With the work of Chomsky, Fodor, etc., cognition did indeed return to center stage, but it returned, I contend, in a very particular form that owed a great deal to the postures of the linguistic turn. A more accurate appraisal would be that the first phase of cognitivism constituted a reaction against behaviorism, however, the break with the linguistic turn is more apparent than genuine. In the pages that follow we will examine first the heritage of the linguistic turn as it manifests itself in the tendency of cognitive scientists to conceive cognition as a "language of thought" (Fodor 1975). Our attention will then be directed to a second carryover from the linguistic turn, the wide-spread attempt to impose the structure of formal logic on thought, meaning, language, and rationality. I will be arguing that these two commitments

56 2. Cognition in the wake of the linguistic turn

have made it impossible for mainstream cognitive scientists to take full cognizance of the implications of the cognitive turn and to realize its potential. The clearest and most controversial formulation of the thesis of the essential propositionality of cognition is to be found in Jerry Fodor's "language of thought" (1975, 1987). Fodor takes a typically cognitivist stance in countenancing a system of representations for the mediation of perception, language, and reasoning. However, his next move is to argue that "the language of thought may be very like a natural language. It may be that the resources of the inner code are rather directly represented in the resources of the codes we use for communication" (1975, 156). In this passage the use of the modal "may" gives Fodor's claim a misleading air of nuanced qualification; Fodor's commitment to the notion that mental representations form a system of propositions could not be more firm. On the view that I am developing here Fodor does not truly depart from the linguistic turn but instead pushes its premises to their ultimate consequences. While he does acknowledge an "inner" space, Fodor, by imposing linguistic structure upon cognitive processes, refuses to grant it any autonomous explanatory power. What makes Fodor's task quite a bit easier is that the aspect of mental life that he takes greatest interest in is the domain of propositional attitudes, beliefs, desires, etc., which lends itself particularly well to this treatment. Most have little difficulty accepting the claim that my belief that "x" can be adequately captured by the utterance "I believe that x". However, despite its intuitive appeal, this conceptualization leads to a perverse circularity that becomes manifest when one considers the implications of Fodor's proposal for the acquisition of language. He suggests that his hypothesis would go "some way toward explaining why natural languages are so easy to learn and why sentences are so easy to understand: the languages we are able to learn are not so very different from the language we innately know, and the sentences we are able to understand are not so very different from the formulae which internally represent them" (1975: 156). Under this view, the innate linguistic faculty takes the same form as the languages we speak. To understand cognition we simply have to study language and to explain how we are able to learn language, it suffices to invoke the "language of thought". By conceiving cognition as a "language", Fodor is able to project the structures of natural language, as revealed by generative linguistics, onto

2.5. Problems

with cognitivism:

the language

of thought and the formalist

stance

57

the mind without having to deal with nonlinguistie cognitive processes and with the question of how language interacts with the rest of cognition. It is a solution that allows us to enjoy, as it were, the best of both worlds: the access to public phenomena offered by the linguistic turn and the causal efficacy of cognitive states made possible by cognitivism. By the same token, the postulation of an innate mental language reduces the implausibility of Chomsky's thesis of the autonomy of language within cognition. But a paradox arises from this comforting position: if language is radically different from the rest of cognition, as Chomsky claims, then how is it possible for cognition in its entirety to be a "language"? We will return to this paradox later, but let us continue our discussion of the legacy of the linguistic turn in cognitive science. To be fair to Fodor, it must be acknowledged that he does not fully endorse the other part of this legacy, the formalist stance. Fodor goes only half-way in this direction because he holds that semantic properties play a causal role in the operation of cognitive systems. To appreciate the importance of this distinction, we need only to compare it to the view defended by Steven Stich in the following passage: the cognitive states whose interaction is (in part) responsible for behavior can be systematically mapped to abstract syntactic objects in such a way that causal interactions among cognitive states, as well as causal links with stimuli and behavioral events, can be described in terms of the syntactic properties and relations of the abstract objects to which the cognitive states are mapped (Stich 1983: 148). If Fodor's language of thought reduces cognition to language, then Stich's "Syntactic theory of m i n d " takes an additional step in that it reduces mind to syntax. 31 One particularly clear example of this principle in the first phase of the cognitive shift is Chomsky's privileging of syntax over semantics. With this reduction the formalist stance assumes its complete articulation. As we will see later in this chapter and in the following one, the second phase of cognitivism will focus on this reduction as one of its principal targets. 2.6. The second phase of cognitivism It is not enough to demonstrate that a currently accepted paradigm possesses defects because, to adopt an argument that has become familiar since Kuhn's Structure of scientific revolutions (1972), anomalies can either

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in the wake of the linguistic

turn

be explained away or simply tolerated without abandoning the paradigm. To mount a serious challenge it is necessary, in addition to pointing out the shortcomings of the received view, to offer an alternative account that can deal with the phenomena that the accepted paradigm was capable of explaining as well as shedding light on recalcitrant problems. Although this assessment might be a bit premature, I think that such an alternative is presently being elaborated by workers in a number of fields. Hilary Putnam and Mark Johnson in philosophy, George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, and Eve Sweetser in linguistics, Michael Arbib in Artificial Intelligence, Elizabeth Bates and Katherine Nelson in developmental psycholinguistics are just some of the researchers who have made significant contributions to the novel view that is presently taking shape. In the way of providing a general introduction to this perspective, I have chosen to focus on the work of Johnson and Lakoff (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987, 1988; Johnson 1987)32 who, in addition to providing a telling critique of the received form of cognitivism, have elaborated a broadly based framework for this new perspective. 33 Although the object of Johnson and Lakoff s criticisms is a complex set of assumptions concerning the nature of thought, language, and reasoning that have deep roots in our intellectual traditions and are in no way limited to cognitive science, these assumptions have taken a particularly problematic form within those fields that are actively investigating the different aspects of cognition. Johnson and Lakoff argue that a great deal of recent work in linguistics, semantics, cognitive science, and philosophy rests upon on the assumption that there can be a "God's-view" of reality that transcends the limitations of human cognition. 34 Johnson and Lakoff use the term "objectivism" to designate the view that there exists an "objective" reality and that language, science, and other forms of human understanding reflect its ultimate structure. As a semantic theory, objectivism holds that language is made up of a set of meaningless tokens that come to possess meaning due to their correspondence with the objective structure of the world. To understand the meaning of a given utterance, it suffices to know the truth conditions that would satisfy it, a formulation which assumes that we have at our disposal an understanding of reality that is independent of both language and cognition and that can be called upon to adjudicate claims of meaning. As a view of rationality, objectivism is committed to the idea that formal logic provides an adequate

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59

understanding of human reason. The rule-governed manipulation of tokens which is codified by formal logic is construed as an objective set of mindindependent logical relations. In so criticizing what they call objectivism, Johnson and Lakoff are advocating a form of constructivism 35 , with which most semioticians would probably agree. However, Johnson and Lakoff take a more controversial stance when they object to the contention that language, reasoning, and thought can be understood in the absence of an account of how human cognition constrains and structures our apprehension of the world. To quote Johnson, "The key point for the theory of meaning that I am advancing is that meaning always involves human understanding and intentionality. It is never merely an objective relation between symbolic representations 36 and the world, just because there can be no such relation without human understanding to establish and mediate it" (1987: 178). This is the first principle of Johnson and Lakoff s view of cognition and it can be extended to say that the particular cognitive mechanisms that people bring to experience are crucial for understanding all aspects of human behavior. Lakoff calls on the findings of a series of experiments by Eleanor Rosch, (Rosch 1973, 1975; Rosch and Lloyd 1978; Rosch, Mervis, Gray, D. Johnson, and Boyes-Braem 1976)37 on what she calls the basic level of categorization, to illustrate this view. Rosch's work has shown that human cognition functions much more efficiently and naturally at the level of categories like cat than either at the levels of its superordinate (animal) or subordinate (manx) categories. For instance it is at this basic level of categorization that subjects most quickly identify category members and that children first learn the names of things. The basic level also constitutes the highest level at which people can subsume an entire category under a single mental image and at which people use similar motor programs on the members of the same category. Lakoff uses Rosch's findings to question the classical theory of categories according to which entities belong to a given category by virtue of a shared set of essential properties. The best illustration of this doctrine is the category of natural kinds which are sonamed because they are thought to correspond to the natural structure of the world. Lakoff admits that some cognitive categories do conform to the received view, but he denies that natural kinds actually exist as such in the world independently of human cognition. He argues that if categorization were a simple reflection of the natural structure of the world, as the

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received view claims, there would be no reason to expect that, as Rosch's work suggests, we would be more successful at establishing and handling categories at one level of complexity rather than at another. Another argument that Lakoff proposes is that if natural kinds did indeed have an objective existence, it would be expected that science could provide unquestionable confirmation of this fact. It would merely be a question of finding a domain that features both natural kinds and a scientific theory capable of providing an objective taxonomy. If any domain would be apt to yield such confirmation, it would seem to be that of the biological concept of the species since categories such as tiger, crow, fish, zebra, etc., have long been taken to be paradigmatic instances of natural kinds. However, citing both Gould (1983) and Mayr (1963, 1984), Lakoff argues that the partisan of the traditional view of categories would find little solace in biological taxonomies, for there are countless instances where natural kinds do not reflect biological facts. Rather than corresponding to some objective structure of the world, he concludes once again that natural kinds are the product of the preconceptual structuring that our experience undergoes. The conclusion that Lakoff draws from these considerations is that an adequate model of human categorization must take into consideration the constraints our cognitive faculties place on our apprehension of the world. Rosch's work on the basic level of categorization also illustrates another important principle for Johnson and Lakoff, namely that there is a powerful nonpropositional, preconceptual basis to language and reasoning. 38 In their view human experience is structured and possesses meaning prior to and independently of conceptual thought. As Johnson has put it, "propositional content is possible only by virtue of a complex web of nonpropositional schematic structures that emerge from our bodily experience" (Johnson 1987: 5). Two aspects of this formulation merit closer scrutiny. First, we should note that Johnson qualifies such cognitive structures not only as nonpropositional but also as schematic. The following passage renders succinctly how this latter notion fits into his view: "... in order for us to have meaningful, connected experiences that we can comprehend and reason about, there must be pattern and order to our actions, perceptions, and conceptions. A schema is a recurrent pattern, shape, and regularity in, or of these ongoing ordering activities" (Johnson 1987: 29). We can illustrate this notion by briefly examining what Johnson calls the

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image schema of force. He contends that beginning with our earliest experiences as children, we encounter countless manifestations of physical force: objects block our advance, we displace objects, and the list could go on. On the basis of this recurring pattern, we develop abstract gestalts 39 that are composed of the common features of these experiences. Such gestalts possess an internal structure—they are composed of a number of elements and relations that hold between them—that is crucial to their operation. Among the features that play a role in the image schemata of force are, according to Johnson, interaction, directionality, path of motion, sources and targets, degrees of power, and a sequence of causality. These examples illustrate the second crucial element of Johnson's formulation, namely that "such structures emerge from our bodily experience" (1987: 5). Schemas are not part of some innate cognitive machinery, nor are they acquired by passive contemplation of the world around us; they are mental representations that our minds construct on the basis of our action in and upon the surrounding world. 40 Since the immediate role of image schemata is to order this interaction with our surroundings, they serve to reduce the chaos of experience to more or less manageable complexity. A crucial feature of image schemata, as Johnson conceives them, is that they correspond to neither proposition-like structures nor to concrete mental images of particulars: instead they constitute an intermediary level of cognition. This is not an easy distinction to explain, but allow me to try. Johnson contends that unlike propositions, image schemata do not possess truth conditions nor do they correspond to subject-predicate distinctions. He also suggests that the notion of the proposition can not effectively capture the relevant features of image schemata. Johnson develops this claim by noting that the proposition is usually defined as "a finitary representation using elements and relational elements among those elements" (Johnson 1987: 3). As an example of this view he cites Pylyshyn's attempt to demonstrate that "any image could be broken into elements or segments whose relations could be completely described in a prepositional fashion" (Johnson 1987: 3). In response to Pylyshyn, Johnson contends that image schemata resist reduction to finitary models because their structure is analog and continuous rather than discrete. The use of linguistic categories to speak of these features should not obscure the theoretical point that schémas constitute preconceptual structurings of experience. The skeptic will no doubt object that it is not

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until we acquire language and learn the different extensions of the word force that we come to view these occurrences as manifestations of a common pattern. As I understand him, Johnson's point is that we can know of force in a general sense prior to and independently of knowing that a number of different experiences can be designated by the word force. Thus his argument rests on the distinction between "knowledge that", which is quite obviously propositional, and "knowledge o f ' , which need not be so. Johnson would no doubt argue that, from a developmental perspective, we can only arrive at "knowledge that" because we have "knowledge o f ' . Perhaps one way to understand what he has in mind is to say that such a schematic representation of reality would be the sole form of cognitive structuring of experience that would be available to prelinguistic children and speechless creatures. However, in adult humans this type of cognitive representation would constitute the foundation upon which propositional knowledge is constructed. 41 Once language becomes available, there is no doubt that we can come to know that such and such is the case without having direct acquaintance with that particular state of affairs. Language can thus become a vehicle for "knowledge that" that vastly exceeds our stock of "knowledge o f ' , but this does not affect the basic point that a foundation of nonpropositional structures of knowledge is necessary for language to be established in the first place. When Johnson contends that propositional meaning is dependent on schematic structures, he is not suggesting that propositional meaning can simply be reduced to image schemata: he is simply arguing that the latter place important constraints on the former. Similarly, image schemata differ from mental images in important ways. First, they are not simply spatial figures that can be called up before the "mind's eye". They are cognitive structures that form the foundation of our Innenwelt, but they are not mere pictures of our surroundings. The important difference is that image schemata do not represent particulars: they reflect the general pattern that is common to a set of similar experiences. At this stage of the research, it is difficult to say on what basis our neural mechanisms determine what constitutes such a set of common experiences, but the essential point is that they seem to do just that. We should note, however, that despite his desire to clearly differentiate the cognitive structures that he is positing from mental images, Johnson confuses matters somewhat by calling his intermediate level of representations "image schemata". To make Johnson's distinction a bit

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clearer, I would suggest that we replace the term "image schemata" with the term "experiential schemata" or simply "schemata". This change in terminology is reasonable because Johnson himself uses the term "experiential schemata" as a synonym for "image schemata" and the former term avoids the confusions that the latter perpetuates. Before leaving this topic I would like to note that in his discussion of the link between nonverbal and verbal sign systems in humans, Thomas A. Sebeok (1991) has made similar points. It is sometimes erroneously assumed that language has replaced the nonverbal codes that other species and most probably our distant hominid ancestors used to communicate. The reasoning that leads to this view would seem to be that since we now possess language which is such a vastly superior mode of communication, we would have little need for less efficient modes. Sebeok rejects this view and considers that the truly distinctive feature of human semiosis is to be found in the elaborate interweaving of nonverbal and verbal codes. To support his position, Sebeok summons evidence from both ontogeny and phylogeny. In the former case, he reminds us that infants are clearly endowed with nonverbal sign systems that allow them "to survive and both to acquire and to compose a working knowledge of their world (Umwelt) before they acquire verbal signs" (Sebeok 1991: 64). Upon the onset of language, these nonverbal codes do not atrophy, but instead become richer and more complex. When Sebeok turns to phylogeny, he argues that language originally evolved not as an instrument of communication, but as a complex system for modeling the environment and it was only as the result of several hundred thousands years of subsequent evolution that language became exapted as a means of communication. The point being made here is that it would be unlikely that language would completely replace nonverbal communication systems, if in fact it had evolved to serve a quite different purpose. We can without too much difficulty see a parallel between the nonverbal modeling systems that Sebeok attributes to infants and early hominids and the nonpropositional structures that Johnson and Lakoff posit. And although Sebeok does not suggest that verbal codes are built on the foundations of nonverbal codes, he does stress that these nonverbal codes do not disappear when language appears but instead are integrated within a new, more powerful system. However, there might be some reluctance to equate the views of Sebeok with those of Johnson and Lakoff because Sebeok is

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referring to sign systems while Johnson and Lakoff are speaking of cognition. But, if we take a closer look at Sebeok's arguments, this discrepancy disappears. When Sebeok invokes the semiotic endowment of infants, he speaks not only of their ability to communicate but of their unmistakably cognitive ability to construct inner models of their surroundings. And in his discussion of the phylogeny of language the very point that he is making is that language evolved not as a system of communication, but rather as a system for modeling the environment. Thus, Sebeok speaks of sign systems in an appropriately broad sense that includes both systems of communication and cognition. Although the object and the focus of Sebeok's remarks are quite different from those of Johnson and Lakoff, I believe that they support the same basic point, namely that a set of nonpropositional schematic structures underlies the much more visible realm of propositional meaning. To continue this discussion of Johnson and Lakoff s views, we need to take a closer look at their notion of "embodied cognition". In rejecting the idea that cognition is an abstract property or substance that transcends those beings that display it, they firmly anchor cognition within the cycle of perception and action. For example Johnson speaks of "schematic structures that are constantly operating in our perception, bodily movement through space, and physical manipulation of objects" (1987: 23). In this view, cognitive beings are not machines whose sole raison d'être is to think; they are designed to glean relevant information from their surroundings in order to adopt a course of action that favors their survival and their ability to procreate. By virtue of the development of language and culture, humans have freed themselves to a certain extent from this basic cycle and pursue additional goals, but, despite this undeniable degree of freedom, the edifice of meaning of all individuals and societies derives ultimately from the cycle of perception and action. We can connect this conceptualization with issues currently discussed within semiotics, by comparing it to Jacob von Uexküll's notion of functional circles which he formulates in the following terms: "Because every behavior begins by creating a perceptual cue and ends by printing an effector cue on the same meaning-carrier, one may speak of a functional circle that connects the meaning-carrier with the subject" (1982: 31). Although von Uexküll's terminology differs somewhat from Johnson and Lakoffs, the same basic point can be found in both formulations, namely

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that for each organism, no matter how simple or how complex, meaning emerges from its sensory and motor interaction with its surroundings. Or, as von Uexküll puts it, "every action, therefore, that consists of perception and operation imprints its meaning on the meaningless object and thereby makes it into a subject-related meaning-carrier in the respective Umwelt (subjective universe)" (1982: 31). This passage introduces another point of convergence between von Uexküll and Johnson and Lakoff. If you will recall, I indicated earlier that Johnson and Lakoff reject the "objectivist" notion that there exists an objective 42 and ultimate reality and that language becomes meaningful by hooking up with this reality. Under this view, the meaning of our utterances is derivative in the sense that meaning is already present in the world and our utterances merely reflect that meaning. In rejecting this view Johnson and Lakoff argue that our cognitive capabilities place significant constraints on which aspects of "reality" will become meaningful. Since it is our minds that carve up the world, we impose meaning on the world rather than passively reflecting meaning that is already there. Von Uexküll adopts a similar view in the above passage. In addition to his emphasis on the role of perception and action in the process, von Uexküll holds that things are meaningless prior to becoming part of the Umwelt of a living organism. The sensory apparatus of each organism picks up those properties of things that are relevant to its functional circles,43 a process which triggers an appropriate action on the part of the organism. It is this integration into the functional circles of an organism that bestows meaning on things. We must also note that, in von Uexküll's conception, things do not possess generalized, universal meaning that is accessible to all organisms: meaning is relative to a particular Umwelt. For instance, within the Umwelt of another bat, the high-pitched squeaks produced by the bat function as perceptual cues indicating the arrival of a conspecific, whereas for a moth the same sound signals the impending attack of a predator. Finally, like Johnson and Lakoff, Von Uexküll recognizes the presence and the importance of meaning in the natural world prior to and independently of the emergence of language. When he affirms that "The question of meaning is ... the crucial one to all living beings" (1982: 37), Von Uexküll is obviously not speaking of the truth-conditional, propositional meaning that constitutes the only true meaning for so many advocates of the linguistic turn. He is referring to the meaning that organisms, through the cycle of perception and action, attach to the things

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that are found in their habitat. Having established the link between the positions of Johnson and Lakoff and that of von Uexküll, we can now continue our exposition of the views of the former by examining several examples of the sort of constraints that experiential schemata impose on propositional knowledge. The specific claim that Johnson makes is that image schemata can and are indeed projected from their concrete context of origin to abstract domains. Another way of putting this is to say that the nonpropositional structure of the schema can be used to shape the structure of propositional meaning. For instance the compulsion schema44 involves a force with the potential to displace an entity to which it is applied. This is the sort of force that one experiences when attempting to make one's way through a crowd moving in the opposite direction. Following Eve Sweetser's (1990) work on semantic structure, Johnson contends that one can detect the structure of this schema in certain modal verbs. The modal that corresponds to this particular schema is "must". 45 It is customary to distinguish between root and epistemic senses of "must". The former sense refers either to physical necessity ("You must move your foot, or the car will crush it") or social constraint ("Paul must get a job now, or else his wife will leave him"), while the second designates the logical necessity of inference ("Paul must have gotten the job, or else he couldn't be buying that new car"). The received view in semantics is that the root and epistemic senses of such modals are not related in any systematic fashion. However, Sweetser and Johnson argue persuasively 46 that the epistemic senses of modals are the result of metaphorical projections from root senses. Johnson also suggests that another metaphorical projection of the compulsion schema can be found in theoretical accounts of speech acts. For instance, in John Searle's (1979) framework, a speech act can be defined in terms of its propositional content and the illocutionary force that it is given. It is quite easy to recognize the experiential schema that is at work here: the entity that is acted upon is the propositional content and the force that is applied is the illocutionary force that determines the specific meaning of the utterance. Johnson demonstrates that the effects achieved by different speech acts (assertives, questions, commands, and performatives) can be understood in terms of the compulsion schema as the result of particular forces exerted on the hearers of utterances.47 One last example of projection from a simple, basic schema is what

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Lakoff calls radial categories. Radial categories feature a central subcategory and a series of motivated extensions that are derived from it. Lakoff (1987: 104-109) illustrates this notion with the Japanese classifier "Hon" that can be applied to a broad range of things including hits in baseball, rolls of tape, telephone calls, radio and TV programs, an inclusion set that would be a nightmare for the classical theory of categorization. According to Lakoff, the central subcategory of this term would be a perceptual schema for long, thin objects; a paradigmatic member of this subcategory would be a baseball bat. To give but one example of the sort of logic that is at work in projections from the central subcategory, a hit in baseball can be subsumed under the category "Hon" because it is linked metonymically to bats, since a hit is caused by contact with a bat, and metaphorically to other long, thin objects due to the trajectory the ball follows after it leaves the bat upon solid contact. Radial categories illustrate what Lakoff calls "our innate capacity to imaginatively project from certain well-structured aspects of bodily and interactional experience to abstract conceptual structures" (Lakoff 1988: 121. To summarize this theory as it has been presented so far, Johnson and Lakoff posit a set of cognitive structures called schemata that emerge from the cycle of perception and action and, subsequently, serve as models of the recurrent features of our surroundings. And in what is their most audacious thesis, they suggest that the network of schemata constitute a preconceptual and nonpropositional foundation for linguistic meaning and propositional knowledge which are derived, at least in part, by means of metonymical and metaphorical projections from schemata. What Johnson and Lakoff are advocating is a sensorimotor theory of knowledge. Put succinctly, the sensorimotor thesis views all knowledge, even its most abstract forms, as derived from our bodily experience with the outside world. We have just seen that Jacob von Uexküll worked out many of the premises of this view several decades ago. We now need to recognize a second major architect of this view, Jean Piaget. Like von Uexküll, the Swiss psychologist did a great deal of the preliminary work for this conception of mind yet, unfortunately, Piaget never provided a convincing and extensive account of how the various domains of knowledge could be derived from sensorimotor schémas. Even if one were basically sympathetic to Piaget's outline, the lack of an explicit mapping of sensorimotor knowledge onto abstract knowledge was troubling. Linguists, just to mention one group, justifiably

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argued that his theory of cognition could explain precious little about particular aspects of grammar. Until recently this is where Piaget's notion of the sensorimotor foundations of knowledge stood; it was an idea that had an undeniable intuitive appeal but that, in the absence of a more detailed formulation, seemed to hold little serious promise. It had been kept alive within developmental psycholinguistics, but it needed to be erected on a different footing to fulfill its promise. There are many deep similarities between the preconceptual organization of meaning that, according to Johnson and Lakoff, results from the cycle of action and perception and Piaget's sensorimotor intelligence, yet we must resist the temptation of simply equating the two. Whereas Piaget's notion is specifically limited to the structuring of knowledge prior to the emergence of symbol use and language, Johnson and Lakoffs allows for sensorimotor experience to organize meaning both prior to and after the appearance of reference and propositionality. In that Johnson and Lakoffs formulation can be seen as an extension of Piaget's basic insight, this distinction does not pose any difficulties for the present endeavor. What is important is that Johnson and Lakoff have provided a general philosophical framework for the sensorimotor thesis and an extensive demonstration 48 of how language, reasoning, and the like could be derived from preconceptual and prepropositional cognitive structures. In this way, they are carrying on the work begun by Piaget and von Uexküll. Some would shy away from a sensorimotor theory of knowledge because they fear that such a view would entail the denial of propositional knowledge, however, this fear is not justified. What a properly conceived sensorimotor theory of knowledge rejects is the belief that all systems of mental representations take the form of a set of propositions. Thus, this view posits two distinct levels of cognitive representation, one that is sensorimotor and a second which is propositional. There is no doubt that the predominant mode of representation in adult humans is propositional, a fact that proponents of a sensorimotor theory of cognition do not deny; they simply contend that the propositional level is derived from our sensorimotor interaction with our surroundings in our early years. Sensorimotor development and the development of what we will be calling functional autonomy in Chapter 5 paves the way for the emergence of language, which then establishes the dominance of propositional thought. However, as we have just seen in the examples offered by Johnson and

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Lakoff, prepositional thought bears significant traces of its sensorimotor origins. Moreover, the case can be made that an important advantage of adopting a sensorimotor view of cognition is that it can provide a framework for accounting for cognitive development in humans and for the cognitive differences between humans and other species. As we will see in the next chapter, propositional theories of knowledge run into serious if not insurmountable difficulties when we try to apply them to young children and other species. Finally, this view places the computational view of cognition in what I believe is the proper perspective, namely as a useful framework that models some but not all aspects of cognition as it appears in nature. As long as we maintain this stance and resist the thesis that cognition is nothing but computation, the computational view of cognition can provide insights into the workings of the mind. The sensorimotor view of mind provides the necessary conceptual and empirical support to sustain this position. Such a novel and far-reaching doctrine requires no doubt greater empirical and theoretical support than I can provide here; in fact it would need more support than what Johnson, Lakoff and similarly-minded researchers have been able to assemble in the past fifteen years that this movement has been underway. This new view of cognition has been drawn in very broad strokes and a great deal of detail needs to be filled in. However, the evidence for the schematic structures of cognition and their metaphorical and metonymical projections that Johnson and Lakoff summon is difficult to refute and it is remarkable how many aspects of language and of propositional knowledge they and others (Fauconnier 1985; Langacker 1987; Sweetser 1990 and Lindner 1981), who have adopted a similar perspective, have been able to account for. This sensorimotor view of knowledge will constitute the basic framework for my attempt to develop a cognitive theory of semiosis. In the chapters that follow I will make extensive use of the notion of schema, as it is formulated by Michael Arbib, and of the distinction between the sensorimotor and the propositional levels of cognition. 2.7. Connectionism and the multiplicity of mind A second major challenge to cognitivist orthodoxy from within cognitive science is presented by connectionism, which is a view of cognition inspired by parallel distributed processing. During the first phase of the cognitive turn, the primary model of cognition was the physical symbol

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system, but in recent years parallel distributed processing models have presented an alternative way of modeling cognition. To get a grasp on what is at stake here we need to examine how each approach programs computers to simulate intelligent behavior. I will discuss three major issues that distinguish these two approaches: the level at which the program's operations are performed, the way data is stored and the type of tasks each approach is best suited for. Our guide in this discussion will be Andy Clark (1989) who not only expounds each approach concisely and cogently, but offers as well an original synthesis of the two approaches. The first generation of computational models of cognition are constructed using a von Neumann architecture that performs tasks by manipulating symbols, a circumstance which has given rise to the central cognitivist claim that cognition is essentially symbol manipulation. 49 In Newell and Simon's (1976) formulation, "physical symbol systems" are made up of a set of physical patterns or symbols that can be combined to form sentencelike structures, a set of transformations that can be performed on them and a consistent set of interpretations that link up these symbols with objects in the world. Clark makes the important point that these models are "semantically transparent in that they posit representations that can be interpreted as standing for the concepts and relations spoken of in natural language (such items as 'ball', 'cat', 'loves', 'equals', and so on)..." (Clark 1989: 2) This is the same basic point that I have been urging, namely that models of the first phase of the cognitive turn view thought as a language: they posit word-like entities that are combined into sentence-like structures. However, we need to refine this general idea by noting that, although ultimately computer simulations of cognition are realized in the digital code known as machine language, the cognitively significant level, that is the level at which the computer's operations can actually be said to be simulating cognition, is that of the symbol. This is the reason why cognitive systems that are realized in physically different forms, for instance in two different types of computer or in a computer and a living organism, can be considered functionally equivalent, if they can be described by the same set of symbols, the same set of rules for combining them, and are given the same set of interpretations. We now need to consider how data is stored and accessed in models that use a von Neumann architecture. In symbol-processing models, data can be either accessed relatively, by specifying the location of the data sought in

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relation to the present location or absolutely,50 by activating data stored in a particular location by means of a name or number. Without entering too deeply into the technical details, what is important for the present purposes is that both relative and absolute access require that data be stored in a definite location within the system and that, in order to perform an operation on it, one know exactly where it is stored, a feature that is quite familiar to users of word processors. Another important aspect of symbolprocessing models is that for data to be accessed it must be explicitly represented. This might seem a trivial characteristic because explicit representation of data would seem to be the only way to store retrievable information, but we shall soon see that parallel distributed processing demonstrates that this is not necessarily the case. With this initial sketch of symbol-processing models under our belts, we can now turn our attention to the other major approach to the mediation of cognitive processes. The connectionist model of mind is best represented by the parallel distributed processing devices developed by McClelland, Rumelhart and their colleagues at the PDP Research Group (1986). Parallel distributed processing models typically store data in a network of microfeatures that exert an inhibitory or excitatory effect on the other units of the network. Such links are assigned relative weights so that, for instance, unit A, when activated can have a weak inhibitory effect on unit B, a strong inhibitory effect on unit C and a strong excitatory effect on unit D. In such a system data is not placed in singular locations, but is instead distributed across the network. A strong initial appeal of parallel distributed processing networks is that they bear much closer resemblance to the nature and functioning of biological neural systems. Putting aside the obvious differences in structural complexity and performance, parallel distributed processing models, like the nervous systems of living organisms, are composed of simple processing units linked in parallel to form an intricate network. In contrast, classical symbol-processing models make use of a relatively complex central processing unit, that performs operations on data serially. If our goal is to develop models that not only simulate intelligent behavior, but that do so in ways that resemble the functioning of the nervous systems of living organisms, parallel distributed processing networks offer the more promising alternative. Continuing our comparison of these two approaches, we indicated above that in order to access information in symbol-processing models, one needs to know the precise address or path for the appropriate

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file. In contrast, in parallel distributed processing models memory is content addressable. Say you want to access the file of an individual, but you do not know where this file is located within your data base and the only information at your disposal is a partial description of the individual. With a symbol-processing model this information is practically useless. However, by activating the microfeatures contained in this description, a parallel distributed system can, provided that no other individual fits the same description, access the available information on that person. Such a search can be completed even if the information provided to the network is defective. If we compare this flexible data retrieval to that of symbolprocessing models, we find once again that parallel distributed processing bears a stronger resemblance to how memory actually seems to work. When we deliberately try to remember a particular fact, we do not seek out, if such a thing were to exist, the precise location where the relevant data is stored, as classical cognitivist models require. Instead we gradually make our way to the desired information by evoking related facts. Parallel distributed processing models hold a similar advantage when we consider the question of implicit vs explicit representation of data. Unlike symbol-processing models, parallel distributed processing networks are able "to generalize in a very flexible way with no need for any explicit storage or prior decisions concerning the form of any generalizations. The network can give you a typical completion of any pattern you care to name if there is some pattern in the data" (Clark 1990: 92). For instance, if we store data concerning a series of individuals, an appropriately designed parallel distributed processing network could generate a profile of the typical member of the data pool even though the only information stored explicitly in the network concerns individuals. Another example of this sort of pattern completion can be found in what Clark (1990: 93) calls emergent schemata. For instance, McClelland, Rumelhart, et al. (1986) propose a model of our knowledge of typical rooms. Instead of storing the likely contents of typical kitchens, dining rooms, bed rooms, etc. in separate, localized files, this model stores a set of household objects. The strength of the connections between these different objects will depend on which objects are generally found together so that the representation standing for refrigerators will have an excitatory effect on the representations standing for stoves and coffee pots, while tending to inhibit the activation of that of showers. Although different sorts of rooms are not explicitly represented in the network, it is

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nonetheless able to group the items commonly found in bedrooms, kitchens and the like. Here again, parallel distributed processing models offer an interesting parallel with natural cognition. Whereas symbol-processing models suggest that we would only be capable of making generalizations already consciously formulated and stored, a scenario which does not seem very plausible, parallel distributed processing models simulate the very common experience of deriving novel generalizations from familiar data. Clark further develops his case for the connectionist view of mind by suggesting a series of biological constraints with which all computational models should comply. The reasoning behind this strategy is that if we are oblivious to such constraints when we design models of cognition, we risk creating devices that, although capable of performing acts which appear intelligent, are so totally different from natural cognitive systems that would in the final analysis shed very little light on the workings of cognition. In the literature, such elegant, but ultimately sterile simulations of cognition are called "cognitive wheels" (Dennett 1984). In developing his notion of the biological constraints on cognition, Clark invokes what he calls gradualistic holism, the familiar evolutionary principle according to which novel features are the result of a sequence of small anatomical modifications and at each step in the sequence the resultant organism must be able to survive and to pass its genes on to offspring. One implication of this principle is that nature does not have the luxury of producing evolutionary novelties from scratch using the most appropriate materials and adopting the most efficient design, as would an engineer. Instead she works with the materials at hand and settles on workable, yet ad hoc solutions to design problems. To illustrate this principle, Clark cites the example of bony flatfish discussed by Dawkins (1986: 92-95). For flatfish the design problem consists in achieving a body form adapted to their sea floor habitat. In contrast to some flatfish, such as skates and rays, that are flattened along a horizontal axis, bony flatfish, like plaice, sole, and halibut, are flattened along a vertical axis and swim along the sea floor on their sides. One unfortunate consequence of such a behavioral adaptation is that one eye would be facing the sea floor and therefore of limited utility. An engineer might solve this problem by redesigning the shape of bony fish so that they too would be flattened along a horizontal axis. The solution that nature has devised is much less radical: bony flatfish begin life as symmetrical surface-

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swimming fish, but as ontogeny proceeds one eye migrates to the other side of the head, distorting in the process the shape of the skull, so that the adult can enjoy its seafloor habitat with both eyes facing up. Nature's solution to this problem is less elegant than the engineer's but, given the material constraints, it requires less drastic anatomical modifications and meets the important evolutionary criterion that the resulting organism be viable at each stage of its development. The moral of this story is that if we accept the principle of gradualistic holism, we should expect to find that evolutionarily more recent developments, such as the cognitive mechanisms underlying language, are constrained by the substrate on which they developed. Clark concludes that cognitive scientists need to "attend to the kinds of capacities required for success at a fairly basic evolutionary level, since the solutions developed here are likely to impose very strong constraints on the later solutions to higher-level problems" (Clark 1990: 72). Among the basic capacities that Clark recognizes are sensorimotor coordination, object recognition, the ability to map the environment, recognition of one's standing in social groups, selective attention, memory and anticipation. The relevance of all this for our current discussion is, Clark argues, that classical cognitivists have committed the fallacy of attempting to offer accounts of higher-level processes without having reached a prior understanding of the more basic processes that constitute their foundation. In sharp contrast, connectionist models appear to be well-suited to performing evolutionarily basic cognitive tasks. Moreover, these models have had some success in simulating higherlevel skills, such as semantic memory and sentence processing. Thus, with models better adapted to basic cognitive processes and having shown promise in dealing with higher-level ones, the stage would seem to be set for an across-the-board replacement of classical symbol-processing cognitivism by connectionism. As long as the classical model was the only game in town, its proponents could argue that the language of thought thesis alone offered the promise of both explanatory power and methodological rigor. With the arrival of successful parallel distributed processing models, the limitations of the symbol-processing approach, which were apparent from the outset, now seemed to weigh in decisively. However, before writing off the symbol-processing approach, we need to pause to consider the rather acrimonious debate between classical cognitivists and connectionists. In addition to criticizing aspects of

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particular parallel distributed processing models, proponents of symbolprocessing have made the deeper and more general claim that connectionism is fundamentally flawed because while thought is structured, parallel distributed processing models posit unstructured representations. They contend that the rich syntactic and semantic structure countenanced by symbol-processing accounts offers a truer reflection of the true nature of cognition. Partisans of the connectionist view respond by arguing that symbol-processing models of mind offer at best reasonably good approximations to the deeper truths revealed by parallel distributed processing models. Clark suggests, however, that this clash of views is misguided in that both sides make the mistake of assuming that "Every cognitive achievement is psychologically explicable using only the formal apparatus of a single computational architecture" (Clark 1990: 128). To put this point in slightly different but complementary terms, classical cognitivists and radical connectionists subscribe to what I will call cognitive monism. 51 Cognitive monism is the belief that one and only one model of cognition is needed to account for all existing forms of cognition. This view is rarely if ever formulated explicitly, but I do believe that it implicitly informs the debate under discussion. It is generally an epistemological belief, as if the ontological claim that one and only one form of cognition exists in nature would be too difficult to maintain. But this distinction creates the difficulty for both sides of the debate of reconciling the epistemological claim of cognitive monism with ontological pluralism. In other words, if different types of cognition do exist, how can a single model of cognition deal with them? The model of cognition that is adopted must take one particular form of cognition as exemplary of all cognition, and, in so doing, excludes all aspects that do not conform to the model adopted. Clark urges us to reject the terms of this debate and to recognize the fundamental multiplicity of mind. Rather than choosing between classical cognitivist and connectionist models of mind, we need to determine the appropriate range of application of these two approaches to cognition. A reasonable assumption would be that not only might different tasks require distinct types of computation, but that different aspects of the same task might put into play different cognitive processes. In this view, symbolprocessing models would be needed to account for the phylogenetically recent tasks that "we intelligent, language-using humans perform (or at least

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we think we perform) largely by conscious deliberate efforts" (Clark 1990: 17), while parallel distributed processing models would be necessary to account for the evolutionarily basic skills discussed earlier. Clark describes the relation between these two levels of cognition in the following terms: "a virtual symbol processor provides guidance and rigor; the substrate provides the fluidity and inspiration without which symbol processing is but an empty shell. In words that Kant never used: subsymbolic processing without symbolic guidance is blind; symbolic processing without subsymbolic support is empty (Clark 1990: 175). Without wishing to endorse this formulation in its entirety,52 Clark does make a point that is well taken: the fundamental complementarity of these two aspects of human cognition. This idea hardly seems extraordinary; one would think that it would immediately occur to anyone who reflected at all seriously on the varieties of cognition found in the natural world and on the complexity of our own cognitive acts. However in this instance, as in too many others, the obvious has been obscured by an often sterile debate. Clark deserves a great deal of credit for having looked beyond the individual trees and seen the entire forest. To conclude this section, we need to draw out some important points of convergence between the framework proposed by Clark and that of Johnson and Lakoff. Although Clark seems unaware of the work of Johnson and Lakoff and the latter make no explicit mention of connectionism, the two frameworks coincide on a very important point: the subsymbolic level corresponds to the schematic or nonpropositional structures that Johnson and Lakoff posit, whereas the classical cognitivist model corresponds to the propositional level of cognition. In addition to this fundamental complementarity, each of these frameworks contributes an important element that is missing in the other framework. While Clark's multilevel model of mind effectively undermines the notion that all cognition is propositional, it does not come to grips with the other aspect of the heritage of the linguistic turn, the formalist stance. Clark takes a step in this direction by including important biological constraints within his view of cognition, but he stops far short of grounding meaning in the functional cycle as Johnson and Lakoff do. We therefore need to complement Clark's model by firmly anchoring it in the functional cycle. But by the same token, Clark's model brings forward something that is missing in Johnson and Lakoffs, namely computational correlates of both the schematic and

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prepositional levels of cognition. By joining the two frameworks, we can adopt Johnson and Lakoff s criticism of objectivism and their insights into meaning and knowledge and still retain a tight conceptual articulation with developments in computer simulations of intelligent behavior. We now have in hand two important components of the cognitive model of symbols that will be proposed in these pages, however, another major component is still missing. Clark himself recognizes a substantial lacuna in his synthesis of parallel distributed processing and symbol-processing models: the question of how we are able to use external devices, such as words, to stand for our internal representations. In Chapters 6 and 7, I will propose the notion of functional autonomy in an attempt to fill this lacuna.

3. Beyond traditional mentalism 3.1. Introduction As we saw in the previous chapter, the cognitive shift has received its impetus from the inability of behaviorism to deal with intelligent behavior and from the promise offered by computer simulations of mental processes. In more general terms, cognitivism grows from the sense that attempts to make do without mental constructs were unable to achieve what they proposed. While it is a sound principle to chose, when confronted with two theories of equivalent explanatory power, the one that postulates fewer entities, there has been a growing awareness that the principle of parsimony does not tip the scales in favor of nonmentalistic accounts because they are simply unable to deal with important questions. There exists a solid consensus in philosophy and psychology that to achieve the metaphysical peace of mind that comes with eschewing mental events, we would have to give up entirely too much. Any effort to continue to exclude mental entities from semiotics will have to come to grips with this challenge. The central premise of cognitivism is that in order to account for all behavior, from perception to language, it is necessary to postulate mental representations of reality as well as a series of appropriate transformations of those representations. 53 I have been following current practice and using the term "cognitivism" to designate the contemporary view of cognition and to clearly demarcate it from traditional mentalistic views. Skeptics will undoubtedly see this change in terminology as an exercise in pouring old wine into new bottles and will attach the vices of the old mentalism to its allegedly "new, improved" form. In this chapter, I will argue that this suspicion is without warrant and that cognitivism avoids the major defects of traditional versions of mentalism. The principles that I will invoke certainly require more extensive treatment than I can accord them in this context. I would, therefore, recommend that the reader who desires more details consult any one of several excellent general studies of cognitivism that are available.54 Moreover, as I have indicated in chapter 2, I do not endorse certain orientations within what I have called the first phase of cognitivism. In the first two sections of this chapter I will hold back on my reservations, for they do not affect the general case for the need to postulate cognitive processes in order to account for intelligent behavior. Thus at the outset I will be offering a fairly neutral account, one that most workers in

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the field would assent to, but one that will not induce me to say anything that I will have to take back when I continue my discussion of the defects of the prevailing conception of cognitivism at the end of this chapter. With this in mind, I will now proceed with the task at hand. 3.2. General Principles of Cognitivism A convenient entry point for this survey is psychology where the change from behaviorism to cognitivism has been the most dramatic. Indeed, as was alluded to in the previous chapter, the rise of cognitivism within this field constituted a rejection of behaviorism and of the thesis that an adequate psychology could be elaborated by studying solely the links between stimuli and subsequent behavior. In dismissing the premises of behaviorism, cognitive psychologists contend that organisms only respond after stimuli have been processed by an appropriate series of cognitive processes. In focusing on stimuli and responses, the behaviorist, they would argue, is concerned with the least interesting parts of this sequence. The conclusion that they urge is that psychology should investigate the processes that intervene between the reception of stimuli and the production of behavior. The central assumption of the cognitive approach is that the basic mental apparatus that needs to be postulated in order to account for all behavior from perception to language is composed of an appropriate set of mental representations of the world and a series of transformations that can be applied to those representations. At this point the skeptic will most likely inquire on what grounds do cognitive psychologists attribute mental processes and what makes their approach to such hoary entities more rigorous than that of traditional mentalists. The first way to respond to this skepticism is to spell out what cognivitism does and does not commit us to. To say that an organism possesses an internal representation of something means nothing more mysterious than that the organism is equipped with some inner way of recognizing that thing. A minimal hypothesis for such recognition is that when the organism encounters the thing in question an appropriate pattern of neural activity is set off. The picture becomes, of course, more complicated when we seek to account for language, reasoning, and other forms of intelligent behavior, but the principle is the same. We can further respond to these doubts by pointing out that contemporary psychologists no longer place their faith in introspection to provide both data for and confirmation of proposed theories. For some time now it has been

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recognized that introspection is not to be taken at face value because people are often known to make mistakes about the contents and the workings of their own minds. However, the fallibilism of introspection is not its most serious defect. Not only is it possible that we might be mistaken about the knowledge gained by introspection, there is the further problem that we have no way of knowing whether we are mistaken in a given instance or, when different researchers have conflicting introspections, to decide which one is correct. In the latter case, it is not apparent that this is even a relevant question, given that introspection is irremediably subjective, it is altogether possible for both researchers to be correct, that is to have reported accurately the workings of their own minds. Such methodology clearly departs from standard scientific procedure and the criticism of the role it played in traditional mentalism is entirely justified. Cognitivism replaces introspection by what Flanagan (1984) has called transcendental reasoning. 55 The starting point for this procedure is observed behavior, say the response of a number of subjects to a given experimental procedure. The next step is to ask how this behavior is possible. If the data can be accounted for by appealing to the information contained in stimuli or other external factors, which is rarely the case when we are dealing with intelligent behavior, the process stops there and an account consistent with behaviorism would be accepted. If such is not the case, the researcher postulates specific cognitive processes to explain the data. In assuming what Dennett (1978)56 calls the design stance, the psychologist breaks down the task into a series of functions whose interaction would account for the observed behavior. This procedure is based on an analogy with the computer in that if we know how a program is designed, i.e., its components and the possible interactions between those components, we can, given the input into the system, predict its output with a high degree of reliability. The design stance in cognitive psychology reverses this sequence. We do not know for sure how the brain and mind are designed, but we are able to gather data that capture consistent links between stimuli received by humans subjects and their responses. The psychologist then attempts to design a system, specifying its components and their interaction, that would produce the observed results. Since this type of account is concerned with the functions of the individual parts of the system, it is also referred to as a functional explanation. The use of transcendental reasoning in the form of the design stance is

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not the sole difference between cognitivism and traditional mentalism. Behaviorism, with its intent to make the study of behavior scientific, brought into psychology rigorous experimental design and statistical analysis of data. Postulation of cognitive processes by means of transcendental reasoning alone would not be sufficient to guarantee the legitimacy of cognitive psychology: the commitment to experimental methodology 57 grounds transcendental reasoning on a solider foundation. Within cognitive psychology, the status of inferred mental states is only as robust as the data that theory is called to account for. Furthermore, such theories are falsifiable; once a theory is formulated it is always possible for other researchers to devise their own experiments to test the validity and the generality of the proposed account. Thus the methodological procedures of cognitivists are not fundamentally different from the postulation of constructs dealing with unobservables in the natural sciences. An oft-cited illustration (Flanagan 1984, Stillings et al. 1987) of the combination of these methods is the work on mental images—a phenomenon that had been scorned by behaviorists—that Shepard and his colleagues began in the late sixties. In one instance Shepard and Metzler (1971) presented subjects with three pairs of two-dimensional pictures of three-dimensional figures. In two of the three pairs the figures were identical but were oriented differently in three-dimensional space. Subjects were asked whether the paired figures were different or identical; thus to respond correctly they had to recognize that one figure of each identical pair had been rotated. When asked how they performed these tasks, subjects spoke of mentally rotating the figures so that their spatial orientation would be the same so that they could be compared. Prebehaviorist psychologists would have concluded on the basis of such introspective reports. However, the crucial component of Shepard and Metzler's experiment was a measurement of the response time of the subjects involved. What they found was that response time was a function of the number of degrees that the figure had to be rotated to achieve comparable spatial orientation. To account for this phenomenon, that has been reduplicated many times 58 , they concluded that people are able to represent in their minds spatial images that can be manipulated to meet the task at hand. The historical significance of these and similar experiments 59 was that they demonstrated that not only was it possible, using behavioristic methodology, to provide a powerful case for the intervention of mental processes, but also that it was impossible to

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account for such results using the theoretical framework of behaviorism. 60 Another example of the need to postulate mental representations comes from the study of perception. Perhaps one of the most amazing and perplexing things about perception is the ability to recognize familiar beings and objects. People recognize faces, words, and places, while animals living in their natural habitat recognize the shapes and smells of food, potential mates, predators and prey. A rather simple cognitive account of this ability involves the notion of template matching. The perceiving organism is assumed to possess a stored set of templates that represent relevant features of familiar aspects of the environment. Such templates can be either genetically hard-wired or constructed from the organism's experience. At any particular moment, the organism compares incoming stimuli to its repertory of stored templates. Recognition of something familiar occurs whenever stimuli matches sufficiently one of the stored templates. Thus, in addition to an appropriate set of templates, the organism must possess a mechanism to determine the fit between incoming stimuli and the template. Over the years this basic model has been modified to account for the finer points of object recognition, 61 but for our purposes the crucial point is that in order to explain the most rudimentary instances of perceptual recognition, it is necessary to postulate a set of mental representations. With this in mind, we can counter the behaviorist claim that behavior can be understood without appeal to mental processes by arguing that unless it had as its disposal a appropriate set of mental representations, an organism would be unable to determine whether stimuli correspond to familiar patterns or are totally novel. In the absence of such representations, one has difficultly imagining how an organism could respond to stimuli in the lawful fashion that behaviorism stipulates. Without appropriate representations of familiar things and events, organisms would be overwhelmed by a never ending rush of unfamiliar sensory data.62 Before continuing this survey of cognitivism let us digress a bit in order to consider how this methodology would measure up to Peirce's pragmatic maxim. As I argued in the previous chapter, the only tenable methodology that can be derived from this principle is a moderate verificationism that would hold that only those propositions that have verifiable effects are meaningful. If we understand Shepard to be making a theoretical statement to the effect that people have access to internal states that take the form of spatial representations of things, we then need to ask whether this statement

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has verifiable effects. I think that there is no question that it does. In the experiments alluded to, the subjects' response time provides observable evidence that they solve certain tasks by mentally rotating such images for there appears to be no other plausible explanation of the reported findings. The mental processes that Shepard and other cognitive psychologists postulate are admittedly not directly available for inspection, but the statements that invoke them do have verifiable effects. I take this to show that the kind of statements that psychologists make about cognition are perfectly consistent with what is allowed by a moderate interpretation of Peirce's pragmatic maxim. At this juncture, we should recall that one of the thrusts of the argument against traditional mentalism was that it relied exclusively on private events. From this it was concluded that serious investigation of human behavior in its many facets should focus on evidence that would be available to all interested parties. Although cognitive psychology does postulate private entities, it does so on the basis of observable events. The mental representations and operations that cognitive psychologists deal with are inferred from behavior. To effectively undermine this position, the critic of cognitivism would thus have to show that the inference of mental representations from observed behavior is fundamentally different from accepted forms of inference. 3.3. Cognitivism and objections to traditional mentalism In presenting an overview of cognitivism in the previous section, I addressed several objections that could be raised against the attempt to explain semiotic phenomena in cognitive terms. I will continue this general defense of cognitivism by discussing the dangers of dualism, the homunculus problem, epistemological foundationalism and the social dimension of meaning and communication. I will argue that cognitivism, as it is presently conceived, avoids many, if not all, of the problems 63 that are generally thought to plague mentalistic views. The first of these objections is the allegation that appeal to mental states commits us to Cartesian dualism. As is well known, the problem with dualism is that once we attribute a unique ontological status to mental entities, that is once we conceive mind as an immaterial substance, it becomes terribly difficult to explain how mind and body could possibly interact. Although Descartes was convinced that our most certain knowledge was that of the contents of our own minds and that such knowledge could

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serve as the basis for justifying knowledge of the external world, his view created the intractable problem of explaining how an immaterial substance could act upon a material one. Unable to influence the actions of the body, mental states become, to borrow Ryle's (1949) expression, "ghosts in the machine". The epistemological elusiveness of mental states has often been cited as a crucial weakness of mentalism, but the more crippling objection is certainly that on this view the mind has no way of acting upon the body. Critics of mentalism would have us believe that postulating mental entities to account for human behavior entails the dualistic principle that minds and bodies constitute irreducibly different substances. From this perspective, mentalism is to be avoided because it commits us to an unnecessary ontological category and leaves us burdened with the apparently intractable nexus of problems raised by the interaction of mental and material events. Although proponents of mentalism in the past had generally also been dualists, recent developments in the philosophy of mind and particularly the emergence of functionalism have cast serious doubt on the necessity of the link between mentalism and dualism. 64 The functionalist effort to reduce our ontological commitments appeals to the hardware-software distinction in computer science. Succinctly put, the functionalist holds that, just as the same program can be instantiated in computers whose physical organization is different, the same mental state can be realized by different brain states. Imagine two computers, say the latest supercomputer and my lap top-model, that are programmed to calculate my income taxes. Suppose that both computers run the same program to accomplish this task. At the final stage of their calculations each computer will hopefully subtract the amount of taxes that I am to pay the government this year from the amount of taxes already withheld from my monthly paychecks. Given the significant differences between the two computers, one would expect them to perform this calculation in noticeably different ways, but the functionalist would describe this situation by saying that they constitute two distinct physical realizations of the same computational function. What counts is that the same operation was performed in both instances. We can apply this point to the mind-body question by contending that each mental state is a brain state, but that different instantiations of the same mental state do not necessarily correspond to the same brain state. This amounts to saying that you and I may be in the same mental state without the neural activity of our brains being identical. What specifies a given mental state is not its

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relation to a particular neural state but rather its causal relations with other mental states and with states of affairs in the external world. The doctrine that I have been describing is called token-functionalism. In the following passage Flanagan provides a succinct summary of this view: Thé functionalist claims that because we have every reason to believe that mental states are individuated functionally, and because we have no reason to believe that most functional types map neatly onto homogeneous physical types, we have no reason to think that psychological kinds will map onto neuroscientific kinds. We can be (token) physicalists without being reductionists (1984: 217). To grasp this doctrine it is useful to compare it to brain-mind identity theory, which enjoyed a certain vogue a few decades ago. On the latter view, what we have been calling mental states are construed as states of the brain, a point with which the functionalist would concur. However, where the identity theorist opts for type-physicalism, the functionalist subscribes to token-physicalism. The type-physicalism of brain-mind identity theory holds that each type of mental state is identical to a particular type of brain state. In other words, if I am in brain state A I will automatically be in mental state X. Given this relation, when I say that I am in mental state X, it is precisely the same thing as saying that I am in brain state A. The charm of type-physicalism is that it authorizes the reduction of mental states to brain states. In contrast, token-physicalism is the view that every token of belief X is a brain state, but that each token of this belief does not necessarily correspond to the same type of brain state. On this view, types of mental states are not equivalent to types of brain states and therefore the statement that an organism is in brain state A does not lead to the conclusion that it is in mental state X. The functionalist holds that the same mental state can be realized by different physical states. This stance allows us to retain the crucial insight that mental states are brain states, thereby avoiding dualism, without committing ourselves to the reductionism that would consist in saying that mental states are identical to brain states and that a thorough account of the latter would obviate the need to have theoretical recourse to the former. It is customary to give an every day example—locks, games and the like—of this relation. Not being one to quarrel with such traditions, I will further illustrate token-physicalism by noting that history books are intended

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to teach us something about the past, whereas the goal of chemistry books is to provide information about the composition of matter. The tokenphysicalist would hold that each history book and each chemistry book is realized in a specific physical form, i.e., hard-cover, paperback, floppy disk or microfilm, but that the physical realization does not enable us to determine whether the book we have before us is a history book or a chemistry book. The fact that the last history book I bought was a paperback and that the last chemistry book was a hard-cover volume does not allow me to conclude that hard-cover books deal with chemistry and paperbacks deal with history. Paraphrasing a bit a formulation of Fodor's (1981), there are important generalizations to be made on the subject of books that simply can not be stated in terms of their physical characteristics. The token-physicalist maintains that the same holds true for mental states. Each mental state is indeed a brain state, but the description of a mental state in terms of neural firings and biochemical reactions provides an inadequate characterization of the role that mental states play in behavior. Instead the functionalist holds that "mental states are identified in terms of the characteristic causal relations which hold among environmental events, other mental states, and action" (Flanagan 1984 214). The outcome of this discussion65 is that recourse to a theory of representations does not commit us to the dualistic view that mental states constitute a separate and distinct substance. In fact, we are not wedded to any irrevocable stance on the ontological status of mental states; they need only be construed as explanatory constructs that, at least at the present, appear to be indispensable for understanding of intelligent behavior. The second possible objection to a cognitive approach to semiosis that I wish to address is the homunculus problem which poses a serious threat to all theories of representation. The computer metaphor also provides the functionalist with a way of tackling this problem. If we want to claim that behavior is mediated by inner representations of the external world, the question that then becomes relevant concerns whom or what will be given the task of reading or interpreting them. To formulate this problem in semiotic terms, inner representations can be thought of as signs that represent something, i.e., events and things in the surrounding world, but to complete this basic semiotic scheme we have to add that a sign is a sign to someone. It might be tempting to say that the organism whose representations we are talking about is the someone, but this obviously

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doesn't work because it is precisely the semiotic capabilities of the organism that we are trying to understand. Without this way out, the postulation of inner representations appears to commit us to the infelicitous conclusion of having to include within our model an intelligent agent, a homunculus, whose task it would be to transform and interpret relevant representations. This solution simply begs the question for it attributes to a part of the system the skills that we are attempting to account for. The data structures of a computer give us some idea of how intelligent acts can be performed in the absence of a homunculus. At a first glace, the flow chart of a typical computer program seems to designate a team of homunculi, each being entrusted with a particular function and in active communication with its cohorts. However, it must be recognized that while an intelligent activity such as playing chess or reading a story could be accomplished at the level of the entire system, the functioning of each individual unit would not be in and of itself intelligent. Furthermore, the units of this first level of operation can be themselves broken into subroutines which could, in turn, be broken into smaller, more specialized functional units. Each successive sub-level would be one step further removed from the intelligence displayed by the entire system. If we follow this downward spiral far enough, we will reach the level of electronic simplicity where the only relevant fact is whether a given micro-circuit is on or off. The point to be made is that at no level of the program do we encounter a homunculus that would possess the faculties which the entire system displays. In the human brain matters are no doubt much more complicated, and there are important differences between the data structures of computers and the mental representations of humans, but this example would seem to demonstrate that the homunculus problem is not a necessary consequence of the postulation of mental representations. Perhaps the skeptic will not consider this a definitive solution to the homunculus problem, but it is highly suggestive that a theory of representations need not be vulnerable to the alleged defect. 66 Another specter that mentalism invariably raises is the contention that the positing of mental processes commits us a quixotic quest for a priori foundations of knowledge. In recent years it has been Richard Rorty (1979) who has most thoroughly explored this question. The worry is that the espousal of some form of mentalism would wed us to a Cartesian belief in the incorrigibility of our knowledge of our own minds. The first point that

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needs to be made is that mentalism is not the only doctrine that runs the risk of epistemological foundationalism. For instance, Rorty (1979 165-212) suggests that, after mentalism was overturned, analytic philosophers have turned to a variety of other "privileged" representations upon which reliable knowledge could be grounded. Second, in order to see that a cognitive approach to semiosis does not commit us to epistemological foundationalism, we have to distinguish two theses. The first is that, in order to account for human behavior, it is necessary to postulate inner events and the second is that knowledge of such events can serve as a rocksolid foundation for the entire edifice of knowledge. The first thesis deals with our ability to acquire and maintain knowledge, while the second concerns the justification of knowledge. Descartes, of course, ran these two theses together, but there is no compelling reason to think that they must be indissociably linked. As long as we pursue the goals implicit in the first thesis and reject those of the second, we can avoid the dangers that Rorty has warned us against. Rorty makes this very point when he discusses: ...the revolt against logical behaviorism in the philosophy of psychology, leading to the development of explanations of behavior in terms of inner representations without, necessarily, any linkup with the justification of beliefs and actions. I have already said that once explanation and justification are held apart there is no reason to object to explanation of the acquisition of knowledge in terms of representations... (1979: 210) Here again I believe that a cognitive approach to semiosis can keep the standard criticisms of traditional mentalism at a save distance. One last worry that many might have is that the return to mentalism would lead us to renounce the notion put forth by both Frege and Peirce, as well as by many thinkers that followed them, that the meaning of a proposition is a social fact, resulting from conventions that exist between the users of the sign systems in question. The fear is that a revival of mentalism would result in acceptance of the notion that the meaning of a sign is the image or mental representation that comes to mind when the sign is presented to us, a view that constituted what was perhaps the central doctrine of traditional mentalism, and a denial of the thesis that meaning is a social phenomena. A recent formulation of this criticism can be found in Vincent Colapietro's (1989) study of Peirce's conception of the self. The

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primary argument that Colapietro cites to support his preference for a conception of meaning as a social fact and his rejection of a mentalistic one is that "From the perspective of semiotic, we are always already in the midst of others as well as of meanings; indeed, otherness and meaning are given together in our experience of ourselves as beings embedded in a network of relations—more specifically, enmeshed in the 'semiotic web'" (1989: 27-28). Colapietro makes a valid point. No one would challenge the notion that our place within a semiotic community is of decisive importance for a comprehensive understanding of the meaning of the signs we use. However, the conclusions that Colapietro and other proponents of this position draw do not necessarily follow from this undeniable fact. To pinpoint the precise focus of my disagreement with Colapietro, we need to examine more closely his formulation of this question. He argues that "The issue primarily concerns whether one is going to adopt a subjectivist approach, in which an isolated and, in effect, disembodied human subject is treated as the ultimate locus of meaning and truth; or whether one is going to espouse an intersubjectivist approach, in which some human community functions as the fundamental source of both meaning and truth" (1989: 27). Here we see that Colapietro assumes that we must make a choice between these two approaches: either we view semiosis from the perspective of the mind of the individual sign user or from that of the community of which the sign user is a member. However, what is lacking is a compelling reason to believe that such a choice is inevitable. I would argue that both perspectives are essential to a thorough understanding of the workings of signs and that it is the misguided attempt to determine the "ultimate locus" or the "fundamental source" of "meaning and truth" that results in the belief that meaning must be either a social phenomena or a cognitive phenomena. What we are dealing with is one of the Grand Dichotomies that Floyd Merrell so judiciously analyzed in his Signs becoming signs (1991: 135-140). On this subject, Merrell writes, "One term cannot be duly considered without the other, and one of the two must properly be construed a process from with the other arises." (1991: 140) Colapietro, like many others before him, makes the mistake of privileging one term, the community, over the other, cognition, rather than grasping their fundamental complementarity. To be fair to Colapietro and those who take a similar stance, it must be acknowledged that cognitivists such as Haugeland who, in the quotation

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cited previously67, described cognitivism as the view that "intelligent behavior can (only) be explained by appeal to internal 'cognitive processes'..." (1981 243) have unfortunately contributed to this situation. The parenthesis that surrounds the word "only" is highly indicative of the status of this view: although cognitivists may not always insist that their approach alone can explain human behavior, all too often this claim is implicit. This, in turn, provokes the sort of reaction that we have seen in the passages from Colapietro. The time is ripe, I believe, to reject this sterile debate of whether meaning and knowledge are ultimately social or cognitive phenomena and to drop the insistence that one particular approach can alone provide an understanding of them. If we accept that both approaches are indispensable to a complete account of intelligent behavior, we can then devote our time and effort to investigating the precise contribution of each set of factors. A great deal of research will be necessary before we know exactly how these two pieces of the puzzle fit together. In the meantime, I would simply like to spell out how I will be conceiving these matters. The cognitive approach to signs that I am advocating does not question the principle that the particular meaning of symbols is largely determined by cultural conventions, however, I would insist that in order for such conventions to play the role that is attributed to them, they must be represented in some fashion or another within the minds of the individuals that use them to communicate. My contention is not that the meaning of a sign can be reduced to the representations linked to it within cognition, but rather that such representations play a necessary, causal role in all forms of culturally mediated communication. Cognitive representations are relevant to the understanding of symbol use in another sense. Although the specific content of signs is a matter of cultural convention, the ability to form such conventions depends in significant ways on the sort of cognitive processes with which we are endowed. As I will be arguing in the following chapters, a special sort of information processing is necessary for this ability. Finally, although the meaning of symbols is highly constrained by cultural conventions, the ways that we carve up nature and the patterns that we find there are also influenced by the sort of cognitive mechanisms studied by Johnson, Lakoff and the other participants in the second phase of the cognitive shift. In the preceding discussion I hope to have demonstrated that cognitivism

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holds up well to the customary criticisms of traditional versions of mentalism and to a large extent is able to avoid its shortcomings, i.e., the trap of introspection, the commitment to dualism, epistemological foundationalism, the homunculus problem and the failure to recognize the social dimension of meaning. Since cognitive psychologists do not make extensive use of introspection, the first problem does not arise in any significant fashion. In the second case, the functionalist position allows us to posit mental states without becoming entangled in dualism. Third, the cognitive approach that I am advocating is exempt from Rorty's critique because neither myself nor cognitive scientists in general purport to provide ultimate grounds for certain knowledge. Fourth, the computer metaphor enables us to develop a view of mental representations that does not require homunculi. Finally, the cognitive approach is perfectly reconcilable with approaches that stress the social dimension of meaning. 3.4. The language of thought and computational theories of mind At this point I would like to return to the critique of mainstream cognitive science that I began in the previous chapter. I will especially be concerned with what I consider to be two areas of cognitivism where the heritage of the linguistic turn needs to be reexamined and overturned. These are the theses that cognition is intrinsically propositional and that cognition can be adequately described as a formal system. In my discussion of these questions, I will be suggesting that we need to make a distinction between computational and representational views of mind and I will continue to develop the distinction between propositional and schematic representations presented in the previous chapter. In order to pursue the first question, I would like to return to Fodor's "Language of Thought" theory (1975,1989). Over the years Fodor has been able to defend this thesis in subtle and ingenious ways however, I hold that we would be wise not to follow him down this path and that a cognitive approach to semiotics does not compel us to do so. I am convinced that this framework can be elaborated on the basis of a theory of representations without committing ourselves to the problematic aspects of Fodor's thesis. It is important to recognize that Fodor defends his views alternatively against foes who hold that we do not need a theory of representations to account for human behavior and others who accept the need for such a theory, but resist the additional stipulation that such representations are irreducibly linguistic. It is my contention, however, that Fodor's strategy

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becomes problematic because at crucial moments in his demonstration he runs the two lines of argument together and takes reasons for a general theory of representations to compel one to adopt his more specific claim. Although he does make a strong case for the need to postulate a system of inner representations, acceptance of this position does not commit one to the belief that such a system must be construed as a language in any more than the metaphorical sense that I will be discussing below. I would like to begin by considering a number of circumstances that give Fodor's thesis a prima facie plausibility. The first is that the principal sort of evidence we have for the mental representations of adult humans takes the form of linguistic utterances. 68 Given that in the majority of cases it is through the mediation of language that we have access to cognitive processes, it is not surprising that these processes appear to possess a distinctly propositional character. Furthermore, language is the primary medium that we use to describe cognition. Thus both our primary evidence for cognition and our descriptions of it are linguistic, however, it would be a mistake to deduce from these facts that cognition is intrinsically propositional. Andy Clark makes this very point when he writes: Because we are so steeped in language, its apparatus may mislead us to conceive of the computational and neural substrate of thought in terms of the categories that language uses to describe thought. But such a policy (pursued by standard functionalists and classical cognitivists alike) has begun increasingly to look ill advised (1989: 80). We must be therefore cognizant of the possibility that our convictions that human thought is fundamentally propositional may be the result of these circumstances and we should entertain the hypothesis that, as was suggested in the previous chapter, the foundations of thought are nonpropositional. Another aspect of this question is that since language perfuses all aspects of adult human experience, we need to ask whether the propositionality of cognition, to the extent that it is actually propositional, was there from the start or whether it is merely the result of a subsequent internalization of the structure of language. In the former case cognition would be essentially propositional, as Fodor and many other cognitivists of the first phase contend, while in the latter propositional thought would be an overlay that grows from and depends upon prelinguistic structures. In the latter case, propositional thought would be significantly constrained by the underlying

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structures. More will be said about this question later; at this juncture I would simply like to suggest that if our ultimate goal is to understand the nature and development of language, the move to postulate an innate "language" of thought is unsatisfactory for it offers as an explanatory principle the very thing that needs to be explained. Another series of difficulties arise when we consider Fodor's language of thought thesis as a general theory of cognition applicable to young children and other species as well as to adult humans. In order to pursue this question, we first need to get clear about what Fodor means when he uses the term "language". All too often this term is employed in a distinctly metaphorical sense to categorize clearly nonlinguistic phenomena. Such is the case, it would seem, when people speak of "the language of bees" or the "language of the brain". What is apparently being claimed is that the phenomena in question are similar to natural languages in that their organization takes the form of a code. However, since these "languages" lack other important characteristics of language, the similarity remains superficial. Fodor explicitly makes the stronger claim that cognition can be properly described as a "language" in that it displays the very attributes that define natural languages. (Fodor 1975: 99-195) However, despite this explicit endorsement, one can detect shifts in Fodor's line of argument from the literal to the metaphorical sense of "language". For instance, in one section of a recent defense of his thesis (1987: 135-154), Fodor begins by arguing for the intrinsically syntactic structure of mind, but after an elaborate chain of reasoning, he concludes "that bird song is a tidy system of recurrent phrases..." (1987: 143), a fact that presumably lends support to his thesis. This line of argument, I would contend, is vitiated by a conflation of the literal and the metaphorical senses of "language". Let us first examine the type of problems that this claim creates within Fodor's framework when we take it literally. If bird song is essentially syntactic, then it follows, from the assumptions of the language of thought thesis, that it would have to be mediated by a language of thought. Now if we take Fodor's language of thought as equally applicable to humans and birds, then the strong claim that Fodor intended to defend is besieged by a host of vexing questions. For instance, how would an avian language of thought differ from human language of thought and how would such differences affect Fodor's formulation of his basic theory? One plausible hypothesis would be to consider that bird song is mediated by an

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impoverished version of the language of thought, but, in adopting this hypothesis, would we still have any reason to consider it a language? If we take Fodor's suggestion to mean that both bird song and human thought can be described as systems of recurrent phrases, the question that must be raised is does either description constitute a particularly accurate one? A theory that would have such a broad range of application, one that would account for such very different phenomena in the very same terms, runs the risk of explaining very little. A further difficultly arises if we consider these questions in light of Fodor's suggestion, that was quoted in Chapter 2, according to which one plausible reason that humans are able to learn language so easily is that the representational code used by our minds is intrinsically linguistic. If we attribute a similar language of thought to birds, then why is it that birds show no propensity to learn language. I think that the only answer to these dilemmas is that Fodor's claim that bird song can be viewed as "system of recurrent phrases" can only be entertained as a metaphor in much the same way that ethologists have spoken of the "language of bees". However, Fodor proceeds as if he were using the term "language" literally at all times and that the entire chain of reasoning lends support to his claim that cognition is intrinsically linguistic. I would contend that Fodor's subtle shifts from a literal to a metaphorical sense of language is linked to the difficulties inherent in a general theory of cognition based exclusively on propositional thought. When we attempt to apply such a theory to young children and other species, we must either deny that they possess internal representations of their surroundings and themselves or accept that both young children and other species possess cognitive processes that are linguistic in nature. To adopt the former alternative, we would have to reject the rather considerable evidence of cognition in both infants and other species by demonstrating that such evidence is fundamentally flawed and by proposing a noncognitive account of the observed behavior. If we chose the latter, we have to explain why infants and other species are incapable of language despite being endowed with a language of thought. 69 In either case, Fodor's language of thought thesis leads to what I consider to be insurmountable conceptual difficulties. 70 A far less problematic way of addressing these questions would be, I believe, to adopt the framework discussed in the previous chapter and to posit at least two distinct types of mental representations, one propositional and the other schematic or sensorimotor.

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I now want to explore the possibility of adopting a representational view of mind without incurring the disadvantages that I believe are inherent in the computational theories that are currently in vogue. In opposing these two type of theories, I wish to make a distinction that generally is not made in the literature since cognitive scientists tend to view the terms "representational" and "computational" as synonymous. The claim that is made by computational views of cognition is that the representations that we ascribe to cognitive systems can be exhaustively described in terms of the formal relations that hold between them. This way of conceiving mental representations constitutes, I believe, a carry-over from the formalist stance of the linguistic turn and, therefore, needs to be challenged. In contrast, a representational theory of mind would hold that, in order to account for the workings of the mind, it is necessary to posit an appropriate set of mental representations and possible transformations of them.71 The principal difference between these two views is that computational views of mind adopt the additional principle that cognition can be exhaustively explained in formal terms. Thus, my task will be to explain why I object to this stipulation. In principle there is nothing wrong with wanting to apply formal logic to domains of human activity that lend themselves to such a treatment. Whenever rigor can be achieved at a reasonable price, it should be sought. It is, however, a different matter when we define the scope of a discipline, such as linguistics, psychology, or philosophy, on the basis of whether a given domain displays the properties of formal systems, and in the process exclude whatever is not amenable to a formal approach. Of course, proponents of this approach will argue that they are concerned with problems that are well-defined and that if this means sacrificing part of the traditional purview of their discipline, then so be it. I would be willing to accept this reasoning in the case of cognition, if it could be shown that by conceiving all cognitive process as computational we could arrive at an adequate and comprehensive understanding of cognition. In what follows I will explain why I believe that this is not possible. The view that I am leading up to consists in taking formal systems as one possible model for human behavior, a model that needs to be supplemented by approaches that can offer an account of those aspects of cognition that fall through the cracks of the formalist enterprise. To demonstrate the limitations of a computational approach to cognition,

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we must back up a bit and take a closer look at the computer metaphor. The primary basis for the claim that research in cognitive science is relevant to the understanding of the mind is that at an abstract level of description both the mind and the computer are properly conceived as "interpreted automatic formal systems" (Haugeland 1981, 1985). For the present purposes, we can disregard the idea of formal systems being automatic and focus on the nature of formal systems and what it means for them to be interpreted. A formal system is composed of a set of tokens 72 and rules for manipulating them. Furthermore, formal systems are selfcontained. In the actual workings of such systems all that matters is the set of different positions that the tokens can assume and the subsequent moves or transformations that the rules allow. The corollary of this principle is that the putative relations between the tokens of the system and anything that stands outside the system are irrelevant. In other words, a formal system is totally specifiable in syntactic terms and its functioning does not rely on semantic relations. The game of chess is an every day example of a formal system, i.e., a set of tokens governed by clearly specified rules. Chess is self-contained in the sense that the relations between pieces and objects in the real world have no bearing on the actual playing of the game. Although the names and shapes of the pieces were derived from the social organization of the Middle Ages, the function of each piece has little to do with what might be considered its real-world counterpart. For instance, the role of the piece known as the "castle" is not dependent on the characteristics of real-world castles but instead is totally determined by the rules of chess that govern its movements. Now of course no one would seriously suggest that the game of chess be taken as an adequate model of the mind. What makes the workings of a computer a more appropriate metaphor is that computers process information in ways that at least at first glance are similar to those of the mind. The comparison is possible because it is customary to assign the tokens of computer programs correspondences in the real world. This is where the question of interpretation comes in. To make mechanical formal systems useful, one simply establishes a coherent correspondence between the tokens and rules of the formal system and objects and processes in the real world. Since the relations between the interpreted tokens of computers and things are stipulated like the "symbols" of formal logic, cognitive scientists consider them symbolic, from whence comes the prevalent idea

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that computers are symbol manipulators. However, these considerations inspire what I consider to be a questionable principle of cognitive science, namely that semantics has no necessary role to play in accounts of cognition. John Haugeland has formulated this principle in what he calls the Formalist's motto which simply states "If you take care of the syntax, the semantics will take care of itself' (1985: 106). Haugeland sees this as a strength of cognitive science since in the manipulation of tokens in a computer simulation one can take care of "semantics" by simply respecting the stipulated relationship between such tokens and real world entities. Closer attention needs to be paid to what the interpretation of formal system entails. Since such systems are self-contained, interpretation has to come from outside the formal system itself. In practice it is the programmer who assigns appropriate meaning to the tokens of the system and without this intervention it would be ludicrous to speak of a given program simulating human rationality or language. But it is important to recognize that such interpretation is not an essential part of the operation of the formal system. If we take away such imposed semantic interpretations, the formal system will continue to perform unperturbed but in a fashion devoid of meaning. A more precise formulation of this idea is that semantics do not play a causal role in the working of formal systems, a fact which establishes a crucial difference between computers and living cognitive systems. This is essentially the same point that John Searle (1980) made in his Chinese room critique of Artificial Intelligence. To reformulate his conclusion slightly, the symbols that a computer manipulates do not mean anything to the computer itself. It is only the human programmer or the human observer that imbues such formal systems with meaning. This constitutes, in my mind, the crucial limitation of the computational view of mind. The primary reason that this view seemed plausible is due to an uncritical acceptance of the computer metaphor that leads to a faulty interpretation of the uncontroversial fact that the content of its internal states is not relevant to the operations of the computer. The inference that proponents of the computational theories of mind urge is that the content of the representations that guide intelligent behavior in humans can be dispensed with just as easily. The inference that I would argue for is that the very fact that meaning does not play a causal role in formal systems constitutes a limitation in their efficacy as models of thought. The question is, I believe, of crucial importance for the elaboration of

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cognitive semiotics; what is at stake is nothing less than the form such an approach will take. With this in mind, I would like to examine the views of a semiotician, Jean-Guy Meunier, who has addressed this question in his article "Artificial intelligence and sign theory" (1989). Meunier's goal is to demonstrate that Artificial intelligence is "an applied semiotic venture" (1989: 42). The question of formalism constitutes necessarily a major obstacle in the path of this endeavor because if semantics can be reduced to syntax as the received view in cognitive science holds, it would have a devastating effect on semiotics, making it largely irrelevant. Meunier tackles this dilemma by rejecting the claims of cognitive scientists and insisting that semantics is indispensable to the understanding of Artificial Intelligence systems. He writes Even though the Newell and Simon formulation seems to say that an artificial intelligence system 'manipulates' physical symbols without reference to semantics, one must see that this 'manipulation' is essentially controlled by an implicit semantic. This is because artificial intelligence always has a domain of application; the choice of the rules is always constrained by an implicit or explicit interpretation. It is true that it is the rules that render a manipulation legal or illegal—i.e., it is the rules that allow a specific configuration to be acceptable from a syntactic point of view—but these manipulations are allowed because they are correlated to a semantic interpretation, be it explicit or implicit (1989: 52). Meunier's point in this passage is that the attempt of cognitive scientists to describe Artificial Intelligence systems in purely formal terms is illusory because, despite their best efforts to keep it at bay, semantics enters the picture the moment we interpret the program being run, as say a simulation of a chess game. Meunier's point is well taken, but as we saw earlier, an ardent proponent of the formalist position such as Haugeland is willing to grant this much, yet would contend that such an "implicit semantic" does not actually play a role in the system. Thus, we need to see whether Meunier's arguments truly undermine Haugeland's position. To focus this inquiry we should attempt to determine the sense in which semantics, according to Meunier, is important to Artificial Intelligence systems and to determine at what point it intervenes in the overall operation of computer programs in general. With these questions in mind, let us

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examine the above passage point by point. First, Meunier declares that symbol manipulation is "essentially controlled by an implicit semantic". This assertion is true if, by that it is meant that human programmers and users endow meaning on the operations of the computer. However, it is false if the term "essentially" means that the implicit semantics is found within the program itself or if the claim is that the implicit semantics is "essential" to the running of the program itself. While it is true that Artificial Intelligence systems typically have domains of application, these domains are extraneous to the actual functioning of the computer; we can change the correspondences between the tokens of the system and the outside world without disturbing the functioning of the computer. It is revealing that Meunier states next that "the choice of the rules is always constrained by an implicit or explicit interpretation" because this formulation introduces explicitly into discussion the decisions of a human agent who makes the relevant choices. At this juncture we need to distinguish on the one hand the internal workings of the Artificial Intelligence system and the designing of a program by computer scientists. Whereas the latter process is constrained by semantic considerations in that the programmer designs a program with the express purpose of modeling a particular phenomena or behavior, the former is not. But this is exactly what Haugeland says when he speaks of formal systems being interpreted. In other words, the system under consideration can be completely specified in terms of the syntactic rules that are used to manipulate the tokens of the system. One only needs to invoke semantics when discussing how a programmer designs a given Artificial Intelligence system, but semantics does not play a causal role in the operation of the system. To conclude this discussion, I want to indicate that my position and that of Meunier are perhaps closer than the above remarks would seem to indicate. On the truly important issue, we are in agreement that a thorough consideration of both semantics and syntax—and I would hasten to add pragmatics—is necessary for an account of cognition; I believe that we differ on the strategic question of how to overcome the formalism inherent in cognitive science. Meunier's response is to argue that semantics is actually present in Artificial Intelligence systems in the form of the interpretations that people attribute to them. I would contend, however, that this addition of semantics to formal systems is not enough to make them totally appropriate models for cognition because such interpretations are

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artificial overlays that do not play a causal role in the workings of such systems. This difference in our positions is due, it would seem, to a divergence in goals: while it is Meunier's intent to bring Artificial Intelligence systems under the purview of semiotics, I am interested in the insights such models can bring to the cognitive mechanisms that underlie semiosis. It could be inferred from the above criticisms that I am advocating a rejection of the computer simulation of behavior. Although I believe that we can not adopt the principles of cognitive science without significant critical revision, I am convinced that semiotics can greatly benefit from a judicious borrowing of cognitivist notions. To spell out my position, I would like to take a closer look at the "computer metaphor". We must not lose sight of the fact that it is just that, a metaphor, but by that I do not mean that we should consider the association between computer and mind an illusion that has no role to play in our efforts to understand cognition. Insofar as metaphors are useful in generating hypotheses, offering plausible solutions to conceptual puzzles and the like (Holton 1973), they have had in the past and should continue to play a constructive role in theory development. Like all metaphors, the computer metaphor points to similarities between the two terms that are brought into association, similarities that should be exploited. However, metaphors can become an impediment to understanding when the association that they establish comes to be treated as a relation of identity. In the case at hand, the problem arises when we move from the reasonable position that some aspects of cognition can be profitably viewed as computational to the conclusion that only the study of cognitive processes as computational is respectable. Proponents of the strong view of mind as computation have taken the latter position, while its opponents seem to be suggesting that because the computer metaphor is, let us not forget it, a metaphor, the entire project can be dismissed. The critique of the computational view of mind that I have been developing does not imply that a theory of representations is superfluous, but rather that the theories that are presently available are not sufficient. To explain symbol use we have to postulate more cognitive machinery than computational accounts do and not less; we need to recognize that in natural cognitive systems the content of representations plays a causal role in their operation. Another way to put this is that it is not wrong to consider thought a computational processes, it is wrong to think that thought is just a computational process.

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The computer metaphor does capture some important characteristics of cognition, but, as Johnson and Lakoff have urged, meaning has to play an integral role in our models of mind. Meaning must emerge from within the system itself, function causally within it and not simply appear when an outside observer chooses to add it on. We are thus requiring that representations exert a significant control over behavior due to what they represent. In the next chapter, I will suggest how this control is possible.

4. Prelude to a cognitive theory of symbols 4.1. Introduction I propose to use the general framework provided by cognitivism, as amended by Johnson and Lakoff, to elaborate a cognitive approach to symbol use. I have been arguing that such an approach does not in principle transgress any irrefutable construal of what types of entities can figure in semiotic accounts. In Chapter 3 I made the case that cognitivism has provided a convincing critique of doctrines that would exclude talk of cognitive processes from the study of language, meaning, and reasoning. As is well known, discussions of such thorny issues rarely lead to decisive victories, but I believe that cognitivism has seriously weakened the case against mentalism. I do not, however, expect semioticians to be so easily convinced of the need for a cognitive approach within their discipline. Some semioticians might respond to the case I have been making by arguing that if psychologists and certain philosophers are willing to compromise their fields of inquiry by countenancing a host of unobservables, that is their business, but students of signs are under no obligation to follow them down this path. In order to take a cognitive approach seriously they would justifiably insist that it be demonstrated that the absence of such an approach is in some substantive way deleterious to the theory of signs. This will be my task for the remainder of this book. I have argued so far that there is no a priori reason to exclude cognition from semiotics; I will now attempt to illustrate the contribution a cognitive approach can make to our understanding of signs. I will suggest that this approach will allow us to formulate and respond to questions that are impossible to address within the prevalent semiotic paradigms. I will pursue two goals in this chapter. First I will continue to make my case for a cognitive approach to semiosis. I argued in the previous chapter that appeal to cognitive factors is not in principle antithetical to the study of signs. I will now turn my attention to the problems which arise when we neglect such factors. I will principally be concerned with questions dealing with the typology of signs because this domain would seem to lend itself particularly well to a pure semiotics approach. It is generally thought that the different relations linking the elements of a given sign are sufficient to provide a complete specification of the sign. However, I will contend that even such a typology can not be fully accomplished without addressing the

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cognitive processes mediating particular signs. My second aim will be to unpack the notion of symbol. We use symbols so frequently and effortlessly that we rarely take cognizance of what is involved when a sound or mark is linked arbitrarily by a cultural convention to what it signifies. My goal will be to draw out some of the aspects of this complex and, I would argue, poorly understood phenomenon. To a large extent I will pursue these goals concurrently. It is my hope that during the course of the discussion of these issues the cognitive approach towards semiosis will come into clearer focus. 4.2. Truth conditions, conventions, and cultural units I wish now to follow up on the above comments on symbol use by conducting a rapid survey of several recent attempts to come to grips with our ability to hook symbols up with states of the world.73 Since this leads us to the heart of some very complex questions dealing with the nature of meaning and reference, it will not be my intent to provide a thorough discussion of these approaches nor of the problems that need to be resolved. The point that I will attempt to make is that the areas of inquiry that one would reasonably expect to deal with the questions raised by our ability to use symbols do not as a rule confront these issues directly. Given the importance of this ability for understanding much of what (language, culture, reasoning, etc.) makes us human, it is extremely surprising to see how little effort is devoted nowadays in relevant disciplines to its elucidation. The case can be made that this situation is intimately connected to the impact that the linguistic turn broadly construed has had on contemporary approaches to these problems. As a general rule, the assumption that guides discussions on the meaning of arbitrary signs in semiotics, set theory semantics, and the philosophy of language is that the link between symbols and things is an unproblematic one. Rather than being subjected to scrutiny, the human ability to communicate by means of symbols is generally taken as a given. In order to develop this contention we need to distinguish two questions regarding the general question of meaning. The first concerns the entity or property that we are referring to when we speak of the meaning of a word, symbol or sentence. In this instance we are asking not what a given word means or refers to,74 but rather what is the nature of meaning itself. Some of the answers that have been given to this question are that meaning is an idea in the mind, a neural process or a social phenomena. For easy reference we can call the first question the what question concerning

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meaning, i.e., what is meaning? The other relevant question is how do sounds or marks come to possess arbitrary meaning. The assumption that motivates this second question is that meaning is a property that things acquire and not a intrinsic physical property, such as extension in space, mass, or color. I will call this second question the how question on meaning, i.e., how do symbols acquire meaning? The claim that I will be making is that contemporary approaches to meaning focus nearly exclusively on the first question and rarely make the second question the subject of serious inquiry. One influential way, from Tarski to contemporary set theory semantics, of addressing the question of meaning has been to speak of the truth conditions of utterances. These approaches rely on the assumption that in order to use and interpret sentences appropriately one needs to know what states of affairs must hold in the world for the sentences to be true. To account for the meaning of a sentence it suffices to provide the sufficient and necessary conditions for the truth of that sentence. Applying the above distinction, we can say that these theories raise the question "what is meaning?" and respond that meaning consists of the truth conditions of utterances. Whatever the intrinsic merits of such theories and their success in answering this particular question, the point that I wish to make is that theories of meaning conceived in terms of truth conditions do little to advance our understanding of how symbols are linked to what they signify or denote. For instance, if we ask ourselves what distinguishes the semiotic capabilities of humans from those of other species, a truth conditional account can only suggest that humans are capable of assessing the truth conditions of a sentence while other species are not, a response that sheds little light on the matter for the simple reason that the ability to examine truth conditions presupposes the very ability that we are seeking to explain. In order to even entertain the question of the truth conditions of sentences, it is necessary for sign users to have grasped the idea that symbols can be used to refer to states of the world. The point here is not to criticize theories of truth conditions for failing to accomplish something which they obviously do not set out to achieve, I simply wish to suggest that it would be erroneous to view, as its proponents do, that theories of truth conditions provide a comprehensive understanding of the questions of meaning and reference. An account of truth conditions certainly has a role to play within a theory of symbols, but no such approach can pretend in and of itself to

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answer the how question concerning meaning. Another way of addressing the puzzle of symbolic reference has been to invoke the notion of conventions. The arbitrariness of symbols and their conventionality seem to be inextricably linked because the principal reason that symbols are considered arbitrary signs rather than natural ones is because it is by dint of conventions among the members of a social group that symbols come to acquire the meaning and uses that they possess. Understandably the notion of convention is often cited in the semiotic literature to account for symbol use or to distinguish symbols from icons and indices. There has not been, however, a concerted effort to unpack this notion. Probably the most thorough attempt to explore the nature of conventions is the work not of a semiotician but of an analytic philosopher, David Lewis (1969), whose primary aim was to specify the conditions that must be met for a regularity in behavior to be considered a convention. Lewis' analysis centers on conventions as solutions to coordination problems, such as which side of the road to drive on. In a rather succinct formulation, D. S. Clarke summarizes Lewis' views in the following terms: "a regularity R is a convention if and only if: a) everyone conforms to R; b) everyone expects everyone else to conform; c) everyone prefers to conform to R on the condition that others do, since R is a solution to a coordination problem P 75 " (Clarke 1987: 87). Clarke suggests that we can further refine this account if we weaken condition a) by specifying that nearly everyone conforms to R or if we add further conditions, such as "violations of R evoke criticisms on the part of others", (1987: 87) which might handle more effectively some counter-examples than does Lewis' original formulation. One might argue that, by exploring the conditions that apply to conventions, this approach does indeed offer a response to the how question concerning meaning, however, I would respond that Lewis' criteria as corrected by Clarke simply give us a way of identifying conventions and of distinguishing them from other forms of behavior. In a sense, Lewis is substituting the question "what are conventions?" for the question "what is meaning?", with the assumption that a solution to the former would also constitute a solution to the latter. But this solution leaves the "how" question of meaning virtually untouched because specifying the conditions that conventions are subject to does not help us to understand how we are able to agree upon and comply with conventions so naturally. As was the case with theories of truth conditions, Lewis' approach simply takes for

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granted the very ability that needs to be explained. Without wishing to minimize the quality of Lewis' work, his elucidation of conventions does no more to help us to understand how we use symbols to speak about the world we live in than does the analysis of truth conditions. To complete this survey I will turn now to an approach that will no doubt be more familiar to semioticians, Umberto Eco's notion of the content of signs as a "cultural unit" (1979: 62-72). This notion has an undisputable utility in that it enables us to avoid the problems that result when we assume that "the 'meaning' of a sign-vehicle has something to do with its corresponding object." (Eco 1979: 62). Many formulations 76 of the sign refer expressly to the "somebody" to or for whom the sign stands for something. However, as I have been contending, this explicit mention of the agents of semiosis rarely gives rise to a detailed consideration of the type of capacities that these agents bring to particular instances of semiosis. In Eco's formulation of sign theory, the notion of the code construed as a correlation established between cultural units is thought to take care of these questions. Whenever a message is exchanged between two sign users, it is simply assumed that the two individuals in question have at their disposal a common code. Given this assumption, a semiotic analysis would consist in determining the code and/or the cultural units that make such communication possible. In construing the meaning of signs as a cultural phenomena, Eco is responding to the what question concerning meaning. The claim that is made implicitly by his theory of sign production is that such codes play a causal role in the communicative behavior of sign users. It is assumed that knowledge of the relevant codes is necessary for both the encoding and the decoding of messages. However, like the two previous accounts, Eco's approach does not address the how question concerning meaning because it offers no account of how we are able to isolate cultural units and establish conventional relations between them. This survey of some prominent ways of dealing with the link between symbols and things should suffice to make a few points. The common theme that runs through these approaches is a reluctance to specify how the correspondence between language and the world is achieved. The reasons for such an exclusion are not always clear, but I believe that a curious dichotomy can be detected. It would seem that the link between symbols and their objects is not studied systematically either because its nature is so obvious as to be self-explanatory or because it is simply too mysterious to

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permit satisfactory resolution. Of course, these diametrically opposed judgments are not held by the same individual, however any phenomena that can be considered by reasonable people to be either self-explanatory or intractably complex constitutes a genuine puzzle. Perhaps this paradox can be explained by the fact that the ability to use symbols plays such an integral role in human behavior that we view its effects as so natural that we could not imagine life without them. Yet once we take a closer look at this ability, we discover a complex phenomenon that stubbornly resists elucidation. Whatever the reasons for this neglect, I view this question as one that urgently needs to be explored, even if a complete understanding is not yet within our grasp. We can now perhaps see with greater clarity how the present approach to symbol use will differ from currently prevalent views. To put it baldly, these approaches address the what question of meaning, while I intend to raise the how question, which has been virtually ignored in recent years. In addition to the reasons given already, this neglect is, I believe related to the general reject of mentalism and, more particularly, of the notion 77 that the meaning of a word is the idea that we associate with it. Once again let us recall that one reason that traditional mentalism has been rejected is because it is thought to be inconsistent with the notion that meaning is a social phenomenon. In so far as the particular meanings or contents that we attribute to symbols are determined by cultural conventions, this latter notion is true. Thus when we ask what is the nature of meaning, we should thus respond by pointing to some socially mediated entity, be it a cultural unit à la Eco, a Fregean "sense" or truth conditions. On the other hand, however, and this is my principal point, the how question of meaning possesses an irreducibly cognitive dimension. This is not to say that a cognitive account can provide a complete response to this question, but rather that in order to understand how symbols acquire meaning, we must, at some point in our investigation, examine the workings of the mind. Thinkers skeptical of cognitivism might contest this point and argue that some sort of reinforcement schedule is ultimately responsible for establishing the link between a symbol and what it refers to. This position loses its plausibility when we confront the undeniable fact that no amount of reinforcement can enable organisms lacking the requisite cognitive capacities to develop the ability to communicate by means of symbols. To explain why humans respond appropriately to such reinforcement and other

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species do not, we are compelled to seriously consider the cognitive mediation of symbol use. This discussion has important consequences for the study of symbol use within semiotics. A theory of signs that would eschew all reference to mental processes would, by the same gesture, be limiting its purview to the consideration of the what question of meaning and would deny any semiotic relevance to the how question. In this light the principal justification for a cognitive approach to semiosis is that such an approach is absolutely necessary if we are ever to develop a comprehensive account of symbols. 4.3. On symbols and indices In so far as I will be attempting to offer a framework capable of distinguishing communication by means of symbols and communication by means of indices, we need at the outset a clear and coherent understanding of the index. We can begin by asking to what extent do indices, as presently conceived, constitute a class of signs distinct from symbols. My line of argument will be that there is an important distinction to be made here, but that it should be drawn differently than is presently the case. Before proceeding with this task, one additional issue needs to be addressed. In that the most influential typological framework in semiotics is Peirce's distinction between index, icon, and symbol, I need to explain why I am not including icons in this discussion. In Peirce's formulation, icons are signs that resemble their objects, while indices and symbols are linked, respectively, causally and conventionally to their objects. My primary reason for focusing on the distinction between indices and symbols is that in the marginal cases of symbol use that were at the origin of this project, and which I will consider in Chapter 7, the principal difficulty is to differentiate symbolic from indexical communication. These two types of signs will consequently figure prominently in the theoretical framework I will be developing, while icons will receive little attention. It is necessary, however, to acknowledge that icons present a number of thorny issues for a cognitive theory of semiosis. I do not believe that these difficulties are intractable, but they would require extended investigation that would lead us far astray from the issues I wish to explore. I am inclined to believe that the vast majority of iconic signs can be subsumed under the other two categories of this trichotomy. In what is no doubt a controversial view, I would like to propose that the iconic signs found in nonhuman species, such

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as mimetism, can be best understood as indices whereas the purported icons in human communication are, as Eco (1976: 191-217) has cogently argued, predominantly conventional. However, a cognitive approach to signs is not inexorably committed to such a view and, if it is proven to be impossible to deal with the signs standardly considered icons as instances of the other two categories of signs, this would not invalidate a cognitive approach to signs. It would simply mean that such an approach would have to allow for this additional distinction. Having stated this restriction of the present endeavor, we can now proceed with our examination of the index. A s Peirce has defined it, an index is a sign that is "in a real reaction with its object" (4.447).

It is

customary to interpret Peirce's formulation in terms of a causal link between a sign and its object, in contrast with symbols where the sign and its object are linked by a cultural convention. A typical example of an index would be the storm clouds that signal the subsequent appearance of rain. In this case the sign, the storm clouds, is, as it were, the cause of its object, the impending storm.78 This is such a commonly accepted view among semioticians that it would hardly seem to merit further discussion. However, D. S. Clarke's (1987) critique of the traditional category of natural signs, under which Peirce's notion of the index would fall, gives us reason to question the received view. Clarke's most important insight on this subject is that the canonical cases of natural signs interpreted by humans typically presuppose the intervention of language. He argues that, for instance, when dark clouds are taken as a sign of an oncoming rain storm, the link between the sign and its object is only possible because w e are aware of the causal generalization "Clouds cause rain." Clarke formulates this case of semiosis in the following manner: More generally, if evidence χ is an instance of an event, state of affairs, or object of type X and its effect is of type Y , then given that X is the sufficient cause of Y a person can infer from the presence of Λ: to a later instance of Y . The form of inference used in making the prediction, is thus X is the sufficient cause of Y Evidence χ occurs (is present) There will be (is) an occurrence of Y . (1987:

87)

Clarke's conclusion is thus that such natural signs involve much more than

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the direct apprehension of a simple causal link;79 they are embedded in a symbol system that makes the correct interpretation of the sign possible. Here Clarke's point is similar to the one I made in Chapter 1 concerning Fisch's example of marine fossils and could also be extended to medical symptoms. To push this analysis a bit further, in the received view of the index there is, I believe, a fundamental confusion between the manner in which a sign is produced and the manner in which it is interpreted. The intuition that seems to be the basis for the category of natural signs is that these signs are not produced with an intent to communicate and, therefore, are to be distinguished from conventional signs. The first part of this intuition is, of course, plausible, but the conclusion does not necessarily follow. If we consider the actual interpretation of such signs by humans, it becomes apparent that the purported causal relation between the sign and its object is erected upon a structure of symbolic relations in the absence of which the indexical link would disappear. In such instances, the indexical relation is thus dependent upon symbols for its interpretation and its existence. To further illustrate the claim that many purported indices possess a significant symbolic underpinning, we can also examine deictics, such as "this-that", "here-there", which Peirce has cited as examples of indexicality within linguistic systems. Deictics offer a slightly different form of indexicality than the one we have been examining to this point; instead of being causally linked to its object, a deictic points to its object. However, I would once again dispute the contention that the indexical relation constitutes the primary mode of signification of such signs. In contradistinction to gestural deictics, such as pointing with a finger, the indexicality of verbal deictics is encoded symbolically. For instance, the deictics "this-that" can be used to differentiate nearby objects from more distant ones solely by virtue of the symbolic meaning that is attributed to them within the English language. This link would be impossible if there were not a prior conventional link between the term and its use. Thus, whatever indexicality such a deictic can be said to possess, it owes its ability to communicate to our general capacity to construct symbol systems.80 While I do not suggest that the indexical component of such signs can be simply ignored, I believe that to consider these and similar examples as canonical cases of the index is to introduce an unnecessary source of confusion 81 into our conceptual schemes. Some semioticians might

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resist this conclusion by arguing that recourse to such semiotically impure forms is unavoidable in a typology of signs because different types of signs are rarely found in a pristine form. I would have no objection to citing, as an example of indexicality, a predominantly indexical sign that nonetheless possessed certain superficial iconic or symbolic properties. But my principal claim in the above discussion was precisely that such signs are not predominantly indexical. Since the indexicality of these signs was actually mediated by symbolic means, their status as indices is clearly dependent on their status as symbols. On the basis of these considerations, I would contend that we need to reconsider how we classify indices and symbols. Clarke's distinction between "natsigns" and "comsigns" is perhaps a good place to begin. Clarke proposes replacing the standard notion of natural signs by what he calls "natsigns". This change entails a significant restriction in scope because Clarke suggests that "only those events or objects whose interpretation does not require linguistic mediation are to be included in this restricted range, that is, those which directly signify on the basis of past correlations in experience between tokens of the sign and what it signifies" (1987: 50). As the first part of this statement clearly indicates, when Clarke speaks of signs that "directly signify", he is referring to signs which do not display linguistic mediation. On the basis of this requirement the traditional category of natural signs as well as that of linguistic deictics would be assigned to a new category that Clarke calls "comsigns". For my part I would like to adopt Clarke's typological distinction with a few modifications. The first of these will be to retain the terms "index" and "symbol". When I speak of indices I will have in mind Clarke's notion of "natsign" and when I speak of symbols I will conceive them as "comsigns". Now some might wonder why I have chosen to retain the terms "index" and "symbol", if what I am really talking about are "natsigns" and "comsigns". One reason for this terminological sleight of hand is that I wish to retain the customary conception of the causal nature of indices and the arbitrary nature of symbols, a point which is not stressed within Clarke's framework. Furthermore, my analysis has a bearing on the concepts of index and symbol, a fact which might be overlooked if I were to adopt the terminology Clarke proposed by Clarke. I also consider Clarke's identification of comsigns with linguistic signs and natsigns with nonlinguistic signs altogether too rigid; we need to be open to the

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possibility that some symbols are not truly linguistic. My principal reason for this last provision is to avoid succumbing to the classical cognitivist vice of equating of cognition with language. To consider comsigns or symbols by definition linguistic signs, as Clarke does, starts us down the slippery slope towards Fodor's Language of Thought thesis. In the wake of these proposed modifications to the received view, the question is what remains of the index. In so far as the capacity to order experience and to communicate by means of symbols extends to virtually all facets of our experience, human signs that are predominantly indexical and not dependent on symbols are extremely rare. In order to find examples of indices construed as we are doing here, we will have to turn to the communication of animals and young children. However, it does not follow from this that the index will have a marginal role within the typology of signs for the case could be made that the overwhelmingly predominant form of semiosis in the biosphere is the index. Symbolic communication is a very recent newcomer on the evolutionary scene and is limited to one particular species. Thus, the index, even if we conceive it in the restricted way that I am proposing, will continue to have a wide range of application. 4.4. Symbols reconsidered The first stage of my reworking of the typology of signs consisted in limiting the scope of the index, I will now seek to also limit that of the symbol. As a rule, semioticians are content to use the term "symbol" whenever an arbitrary relationship links a sign and its object. This criterion usually suffices in the study of adult human semiosis, since the capacity to communicate by means of symbols has already been firmly established and the question is not whether an individual is capable of using symbols, but whether, in a particular instance of communication, she is using an arbitrary sign as opposed to an icon or an index. I would contend, however, that it is an entirely different matter when one studies symbol use in young children or in nonhuman species where the question of whether the subject in question is actually communicating by means of symbols is posed quite dramatically. To pursue this question, I will now examine what I consider erroneous attributions of symbol use to nonhuman species. I would first like to consider a case reported by Thomas Sebeok (1976: 117-42) in an article entitled "Six species of signs". In this paper, Sebeok illustrates his claim

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that symbols are used by a wide variety of nonhuman species by presenting the example of tail displays in rhesus monkeys and in baboons. Whereas the baboon signals fear by holding its tail in a vertical position, the rhesus monkey conveys the same message by carrying its tail stiffly out behind. Sebeok's reasoning seems to be that, since either tail position can effectively stand for fear, there is no natural link between the sign and its object and that, therefore, the relationship between the two is an arbitrary one. Another example of a questionable attribution of symbol use can be found in the section of The dimensionality of signs, tools and models that James Bunn (1981: 7-13) devotes to animal communication. Bunn's discussion centers on several observed cases of ritualization which involve a gradual transformation of a functionally-based behavior until it loses its original function and becomes a signal used exclusively to communicate. Since such behaviors are no longer used to fulfill their original purposes, they are thought to function "symbolically". To illustrate this process of symbolization, Bunn uses an example of the courtship behavior of dance flies reported by Edward Wilson (1972). According to Wilson, in one empid species, the male offers an empty cocoon to the female as part of the mating ritual. This offering would constitute a total mystery if not for the existence of similar behaviors in related species that permit entomologists to reconstruct the evolutionary development from a clearly functional behavior to a ritualized one. This process begins as an attempt on the part of the male to avoid being devoured by the voracious female by offering a captured insect to satiate the appetite of his future partner. In another species, the offering is slightly modified in that the male "decorates" the captured insect by draping threads of silk around it. The next stage in this process of ritualization is found in still another species where the captured insect is totally enclosed in a silk cocoon. The offering of the empty cocoon constitutes the final stage in this sequence; it no longer provides the female with food to consume, but functions instead as a signal to inhibit the female's attack behavior so that mating can take place. Bunn suggests that the empty cocoon can be considered a symbol that stands for the captured prey. Since the cocoon does not actually provide nourishment, the only way that it can apparently diffuse the female's attack mechanisms is by symbolic substitution. As fascinating as these two forms of communication are, I believe that

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most semioticians would have serious difficulties accepting them as equivalent to human symbol use. I would contend that such cases reveal the difficulty of clearly identifying, on the basis of the premises of the pure semiotics position, what constitutes symbol use. I would further argue that as long as we continue to accept these assumptions and refuse to take into consideration the cognitive abilities of sign users, these difficulties will be unavoidable because a sign theory that limits itself to the internal structure of signs does not provide adequate criteria for making such distinctions. As an initial step towards a stricter conception of symbols, it is instructive to consider the definition of this term that Elizabeth Bates developed in order to deal with the questions raised by the development of symbol use in children. Bates defines a symbol as "the comprehension or use, inside or outside communicative situations, of relationships between a sign and its referent, such that the sign is treated as belonging to and/ or is substitutable for its referent in a variety of contexts; at the same time the user is aware that the sign is separable from its referent, that is, not the same thing (Bates 1979: 43)." In this definition, Bates introduces two criteria for symbol use: the user's awareness of the difference between a sign and its object and the use of such a sign in a variety of contexts. In order to avoid the inevitable misunderstandings, it is important to spell out exactly what is meant here by the term "awareness". Bates' definition does not imply that the individual to whom a symbol is attributed will be able to state, upon questioning, that the relationship between the sign and its referent is an arbitrary one. Furthermore, such a procedure is not used to determine symbol use. Bates is only stipulating that, in its behavior, the organism must treat the sign as substitutable, but separate from its referent. This stipulation is similar to that of linguists who postulate a series of transformational rules to account for the surface structures of an utterance without claiming that the speaker can actually formulate such rules. In the present view of symbols, just as in the linguistic account of grammatical competence, explanation rests ultimately on an appeal to tacit knowledge. The second component of Bates' definition, the ability to use the sign in question in a variety of contexts, seems to offer a methodological criterion for determining the awareness of the arbitrary relationship on the part of the sign user. The awareness of the sign user is a private phenomenon which is not directly accessible to observation, but if we could establish the link between such awareness and the use of a sign in a variety of contexts, we

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would have a public criterion for identifying symbol use as Bates defines it.82 Although this criterion does not provide ironclad proof of such awareness, there is reason to accept it as a tentative operational definition of symbol use. While the appearance of a sign in a variety of contexts does not guarantee that we are dealing with a symbol, the limitation of a sign to a single context casts, as we shall see in Chapter 7, serious doubt on its status as a symbol. Thus, I am suggesting that we can only speak of an organism demonstrating evidence of symbolic communication, if it possesses the ability to encode and decode the alleged symbols in a variety of contexts. Since the ability in question is an irreducibly cognitive one, Bates' definition forces us not only to examine the internal structure of the sign, but also to take into consideration the cognitive processes that mediate it. In order to clearly differentiate between human symbol use and the instances that Sebeok and Bunn have analyzed, we must adopt criteria no less strict than the ones Bates proposed. Although they might not be sufficient criteria for the attribution of symbol use, I am convinced that they are necessary ones. Whenever we are inclined to say that an animal or child can communicate by means of symbols, we must insist that not only the adult human observer be able to detect an arbitrary relationship, but that this relationship actually play a causal role in the encoding and the decoding of the sign. You will recall that I invoked this same principle in chapter 3 when I spoke of the crucial difference between formal systems like computers and living or natural cognitive systems. At this point we should anticipate a possible objection. Since it is being suggested that we should attribute symbolic communication to someone when they demonstrate the ability to use an arbitrary sign in a variety of contexts, it could be asserted that the conception of symbol use being proposed is in the final analysis a behavioral one. This contention would rest on the idea that it is the propensity to appear in different contexts which gives symbols their particular semiotic properties and nothing is to be gained by attempting to define symbols in terms of putative covert processes. Such an account would have the decided advantage that it would make sense of symbolic communication uniquely in terms of signs and their use. This objection can be countered in the following way. First, a behavioral account which would define symbols in terms of the diversity of contexts in which they appear does not offer the slightest hint of an explanation of how symbolic communication is possible. This behavioral

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regularity only becomes a more or less reliable criterion for attributing symbol use when it is embedded within a theoretical framework which is capable of providing it with the appropriate motivation. It is only in conjunction with a cognitive account that we can begin to understand why the use of a sign in different contexts is so important for it being considered a symbol. I will attempt to provide such an account in Chapters 6 and 7. Before proceeding we need to render a bit more explicit Bates' suggestion that in order to be considered a symbol a sign must be treated as substitutable for its object, yet distinct from it. Given a physical mark (sound, movement, shape, etc.), a, and a particular class of things, b, that a is thought to stand for, let us consider three possible ways which organisms can relate a and b. In the first instance the organism fails to grasp any relation whatsoever between the two. Such would be the case if one were to utter the word "semiotics" in the presence of the family cat. Although we might consider the sounds in question a sign standing for a particular object, it would be erroneous to say that it is a symbol for the cat who is incapable of comprehending the relation linking sign and object. In this first case, semiosis is thus absent. In a second case, the organism would be capable of relating the two, but instead of apprehending a relation between two distinct entities, it would simply react in the same fashion if presented a or if presented è. Or if we frame this question in terms of encoding, the sign would be produced as an automatic correlate of its object, as when an infant cries out in hunger. In these two examples we can recognize the basic structure of indexical signs. In the third case, the organism would recognize a and b as distinct but related. Although young children and some adults do at times confuse words and things, the fact that few would attempt to drink the word "water" demonstrates that we consider the sign and its object distinct entities. Yet our spontaneous use of this sign to request a genuine drink of water, as well as countless other descriptive and narrative uses, is evidence that we view the sign as an appropriate substitute for the thing. This ability to view a sign and its object as related yet distinct is essential to communication by means of arbitrary signs. When signs are thus related, we are, to adapt Bates' suggestion, dealing with symbols. To illustrate this distinction, let us turn to an example from Bates' work on the development of symbolic communication in children. Bates (1979: 40) observed one of her subjects, Carlotta, to utter the sound "bam" while

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banging on her toy piano. While we might be tempted to say that Carlotta was using "bam" as a symbol 83 to refer to the action of banging, I believe it to be a perfect instance of an insufficient separation of sign and object. During the period of Bates' observation, Carlotta would only utter "bam" while banging on her piano. The sound would neither be used in the absence of this particular action nor would it be used in conjunction with other actions which adults consider instances of banging. Given this pattern of behavior, there is little reason to think that Carlotta was, at this stage, capable of grasping the particular way a symbol and its object are related yet distinct. To use the terminology of the previous section, the utterance "bam" would be an automatic correlate of the action of banging. In a later observation, during the twelfth month, Carlotta uttered the sounds "bam", paused and then proceeded to bang on her toy piano. The temporal separation between utterance and action is indicative of an increasing separation of sign and object in cognition. Another interesting facet of this example is that, when Carlotta became able to utter "bam" without automatically performing the action, she also began to use this utterance in a variety of contexts, a fact that further reinforces the correlation between symbol use, the cognitive distinction between a sign and its object and the ability to use a sign in a variety of contexts. Returning to the analyses of Sebeok and Bunn, we can perhaps see more clearly why such instances of communication do not qualify as symbolic. In Sebeok's example of the rhesus monkeys and the baboons, one could argue that, for the animal that performs a tail display, the position of its tail is no less a physiological manifestation of the inner state of fear than would be an increased heart rate or increments of adrenaline. The sender does not choose this sign to represent its fear; the sign automatically accompanies the inner state. Furthermore, the only situation in which the animal uses the tail display to signal fear is when it is actually experiencing fear. For instance, it is highly unlikely that a member of either species would use a tail display to plan with conspecifics how they would defend themselves the next time a particular predator approached. In the absence of such an ability to use the sign in a variety of contexts, we must conclude that, from the standpoint of the monkey, it is not a symbol. I would further argue that a similar judgement must be made concerning the animal decoding this sign. We need to keep in mind that the sign is not decoded in a sensory vacuum; the position of the first animal's tail is

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accompanied by a host of other visual, auditory, and olfactory signals which enable other animals to determine the emotional state of the sender. In other words, the receiver of this sign need not grasp the alleged arbitrary relationship between the sign and its object in order to perceive the fear of the sender because many other aspects of the latter's behavior are transmitting the same message. Applying Bates' criterion, neither animal can be said to perceive the sign as substitutable or separate from its object, since the appropriate tail position is indissociably linked to the inner state, fear. Thus, we are dealing here with indices. From the standpoint of methodology, an important point to be made at this juncture is that if we pay attention to the entire context and take into consideration the cognitive abilities that are required to encode and decode them, the arbitrariness of these tail displays disappears. The only entity for whom the relationship between inner states and tail displays could be said to be arbitrary is the ethologist who compares the message conveyed by the tail displays in these two species, but this impression is erroneous and it would be a serious mistake to project it onto the animals involved. Moving on to Bunn's example, we must ask ourselves if it makes any sense to say that the male dance fly substitutes the cocoon for the captured insect. It would hardly seem conceivable that the cocoon-offering dance fly is intentionally modeling its behavior on the offering of a captured insect that presumably played a role in the mating behavior of an ancestor species in the far distant past. A more plausible account is that the male's offering of an empty cocoon to initiate mating is a fixed action pattern that evolved in this particular species. As such it would best be viewed as an automatic correlate of the male's mating drives, rather than the result of a convention. Next, we must ask ourselves if the empty cocoon constitutes a real substitute for food for the female, or, in other words, does the female actually interpret the cocoon as an ingestible insect? The female's behavior seems to be the result of an innate releasing mechanism that has been adapted by evolution to activate mating and inhibit attack behavior and it does not seem very plausible that the appropriate substitution plays a causal role in the female's cognition. Thus, in neither the actions of the male nor in those of the female does the object of this presumed symbol (the captured insect) actually play the required role. Obviously, the offering of a captured insect was instrumental in the evolution of this stereotypical behavior, but it is by no means clear that it assumes a functional role in the

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modern ritualized form. This discussion suggests the following conclusion: if we limit ourselves to the study of the internal structure of signs and neglect the cognitive processes that come into play as the pure semiotics position entreats us to do, we will be unable to draw a clear distinction between human symbol use and certain superficially similar forms of animal communication. The preceding would seem to indicate that it is necessary to take into consideration the cognitive mediation of signs in order to make this crucial distinction. At this point, it is important to return to the question of the parsimony of sign theory.84 We must not forget that parsimony is not an absolute principle; the most parsimonious account is not necessarily the best one. Quite to the contrary, the parsimony of competing theories must be weighed against their respective explanatory power and parsimony becomes the decisive factor only when competing theories have equivalent explanatory power. In the case at hand, it is my contention that, despite its parsimony, the pure semiotics approach is inadequate because it does not allow us to draw important distinctions. Consequently, we are not comparing theories of equivalent explanatory power because a fully developed account of the cognitive mediation of signs would be able to make distinctions that a pure semiotics account can not. Before concluding this chapter I wish to explore the principle enunciated earlier that in order for a sign to qualify as a symbol the arbitrary relation that is believed to hold between a sign and its object must play a causal role in the decoding and encoding of the sign. To illustrate this principle I would like to examine what I consider to be a loose use of the term "symbol". As I have mentioned several times, a rather common view these days is that cognition can be viewed as the manipulation of symbols. In one sense, this is certainly true. Since human beings embellish the entire range of their experience with symbols, it is without question the case that at an appropriate level of description human thought can be conceived of as a series of operations performed on symbolic representations of the objects and events of our experience. By adopting the multilevel view of cognition advocated by Clark, Johnson and Lakoff, we granted this point. However, the view in question is more radical than that; it is the claim that the workings of a computer and the mental life of our pets are also in essence symbol manipulation. For the moment let us consider this claim as it applies to computers. I have already alluded to the fact that the computer

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is merely the most recent metaphor for thought, but the principal novelty of this new model of thought is that the computer manipulates tokens which convey information, and that therefore a purely mechanical description is not as successful in describing its workings as it would be for a watch. In order to evaluate this claim, we must examine closely whether a machine that is able to use a system which for humans would be symbolic is actually displaying the capacity to communicate by symbols. This is essentially the caveat that critics of the ape language projects raise when they argue that the putative linguistic signs do not mean to the apes what they mean for humans that use them. These critics contend that human trainers are the ones who bestow symbolic meaning on the signs of the ape, but that the apes themselves are incapable of intending such meaning. To reformulate this claim, we can say that the defining quality of symbols, arbitrariness, does not play a causal role in the ape's behavior. To insist that arbitrariness play such a role in order for an instance of communication to qualify as symbolic is a valid point, and I know of no reason for excusing computers from it. The problem arises when machines or animals are said to use, understand or communicate by means of man-made symbols. For instance when a chimp trained in Yerkish presses one of the "symbols" on its keyboard to request food or when a computer manipulates the "symbols" of a computer language to furnish a solution to a problem, there is an obvious sense in which both the chimp and the computer are using symbols to communicate. This judgement appears obvious because if humans were to use the very same signs, we would say that they were using symbols. However, we need to distinguish the use of a set of terms that due, to their human origin, are conventional and the use of those terms as symbols. To say that a chimp or a computer used a sign, that from a human perspective would be conventional and arbitrary, is not the same thing as to say that the chimp or the computer used the sign with a communicative intent as a symbol. The distinction that must be made here is between a sense of use as a mechanical activation and use as a meaningful act of communication. In the former instance the arbitrariness of the putative symbols does not actually play a causal role in the sign behavior in question, while in the latter it does. To flesh out this claim I would like to take a closer look at how it applies to the so-called symbol manipulation of computers 85 . As we saw in chapter 3, computers are formal systems in which a "symbol" is a token whose

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meaning does not enter into the workings of that system. Thus, by definition the arbitrary link holding between sign and object plays absolutely no role in the operations which the computer performs on the "symbols" it has at its disposal. We could substitute an entirely different set of objects for these "symbols", yet this difference would not make the slightest difference for the computer since its functioning would not be altered. Advocates of the computational view of mind such as Haugeland see this aspect of computer simulations to be their strength, but I believe that it is the very fact that the arbitrary relation between sign and object does not play a causal role in the working of the computer which allows us to distinguish its manipulation of formal tokens from genuine symbol use.86 4.5. Conclusion I would like to conclude this chapter by summarizing the proposed conceptualization of symbol use. In addition to the notion that symbols are signs linked to their objects by an arbitrary relation, we have stipulated that in order for an instance of communication to be considered symbolic, arbitrariness must play a causal role in the behavior under consideration. We can give this stipulation a more precise formulation by adopting Bates' suggestion that an awareness of the sign as related to yet distinct from its object be required for the attribution of symbol use. Finally, we proposed that the use of a particular sign in a variety of contexts be accepted as a methodological criterion for identifying such an awareness. One might object to this proposal by arguing that the received semiotic criterion of arbitrariness is sufficient for recognizing symbols and that the additional constraints being proposed here are artificial ones necessitated by the consideration of marginal cases of symbol use. In this view, standard semiotic formulations would be considered preferable because they are more parsimonious and are perfectly adequate to the task of analyzing adult human symbol use, which is by far the most interesting domain. My response to this objection would be that the constraints I have proposed are in no sense artificial; they are simply implicit assumptions that we make all the time when we discuss particular instances of adult human symbol use. These assumptions, I would argue, are responsible for the skepticism of most scholars in face of claims of apes "speaking" or computers "thinking". As I indicated earlier we can generally make such assumptions without risk when we are talking about sign users whose capacity to communicate by means of symbols is firmly established. However, the fact that we can

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normally take these aspects of symbolic communication for granted does not imply that they can be dispensed with entirely in a comprehensive account of what it means to communicate by symbols. While the adoption of these criteria makes our conception of symbols a bit less parsimonious, this loss of parsimony is more than compensated by an increase in explanatory power. And rather than viewing the instances of pseudosymbolic behavior considered above as needlessly diverting our attention from the truly interesting cases of symbol use, I would argue that the examination of such instances helps us to become aware of aspects of symbol use that we normally take for granted. The point that needs to be stressed is that when these aspects are absent, we are no longer dealing with symbols.

5. Steps towards a theory of representations 5.1. Introduction If we accept the premise that a cognitive approach to signs is a valid one, we next need to adopt a theory of representations that can be applied to semiotic questions. Up to this point we have been using the term "representation" in a variety of forms ("mental representation", "cognitive representation") without explaining exactly what is meant by it. It is appropriate to begin this section by having a closer look at this key cognitivist notion. To suggest that an organism possesses mental representations involves nothing more than affirming that the organism has at is disposition neural mechanisms which can record and recognize salient features of the environment. The principle I am invoking is that, an organism capable of identifying certain events as potentially dangerous, certain things as sources of nourishment, certain beings as potential mates, must have some means of comparing current stimuli with stored patterns of neural activity that represent events and entities that are of vital interest to the organism. In the absence of such means, participation in the functional cycle would be impossible. Having said this we need to be clear about what this approach does and does not entail. First, a theory of cognitive representations is not directly concerned with the exact nature of these mechanisms. It is safe to assume that these mechanisms are ultimately neurochemical, but it is not necessary at this stage of inquiry 87 to offer a detailed account. The primary task of a theory of cognitive representations is to map out the contents of representational states, the relations that can form between them and their causal links to behavior. Secondly, the notion of cognitive representation, as I am construing it, does not imply, as some (Ouellet 1988) would suggest, that such representations need be accessible to consciousness. I would contend that this implication only seems inevitable when we focus our inquiry too narrowly on adult human cognition, for which such accessibility to consciousness constitutes a defining characteristic. I will have more to say on the latter point in Chapter 6 when I discuss the notion of functional autonomy. For the time being, I want to stress that the general notion of cognitive representations proposed here stipulates only that organisms are able to store relevant information about their surroundings

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but not that they have conscious access to such representations. Construed in this fashion, the notion of cognitive representation can be applied to young children and to other species as well as to adult humans. In the model of cognition that I am proposing, conscious accessibility will constitute a special characteristic of some but not all cognitive representations. 5.2. Criteria for evaluating cognitive theories Theories of cognition come in all shapes and sizes, colors and flavors. To guide us through this maze of competing frameworks we will call upon the criteria for evaluating cognitive theories identified and cogently discussed by Guy Claxton (1988). We will focus on a few 88 of Claxton's criteria that seem particularly appropriate to the questions under consideration. Before we begin this discussion, it is important to point out that the role of such criteria does not simply consist in evaluating cognitive theories after they have been formulated; they are also instrumental in the design and development of theories. Whether such principles are expressed explicitly or not, cognitive psychologists, like other researchers, proceed on the basis of a number of epistemological principles that determine the type of experiments they perform, the type of empirical proof they require and the type of theoretical statements they find acceptable. Thus, Claxton's discussion of criteria for evaluating theories of cognition serves the additional purpose of making explicit the epistemological choices of different approaches to the study of cognition. Claxton begins his discussion with the experimental criterion, which is based on a commitment to submitting proposed theories of cognition to controlled empirical testing. This criterion played an important role in the rise of modern psychology and, as I asserted in Chapter 3, it is one of the things that sets cognitivism apart from traditional forms of mentalism. Yet, Claxton argues, despite its overall beneficial effects on the emergence of psychology as a rigorous discipline, cognitive psychology has been guilty of an over-zealous application of the experimental criterion. Psychologists in the laboratory break down complex behaviors in order to isolate a small set of variables. Although this procedure has been quite successful in the natural sciences, in psychology it has tended to result in a proliferation of mini-theories, each making very precise claims about a limited domain of behavior and, with little effort being devoted to integrating findings into a broader theory. Moreover, in striving to isolate a manageable set of factors,

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the experimental method often separates behavior from the context within which it is meaningful. Cognitive processes, which in the normal behavior of the organism are means to ends, are treated as ends in and of themselves in the laboratory. That the experimental approach to mind is prone to these and other defects should not surprise us because all approaches have strengths and weakness; the judicious response would be to turn to other approaches to offset the shortcomings of one's principal paradigm. The reliance of cognitive psychologists on the experimental criterion becomes deleterious when current empirical methodology is taken to define what it means to do cognitive psychology: whatever is not amenable to this methodology is automatically excluded from consideration. Thus, in criticizing this use of the experimental criterion, Claxton is not suggesting that psychologists renounce all laboratory testing of behavior, but rather that, in the development and evaluation of theories of cognition, this principle be weighed against other equally valid criteria. If our goal is to understand intelligent behavior, the best theory of cognition is not necessarily the one that lends itself most readily to experimental manipulation. By placing such great stock in the experimental criterion, cognitive psychologists run the risk of concentrating on phenomena, not because they are intrinsically interesting or because they are somehow crucial to the understanding of cognition, but because they are easily accessible to established experimental procedures. A second important criterion, the computational criterion should be somewhat familiar to the reader by now. This criterion, as Claxton defines it, holds that theories of cognition should be evaluated on the basis of their ability to be transformed into computer programs which effectively simulate the behaviors that the theories attempt to explain. Like the experimental criterion, the computational criterion imposes a stern test of rigor on theories of cognition because they must be formulated in very precise terms in order to yield programs that can be run by computers that, as all computer users know, are intransigent detectors of internal inconsistencies and incompleteness. Yet these advantages are not without certain risks. In devising sophisticated computer instantiations of natural behaviors, there is the danger of producing a "cognitive wheel" (Dennett 1984) that, although it might constitute a remarkable feat of programming, has little to do with the functioning of cognitive processes in living organisms. Another

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difficulty that Claxton, following (Clark 1986), speaks of is that computers, unlike living organisms which construct and organize their representations through experience, are provided with previously digested knowledge stores. When we use computers as models of cognition "we invariably lose much of the experiential richness that subserves and underpins what we consciously know and unnaturally dissociate that knowing form the tacit procedures that give rise to it" (Claxton 1988: 14). We can add to these remarks the point made by Johnson and Lakoff that the computational approach to cognition disconnects propositional knowledge from its sensorimotor origins. The conclusion to be drawn here is essentially the same one that we suggested in our earlier discussion of the computer metaphor, namely that the shortcomings of the computational approach should not lead us to abandon it, but they should convince us of the need to supplement this view with others that remedy its weaknesses. To avoid this over-reliance on a single criterion for designing and evaluating cognitive theories, Claxton suggests a number of paths to follow. One such path would be, instead of limiting our study to cognitive processes in adult humans, to seek to understand how these processes achieve their finished form. For instance, we can ask how particular cognitive processes might have evolved and what purposes they originally evolved to meet. Such a line of inquiry makes appeal to what Claxton calls, not surprisingly, the evolutionary criterion.89 This approach is grounded on the belief that, to apply Sebeok's (1991: 23) argument concerning language to cognition in general, the higher cognitive faculties that characterize adult humans do not replace the simpler forms of cognition of other species: they are built upon these simpler forms. Nature rarely invents novel features, evolution works instead by putting old features to new functions or by reorganizing old systems to create ones with novel capabilities. 90 The goal would be to provide "descriptions of our evolutionary antecedents which deal with the mechanisms and computational processes employed at different evolutionary stages in the hope of better understanding the mechanisms and strategies of its natural predecessors" (Clark 1986: 54). Our ability to reconstruct the evolution of a given behavior has, of course, important limitations: much of the relevant data has been forever lost and there is no way to repeat the procedures of previous studies. Yet we can fill in some of the gaps in the fossil record by studying cognitive processes in other species.91 However, the interest in the cognition of other species is not

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simply for the possible insights into human cognition that can be gained. The cognition of other species constitutes an important domain to be explored and explained in its own right and a successful theory of cognition must be applicable to the entire range of cognitive processes found in the natural world and not just the propositional thinking of adult humans. Another way of supplementing the approaches to cognition legitimatized by the computational and the empirical criteria is by tracing the development of different aspects of cognition in young children. As we have just seen, the goal of both the experimental and computational approaches is to break down complex processes and structures into the relatively simple components that make them up. However, in each of these cases, it is extremely difficult to isolate components for testing or simulation without inflicting serious damage to the logic of the system. However, by focusing on particular stages of the development of cognition, we can observe the workings of simpler cognitive processes and watch new structures emerge and combine to form more complex ones. And unlike the evolutionary and ethological criteria, which always require an extrapolative leap in applying the findings of evolutionary reconstructions or of studies of cognition in other species to questions of human cognition, the development of cognitive processes in children forms an unbroken link to their mature forms in adults. Thus, the study of the development of cognition offers a unique perspective on the organization of cognition. Moreover, for the view of cognition that is being adopted here, the developmental perspective is particularly important. Since I am defending the view that meaning is originally derived from the sensorimotor interaction of the child with her surroundings and that it subsequently receives further elaboration due to the child's participation within a linguistic community, it is crucial to pay close attention to the unfolding of cognition. By taking this stance, it does not follow that we need to trace the developmental history of every term that the adult makes use of; we are only committed to give a general account of how the knowledge structures of the adult are constructed. We can now draw some conclusions from Claxton's discussion and explain how these different criteria will be deployed in the remainder of this book. The general lesson to be learned from Claxton's remarks is that we must avoid excessive reliance on a single criterion, be it experimental rigor, computational precision, theoretical parsimony or evolutionary

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plausibility. These and other criteria are valid when applied in moderation but become utterly stifling when imposed dogmatically. Thus, our first guideline will be to appeal to several complementary criteria in order to achieve a broader view of the phenomena studied. At the same time, no theory of cognition can be expected, given the state of the art and the difficulty of the problems that need to be addressed, to comply thoroughly with all the criteria that Claxton presents. At best one can hope to comply with those criteria that are appropriate given the nature of the questions one is pursuing. This should not be construed, however, as a theoretical licence authorizing an "anything goes" approach. We need instead to be quite precise about the role the various criteria are to play in the approach adopted. The developmental criterion will inform my approach more than any other. A good reason for turning to this criterion is that it has been inadequately exploited in both cognitive science and semiotics and will thus allow us to bring to bear on significant questions findings that are not generally available to semioticians and mainstream cognitivists. In Chapter 6 I will rely heavily on a developmental perspective to elaborate my theory of functional autonomy and then in Chapter 7 I will illustrate this notion by applying it to the development of symbolic communication in young children. I will also apply, but to a much lesser extent, the evolutionary criterion. Although I will not attempt to provide an extensive account of the phylogenetic development of cognition, my intent is to develop a theory of representations that is in principle applicable both to other living species and to the cognitive processes of our hominid ancestors. In Chapter 5 I will try to show that the notion of functional autonomy is compatible with the accounts of the evolution of language proposed by Sebeok and Bickerton and actually adds greater specificity to some aspects of their accounts. Moving now to the two criteria that have, for all practical purposes, defined cognitive science, my appeal to a theory of representations is grounded ultimately on both the experimental and the computational criteria. By this I mean that both of these approaches have provided substantial theoretical and empirical support for this general undertaking. I have discussed this support at some length in Chapters 2 and 3. Yet I will not present a novel computational or experimental program. The work that I will be undertaking is essentially conceptual in nature, that is I will bring together available findings with the hope of forming a more comprehensive

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framework for the understanding of semiosis. In principle this framework can generate specific computational or experimental proposals, however, my primary goal is to suggest possible contributions of cognitive science to the study of signs and not to offer an original project in cognitive science. That being said, we need to point out a few instances where my approach will be informed more specifically by these two criteria. Later this chapter when I begin to forward a theory of representations, I will make appeal to Michael Arbib's theory of schémas which has been rigorously formulated in computational terms and has given rise to an ambitious and far-reaching research program (Arbib and Hanson 1987; Arbib, Conklin and Hill 1987) that successfully models among other things the effects of brain lesions on linguistic performance, language acquisition and language production. Furthermore, the studies (Bates 1976, 1979; Nelson 1985, 1986) of the development of symbolic communication that I will be discussing employ rigorous empirical methods for collecting observational data. One reason for employing these four criteria in the way I have chosen is my commitment to Johnson and Lakoffs critique of mainstream cognitive science and their conception of embodied cognition. Although their arguments as well as their specific critiques of the dominant trends in cognitive science are somewhat different from Claxton's, Johnson and LakofFs suggestions can easily be interpreted as advocating a less oppressive reliance on the experimental and the computational criteria and recourse to other criteria to provide a more balanced view of cognition. As I have already indicated, I have opted to rely heavily on the developmental criterion because it has been severely neglected by both cognitivists and semioticians. Perhaps critics will contend that I have strayed too far from the rigor and precision that reliance on the experimental and computational criteria are thought to insure. I am convinced, however, that the need to bring developmental issues firmly into focus justifies that risk. Claxton's discussion can provide one further service: it can help to clarify certain differences between my approach and those of other authors who are exploring the possible contributions of cognitive science to semiotics. We should begin by recognizing that there are a number of reasons why it is to be expected that different theoretical stances would be adopted by researchers pursuing this same general goal. First, the developing field of cognitive semiotics offers a wealth of questions to be investigated and, consequently, the approach chosen by each researcher will be determined

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to a large extent by the problems under investigation. We should stress that approaches that differ due to the particular objects under study are in principle complementary and should be able to be brought together within a common framework at a later date. A second source of difference comes about when individual researchers choose to apply different frameworks or aspects of cognitive science to semiotic questions. This is inevitable given that no single framework is universally accepted within cognitive science. Although inevitable, this set of differences can lead to incompatible assumptions about the nature of cognition or/and semiosis and about the best ways to conceptualize these phenomena. Furthermore, some of the authors (Daclès 1988, 1989) place their work clearly under the aegis of cognitive semiotics while others, whose research has an undeniable relevance for the cognitive study of signs, do not take direct steps towards the elaboration of this discipline. Although it is difficult to generalize when speaking of so many authors with differing approaches, I would nonetheless hazard to say that the principal tendency of these researchers is to rely much more directly on the computational criterion than I.92 This certainly has its advantages, not the least of which is a greater degree of formal precision. A less desirable characteristic of this research is, I would contend, the acceptance, with nary a reservation, of the computational view of mind. A good example of this tendency is Jean-Guy Meunier's (1988, 1989) categorial description of semiotic systems. The strength of Meunier's work is that it provides a viable alternative to models of semiosis drawn from linguistics and a rigorous conceptual apparatus for describing sign systems. Moreover, by providing a formal description of semiotic notions Meunier has made them more amenable to computational modeling. Yet, Meunier displays little awareness of the critiques of the computational approach by Johnson, Lakoff, Claxton, etc. or the need to supplement the computational criterion with other perspectives on cognition. Despite advocating the development of cognitive semiotics, Meunier does not deal explicitly with the question of the cognitive mediation of signs. This is especially surprising since the primary motivation for cognitive semiotics would be to shed light on this question. To cite one other example of this research, Ray Dougherty's (1988) work of language learning machines would appear to move in the direction that I am suggesting by attempting to bring together the computational and the developmental criteria within a single conceptual framework. Dougherty has

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devised a program that simulates the cognitive abilities children bring to language acquisition. However, we should not over exaggerate the role played by the developmental criterion in Dougherty's work; it is a fair appraisal to say that Dougherty applies the computational criterion to developmental issues rather than truly adopting a developmental perspective on cognition. The results of Dougherty's analysis challenge other computational models of language acquisition, but do not question the general principles of the computational view of cognition. Another point that needs to be made is that although Dougherty's work has obvious relevance for semiotics, Dougherty does not address the question of bringing semiotics and cognitive science together within the same framework. My point in making these comments is not to insinuate that this sort of work is illegitimate, but merely to situate my research with regards to other attempts to pursue the same general goals. Although I have emphasized the differences, many more things unite the various projects than separate them. Aside from the very important general stance that currently available models in semiotics need to be supplemented by models drawn from the cognitive sciences, there are many specific points where these approaches and mine converge. For example Ouellet's (1988) analysis of morphological and syntactic structures in terms of the stance of the perceiver towards events marks a step towards the type of sensorimotor theory of cognition that I advocated in Chapter 2. To a large extent the differences that I have evoked flow from the inevitable division of labor within intellectual disciplines; there are many different jobs to do and one can only rejoice in the fact that others have accepted their challenge. In areas where the differences concern substantial matters, open discussion of issues is the most fruitful way to advance. I wish to conclude this section by considering one additional criterion for choosing a particular theory of representation. Moreover, it is imperative that the theory of representations adopted be compatible with the other segments of the theoretical framework that is being developed. The reason for this compatibility between conceptual frameworks is that it is always risky to remove, to borrow an organic metaphor, a notion or model from the theoretical environment where it came to life and developed and to place it in hostile surroundings. When the borrowed notion and its new theoretical context are incompatible one of two things has to happen: either

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the borrowed notion will be deformed or denatured to fit the new conceptual framework or if it is introduced without modification it will remain an irreducibly foreign body that will constantly menace the conceptual coherence of the framework. Since the overall structure of the framework that I am proposing derives from a sensorimotor view of cognition, we need to take care that the particular theoretical sources drawn on are compatible with that framework. 5.3. Preliminaries for a theory of representations Following the suggestion of Johnson and Lakoff, we wish to build our account of symbolic communication within a theory of embodied representations. Although Johnson and Lakoff provide a general model of the derivation of knowledge from sensorimotor experience, we still need to render this general scheme a good deal more explicit. This is especially the case because their approach does not directly deal with the sort of developmental issues that will concern us. As an initial step in this direction, I would like to distinguish three phases in the development of the mental representations that mediate experience understood in the broad sense that includes the apprehension of the physical and social world as well as the affective states of the organism. As we have already indicated, the phase of schematic representations corresponds to Piaget's sensorimotor intelligence. Such representations mediate basic perceptual and motor interaction with the surrounding world. Most animals interact with their surroundings exclusively at this level, but in human ontogeny conceptual representations appear. During this phase, it becomes possible to activate representations in the absence of the appropriate sensory input, without enacting the corresponding motor program or being in the relevant affective state. This phase corresponds to the stages of single-word and two-word speech in children. Finally, we need to postulate still more complex representations that underlie syntactic relations. We can recognize that the first and the third levels postulated here correspond to the two levels of cognition proposed by Andy Clark. The second level that I am positing is intended to fill the gap that Clark refers to as "the lacuna of real symbol processing" (1989: 13). To avoid any possible misunderstandings about what I mean by the term "concept", 93 which has such a long and complex history, let me say that, in the view that I will be advocating, in order for a mental representation to be considered a concept, the organism must be able to think with it. By this I mean that a concept is a representation that

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can be mentally manipulated, that is, it can be called to mind either in the form of deliberate reminiscence or as part of the planning of future action, in the absence of related stimuli. My use of the term should become clearer in the next chapter when I explain the notion of functional autonomy. For the time being I would like to add that I do not posit these three levels of cognition lightly. There are good reasons to be on guard against the abusive proliferation of mental states; I hope to err on the side of not countenancing enough mental machinery rather than too much. It is my conviction, although it would be very difficult to demonstrate decisively that such is the case, that the account offered here contains the bare minimum for a cognitive account of symbols. We now need to survey classical cognitive science for theoretical models that would correspond to the different levels of cognition that I have posited. Unfortunately, for most classical cognitivists, there is no essential difference between supplying appropriate representations for a program intended to model perception and designing one to simulate language; the interesting part begins with the development of rules and program components that are necessary to simulate the desired behavior. The classical cognitivist only needs to worry about what is necessary for the program to function; there is no concern for the question of how such representations would be developed in a living organism. Moreover, as I have already indicated on several occasions, mainstream cognitivists generally consider the basic level of cognition to be propositional. Just to give a few examples, Johnson-Laird's mental models (1983), Shank and Abelson's scripts (1977), Jackendoffs (1983) conceptual structures are all formulated on the level of propositions. If anything the trend is towards work on ever higher levels of cognitive organization, witness the progression of Roger Schank's work from scripts to Memory Organization Packets (Shank 1982) and the Swale program. 94 The one area of inquiry within mainstream cognitive science that might appear to shed some light on the matters that concern us here would be the question of whether all mental representations are encoded in a propositional code or whether there are also sensory specific codes. The primary candidate for a sensory specific code is visual imagery, but there is no a priori reason to rule out other sensory modalities. Advocates for the existence of sensory codes such as Kosslyn (1981) hold that imagery or the mental manipulation of visual representations involves the same system of

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representation as would visual apprehension. For instance, the subject who mentally rotates a geometric figure in order to solve a problem within an experimental setting is said to be making use of the same cognitive machinery as "if the appropriate physical object were presented in successively more rotated orientations in the external world" (Shepard and Cooper 1982). At first blush, this distinction would seem to be exactly the type we are looking for. Sensorimotor representations would appear to correspond to the units of sensory-specific codes, while propositional representations would correspond of course to those of the propositional code. Although this would still leave us with the problem of finding an equivalent for conceptual representations, the distinction in question would seem to have the merit of capturing the intuitive sense that propositional representations would be abstract, while nonpropositional ones would be more concrete. Unfortunately, things are not so simple. I will be suggesting that the primary distinction between sensorimotor representations on the one hand and conceptual and propositional representations on the other is that the latter can be mentally manipulated, 95 while the former cannot. The mental rotation of figures constitutes, in my opinion, a perfect example of this sort of mental manipulation. In order to mentally rotate an image, one must be able to call to mind voluntarily the appropriate representation, a capability which is, I will argue, not available at the sensorimotor level of cognition. I will be suggesting that the emergence of this ability is constitutive of the conceptual level. Thus, within the framework that I am developing, the sensory codes that Kosslyn and Shepard and Cooper postulate correspond not to sensorimotor representations but rather to conceptual ones. Although at this stage in the exposition of a cognitive theory, I can do little more than assert this point, I will return to it later in this chapter to give this claim a more substantial form. 5.4. Arbib's schema theory We can now begin constructing a theory of representations appropriate for a cognitive account of symbols. A good place to start is Michael Arbib's theory of schémas. The contemporary use of the term "schema" can be traced, of course, to Kant. However, we should note that it was given an explicitly psychological treatment in the 1930's by Bartlett and then held a prominent position within Piaget's theory of development. We have already seen this notion in our discussion of Johnson and Lakoff s work, and not

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surprisingly their conception of schémas and that of Arbib share many important features. Arbib begins with the central assumption that guides all of cognitive science, namely that in order to account for cognition it is necessary to postulate a set of internal representations that model relevant portions of the environment. However, Arbib departs significantly from mainstream cognitive science when he and his associates indicate that "where much of cognitive science talks of knowledge only in some abstract realm of symbol-manipulation or problem-solving, we here wish to stress representations that subserve perception as it is embedded within the organism's ongoing interaction with its environment" (Arbib, Conklin, Hill 1987: 8). In this passage Arbib is criticizing what, in Chapter 3 and 4, I called the formalist view of cognition. By conceiving cognition in terms of the organism's interaction with the environment, Arbib has taken an important step towards Johnson and LakofFs notion of embodied cognition. 96 Rather than viewing representations as meaningless symbols, as classical cognitivists do, Arbib construes the schema as "a domain of interaction, which may be an object in the usual sense, an attention-riveting detail of an object, or some domain of social interaction" (Arbib, Conklin, and Hill 1987: 7). Thus, the representations that Arbib postulates are endowed, from the very outset, with specific content and with a specific reference to something in the surrounding environment. In adopting this view, Arbib's conceptualization has much more in common with Piaget's notion of sensorimotor schémas than with the scripts (Shank and Abelson 1975) or mental models (Johnson-Laird 1983) of other cognitive scientists, a link that he actively develops. For his part, Piaget postulated the notion of schema to account for the child's interaction with the environment. Of utmost importance for the present project is that Piaget's schema is designed to be applied to cognition prior to the emergence of language. In his formulation, an important trait of this notion was that of regularity: he spoke of the schema of an action as "the generalizable characteristics of this action, that is, those which allow the repetition of the same action or its application to a new content" (Beth and Piaget 1966: 235). What is being suggested here is that the child applies motor patterns, such as grasping, sucking, or shaking, to a variety of objects by activating a schema that coordinates the many muscle contractions that make up the gesture. Arbib clarifies the distinction

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between motor schémas and the muscle contractions needed to effectuate them by defining motor schémas in the following terms: we may postulate basic motor processes which, for example, given a path-plan as input, will yield the first step along that path as input. Another such unit would direct a hand to grasp an object, given its position as input. We refer to such units of behavior as "motor schema". Our analysis will descend no further than the level of motor schémas, and will leave aside details of mechanical or neuromuscular implementation. Our claim will be that crucial aspects of visuomotor coordination can be revealed at this level of aggregation. (Arbib, Conklin, and Hill 1987) We will adopt this distinction between motor schémas and the muscular activity needed to realize them. We now need to complete this initial discussion by considering the sensory component. Motor schémas alone can not lead to consistently effective action; actions must be guided towards completion by sensory schémas that model appropriate aspects of the environment. The interaction between these two types of schémas is complex because not only are perceptual schémas needed for the realization of motor schémas, but it is also the case that perceptual schémas are constructed on the basis of the child's action in the surrounding world and upon the objects that are found there. The notion of regularity is also important here in that it is postulated that sensory schémas pick up recurrent stimuli patterns. However, Arbib makes it clear that sensory schémas represent the environment in terms of objects and social relations rather than in terms of the raw sensory input that impinges on our sensory mechanisms. On this point he writes that "the raw pattern of retinal stimulation cannot guide locomotion directly. Rather, it must be interpreted in terms of objects and other 'domains of interaction' in the environment. We use the term 'perceptual schema' for the process whereby the system determines whether a given 'domain of interaction' is present in the environment" (Arbib, Conklin, and Hill 1987). Just as motor schémas control and should therefore not be confused with the movements of muscles, perceptual schémas are located, in Arbib's framework, at a higher level in the cognitive hierarchy than stimuli. Arbib's notion of "domains of interaction" is also worth noting: what is represented in the mind are not "things-in-themselves", but rather things as they are apprehended by the

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perceiver. In this conception, mental representation entails interaction between things and the perceiver rather than passive reflection. On this point, Arbib's views are compatible with von Uexküll's (1982) and with John Deely's recent (1990: 53-62) elucidation of the relation between subject and object from a semiotic point of view. To illustrate these notions we will offer a simple example. Let us imagine that we observe a child who spots her favorite toy at some distance across the room, crawls to the toy, and begins to play with it. An account of the observed behavior in terms of schémas would go as follows: we first have to postulate that the child possesses a perceptual schema of the toy that enables her to recognize it among the other objects present in the room. The child then formulates a goal that consists of moving towards the toy; this goal then activates a sequence of motor schémas that result in the child's crawling. When the child reaches the toy, the updated sensory information alerts the child that the toy is now within grasp, and at this point the motor schémas controlling the movement of arms and hands are activated so that the child can reach out and grab hold of the toy. Since there is so often a tight interaction between motor activity and perception, Piaget often spoke of sensorimotor schémas. Without entering too deeply into the technical details of Arbib's programme of computer simulations of behavior, I would like nonetheless to sketch it with very broad strokes. The dual nature of schémas, both perceptual and motor, made it difficult for Arbib to find an appropriate conceptualization. In cognitive science, there are two principal means of building a data base: semantic nets and production rules. In Arbib's conception of semantic nets, schémas are represented as nodes that are linked to other nodes by arcs.97 Such arcs link a given node with all other schémas that are related to it. To formulate this idea in semiotic terms, the schema representing a given sign would be linked in this fashion to its interprétants. Although this notion can provide a rich network of relationships between schémas, semantic nets constitute an essentially passive representation of knowledge and lack the ability to initiate action that Arbib wishes to attribute to schémas. To remedy this shortcoming, he suggests that schémas also possess the procedural efficacy of production rules. While semantic nets represent knowledge of things, production rules encode knowledge of how to perform given activities.98 Thus, in order to capture the dual nature of schémas that Piaget had recognized, Arbib insists

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that schémas possess the characteristics of both semantic nets and production rules. Before moving on, we need to raise one criticism of Arbib's use of the term "schema". In addition to employing it to refer to mental representations at what I have been calling the sensorimotor level of cognition, Arbib uses this term, especially in his book with Mary Hesse (Arbib and Hesse 1986), to designate the mental representations that mediate religion, science, social structures all of which clearly depend upon the propositional level of cognition. This extended use of the term tends to blur the distinction between sensorimotor schémas and propositional representations that I have been proposing and therefore commits, I believe, a theoretical error that is the mirror image of the one that mainstream cognitivists commit. You will recall that proponents of mainstream cognitivism begin with propositional representations and then apply that conception to all domains of cognition, even to those that clearly make no use of propositional thought. Arbib, for his part, formulates a conception of the sensorimotor schema which he then uses to account for phenomena that belong to what Deely (1982, 1990) calls the postlinguistic realm of experience. Now the principal reason for developing the notion of a schematic or sensorimotor level of representation is to clearly distinguish nonpropositional from propositional levels of cognition. Of course, if we were to use the very same notion in each case, as Arbib does, the distinction would collapse. I will thus depart from Arbib's use of the term and only speak of schémas when we are dealing with the sensorimotor level of cognition. Thus, within the framework that I am proposing, the terms schema and sensorimotor representation will be synonymous. With this caveat in mind, I will adopt Arbib's formulation of the schema. In my mind the importance of Arbib's work is that his conception of schémas places Piaget's important insights within a more explicit and rigorous framework and this framework has produced a successful series of computer simulations (Arbib and Hanson 1986; Arbib, Conklin, and Hill 1987) of a wide variety of aspects of cognition. Moreover, by grounding his account of cognition in the functional cycle of action and perception and by expanding the scope of his theory beyond the limits customarily respected in the field, Arbib has offered a viable alternative to the conceptions of mental representations proposed by other cognitive scientists. Finally, Arbib's model is compatible with the sensorimotor view of

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cognition that I proposed in Chapter 2 on the basis of the work of von Uexkiill, Piaget, Johnson and Lakoff. 5.5. Dretske's model of elementary behavior We can further flesh out this model by considering Fred Dretske's (1988) model of elementary behavior. To situate this approach it is important to note that, in his most recent offering, Dretske has taken on the challenge of demonstrating that mental representations exert a causal force in behavior by virtue of the content that they carry. The first step in this argument is to accept that organisms of a certain complexity have internal means of representing states of affairs in their surroundings. Roughly speaking, the content of a mental representation is the state of affairs that it indicates. If the appropriate sensory input activates a representation indicating that a predator is approaching, then we can say that the content of this representation is that "a predator is approaching" or "danger" or whatever is appropriate given the constitution and behavior of the organism in question." This point can be formulated without difficulty in semiotic terms: the internal representation is the sign, its object is the predator and its interprétant is what the sign indicates to the organism. Dretske's next step is to suggest that this representation can cause a particular motor program, such as flight, to be activated.100 Proponents of a syntactical theory of mind would admit this much. However, they would insist that, although internal representations do possess such content and play a causal role in behavior, this content does not determine the causal role of such representations. Dretske counters this latter assertion by addressing what he calls the "Design Problem": "We want a system that will do M when, but only when, conditions F exist. How do we build it?" (1988)101 The basic solution to this problem requires some mechanism for detecting the appropriate conditions F and a link between this mechanism and the motor programs that produce M. One way nature solves the Design Problem is by hard-wiring a direct link between a motor program and the appropriate perceptual mechanism. The "bug detector" of frogs is a familiar example of such a link. Small objects that move rapidly across the frog's visual field set off a particular class of neurons which in turn trigger the frog's response. This perceptual mechanism does not recognize flies per se, but within the frog's natural environment there is a high probability that things that fit the relevant perceptual profile will be flies.

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Learning is the second way of solving Dretske's Design Problem, the difference here, of course, is that the correlation between action and perception is acquired through experience rather than being hard-wired. In organisms so designed, learning is a process whereby internal states that represent relevant aspects of the environment come to acquire control over motor schémas. Dretske analyses this process in the following way: given an organism with the appropriate sensory mechanisms and the ability to learn, the solution to the Design Problem consists in linking C, the internal indicator of F, the presence of a predator, to M, the motor program that initiates flight. In the simple case that we are examining, such a link can be achieved by some form of reinforcement, but the exact mechanism does not concern us here. What is important is that in order for such instrumental learning to take place—and there is little doubt that it does indeed take place—C must be "recruited" to function as a cause of M.102 Dretske argues that the only plausible explanation for C's being linked causally to M is that it is a reliable indicator of F. Thus it is C's content that allows it to play a causal role in behavior and that determines the syntactic relations that hold between C and other internal representations of a given organism. Dretske is well aware that this simple case does not totally explain the operation of reason in the intelligent behavior of humans, but if the content of internal indicators can be shown to be causally efficacious in such rudimentary behavior, there would seem to be no principled reason for denying this role in more complex behavior. Thus far Dretske's model parallels Arbib's; the two are complementary because Dretske unpacks certain concepts that are implicit in Arbib's view. However, in addition to the sensory and motor components that his model shares with that of Arbib, Dretske also recognizes that the organism's motivational states (needs, desires, fears, preferences) have an important role to play in behavior. He argues that the internal cause of behavior actually has two parts: Β (for belief), an indicator of a particular state of affairs in the world, and D (for desire), the state of motivation of the organism. If we take a simple example, say a rabbit's response to an approaching fox, it is relatively easy to factor out the rabbit's motivational state because one tends to assume that as soon as the rabbit becomes aware of a predator's presence, fear will be an inevitable motivational state. However, Dretske offers a more problematic case wherein motivational states take on a more noticeable role. He presents the case of a jackal that,

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in the hope of being able to eat any scraps that the tiger would leave behind, waits a short distance from a tiger who is devouring its prey. In this case we have two motivational states—hunger and fear—that have reached a state of equilibrium. One could speculate that a starving jackal might run the risk of being attacked by the tiger, but that a relatively well-fed one would not. Thus motivational states play an obvious role in the jackal's behavior and Dretske insists that such states are a crucial component of behavior in general. More specifically he stipulates that motivational states come to play a role in the organism's behavior because they are directed towards a particular outcome: D is a partial cause of M because M is likely to result in R, which is the goal toward which the organism's behavior is directed. To sum up this model we can say that there are two partial causes of behavior M, an internal indicator Β and a motivational state D. Β increases the probability of M because it indicates F, while D motivates M because M is a good bet to lead to R, the desired outcome. Let us take stock of the preceding discussion. Our goal has been to develop a theory of mental representations that will be used later to give an account of symbol use. As a first step towards such a model, we will adopt Arbib's theory of schémas and supplement it with Dretske's proposals. This initial model fits Johnson and LakofFs criterion for embodied cognition by firmly anchoring cognition within the functional cycle; the three principal components, perceptual, motor and affective, of this model lead us beyond the limits of a formalist or syntactic view of cognition. Moreover, it is by virtue of their content that perceptual schémas, the central core of cognition, are able to contribute to the behavior of the organism. It would make no sense to attempt to describe such representations in strictly formal terms since their content determines to a large extent the relations they maintain with the other elements of a working cognitive system. In addition, the proposed model goes beyond the limits of the mainstream view by recognizing the necessary role played by action and motivation in intelligent behavior. Now if there is a benefit to be gained by conceiving cognition in terms of information processing, and I believe that there is, such a view can only present a thorough picture of cognition by making room for motivation and action. Finally, it is quite common to speak of mental representations as if they constituted discrete and somewhat isolated units of representations. However, the model adopted here stresses that representations typically combine to form functional assemblages. An

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elementary assemblage would be composed of a perceptual schema, a motor schema and a motivational schema. Of course, such elementary assemblages can be brought together to form scripts (Shank and Abelson 1977) but we should not forget that the meaning of complex systems of representations rests on the foundation of elementary functional assemblages.

6. Functional autonomy and the arbitrariness of symbols 6.1. Introduction The theory of schematic representations outlined in Chapter 5 responds to many of the criteria that a theory of cognition should address. By recognizing the constitutive role played by the functional cycle of perception, action, and motivation in all cognitive acts, this framework endows mind with an appropriate "embodiment". Moreover, since it avoids conceiving mental representations as intrinsically propositional structures, it can in principle be applied to adult humans who possess articulate speech as well as to young children and other species. We now need to see how far this framework takes us towards the elaboration of a clear and consistent cognitive distinction between symbols and indices. As an initial step in transposing this model to the question at hand, we could say that at the level of the individual index, the sign, its object and its interprétant must each be represented by a schema in the cognitive system of the individual. The sign relation that holds between these elements would thus constitute a simple schematic assemblage. When one decodes an index, a schema representing the sensory vehicle of the index would be activated which would in turn activate the rest of the assemblage. When if we apply this model to communication by symbols, we find that the only conceivable account would be identical to the one just offered for indices. A schematic account of a symbol would also be formulated in terms of a schematic assemblage linking the sign, its object and its interprétant. The model proposed so far clearly provides no means of distinguishing indices and symbols; it provides a suitable framework, I believe, for indices, but in order to apply it to symbols we need to develop additional provisions that deal directly with the arbitrariness of symbols. We might be tempted at this point to invoke the metaphorical and metonymical projections that, according to Johnson and Lakoff, radiate out from schémas. These constructs are extremely useful for modeling the ways sensorimotor knowledge structures propositional meaning, but, in and of themselves, they provide no indication of how arbitrary relationships between sign and object could be established in the first place. In the following pages, I will suggest that the key to a cognitive account of symbolic communication and of arbitrariness is to be found in the differentiation of the individual units of a functional assemblage so that

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they can be accessed independently. I will also argue that the metaphorical and metonymical projections that Johnson and Lakoff refer to depend upon this prior differentiation of schematic assemblages. I will present this framework in a straightforward expository manner with a minimum of examples; I will then apply it in Chapter 7 to the symbolic communication of young children, and in so doing, I hope to flesh out this model for the reader. 6.2. Perception and understanding Having laid the groundwork for a theory of mental representations, we now need to apply this approach more directly to semiotic questions. The task that faces us is to introduce talk about mental representations into an area of inquiry where talk of signs has been the only recognized idiom. Our guide in this endeavor will be John Deely whose reflections on the role that semiosis plays in our experience opens the door for a rapprochement between signs and cognition. We will see in the pages that follow that, despite some differences in terminology, the model that was developed in the previous chapter is quite compatible with the one Deely presents. Our starting point will be his (1982 93-106) distinction between three levels of cognition, sensation, perception, and understanding, that we briefly discussed in chapter 1. As the title of this section suggests, we will be concerned exclusively with the latter two levels.103 Deely defines perception in terms of "the organism's apprehending and responding to its surroundings at a higher level than merely affecting it here and now, namely, at the level of things to be sought and things to be avoided, offspring and enemy, insider and outsider, and the like" (1982: 99). This conception of perception is strikingly similar to Arbib's notion of domains of interaction, as modified by Dretske's suggestions, because it relates the apprehension of the environment to the responses and the needs ("the level of things to be sought and things to be avoided") of the organism. Moreover, Deely argues that perception is not to be viewed as the passive reception of information; instead he posits that at the cognitive level of perception there intervenes "an active formation and construction from the side of the organism whereby the elements of the physical environment become organized and presented to the organism in ways other than the ways they exist physically as stimulating here and now" (1982: 100). In this view the organism's constructed reality or Umwelt is dependent upon its perceptual apparatus, its action upon its surroundings, and its motivational states. Deely's

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conception of the functional cycle of perception, action, and motivation thus dovetails nicely with the framework that I adopted in the previous chapter. Deely completes his conception of perception by stipulating that this level "requires the introduction in cognition of icons or representative forms serving (not all to terminate cognition objectively but) to found relations whereby the superstructure of objectivity is erected on the foundations of sensations rooted in the physical world" (1982: 99-100). Although I am not totally convinced that we need to view the "representative forms" subserving perception as icons, the important point in this passage for my present purposes is Deely's recognition of the need to posit internal representations in order to account for perception. To formulate this point in the terms proposed earlier, perception, as Deely conceives it, gives rise to and is mediated by an appropriate set of schémas that represent the organism's surroundings. Moving now to the distinction between perception and understanding, Deely explains that the crucial difference between these two levels of cognition is that: Perception reveals objects as they are only relative to the interests (dispositions, needs, and desires) of the organism perceiving, whereas the further realization that these objects of experience don't entirely reduce that experience of them—that there is a "surplus" in the Umwelt, more to objects than their relation to me, something there to be considered in its own right, something existing beyond the question of my experience and interest in it—-is the unique achievement of human understanding. (1982: 103) Although Deely's vocabulary and perspective are a bit different than the ones I have been employing, his points are of capital importance for my endeavor. Since it is rather difficult to distinguish clearly and concretely these two levels of cognition within the same organism, let us attempt to reformulate Deely's points, using two different organisms to illustrate perception and understanding. First, an organism, whose dealings with the world is limited to perception, as construed by Deely, would be able to apprehend things in the surrounding world in function of its own needs and dispositions, or to use the term employed in the previous chapter, its motivational states. Obviously, such an organism would not classify animals sharing the same niche in terms of their genera and species or their

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evolutionary history, but rather as either predator or prey. Although this constitutes a rather simple instance of cognition, it must be noted that, for both Arbib and Deely, perception involves the active constructive of sensory input by means of representative forms so that the organism apprehends objects and not merely raw sense data. In that these representative forms mediate, according to Deely, the lowest level of cognition at which internal representations of the outside world intervene, they correspond to what I have been calling sensorimotor representations. In sharp opposition to this simple case, an organism capable of understanding would be able to conceive of things apart from their relation to its own affective states. Although Deely does not make this point explicitly, it would seem to follow from his distinction between perception and understanding that a different sort of representative forms would have to be posited to account for this higher level of cognition. We can further develop Deely's distinction by associating these two levels of cognition with particular types of decoding of signs. I would like to suggest that for an organism that apprehends its surroundings by means of perception an appropriate example of decoding would be an animal, say a rabbit, that hears a fox moving through the brush and interprets the sound of rustling leaves as a sign of the presence of a potential predator. One would feel especially confident in attributing this semiotic act, if the rabbit were to respond in an appropriate fashion, such as fleeing, upon hearing the rustling leaves. An example of understanding would be a human being who hears the word fox and decodes its meaning. The standard semiotic analysis of these cases would consist in saying that the sign decoded by the rabbit is an index that is characterized by a causal relationship between the sign, i.e., the sound of the rustling leaves, and its object, the fox, while the word fox is a symbol displaying an arbitrary link between the sign, i.e., the spoken word, and its object. Whereas the sound that alerts the rabbit to the presence of the fox is actually produced and, therefore caused, by the fox, the link between the word fox and the animal it refers to is the result of a cultural convention. The upshot of this discussion is that indexical communication would be characteristic of organisms endowed solely with what Deely calls perception and that symbolic communication would be found in organisms capable of understanding. 104 It would also seem reasonable to suggest that symbolic communication is a necessary, but perhaps not a sufficient condition for the

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emergence of understanding. A further inference would be that indexical communication is mediated by schémas, while communication by means of symbols is mediated by concepts. Although I believe that the above analysis is intuitively sound, it is quite obvious that these affirmations need to be specified in greater detail and provided additional support. Rather than being construed as results, the notions that I have just discussed will constitute the working hypotheses for what is to follow. For the moment I would like to use them to sketch the general outline of what I think a cognitive theory of symbols should look like. Simply put, we will need a theory of schémas and their relationship to indexical communication as well as a theory of concepts and their relationship to symbolic communication. Moreover, we will need an account of how concepts can be derived from schémas. These tasks will occupy our attention for the remainder of this chapter. 6.3. Functional autonomy The conceptualizations developed by Johnson and Lakoff, Arbib, Dretske and Deely have given us a general framework for a cognitive theory of symbols. In particular, Arbib's reworking of Piaget's notion of schémas has provided us with a precise formulation of sensorimotor representations; Johnson and Lakoff have demonstrated convincingly that many aspects of propositional thought can be derived from schematic structures; Dretske has contributed an analysis of elementary behavior that reveals the necessary links between perceptual, motor, and motivational states and Deely has rendered explicit the relations between semiosis and cognition. Yet a major component of the framework that I" am proposing is still missing: an account of how concepts emerge from sensorimotor schémas. In the following pages I will develop the notion of functional autonomy in an attempt to fill this lacuna and to offer a cognitive account of symbols. My central claim will be that concepts which, in the view being proposed, mediate symbols, are derived from schémas that have been freed up from their tight link to perception, action, and emotion. One plausible way of accounting for the difference between symbols and indices is to suggest that symbols are mediated by abstract representations as opposed to concrete ones which would seem to underlie indices. We all have an intuitive feel for this distinction and we are quite confident when qualifying mental events as either abstract or concrete. For instance, I do

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not think that I would risk generating much controversy if I labeled the percept that I have of the computer sitting before me concrete and Gödel's proof abstract. This intuition possesses a certain validity, but we need to be more specific about what the distinction in question actually entails. A useful starting point is, I believe, the conceptualization proposed by Goldstein (1948: 6). Although Goldstein did not formulate his reflections in terms of mental representations, but instead spoke of the difference between the concrete attitude and the abstract attitude, the points he raised are germane to the present discussion. As an initial step, he distinguished between assuming the concrete attitude where "we are given over passively and bound to the immediate experience of unique objects and situations" and the abstract attitude where "we transcend the immediately given specific aspect of sense impressions... and consider the situation from a conceptual point of view and react accordingly" (Goldstein 1948: 6). Goldstein further qualified the abstract attitude by linking it to the following capabilities: 1. Assuming a mental set voluntarily, taking initiative, even beginning a performance on demand. 2. Shifting voluntarily from one aspect of a situation to another, making a choice. 3. Keeping in mind simultaneously various aspects of a situation; reacting to two stimuli which do not belong intrinsically together. 4. Grasping the essential of a given whole, breaking up a given whole into parts, isolating them voluntarily, and combining them into wholes. 5. Abstracting common properties, planning ahead ideationally, assuming an attitude toward the 'merely possible' and thinking or performing symbolically. 6. Detaching the ego from the outer world Goldstein (1948: 6). This list provides an excellent starting point, but we need to provide a more systematic formulation. It is my belief that the variety of capabilities that Goldstein associated with the abstract attitude can be shown to involve three basic cognitive principles. By this I do not mean that these capabilities can be entirely accounted for in terms of these three principles: a complete account would obviously require additional provisions. The point that I wish to make that these three abilities are essential to the capabilities that Goldstein has isolated.

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The first two capabilities on Goldstein's list would seem to require the ability to call to mind one's mental representations. Since this activation of mental representations is under volitional control, I would suggest that one important difference between the concrete attitude and the abstract attitude is that in the former mental representations are triggered automatically by stimuli, while in the latter representations can also be activated by the organism's will. I would argue that this ability to mentally manipulate representations is essential to all the capabilities that Goldstein links to the abstract attitude. Goldstein's fourth capability introduces a second important feature, the capacity to perform part-whole analysis on the mental representations that are activated, but we must recognize that this ability is implicit in the third, the fifth and the sixth as well. For instance, in order to shift "voluntarily from one aspect of a situation to another", or to keep "in mind simultaneously various aspects of a situation", it is necessary to first be able to break up the situation into its parts, while "reacting to two stimuli which do not belong intrinsically together" requires one to analyze into their parts the situations to which each stimulus originally belonged and then to bring the two stimuli together. These two steps are also needed to abstract common properties; in order to identify properties that can be found in two or more things, one must break up the things being compared and then determine which properties are found in all the items considered. Although I must qualify this assertion by acknowledging that much more is involved, the case can be made that the detachment of the ego from the outer world also requires part-whole analysis. In this instance, the whole would be the world with the ego constituting a yet to be differentiated part. The detachment of the ego can only be achieved by breaking up this whole into two parts, the ego and the world. The constitution of the self raises many complex issues that we can not go into here, but the point that I wish to make, namely that in Goldstein's scheme the detachment of the ego from the outer world depends on the ability to perform part-whole analysis, is, I believe, a valid one. Goldstein's fourth capability also introduces a third feature of the abstract attitude, the ability to combine into new patterns the parts yielded by the analysis of the whole and his fifth capability offers several examples of this ability. For instance, we can construe the ability to plan ahead ideationally as a particular form of the mental manipulation of representations that takes

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aspects of familiar situations and combines them to form a hypothetical course of action. "Assuming an attitude toward the 'merely possible'" as well as "thinking or performing symbolically" would also seem to require the ability to create novel patterns from the parts of familiar situations. During the course of my discussion of Goldstein's proposal concerning the abstract stance, there was an implicit shift of the focus from the consideration of a stance assumed by the subject to that of the nature of the transformations operated on mental representations that make such a stance possible. I would now like to assume the latter position explicitly and draw out some of its implications. I began by suggesting that a possible entry point into the investigation of the cognitive differences between indexical and symbolic communication could be found in the distinction between concrete and abstract representations. From the capabilities that Goldstein attributed to the abstract stance, I derived three general cognitive principles: the voluntary activation and mental manipulation of abstract representations, part-whole analysis of such representations and the recombination of the parts resulting from part-whole analysis into novel patterns. These cognitive transformations would seem to form a logical hierarchy: the voluntary activation of mental representations could be said to be underlie the entire structure, since it is required for the other transformations. By this I mean that representations must be called to mind before they can undergo partwhole analysis or recombination into novel patterns. In this light, part-whole analysis and the creation of novel patterns would constitute two particular types of the mental manipulation of representations. Finally, the creation of novel patterns would be depend upon part-whole analysis because it requires a prior analysis of situations into parts. Having isolated these three basic cognitive transformations, I will further unpack the idea that some mental representations are more abstract than others and explore what it means to say that symbols are linked to their objects by an arbitrary link by developing the notion of "functional autonomy". To give a preview of what is to come, I will be arguing that functional autonomy can be detected along three parameters: sensory, motor, and affective, and that symbols are mediated by representations that have been freed up from their tight link to perception, action, and emotion. To say that abstract representations are somehow independent from direct sensory input is not a very novel suggestion since, at least as far back as Plato, it has been customary to conceive ideas as abstract as opposed to

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percepts which are deemed concrete. The contention that these representations can be manipulated in relative independence from action and emotion is much less obvious, so the remainder of this section must take on the burden of this demonstration. The notion of functional autonomy takes its initial inspiration from a series of observations and constructs provided by developmental psychologists. In her account of the changes that take place in the child's problem solving ability between the onset of Piaget's Sensorimotor Stage 4 and the appearance of Stage 6 behaviors, Elizabeth Bates has written that "the passage from Stage 4 (familiar means to novel ends) to Stage 5 (novel means to familiar ends) to Stage 6 (representational means-end analysis) involves a gradual processes of decontextualization, in which the child requires less and less perceptual support from the environment to call up and/or carry out mental acts of selection, comparison, extraction of similarities, etc" (1979: 32). At each stage in this developmental sequence, the child's dependence on the current perceptual field decreases. A good example of this development is the child's incipient use of "tools" to gain desired objects. To study the emergence of this behavior, experimenters place the child in situations where she can not simply reach out and grasp the object because either access to the object is prevented by obstacles or the object is out of the child's reach. At Stage 4 (Piaget 1952: 212-225) the child can apply familiar schémas, such as pushing or pulling, to clear obstacles away so that she can attain the object. However, if familiar schémas fail to achieve the desired result, the child will typically give up the quest. At Stage 5, a child is able to devise a novel means such as using a simple "tool" to pull an object toward her, if there is physical contact between the object and the thing that is to serve as the tool. In such cases, the novel means is suggested to the child by the visual display before her. For instance, at this stage, the child will be able to grasp that he or she can obtain a cookie resting on a table cloth by pulling on the latter. However, it will not occur to the child to complete the same task with a nearby stick which is not in direct contact with the desired object. Thus, at this stage, the child's ability to devise a novel means to attain familiar ends is heavily dependent on perceptual support. The child can take advantage of a visible link between the desired object and the "tool" but can not imagine a solution to the problem in the

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absence of such a link. At Stage 6, the child will not only be able to use a table cloth to pull a cookie toward her but, if this or a similar solution is not available, she will seek out a stick that is out of sight to achieve the same end. The important development here is that neither the tool's link to the desired object need be evident nor the tool itself be present for the child to devise an appropriate solution. Bates contends that in order to invent novel means in this fashion, the infant must be able to break down the entire situation at hand into parts to find out exactly where familiar schémas are deficient and to determine an appropriate substitute. In the example under discussion, the infant must recognize that her familiar schémas of reaching and grasping fail due to the distance separating her from the cookies, and that the stick can be used as a means to bring the cookies within reach. For the child to be able to imagine that the stick can serve as a means to her ends, she must be able to call to mind the schema representing the stick even though the stick is not currently present. Bates contends, and I would agree with her, that the child is now able to mentally manipulate representations rather than automatically acting out the corresponding gestures. I would also add that at this point in ontogeny it is appropriate to refer to the child's representations as concepts rather than schémas. It is this ability to activate and manipulate conceptual representations in the absence of immediate perceptual support that I will call sensory autonomy. To provide a more explicit definition of this notion I will say that sensory autonomy refers to the extent to which information is processed in cognition independently of immediately present stimuli. We can complete the discussion of these findings by drawing the reader's attention to the fact that all three of the cognitive transformations that I spoke of earlier in connection with Goldstein's remarks on the abstract attitude are present in this example. Initially, the child must voluntarily call to mind to schémas representing her familiar action patterns and the situation at hand, and then must submit these schémas to part-whole analysis to determine why they failed to achieve the desired results. The final step in this problem solving exercise consists of recombining the results of the prior part-whole analysis to plan a novel course of action. To further illustrate this notion, let us compare some cases that are characterized by varying degrees of sensory autonomy. The simple recognition of an object would display little or no sensory autonomy, for it

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is the sensory pattern of the object itself that activates the appropriate schema. However, the act of imagining an absent object requires substantial sensory autonomy because the schema must be activated in the absence of perceptual support. Finally, the passive contemplation of abstract ideas, such as immortality and the Supreme Being, which are irreducible to direct perceptual experience, would be characterized by a very high degree of sensory autonomy. In other words, the degree of sensory autonomy is inversely proportional to the degree of involvement of direct perceptual input in instances of cognition. At this point it is useful to consider Pierre Miranda's 105 work on imagination. In a paper published in 1989 Miranda has provided a convincing case that an important ingredient is missing from Artificial Intelligence models of cognition: imagination. Although mainstream Artificial Intelligence models do not explicitly postulate such a function, Miranda argues that the notion of "expectation" depends on the ability to imagine. He writes "...to expect is to anticipate—i.e., to imagine a range of possibles and to scan them in order to give them coefficients of possibility" (1989: 229). Miranda then goes on to distinguish two forms of imagining when he defines imagination as "the facultas of anticipating the future or revising the past while weighing alternatives (computing existential 'cost/benefit ratios', as it were)" (1989: 230). To illustrate this notion, Miranda offers the following examples: What will/might happen if I do this instead of that? If I have a liaison with that occasional lover; if I buy that kind of house; if I make this trip instead of that other one; if I decide to become active in politics... Where would I be now if I had done differently at that time—say if I had not dropped out of school at fifteen? Or if I had divorced? Or if I had taken that other job, which meant that I would have moved to a smaller town? (1989: 230) Although these examples imply adult cognition accompanied by the use of language, we can easily recognize the tool use of children just discussed as a rudimentary instance of imagining. Furthermore, I would contend that the mental manipulation of representations that I have named functional autonomy is strictly equivalent to imagination as Miranda construes it.106 In both cases, the subject must be able call to mind and recombine relevant representations in order to consider a series of alternatives. The example of

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problem solving that I discussed earlier is an example of prospective imagining, but I would contend that functional autonomy is equally necessary for retrospective imagining. I thus agree with him that, whether we call it imagination or functional autonomy, we are dealing with an important aspect of cognition which has been neglected by mainstream cognitive science. I do believe, however, that the conception of functional autonomy that I am developing here goes much far than Miranda's conception of imagination towards accounting for this aspect of cognition. A very important difference between these two conceptions is that my notion of functional autonomy is grounded on a sensorimotor view of meaning and knowledge and it is accompanied by specific proposals concerning the cognitive processes that make the observed behaviors possible. Returning to the two types of semiosis that I discussed earlier, it is my contention that the rabbit that becomes aware of the presence of a fox due to the sound of rustling leaves displays, at best, weak sensory autonomy. As a general characterization, I think that it is fair to say that the rabbit's Umwelt is limited, for all practical purposes, to immediate sensory input and there is no reason to suspect that the rabbit would be capable of thinking of a fox in the total absence of this animal.107 In order to decode the sign in question, the rabbit merely has to match the incoming sound of rustling leaves with memory traces of similar sounds that were followed by the intrusion of predators. 108 The important point here is that the immediately present stimuli carry all the information that the rabbit needs to make this association. For these reasons, I contend that such semiosis is best considered stimuli-bound. In sharp contrast, in order to grasp the meaning of a symbol, one must, to borrow a phrase coined by Jerome Bruner (1973), go beyond the immediately present sensory input. While the sounds that make up the word "fox", its particular intonation pattern and the gestures that accompany it are all physically present, the animal to which the sound refers need not be. Furthermore, there is nothing in the sensory profile of the sign itself that determines the meaning of the symbol. To decode a symbol, one has to be able to perceive the material elements of the sign, but the meaning of the sign can not be derived in a direct fashion from these stimuli. Instead, individuals that decode symbols must be able to associate present stimuli with an abstract representation of the entity or state of affairs to which the sign refers. This would suggest that strong

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sensory autonomy is a necessary component of the arbitrariness of symbols. We can further elaborate on the notion of functional autonomy by turning to David McNeil's (1979) notion of the differentiation of sensorimotor schémas. McNeil contends that in the initial stages of human development, the function of sensorimotor schemes is limited to the co-ordination of the child's movements. I made essentially the same point in my discussion of Arbib's theory of schémas when I mentioned that perceptual schémas are necessary for the execution of motor schémas and that the child's active interaction with things in the surrounding world plays a crucial role in the construction of her perceptual schémas. At this early stage, the child's schema of an object or an event will only be activated when a member of that class is actually present. Thus the child does not have access to that schema in the absence of the object. A similar limitation affects motor schémas in the sense that the child is unable to call up schémas of action patterns without automatically enacting the corresponding action. At this stage, the child's representations can not be mentally manipulated nor can they support part-whole analysis or the creation of novel patterns. Such representations, thus, are properly considered concrete rather than abstract or to use an equivalent distinction sensorimotor rather than conceptual. However, McNeil notes that as ontogenesis proceeds, there is a growing differentiation between acts or perceptual events themselves and the mental constructs that represent them. With this development, the child becomes increasingly able to activate sensory schémas in the absence of the objects they represent and to call up motor schémas without enacting the corresponding action. I would contend that it is at this point in the development of the child that part-whole analysis and the creation of novel patterns begin to emerge. McNeil also claims that the differentiation of sensorimotor schémas is an important cognitive antecedent to the emergence of symbol use and I would add the further point that this process leads to the development of conceptual representations which make symbol use possible. Reformulating this account, we can say that McNeil's notion of the differentiation of sensorimotor schémas can be equated with an increase in the sensory and motor autonomy of the child's representations. Bates' example of Stage 6 problem solving behavior, which was discussed in the previous section, illustrates quite clearly this point. When a child seeks out, to use as a tool, a stick that is out of sight, he or she must be able to call up a series of

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motor schémas to consider the possible solutions and to plan the acts necessary to obtain the desired object and she must be able to activate a schema of sticks as potential tools, an activity which requires that she gauge the distance separating her from the object and the characteristics of an appropriate tool, i.e, stiffness, moderate weight, adequate length, etc. As the result of such an analysis, the child seeks out a stick, rather than an apple or a blanket, to pull the cookie towards her. I would contend that this sort of mental manipulation requires that the child have as her disposition conceptual representations which can be called to mind in the absence of triggering stimuli and without enacting physically each motor program that is activated. We can now further specify the notions of sensory and motor autonomy by asserting that they involve the differentiation between acts or perceptual events themselves and the mental constructs that represent them. Moreover, it is this sort of differentiation that I have in mind when I speak of conceptual representations which have become, to a significant degree functionally independent of incoming stimuli and current action. If we apply these notions to the question of symbol use, many border line cases that intuitively seem to be lacking a crucial but difficult to define quality of true symbols reveal, upon closer examination, to be characterized by little or no sensory and/or motor autonomy. 109 This would lend support to the hypothesis that sensory and motor autonomy are directly relevant to the question of the arbitrariness of symbols. However, other cases can not be explained by these two criteria, but instead are context-dependent in another way: they seem to be rigidly linked to the basic drives of the organism and only appear to be means to satisfy those desires. In fact, this limitation has been invoked as an argument (Petitto and Seidenberg 1979) against the attribution of symbol use to the trained simians of the various ape language projects. It is therefore imperative to postulate a third form of contextual freedom that I choose to call "affective autonomy". In order to avoid unnecessary and tedious repetition of the terms "affective", "sensory" and "motor autonomy" I will use the term "functional autonomy" to refer to the ensemble of these aspects of conceptual representations and reserve the more precise terms for when I want to speak specifically of a particular type of functional autonomy. At this point it is necessary to qualify the notion of functional autonomy. I have been developing this notion in relative terms: a given set of representations can be said to display a lesser, equal or greater degree of

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functional autonomy than another set of representations. Furthermore, at the present time, there is no precise way to measure empirically varying degrees of functional autonomy. For these reasons, we must refrain from attempting to draw overly fine-grained distinctions. For my present purposes, a rather obvious distinction between weak, moderate, and strong functional autonomy will suffice. A similar limitation must be placed on the distinction that I am making between schémas and concepts. I am suggesting that schémas are characterized by weak functional autonomy, while concepts possess a moderate degree of functional autonomy. 110 Having made these distinctions, it must be noted that the development of functional autonomy forms a continuum and it is admittedly artificial to isolate two points on that continuum and to raise them to the apparent status of real entities in the way that naming them schémas and concepts does. In keeping with the design stance I am positing these constructs in order to account for observed changes in the child's behavior over time. We should not, however, lose sight of their status as idealized, theoretical constructs. To give a clearer idea of these notions, I will offer three examples of sign behavior that would fail to qualify as symbolic because they do not meet one of the criteria of functional autonomy. An example from the development of symbolic communication can illustrate the notion of motor autonomy. As Bates (Bates 1976, 1979) has reported, many of the child's earliest word-like vocalizations constitute an integral part of an action package; the enactment of one element automatically triggers the other actions that make up the sequence. An example of this early form of communication, which we discussed in Chapter 4, is Carlotta's (Bates 1979: 40) utterance "bam" that would occur when she would bang on her toy piano. In such cases, it is important to resist the temptation to attribute referentiality to the vocalization since the uttered sounds do not stand for the action of banging: they merely accompany the gesture. The best proof of this is that, during the time period in question, Carlotta would not use the utterance "bam" to designate other instances of banging. At this stage in the child's development, the schémas underlying the utterance "bam" are indissociably linked to those that control the movements performed by the child's hand. Such vocalizations do not qualify as symbols because they lack the required degree of motor autonomy. Later in the child's development, when she is able to utter these sounds without automatically

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performing the action and is able to use this utterance in a variety of contexts, we have reason to view the utterance as an rudimentary symbol, albeit one that retains the marks of its iconic origin. In our second example symbol use is denied on the grounds of insufficient affective autonomy. As we mentioned earlier Pettito and Seidenberg (1979), along with others, have contended that there is no reason to assume that apes trained in American Sign Language understand the meaning of the signs that they are forming. Since the trained apes generally use the signs at their disposal to obtain things they desire, i.e., food, toys, and attention, these authors argue that the apes are merely performing "tricks" that will provide them with what they seek. Another way of formulating this claim would be to say that the apes are not aware of the conceptual content that human beings assign to such signs, and that Nim, Koko and the others have simply learned to associate different gestures with the functions that these signs can perform. The conclusion that Pettito and Seidenberg suggest is that the ape's communicative behavior can be accounted for in pragmatic terms without any need to postulate an underlying semantic structure. To make this point using the terminology introduced earlier, we can say that the ape's signings do not qualify as symbols because the arbitrariness humans attribute to these signs does not play a causal role in the behavior of the apes. To the extent that the apes use these signs primarily to obtain things they desire and don't appear to use them independently of actual desires, such behavior can be said to lack affective autonomy. A third case of a communicative act that fails to meet the criteria of functional autonomy can be found in Sebeok's example of primate tail displays discussed in Chapter 4. In my previous remarks on this example, I argued that for the animal producing the sign, the tail display is a physiological correlate of the affective state, fear, that it stands for. From the vantage point of the model I have been developing in this chapter, the tail display fails short of symbolicity because it lacks the requisite affective autonomy. In other words, the tail display does not stand arbitrarily for fear; rather it is causally linked to this motivational state. I would now like to consider whether we have reason to attribute an ability to decode symbols to a second animal that comes to be aware of the fear of the first animal on the basis of these signs. At this point, we need to ask whether the animal decoding these signs can arrive at their meaning on the basis of the

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immediately available sensory information or do we need to postulate the intervention of conceptual representations? Further field research would be necessary to provide a definitive answer to this question, however, I do believe that we can offer a fairly plausible one. If you recall my earlier discussion, you will remember that the tail displays do not occur in isolation; they are generally accompanied by a perfusion of visual, olfactory and auditory signals that all point to the same thing, namely the fear of the first animal. The first animal's fear is so redundantly encoded in the sensory input received by the second animal that the immediately available perceptual information would seem to be more than sufficient to ensure decoding of the sign. Furthermore, the manifestation of the inner state in overt behavior is so pervasive that there is no guarantee that the second animal even attended to the tail display as indicative of the first animal's fear. Any of the other signals available could have relayed the same message. This would be especially true if the two animals were not conspecifics, in which case it would be unlikely that the second animal would recognize or even attend to a species-specific signal for fear when it could gain the same information from other signals having a more universal application. Although there is nothing that totally rules out the intervention of conceptual representations in the decoding of these signs, the message of fear is just too omnipresent in the first animal's behavior to merit attributing the ability to decode symbols to the second animal. Here I believe it is appropriate to invoke Morgan's canon and accept the relatively simple explanation that is available rather than postulating higher cognitive faculties. If my interpretation is valid, this example would thus constitute a case where insufficient sensory autonomy would lead us to deny the ability to decode symbols. I would now like to draw out the link between the notion of functional autonomy and Bates' suggestion that symbols are signs in which the sign vehicle is treated as substitutable for its object, yet distinct from it. The case can be made that in the examples just examined, the various organisms were obviously capable of relating the sign vehicle and its object, but showed no sign of apprehending this as a relation between two distinct entities. When we focus on the encoding of signs, the organisms in question have no more control over the gestures that compose the sign vehicle than they would have over the emotion that the sign stands for. For instance, in our discussion of primate tail displays in chapter 4 we argued that the sign

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behavior of the organism performing such a display is not symbolic because the display is an automatic correlate of the emotion, fear, it stands for. In the examples just discussed, Carlotta's early use of the vocalization bam in conjunction with the act of banging on her toy piano would display this same sort of rigid dependence since the vocalization and the related gesture do not appear separately. Although the pragmatic use of signs by the simians of the ape language projects is a bit more involved, since apes are relatively advanced on the road to genuine symbol use, to the extent that the apes use these signs exclusively to satisfy their needs and desires, we have good reason to doubt that they possess the ability to conceive signs and their objects as truly distinct entities. Returning once again to the example of primate tail displays but asking this time whether the animal that decodes a particular display recognizes that the sign, the tail display, and its object, fear, are distinct yet related entities, I would contend that we have little reason to endorse such a conclusion. To get a handle on this question, we could compare hypothetically the conceivable reactions of the second animal to the tail display with its reactions to other clearly indexical signs, i.e., release of adrenaline and other chemical substances, hair standing on end, emotional vocalizations, etc, of the first animal's state of fear. Would it be plausible to think that the second animal would be able to respond differently in first case than it would in the second? I would suspect not, although once again the matter could only be settled by additional field research that focuses specifically on this aspect of the behaviors in question. Once again if we invoke Morgan's canon, the burden of proof would have to be met by those who would argue that the second animal would indeed be capable of perceiving the tail display and the state of fear as related yet distinct. 6.4. Functional autonomy and the relation of signification At this juncture we should also note some important points of convergence between the views that I have been discussing and Jacques Maritain's notion of the relation of signification. 111 In his essay "Language and the theory of sign", Maritain writes: Normally in the development of a child it is necessary that the idea be 'enacted' by the senses and lived through before it is born as an idea; it is necessary that the relationship of signification should first be actively exercised in a gesture, a cry, in a sensory sign bound up with

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the desire that is to be expressed. Knowing this relationship will come later, and this will have to be the idea, even if it is merely implicit, of that which is signified. Animals and children make use of this signification; they do not perceive it. When the child begins to perceive it (then he exploits, he toys with it, even in the absence of the real need to which it corresponds)—at that moment the idea has emerged. (Maritain 1986: 53) There are several points that are worth stressing. First, when Maritain suggests that "it is necessary that the idea be 'enacted' by the senses and lived through before it is born as an idea", he recognizes the prepropositional origins of ideas, a point which constitutes, I believe, a first step towards assuming a sensorimotor view of meaning and knowledge. And in his formulation "lived through", there is perhaps a hint of the notion that meaning emerges from the interaction between the child and her surroundings. Second, in stating that "the relationship of signification should first be actively exercised in a gesture, a cry, in a sensory sign bound up with the desire that is to be expressed", he has identified the inseparable link that ties together gesture, vocalizations and desire in the semiosis of young children. Against this background, Maritain introduces the most important idea of this passage, the relation of signification. He establishes a distinction between making use of signs in practical ways and grasping the relation of signification itself112. In one of his many discussions of Maritain's ideas, Deely explicates this distinction by proposing a distinction between perceiving in actu exercito and in acto signato (1990: 36-37). To say that the relation of signification is grasped in actu exercito means, Deely asserts, that it is "grasped in a practical way as employed in interaction to make one's way in the physical surroundings and especially to get control over them or turn them to one's advantage". In contrast, at the level of perception in actu signato, the relation of signification "can be distinguished from the vehicle conveying it and the object it conveys". This distinction would seem to be equivalent to the one that I have been proposing. The case of an organism capable of associating the sign with its object, but unable to apprehend this as a relation between two distinct entities would constitute an example of perception in actu exercito or, to use Maritain's terminology, an example of making use of but not grasping

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the relation of signification. In the absence of the realization that the relation of signification "can be distinguished from the vehicle conveying it and the object it conveys", the organism would tend to respond in the same fashion when confronted with the sign or with its object. To illustrate this point, let us return to our example of the rabbit for whom the sound of rustling leaves is a sign of a nearby fox. What I am suggesting is that the rabbit simply apprehends the relation of signification in actu exercito and would have a strong tendency to flee either upon hearing the sound of the leaves or seeing an actual fox, an extremely plausible hypothesis. Since it was established earlier that the rabbit's behavior in this example displays weak sensory autonomy, we can equate this notion with those proposed by Maritain and Deely. Deely's second notion "perception in actu sígnalo" would seem to correspond perfectly to the definition of symbol use that Bates proposed and which I have adopted. While Deely describes perception in actu signato in terms of distinguishing the relation of signification "from the vehicle conveying it and the object it conveys", the conception I have endorsed asserts that an essential feature of the symbol use is the apprehension of the sign vehicle and its object as distinct yet related entities. To complete the connections between the different notions discussed in this chapter, I would make the further claim that this initial grasp of the relation of signification is intimately linked to the emergence of functional autonomy. One possible objection to my equating the grasping of the relation of signification with the onset of symbol use, is that once one grasps the relation of signification it becomes possible not only to see that symbols and their objects are distinct yet related, but to come to the same realization concerning indices and icons. While I would accept the suggestion that after the ability to communicate by means of symbols appears and one is able to grasp the relation of signification underlying symbols, this ability can be subsequently transferred to icons and indices, I would reject the idea that an organism capable of communicating by either icons and/or indices but not by symbols would be able to grasp the relation of signification. To conclude this section, I would like to demonstrate that many of the ideas that I have just presented are implicit in Deely's distinction between perception and understanding. I have already noted that Deely considers it necessary to posit representative forms to account for perception and that, from this position, it is reasonable to infer the need to posit appropriate

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representations for the mediation of understanding. However, the case can be made that not only are the notions of schémas and concepts present at least implicitly in Deely's formulation, but that this formulation also contains in nuce the basic premises of functional autonomy. For instance, Deely speaks of "the organism's apprehending and responding to its surroundings" (Deely 1982: 99; my emphasis) a formula that brings out the link between perception and action. And when he writes that "Perception reveals objects as they are relative to the interests (dispositions, needs, and desires) of the organism perceiving .. ." (1982: 103), he hints at the weak degree of affective autonomy that characterizes sensorimotor schémas. At the level of perception, the organism can only apprehend things in its surroundings in function of its own motivational or affective states. In contrast, the type of apprehension of objects that Deely calls understanding requires the emancipation of cognition from the affective state of the organism, a point that parallels my discussions of affective autonomy. Thus, there is a broad area of agreement between Deely's conception and mine. Our views differ, however, on two basic points. First, whereas Deely conceives these issues in terms of the act of apprehending reality, my scheme poses the question in terms of the mental representations that mediate these two levels of cognition. Second, Deely holds that the level of perception is heavily constrained by affective states and that understanding involves the emancipation of cognition from these states, while my conception is a bit broader in that I formulate this dependency and relative emancipation of representations, that characterize respectively perception and understanding, in terms of current sensory input, affective states and ongoing motor activity. These differences do not necessarily constitute areas of dispute; instead I believe that they make our two approaches complementary. 6.5. Functional autonomy and cross-modal transfers Since we are committed to the thesis that mental states are brain states, we are also committed to the position that functional autonomy is mediated by neural mechanisms. Although the notion of functional autonomy should rise or fall on the basis of its ability to shed light on symbol use, on the way mental representations function, and on other cognitive questions, it will gain in legitimacy if we can demonstrate a plausible link between this notion and what we know about brain function and organization. We must

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however acknowledge that the question of what sort of neural processes make symbol use possible takes us far beyond the current state of the art. In the absence of a definitive response to this question, I would like to hazard an indication of where such a response might come from. One promising area is the study of cross-modal transfers. The notion of crossmodal transfers refers to the capacity of the human brain113 to integrate information processed in the visual, auditory and somoaesthetic areas of the cerebral cortex and to form multimodal representations of things. This notion is, I believe, of crucial importance due to the link between multimodality and abstract representations. Concrete representations can be considered concrete because they are linked to a specific sensory modality, while the defining characteristic of abstract representations is that they are free from such linkage. Whether or not every multimodal representation is also an abstract representation is difficult to say, and is certainly not required by my view, but I would contend that all abstract representations must be free from sensory specificity. In other words multimodality, in my view, may not be a sufficient criterion for abstract representations, but it is a necessary one. If we frame this inquiry in terms of the notion of sensory autonomy, the question becomes how does the brain take the output of the various sensory systems and construct abstract meanings that are not dependent upon incoming sensory information. In the 1970's, Norman Geschwind (1974: 81104) presented a fascinating hypothesis concerning the neural substrate of language.114 Geschwind claimed that object naming is linked to the ability to form cross-modal transfers. He argued that, in order to associate a linguistic sound with a thing apprehended by another sense such as sight, it is necessary to transfer information from the auditory cortex to the visual cortex and vice-versa. Although I basically agree with this claim, I believe that the ability to become aware of a thing by means of a verbal symbol involves much more than linking an auditory percept with, say, a visual percept: it consists rather in linking an abstract, conceptual representation of the thing with the corresponding auditory pattern. Moving now to the neural mediation of cross-modal transfers, Geschwind asserted that, in the typical mammalian brain, there are no fiber tracts establishing direct two-way links between the various specialized sensory areas of the cortex (visual, auditory, somoaesthetic), and that the only way that the brain can transfer impulses from one sensory modality to another

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is by way of the limbic system. Since the structures of the limbic system control, to a great extent, the drives and instincts of the organism (Uttal 1978), such cross-modal transfers are tightly linked to the affective states of the organism and do not lead to the formation of the conceptual representations necessary for symbol use. Instead, these transfers are firmly connected to the organism's affective states. If we return to the example of the rabbit discussed earlier in this chapter, Geschwind's claim amounts to saying that any multimodal representation of foxes that the rabbit would be capable of forming would be in function of the affective state, fear, triggered by the presence of a fox. However, with the development of the association cortex, which, in the human brain,115 receives fiber tracts from the different areas of the sensory cortex, nonlimbic cross-modal transfers can be performed with ease. Thus, in humans, there appears to be at work a stage of information processing where input from the different senses can be integrated in the relative absence of input from the areas of the brain controlling affective states. Returning now to the differences between the decoding of indices and symbols, I would like to suggest that when our hypothetical rabbit associates the auditory stimuli of rustling leaves with, say, a visual representation of a fox, the transfer of information from one area of the cortex to the other takes place by way of the limbic system and, consequently, the fox can solely be apprehended in function of the affective states of the rabbit. In other words, the rabbit can only become aware of the fox as a potential enemy. In contrast, the symbolic decoding of the word "fox" does not automatically trigger an emotional response from the person who decodes it. Perhaps the example of the word "fox" does not do justice to this point because foxes do not strike fear into the hearts of most people. To take a more appropriate example, I might be deathly afraid of spiders, but the word "spider" does not automatically put me in a state of panic as a live, crawling arachnid would. In the sort of central nervous system exemplified by the rabbit, the different areas of the sensory cortex and the limbic system form a closed loop with the drives and instincts mediated by the limbic system exercising rather tight control on the rabbit's perception. From an evolutionary point of view, such a design makes very good sense since it is obviously very important for the perceptual mechanisms of an organism to be sensitive to its needs and vulnerabilities. For instance, a species of rabbits, that would be able to perceive foxes but would be unable

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to recognize them immediately as a potential danger, would have a serious selective disadvantage. Despite the efficiency of this design, the human brain features an additional functional unit whose role it is to integrate information from the different senses independently of the affective states of the individual. It must be stressed that this new unit doesn't replace the old system; it is merely grafted on to and complements the previously existing system. Furthermore, although this new system creates the possibility of what I have been calling functional autonomy, this does not imply that internal representations are completely isolated from incoming stimuli or from the drives and instincts of the organism. It merely suggests that, in order to serve certain functions, such representations can be manipulated independently of ongoing motor activity and current sensory and affective states. That the emergence of this system has had far-reaching consequences in the evolution of language and culture hardly needs to be pointed out. Let us now attempt to draw together the principal elements of the account of symbol use being proposed here. The central claim that I have been making is that symbols are mediated by abstract cognitive representations of the environment. These representations are considered to be abstract because they are functionally autonomous with regards to incoming stimuli, the affective states and the ongoing activity of the individual. Sensory autonomy plays an important role in the decoding of symbols which requires that the organism be able to pick up the stimuli composing the sign and go beyond them by associating the stimuli with an abstract, conceptual representation. When the requisite degree of sensory autonomy is missing the organism can respond to the sensory profile of the sign, but can not grasp the symbolic meaning that humans attach to it. Motor autonomy is especially crucial to the production of arbitrary signs because, in order to construct symbols, one must be able to dissociate the underlying representations from ongoing motor activity. Finally, affective autonomy plays a role in both the comprehension and the production of symbols because it ensures that the individual can access abstract representations of things independently of affective states. In each case, functional autonomy involves a step away from the here and now. The organism whose representations of the world display little or no functional autonomy, can be aware of its current affective states, motor activity and the present state of the world, but has limited access to anything beyond these immediate

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circumstances. In contrast, an organism that displays strong functional autonomy can call up abstract representations of things without experiencing the affective reactions that the actual thing would provoke, can imagine things not actually present and can envision possible courses of action without necessarily acting them out. Now, it could appear inconsistent, after having stressed the necessity of adopting a view of embodied cognition firmly anchored in the functional cycle of perception, action and motivation, to adopt a notion that establishes an emancipation from this cycle. Although the differentiation of sensorimotor schémas does allow the subject to step away from the functional cycle, it is important to note that with the emergence of the conceptual and propositional levels of cognition the sensorimotor level does not simply vanish into thin air. Although I do agree that, at these higher levels of cognition, the basic elements of sensorimotor knowledge can be reorganized in novel ways and notions having no grounding in sensorimotor experience can and do emerge, this does not change the basic fact that the entire edifice of knowledge and meaning is erected upon this sensorimotor foundation. To complete this discussion, I now wish to link the notion of functional autonomy to that of cultural conventions. I will not attempt to do justice to all the sociocultural factors that come into play when we use symbols, I merely want to reaffirm my view that cognitive factors can not provide a complete account of symbol use. As I stated in Chapter 4, it is my conviction that neither cognitive nor sociocultural factors can be ignored if we want to achieve a comprehensive understanding of our ability to communicate by symbols. Although I have been claiming that the biological and psychological mechanisms underlying the ability to construct abstract, functionally autonomous representations make symbol use possible, the logical construction of symbols is not completed until a cultural convention is introduced to link the representations mediating the sign and its object. In general, these conventions are established by a relatively large social group as in the case of language, myths, and customs, but there is nothing to prevent a convention from being established in groups as small as two. For instance, developmental psychologists (Bates 1979; Bruner 1983) have found that, in many cases, the first intentional communication the child engages in is mediated by idiosyncratic conventions established between the child and his or her parents. Furthermore, it can be said that the ability to

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use symbols is placed at the service of and under the tutelage of culture. Although biological and psychological factors create the conditions of possibility for symbolic communication, it is culture and social interaction that give our symbols their specific form and content. All normal humans possess the general capacity to construct symbol systems; the specific systems we use depend on our cultural experience. While the biological and cognitive mechanisms mediating symbols are pretty much the same for all peoples, the superimposition of cultural codes on them adds an almost limitless range of diversity. Without having to endorse the extreme view represented by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, (Sapir 1949; Whorf 1956), it seems obvious to say that the world each of us lives in is to a large extent conditioned by the cultural systems (language, religion, science, etc.) that we have acquired and that we use to make sense of our experience. Another important point is that, although a certain degree of functional autonomy is necessary for culture, culture leads to an even greater degree of functional autonomy. Language, which is unquestionably the most powerful of culture's symbol systems, provides the individual with a ready-made set of categories and labels to apply to the environment. The acquisition of culturally encoded labels for things and events adds an additional degree of functional autonomy to the child's cognition and communication because such symbols are one step further removed from the symbol user's sensorimotor and affective experience with whatever the symbols stand for. Thus, the sociocultural dimension of symbol use both depends on neural and cognitive mechanisms, but at the same time this dimension stimulates and shapes the development of the latter, taking it to a higher level. 6.6. Functional autonomy and imagination I would like to conclude this account by examining how functional autonomy would fit into the framework developed by Johnson and Lakoff. Perhaps the best way to do this is to discuss Mark Johnson's (1987) conception of imagination. As Johnson takes great pains to point out, his conception has little to do with the literary Romantic view of imagination as the unfettered flight of fancy. Instead he adopts a Kantian view that conceives imagination as the process by which we impose structure on our experience. Construed this way, imagination enables us to form coherent representations of the world around us and to derive meaning from our experience. An adequate theory of imagination, in Johnson's view, would need to make room for the different modalities of categorization described

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need to make room for the different modalities of categorization described by Lakoff, his own experiential schemata with their metaphorical and métonymie projections, and narrative structure. As this theory develops in the coming years, it might become necessary to add other components, but even as it is presently conceived Johnson's theory would constitute nothing less than a vast synthesis of the different research projects that make up the second phase of the cognitive turn. The notions that I have developed in this chapter can, I believe, contribute to this endeavor by filling in some of the details of this general framework. The undeniable merit of Johnson and Lakoff has been to locate the flaws of mainstream cognitivism, to describe a rich set of meaningful phenomena with which such theories are not prepared to cope, and to develop an alternative framework that is both ambitious in scope and rigorous in its formulation. Their decision has been to examine how, given our faculties for categorization and for constructing experiential schemata, the extremely complex content and structure of language and thought could be derived. In contrast, my approach has been to begin at a much simpler level of cognition and work upwards toward symbol use. Roughly speaking Johnson and Lakoff pick up where I leave off. The various mechanisms that Johnson includes within his notion of imagination would seem to presuppose the availability of functionally autonomous representations. For instance, it would be extremely difficult to imagine an organism whose cognition were limited to the activation of sensorimotor schémas being capable of projecting, either metonymically or metaphorically, these schémas to abstract content domains. It is only with the freeing up of sensorimotor schémas and the emergence of concepts that these projections become possible. In suggesting that the cognitive process that Johnson and Lakoff describe require functional autonomy as a prerequisite, I do not mean to imply that the relationship between these different processes is a simple one. To take just one example, it seems quite clear that the roots of Johnson's experiential schemata plunge quite deeply into the realm of sensorimotor representations. A great deal of the structure that image schemata possess is without a doubt acquired during the earliest stages of human development. However, the propensity of these schemata to project similarities on a wide range of apparently distinct experiences only becomes possible, I would contend, with the emergence of conceptual

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representations. Rather than situating Johnson's experiential schemata at a particular level of cognitive representation, I would be more inclined to say that they cut across the levels postulated in this chapter. If the suggestion that experiential schemata display such a hierarchical structure were to hold up under closer scrutiny, it could be the beginning of a more detailed picture of this construct. These matters are certainly in need of more extensive examination, but it does nonetheless give us some idea of how the notion of functional autonomy could be integrated within Johnson and Lakoffs framework. Finally I make no claim that the notion of functional autonomy can provide a complete account of symbol use; my goal has been simply to set forth an account of how a cognitive system could establish and/or grasp an arbitrary relationship linking a sign and its object. This capacity is necessary for a wide range of higher faculties such as language, reasoning and mental imagery, but I am well aware that it is no simple matter to derive them from functional autonomy. I do nonetheless believe that if properly articulated to the schemes of Arbib and Johnson and Lakoff, the framework I have presented here could be an essential component within a very broad-based account of everything from perception to metaphor, but obviously such an articulation would require the efforts of many researchers working in a variety of fields.

6.7 Functional communication

autonomy

and

the

evolution

of

symbolic

To conclude this chapter, I would like to indicate how the concept of functional autonomy would fit into an account of the evolution of symbolic communication. My goal is largely illustrative and I will not attempt to provide a comprehensive theory of these developments; rather I will seek to demonstrate that the notion of functional autonomy is compatible with two influential accounts of the evolution of language and human cognition that have been advanced in recent years. I will not attempt to review these accounts in their entirety, but instead I will concentrate on one particular phase of the human evolution, the emergence of symbolic communication. Before proceeding, we most note that, despite a general agreement on many points, these accounts do differ in some respects especially in their assessment of the primary factors in the evolution of language. I will express my own views on several of these matters, I will not attempt to elaborate a complete synthesis of the different positions. The first account that we will examine has been proposed by Thomas A.

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Sebeok (1991: 68-72). When one reflects on the question of the evolution of language, there is a strong temptation to assume that language evolved to meet the communicative needs of our distant ancestors because communication is now the primary function of language. Sebeok rejects this facile equation and, following Gould and Verba (1982), argues that we must not confuse historical genesis and current utility. From an evolutionary perspective, there is no guarantee that the purpose that a particular trait serves in a modern species was the same for which the trait was originally adapted, since it is quite common for traits, which evolved to serve one purpose, to be recruited to serve additional functions in the subsequent history of the species. Familiar examples of this process are feathers, which originally evolved to subserve the function of thermoregulation of birds but later become an important aid to flight, and lungs, that evolved from the swimming bladders which aid fish to move in the water. Applying this reasoning to the evolution of language, Sebeok contends that language first evolved as a system designed to model the environment of early hominids and was later "co-opted" to serve as a means of communication. 116 Sebeok cites the sophisticated toolmaking of Homo habilis as proof that the first members of the hominid lineage possessed such a developed modeling system. He finds especially relevant to his thesis the fact that Homo habilis is known to have transported materials necessary for making tools which indicates that these hominids were capable of planning future activities. He adds that it is not surprising that such novel cognitive capabilities would appear in Homo habilis since the members of this species had larger brains (600-800cc) than their australopithecine ancestors. On this account, the subsequent evolution of language consisted largely of developing the necessary mechanisms for producing and understanding speech. I find Sebeok's account very convincing and I believe that not only is it compatible with the notion of functional autonomy, but that it is possible to elaborate on it by reformulating it in terms of the framework that I have been proposing. We can begin by returning to our earlier discussion of the incipient tool use in children. You will remember that we argued that for a child to be able to use a stick to pull a desired object toward her she must be capable of mentally manipulating the relevant cognitive representations in order to determine why familiar motor schémas were not successful and to devise an appropriate substitute. Moreover, I contended that mental representations that can be so manipulated must be partially emancipated

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from current sensory input and affective states as well as from ongoing motor activity. This analysis can be applied without major modification to the toolmaking of Homo habilis. The very act of making the sort of tools that Homo habilis is known for would require the same type of mental representations that the rudimentary tool use of young children requires. The principal difference would be that the relative sophistication of the tools of Homo habilis provides evidence of a far greater degree of functional autonomy. Whereas Sensorimotor Stage 6 children are capable of realizing that an already existing object, such as a stick, can serve as a tool, Homo habilis was able to shape a piece of rock to meet a specific purpose. In order to do so, Homo habilis must have been able to call to mind representations of available toolmaking procedures, of the eventual function of the tool and of the qualities that a successful tool must possess. On the basis of this and perhaps other relevant information, the hominid would then devise an appropriate procedure for making the tool. In forwarding this account, I am not suggesting that it is necessary for this chain of mental manipulations of representations to be completed before work on the tool could begin. Although a general plan would probably be necessary at the outset, a great deal of planning could take place while the tool was being fashioned. What is crucial to recognize is that the completion of the tool requires such a manipulation of mental representations. We also need to give an account of Homo habilis' habit of transporting materials for making tools. It is quite obvious that this ability requires a detailed model of the environment, which includes information about the type of rocks which are suitable for fashioning tools and the sites where such rocks can be found, however this cognitive capability is not in and of itself sufficient to explain the behavior of Homo habilis. It is not simply the possession of a more refined set of representations that allows an organism to plan; it is the ability to mentally manipulate those representations that makes planning possible. In order for an organism to grasp the utility of carrying along toolmaking materials during its peregrinations, it must anticipate that the appropriate materials may not be available at other locations and it must weigh the advantage tool use would confer against the expenditure of energy required to carry these materials. It is only by being able to call the relevant representations to mind that an organism can carry out such analyses. We can thus conclude that the cognitive modeling system

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of Homo habilis is characterized by a significant degree of functional autonomy. The next account that I want to examine was proposed by Derek Bickerton in his book Language and species (1990). Bickerton takes a stance similar to Sebeok's in that he stresses the role of language as a cognitive modeling system. He argues that "Communication is, after all, not what language is, but (a part of) what it does" (1990: 21). Bickerton contends that if we approach the question of the evolution of language from the perspective of systems of communication, we find that language is so utterly different in terms of its structure and its mechanism from known forms of animal communication that it is impossible to imagine how the former could have evolved from the latter. He suggests instead that we formulate this question in terms of the evolution of systems of cognitive mapping, from the appearance of cells that responded to fluctuations in their environment to the development of neural systems capable of richer and more sophisticated representations. To meet this demand, Bickerton posits a series of steps in the evolution of systems of representation that, over millions of years, led to the emergence of language. The second major component in Bickerton's account is what he calls "protolanguage". At some point, during the phylogenetic development of systems of cognitive mapping, this system was adapted to fulfill another function, communication. This was achieved by attaching a series of labels, most likely verbal, to already existing representations of relevant features of the environment. This new form of communication was probably quite similar to the one and two-word utterances of young children, utterances which display a lexical link between vocalizations and representations that stand for things, but which lack true syntax.117 Protolanguage corresponds, then, to what I have been calling symbolic communication. Initially, and this period probably lasted several hundred thousands of years, the repertory of "words" that made up the protolanguage of our ancestors was quite reduced and, given the limitations of their articulatory apparatus, these vocalizations were not uttered with the ease and precision that modern humans possess. Yet, as rudimentary as it was, protolanguage provided, in all likelihood, a significant advantage to those individuals that first used it to communicate. From a cognitive point of view, protolanguage would seem to require that the subject had attained what I have been calling the conceptual level, where representations can be activated in the absence of

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the things they stand for and without triggering the associated motor response. In order to attach a verbal label, no matter how rudimentary or poorly articulated, to the representation of a thing, functionally autonomous representations would seem to be an absolute necessity. Continuing this discussion of Bickerton's account, we need to consider the point in the evolution of the hominid lineage when protolanguage first emerged. After raising some reasons for caution in interpreting the fossil record, Bickerton, like Sebeok, notes 118 the important increase (33%) in brain size from the australopithecines (Austrcdopithicus afarensis) to Homo habilis, yet he finds greater relevance in the slightly greater increase (37.5%) from Homo habilis to Homo erectus over a much shorter period of time.119 Bickerton's point is that the acceleration of the increase in the size of the brain associated with the emergence of Homo erectus was greater than that associated with Homo habilis. Assuming that there is a positive correlation between the increase in brain size in the hominid line and the evolution of language, a reasonable assumption, but one which we can not take for granted, Bickerton argues that the appearance of protolanguage most plausibly coincided with the more dramatic increase in brain size, namely that associated with the emergence of Homo erectus. Considering next the artifacts left by these two species, Bickerton notes that by all accounts the bifaced stone hand axes of Homo erectus marked a significant advance over the tools fashioned by Homo habilis. He cites this as further evidence that Homo erectus not Homo habilis first developed protolanguage. This interpretation receives additional support from findings (Donald 1991: 110-114) that, while Homo habilis had essentially the same life style and geographical distribution as the australopithecines, Homo erectus lived in regular home bases, which suggests a more stable social structure, and migrated throughout Africa, Europe and Asia. These modifications in social organization and the ability to adapt to different habitats lend credence to Bickerton's contention that Homo erectus not only possessed larger brains and better stone instruments than the habilines, but also developed a powerful new tool for group survival, protolanguage. The notion of functional autonomy can be easily reconciled with this scenario. In our earlier discussion, we addressed the link between the infant's rudimentary tool use as a manifestation of the increasing functional autonomy of her mental representations and proposed that this latter development serves as the foundation for the subsequent development of

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symbolic communication. Although the analogy120 is far from perfect due to the immaturity of human children at this age, a circumstance that affects dexterity as well as memory storage and other cognitive capabilities, Homo habilis would, roughly speaking, correspond to this level of functional autonomy. Moreover, it is reasonable to assume that Homo habilis was able to exercise greater voluntary control over vocalizations and began to communicate by means of protoimperatives and protodeclaratives. This assumption is, I believe, justified by one of the cognitive changes that functional autonomy entails, namely the increased differentiation between representations and the motor schémas to which they were originally linked. In the case of voluntary control over vocalizations, what would be required is a functional differentiation between the motor programs governing the production of sounds and the affective or motivational states to which they had been linked. Thus, the growth of functional autonomy that, as we suggested earlier, was evidenced by the tool-making and the related planning of Homo habilis could have conceivably also permitted greater voluntary control over vocalizations. Therefore, it is quite plausible that Homo habilis developed protolanguage, as Bickerton argues. The standard wisdom (Steklis and Harnad 1976) is that sophisticated toolmaking required at least a rudimentary form of symbolic representation and/or vocal communication to plan the manufacture of tools and to ensure transmission of toolmaking skills from one generation to another. This is a plausible way of explaining the relationship between toolmaking and protolanguage, however, the notion of functional autonomy suggests a complementary account, namely that part-whole analysis and mental manipulation of representations needed for sophisticated toolmaking as well as the voluntary control over vocalization and the ability to associate an arbitrary sound with a particular aspect of the Umwelt depend on the differentiation of sensorimotor schémas. If we compare these two accounts of the evolution of language, we are confronted with one particularly sharp divergence. Whereas Sebeok attributes language in the form of a sophisticated cognitive modeling device to Homo habilis, Bickerton contends that protolanguage probably did not appear until the arrival of Homo erectus on the evolutionary scene. Although a total reconciliation of these views is perhaps too much to expect, there is room for a possible rapprochement. Although Sebeok holds that language first appeared and manifested itself in the toolmaking of

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Homo habilis, he does acknowledge that this basic capacity underwent significant evolutionary changes until speech, as we know it, emerged in Homo sapiens. His claim is that Homo habilis possessed a fairly complex cognitive modeling device, but there is no reason to suppose that this device was as complex as that of modern humans. In fact, by all accounts, it was this system of representing the environment that underwent the greatest modification during the course of evolution from Homo habilis to Homo sapiens. Moreover, Sebeok's claim that Homo sapiens was the first species to develop the modern capacity for speech does not rule out the possibility that, as Bickerton argues, Homo erectus communicated by means of protolanguage. In fact, it is hardly plausible that fully articulate speech would suddenly appear in a species (Homo sapiens) whose immediate ancestors (Homo erectus) were mute. Since Sebeok does not argue that Homo habilis possessed a verbal mode of communication, the likeliest candidate for an early precursor of speech would be Homo erectus. Thus, the difference between Sebeok and Bickerton on this point hardly seems insurmountable. In the preceding, I addressed only some of the issues that an account of the role played by cognitive processes in the evolution of language needs to consider, and, in doing so, I have neglected many important questions, most notably the selective pressures that motivated these developments. Despite these limitations, I hope to have demonstrated that the notion of functional autonomy can be easily integrated into existing accounts of the evolution of language and in some instances provide specific insight into these developments.

7. The development of symbolic communication in children 7.1. Introduction I will now attempt to provide further illustration of the account of symbol use proposed in the previous chapter by applying it to the early communication of children. Given that this area of research is not a common subject of discussion among semioticians, a few words of justification for my choice are in order. As was argued earlier, if semiotics aspires to be a truly general theory of signs, it is committed to studying signs wherever they might appear. Since, to my knowledge, there is no principled reason why the communication of children should be excluded from the purview of semiotics, study of this area would follow unproblematically from the epistemological agenda that semioticians have assumed. An additional reason is that, as I have suggested in Chapter 4, the consideration of such marginal cases of symbol use could, by their very nature, help to sharpen the conceptual tools that we use to study symbols in general. I would now like to elaborate on this claim. When we seek to unravel the nature of symbol use by investigating the communication of adults, two factors impede our progress. First, in adults symbols rarely appear in isolation; they are typically embedded in complex discursive structures. When we encounter symbols in such contexts, there is no simple way to determine what is the proper of symbols and what is imposed by the discourse of which they are part. Thus, the contribution of individual symbols to the meaning of a complex utterance resists analysis, a circumstance that has led some philosophers to assert that words in and of themselves do not possess meaning and that meaning is an attribute of sentences. A second obstacle is that in the communication of adults it is difficult to establish a clear contrast between symbols and other types of signs. Adult human semiosis bears so deeply and so pervasively the mark of symbolicity that it would simply be unrecognizable if we were to abstract away the effects of convention, a point that Clarke's critique of the category of natural signs makes compellingly. The task of providing a coherent distinction between indexical and symbolic communication becomes quite difficult, if the indices that we use for purposes of comparison with symbols are themselves strongly shaped by cultural conventions. The study of the development of communication in children gives us a way of getting around these difficulties in that the early symbol use of

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children takes the form of one or two word utterances wherein the articulation of symbols into larger units of discourse is minimal if not totally absent. Secondly, as we follow the development of the child, we will encounter a stage where the child communicates solely by means of indices, a transitional stage during which communication begins to acquire arbitrariness, and a third stage during which the child communicates by means of rudimentary symbols. This glimpse into the very emergence of symbol use from purely indexical communication can provide us, I believe, with a firmer empirical basis for distinguishing between these two types of signs. However, despite the advantages that the study of symbol use in young children holds, we should not underestimate the difficulties that are involved. This area confronts us with a variant of the rather treacherous philosophical question of whether speechless creatures are capable of thought. The inherent difficulties of this question are further complicated by my intent to offer a cognitive account of the development of symbols in children. At issue here is, in the absence of a fully articulated linguistic system, what, if anything, do the early utterances of children mean. We have strong reasons to believe that when a young child utters a word from the adult lexicon, the meaning of the word is not the same as that which adults unproblematically attach to it. The phenomenon of overextension (Anglin 1977, 1983; Bowerman 1976, 1977; Rescorla 1980) that pervades the early acquisition of language is an empirical factor that strongly supports this suspicion, while the demonstration by Quine (1951, 1960) and others of the intrinsically holistic character of meaning provides a theoretical reason. A second difficulty is that the conceptual signposts that we can usually rely upon in our discussions of meaning—reference, convention, proposition, intention—are of little avail here for the simple reason that they have not been solidly established but instead are in active formation. Rather than being able to turn to these concepts for a coherent account of the communication of young children, we are faced with the task of determining at what point in the child's development these concepts become applicable. However, as daunting as these and related problems may be, they should not deter us from investigating the early communication of children because the potential of this line of inquiry to shed light on important questions far outweighs its dangers.121 This chapter has several goals. As noted above, despite its implications

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for our understanding of semiosis, the study of the development of communication in children has received but cursory attention from semioticians. Thus an initial goal of this chapter is to provide a general introduction to this field. Secondly I will begin to put to work the theoretical framework developed in the previous chapter by examining the initial appearance of symbol use in children. In order to provide a more detailed picture of the development of functional autonomy and its relationship to symbol use, I will present examples of the transition from index to symbol in children that show how sensory, motor and affective autonomy enter into the picture. The temporal scope of this inquiry will be quite narrow for I will be picking up the development of communication during the latter part of the child's first year and following it through the second year of life. I will focus primarily on what is known in the literature as the stage of one-word speech that precedes the appearance of syntax. 7.2. Piaget's sensorimotor period and the child's first words For the reader who is unfamiliar with the early development of children, I would like to provide a few points of reference so that the remainder of this chapter will not prove to be too arduous. Although many of Piaget's specific proposals concerning child development have not held up under further inquiry, his work on the sensorimotor period is still useful as a general outline of the early stages of cognitive development. Since Piaget's views have influenced many of the researchers whose work I drew upon in earlier chapters, I will be returning to several points that I have discussed already. In Piaget's (1951, 1954) scheme, the sensorimotor stage lasts from birth to roughly two years of age. During this period the child's knowledge of the world is limited to the direct perceptual stimuli received and to her own action on the world. Thought, in the sense of a controlled manipulation of inner representations, is totally absent during the early phases of this period and only begins to emerge at its very end. At this stage, the infant's knowledge of the world is mediated by sensorimotor schémas that organize action and perception and, as we saw in Chapter 5, such schémas automatically trigger the appropriate action. However the infant shows no evidence of being able to bring schémas to mind without immediately acting them out. The principal characteristic of the sensorimotor period is that the child's schémas are indissociably linked to the corresponding actions or perceptual events.

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Since the last three stages of the sensorimotor period will provide the background for our discussion of the development of symbol use, a more detailed characterization of them is appropriate at this point. In his account of Piaget's theory, Ansfield (1984) speaks of Stages 4 and 5 of the sensorimotor period (roughly the last quarter of the first year through the first quarter of the second year) as the "beginnings of detached sensorimotor representation" (1984: 35) because it is at this point that "children begin to develop representational notions of objects that are separate from the actual specific sensorimotor actions toward them" (1984: 35). For instance during this period when an object that occupied the child's attention is covered, the child removes the cover. Prior to this stage children do not display an awareness that the object can be "retrieved" by removing whatever is covering it. The inference that is made from this and similar behaviors is that the child now possesses rudimentary representations of objects that can be maintained in awareness even though the object momentarily disappears.122 It needs to be stressed that cognition is still heavily dependent upon current sensory input,123 a fact that is illustrated by the type of errors that children commit at this stage.124 During Sensorimotor Stage 6 the child's capacity to represent becomes more firmly established. One illustration of this capacity is what has come to be known as deferred imitation wherein Stage 6 children (Piaget 1951: 63) have been observed to imitate behaviors several hours after their initial occurrence. Let us examine an example of this sort of behavior: At 1;4(3) Jacqueline had a visit from a little boy of 1;6 whom she used to see from time to time, and who, in the course of the afternoon, got into a terrible temper. He screamed as he tried to get out of a playpen and pushed it backward, stamping with his feet. Jacqueline stood watching him in amazement, never having witnessed such a scene before. The next day, she herself screamed in her playpen and tried to move it, stamping her foot lightly several times in succession. (1951: 63) If an infant only imitates the behavior of an adult or of another child immediately after she observes that behavior, we can safely say that she is patterning her own acts after the model that she has before her. But if imitation is deferred, as is the case here, there seems to be no other plausible explanation than that the child is able to call up and enact the

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appropriate motor schema in the absence of both a triggering stimuli and the model of behavior being imitated. To use the terminology proposed in the previous chapter, such behavior provides evidence of the emergence of functionally autonomous representations. At the same stage, children engage in rudimentary forms of make-believe play. During earlier stages of development, instances of play take the form of rehearsing previously acquired behaviors; they can be considered play because they are not directed toward a particular goal and because they are accompanied by obvious enjoyment on the part of the child. In a typical example of Stage 6 play (1951: 96), Piaget's daughter Jacqueline pretended on several occasions to be sleeping. By blinking her eyes she would suggest the closed eyes of sleeping and would rest her head on a piece of cloth, the collar of her mother's coat or even the tail of a toy animal, which served as pretend substitutions for her pillow. All the while she would laugh, thereby clearly indicating the playfulness of her activity. The relationship between such make-believe behaviors and the question of the child's representations might not be immediately apparent, but in order for Jacqueline to substitute the pretend gestures and objects for those of the actual act of sleeping, she had to be able call up the schémas linked to the latter activity independently of the context (bedroom, darkness, nighttime) with which sleeping is generally associated. In these and similar behaviors the Stage 6 child shows a much greater ability125 to manipulate representations mentally. To place these developments in the context of the framework being developed in these pages, I would contend that Stage 6 constitutes a pivotal point in the transition from sensorimotor to conceptual representation. To complete this introduction to the phenomena that will be discussed in what follows, we will take a quick look at the development of communication in children. A suitable framework for this overview is Dore's (1985) four phases of the growth of reference, a conceptualization that systematizes a set of patterns of development that other researchers (Lock 1980) have detected. Of special importance here is the appearance of intentions and reference. Prior to the onset of one-word speech, the child does engage in communication of a sort: her cries, babbling and fussing carry substantial information concerning her needs and desires. Adults typically interpret such signals as signs that the infant is trying to tell them something and actually attach very precise meanings to these signals. But, of course, it would be a mistake to consider such signing "intentional" in

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any significant sense of the term because the child's vocalizations are essentially automatic correlates of inner states. The infant does not chose to communicate her hunger by means of crying, the latter is the result of the former. 126 Since these signs are not yet accompanied by a clear communicative intent on the part of the child, Dore calls them "protocommunicative signals". At the end of the first year, the child's signs come under greater intentional control and also begin to take on a speech-like form. The child gives indications, such as alternating eye contact between the desired objects and the adult, of intending that her utterances be attended to by adults.127 Although the case can be made that such signs are intentional,128 they lack semantic content in that they do not pick out a well-defined class of referents. For instance, one of Bates' (1979: 39) subjects used the utterance "na-na" as a generic request form. The child in question did not attach these sounds to a unique referent, but instead would utter them to request everything from food to attention. Furthermore, such utterances were typically accompanied by gestures such as pointing and reaching that reinforced the child's intentions. Dore calls this class of utterances "indexical signs", but we must not allow his use of semiotic terminology to create any confusion. While I would agree that such utterances are indexical, I must insist that what he calls "proto-communicative signals" are also indices. The difference between these two phases has nothing to do with indexicality; what allows us to distinguish them is the presence of a clear communicative intent in the later phase and its absence in the earlier one. To avoid this confusion, I will adopt Bates' (1976) term "pure performatives" to designate these word-like, intentional utterances. With this modification, I will regard "proto-communicative signals" and "pure performatives" as two species of the index. The third phase in the development of reference in children is marked by the appearance of what Dore calls "denotative symbols". Here again Dore's terminology can lead to erroneous associations that I wish to avoid; I will simply drop the qualifying adjective and use the term "symbol." In the following I will be interested in the passage from "pure performatives" to "symbols". 129 Applying Bates' insights (1979), we can posit that this transition involves a gradual decontextualization of the child's utterances. Pure performatives are tightly linked to a specific action or context; the emergence of symbolic communication consists essentially of the

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in young children

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emancipation of the child's utterances from their original context. During the stage of pure performatives, the child's vocalizations, whether they are employed in conjunction with requests in general instead of serving to request specific things, or as an integral part of a game, the elements of which are repeated almost mechanically, are linked to her own perceptual, motor or affective states rather than to a referent. The critical change that marks the next stage in this development is that the child begins to utter sounds to refer to things in a variety of contexts.130 For instance, at the age of 13 months, one of Bates' (1976: 75) subjects would use the sound "Maomao" to name cats in a number of different situations. This new communicative skill constitutes an outward manifestation of modifications of the child's cognitive system: the different components of what was previously a tightly linked cognitive package can now be accessed separately. This process is necessary for the utterances of the child to become free from exclusive relationships with single, specific contexts and thereby allows them to be generalized to an entire class of events or objects. At this point in development, Bates feels that there is strong evidence to conclude that the child's utterances possess a significant degree of semantic content. This, of course, is not to say that the content of the child's utterances is as complex as that of the utterances of adults, but merely that the child's vocalizations have begun to display something more than pure performative value and have begun to refer to events and objects. It is at this point that we may begin to consider them rudimentary symbols. 131 7.3. Intentions in y o u n g children In the preceding, the use of the term "intentions" might prove troubling to some. The difficulty would seem to reside in the fact that in the attempt to apply it to the signings of young children, developmental psychologists have departed in significant ways from the technical sense that this term has acquired. Skeptics might argue that the sole reason that we can be warranted in attributing specific intentions to adults is because we generally have at our disposal a redundant set of actions and statements that gives us adequate grounds to make such attributions. Thus, we feel relatively comfortable in saying that an acquaintance had a desire for some Chilean wine because he went to the local package store and purchased some Undurraga. Furthermore, we might seek confirmation of our assessment

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from the individual. Assuming that the person is not engaging in deception, we can take the statement "I was planning to cook a roast and I thought that a red Undurraga would go well with it" to confirm what we have inferred from the individual's prior behavior. With young children, however, we have to infer intentions from a meager set of behaviors and we can not expect the child to provide explicit confirmation of her intentions. I would agree that there is a very real danger of mistakenly attributing particular intentions to young children. It is well known that parents do tend to over-attribute meaning to the actions of their infants, so we have every reason to suspect that students of child language might be prone to the same errors. The possibility for such errors might tempt us to withhold attribution of intention until the infant is able to explicitly voice her intentions. This condition might ease our worries about erroneously attributing intentions to young children, but it would also have an utterly paralyzing effect on the study of the development of communication in children. If we were to adopt this condition, we would be insisting that the child be capable not only of intentional communication but also of metalinguistic paraphrase of the sort "What I meant my previous utterance is that . .." The ability to talk about one's own discourse appears (Perner 1988: 150) at a much later stage of development when a relatively sophisticated command of syntax is achieved. The trouble is that we are interested in the emergence of forms of communication that precede such metadiscursive ability by some 2 to 3 years. The criterion in question would then clearly be too strong because it demands, as evidence for intentional communication, skills that are much more advanced than intentional communication and, consequently, it would not allow us to acknowledge undeniable changes that take place in the child's signings, long before the child is able to comment on the meaning of her own utterances. We, thus, need to adopt a conception of intentional communication that would be broad enough to include these changes.132 7.4. The child's conceptual system In Chapter 5 I suggested that symbols are mediated by representations that have been freed up from their tight link to perception, action and emotion. I would now like to explore further one particular aspect of this model, namely the notion that prior—either phylogenetically or ontogenetically—to the development of concepts, the organism's representations of its surroundings are fused complexes of elements that can not be activated

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surroundings are fused complexes of elements that can not be activated separately. We can perhaps give this notion additional support and greater precision by considering two models of the cognitive system of children that have been proposed in recent years. In the culmination of a long and determined examination of the problem, Katherine Nelson presents in Making sense (1985) a comprehensive and insightful analysis of the development of meaning in children. Her model constitutes a successful attempt to bring together the Piagetian focus on the development of the child's cognitive structures and the Vygotskian emphasis on the role played by social interaction in this process.133 Nelson has followed the sequence of stages from the child's initial attempts to communicate during the first year of life to the establishment of a hierarchial semantic system at the age of 5. Of interest to us here is the earliest period of this sequence. In Nelson's model the primary unit of cognitive structure is the event representation,134 which can be defined as a mental construct composed "of a sequence of acts that are linked together through temporal or causal links, one act resulting in a state and leading in sequence to the next" (1985: 185). Within a given event representation, such temporal and/or causal relations bring together components that can stand for people, objects, and actions. Like Johnson's experiential schemata and Piaget's sensorimotor schémas, event representations are built up from the child's experience with recurrent events or actions. That even very small children have representations for causal or temporal sequences is evidenced (Nelson 1985: 45-58) by their ability to anticipate what will typically follow in a familiar situation.135 Nelson illustrates her notion by describing (1985: 40-45) the event representation for lunch at a day-care center, which for the children she studied was a familiar experience. The sequence of actions is as follows: playing outside, coming inside when the teacher calls, washing one's hands, getting food, eating, getting dessert, discarding plates and taking a nap. In this description of a typical event representation, we can see that the child, while playing with other children, requesting food, obeying instructions, assumes a variety of social roles and interacts with others who also play particular roles. Thus, Nelson's model presents the child as living in a socially constructed world. Nelson also suggests that the child's early representations of her surroundings are holistic and that development is

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primarily a process by which the components of the whole become differentiated. Thus at the end of the first year the child's cognitive system consists of "representations of experiences—actions, reactions and interactions—that have not been analyzed into separate components and relations." (Nelson 1985) and that "it is only during the second half of the second year, in general, that discrete concepts are differentiated from the whole" (Nelson and Lucarello 1985: 80) In other words, during the early stages of cognitive development, entire event representations are activated, but the child's mind does not seem to be able to access the components of such representations independently of the whole, this latter capacity only emerging around the age of 18 months. The idea of developmental differentiation is not novel for it is has long been a commonplace in both embryology and developmental psychology. However, the application of this principle to the question of the child's representations does nonetheless contradict many of our unquestioned assumptions about meaning. For instance, componential theories of meaning would predict that the development of the child's conceptual system would proceed by the acquisition of semantic primitives, which would then be combined to form more complex units of meaning. Nelson's model suggests instead that the child's early representations stand for large chunks of the environment and it is only as development proceeds that the elementary units of meaning recognized by componential analyses begin to emerge. We must, however, be clear about what is being claimed here.136 To say that the elements that make up an infant's event representation are tightly embedded within a holistic structure does not mean that the infant is incapable of perceiving objects or people as distinct entities. Instead the point that is being made is that in very young children the components of an event representation can not be called up in the absence of the triggering input that would activate the entire event representation. This does not prevent the child from recognizing familiar things or persons when they enter her perceptual field, but observations have consistently shown that children at this stage have great difficulty calling to mind the inner representations of such people or things when they are not actually present. Having offered these clarifications, I want to make the further point that the type of cognitive representation that Nelson has described corresponds perfectly to what I have been calling the sensorimotor level of cognition. However, on one particular point, Nelson's formulation leads us to depart

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from Arbib's. To repeat the definition given earlier, Arbib views the schema as "a domain of interaction, which may be an object in the usual sense, an attention-riveting detail of an object, or some domain of social interaction" (Arbib, Conklin, and Hill 1987: 7). He also suggests that such basic units of cognitive representation can then be combined to form complex systems that he calls assemblages. This conceptualization of the relations between individual representations and the complex wholes of which they form part might be an acceptable description of the cognitive organization of adults, but it does not capture the progressive differentiation of entire event representations that Nelson's studies of cognitive development reveal.137 I would therefore like to adopt Nelson's idea that the child's early representations stand for entire events, the components of which can not be accessed separately. At the same time, I feel that the notion of functional autonomy that I have been developing can help us to understand why the child's early representations are holistic in the sense suggested by Nelson. During the early stages of development, the child is not able to call up the individual elements of an event representation, 138 because these representations are still directly linked to her ongoing action and current perceptual and affective states. To complete the picture sketched by our discussion of Nelson's model, I want to turn to the work by Bates and her colleagues (1983) on the development of naming in children. 139 In a further elaboration of their ground breaking work of the seventies, they present a model that postulates three levels or planes of cognition that underlie observable changes in communication. The central representation of things in this model is the script,140 a term that Bates and her colleagues borrowed from Shank and Abelson (1977). Like Nelson, Bates holds that each script represents a typical event and includes objects and people that are generally associated with the event as well as the child's vocalizations and gestures.141 The script constitutes the unit of representation at all three levels of Bates's model; changes in the child's behavior are explained in terms of the way the information contained in scripts can be accessed and manipulated. One of Bates' theses is that the basic components making up a script are present from the very first stage and that further developments make use of the relations that are already present. This model does not imply that the child's knowledge of the world is static and that no new information is acquired as the child moves into the later stages. Bates' point is simply that the

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addition of new components to the script is not necessary in any causal sense for the unfolding of the developmental sequence. Bates and her colleagues hold that at the first level of cognition, the script can be activated by any one of its components, but that such activation calls the entire script into readiness. At this stage, the child communication's would be limited to what Dore called proto-communicative signals. With the onset of the second stage in the development of naming both of these conditions undergo modification. The child now is able to activate the script and to use a component to stand for it. It is at this stage that we would see the appearance of pure performatives, which as we indicated earlier, are tightly linked to specific contexts or actions. We can now further specify that such utterances are inseparably tied to the overall structure of the script or event representation of which they are part. During the final stage, the child becomes able to use one component of the script, a sound, to designate another component, say a person or a thing. At this point, we can say that the child uses the uttered sound as a name for the thing it designates. To use the terminology we have adopted, the first two stages of Bates' model correspond to the sensorimotor level of representation, while the third corresponds to the conceptual level. We can further illustrate142 Bates' model of the relationship between the early development of cognition and communication with one of Dore's (1985: 35) examples of the transition between pure performatives and symbols. Dore's son, whom he designates as S, displayed an unusual set of verbal associations during the pure performative phase: S would use the sounds "mama" when he saw white cars, "dada" when he saw blue cars and "nana" when he saw brown ones. Dore explains this idiosyncratic use of person-related terms by speculating that his son was merely associating them with the color of the cars that he had seen respectively his mother, his father, and grandmother drive. What Dore is suggesting is that when S first learned these terms, he did not understand them to refer to a specific person or even to a specific color; he learned them as fixed associations between sounds, people, and the color of the cars they drove. Applying Bates' framework, we can say that the script representing people driving cars was at this point in development an undifferentiated whole. S could not, thus, use the sounds "mama", "dada" and "nana" to refer to other components of the script, i.e., his mother, father and grandmother; they stood instead for the entire script. In this example S is displaying behavior that is typical of

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Bates' second stage of cognitive development. However, during the course of a long car trip, Dore, after having observed his son use these terms in his customary way, began to label the different individuals by pointing to the person and uttering the term. S joined in the game and when asked "Who's that?" would respond with the appropriate label.143 He would also laugh when a term was applied to the wrong person. The appearance of word-like sounds in such play routines still falls under the category of pure performatives, so that the signing that Dore is describing here is best conceived as an intermediary step between communication by means of indices and symbol use. A significant step in the transition to symbols occurred during the next few days when S began to use these terms to designate the appropriate persons both inside and outside play routines. Bates' model would explain this development in terms of the child's growing ability to access components of the script separately and to use one component, a vocalization, to refer to another component which stands for a person. Let me now summarize the preceding account and examine how the notion of functional autonomy would fit in. It is customary to assert that the acquisition of naming involves learning to associate a sound with a referent. However, the work of Nelson and Bates suggests that something more is required and that the simple association of an uttered sound and a referent is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for symbol use. When a child first begins to use word-like sounds, a mental association between a sound and an object or person is certainly present, but these elements are equally strongly linked to the other components of the script. Rather than standing for a particular referent, the child's vocalizations are activated as part of the entire event representation. In order for a child to use sounds to refer to a particular class of things, she must be able to activate the schémas representing sound and referent independently of the rest of the script. In a similar way, my theory of functional autonomy holds that indexical communication is mediated by representations that take the form of tightly linked packages and that for genuine symbol use to emerge the components of such packages must be freed up so that they can be accessed independently. The further claim that I make is that sensory, motor and affective schémas are all fused together within these packages. The difference between my model and those of Bates and Nelson is, I would contend, a difference of perspective on the same basic phenomenon.

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Whereas Bates and Nelson formulate their accounts in terms of the objects, actions, and people that are assumed to be represented by a particular script or event representation, I formulate the notion of functional autonomy in terms of the basic functional divisions of the central nervous system. In the former instance the emphasis is placed upon those elements of the outside world that are represented; in the latter it is directed toward the source of the representations within the organism. Taken together144, these models present a more complete picture of the early development of cognition and communication in children. 7.5. Pure performatives and functional autonomy To further illustrate the principles that I have been expounding, let us examine several examples from the literature on language development. I want to continue the synthesizing effort of the previous paragraph by presenting evidence that the notion of functional autonomy can provide the criteria necessary to account for the different ways that the prelexical utterances of infants fall short of the threshold of symbolicity. I want to first make clear that whenever I speak of an act of communication that fails to meet the individual criteria of sensory, motor or affective autonomy, it should not be inferred that the representations of the child in question have achieved a sufficient degree of functional autonomy on the two other criteria. What we will find is that in given instances of weak functional autonomy, the utterance displays most noticeably an undifferentiated link to, say a perceptual schema, and in which case we will say that the particular instance lacks the requisite sensory autonomy to be considered a symbol. I will speak in this manner with the sole purpose of illustrating the thesis that sensory, motor and affective autonomy each play a crucial role in the emergence of symbol use. My hunch is that functional autonomy (or the lack thereof) of cognitive representations is a fairly unified phenomenon and that the child's capacity to represent will not possess substantially different degrees of autonomy along the three parameters, although at present it is very difficult to determine that this is actually the case. We should expect that, due to their own particular developmental history, vocalizations will be characterized by tighter links to either perceptual, motor or affective schémas. For instance, it is not surprising that Carlotta's use of "bam" would, in the early stages of its development, display weak motor autonomy, for it was acquired in connection with her actions upon her toy piano. However, this should not induce us to conclude that, at the

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period in question, Carlotta's representations were capable of sensory or affective autonomy. Nor do we have reason to conclude that the development of the different components of the functional autonomy of cognitive representations proceeds at different paces. With these qualifications in mind we can now examine some prelexical signs where the utterance can be said to be tightly bound to the percept with which it was originally associated. Bloom (1973) cites the example of an infant who would say "car" when cars would pass by in the street below. At a first glance it is tempting to conclude that the child was using these sounds to refer to cars and that his utterances qualify as rudimentary symbols. However, the specific pattern of the child's use of this utterance makes it quite clear that this attribution of reference is premature. The fact of the matter is that when this utterance was first observed (9-10 months), the child would not use it to designate stationary cars or pictures of cars but only in conjunction with cars passing by in the street. To apply Nelson's formulation, we can say that the child possessed an event representation of cars in movement, the components of which were cars and their typical motion, the vocalization "car" and the child's particular view, i.e., looking out on the street below, of these events. The dynamic element that makes this the representation of an event is the movement of the cars across the perceptual field. At this early stage in the development of symbol use, the child's use of the word "car" within such a narrow range of circumstances would suggest that this event representation functioned in the child's cognition as an undifferentiated whole, with the vocalization being bound to specific perceptual schémas, cars in movement, and to the child's location in relation to the cars. In a very similar example Piaget (1962) reported that when his daughter Jacqueline was 12 months old, she would utter "bowwow" upon observing, from her vantage point on a balcony, a dog pass by below in the street. In this instance there is an additional element that suggests the child's behavior is mediated by an undifferentiated script. Jacqueline was observed to use this sign not only in the presence of dogs but also in conjunction with horses, cars, baby carriages, and people when and only when they were seen from her balcony. Thus, the utterance was not used to pick out a particular class of entities, wherever and however they might have come to the child's attention, but rather was directly linked to the child's representation of things passing in the street. In a third example of an utterance lacking the requisite degree of

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perceptual autonomy, Nelson (1985) describes the development of Billy's use of the sounds "tih-toh" (his pronunciation of the baby-talk lexeme "ticktock" to refer to clocks). At 11 months Billy first began to use these sounds exclusively in the presence of his grandmother's clock. At 12 months his use of the term took on a broader range, it now being uttered in conjunction with any number of clocks. Although this case is a bit more complex than the previous two, it is still possible to identify two specific contexts in which it appeared. First Billy would utter "tih-toh" in response to a clock's chimes. He also used it to answer his mother's question "What does the clock say?" In the first instance, Billy's utterance was triggered by a particular stimulus, whereas in the second it formed part of a social routine. In neither case would it be appropriate to attribute a strong degree of functional autonomy. Then, during a two-week period during the fourteenth month, Billy was observed to utter "tih toh" while searching among his toys. In this instance the term was not triggered by the stimulus but rather preceded it. Nelson speculates that at this point the utterance was used as a device to plan the child's search. It is a fairly common observation that before using single-word utterances to communicate with others, the child uses them in a sort of self-communication as a mnemonic device or for planning. Bates' example of the early use of "bam" also fits this basic profile. 145 Such examples suggest that the child was now beginning to be able to utter sounds in the absence of the stimulus, i.e., the sight or sounds of clocks, that would normally trigger the activation of the entire script. At this point it is perhaps appropriate to consider the fact that many of these initial single-sign utterances ("bow-wow", "tih-toh") are onomatopoeias which are generally considered by semioticians to be iconic because they are signs that resemble their objects. It might thus seem to be erroneous to invoke them as instances of the development of symbolic communication. An important consideration, which unfortunately tends to be neglected by child language researchers, is whether the form of these utterances is provided by adults or by the child herself. I suspect that the former is most often the case since such forms are generally part of what is labeled in the literature "caretaker speech", i.e., the "baby talk" that adults engage in when speaking to infants. If we assume that adults provide these onomatopoeias, then the case can be made that it is not significantly easier for the child to learn such forms than to learn signs that are more clearly arbitrary. The alleged similarity between the utterance and the sound

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of a dog's bark is probably something we can recognize only within a specific cultural context.146 For instance the fact that, in the example cited earlier, Jacqueline used the sign "bow-wow" in the presence of all manner of things that do not make the appropriate noises is probably the strongest evidence that the relation of similarity escaped her. This sort of overgeneralization would seem to demonstrate that she had no idea that the sound she uttered was supposed to resemble the sounds that dogs make. In Chapter 4 I argued that, in order to attribute a particular semiotic property (indexical, iconic, or symbolic) to an utterance, we must have significant evidence that said property actually plays a causal role in either the encoding or decoding of the sign. Applying this principle to the case at hand, I would contend that the fact that adults view utterances such as "bow-wow" or "tih-toh" onomatopoeic is largely irrelevant to study of their role in the early stages of communication because young children display little or no awareness of the alleged similarity between their vocalizations and the sounds that things make. Moving now to instances where the child's utterances fall short of my criteria for symbol use because they lack affective autonomy, let us begin with the observation made by a number of researchers (Griffiths 1985; Lock 1980) concerning the predominantly emotional character of the child's early speech. Prior to the appearance of rudimentary symbols, a significant portion of the utterances used by children have as their primary function the signaling of the child's affective state. The development of requests is a particularly good illustration of this phenomena. During the pure performative stage, one of Bates' (1976, 1979) subjects would accompany gestural requests, i.e., reaching and pointing toward a desired object, with the sound "mm" which later took on a more word-like form "na-na". It is tempting to attribute some rudimentary propositional content to this, to use Bates' term, "protoimperative", by reasoning that these sounds encode the underlying proposition "I want X". Such a claim might be motivated by the belief that, since they can be used to request any number of things, these vocalizations can be said to function in a variety of contexts, thereby meeting the criteria for symbol use proposed in Chapter 4. This circumstance should not lead us to minimize the important way that they are context bound. Protoimperatives do not refer to specific objects or events, but rather seem to be indissociably linked to the child's desires. There are two basic reasons for denying these utterances semantic

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content. The first is that, although they can be used to ask for a variety of things, protoimperatives do not specify the object of the child's request; it is only because the child's vocalizations are generally accompanied by a pointing gesture that adults are able to know what the child wishes. Protoimperatives are thus highly dependent on the immediate context and lose their specific meaning if they are removed from it. The second reason for denying that these utterances are referential, even in the most rudimentary sense, is closely related to the first. These vocalizations do not stand for specific requests; instead they accompany and seem to form an integral part of the gestural act of pointing to the desired object, a consideration that shows the extent to which functional autonomy is an integrated cognitive phenomena. The example at hand could just as legitimately be analyzed as a case of weak motor autonomy as one of weak affective autonomy. However, which ever way we chose to consider it, the conclusion to be drawn is that the cognitive representations that mediate such utterances do not possess the degree of functional autonomy that is required for symbol use. In her discussion of the utterances of a sixteen-month old, Rachel, Nelson observes that not all the child's words were context-specific and cites as an example of a context-free vocalization "'mine' said in a whining tone and used with a grasping reach gesture..." (Nelson 1985: 51) Although this utterance did appear in different situations, Nelson's brief description does not rule out the possibility that it was used exclusively as a correlate of a particular affective state of the child, and as such would continue to be context-bound, as we have construed the notion. Once again we should note that in addition to being tightly linked to a particular class of affective states, this verbal sign is accompanied by a reaching gesture, which would suggest that the vocalization, gesture and affective state are all tightly linked together within a single, undifferentiated script. In the last two examples we have seen utterances that, in addition to displaying an indissociable link with particular affective states, are characterized by an equally close relation with a motor schema. To further demonstrate the role played by the notion of motor autonomy in the analysis of symbol use, let us examine an observation by Svachkin (1973), who reported that his daughter had uttered regularly the sound "kitty" as part of a simple game played with an adult. The game in question consisted of the infant throwing a toy kitten out of her crib, uttering the Russian

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equivalent of kitty and then waiting for the adult to hand back the toy and at which point the game would begin anew. In her analysis of this example Bates (1979) declines attributing semantic content to the child's vocalization, because the signal "kitty" only appears within the framework of this game and is not used to refer to cats in other contexts. What we seem to have here is an action sequence: the child first throws the toy kitty and then utters the appropriated sounds. To account for this sequence we have to posit an event representation that would include the child's actions and vocalizations. At the stage of development in question, Svachkin's daughter appears unable to call up the schema controlling her vocalizations without activating the rest of the sequence. We must conclude, therefore, her utterance does not possess sufficient motor autonomy to qualify as a symbol. I would like to conclude this section with an example that illustrates the stages that make up the transition from pure performatives to symbols. In Bates' study (1979) of the changes in the use of the term "papa" by one infant over a period of several months, she found that, when it first appeared, the term was used as part of an undifferentiated action schema. The child would, for instance, utter "papa" as she would crawl toward her father. In this instance the particular vocalization and movement typically accompanied each other and the one would rarely occur without the other. Using the framework being proposed here, such an utterance would be said to lack motor autonomy. Next, the term took on an anticipatory function in that it would appear when the child would hear someone at the door prior to the father's appearance. Here the child was responding to the causal connection between the sound of someone at the door and the appearance of her father, which in a fairly reliable fashion, would follow. It is important to recognize that the temporal separation between the father's appearance and the child's utterance, though ever so slight, is an indication of an increase in the functional autonomy of the child's representations. In the following phase, according to Bates, the child would use the term to designate actions and the agents or objects of such actions. She illustrates this phase by pointing to instances where children would use "papa" in order to request their father to give them whatever he was holding. Whether or not this type of communication actually constitutes an advance over the previous examples is certainly open for discussion however, the relevance of this example for the present purposes is that the script in which the term

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is embedded has still not attained the degree of differentiation needed to permit it be used referentially; the sensory autonomy of the child's representations is not sufficient to support symbol use. In the fourth stage the child uses words to designate a category of persons, objects or events within a broader range of contexts. This can be illustrated by the use of the term "papa" to designate not only her father but men in general. There is no doubt that such a use constitutes an overextension of the term and for this reason its meaning does not coincide with that which adults would attach to it. These considerations should not, however, blind us to the important modification that this use represents. At this stage, the child demonstrates a nascent ability to detach the utterance from its script and to use it to refer to another element of the script, one that stands for men in general. We can also describe this development as the emergence of conceptual representation whereby the child begins to be able to activate individual representations in relative independence from current sensory and affective states as well as from ongoing activity. The entire sequence plots out the transition from indexical to symbolic communication and illustrates the role that the increasing degree of functional autonomy of the child's representations plays in this transition. Having presented a series of examples to illustrate the notion of functional autonomy, I would like to conclude this section by examining some general issues. Let us first consider another possible explanation of the emergence of symbolic communication. Some researchers (Dare 1978; McShane 1979) account for this developmental sequence by invoking a "naming insight" or "designation hypothesis" that involves "the realization on the part of the child that language constitutes a system of using words as symbols, symbols that can be recombined in different ways to stand for different relations between things in the world" (Nelson 1985: 63). While it is no doubt true that at this point in their development children do gain insight into the referential power of words, we must be careful about equating this transition with the sudden illumination that Helen Keller described, when at the age of 20 she became aware that words are used to refer to things. Since Keller was much older and had assimilated a much greater portion of the social and physical world than a 15 month old child, her discovery brought together a whole variety of things and made them comprehensible. In contrast, we have little reason to believe that, when a child of 15 months begins to use symbols, she is able to comprehend the

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far-reaching consequences of this new skill. This realization is, I would argue, much more gradual than the formulations of Dare and McShane would have us believe. We must admit, however, that these points are highly speculative and it is probably impossible to determine who is right. A more important issue is that by speaking of the acquisition of the concept of naming, McShane and Dare suggest that naming is a concept to be learned like any other. Their account offers no explanation of why children are able to learn this concept at this particular stage of development nor do they offer any insight into why children can learn this concept, while the young of other species can not. And most importantly, this formulation obscures the fact that the emergence of symbol use is but one manifestation of a profound transformation of the child's cognitive structures that affects many aspects of her behavior. One additional issue that I would like to address is how would the development of functional autonomy fit into a general model of cognitive development. The view that I find most persuasive holds that developing cognitive mechanisms do not operate across the board, but rather are applied to specific domains that group together different behaviors that place similar demands on cognition. Researchers such as Bates (1979) and Ammon (1977) have challenged Piaget's (1954) assertion that the general cognitive principles that emerge at each stage of the child's development trigger changes in all areas of cognition. If this sort of "deep homology" model were correct, it is argued, then we should expect to find significant correlations across the entire range of sensorimotor development. In her study of 25 infants Bates (1979) found strong correlations between language development and measures of Imitation, Means-Ends Relations, Combinatorial Play and Symbolic Play, but measures such as Object Permanence and Spatial Relations gave a low, nonsignificant correlation with language. The strong correlation between certain measures of cognitive development and that of language presents a convincing case for the existence of common mechanisms underlying linguistic and nonlinguistic behaviors, whereas the nonsignificant correlation between Object Permanence and Spatial Relations on the one hand and language on the other tends to rule out an account in terms of general maturational factors. Since the relevant research offers evidence of meaningful parallels between language and some but not all measures of early cognitive development, neo-Piagetian theorists generally reject the "deep homology" model in favor

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of an account in terms of "local homologies" according to which development brings changes in cognitive domains that share a common mechanism. The development of functional autonomy, as I have been describing it, would appear to constitute a perfect example of such a common mechanism. We have seen that functional autonomy is involved in the development of tool use and symbolic communication and the case can be made that it is the common mechanism underlying the behaviors, i.e., Imitation, Means-Ends Relations, Combinatorial Play and Symbolic Play, that Bates found were strongly correlated with language. In closing, it is worth noting that the local homology model of cognitive development offers a compromise between Piaget's views on the relationship between language and cognition and those of Chomsky.147 Whereas Chomsky argues that language is mediated by unique cognitive mechanisms and Piaget held that the stages of early language development are similar to those occurring in all areas of cognition, the local homology model claims that language shares a common set of structures with a specific set of nonlinguistic behaviors. This view rejects Chomsky's position by holding that the development of language is linked to that of some other cognitive domains, but stops short of Piaget's thesis that developmental changes operate simultaneously in all domains of cognition. 7.6. Cognition and social development The argument commonly invoked to reject the sort of approach to symbol use that I have been advocating here is that meaning is ultimately a social phenomenon and that only a framework that formulates this question in those terms can help us to understand it. I would now like to address this possible criticism by further pursuing the point that I made in chapter 3 that cognitive and social approaches to these questions are not irreconcilable. There is no doubt that cognitive development takes place within and is shaped by a particular social context. That I have accorded greater attention to cognitive development does not mean that it is being proposed that the effects of the child's maturation within a social group can be neglected. Quite to the contrary, I am convinced that cognitive and social factors are equally important to the child's development; it is simply that I have chosen to focus on the cognitive component. At the same time, I would strongly contest the suggestion that an account of the child's social development could allow us to dispense with a cognitive account. Partisans on both sides of this debate have urged that their approach alone could make sense of

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meaning and development. However, I believe that the proper course of action is to attempt to determine what each approach can contribute and how we can bring these different factors together within a coherent account. To illustrate the sort of interaction that I have in mind, I will examine a few examples of the development of cognition and functional autonomy in a social context. In developmental psychology there has been a tendency, in large part due to the influence of Piaget, to view development from the perspective of the solitary child who "struggles single-handed to strike some equilibrium between assimilating the world to himself or himself to the world." (Bruner 1985: 25) The most persuasive and insightful voice in favor of the careful consideration of the social context of cognitive development has been that of L. S. Vygotsky (1962, 1978). Of particular interest here is his notion of "the zone of proximal development" which he defined as "the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers" (Vygotsky 1978: 86). What Vygotsky is suggesting is that when the infant interacts with adults or older children, the latter provide support structures that enable the enfant to participate in social activities whose cognitive demands exceed the child's current level of development. Adults and older children generally take care to tailor the demands of the activity so that the infant is able to take part. The baby talk adults use when speaking to young children is a familiar example of this process. Although they are generally not aware of the reasons for their behavior, adults typically adjust the level of complexity of their speech to fit the level of linguistic development of the child and studies have shown that four yearolds make similar adjustments when speaking to two year-olds (Gellman and Shatz 1977). As a result of this sort of assistance, the infant gradually assimilates or internalizes the structures of the activity so that she is able to participate more fully. At any given level of development, the child is capable of assimilating structures of a certain complexity, yet this assimilation provides an added impetus for attaining higher levels of development which permits the assimilation of structures of even greater complexity, a process that can continue throughout the formative years and beyond. The last sentences of the previous paragraph introduce a second major

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component of Vygotsky's view of cognitive development, namely that a great deal of the organization of human cognition first appears in the social realm and is subsequently internalized. 148 On this subject he wrote that "it is necessary that everything internal in higher forms was external, that is, for others it was what it now is for oneself. Any higher mental function necessarily goes through an external stage in its development because it is initially a social function" (1981: 162). Before providing specific examples of this process, we need to assess the import of Vygotsky's ideas. As a matter of common sense, we all know that children learn language and culture from their parents and other children; since the system of signs the child is acquiring is conventional, it would be by definition impossible for this system to be acquired in a social vacuum. Thus, Vygotsky's insight might appear to be a meager one. But, when we try to conceive how children actually acquire language and culture, there is a tendency to adopt either an Augustian view according to which this acquisition is achieved by means of active instruction on the part of parents or a Piagetian one that places the emphasis on the child's inferring relevant principles from her parents' behavior. Vygotsky's insight consists in conceiving this process as quintessentially interactive with both parents and the child making a specific contributions. To illustrate this interaction let us examine Jerome Bruner's (1983) work on the social scripts that facilitate the child's entry into language. Bruner focused on what he called formats, which are routinized activities that give the child the opportunity to engage in social interaction and to communicate in an orderly fashion long before language appears. One such format was the peekaboo game that one of Bruner's subjects, Jonathan, would play with his mother. The two basic components of this format are the disappearance and the reappearance of a person or object. The variation of the game that Bruner studied in detail involved a toy clown which would disappear into a cone. Jonathan's mother would typically begin by asking "Who's this?" to call her son's attention to the clown. She would then accompany the disappearance of the clown by saying "Here he goes!", "He's gone!", "Where is he?" and "He's coming. Boo, Jonathan! Here he is" to mark the clown's reappearance. To grasp the role of such formats in the development of the child's communication, it is important to realize that such games hold little genuine surprise for the child and that the recurrent structure of the game allows the

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infant whose cognitive capacity is still quite limited to anticipate the sequence of acts and utterances and to eventually participate at the correct moment. Like Nelson's event representations, Bruner's formats also contain social roles. The principal role in this particular format consists in making the clown disappear and appear. At the outset this role was played exclusively by the mother, but as his mastery of the game increased Jonathan would also assume it. The development of the child's participation passed through a number of stages.149 From five to nine months, his role was essentially passive, observing but not participating directly in the game. The initial change that Bruner noted was a gradual increase in Jonathan's ability to anticipate what was to follow in the sequence of events. First he observed that Jonathan, at points in the sequence where his mother would say something, would look away from the clown and smile at his mother in anticipation. This development would indicate that he was beginning to develop a sensorimotor event representation of the game. During the next few months he began to utter "oo" when the clown would reappear.150 By the age of fourteen months, he was able to play the role of initiator of the game and would accompany vocally, though idiosyncratically, its different phases. For instance, when the clown disappeared he would say "a ga"(all gone). This finding is consistent with the pattern of development that has been previously described, namely that during the first half of the second year the child's speech is performative: it simply accompanies the child's activities but does not refer. From a cognitive point of view, his utterances evince an incipient though still rudimentary differentiation of the corresponding sensorimotor schémas. It is also important to note that at this stage of Jonathan's development he was beginning to learn to place his utterances into the appropriate slot in the format sequence. At nineteen months Jonathan had advanced in his mastery of this format until he was able to play peekaboo by himself. At this stage he would make objects appear and disappear and, pretending that they were people, would greet them and bid them farewell. This stage marked the completion of the internalization of the format; Jonathan could now initiate the game, orchestrate its phases and assume fully and appropriately the different roles. We should note that he was not simply playing peekaboo as he had learned it; he had successfully adapted the game to new contexts. This ability constitutes evidence, I believe, that he had attained, at least in this particular domain, the conceptual level of representation. In order to create variants

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of the peekaboo game, he had to, it would seem, decompose the original game with the clown disappearing into the cone to determine the essential elements of the game, i.e., one object that hides a second object and a way of making the second object reappear. The second step would be to find appropriate substitutes for the clown and the cone. Of course, this task could be solved by simple trial and error, but given that the number of possible combinations of household items would be very high this solution does not appear plausible. A more efficient strategy would consist of mentally manipulating representations of the available objects and gauging which ones would be appropriate. One of the variants of the peekaboo format that Jonathan played consisted of hiding the pieces of a puzzle in a kettle and then making them reappear by opening the lid. In addition to providing evidence of conceptual representation, this stage in the development of the peekaboo format illustrates one of Vygotsky's central principles, namely that many cognitive structures first appear in the domain of social interaction and are subsequently internalized. In the case in hand, the peekaboo format was introduced by Jonathan's mother, but by dint of regular and active participation in the game, the child was able to assimilate it to his own cognitive structures. We now need to consider the status of Jonathan's vocalizations at this stage of development. Returning to the kettle example, Bruner reported that Jonathan would say "bye house" 151 when he would cover the kettle and "hello house" when he would lift the lid. We noted earlier that at fourteen months his utterances were essentially performative, that is they would accompany his participation in the game, but lacked semantic content. The relevant question here is whether his utterances still qualify as performative or whether they show signs of symbolicity. I have been arguing that an important criterion for considering an utterance symbolic is that the child be able to use it in a variety of settings and in fact my principal reason for maintaining that pure performatives are not symbols is that they are firmly linked to a single context. Bruner indicates that at this stage not only did Jonathan say "hello" and "bye-bye" when playing peekaboo, he also used them systemically and appropriately to greet and to bid people farewell. Bruner also notes that Jonathan was able to assume the interchangeable roles with ease, which further supports the case that he was using them with meaningful intent. We can conclude this discussion of Bruner's work on formats by

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considering two additional points. An important component of the interaction between adults and children is what Bruner has called the handover principle whereby the parent introduces a new procedure into the game and allows the child to take over the procedure when he achieves a certain degree of familiarity with it. What Bruner is suggesting here is that the parent systematically increases the complexity of the format as the infant demonstrates mastery of simpler forms. Parents seem to possess a very accurate sense of what the infant is able to do at a given stage in her development and are careful to provide the infant with a helping hand to accommodate the newly added elements. A corollary to the handover principle is the insistence on the part of the parent that the infant use the most complex procedures that she is capable of rather than allowing her to fall back on simpler responses. Some examples from the book reading format that Bruner studied can illustrate this phenomenon. Early in the development of this format, the mother of another of Bruner's subjects, Richard, would direct the child's attention towards a picture in a book and ask "What's that?" When Richard would respond with a string of babbles, his mother would generally say "Yes, that's an 'x'". Later on, when Richard would respond by using a word-like babble with a consistent form, his mother would no longer be satisfied with a random string of babbles; she insisted on lexeme-length vocalizations. At a still later stage, Richard's mother would insist that he label the picture with a word, but would still make some allowance for the infant's rather limited lexicon and would accept "mouse" as a correct label for a picture of squirrels. Thus, we see that parents both prepare infants to learn increasingly complex elements of the format and insist that they put to use the most complex forms at their disposal rather than reverting to simpler forms. Let us now summarize this discussion. Aside from the ludic function they serve, simple games played by the infant and his caretakers provide an effective way of focusing the infant's attention on relevant features of the environment, of helping her to acquire communicative functions and introducing her to the social conventions which are necessary for the proper use of language. In a sense, formats constitute a sort of developmental prothesis because they adapt important tasks and functions to the still rudimentary cognitive skills of the infant. At a time when the complexity of the physical and social environment far exceeds her ability to process

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information, formats provide the infant with a regular sequence of acts that become internalized with repetition over several months. In a similar fashion, formats create simplified settings in which the infant can engage in organized interaction with adults by merely following the rules of the game without needing to understand the larger consequences of her actions. Another important characteristic of formats is that the sequence of events that compose them is not a natural one, but instead follows a highly conventionalized pattern. In this way, formats give the infant a first glimpse at the conventional nature of human culture. Finally, it is important to note that the infant can participate in the activities organized by the format at a number of different and successively more complex levels. Once the infant masters one level of complexity, she is able to redirect her attention to more difficult aspects of the format, and, since formats have such clearly defined roles, she can, as her knowledge of the game develops, assume the more active role of the parent. This aspect of the child's behavior has a parallel with that of the parent who often dispenses with procedures that the child has already mastered. Thus far in our examination of Bruner's work on formats, we have stressed the social dimension of development. We now need to see how the notion of functional autonomy would fit into this framework. Bruner argues that children are endowed with four general cognitive mechanisms that permit them to participate in formats and to eventually master language and culture. The first element of this general cognitive endowment is the child's sensitivity to the "structure of action and particularly the manner in which means and ends must be combined in achieving satisfactory outcomes..." (Bruner 1983: 26) This means-end readiness enables the infant to analyze the sequence of events that make up a given format and to participate in an appropriate fashion. Secondly, human infants have a strong disposition to engage in social and communicative activities. The third element that predisposes children for participation in formats is the systematicity of their behavior. What Bruner means here is that the child, instead of generating behavior randomly, tries out a small number of action schémas on a variety of objects and eventually begins to combine them into novel patterns. He argues that the ability to use "a small set of elements to create a larger range of possibilities" (Bruner 1983: 29) plays a crucial role in the development of the child's mastery of formats. Finally, the infant's early behavior is characterized by its abstractness. Bruner suggests that, far from

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being a blooming, buzzing confusion, the infant's perceptual world is rather orderly and is organized by what seem to be highly abstract rules. This capacity for abstract analysis allows infants to recognize the invariant structure that underlies the many surface variations that appear in formats. For the purposes of the present discussion, I would like to exclude from consideration the second of these general principles. The predisposition for communication and social interaction is crucial for human development; my reason for leaving it to one side is that it involves, I believe, different mechanisms than the other three, which would seem to be closely related to what I have been calling functional autonomy. Before attempting to demonstrate this link, we need to point out that Bruner offers evidence that these abilities are present when the infant is several weeks old. Thus, it is his contention that they first appear while the child is still operating at the sensorimotor level of cognitive representation. However, we need to recognize that during the infant's first year, these abilities are still quite rudimentary and, it is only during the second year with the development of conceptual representation that they truly begin to fulfill the functions that Bruner attributes to them. The young infant is no doubt sensitive to action sequences, but, as we saw earlier in this chapter, there is little evidence that, prior to Piaget's Sensorimotor Stage 5 and 6, the child demonstrates unequivocally the ability to break down action sequences into relations between means and ends. We need to distinguish between anticipation of what will follow in a action sequence, an ability that small infants display, and the ability to perform means-ends analysis which only begins to emerge during the second year (Nelson 1985). The same can be said for what Bruner has called the systematicity of the child's behavior. While the first part of Bruner's formulation, i.e., the tendency to try out the entire repertoire of action schémas on any object, is true of young children, the second part, i.e., the recombination of existing elements to yield novel patterns, only appears during the child's second year. In fact, Bruner's study of Jonathan's acquisition of the peekaboo game illustrates this developmental sequence since Jonathan first began to create novel versions of this game during the second half of his second year. Not wishing to belabor this point, a similar demonstration can be made regarding the third of Bruner's general cognitive principles, the abstractness of the child's behavior. A more pressing matter is to introduce the notion of functional autonomy into the discussion. The reader will recognize that

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the general cognitive principles that Bruner posits bear a striking resemblance to the abilities that I have linked to functional autonomy. The analysis of means-end relations, the recombination of familiar schémas into novel patterns and the recognition of the invariant structure of formats would all seem to involve the mental manipulation of relevant representations. Moreover, the relation between Bruner's general cognitive principles and my notion of functional autonomy becomes even more convincing when we consider that the abilities that Bruner attributes to children practically from birth do not become fully operational until a significant degree of differentiation of the child's sensorimotor schémas is achieved. To grasp the relation between Bruner's ideas and what I have been proposing here, we need to realize that a portion of the explanation of the child's progressive mastery of formats is to be found in the process whereby adults tailor the demands of an activity to the child's current level of development, the child then using this level of participation as a platform152 to reach higher levels of performance. However, this explanation can only be completed by providing a developmental mechanism that would enable the child to participate at successively higher levels. The model of functional autonomy that I have been developing would seem to offer such a mechanism. I will conclude this section by stating the obvious: the previous discussion of Bruner's work on formats illustrates but one way that cognition and social context interact during the development of the child. In recent years there has been a substantial increase in the number of developmental studies that focus on social factors; Vygotsky's ideas have contributed in no small way to this trend. The point that I hope to have made is that the adoption of a cognitive approach to symbol use, language or meaning does not entail a rejection of the importance of the social context. Quite to the contrary, it is my conviction that these two approaches, if properly construed, offer complementary perspectives that are necessary for a thorough account of these phenomena. I also hope to have provided evidence of the value of a developmental approach to the question of the sociocultural dimension of language and meaning. It is all too common for proponents of the view that meaning and language are essentially social to ignore how the social context actually guides the development of the child. The thing that is puzzling about this neglect is that if meaning and language are ultimately social, the reason for this is that they developed within a social context. A

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conventions yet ignores the precise processes by which these factors actually influence the development of meaning is, in my mind, seriously flawed. So, in closing this section, I want to stress the need for proponents of sociocultural views of language and/or meaning to pay serious heed to the manner in which these phenomena develop. 7.7. Conclusion In the preceding I have attempted to flesh out the notion of functional autonomy and to give the reader a glimpse of the sort of questions it enables us to address. I argued that my account was consistent with important models (Bates and Nelson) in the field of developmental linguistics. I also attempted to show, in my discussion of utterances that failed to meet my criteria of symbol use, how the notion of functional autonomy could make a specific contribution to work in this field. I do not intend this as a definitive account of symbol use, but I feel that it does provide a useful starting point. As I indicated in Chapters 2 and 5,1 believe that the notion of functional autonomy can fill an important lacuna within the broad-based account of reason, meaning and language that Johnson, Lakoff and the other participants of the second phase of cognitivism are putting together. In other words, the account presented here is not intended to stand alone; it would take its place within a much more comprehensive framework that remains to be elaborated. Moreover, as I have stated on a number of occasions, a cognitive approach alone can not provide a thorough understanding of symbol use; it must be articulated one day with an account of the sociocultural factors that come into play. Thus, to the extent that the notion of functional autonomy proves to be a valuable addition to our understanding of the mediation of symbols, it would need to be combined with a model of the sociocultural dimension of this question.

Afterword As I bring this endeavor to a conclusion, I feel compelled to say a few words about the obvious: to the extent that this book is an attempt at establishing a dialogue between semiotics and cognitive science, the conversation has been a bit one-sided because I have been almost exclusively concerned with the insights that cognitive science could lend to the semiotic study of symbols. If I had set out to convince cognitive scientists of the need for them to take greater stock of the semiotic nature of many of the questions that they investigate, the final result would have been quite different. The reason why this book turned out the way it did was that I started out with some queries about the nature and workings of symbol use and conjectured that cognitive science could provide a vantage point that was not available within semiotics. This choice skewed my interests towards the cognitive side of the equation, however, I don't believe that I can be accused of having imported unadulterated cognitive science to the theory of signs. The very attempt to coax insights on semiotic matters from cognitive science obliged me to take a critical stance towards cognitivist orthodoxy. I would even go as far as to say that my commitment to semiotics played an important role in my willingness to follow Johnson, Lakoff and the other architects of the second phase of the cognitive turn down the road towards a sensorimotor view of knowledge. When I first learned that cognitive science had profoundly adopted the view of cognition as symbol manipulation, I felt assured that developments in this field would be relevant to the semiotic study of symbols. Little did I realize that the demands of a cognitive account of symbol use would lead me to endorse substantial modifications of the tenants of mainstream cognitive science. Most importantly I challenged two principles that classical cognitivism had inherited from the linguistic turn: the notion that cognition is essentially propositional and the belief that a complete specification of cognition could be provided in terms of syntactic relations linking mental states. I also came to the conclusion that a major error committed by the partisans of the first phase of the cognitive turn was to have taken the view of cognition offered by the simulation of intelligent action by computers as the sole valid model of cognition. I argued that we should reject this version of monistic cognitivism in favor of a model of cognition that recognizes three distinct modes or levels of cognition,

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sensorimotor, conceptual, and prepositional. I suggested that the sensorimotor level is firmly anchored in the functional cycle of perception, action and motivation. Although we often take this mode of cognition for granted, it is extremely important because it ensures the survival of countless species and because in humans it constitutes the foundation upon which all other structures of meaning and knowledge are built. The crucial feature of this mode is that it relies on schémas or event representations that function as undifferentiated wholes. The activation of representations at this level is an all or nothing process; either the entire event representation is activated or it remains dormant. To formulate this idea in terms of the functional cycle, sensorimotor schémas and motivational states form a tightly linked package. At this level of cognition the organism has little or no ability to devise novel courses of action or to plan activities in advance of actually performing them. The theoretical reason for according such importance to the sensorimotor level of cognition is that it allows us to remedy an important defect of mainstream cognitive science by firmly grounding meaning in the functional cycle of perception, action and motivation. This move addresses one problem, i.e., it places meaning at the center of our theoretical framework from the very outset, but it creates another problem. One of the principal features of human language and cognition is its ability to transcend the here and now. Our ability to talk about things that are absent, our ability to think about abstract ideas that have little or no footing in the physical world, our ability to plan future courses of action are but some examples of this capacity to go beyond the information given. The problem that a sensorimotor view of meaning must confront is simply that, if meaning is ultimately grounded in the functional cycle, how is it possible for us to so consistently and effortlessly step outside it. The notion of functional autonomy was designed to respond to this query. I argued that the transition between the sensorimotor level of cognition and the conceptual level involves a functional emancipation of the organism's representations from its ongoing activity and perceptual and motivational states. As a consequence of this emancipation, it becomes possible for the organism to mentally manipulate its representations in the absence of the corresponding objects or emotions and without automatically enacting the associated motor sequences. It was claimed that this ability to mentally manipulate representations constitutes a very general mechanism that

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operates in a wide variety of cognitive domains. The domain that was of greatest interest to us was symbolic communication where we found that in order to use one element of an event representation, a vocalization, to stand for another element, an entity or process, a substantial degree of functional autonomy was necessary. But we also analyzed the role of functional autonomy in tool use and problem-solving. It was our contention that these two activities relied on the ability to perform mentally part-whole analysis of the situation at hand and then to reorganize the elements yielded by this analysis into novel combinations whose suitability as a solution to the problem could be evaluated. I would now like to examine the theoretical status of the notion of functional autonomy. One important question that I have yet raise is does this notion refer to an empirically verifiable phenomena or is it merely a theoretical construct. Although psychologists such as Bates (1979) and McNeil (1979) have taken serious steps towards developing such a notion, the present formulation is, to my knowledge, the first to have united the sensory, affective, and motor components of this notion and to have associated them with symbol use. It is conceivable that Bates and McNeil refrained from an explicit formulation of this notion because it is so difficult to pin down empirically. However, I feel that this difficulty should not lead us to abandon it. Students of animal behavior (Oakley 1985; Walker 1983) postulate the existence of mental representations, such as cognitive maps, to account for the behavior of the animals they study, and cognitive psychologists build their views of human cognition on similar representations. I would agree that, in both cases, it is necessary to posit such cognitive structures, but, as I have argued, the question that must be asked is are we really talking about the same type of representations. If no distinction is made between them, then I am afraid that we will have a great deal of difficulty in explaining why humans are able to mentally manipulate their representations independently of current sensory input, affective states, or motor activity, and why other animals seemingly are not so able. This difficulty is closely related to the one that I spoke of in conjunction with Fodor's language of thought thesis and with propositional views of cognition in general. I would contend that, if we wish to differentiate these two types of cognition, only a principle that is similar to functional autonomy can do the trick. Although I will not attempt to provide such a demonstration here, I am inclined to believe that the different concepts,

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truth conditions, conventions and intentions, that are invoked to account for the fact that sounds and marks can come to convey meaning, can be shown to presuppose in a significant sense functional autonomy. Thus, despite the problems posed by the empirical investigation of this notion, there are very compelling reasons to use it as working hypothesis. Perhaps some day someone will develop an explanatory principle that is easier to verify; but, until that day comes, I believe that we can not do without the notion of functional autonomy if we wish to make these fundamental distinctions. At this juncture we need to consider a possible objection to this approach. Proponents of mainstream cognitive science might argue that the challenges to the computational view of mind issued by Johnson, Lakoff, Arbib, Nelson and others run the serious danger of undermining the very basis of cognitivism. To demonstrate that this conclusion does not follow, and to suggest the possibility of adopting a cognitivist position without subscribing to the computational view of mind, let us to return one last time to some of the issues discussed earlier. To assume that the mind is computational is a bold conjecture and very often such daring is needed to mobilize time and energy in a promising line of inquiry. However, I believe that this hypothesis becomes pernicious when it leads to the judgement that anything that is not computational is irrelevant to the study of cognition. The view that human cognition has a great deal in common with the information processing that computers perform is, I would argue, a reasonable view; and it would be an empirical question to determine which aspects of cognition are computational and which are not. However, when classical cognitivists exclude from consideration those cognitive processes that are not amenable to computer simulation, they seriously compromise the continued development of the discipline. The view I am advocating would recognize the utility of computer simulations of cognition, but would insist that cognitive models of mind account for cognition in all its richness and complexity. Such a view would authorize a fundamental division of labor within cognitive science: one branch would be concerned with the modeling of cognitive processes that are amenable to computer simulation, while a second would undertake the empirical investigation and the theoretical explanation of those processes that are recalcitrant to a computational approach. This way of developing models of the mind would make use of computational processes, which are well-defined and relatively well-understood, as a conceptual core around

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which a richer, more-inclusive account could be built. Moving on to matters more directly semiotic, I would like to make it clear that the model of symbolic communication presented in these pages is in no way intended to be a definitive account of the processes that mediate this sort of sign behavior; I merely hope that it will have provided the reader with a clear enough idea of my conception of semiosis so as to spark discussion and encourage further inquiry. My primary goal was to develop an account of symbol use in order to illustrate this conception, but I believe that the perspective adopted also sheds light on this capacity that all too often we take for granted. On several occasions I have discussed the ideas of other scholars (especially Meunier and Miranda) who are working to bridge the gap between semiotics and cognitive science. Although there is much that links these projects and my own and I have at times borrowed notions from them, I would like to stress once again our differences. At the heart of the matter is a different appraisal of how compatible semiotics and cognitive science, as they are currently construed, actually are. With the exception of perhaps Miranda, 153 these researchers display little awareness of the need to either overcome the antimentalistic temper of so much of contemporary semiotics154 or to reform the basic tenets of cognitive science in a semiotically enlightened way. Furthermore, on the latter question, these researchers do not seem to be familiar with the work of Johnson, Lakoff, and others who are challenging these tenants from within cognitive science and who are developing a substantially different brand of cognitivism. I firmly believe that in order to build cognitive semiotics on a solid foundation, we need to be aware of and take steps to overcome the tendencies within both cognitive science and semiotics that stand in the way of their rapprochement. We also need to consider the question of how the cognitive framework proposed here will fit into the existing disciplinary matrix of semiotics. I have suggested that the adoption of a cognitive approach does not require us to abandon tried and true methods, but we do need to a bit more specific as to what this addition will entail. In semiotics it has become customary (Eco 1976) to distinguish between communication and signification. This is a valuable distinction, but the approach I advocate should lead us to modify the latter term. As a general rule, the system of signification thought to account for a given set of instances of communication takes the form of

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a theory of codes that specifies the relations that hold between form and content. The elaboration of a theory of codes clearly falls within the purview of what I have been calling pure semiotics. As a consequence of my critique of this conception of semiotics and my desire to include cognitive considerations within the scope of semiotics, I believe that we should make room for a cognitive theory of our ability to establish and to recognize codes within our conception of signification. Whenever we call something a sign, we are always, at least implicitly, defining it as such in relation to a given organism or class of organisms. Such a cognitive theory would not replace the theories of codes that semioticians currently invoke; its function would be to place such theories on a solider footing and fill in some important gaps in the account of the workings of signs that semiotics can offer. The step away from the pure semiotic position that I have proposed can be seen as part and parcel of the natural development of semiotics as a discipline. As I mentioned in my Introduction, it was of paramount importance for semioticians in the initial stages of the development of their discipline to delimit an autonomous field of study. The pure semiotics position results, I would argue, from taking this perfectly reasonable strategy for a necessary feature of the discipline. The fact that it was once necessary for semioticians to isolate a set of issues to investigate and to draw sharp boundaries between semiotics and adjacent disciplines does not entail that the study of signs must forever adhere to this conception of its scope. It is my firm conviction that semiotics has reached a stage in its development where it is not only possible to broaden its scope but that future progress of the discipline will be hampered if we do not actively seek to expand its purview to include relevant issues that have been excluded. Although such a process will require us to rethink some deeply-held assumptions and change some fundamental theoretical commitments, the requirements of a comprehensive understanding of the workings of signs leads inexorably in that direction.

Notes 1. When I speak of traditional mentalism I have in mind the Cartesian and Lockian varieties and most particularly the theses that we can know nothing with greater certainty than the contents of our own minds and that the meaning of a word is the idea with which we associate it in our minds. Cognitivism, the version of mentalism I will be endorsing, has no relation to the former, but it could be thought that it does, in the final analysis, derive from the latter. In Chapter 3 I will discuss at some length how this version of mentalism departs from its traditional varieties. 2.

It should be noted here that in my view semiotics shares the suspicion of mental entities which has characterized the linguistic turn, but it should not be inferred that I am attributing to semiotics the tendency to reduce all matters dealing with experience, knowledge and meaning to questions of language. The critiques by Thomas Sebeok (1977) and John Deely (1990) of the glottocentrism of French semiology are just one example of how sharply semiotics departs from the premises of the linguistic turn on this particular point.

3.

To avoid any terminological confusion that might result from the use of similar sounding expressions, I will be using the term "cognitive science" to designate the entire set of fields—artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy of mind — whose business it is to study cognition. I will employ the term "cognitive psychology" to refer to the study of the thought process in people and animals as opposed to Artificial Intelligence which is concerned with the simulation of such processes in machines.

4.

One additional line of inquiry which informs this second phase of cognitivism is the connectionist view of cognition that has emerged from the parallel distributed processing research program lead by McClelland, Rumelhart and the PDP Research Group (1986). Although this work has had and will continue to have a profound effect on developments in cognitive science, it has been less of an influence on my own reflections than the other sources I have cited. Nonetheless I will discuss some of the implications of connectionism in Chapter 2.

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5.

A clear illustration of this trend can be found in the "Introduction and Overview" of Ronald Langacker's Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Langacker begins this introduction by criticizing received views in linguistics and urging a bold new approach. Putting his finger on what is currently wrong with linguistics, he writes Figurative language is generally ignored in current theories; at best it is handled by special, ad hoc descriptive devices. Yet it would be hard to find anything more pervasive and fundamental in language, even (I maintain) in the domain of grammatical structure; if figurative language were systematically eliminated from our data base, little if any data would remain. We therefore need a way of conceiving and describing grammatical structure which accommodates figurative language as a natural, expected phenomenon rather than a special, problematic one. An adequate conceptual framework for linguistic analysis should view figurative language not as a problem, but as part of the solution. (Langacker 1987:1)

6.

Since the majority of the papers in the volume edited by Eco, Santambrogio, and Violi present different variations of the cognitivist position, but do not raise directly the question of bridging the gap between semiotics and the cognitive science, my present remarks will not apply to them. The criticisms I am raising here are directed towards the essays published in the special issues by Semiotica and Recherches Sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry.

7.

One exception to the tendency to take the present stance toward mentalism for granted is Herman Parret (1983: 24) who argues insistently against mentalism and in favor of the notion of semiotics as logic.

8.

I have argued elsewhere (Daddesio 1987) how this ban extends to both the neurological and psychological processes that mediate semiosis. In this book, however, I will concern myself exclusively with the cognitive processes that have been neglected.

9.

Charles Morris (1938:9) used the term "pure semiotic" to designate the formulation of a general theory of signs "as a deductive system with

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undefined terms and primitive sentences which allow the deduction of other sentences as theorems." He also contrasted "pure semiotic" with "descriptive semiotic" which would involve the application of this formalized theory to specific sign systems. While the goal of a formalized theory of signs is not totally absent from what I call the pure semiotics position, the question of the formalization of sign theory is of secondary importance for the present discussion. The aspect of the pure semiotics position that presents an obstacle to the investigation of the processes that mediate semiosis is the exclusive focus on the internal structure of signs at the expense of their mediation. 10. I want to acknowledge that the picture I have drawn thus far of the status of the mediation of signs in contemporary semiotics has been overly bleak, and that there are many encouraging signs that the pure semiotics position is being replaced by a broader paradigm. One such development is the position paper of Myrdene Anderson and her colleagues (Anderson, Deely, Krampen, Ransdell, Sebeok and T. von Uexküll 1984) that claims for semiotics the role of unifying the natural and human sciences. 11. Since Peirce called the theory of signs "semeiotic" rather than "semiotics", I will use the term "semiotic" when referring to Peirce's view. In all other cases, I will employ the more general term "semiotics". 12. Peirce phrases the logical sequence from action to conception in the following terms "Thus our action has exclusive reference to what affects the senses, our habit has the same bearing as our action, our belief the same as our habit, our conception the same as our belief." (5.401) 13. This discussion of reduction is inspired by Blackburn (1984: 151-157). 14. This is the same point that I made earlier in my discussions of Eco and Fisch. 15. I must add that in the view of cognition that I am defending, introspection is no longer the primary source of data for theorybuilding. In most instances, absolutely no appeal to introspection is made. Whenever introspective reports conflict with data gathered from

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a third-person perspective, the introspective data will be challenged first. 16. Deely writes "I had quite forgotten the contemporary near-dogma that these mythical 'ideas' behind words, like the epicycles of Ptolemy, are, to borrow a formulary from Geach (1968: 54), 'idle wheels, useless reduplications of the linguistic structures.'" (1982: 191) Although I agree with Deely on many matters, I have to admit that I do not share his confident optimism that semiotics is free from this "contemporary near-dogma". Perhaps semiotics clears the way toward this position, but the salutary effects of this progress have yet to be felt in a substantial way. 17. A case in point is the family dog who listens intently to a dinner table conversation. Although the dog can perceive the sounds that people make, most would agree that he is unable to understand the meaning of those sounds. 18. Deely makes this point when he writes, "The philosophers of our universities today who have attached themselves to such a method and see in its exercise the very progress of philosophy, therefore, not surprisingly find themselves without a great deal to say of general interest for semioticians" (Deely 1982: 81). The turn of Deely's phrase should not obscure the basic point that most semioticians, with perhaps the exception of Umberto Eco, judge analytic philosophy of meager import for the theory of signs. 19. Although both of these thinkers refuted decisively the varieties of mentalism then in favor, their influence on the development of AngloAmerican thought in the twentieth century has been unequal. As has been amply noted in semiotic circles, the American pragmaticist has yet to receive the widespread recognition that the originality and rigor of his thought merit. Frege, on the other hand, has been a central figure in the development of mainstream Anglo-American thought that leads from Russell to Ryle and beyond. This is not to say that Peirce's work has had no effect on the linguistic turn; Quine (Ayer 1968: vii; Quine 1976: 278) for one was influenced by Peirce and some writers have traced an indirect Peircean influence in the later Wittgenstein.

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20. It is not my contention that the intense scrutiny that language and signs have received is misguided; these phenomena have a legitimate and necessary place in a wide variety of disciplines. The framework that I am proposing would consider neither language nor mind primary in the sense that one could be explained in terms of the other. The interplay between cognition and signs is much more complex than either traditional mentalism or the current focus on language can capture. 21. This notion of the tangibility of words is not without parallels within the semiotic literature. For instance, in an account of the implications of Peirce's concept of the interprétant, this metaphor appears several times under Eco's pen. "In fact we can 'touch' interprétants (i.e., we can empirically test a cultural unit), for culture continuously translates signs into other signs...." "We can say that cultural units are physically within our grasp" (Our emphasis). (1976: 71) One could argue that the single quotations that set off the word "touch" in the first example indicate that Eco is well-aware of the metaphoricity of this formulation, however, his insistence that inferences from sign to sign, or from sign to interprétant, are more "tangible" than inferences from signs to mental representations would suggest that this metaphor operates at deep level in his conception of signs. 22. The complexity of the contemporary turn to language looms much larger when one takes into account the views of Continental thinkers from Heidegger to Derrida. 23. Rorty makes this connection in the following terms: The line of thought I have called 'epistemological behaviorism' has produced a prejudice against the notion of 'mental entities' and 'psychological processes.' A certain common picture of man's higher faculties, common to Descartes and Locke, has been gradually erased by the work of such writers as Dewey, Ryle, Austin, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Quine (1979: 213). 24. I am following here Lakoff (1987: 219-229) who has called this tendency the formalist enterprise. 25. John Deely has qualified this version of logic in the following terms: In the context of an artificially stipulated symbolic system, the understanding of logical interpretation tends rather to narrow

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itself precisely to the elements of control, and become a pure technique, a calculus of consequences more and more empty of natural substance. In the extreme, this tendency leads logic itself into a hollow or empty formalism, more and more technically perfect, as relations of reason build upon one another constructs ever more intricate and subtle, but by the same token further and further removed from foundations in reality—what the older logicians used to call 'distinctions of reason reasoning.' (cf. Poinsot 1632 294al-300b48) (Deely: 1982 81) 26. Both Baars (1986) and Gardner (1985), in their otherwise praiseworthy accounts of these developments, speak of the cognitive revolution. I would prefer to avoid such a formulation because only time will tell how profound these changes are. My use of the term "cognitive shift" reflects this preference. 27. Haugeland (1981: 243) provides a succinct definition of this view: Cognitivism in psychology and philosophy is roughly the position that intelligent behavior can (only) be explained by appeal to internal 'cognitive processes,' that is, rational thought in a very broad sense. Although I will adopt Haugeland's general formulation of cognitivism, I will not subscribe to his endorsement of a strong form of the computational mind thesis. 28. For a fairly detailed account of the rise of cognitivism, see Howard Gardner's The mind's new science (1985). Worthy of special mention is Gardner's narration of the early stages of the emergence of this new paradigm which are not treated herein. 29. I am leaving out of this account the contribution of Jean Piaget. This omission can be explained by my belief that Piaget's work did little to set the cognitive turn in motion. Rather it was only after the cognitive turn had begun did significant numbers of psychologists in the Englishspeaking world become interested in Piaget's developmental studies. During the heyday of behaviorism Piaget's findings were dismissed because his experimental design did not conform to the exacting standards of behaviorists and because he appealed to unobservables in

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his accounts of development. It was only after important sectors of psychology became cognitivist that the value of Piaget's work began to be appreciated. 30. A particularly interesting case is that of Hilary Putnam, who in the early sixties played a major role in formulating rigorously the functionalist thesis, but in recent years has become sharply critical (1981, 1988) of his earlier views as well as those of other functionalists. 31. Howard Gardner has linked this tendency of cognitive science to the Vienna Circle. As I see it, a major ingredient in ongoing work in the cognitive sciences has been cast in the image of logical empiricism: that is, the vision of a syntax—a set of symbols and the rules for their concatenation—that might underlie the operations of the mind (and a correlative discomfort with issues of mental content) Gardner (1985: 64). 32. For a succinct presentation of the views of Johnson and Lakoff, see Lakoff (1988). 33. Howard Gardner (1987: 384-400) also detects an important change in the approach of cognitive scientists. Although the focus of his critique is a bit different than mine, both reflect the need to remedy the defects of earlier work in this field. 34. In his Basics of semiotics (1990: 18-82), Deely develops a thorough version of the same thesis from a semiotic point of view. Although their arguments are somewhat different, the conclusions drawn by Johnson and Lakoff and Deely are quite similar. 35. By constructivism, I mean the general thesis that reality is constructed, be it by individuals or social groups, rather than given. 36. It is important to note the difference between Johnson's use of the term "symbolic" and the Peicean definition that I have adopted. 37. For a more recent study that follows up and expands upon Rosch's ground-breaking work, see Markman (1989). 38. An early advocate of this view was Charles Darwin. For a succinct discussion of Darwin's views on the matter, see Donald (1991: 20-44).

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39. Here the term "abstract" is used to designate a mental representation that can be generalized to an entire set of experiences that share relevant qualities. In Chapter 6 I will be employing this term with a substantially different meaning in mind. 40. The link between perception and action in the development of schémas is neatly summarized in a passage by Ulric Neisser that Johnson quotes. Neisser writes A schema is that portion of the entire perceptual cycle which is internal to the perceiver, modifiable by experience, and somehow specific to what is being perceived. The schema accepts information as it becomes available at sensory surfaces and is changed by that information; it directs movements and exploratory activities that make more information available, by which it is further modified (1976: 54). We should note that this conception is essentially the same as the one proposed by Piaget. 41. In making the claim that image schemata are not propositional, Johnson also addresses Zenon Pylyshyn's (1981) argument that, since we can fully describe images and other putatively nonpropositional forms of cognitive representation with propositions, such representations are ultimately propositional. Although Johnson does not rely on this line of attack, to assume that there is a direct relation between how we describe something and the nature of that which we describe is to commit an elementary category mistake. 42. I am using this term in its standard acceptance, i.e. as a reality that exists independently of the subject and not in the sense, i.e. as "whatever exists in any way as known" (1990: 59), that John Deely has adopted in his recent writings. 43. According to von Uexküll, "The most important functional circles found in most Umwelts are the circles of physical medium, food, enemy, and sex" (1982: 33). 44. The compulsion schema is one member of the family of force schemata. Other force schemata are blockage, counteiforce, diversion, removal of restraint, enablement, and attraction. (Johnson 1987: 45-48)

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45. According to Johnson, the meaning of "may" is derived from the removal of restraint schema, while enablement provides the experiential basis of "can". 46. Here I am simply attempting to illustrate the views of Johnson and Sweetser. The reader who wishes a closely argued defense of these views is invited to consult Johnson (1987) and Sweetser (1990). 47. Johnson provides detailed analysis of the structure and the metaphorical projections of several other schemata. For instance, the CONTAINER schema traces an enclosed space and establishes a fundamental distinction of either being inside or outside this space. Johnson then shows how this schema is at work in the multiple uses of the propositions in and out (Lindner 1981), in the metaphorical projections such as ARGUMENT IS A CONTAINER or in patterns of inference such as the "Law of the Excluded Middle", "transitivity", and negation. Johnson's contention here is that such logical relations do not exist in some rarefied realm of abstract entities but instead have deep roots in our concrete experience. 48. The work of Sweetser, Rosch, Langacker and others has provided a great deal of the empirical support for this demonstration. 49. The term "symbol" is used here in the sense of a token in a formal system. I will discuss at some length this use of the term in Chapters 3 and 4. For the time being, I will limit myself to saying that from a semiotic point of view this use is misleading in important respects. My only reason for using it at this point is that it is the standard term in cognitive science and in this section I will be essentially summarizing issues raised by Clark. 50. This method of accessing data is also called random access. 51. For his part, Clark speaks of this assumption as the uniformity principle. Since our analyses coincide on the major points, we should not let this terminological difference bog us down. 52. The assertion that "subsymbolic processing without symbolic guidance is blind" is troubling since all animals on the planet with the exception of one species operate on the level of subsymbolic processing. We can, I believe, acknowledge that symbolic processing radically transforms

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cognition without disparaging species that lack it. Clark's openness to evolutionary considerations that bear on the study of cognition convinces me that this was not his intention, but we need to take care that such a statement is not misconstrued. 53. For instance, the schemata that Johnson and Lakoff posit are examples of mental representations, while metonymical and metaphorical projections are transformations. 54. See Gardner (1985), Flanagan (1984), Baars (1986) Stillings, et al. (1987). 55. This method is essentially what Kant referred to by the term transcendental deduction; Flanagan saw fit to modify Kant's appellation on the grounds that transcendental deductions are not deductions at all, but rather are instances of eliminative induction. 56. Dennett distinguishes this mode of explanation from the "intentional stance" which appeals to the beliefs and desires of the organism to account for behavior. 57. However for a critique of the phenomena that can be easily paradigms, see Claxton (1988). I evaluating theories of cognition in

dangers of studying only those adapted to current experimental will discuss Claxton's criteria for Chapter 5.

58. See Kosslyn (1980) for a thorough account of this research. 59. See Baars 1986. 60. It must be noted that the interpretation of these and similar research findings has generated a fair amount of controversy. What is at issue is whether the representations that mediate such observed results are truly spatial in nature or whether they are propositional. Since this debate does not challenge the ascription of mental representations to people but rather raises the question of the nature of such representations, it does not bear significantly on the present discussion. 61. For a concise survey of this field see Bruce (1988). 62. A literary example of this dilemma is the short story by Borges "Funes the Memorious" (Borges 1962: 107-115).

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63. As I have mentioned on several occasions a major objection to mentalism concerned its ill-advised reliance on introspection. Since cognitive science does not make significant appeal to introspection, I will not consider this objection for it is no longer applicable. 64. For a concise account of this position see Fodor (1968: 49-89). 65. A slightly different way of expressing this view is offered by Mary Hesse and Michael Arbib, whose theory of schémas I will discuss in Chapter 4. They write, Scientific study of the brain will need both the 'high-level' language of schema theory to describe mental states and behavior (and then we study mind rather than brain: call it cognitive psychology) and 'low-level' language to describe the anatomy and physiology of neurons (call it brain theory). Our cognitive psychology is materialist to the extent that we hold mental activity to be determined by the collective interaction of neurons; our neuroscience is mentalistic to the extent that we find it best to classify neuronal behavior with respect to schémas that mediate the overall behavior (or mental state) of the organism (Arbib and Hesse, 1986: 72). Thus, the distinction between neural states and representations is a distinction between levels of description. 66. Daniel Dennett's (1991) critique of the Cartesian Theater and the Multiple Drafts view of consciousness that he proposes provide further support for the contention that cognitivism can indeed overcome the homunculus problem. 67. See endnote 27. 68. This takes on special importance in Fodor's case since he typically confines his discussion of cognition to the consideration of propositional attitudes, i.e., beliefs, desires, etc. Within this area, it seems quite natural to detect a profound similarity between the utterance "John Searle's beer cans are capable of thought" and the belief that John Searle's beer cans are capable of thought. However, there is a vicious circularity in taking linguistic utterances as the primary source of data for the thesis that thought is intrinsically propositional.

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69. One can argue that in the case of infants language will eventually emerge. This argument begs the question that I am attempting to pose. If the cognitive processes of a six month old child were indeed linguistic, then why is it that a child at this stage is incapable of language? 70. We can add that, in addition to the difficulty of integrating the cognition of infants and others in its account, Fodor's LOT is also unable to make room for the nonlinguistic structures, alluded to in our account of Johnson and Lakoff s views, that lay below the surface of language. By insisting that cognition is propositional, we would be compelled to dismiss out of hand the important work that linguists such as Eve Sweetser and Ronald Langacker are doing. 71. I will, of course, be also adopting the sensorimotor thesis that I explored in Chapter 2. I would, however, like to keep my treatment of that thesis separate from the discussion of the matters at hand. 72. Although it is common to refer to the elementary units of computer programs as "symbols", the danger of adopting this practice is that of assuming that such units have the same characteristics of "symbols" in the semiotic sense that I am attributing to the term. I will argue that the conception of "symbols" in cognitive science is one of the facets of this discipline that a cognitive approach to semiosis needs to reject. I will be thus adopting Haugeland's more neutral term "token". 73. Reference is not the only function of symbols however, since it deals with the very relation that links a symbol and its object, it is a convenient place to begin. 74. In this discussion we will leave aside the question of the determination of the precise meaning of particular utterances. We are interested in meaning as a general phenomenon and not the meaning of individual signs. 75. A simple example can clarify condition c. A typical coordination problem would be the need to regulate traffic. There is a problem because we could chose between two more or less equivalent solutions: driving on the left or driving on the right. In the United States we drive on the right and expect others to do so. This convention takes on the added constraint of being enforced by law.

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76. Just to give one well-known example, Peirce wrote: A sign or representcanen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind o f t h a t person an equivalent, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interprétant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen. Peirce (2.228) 77. It would take a more much thorough examination of the problem than I can give it here, but the case can be made that traditional mentalist conceptions of meaning tended to conflate the what and how questions concerning meaning. Although it makes sense to speak of a particular content being instantiated in or represented by a mental construct, this does not imply that meaning by its very nature is a mental construct. This confusion of the nature of meaning with the way it is instantiated in the mind is, to my way of thinking, one of the more serious defects of traditional mentalism. 78. In some instances, the object will be the cause of the sign. For example, the clues in detective novels and medical symptoms are typically indices where the sign leads us to become aware of its cause. 79. This is especially true when we consider Hume's demonstration that the apprehension of causality is never a simple matter. 80. Michael Shapiro makes this very point when he writes "...we are forced to the conclusion that all linguistic phenomena must ultimately be comprehended as instantiations of symbolicity" (1983: 191). 81. Although I have adapted Clarke's point, it must be pointed out that my reasons for doing so are quite different from his. Clarke's conclusion is that the canonical cases of natural signs should be eliminated from the scope of semiotics because they do not offer relevant analogies with linguistic signs. I feel that Clarke has identified an important area of confusion within semiotics, but there is no reason to follow him in his exclusion of this traditional category. I would simply classify the phenomena in question, to use Deely's (1982: 111-112) expression, as

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signs belonging to the postlinguistic realm. 82. This criterion would also comply with Peirce's pragmatic maxim, as I construed it in Chapter 1. 83. The fact that "Bam" is an onomatopoeia would seem to complicate matters. One could argue that this sign is not a symbol, but rather an icon because it resembles its object. In Chapter 7 I explain my reasons for believing that, in order to use such signs, children must grasp the convention that links sign and object and that the iconicity of onomatopoeias plays a negligible role in their acquisition. 84. In this context, it is instructive to ponder Eco's reflections on similar matters in the "Foreword" to his Theory of semiotics (1979: viii). While the elaboration of his theory of codes obeys the strictures of Ockham's razor, his theory of sign production follows "an antiOckhamistic principle: en ti a sunt multiplicando propter necessitatem." Eco explains his departure from orthodox parsimony on the grounds that the established semiotic categories (symbol, index, and icon) were not able to account for the entire range of relevant phenomena. 85. I do not mean to suggest here that there is no evidence for the ability of the trained apes to communicate by means of symbols. Indeed Savage-Rumbaugh's (1986) attempts to achieve symbolic communication between two chimps presents a more compelling case than was previously available. My intent here is simply to suggest that workers in this field have in general failed to take into consideration the distinction between the use of signs that function as symbols for humans and the use of those signs as symbols. To the extent that evidence could be gathered that would demonstrate that apes are capable of using signs in this second, more restrictive sense, we should keep an open mind on this question. 86. In addition to being a shortcoming of the computational view of mind, this is, I believe, a shortcoming of the work of some of the scholars who have sought to apply cognitive science to semiotics. For instance, Meunier simply repeats the central computational doctrine that "an artificial intelligence is a 'machine' whose 'rational' behavior consists of manipulating physical symbols" (1989: 47) without stopping to ask in what sense such signs are conventional. Even when he specifically

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addresses the question of the nature of symbols (1989: 47), he fails to raise the crucial semiotic question of whether it makes any sense to say that the computer is communicating by means of symbols. 87. It is entirely conceivable that as the study of the brain advances a theory of mental representations grounded in precise neural mechanisms will become possible. At present theories of cognition should be compatible with what is currently known about the brain, but it is premature to insist on a more stringent constraint. 88. Claxton actually identifies 13 criteria. Given the state of the art no theory of cognition can hope to adequately address more than a handful of these. The reasons for my particular choices should become clear as this discussion proceeds. 89. Andy Clark's biological constraints on models of cognition, that we discussed in Chapter 2, are an excellent example of this criterion. 90. The principle of evolutionary continuity has been roundly criticized in conjunction with attempts to teach apes "language", however we should recognize that used judiciously this principle is a useful one. Even when we are dealing with a behavior that constitutes an evolutionary "novelty", we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by studying how the novel behavior builds upon preexisting structures and processes to achieve its uniqueness. 91. Claxton calls this the ethological criterion and makes a clear distinction between it and the evolutionary criterion. For my part, I would like to stress the complementarity of these two criteria. Although the ethological approach can be pursued independently of the evolutionary criterion, the same can not be said of the evolutionary criterion for without the behavioral data provided by the study of living species our reconstructions of the evolution of cognitive processes would be quite limited. 92. One exception to this generalization is the essay by Belley, Larochelle and Pineau (1988) on the relationship between words and concepts in that these authors adopt an experimental rather than a computational approach. 93. Without attempting to settle the terminological proliferation found in

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cognitive science, I will be following Katherine Nelson's (1985: 71) use of this term. 94. See Shank and Kass (1988) for a brief survey of this progression. 95. I will spell out more clearly in the following chapter what I mean by "mentally manipulated". As a preliminary formulation, I will use this term to speak of the activation or accessing of representations in the absence of appropriate stimuli and without necessarily leading to overt action. 96. We should also draw the reader's attention to the obvious parallels between Arbib's conception and the views of von Uexküll that we discussed in Chapter 2. 97. This conception bears strong resemblance to the Parallel Distributed Processing models that I discussed in Chapter 2. 98. For a more detailed account of the differences between semantic nets and production rules, see Arbib, Conklin and Hill (1987). 99. In order to get on with Dretske's account, it is necessary to pass over a number of nuances. 100. Behaviorists of course would not accept this way of formulating the question. They would hold that it is the stimulus that causes flight and not any internal representation. The cognitivist would reply that the animal would not flee if it did not possess some means of recognizing that a particular pattern of stimuli constitutes a threat and that this is all that it is meant when it is claimed that this representational state functions as a cause of the animal's behavior. Thus, when a cognitivist speaks of a representation being the cause of behavior, all that is being claimed is that the animal possesses a mechanism for recognizing relevant stimuli and that an adequate account of the animal's behavior must specify these perceptual and cognitive mechanisms. 101. Von Uexküll adopted a similar stance in the last pages of The theory of meaning (1982: 77-78) when he raised the question of how one would go about designing the night moth, if these insects had been wiped out by a natural calamity. The goal of this intellectual exercise was to determine the capabilities that, given the dangers of its habitat,

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the night moth would need to survive. This is but one of the many instances where von Uexküll anticipated contemporary developments. 102. It must be noted that C is not being claimed to be the sole cause of M (other internal states might also bring about M) or that C is a sufficient as well as a necessary cause of M. Dretske is quite clear that behavior, in even the simplest cases, depends as well upon the organism's motivational states. We will return to this point in Chapter 6.

103. Deely's three levels of cognition do not coincide with the three levels that I am positing. Deely's "perception" corresponds to my sensorimotor level, while his "understanding" englobes both my conceptual and propositional levels. By distinguishing a level of "sensation", he is postulating an additional level below the three that I propose. 104. This is consistent with my earlier argument that claims of symbol use in species other than Homo sapiens are problematic. 105. We should point out that Miranda is one of the semioticians who is attempting to bridge the gap between semiotics and cognition. 106. This qualification is necessary for the obvious reason that the term "imagination" has been attributed a variety of meanings over the centuries (for an overview of some of the modifications this term has undergone, see Kearney 1988). 107. My comments on the cognitive capabilities of rabbits and the underlying neural mechanisms are, to a large extent, personal speculation; I do not have any sources that can unequivocally confirm these views. However, I do feel that they are plausible because they can be justified by cautious extrapolation from findings on mammals with more complex brains. To give just one example, in his book Animal thought (1983), Stephen Walker concludes that there is only solid evidence for cognition based on abstract representations in the great apes and humans. The picture he draws of mammals with smaller and less complex brains supports, in its general outline, the views presented here. 108. In this discussion, I am leaving out the fact that the rabbit would

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probably use other sensory modalities, especially the sense of smell, to detect the presence of the fox, but this omission doesn't significantly alter the point that I am making here. It is still the case that the rabbit is using information provided by the immediate stimuli pattern, albeit a rather complex one, to become aware of the fox. 109. I will present several illustrations of this principle in the next chapter. 110. Propositional representations would possess a still greater degree of functional autonomy. 111. Credit must be given to John Deely (Deely 1982; Deely, Williams and Kruse 1986; Deely 1990) for bringing this notion to the attention of semioticians. 112. Returning for a moment to Maritain's formulation, we need to make clear that, when the ability to grasp the relation of signification first appears, we can not expect the child to write a treatise on her newfound awareness; this awareness emerges first in a rudimentary form, and only receives verbal elucidation as the child achieves greater mastery over language. Moreover, Maritain's formulation does not require that the child be able to wax eloquently on her new discovery; he merely adds that, upon gaining insight into the relation of signification the child "exploits it, ... toys with it, even in the absence of the real need to which it corresponds". 113. There is some evidence that other species are capable of cross-modal transfers. However, no other species performs them with the ease that humans do. 114. There is reason to regret that Geschwind's hypothesis has not received the subsequent attention that it certainly deserves. One can only hope that, as our knowledge in the area increases and as neuroscientists become more successful in understanding higher brain functions, the questions that Geschwind's hypothesis raises will receive closer scrutiny. 115. This account greatly simplifies the evolutionary history of the association cortex. A somewhat more accurate picture would take into consideration, among other things, how this area of the brain grew in size and in complexity during the evolution of the primate order.

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116. We should note that Sebeok's account rests on a hypothesis concerning the cognitive capabilities of Homo habilis and that from these considerations he draws conclusions about the semiotic propensities of these early hominids. This hypothesis supports my general argument for the utility of recourse to cognitive processes in the study of signs. 117. Actually, Bickerton's thesis is much bolder than my discussion indicates. He not only claims that the utterances of young children are similar to protolanguage, he argues that children speak protolanguage until they acquire language. Protolanguage differs (Bickerton 1990: 122-126) from language in that differences in constituent order are not constrained by formal structures, and constituents are omitted in a nonsystematic fashion. Moreover protolanguage lacks mechanisms for expanded phrases and possesses few grammatical items. These differences are so great that Bickerton concludes that they constitute two distinct modes of communication. Although children eventually progress from protolanguage to language, Bickerton contends that more stable forms of protolanguage can be found in pidgin "languages", the speech of aphasies and the utterances of Genie, a woman whose first exposure to language came when she was 13 years old. Since the points that I am attempting to make do not depend on the validity of this thesis, we can be content with this superficial exposition of it. 118. The data that Bickerton cites are from Tobias (1987). 119. The measurements for A. afarensis are dated at 3.5 to 3 million years ago, those for Homo habilis 2.0 to 1.6 million years ago and those for Homo erectus 1.6 million years ago. 120. We have to make clear what these suggested parallels between the phylogeny and the ontogeny of symbolic communication entail. While there are no grounds for assuming that ontogeny thoroughly and exactly recapitulates phylogeny, it would be equally problematic to suppose that the two processes follow totally distinct paths without the slightest convergence. A more reasonable approach consists, I believe, in granting that in some instances the stages in the phylogeny of symbolic communication are similar to those that we can observe

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in ontogeny. Each suggested convergence would, in the final analysis, be only as robust as the evolutionary and developmental data that could be mustered to support it. 121. The points that I have been discussing have been made compellingly by Elizabeth Bates when she writes: The difficulties that arise when we consider these early moments in the development of human communication are largely the result of our no longer being able to take for granted the things that we take for granted in adult semiosis. At this stage concepts such as code, cultural units, conventions, arbitrariness lose their explanatory power and demand explanation rather than providing one. It is this very fact, I would contend, that makes the study of this developmental phase so important; by examining the formation of these abilities we can hope to gain insight into their nature that is not available from the analysis of the necessary conditions applying to their adult forms. However, the difficulties that this study raises have a positive contribution to make in that they force us to clarify and sharpen our analytical tools. Looking at the adult end of that development, we can be overwhelmed (narcissists that we are) at the complexity and perfection of a symbol-using mind. But if we trace this marvel to its beginning in human infancy, we will see that this particular work of art is a collage, put together out of a series of old parts that developed quite independently. This does not make the achievement any less wonderful. But it does begin to make it understandable. (Bates 1979: 1) 122. This particular skill also requires a more developed understanding of causality since the child must also realize that it was the cover that caused the object to disappear and that the object can be made to reappear by removing it. Consideration of such factors would complicate the account of the later stages of the sensorimotor period that I am giving but would in no way contradict the general point that I am making. For a succinct account of the parallel development of causality during this period see Ansfield (1984: 38-39).

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123. In an independent set of findings, Sugarman (1983) has shown that at 12 months of age, the child classifies objects solely on the basis of perceptual similarity. 124. Piaget reported the following pattern of behavior: Suppose an object is hidden at point A: the child searches for it and finds it. Next the object is placed in Β and is covered before the chid's eyes; although the child has continued to watch the object and has seen it disappear in B, he nevertheless immediately tries to find it in A! (1954: 50) 125. Ginsburg and Opper note that this increased ability to represent also allows the child "to develop solutions on a mental rather than a physical level." and to "reconstruct a series of invisible displacements of an object... " (1988: 65) 126. This case is similar to the tail displays of rhesus monkeys and baboons that we saw in Chapter 4. 127. For a detailed account of this process see Bates (1979). 128. I will be addressing the question of the child's intentions later this chapter. 129. In the final phase of this model features the use of what Dore calls "predicative syntagms". During this phase, the child's one-word utterances begin to show signs of syntactic organization. Since consideration of this phase would compel us to introduce a series of issues that are not directly connected to the points that I am trying to make, this phase will be excluded from the present account. 130. I discussed in Chapter 4 my reasons for adopting the use of a sign in a variety of context grounds for considering the sign a symbol. 131. A powerful argument for the claim that an important cognitive milestone has been reached is that the appearance of the first symbols is quickly followed by an exponential increase in the child's vocabulary. 132. A similar dilemma surfaces when we speak of the child's early utterances as obeying conventions. Since many of the child's first "words" do not conform either in their form or in their range of

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meaning to adult words, some would vigorously object to any talk of conventions at this stage. This objection might take the form of pointing out that conventions need to be accepted by a much broader social group for them to qualify as linguistic. The position that developmental psychologists adopt is that long before the child becomes aware that conventions can be recognized by large social groups, she learns to share meaning with the adults she interacts with. We thus need a conception of convention that is broad enough to include the child's early utterances. The reader who is interested in a more thorough discussion of the question of conventions in the communication in young children is advised to consult Bates (1979). 133. I will return to Vygotsky's view on the development of cognition later in this chapter. 134. Evidence of the role played by event representations in cognition is provided not only by Nelson's Making sense, but also by Nelson (1986). 135. Another source of evidence for Nelson's model is the type of overextentions that children make. As has been amply documented it is very common for young children to overgeneralize, that is to apply words they have learned to a much broader range of phenomena than is appropriate. For instance, a child might use the term "apple" to refer to fruit other than apples. Nelson's model predicts that such overgeneralizations would tend to apply to things that are known to occupy the same slot within an event representation. If we assume that the recurrent context for apples and other fruit was as desserts following meals, and if the child has acquired only one word of the fruit category, namely "apple", then we would expect the child to overgeneralize in the indicated fashion. Such overgeneralizations would tend to confirm Nelson's model. 136. We must also be careful to distinguish Nelson's claim that the event representations of the child are holistic and the holistic thesis on meaning advocated by Quine, Davidson and others. The holistic thesis is that the meaning of individual words and sentences is dependent upon the entire system of meaning of which they are part and that changes in the system redistribute the meanings of each and

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every element. The holistic thesis is thus a general theory of meaning, while Nelson's claim concerns one particular aspect of the development of cognition in children. 137. To a large extent this problem results from Arbib's use of "schema" as a generic term for cognitive representation that can be applied to both prelinguistic children and adults. In other words, Arbib does not adequately distinguish between what we have been calling the sensorimotor, conceptual and propositional levels of representation. 138. This, of course, is just a way of speaking because the point that is being made is that, at this stage of development, each event representation functions in cognition as an indissociable whole, and, therefore, what will later become the elements, i.e., people, things, actions, of the event representation can not yet be accessed as independent units. 139. Nelson also proposes a similar account in Making sense. I have chosen to present Bates' proposals because they develop more explicitly the idea of distinct levels of cognition. 140. I will use the terms script and event representation interchangeably. Due to the work of Shank and Abelson (Shank and Abelson 1977; Abelson 1981) the term "script" is frequently employed in both cognitive science and developmental psychology. Bates uses the term for roughly the same purposes that Nelson uses "event representation". For her part, Nelson uses Shank and Abelson's early work (1977) on scripts to specify her notion of event representation and at no point clearly distinguishes the two concepts. 141. It should be pointed out that these suggestions elaborate upon Bates' earlier reflections (1973, 1979) on "context-bound" utterances and the "decontextualization" of cognition that inspired my notion of functional autonomy. 142. Bruner's (1983: 77-88) account of naming routines provides further evidence of this model. In this activity the child's mother would direct his attention to pictures of animals, would ask him "What's that?" and then give him appropriate feedback, i.e., "Yes, that's a rabbit." Although the data that Bruner presents constitutes evidence for the different stages of Bates' model, no mention is made of the

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appearance of the child's words outside the formats in which they were originally acquired. This additional information would be necessary to lend credence to the pattern of development that I am attempting to establish. It is nonetheless important to recognize that the data Bruner does provide on this topic supports unequivocally the view that I am advocating. 143. This game is a variation of the name routine format studied by Bruner that was evoked in note 21. For further discussion of the implications of this aspect of the child's development, the reader is encouraged to consult Bruner's (1983) Child talk. 144. It is important to recognize that despite their rather obvious similarities, these three models were elaborated in relative isolation. I qualify this statement by saying "relative isolation" because Bates' earlier work greatly influenced my model of functional autonomy. I was not, however, familiar with Nelson's theories until a very late stage in the completion of my project. The reason for the convergence of these three models is, I believe, the need to account for the undeniable cognitive changes that underlie the early development of the child's communication. 145. This suggestion merits closer scrutiny. Planning action at this rudimentary level involves the ability to call relevant representations to mind, to formulate different ways of achieving a goal, and to choose among the possibilities. At this stage of development the child shows signs of being able to dissociate the components of event representations however, such dissociation is still quite limited. The child's use of uttered sounds to facilitate planning would seem to be linked to this limited capacity to isolate the components of her mental representations. Thus, prior to being able to manipulate mental representations with ease, the child is able to call to mind the appropriate motor program by uttering the sounds that are intimately connected to it. 146. Just to give one fairly obvious example, the contrast between the French "cocorico" and the English "cock-a-doodle-doo" for the sound that rosters make illustrates the cultural boundedness of onomatopoeias.

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147. Although neither of these views are very new, it is remarkable to note how many scholars in the field ascribe to a variation of either one approach to the question of the relationship between language and cognition or the other. 148. In adopting this position we have to be careful not to minimize the role played by cognitive processes. We are able to assimilate only those cultural patterns that our cognitive makeup permits; the cultural diversity that is permitted is quite impressive, however, this diversity is still cognitively constrained. It should come as no surprise that we can assimilate the cultural patterns that we do, because such patterns are ultimately a product of human cognition. 149. In the interest of succinctness, I have not attempted to include in this account all the subtle variations of the basic game that Bruner describes. The reader who desires a more detailed exposition is invited to consult pages 48 to 60 of Child's talk. 150. This example comes from a variation of the peekaboo game in which Jonathan hid behind a chair and said "oo" upon reappearing. He would also utter the term "gone!" when Bruner himself hides behind the chair. 151. Bruner does not explain Jonathan's use of the word "house". If the puzzle in question depicted a house, then his use of the term would make sense. Unfortunately, Bruner does not provide the necessary information to determine whether the use of this word was appropriate or not. 152. Bruner compares this process to the building of a scaffold; the parent provides the necessary support for the child's participation allowing the child to lift herself up to reach the level of cognitive processing necessary for taking over the function. 153. Jean-Claude Gardin (1989) constitutes another case altogether. So convinced of the differences between Artificial Intelligence and semiotics, Gardin sees little hope for their rapprochement. Needless to say, I do not share Gardin's pessimism. 154. One obvious reason for this is that these researchers are much closer to Saussure, who recognized semiotics as a branch of general

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psychology, than Pierce or Morris. However, this is not a good reason for assuming that all or even a majority of semioticians share their position.

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Michael The Sense of Grammar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Roger—Lynn Cooper Mental Images and Their Transformations. Cambridge: MIT Press. Shepard, Roger —Jacques Metzler 1971 "Mental Rotation of Three-Dimensional Objects", Science. 171: 701-3. Sheriff, John K. 1989 The Fate of Meaning. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shvachkin, N. Kh. 1973 "The Development of phonemic speech perception in early childhood", in: Charles A. Ferguson and Dan Slobin, Studies of Child Language Development, (eds.), New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 91-127. Singer, Milton 1984 Man's glassy essence: Explorations in semiotic anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Stelkis, H. D —S. Harnad 1976 "Critical stages in the evolution of language", A nnals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 280: 445. Stillings, Neil—Mark Feinstein—Jay Garfield—Edwina Rissland—David Rosenbaum—Steven Weisler—Lynne Baker-Ward. 1987 Cognitive science: An introduction. Cambridge,: The MIT Press. Stitch, Steven 1983 From folk psychology to cognitive science. Cambridge: MIT Press. Sugarman, Susan 1983 Children's early thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Index of Names Abelson, R. 135, 137, 144, 189, 255 Almeder, R. 37-40, 243 Ammon, P.R. 199, 243 Anderson, M. 23, 243 Anglin, J. 180, 243 Ansfield, M. 182, 243 Arbib, M. 3, 4, 7, 8, 58, 69, 87, 131, 136-140, 142, 143, 146, 148, 149, 157, 172, 189, 214, 243 Ayer, A.J. 47, 244, 246 Baars, B. J. 52, 79, 82, 244 Baker-Ward, L. 256 Barrett, M.D. 244, 245, 247,

Bruner, J. 156, 169, 190, 191, 201-208, 245 Bunn, J. 114, 116, 118, 119, 245

249, 252,257 Bates, E. 4, 8, 58, 115-119, 122, 131, 153, 154, 157, 159, 161, 164, 169, 180, 184, 185, 186, 189-192, 194, 195, 197, 199, 200, 209, 213, 244 Beaver, T. 53, 248 Belley, R. 132, 244 Beth, E. 137, 244 Bickerton, D. 130, 175-178, 244

137-140, 189, 243 Cooper, L. 136, 244, 256 Corrado, M. 47, 246 Daclès, J.P. 132, 246 Daddesio, T. 19, 246 Danto, Α. 50, 247 Dawkins, R. 73, 247 Deely, J. 1, 3, 7, 9, 11, 13, 23, 28, 38, 40-44, 46, 51, 58, 65, 111, 139, 140, 146, 147, 148, 149, 162-165, 243, 247, 251,254 Dennett, D. 73, 81, 88, 127, 247

Blackburn, S. 34, 244 Bloom, L. 193, 245 Borges, J.L. 83, 245 Bowerman, M. 180, 245 Boyes-Braem, P. 59, 255 Bretherton, I. 244 Broughton, J. 245 Bruce, V. 83, 245

Carnap, R. 50, 51, 246 Chomsky, N. 47, 53-55, 57, 200, 246 Clark, A. 70, 72-77, 93, 120, 128, 134, 246 Clarke, D. 6, 47, 106, 110-113, 179, 246 Claxton, G. 7, 82, 126-132, 245, 246 Colapietro, V. 89-91, 246 Conklin, J.E. 3, 7, 131,

Descartes, R. 31, 35, 47-49, 51, 54, 84, 89, 255 Donald, M. 60, 176, 247 Dore, J. 183, 184, 190, 191 Dougherty, R. C. 132, 133, 247 Dowty, D. 247

258 Index of Names

Dretske, F. 7, 8, 141-143, 146, 149, 247 Eco, U. 6, 10, 14, 21, 22, 24, 27, 37, 40, 46, 49, 107, 108, 110, 120, 215, 248, 250, 256 Fauconnier, G. 69, 248 Feinstein, M. 256 Findlay, J. 51, 248 Fisch, M. 25-27, 37, 111, 248 Flanagan, O. 21, 36, 79, 81, 82, 86, 87, 248 Fodor, J. 3, 12, 36, 46, 53, 55-57, 85, 87, 92-95, 113, 213, 248 Foucault, M. 45, 248 Frege, G. 47, 48, 51, 89 Gardin, J.C. 215, 248 Gardner, H. 52, 57, 58, 79, 249 Garfield, J. 256 Garrett, M. F. 53, 248 Geach, P. 42, 249 Gellman, R. 201, 249 Geschwind, Ν. 166, 167, 249 Ginsburg, Η. 183, 249 Goldstein, Κ. 150-152, 154, 249 Goodman, Ν. 51, 249 Gould, S.J. 60, 173, 249 Gray, W. 59, 255 Griffiths, P. 195, 249 Hacking, I. 47, 48, 249 Hanson, A.R. 131, 140, 243 Harnad, S. 177, 256 Haugeland, J. 52, 90, 97-100, 122, 250,252 Hesse, M. 3,7, 87, 140, 243

Hill, J. 3, 7, 131, 137-140, 189, 243, 248 Holton, G. 101, 250 Hume, D . l l l Innis, R. 31, 250 Johnson, M. 4, 47, 58-69, 76, 77, 79, 91, 95, 102, 103, 120, 128, 131, 132, 134-137, 141, 143, 145, 146, 149, 170-172, 187, 209, 211, 214, 215, 245, 250, 251, 255 Johnson-Laird, P. 135, 137, 245,250 Kant, I. 76, 81, 136 Kass, A. 135, 256 Kearney, R. 155, 250 Kosslyn, S. 82, 135, 136, 250 Krampen, M. 23, 243 Kuhn, T. S. 23, 57, 250 Lakoff, G. 4, 47, 51, 58-60, 63-69, 76, 77, 79, 91, 95, 102, 103, 120, 128, 131, 132, 134, 136, 137, 141, 143, 145, 146, 149, 170-172, 209, 211, 214, 215, 250,251 Larochelle, S. 132, 244 Laudan, L. 23, 251 Lewis, D. 6, 106, 107, 249, 251 Lifter, K. 245 Lindner, S. 66, 69, 251 Lloyd, B.B. 59, 255 Lock, Α. 183, 195, 251 Lucariello, J. 252 Markman, Ε. M. 59, 251

Index of Names

Martlew, M. 257 Mauritain, J. 251 Mayr, E. 60, 251 McClelland, J. L. 4, 71, 72, 251 McNeil, D. 157, 213, 252 McNew, S. 244 McShane, J. 198, 199, 252 Merrell, F. 90, 252 Mervis, C. 59, 255 Metzler, J. 82, 256 Meunier, J.G. 99-101, 122, 132, 215, 252 Miller, G. 47, 53, 252 Miranda, P. 155, 156, 215, 252 Morris, C. 2, 17, 19-22, 26-30, 34-36, 40, 215, 252 Neisser, U. 61, 252 Nelson, K. 4, 8, 51, 58, 131, 134, 187-189, 191-194, 196, 198, 203, 207, 209, 214, 244, 249,252 Newell, A. 70, 99, 252 Oakley, D. 213, 253 Oehler, K. 31, 253 Opper, S. 183, 249 Ouellet, P. 125, 133, 253 Parrei, H. 17, 21, 253 PDP Research Group 4, 71, 251 Peirce, C.S. 1, 2, 5, 11, 14, 17, 19, 25, 27-41, 46-49, 51, 83, 84, 89, 107, 109-111, 116, 243, 246, 248, 250, 253 Perner, J. 186, 253 Petitto, L. 158, 253

259

Piaget, J. 4, 52, 61, 67, 68, 134, 136, 137, 139-141, 149, 153, 181-183, 187, 193, 199, 200, 201, 202, 207, 243, 244, 249,254 Pineau, H. 132, 244 Poinsot, J. 1, 11, 41, 51, 254 Putnam, H. 47, 55, 58, 254 Pylyshyn, Z. 61, 62, 254 Quine, W. 47, 49, 51, 180, 188, 254 Ransdell, J. 23, 26, 254 Rescorla, L. 180, 254 Rissland, E. 256 Rorty, R. 47, 49-51,88, 89, 92, 254 Rosch, E. 59, 60, 68, 254, 255 Rosen, S. 47, 255 Rosenbaum, D. 256 Rumelhart, D. 4, 71, 72, 251 Ryle, G. 47, 50, 51, 85, 255 Santambrogio, M. 10, 250, 256 Sapir,. E. 170, 255 Savage-Rumbaugh, E.S. 121, 255 Scruton, R. 47, 255 Searle, J. 66, 93, 98, 255 Sebeok, T. 3, 9, 23, 63, 64, 113, 114, 116, 118, 128, 130, 160, 173, 175-178, 243, 255 Seidenberg, M. 158, 160, 253 Shank, R. 135, 137, 144, 189, 255, 256 Shapiro, M. I l l , 256 Shatz, M. 201, 249 Shepard, R. 82-84, 136, 256

260 Index of Names

Sheriff, J. 45, 256 Shore, C. 244 Shvachkin, N.K. 256 Simon, H. 47, 70, 99, 244, 252 Singer, M. 256 Snyder, L. 244 Steklis, H.D. 177 Stillings, N. 79, 82, 256 Stitch, S. 256 Sugarman, S. 182, 256 Suppe, F. 23, 257 Sweetser, E. 58, 66, 68, 69, 95, 257 Tobias, P. 176, 257 Uexküll, J. von 9, 10, 23, 26, 27,43, 64-68, 137, 139, 141, 243,257

Uexküll, T. von 23, 243, Urtai, W. 167, 257 Verba, E. 173, 249 Violi, P. 10, 248, 250, 256 Vygotsky, L.V. 187, 201, 202, 204, 208, 245,257 Walker, S. 156, 213, 257 Weisler, S. 256 Wertsch, J. 245, 257 Whorf, B. 170, 257 Wilson, E. 114, 257 Wittgenstein, L. 47, 49-51, 248, 255,257 Zinobar, Β. 257

Subject Index Abstract representations 24, 27, 35, 37, 38, 57, 61, 64, 66, 67, 97, 136, 137, 149-152, 154-157, 166, 168,169, 171, 179, 207, 212 Affective autonomy 158, 160, 165, 168, 181, 192, 193, 195, 196 Antimentalism 1, 2, 3, 17, 22, 27, 35, 45, 47, 50, 51, 52, 215

208, 211-214, 245, 246, 251, 252, 253, 255,257 Cognitive monism 75 Cognitive psychology 4, 81, 82, 84, 87, 126, 127, 254, 255 Cognitive science 4, 7, 10, 36, 41, 47, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 69, 70, 84, 92, 97-101, 122, 130, 131, 132-135, 137, 139, 156, 189, 211, 212, 214, 215, 246, 248,

Arbitrary 6, 8, 21,38, 39, 104-106, 112-117, 119-122, 145, 148, 152, 157, 158, 160, 168, 172, 177, 180, 194 Artificial Intelligence 4, 10, 54, 55, 58, 98-101, 122, 155, 215, 248, 250,252

256 Cognitivism 1, 3, 4, 7, 30, 40, 46, 47, 50, 52-55, 57, 58, 74, 79-84, 88, 91, 92, 103, 108, 126, 140, 171, 209, 211, 214, 215 Computational view of mind 3, 52, 69, 70, 73, 75, 76, 85, 92, 93, 96, 98, 101, 122, 127-133, 214 Comsigns 112, 113 Connectionism 4, 69, 71, 73-75 Conventions 15, 37, 91, 104, 106, 110, 118, 119, 148, 169, 179, 180, 186, 251 Cross-modal transfers 165-167 Cultural codes 6, 24, 27, 170

Basic level of categorization 59,60 Behaviorism 21, 22, 28-30, 36, 40, 48, 50-53, 55, 79-83, 89 Cognition 1-4, 6, 7, 9-11,13, 14, 17, 2 5 , 2 8 , 3 1 , 3 2 , 3 7 , 3 9 , 4 1 , 43, 45, 46, 49, 52, 53, 54-59, 61, 64, 68-70, 73, 75-77, 79, 82, 84, 90-96, 98, 100-103, 113, 118, 119, 120, 125-137, 140, 141, 143, 145-149, 154-156, 165, 169-172, 182, 187-190, 192, 193, 199-202,

Developmental psychology 53, 188, 189, 201 Distinction between words and ideas 3, 42, 43 Dualism 5, 84-86, 92

2 6 2 Subject Index

Embodied cognition 64, 131, 137, 143, 169 Evolution of language 130, 168, 172, 173, 175-178, 256 Experiential or image schemata 61-63, 66, 171, 172, 187 Formal systems 96-98, 100, 116, 121 Formalism 51, 52, 55, 57, 76, 96, 98, 99, 137, 143 Formats 190, 202-208 Functional autonomy 4, 5, 8, 68, 77, 125, 130, 135, 145, 149, 152, 153, 155-162, 164, 165, 168, 169-178, 181, 189, 191-194, 196-201,206-209,212-214 Icon 109, 112, 113, 118, 120, 160, 194, 195 Imagination 155, 156, 170, 171, 250,252 Index 6, 8, 38, 106, 109-113, 117, 119, 120, 145, 148, 149, 152, 162, 164, 167 179,180, 181, 184, 191, 195, 198 Innenwelt 10, 43, 62 Introspection 30, 31, 39, 48, 80, 81, 84, 92 Language of thought 3, 55-57, 74, 92, 94, 95, 113, 213, 248

Mediation of signs 19, 23, 24, 120,132 Mentalism 1-3, 14, 17, 22, 27-30, 33-36, 39, 40, 42, 44, 46-52, 54, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 88, 89, 92, 103, 108, 126 Motor autonomy 157-159, 168, 192, 196, 197 Natsigns 112 Natural boundaries of semiotics 14-15 Objectivism 58, 59, 77 Parsimony of theories 13, 22, 52, 79, 120, 123, 129 Part-whole analysis 151, 152, 154, 157, 177, 213 Pragmatic maxim 29, 32, 33, 37-40, 83, 84, 116 Psycholinguistics 53, 58, 68, 248 Pure performatives 184, 185, 190-192, 197, 204 Pure semiotics 17, 19-25, 27, 103, 115,120, 216 Radial categories 67 Reasons for the cognitive shift 52-55 Reduction 32, 34, 57, 61, 86 Ritualization 114 Second phase of cognitivism 4, 57-77, 209

Subject Index

Semantics 57, 58, 66, 98-100, 104, 105, 247, 250, 253 Sensorimotor Stage Four 153, 154, 182 Sensorimotor Stage Five 153, 182-183, 207 Sensorimotor Stage Six 153, 154, 182-184, 207 Sensory autonomy 154-157, 161, 164, 166, 168, 192, 198 Symbols 2, 4-9, 13, 20,26, 38, 39, 42, 59, 68-77, 91, 97-101, 103-123, 130, 131, 134, 136, 137, 143, 145, 146, 148-150, 152, 156-162, 164-172, 175, 177, 179-182, 184-186, 190200, 204, 208, 209, 211, 213, 215, 244, 255

263

Syntax 3, 7, 51, 57, 98-100, 175, 181, 186, 245, 246 Transcendental reasoning 82 Truth conditions 58, 104-108, 214

81, 61,

Umwelt 9, 10, 26, 27, 43, 63, 65, 146, 147, 156, 177 Understanding 7, 9, 15, 18, 29, 41, 42, 46, 50, 51, 55, 58, 59, 74, 87, 90, 91, 96, 97, 99, 101,103-105, 108, 109, 127, 128, 131, 146-149, 164-166, 169, 173, 181, 182, 209, 216,255 Verificationism 38, 39, 83