Signs - what are they?

We live in a complex world of signs. Traffic lights, interface icons, mathematical symbols, maps, words, and so on, are examples of the variety that the semiotic universe holds. Signs seem to be fundamental mediators of human action. All the afore mentioned kinds of signs belong to the surrounding world. They are external mediators of our internal activity. There, their physical constituents seem to be neuro-chemical processes in neural networks. This is the material form of internal signs.

Psychological analysis requires that we know a bit more. The peculiarity of neural networks is their ability to contain referential links. The basic idea in the concept of sign is its ability to refer to something else. Traffic signs direct our driving. They help anticipate yet unseen events and road properties. Often their iconic symbols are straightforward, sometimes not, and we must learn their meaning.

Language is perhaps our most important system of signs. Words have no natural referents. Their meaning is established in social practices and, hence, learning to know their meaning is a life-long labour.

The word “sign” also has a meaning. What should it involve to make it applicable for psychological analysis? The challenge here is that as both external and internal activities are mediated by signs, the understanding the common constituents of their meaning must be spelled out.

In the last century, Lev Vygotsky and George Herbert Mead represented the two classic attempts to work out the meaning of psychological signs. Their formulations were, first, marginalised by behaviourism and, later, by the arrival of cognitive psychology that discarded the idea of symbolic mediation in favour of the Aristotelian view of in-formation.

The third contemporary conception in the 1930s was Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic understanding of signs. Together with Valentin Voloshinov he generated and extremely interesting view of words as 2 sided acts. Bakhtin’s writings became fashionable in Finland in the late 70’s after a translation of some of his essays into Finnish. Somewhat later, Holqvist and Emerson’s work made his texts available in English. Voloshinov’s “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language” had been translated in 1971. I came across the book in 1986, when the extended revision was published in English.

Having been familiar with Vygotsky’s sign concept and Leontiev’s unsuccessful attempt to incorporate it into his activity theory, the idea of dialogic signs felt like a fresh breeze. It formed the starting point for my explorations of the meaning of psychological signs. 

I also had a laboratory, my psychotherapy practice, that seemed appropriate to the task of studying the relationships between Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov in their manner of understanding signs.

The task was much harder than I ever imagined.

   

Theoretical work is peculiar

Theoretical work is very peculiar. The object of research does not openly show that the tools by which it is approached generate skewed outcomes. We tend to get what we expect to find. This is, of course, true in empirical research as well. 

When Marie Curie studied radioactive substances she could not anticipate the health hazards involved. In all fields of research, we can recognize, in hindsight, that we have paid attention to a limited sphere of outcomes in the data at the early stages of research.

However, sooner or later, the object of study responds in ways that compel us to pay attention to previously unseen consequences. 

Theories do not do that. They humbly comply with our prevailing convictions and beliefs. Hence, as in the case of cognitive psychology, we can happily rely on conceptualizations that have originated 2300 ago. 

We do perceive the paradoxes, like the mind-body problem, the gap between imagery and linguistic thought, or the difficulty in understanding the relationship between cognition and emotion. But we do not perceive that the basic fault is our habit of beginning the analysis from sensation and understanding activity as a response to stimulation. This point of departure repeats Aristotle’s original approach.

These issues were as clearly evident in 1966, when I became a psychology student, as they are presently. The gaps and inconsistencies in theory do not point out potential conceptual alternatives. In spite of our misgivings, we tend to stick to what we have assumed. 

Alternative ways of analyzing mental phenomena have been proposed. George Herbert Mead, Sigmund Freud, and Lev Vygotsky understood the object of psychological study in different terms. Their common point of departure was mediation. Mental phenomena are mediated by symbolic tools. 

They differed in their ways of understanding the origin of these tools, but they shared the idea that human activity, and mental action as its specific mode, is a triadic phenomenon. But mainstream psychology has been unable to revise its classic approach to mental phenomena, Hence, Freud, Vygotsky, and Mead have remained in the margin throughout the last century up to this day.  

Adopting mediation as the point of departure breaks the Newtonian understanding of causality. Contemporary nuclear physics seems to have no difficulty in conceptualizing mediated interactive events. Cognitive psychology still wants to detect causal sequences, disregarding the triadic forces that are involved in any mental event.

I was a young psychology student in 1969, when getting in touch with Lev Vygotsky’s work. Finland’s geopolitical position and the radicalization of university students generated an exchange between German (East and West) and Russian academic institutions in the early 1970’s. 

Vygotsky’s thinking presented an obvious alternative to the information processing approach that was in the vogue within academic psychology. From those days onward, the issue of sign mediation has occupied me and it still does.

Conceptual research needs a lab

The best way to understand the meaning of concepts is to trace their origin and history. However, even this method does not help us generate alternative viewpoints to the theoretical difficulties and contradictions we have encountered while tracing the development of a concept. The history of representation is a powerful example. It has experienced many transformations since the Aristotelian formulation of forms that are taken in without matter (in-formation). Yet the theoretical contradictions that it creates have remained unsolved in cognitive science to this day.

So how about empirical research? We expect that putting the concept into a rigorous experimental test will lead us forward. In the case of representations, no empirical research (as Cummins has concluded) has been able to account for the gap between sensory input and meaningful representations that Fodor postulated in his Language of Thought hypothesis. 

Ptolemaic astronomy illustrates this problem. No empirical observation that could be made by naked eye undermined the basic theory. Aristarchus of Samos had proposed a heliocentric alternative in the third century BCE, but the geocentric understanding prevailed well over a millennium. 

In a way, we are in a hermeneutic impasse. Our theories dictate what we expect to observe and contradictory observations tend to remain meaningless and neglected.

Yet, laboratories are useful because they help generate varying series of observations. The repeated patterns in this continuous variation may, eventually, show the limits of our current explanatory concepts unless we interpret them to be meaningless noise. Thus, laboratories have a potential, even if the power of our ways of thinking may, initially, mute the alternative signs that are experimentally generated.

My personal experience of exploring the concept of sign makes a good case. Having become excited by Vygotsky’s idea of semiotic mediation as the explanatory principle of mental processes, I wanted to explore its potential for clinical psychology. Psychotherapy was my laboratory. 

In the early 1970’s we formed a study group that tried the idea in individual counseling and clinical assessment. At the time, we were completely ignorant of the conceptual gap that had developed within the Vygotskyan tradition during the Stalin era. 

Vygotsky’s understending of semiotic mediation had been discarded in favor of Leontiev’s activity theory. We adopted his tripartite conceptualization of activity, action, and operation as our point of departure. 

Afer a few years, it became clear that Leontiev's conceptualization did not help understanding the interactive events that we encountered in the consulting rooms. They were far too general. 

Leontiev’s concepts of object and tool had been developed in studying distributed work activities, but we were involved in verbal exchange with the client whose “objects” were accounts of personal experiences. Much later, I perceived that Leontiev's concept of activity included mediation, but he had no clear concept of semiotic mediation. Consequently, instrumental and communicative activities remained separate fields of research, as Radzhikowskii noticed in his 1984 paper. 

What was even more disappointing was Leontiev's complete inability to account for internal actions. He only stated that they share the structure of mediated instrumental actions. 

So, in order to understand  we went to train ourselves in psycho-dynamic and cognitive therapies that appeared to have much more adequate conceptual tools. 

The psychotherapy lab quickly demonstrated that activity theory did not work, but neither it did point out any alternative that might have involved semiotic mediation. Thus, we had to give up our hopes and go back to the existing traditions in the field.

An adequate concept of sign that would serve both communication and psychic activity called for theoretical work.

The Aristotelian shipwreck

The Aristotelian shipwreck, buried in Kantian sand dunes, reappears unexpectedly here and there. Some weeks ago, Harry Procter sent me Mats Bergman's paper “Representationism and Presentationism (2007), which is a valuable account of Peirce’s struggle to unite his semiotic understanding of the consciousness with the doctrine of immediate perception. The article, again, shows how useful is a careful  developmental approach that compares and contrasts Peirce’s early and mature views of perception.

In my reading of the article, Peirce did not manage to reach his aim for two reasons. His early theoretical maxim that everything in the consciousness is semiotic presupposes a unified conception of sign that unites the elementary modes of perception with the “higher” processes in consciousness, such as remembering, imagining, and thinking. Peirce never reached such a conception, although he experimented with different versions of the triadic conception of object, representamen, and interpretant.  His later solution of categorising signs according to the ontological categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness blurred the picture and created problems of analysing consciousness in terms of the relationships between iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs.

The other problem that I sensed when reading Bergman concerns Peirce’s way of approaching perception from the traditional Aristotelian angle.  The following citation that Bergman quotes  in full illustrates it very well:

. . .the object of a sign, that to which it, virtually at least, professes to be applicable, can itself be only a sign. For example, the object of an ordinary proposition is [a] generalization from a group of perceptual facts. It represents those facts. These perceptual facts are themselves abstract representatives, though we know not precisely what intermediaries, of the percepts themselves; and these are themselves viewed, and are,—if the judgment has any truth,—representations, primarily of impressions of sense, ultimately of a dark underlying something, which cannot be specified without its manifesting itself as a sign of something below. There is, we think, and reasonably think, a limit to this, an ultimate reality like a zero of temperature. But in the nature of things, it can only be approached, it can only be represented. The immediate object which any sign seeks to represent is itself a sign. (MS 599:36–37 [c. 1902]; cf. NEM 4:309–310 [c. 1894?])

The receptive understanding of perception that Aristotle cemented seems here to be modified by a Kantian cautiousness that prevents Peirce to name “the thing in itself” as the starting point. Instead, he refers to “a dark underlying something”. Nevertheless, the following steps seem to come close to the Medieval debates on abstractive cognition, or Roger Bacon’s doctrine of De multiplication specierum. The path from “impressions of sense”, “percepts”, and “perceptual facts” to  “ordinary propositions”  is a faithful reproduction of the Aristotelian theory of cognition.

The inherent dynamics of this account brings about problems that lead to “a multiplication” of the steps that seem to be needed. Bergman’s paper illustrates this nicely by Peirce’s conceptual division between “percept” and “percipuum”. As instances of secondness, percepts only convey the “brute force” of their instigators. Percipuums are a bit like Fodor’s symbolic representations. Still within the perceptual domain, they involve a kind of identifying judgments that make them appearances of something. “But the moment we fix our minds upon it and think the least thing about the percept, it is the perceptual judgment that tells us what we so ‘perceive’.” (CP 7.643 [c. 1903])

The recent commentaries that try to bring some coherence in Peirce’s prolific and contradictory thought seem, unwittingly, to reproduce the tendency of introducing more steps and substages in order to cope with the Aristotelian fallacy. Bergman  presents Carl Hausman’s suggestion to distinguish between percept₁ and percept₂ . The former denotes the dynamic object, or the immediate impact of the brute force, while the second incorporates a cognitive generalization that prepares the percept suitable for becoming the immediate object of thought, or the percipuum.

At this stage, I cannot help concluding that Peirce was, as we still mostly are, too closely tied to the Aristotelian understanding of cognition in order to unite his semiotic maxim of the consciousness with his accounts of perception. Jerry Fodor’s much more recent attempt to fill the rift between propositional attitudes and immediate sense impressions is another reproduction of the ancient problem that remains unsolved despite terminological modifications.