**Introductory Chapter: Semiotic Hauntologies of Ghosts and Machines**

Asunción López‐Varela Azcárate

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.69858

## **1. Introduction**

Semiotics has a long tradition as the science of signs, signification and meaning‐making. Four traditions have contributed to Western semiotics: semantics (including the philosophy of lan‐ guage), logic, rhetoric and hermeneutics. However, both John Deely and Umberto Eco [1, 2] have claimed the need to re‐read the history of philosophy, and maybe of other disciplines, from a semiotic point of view. This volume shows that there are many other fields contribut‐ ing to make semiotics an interdisciplinary arena and an ever‐growing field of interest.

In the Western world, the first semiotic incursions can be traced back to the Greeks. Before contemporary semioticians raised the question of the powerful action and "affordances" of signs (see below for this concept), there were phenomena considered "significant" in three main contexts: poetics (and linguistics), logic (and philosophy) and medicine. This introduc‐ tory paper shows how knowledges from the past haunt the present and future of semiotics in various ways. The reflection functions as a catalyst to connect the diverse papers collected in this volume, contributing to point out the contemporary relevance of semiotics and its inter‐ disciplinary applications.

The subtitle "of ghosts and machines" refers to a phrase used by Oxford professor of philoso‐ phy Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) to capture the Cartesian idea of a soul/mind within the body/ machine, which he employed to criticize materialist theories that reduce mental activity to physical reality. The phrase was later popularized by Hungarian‐British journalist Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) who borrowed it for his 1967 book *The Ghost in the Machine*, where his central concern was the controversy over auto‐replicative forms of intelligence in the human brain. The phrase has acquired new meanings in artificial intelligence. It was used by Arthur

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C. Clarke in his (1982) novel *2010: Odyssey Two,* by Stephen King in his 1991 serial novel *The Dark Tower,* and more recently, by Japanese artist Masamune Shirow for his manga *Ghost in the Shell* and its movie adaptations. The evolution of the topic shows concern over the possibil‐ ity of cyber‐brains and the symbiosis of the human and the machine, throwing light on some key aspects of the contemporary debate on semiotics.

Indeed, cybernetic advance is so rapid that there is already software that tracks the electrical activity of human nervous systems, collecting patterns of thoughts and emotions in order to map entire human life experiences, turning them into searchable data (i.e., the British Telecom "Soul Catcher" computer chip). In the move towards "Silicon Souls", research on biomecha‐ tronics developed at MIT lab (http://biomech.media.mit.edu/) will allow a new generation of prosthesis by means of a dynamic socket that maps nerve and muscle movements in the amputee's body. These prostheses are extensions of the body as much as of the mind, since they map machine algorithms upon artificial limbs. All these contemporary immersive tech‐ nologies explore the imbrication of digital simulations with body schemata. Furthermore, in the race to connect the world, the InterPlaNet (IPN) initiative launched by NASA in 1998 offers a computer networking protocol designed to operate at interplanetary distances (http:// ipnsig.org/), not just "connecting people", but connecting galaxies.

Let me turn for a minute to the etymology of the word "ghost". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term originates in Proto‐Germanic *Gaisto‐z,* which in Old English became *gāst* and *gáest* (*Exeter Book*) and *Geist* in German, meaning "breath", in the sense of disembodied spirit of a dead person that inhabits a body and might be good or bad. It later acquired religious and psychological overtones as "psyche", "soul" and "vital principle". According to Sir James Frazer, the "ghost" is a sort of creature that animates de body, escaping it temporarily during sleep and permanently in death: death being the permanent absence of the soul, he explains in *The Golden Bough*. The similarities with Proto‐Indo‐European \*ǵʰeysd‐, \*ǵʰisd‐ ("anger, agitation"), \*ǵʰyis‐ ("bewildered, frightened") and \*ǵʰey‐ ("to propel, move, spin") should also to be noted.

Alongside "ghost", the Greek term *phántasma* originally meant to "make visible" or "bring to light", and it is related to contemporary terms such as "appearance" "image", "phantom" or "fantasy", all of which entered Western languages through Latin. As in the case of "ghost", it came to mean "soul" and "spirit", maintaining a religious significance as in the Bible (i.e., "the Holy Ghost"; in Latin *Spiritus Sanctus*).

Continuing our incursion on etymological roots, the origin of the term semiotics shows inter‐ esting parallels that make obvious the human desire to transcend death through memory and representation, that is, the use of signs that try to make present that which is absent. In Jacques Derrida's terms, "logocentrism" would be a characteristic pattern of the Western world. He also used the term "hauntology" in his 1993 book *Spectres of Marx,* following a reference to "spectre" made by Marx himself in his *The Communist Manifesto* [3]. Derrida also echoes Shakespeare's *Hamlet* in order to explain that re‐presentation is a form of making pres‐ ent an absent past by means of different sets of signs. He argues that the attempt to isolate social (history) or individual identity is always futile because it is "always already" (he uses this term to capture the idea of the past living in the present) dependent of semiotic systems where meaning is deferred, subject to interpreting actions. According to Derrida, the sign/ signifier can never capture the object/signified in its totality because we are not talking of essences but of complex processes that encompass many dimensions, as well as various forms of temporality.

C. Clarke in his (1982) novel *2010: Odyssey Two,* by Stephen King in his 1991 serial novel *The Dark Tower,* and more recently, by Japanese artist Masamune Shirow for his manga *Ghost in the Shell* and its movie adaptations. The evolution of the topic shows concern over the possibil‐ ity of cyber‐brains and the symbiosis of the human and the machine, throwing light on some

Indeed, cybernetic advance is so rapid that there is already software that tracks the electrical activity of human nervous systems, collecting patterns of thoughts and emotions in order to map entire human life experiences, turning them into searchable data (i.e., the British Telecom "Soul Catcher" computer chip). In the move towards "Silicon Souls", research on biomecha‐ tronics developed at MIT lab (http://biomech.media.mit.edu/) will allow a new generation of prosthesis by means of a dynamic socket that maps nerve and muscle movements in the amputee's body. These prostheses are extensions of the body as much as of the mind, since they map machine algorithms upon artificial limbs. All these contemporary immersive tech‐ nologies explore the imbrication of digital simulations with body schemata. Furthermore, in the race to connect the world, the InterPlaNet (IPN) initiative launched by NASA in 1998 offers a computer networking protocol designed to operate at interplanetary distances (http://

Let me turn for a minute to the etymology of the word "ghost". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term originates in Proto‐Germanic *Gaisto‐z,* which in Old English became *gāst* and *gáest* (*Exeter Book*) and *Geist* in German, meaning "breath", in the sense of disembodied spirit of a dead person that inhabits a body and might be good or bad. It later acquired religious and psychological overtones as "psyche", "soul" and "vital principle". According to Sir James Frazer, the "ghost" is a sort of creature that animates de body, escaping it temporarily during sleep and permanently in death: death being the permanent absence of the soul, he explains in *The Golden Bough*. The similarities with Proto‐Indo‐European \*ǵʰeysd‐, \*ǵʰisd‐ ("anger, agitation"), \*ǵʰyis‐ ("bewildered, frightened") and \*ǵʰey‐ ("to propel, move,

Alongside "ghost", the Greek term *phántasma* originally meant to "make visible" or "bring to light", and it is related to contemporary terms such as "appearance" "image", "phantom" or "fantasy", all of which entered Western languages through Latin. As in the case of "ghost", it came to mean "soul" and "spirit", maintaining a religious significance as in the Bible (i.e., "the

Continuing our incursion on etymological roots, the origin of the term semiotics shows inter‐ esting parallels that make obvious the human desire to transcend death through memory and representation, that is, the use of signs that try to make present that which is absent. In Jacques Derrida's terms, "logocentrism" would be a characteristic pattern of the Western world. He also used the term "hauntology" in his 1993 book *Spectres of Marx,* following a reference to "spectre" made by Marx himself in his *The Communist Manifesto* [3]. Derrida also echoes Shakespeare's *Hamlet* in order to explain that re‐presentation is a form of making pres‐ ent an absent past by means of different sets of signs. He argues that the attempt to isolate social (history) or individual identity is always futile because it is "always already" (he uses this term to capture the idea of the past living in the present) dependent of semiotic systems

key aspects of the contemporary debate on semiotics.

4 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

ipnsig.org/), not just "connecting people", but connecting galaxies.

spin") should also to be noted.

Holy Ghost"; in Latin *Spiritus Sanctus*).

Indeed, the haunting figure of the ghost sign, simultaneously absent and present, dead and alive, was always already there in the etymology of the term semiotics. The Greek noun *sêma* appears in ancient texts (i.e., Homer and Hesiod) with the sense "tomb/burial ground" as well as with the meaning of natural or conventional signal. After the sixth century BCE, the term *semeîon,* which originates from *sêma*, was commonly used by Aeschylus, Aesop, Hecataeus of Miletus, Anaxagoras or Cleostratus, and it comes to mean "symbol" and "sign of a god" as well as "indication" and "proof". It coexists with *tékmor*, found in *The Iliad* with the meaning of "proof" and eventually "sign" and "indication" (*Iliad*, I, 526; VII, 30; IX, 48; IX, 418; IX, 685; XIII, 20; cited in Castañares 2012) [4]. According to Detienne and Vernant, these terms were also used in fortune telling, astronomy and navigation, referring to signals coming from the gods and alluding to cunning knowledge associated with the goddess Metis (pp. 168–169) [5].

The term *tékmor* evolved towards *techné* in the context of medicine during the fifth century BCE and the beginning of the fourth, when Hippocrates' disciples compiled the chief trea‐ tises of the *Corpus Hippocraticum.* According to these treatises, doctors were able to identify a specific type of signs (*semeîa*) through which they were able to conclude the health or illness of individuals. The medical method of establishing conjectures (*tekmaíresthai*) for diagnosis departed from the analogical deductive procedure used in philosophy and which rested on the notion of *phýsis* as a cosmos (a whole finished reality, arranged by laws that were repli‐ cated at the human microcosmic level). Hippocratic medicine described inferential semiotics when it explained how *semeîa* moves beyond mere conjecture to become *semeîon* and gain the sense of proof (*tekmérion*) [4].

Aristotle's contribution to semiotics had already clarified that signs are demonstrative propo‐ sitions that might (or might not) acquire meaning to someone. Beyond causality relations, statements can constitute the premises of a syllogism and, as such, they can become conven‐ tional cultural signs whose paradigm is the "word". However, they may also lack a specific name (*anónimon*) and therefore be refutable (*Rhetoric* I, 2, 1357 a 34 ff.). For instance, the fact that Socrates was wise and just is a (*anonymous*) sign that wise men are just (1357b pp. 11–13) [6]. Although in his *Poetics* (1456 b 20–21), Aristotle's attempts to define various terms related to the field of logic and semiotics, a clearer allusion appears in *Perihermenias or De interpre‐ tatione*, where he puts forth the explicit opposition between words and things (*lógos* and *ón*), already prefigured in Plato. One of the fragments presents an early description of triadic semiotics (Deely p. 76) [7].

"Now spoken sounds (*ta en têi phonêi*) are symbols (*sýmbola*) of affections (*pathématon*) in the soul, and written marks (*ta graphómena*) symbols of spoken sounds. And just as written marks are not the same for all men, neither are spoken sounds. But what these are in the first place signs *(semeîa prótos*) of – affections of the soul – are the same for all; and what these affections are likenesses (*omoiómata*) of – actual things (*prágmata*) – are also the same." (*De interpretatione* 16a 3–8) [7].

After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE and the emergence of the Roman Empire, Greek civilization entered the Hellenistic Age, a period marked by battles and territorial shifts which lasted until the Roman conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt in the first century BCE. Many sources were lost during this period, either because of war or because of lack of interest in scribal preservation.

In the second century CE, Claudius Galenus synthetized Hippocratic medicine and the philosophical thoughts of Plato and Aristotle to include the advancement of technology into the inferential process of medical diagnosis (*diagnostikón meros tes technes*), coining the term *semeíosis.*

In the 1750s, a series of excavations that took place at Herculaneum (an ancient Roman town located at the skirts of Mount Vesuvius and covered with debris after the 79 CE eruption) unveiled a great collection papyrus.<sup>1</sup> Among these, there was a treatise by Epicurean philoso‐ pher Philodemus of Gadara (c. 100–35 BCE) probably entitled *Perì semeîon kai semeióseon* (*On Signs and Sign Inferences*), known now by its abbreviated title, *De Signis*. The treatise contains a variation of the term *semeióseos,* from which C.S. Peirce would derive *semiosis* [8, 9]. As in Aristotle, for Philodemus, common signs cannot be taken as valid inferential premises, as can particular or necessary signs (*anankastikón*). The treatise preserves the controversy on the validity of sign inference which took place between Epicureans and Stoics in order to estab‐ lish the type of "proof" to determine the difference between signs. While the Stoics defended deductive inferences established from *a priori* principles, the Epicureans trusted empirical inductive testing.

Greek reflections on the nature and purpose of sign systems and their relations to differ‐ ent types of knowledge has continued to "haunt" Western thought for centuries. Thus, scholasticism and medieval semiotics developed within theology and the trivium of the three liberal arts, concerned primarily with textual exegesis and hermeneutics: grammar, dialectic (logic) and rhetoric. During this period, realist and nominalist positions debated over the existence (or not) of universals. A proponent of nominalism, William of Ockham (1285–1349) considered universals to be signs without an existence of their own, but stand‐ ing for individual objects. Conceptualism, held by Peter Abelard (1079–1142), Albert the Great (1200–1280) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), was accepted as a synthesis of the two positions, with universals are also mind‐dependent but formed by similarities with real things of a common form.

A new era of interest and research on the nature of signs began in the ages of rationalism and British empiricism. The period showed a shift from analogic reasoning towards the expres‐ sion of knowledge as both analytic and referential practice, where representation stems in the observer's perceiving/thinking mind (subject of enunciation) and gradually shifts to a more abstract mode, where the word/sign and the phenomenon/matter are brought to coincide in the act of mimetic representation. This move was also associated with an epistemological shift: from the perceiving subject to the observed empirical object (experiment) [10]. The use

<sup>1</sup> http://www.herculaneum.ox.ac.uk/http://163.1.169.40/cgi‐bin/library?e=d‐000‐00‐‐‐0PHerc‐‐00‐0‐0‐‐0prompt‐10‐‐‐4‐‐‐‐‐‐ 0‐1l‐‐1‐en‐50‐‐‐20‐about‐‐‐00031‐001‐1‐0utfZz‐8‐00&a=d&c=PHerc&cl=CL5.1

of optic technologies and lenses employed in instruments such as the telescope, developed by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), enabled this viewing transition, just as the screens of computers, tablets and smart phones open contemporary worlds to the virtual cyber‐sphere.

After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE and the emergence of the Roman Empire, Greek civilization entered the Hellenistic Age, a period marked by battles and territorial shifts which lasted until the Roman conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt in the first century BCE. Many sources were lost during this period, either because of war or because of lack of interest in

In the second century CE, Claudius Galenus synthetized Hippocratic medicine and the philosophical thoughts of Plato and Aristotle to include the advancement of technology into the inferential process of medical diagnosis (*diagnostikón meros tes technes*), coining the term

In the 1750s, a series of excavations that took place at Herculaneum (an ancient Roman town located at the skirts of Mount Vesuvius and covered with debris after the 79 CE eruption)

pher Philodemus of Gadara (c. 100–35 BCE) probably entitled *Perì semeîon kai semeióseon* (*On Signs and Sign Inferences*), known now by its abbreviated title, *De Signis*. The treatise contains a variation of the term *semeióseos,* from which C.S. Peirce would derive *semiosis* [8, 9]. As in Aristotle, for Philodemus, common signs cannot be taken as valid inferential premises, as can particular or necessary signs (*anankastikón*). The treatise preserves the controversy on the validity of sign inference which took place between Epicureans and Stoics in order to estab‐ lish the type of "proof" to determine the difference between signs. While the Stoics defended deductive inferences established from *a priori* principles, the Epicureans trusted empirical

Greek reflections on the nature and purpose of sign systems and their relations to differ‐ ent types of knowledge has continued to "haunt" Western thought for centuries. Thus, scholasticism and medieval semiotics developed within theology and the trivium of the three liberal arts, concerned primarily with textual exegesis and hermeneutics: grammar, dialectic (logic) and rhetoric. During this period, realist and nominalist positions debated over the existence (or not) of universals. A proponent of nominalism, William of Ockham (1285–1349) considered universals to be signs without an existence of their own, but stand‐ ing for individual objects. Conceptualism, held by Peter Abelard (1079–1142), Albert the Great (1200–1280) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), was accepted as a synthesis of the two positions, with universals are also mind‐dependent but formed by similarities with real

A new era of interest and research on the nature of signs began in the ages of rationalism and British empiricism. The period showed a shift from analogic reasoning towards the expres‐ sion of knowledge as both analytic and referential practice, where representation stems in the observer's perceiving/thinking mind (subject of enunciation) and gradually shifts to a more abstract mode, where the word/sign and the phenomenon/matter are brought to coincide in the act of mimetic representation. This move was also associated with an epistemological shift: from the perceiving subject to the observed empirical object (experiment) [10]. The use

http://www.herculaneum.ox.ac.uk/http://163.1.169.40/cgi‐bin/library?e=d‐000‐00‐‐‐0PHerc‐‐00‐0‐0‐‐0prompt‐10‐‐‐4‐‐‐‐‐‐

0‐1l‐‐1‐en‐50‐‐‐20‐about‐‐‐00031‐001‐1‐0utfZz‐8‐00&a=d&c=PHerc&cl=CL5.1

Among these, there was a treatise by Epicurean philoso‐

scribal preservation.

6 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

unveiled a great collection papyrus.<sup>1</sup>

*semeíosis.*

inductive testing.

things of a common form.

1

In spite of Galileo's innovative engineering, his methods were based largely on the theo‐ ries of analogy, proportion and inverse proportion, passed, on by the Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa (1175–1250) as well as the Egyptian‐Greek architect known as Euclid (c. 300 BCE). A new translation of his book of *Elements* was published in 1543, only some 20 years before Galileo's birth. It had the advantage of coming from a Latin version based on an earlier Greek source, rather than via Arabic translations. I bring to the fore these issues of translation and the differences in symbolic representation because the late 1500s and early 1600s mark the expansion of Gutenberg printing press as well as the rupture of the ancient unity between calculation, natural philosophy and alphabetic writing [11].

The ensuing separation continued to pose the problem in philosophical debates between demonstrative and dialectical reasoning, as scholars tried to explain how singular items of experience were part of universal knowledge, a problem explored by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Mathematician and author of *Alice Adventures in Wonderland,* Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, confronted the problem in his *Tangled Tales*. In *Principles of Mathematics* (1901), Bertrand Russell continued to face a similar chal‐ lenge: Whether the class of all classes [now called 'sets'] is or is not a member of itself [12, 13].

The analytico‐referential form of reasoning developed after René Descartes (1596–1650) tried to explain the connection between the physical body, much like a machine, separated from the "spirit" or "soul" that animated the mind. In *The Description of the Human Body,* he argued that the mind regulates the body through the pineal gland, which he considered the "seat of the soul". His idea of innate human knowledge led John Locke (1632–1704) to combat Cartesian deduction with inductive empiricism. Limitations arose in both cases, as knowl‐ edge was treated as an object, thus creating a boundary between the liminal being, of which one is conscious, and the ineffable being (the sublime) for which there was no articulation (Reiss p. 39) [10].

The semiotics of George Berkeley (1685–1753) maintained that words do not always stand for ideas and that they have other functions such as referring to passions. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) sustained that human cognitive capacity only has access to the exterior marks of things (signs) and that these do not express the things themselves, only their names. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) *Critique of Pure Reason* (1781) postulated basic conceptual catego‐ ries of human thought as *a priori* tools for making sense of the world. To Kant, these catego‐ ries exist independently of human experience; the image (*Bild*) was a category of perception, while *a priori* concepts formed part of 'pure reason'. This topic was also explored by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) in his work *Laocoon*, a prominent example of the study of ico‐ nicity in the arts. A precursor of the studies on iconicity was Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), whose philosophy was also influential upon Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling (1775–1854) or Novalis (1772–1801), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and, more specifically, Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848) continued to develop a pragmatic dimension of semiosis by exploring different types of signs from the point of view of perception (visual and auditory signs, gestural and verbal signs).

In the twentieth century, the study of semiotics takes a definite impulse. Victoria Lady Welby (1837–1912) has been recently acknowledged an important female precursor. In *Philosophical Investigations*, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) developed a phenomenological theory of signs and meaning which explored the phenomenon of awareness and attention. Husserl argued that some phenomena are not immediately perceived in themselves. Such assertion already implied a gap between the objects as sign (signifier) and as thing (signified). Under the impe‐ tus of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), Louis Trolle Hjelmslev (1899–1965) and Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917–1992), the European structural approach relied on the supremacy of discourse and emphasized the dyadic correspondence between the material sign (signifier) and its referent (signified). It was later criticized under poststructural and deconstructive criticism (i.e., Derrida above). The North‐American triadic approach, developed by Harvard pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and Charles William Morris (1901–1979), as well as Italian semiotician Umberto Eco (1932–2016), went beyond the scholastic conception of reference *aliquid stat pro aliquo* and placed attention on the role of the user in the process of sense‐making and interpreting, establishing three semiotic moments of reference: the mate‐ rial sign vehicle, the object it refers to, and the decoding "interpretant". Peircean semiotics, as both metaphysics and epistemology, reconfigures any simple binary distinction between phenomena (sensation, perception) and noumena (unmediated referent or event that exists without sense or perception) as an irreducible triadic relationship [14].

In the years of expansion of Claude Shannon's information theory, Eco insisted in distin‐ guishing between a semiotics of communication, multidimensional, always intentional and based on a shared code by transmitter and receiver, and a semiotics of meaning which only required an intelligent consciousness at the reception pole, not requiring a transmitter that would transmit signs and signals willingly. Likewise, the members of the Palo Alto "Invisible College" who came from various fields but mainly from anthropology, sociology and psy‐ chology (i.e., Gregory Bateson 1904–1980, Paul Watzlawick 1921–2007 and Erving Goffman 1922–1982, among others) confronted the mathematical theory of information systems and defended the social aspects of human communication as a matrix that encompasses all human activities, a permanent social process that integrates intentional behaviour, with orchestral forms of verbal and non‐verbal communication (i.e., kinesthetics, proxemics, etc.; Matterart pp. 51–54) [15]. This interest for the intentional aspects of communication gradually gave way to the theory of affordances [16].

Anthropologist Marcel Danesi, editor of the world's leading journal "*Semiotica*", sees semiot‐ ics as an interdisciplinary Web, following his mentor and collaborator Thomas Sebeok (1920– 2001). This "Semiotic Web" provides the interconnectivity of sign systems not just in the milieu of cultural representations but also in nature, embracing recent cybernetic theories of embodi‐ ment and performance coming from biosemiotics and the neurosciences. In Sebeok's view, the term "semiology" only captured the anthropocentric part of the discipline [17]. Sebeok's ideas coincided with the development of cybernetics, defined by Norbert Wiener in 1948 as the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine. The term "cybernetic" comes from Greek *kybernetike* meaning "governance" as well as "steering" (in navigation). Metaphors of navigation are frequently used when referring to moving within the encrypted codes of the World Wide Web. In contemporary Data Mining, semiotic model‐ ling is used to map concepts into measurable variables through specific diagnostic criteria, and establish their specificity in relation to contextual interpretation. For instance, Sebeok's and Danesi's modelling systems theory (MST) distinguishes representations that include a singularized (sign), a composite (text) or cohesive form (code) [18, 19].

exploring different types of signs from the point of view of perception (visual and auditory

In the twentieth century, the study of semiotics takes a definite impulse. Victoria Lady Welby (1837–1912) has been recently acknowledged an important female precursor. In *Philosophical Investigations*, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) developed a phenomenological theory of signs and meaning which explored the phenomenon of awareness and attention. Husserl argued that some phenomena are not immediately perceived in themselves. Such assertion already implied a gap between the objects as sign (signifier) and as thing (signified). Under the impe‐ tus of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), Louis Trolle Hjelmslev (1899–1965) and Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917–1992), the European structural approach relied on the supremacy of discourse and emphasized the dyadic correspondence between the material sign (signifier) and its referent (signified). It was later criticized under poststructural and deconstructive criticism (i.e., Derrida above). The North‐American triadic approach, developed by Harvard pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and Charles William Morris (1901–1979), as well as Italian semiotician Umberto Eco (1932–2016), went beyond the scholastic conception of reference *aliquid stat pro aliquo* and placed attention on the role of the user in the process of sense‐making and interpreting, establishing three semiotic moments of reference: the mate‐ rial sign vehicle, the object it refers to, and the decoding "interpretant". Peircean semiotics, as both metaphysics and epistemology, reconfigures any simple binary distinction between phenomena (sensation, perception) and noumena (unmediated referent or event that exists

without sense or perception) as an irreducible triadic relationship [14].

In the years of expansion of Claude Shannon's information theory, Eco insisted in distin‐ guishing between a semiotics of communication, multidimensional, always intentional and based on a shared code by transmitter and receiver, and a semiotics of meaning which only required an intelligent consciousness at the reception pole, not requiring a transmitter that would transmit signs and signals willingly. Likewise, the members of the Palo Alto "Invisible College" who came from various fields but mainly from anthropology, sociology and psy‐ chology (i.e., Gregory Bateson 1904–1980, Paul Watzlawick 1921–2007 and Erving Goffman 1922–1982, among others) confronted the mathematical theory of information systems and defended the social aspects of human communication as a matrix that encompasses all human activities, a permanent social process that integrates intentional behaviour, with orchestral forms of verbal and non‐verbal communication (i.e., kinesthetics, proxemics, etc.; Matterart pp. 51–54) [15]. This interest for the intentional aspects of communication gradually gave way

Anthropologist Marcel Danesi, editor of the world's leading journal "*Semiotica*", sees semiot‐ ics as an interdisciplinary Web, following his mentor and collaborator Thomas Sebeok (1920– 2001). This "Semiotic Web" provides the interconnectivity of sign systems not just in the milieu of cultural representations but also in nature, embracing recent cybernetic theories of embodi‐ ment and performance coming from biosemiotics and the neurosciences. In Sebeok's view, the term "semiology" only captured the anthropocentric part of the discipline [17]. Sebeok's ideas coincided with the development of cybernetics, defined by Norbert Wiener in 1948 as the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine. The term "cybernetic" comes from Greek *kybernetike* meaning "governance" as well as "steering" (in

signs, gestural and verbal signs).

8 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

to the theory of affordances [16].

Ronald Stamper, a British pioneer in the field of semiotics as applied to informational systems, also stresses the importance of "signs" as fundamental units in computer science. Stamper incorporated Speech Act theory (i.e., Austin and Searle) in his *Organizational Semiotics meth‐ odology*. Methods for Eliciting, Analysing and Specifying Users' Requirements (MEASUR) is used to incorporate technical and social aspects of communication in data mining models corresponding to three fundamental domains: application domain (i.e., medicine), the com‐ putational domain (where mathematical codes correspond to concepts in the application domain), and the implementation or "empirical" domain (physical properties of sign and signal transmission and storage). This last aspect was added by Stamper to the traditional semiotic division of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic concerns, including a "social" level for shared understanding above the level of pragmatics [20].

Since the 1990s, with the advent of the digital revolution, the discussion has shifted towards the inclusion of tools and machines in human lives, and how new technologies might impact meaning making and operate as semiotic instruments, embodying the ghost in the machine. Contemporary trends in semiotics explore interactions between living systems, organisms and their environments, following the pioneering work of Jacob Von Uexküll (1864–1944). These approaches have culminated in perception‐action (sensory‐motor integration‐mirror neuron structures) approach, which stresses the role of observers/users around the concept of "affordance" (experience from previous interactions with the world) and the active task‐ori‐ ented sense‐making anticipated by Gibson [16]. Instead of conceiving living systems in terms of their reactions to external stimuli, in these approaches, it is important to pay attention to their constructed internal model of the world and the relation between sensing, desiring and acting. Interestingly, Marx's spectre lucks behind the theory of affordances as it can be seen in the following passage.

"Since the relative form of value of a commodity—the linen, for example— expresses the value of that commodity, as being something wholly different from its substance and prop‐ erties, as being, for instance, coat‐like, we see that this expression itself indicates that some social relation lies at the bottom of it. With the equivalent form it is just the contrary. The very essence of this form is that the material commodity itself—the coat—just as it is, expresses value, and is endowed with the form of value by Nature itself. Of course this holds good only so long as the value relation exists, in which the coat stands in the position of equivalent to the linen. Since, however, the properties of a thing are not the result of its relations to other things, but only manifest themselves in such relations, the coat seems to be endowed with its equivalent form, its property of being directly exchangeable, just as much by Nature as it is endowed with the property of being heavy, or the capacity to keep us warm" (p. 66) [21].

Another spectre is that of Aristotle, who struggled to define the affordances of knowledge, truth and the "soul" in his *Nicomachean Ethics* (Book VI, Ch. 3). He spoke of *epistēmē* (1139 b 18–36) or universal knowledge, shared, circulated and preserved in cultural memory and heritage; *techne* (*Nicomachean Ethics* 1140 a 1–23), skills or capacities to accomplish tasks that operate on variable spheres, and related in chapter 4 to a trained capacity to create through reason (*logos*); and, in other words, knowledge of specific principles and patterns, and frequently translated as "craft" or "art" in its meaning of systematic use of organizational know‐how or codified knowledge oriented towards intelligent human action. And finally, he also defined *phronesis* (*Nicomachean Ethics* 1140 a 24–1140 b 12) as a sort of practical wisdom and idiosyncratic knowl‐ edge that comes from life experiences as a result of trial and error; to some extent, it is intuitive and cannot be shared. Aristotle distinguished *phronesis* from *sophia* (theoretical wisdom, which involves epistemic reasoning) and held that these types of knowledge corresponded to three basic human activities: *theoria* (thinking), aimed at universal knowledge and truth, *poïesis* (mak‐ ing), whose end goal is production, and *praxis*, the objective of which is doing or action [6].

In recent discussions of Aristotle's *Rhetoric*, such as the collection edited by Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer (2000), *phronesis* is discussed in relation to an older quality, *metis* or conjec‐ tural intelligence, personal mode of knowledge encapsulated in practice, and popular in the Mycenae civilization, and attributed to figures such as Prometheus and Odysseus/Ulysses, the paragon of craftiness and cunning [22]. Drawing on work by Detienne and Vernant, *metis* has been found to exemplify and earlier form of world knowledge prior to the development of the synthesis of Platonist and Aristotelian models [5]. Carolyn R. Miller writes that this "conjectural worldview concerns the individual case, rather than universal knowledge, prob‐ ability rather than certainty, qualitative rather than cumulative or quantifiable information, and inferential rather than deductive thought" (p. 138) [23].

Thus, rapidly shifting and disconcerting apprehensions of reality require both conjectural knowledge (*metis*) and practical intelligence (*techne*) targeted at concrete decisions. Some scholars (notably Stephen Gaukroger) have noted that when knowledge shifts occur, and a new cluster of concepts emerge. In the case discussed, the notion of *epistēmē* took over *metis* (p. 42) [24]. In the introduction to the thematic issue of the journal *Icono 14*, "Technopoïesis: Transmedia Mythologisation and the Unity of Knowledge" (2017), co‐authored with Henry Sussman, we attempted to show, following Foucault's *L'Archéologie du Savoir* or Timothy Reiss among others [25, 26], the co‐existence and shifting of different *epistēmēs* as power‐knowledge systems, visible for instance in the transition that took place in the late medieval and early Renaissance Europe with the combination of Neo‐Platonism and Aristotelianism [27].

In his contribution to the *International Handbook of Semiotics* (2015), Deely traced back to Aristotle the premodern background of the semiotic triangle and explained how translations overlooked certain expressions referring to a kind of collective consciousness (a hauntology?) prior to the development of individual self‐awareness:

"In terms of the (lost) terminology, the *passiones animae* or "passions of the soul" are the forms of specification (*species impressae*) for developing thought which have their origin in the action of sensible things upon the senses, as these stimuli are *further* developed or shaped by the active interpretative response of the internal sense of memory, imagination, and estimation that together, or "collectively" constitute, on the side of animal Innenwelt, the foundations or basis (*species expressae*, or "phantasms") for the relations to the environment constituting the animal's objective world, the Umwelt" (p. 67).

As John Derbyshire's contribution to *The Spectator* (June 5, 2014), "Chasing down the Ghost in the Machine" shows the controversy on the seat of consciousness remains [28]. Writing also in 2014, semiotician Paul Cobley emphasizes the role of biosemiotics in challenging the mechanist worldview and placing consciousness in relation to nature and in a continuum with plant‐animal existence. To Cobley, biosemiotics also serves to question the role of agency as inherently human and shows that different forms of agency can be found at very lower biological levels in the most rudimentary of organisms [29].

or universal knowledge, shared, circulated and preserved in cultural memory and heritage; *techne* (*Nicomachean Ethics* 1140 a 1–23), skills or capacities to accomplish tasks that operate on variable spheres, and related in chapter 4 to a trained capacity to create through reason (*logos*); and, in other words, knowledge of specific principles and patterns, and frequently translated as "craft" or "art" in its meaning of systematic use of organizational know‐how or codified knowledge oriented towards intelligent human action. And finally, he also defined *phronesis* (*Nicomachean Ethics* 1140 a 24–1140 b 12) as a sort of practical wisdom and idiosyncratic knowl‐ edge that comes from life experiences as a result of trial and error; to some extent, it is intuitive and cannot be shared. Aristotle distinguished *phronesis* from *sophia* (theoretical wisdom, which involves epistemic reasoning) and held that these types of knowledge corresponded to three basic human activities: *theoria* (thinking), aimed at universal knowledge and truth, *poïesis* (mak‐ ing), whose end goal is production, and *praxis*, the objective of which is doing or action [6].

In recent discussions of Aristotle's *Rhetoric*, such as the collection edited by Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer (2000), *phronesis* is discussed in relation to an older quality, *metis* or conjec‐ tural intelligence, personal mode of knowledge encapsulated in practice, and popular in the Mycenae civilization, and attributed to figures such as Prometheus and Odysseus/Ulysses, the paragon of craftiness and cunning [22]. Drawing on work by Detienne and Vernant, *metis* has been found to exemplify and earlier form of world knowledge prior to the development of the synthesis of Platonist and Aristotelian models [5]. Carolyn R. Miller writes that this "conjectural worldview concerns the individual case, rather than universal knowledge, prob‐ ability rather than certainty, qualitative rather than cumulative or quantifiable information,

Thus, rapidly shifting and disconcerting apprehensions of reality require both conjectural knowledge (*metis*) and practical intelligence (*techne*) targeted at concrete decisions. Some scholars (notably Stephen Gaukroger) have noted that when knowledge shifts occur, and a new cluster of concepts emerge. In the case discussed, the notion of *epistēmē* took over *metis* (p. 42) [24]. In the introduction to the thematic issue of the journal *Icono 14*, "Technopoïesis: Transmedia Mythologisation and the Unity of Knowledge" (2017), co‐authored with Henry Sussman, we attempted to show, following Foucault's *L'Archéologie du Savoir* or Timothy Reiss among others [25, 26], the co‐existence and shifting of different *epistēmēs* as power‐knowledge systems, visible for instance in the transition that took place in the late medieval and early

Renaissance Europe with the combination of Neo‐Platonism and Aristotelianism [27].

In his contribution to the *International Handbook of Semiotics* (2015), Deely traced back to Aristotle the premodern background of the semiotic triangle and explained how translations overlooked certain expressions referring to a kind of collective consciousness (a hauntology?)

"In terms of the (lost) terminology, the *passiones animae* or "passions of the soul" are the forms of specification (*species impressae*) for developing thought which have their origin in the action of sensible things upon the senses, as these stimuli are *further* developed or shaped by the active interpretative response of the internal sense of memory, imagination, and estimation that together, or "collectively" constitute, on the side of animal Innenwelt, the foundations or basis (*species expressae*, or "phantasms") for the relations to the environment constituting the

and inferential rather than deductive thought" (p. 138) [23].

10 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

prior to the development of individual self‐awareness:

animal's objective world, the Umwelt" (p. 67).

Introduced by Jakob von Uexküll (1936, 1937), the idea of Umwelt is pivotal in biosemiotics. For some scholars, it is the 'world' of signs which an animal *creates/inhabits* according to its sensorium. According to Sebeok, the Umwelt can be understood as a 'model' that allows an organism to survive (avoid predation, seek out comfort and nourishment, reproduce etc.) [30]. The perception‐action shift has placed semiotics at the centre of phenomenal apprehen‐ sion, and meaning making as a subjective mapping‐function of (*interpreter*) intentionality and action‐oriented survival. The object is also invested with perceptual‐effector potentialities that capture interpretive action and reflect human desires [27].

The emphasis on performative models that stress the 'actant/agent/user' is also visible in rela‐ tion to the tools and machines we use. Since the publication of Philip Johnson‐Laird's theory of Mental Models, [31] there has been much discussion and use of the theory of "affordances" and mental models in human‐computer interaction and usability, as shown in several paper in this volume, which address the debate between the compatibility of mental models and formal rules of inferential logic. In recent years, software tools capable of capturing and ana‐ lysing the structural and functional properties of mental models are being designed [32]. The study of semiotics and the concept of "affordance" is relevant to these fields with regards to the semantic and pragmatic possibilities of task‐oriented sense‐making approaches, con‐ ceived in terms of their constructed internal model (*Innenwelt*‐eventually *Umwelt* in biose‐ miotics), as applied to very different fields such as Psychology, Linguistics, Philosophy of Language or Computer Programming. The application of the concept of "affordance" in the context of human‐machine interaction in Donald Norman's *The Design of Everyday Things* (1988) opened semiotics to areas involved in user‐centred‐design, manipulation interfaces, cognitive engineering, modelling systems, organizational semiotics, and so on, some of which are addressed in this volume. The complex relation of distinctive semiotic affordances (poten‐ tials and constraints for making meaning) intention, and intermedial variability, alongside questions of social usability in particular contexts, have caused the category of design to move into the foreground of attention in semiotics [33].

Since the 1990s, the widespread use of computer systems has contributed to the development of systemic approaches that contemplate knowledge as made of various (fractal) levels of communication structures; dynamic open systems with permeable interdisciplinary borders which include ideological, political, economic and axiological structures. Very importantly, because all human actions are increasingly performed by means of digital instruments, the changes point in the direction of a huge shift in the ontology of symbolization, involving the foundation of design, development, and evaluation of visualization systems from a semiotic perspective. Thus, the present volume includes various papers on Organisational Semiotics (OS) in Building Information Modelling (BIM), and Functional Requirements Classification Models and Operational Approaches to Conceptual Understanding.

Immersed as we are in the digital revolution, the pedagogic significance of images cannot be underestimated. The corpus of learning resources relies more and more on graphics, charts and icons than it ever did before. Once the amount of content in the World Wide Web has reached saturation levels, design practices are oriented towards the transformation of con‐ tent and its replication (re‐mediation/transmediation) in various semiotic multimodal for‐ mats. The image is possibly the most prominent one. Different gains and losses take place when the actions involved in using an artefact are captured onto an image, as it may happen in the context of teaching technological subjects such as physics or mathematics. Debates on the effects of these changes upon representation, and their impact on learning practices have ranged from views on the catastrophe of image‐dominance for literary and cognition, to expressions of enthusiasm and attempts to elucidate the effects of the distinctive semi‐ otic affordances (potentials and constraints for making meaning) amid diverse media for‐ mats. As pointed out above, the foregrounding of 'design' as a crucial semiotic category, also implies a conceptual shift from the idea of learning competences (in relation to specific educational practices conceived in terms of understanding and following particular conven‐ tions) to a focus on agency at both ends of the semiotic chain. Thus, various papers in the volume develop the topic of science education, conceptual change and teaching methods and approaches.

As a conclusion, this introduction has provided a framework for the papers included in this collection. A common thread is the delimitation of interdisciplinary borders at the material level of physical reality as well as in their semio‐cognitive and cultural implications. Semiotics continues to provide a framework for emerging knowledge traditions, extending its limits to the non‐human realm of biosemiotics and cybernetics, without completely disregarding the hauntings of the past. As body schema expands to its non‐human and posthuman dimen‐ sions, we need to keep chasing the ghost in the machine.

## **Author details**

Asunción López‐Varela Azcárate

Address all correspondence to: alopezva@filol.ucm.es

Universidad Complutense Madrid, Spain

## **References**


[4] Castañares W. Lines of development in Greek semiotic. In: López‐Varela A, editor. Semiotics of World Cultures. Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology. Germany: Peter Lang. 2012;**9.2**:13‐32.

Immersed as we are in the digital revolution, the pedagogic significance of images cannot be underestimated. The corpus of learning resources relies more and more on graphics, charts and icons than it ever did before. Once the amount of content in the World Wide Web has reached saturation levels, design practices are oriented towards the transformation of con‐ tent and its replication (re‐mediation/transmediation) in various semiotic multimodal for‐ mats. The image is possibly the most prominent one. Different gains and losses take place when the actions involved in using an artefact are captured onto an image, as it may happen in the context of teaching technological subjects such as physics or mathematics. Debates on the effects of these changes upon representation, and their impact on learning practices have ranged from views on the catastrophe of image‐dominance for literary and cognition, to expressions of enthusiasm and attempts to elucidate the effects of the distinctive semi‐ otic affordances (potentials and constraints for making meaning) amid diverse media for‐ mats. As pointed out above, the foregrounding of 'design' as a crucial semiotic category, also implies a conceptual shift from the idea of learning competences (in relation to specific educational practices conceived in terms of understanding and following particular conven‐ tions) to a focus on agency at both ends of the semiotic chain. Thus, various papers in the volume develop the topic of science education, conceptual change and teaching methods

As a conclusion, this introduction has provided a framework for the papers included in this collection. A common thread is the delimitation of interdisciplinary borders at the material level of physical reality as well as in their semio‐cognitive and cultural implications. Semiotics continues to provide a framework for emerging knowledge traditions, extending its limits to the non‐human realm of biosemiotics and cybernetics, without completely disregarding the hauntings of the past. As body schema expands to its non‐human and posthuman dimen‐

[1] DEELY, J. "Semiotics 'Today'. In The International Handbook of Semiotics. Ed. Peter

[2] ECO, U. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Bloomington IN: Indiana University

[3] Derrida J. In: Kamuf P, trans. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of

Pericles Trigonas. New York and London: Springer, 2015;29‐114.

Mourning, & the New International. London: Routledge; 1994

sions, we need to keep chasing the ghost in the machine.

Address all correspondence to: alopezva@filol.ucm.es

and approaches.

12 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

**Author details**

**References**

Press, 1984

Asunción López‐Varela Azcárate

Universidad Complutense Madrid, Spain


**Existential Semiotics and Mental Models**

[19] Wiener N. Cybernetics: Or Communication and Control in the Animal and Machine.

[20] Stamper R. Physical objects, human discourse and formal systems. In: Architecture and

[21] Marx K. In: Engels F, editor. Capital. Vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy. New York:

[22] Gross AG, Walzer AE. Re‐Reading Aristotle's Rhetoric. Southern Illinois University

[23] Miller CR. The Aristotelian topos. In: Gross AG, Walzer AE, editors. Reading Aristotle's Rhetoric. Southern Illinois University Press; 2000. pp. 130‐146; Miller CR. Technology as a form of consciousness: A study of contemporary ethos. Central States Speech Journal.

[24] Gaukroger S. The Genealogy of Knowledge: Analytical Essays in the History of

[25] Mcluhan M. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto, Canada:

[26] Bakhtin MM. In: Iswolsky H, trans. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press;

[27] López‐Varela Azcárate A, Sussman H, Coords. and editors. Technopoïesis: Transmedia mythologisation and the Unity of knowledge. Icono 14 Revista Científica de Comunicación y Tecnologías Emergentes. 2017;**15**(1). http://www.icono14.net/ojs/index.

[28] Derbyshire J. Chasing down the ghost in the machine. The Spectator. June 5. 2014.

[29] Cobley P. What the humanities are for—A semiotic perspective. American Journal of

[30] Hoffmeyer J. Surfaces inside surfaces. On the origin of agency and life. Cybernetics &

[31] Johnson‐Laird PN. Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1983. Available from:

[32] Groessner SN. Mental model of dynamic systems. In: Seel NM, editor. The Encyclopedia

of the Sciences of Learning. Vol. 5. New York: Springer; 2012. pp. 2195‐2200

Available from: https://spectator.org/59168\_chasing‐down‐ghost‐machine/

Models in Data Base Management Systems. 1977. pp. 293‐311

1978;**29**(4):228‐236. DOI: doi/abs/10.1080/10510977809367983

Philosophy and Science. London: Ashgate; 1997

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Semiotics. 2014;**30**(3/4):205‐228

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https://hal.archives‐ouvertes.fr/hal‐00702919

[33] Norman D. The Design of Everyday Things. MIT Press; 1988

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 1948

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14 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

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php/icono14

## **Chapter 2**

## **Semiotics of Conscience**

## Rufus Duits

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.68693

#### **Abstract**

This chapter offers a long‐overdue semiotic analysis of the phenomenon of conscience. It is remarkable that such an analysis has not yet been attempted, because conscience has always been understood as something like a voice signing, and not just unimportantly, but as the voice of God. One could well have expected that an analysis of conscience would have been first on the semiotician's tick list. Using Martin Heidegger's phenom‐ enological analysis of conscience as a guide, it turns out that a simple Peircean analysis in terms of *representamen*, *object* and *interpretant* is at least a good way of opening the phenomenon up with the semiotician's tools. My conclusions point to the uniqueness of the sign of conscience among all signs. For it is one sign where all three moments representamen, object and interpretant—*are the very same entity*. Given the existential semiotic reduction—without remainder—of the subject to a structured network of signs, one can then glimpse the extraordinary conclusion that in the phenomenon of conscience we encounter the signing of semiosis itself—the sign of signs. It is no wonder, then, that it has been understood to be the voice of God. I finish by developing the ethical ramifica‐ tions of my analysis for semiotics.

**Keywords:** conscience, Heidegger, peirce, *enkratic* principle, existential semiotics

## **1. Introduction**

It is very remarkable that a semiotic analysis of conscience has not yet been attempted. Conscience has always been understood as something like a voice signing—but not just any voice: it has largely been identified with the signing of the voice of God, expressing God's law, intentions, thoughts, etc., or the law of God 'written on our hearts'.<sup>1</sup> One may have thought, therefore, given its potential importance that it would have been first on the semiotician's

1 Romans 2:15.

© 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ticklist for analysis. In fact, quite the reverse appears to have been the case, and even moral philosophers, on whose conceptual territory conscience traditionally has been thought to lie, appear to have left the topic well alone over the last half‐century. There has been very little in the way of comprehensive and systematic attempts to elaborate theories of conscience since Heidegger made it central to his existential analysis of *Dasein* in *Being and Time* [1].

This lacuna needs explanation. Langston [2], in his historical survey of theories of conscience, suggests that the turn away from faculty psychology left no room for conscience as a psychical component. But this is unlikely to be a sufficient explanation, because it is not necessary to posit conscience as a faculty, and, certainly, Heidegger's account in no sense at all attributes to the phe‐ nomenology of conscience anything like the properties of being a psychical component. I suggest, rather, that theorising about conscience became problematic largely because it had always been understood as a totalising and authoritarian phenomenon that the shift towards disseminated subjectivity, deconstruction of conceptual hierarchies, and suspicion of power relations found almost impossible to accommodate. Scepticism towards the authority of conscience has been com‐ pounded in the last decades by the terror wreaked by some claiming to 'follow their consciences'.

It may be thought to be paradoxical that Heidegger's existential epistemology, which roots knowing in *Dasein*'s modes of being, both contains a highly‐developed theory of conscience, and at the same time sows the seeds of its conceptual demise. In fact, I will try to show that this paradox points at the heart of a renewed semiotics of conscience.

I will argue that the phenomenon of conscience points us towards the origin of semiosis and thus that a semiotic analysis of the phenomenon gives us insight both into the concept of conscience itself and into fundamental semiotic operations. I will also suggest that the analysis can open the way towards a genuinely ethical or critical theory of signs.

## **2. Heidegger: conscience as the call of being**

Many of the most powerful tools of semiotic analysis derive from structuralist accounts of meaning. Conscience, I suggest, however, is a *sui generis* concept that cannot be embedded within the usual patterns of signification. As such, it lends itself much more appropriately to *phenomenological* rather than structuralist analysis. So I am going to use Heidegger's phenomenological account as a route of access for my own semiotic analysis. This route will make clear precisely why the tools of the structuralist are inapplicable here.

In *Being and Time* [1], first published in 1927, Heidegger makes the concept of conscience a centrally important component of his so‐called 'existential analysis of *Dasein'*. I will take the term *Dasein* to refer, perhaps controversially, to the set of ontological preconditions that enable the experience of being as such and thus that enable the sort of experience that, among the animal kingdom, might be thought to be unique to humans: the sort of experience that accompanies *being‐a‐self*.

All of these preconditions are rooted fundamentally in the phenomenon that Heidegger describes under the title of 'care': *Dasein* is a being whose being matters to it, who cares about its being, who is concerned about how its existence or its life 'goes'. All our experience, according to Heidegger, is wholly determined by this basic characteristic; indeed, it is this characteristic that enables in the first place human experience. If it was not for our care for ourselves, we would have no expe‐ rience—in the sense we have it—at all; things would not 'show up' for us in the way that they do. Of course, some other form of experience might be possible, the experience associated with the being of nonhuman animals, perhaps, but not that of the distinctively human animal. Things are disclosed to us, according to Heidegger, only within the horizons mapped out by the matter‐ ing of our concerns. Only insofar as we are concerned about something for the sake of ourselves can things connected in significance relations to that something first 'show up'. The hammer does not become an object of experience at all until it gets embedded in the relations of use that are organised around those goals of ours that can be accomplished by hammering—building a house, putting up a picture, etc. It may nevertheless be in our visual field—but we do not *see* it, that is, notice it, unless it takes a significance upon itself from the projects that we are commit‐ ted to for the sake of ourselves. This is not simply to say that there would not be any hammers if we did not need to make them to use as tools to achieve certain projects that we might have. Even if there are hammers all around us, whether they are disclosed in our experience, and the significance that the bear if they are, is determined by the projects that we are engaged with in virtue of the fact that we are concerned about how our existence is going.

ticklist for analysis. In fact, quite the reverse appears to have been the case, and even moral philosophers, on whose conceptual territory conscience traditionally has been thought to lie, appear to have left the topic well alone over the last half‐century. There has been very little in the way of comprehensive and systematic attempts to elaborate theories of conscience since

This lacuna needs explanation. Langston [2], in his historical survey of theories of conscience, suggests that the turn away from faculty psychology left no room for conscience as a psychical component. But this is unlikely to be a sufficient explanation, because it is not necessary to posit conscience as a faculty, and, certainly, Heidegger's account in no sense at all attributes to the phe‐ nomenology of conscience anything like the properties of being a psychical component. I suggest, rather, that theorising about conscience became problematic largely because it had always been understood as a totalising and authoritarian phenomenon that the shift towards disseminated subjectivity, deconstruction of conceptual hierarchies, and suspicion of power relations found almost impossible to accommodate. Scepticism towards the authority of conscience has been com‐ pounded in the last decades by the terror wreaked by some claiming to 'follow their consciences'. It may be thought to be paradoxical that Heidegger's existential epistemology, which roots knowing in *Dasein*'s modes of being, both contains a highly‐developed theory of conscience, and at the same time sows the seeds of its conceptual demise. In fact, I will try to show that

I will argue that the phenomenon of conscience points us towards the origin of semiosis and thus that a semiotic analysis of the phenomenon gives us insight both into the concept of conscience itself and into fundamental semiotic operations. I will also suggest that the

Many of the most powerful tools of semiotic analysis derive from structuralist accounts of meaning. Conscience, I suggest, however, is a *sui generis* concept that cannot be embedded within the usual patterns of signification. As such, it lends itself much more appropriately to *phenomenological* rather than structuralist analysis. So I am going to use Heidegger's phenomenological account as a route of access for my own semiotic analysis. This route will

In *Being and Time* [1], first published in 1927, Heidegger makes the concept of conscience a centrally important component of his so‐called 'existential analysis of *Dasein'*. I will take the term *Dasein* to refer, perhaps controversially, to the set of ontological preconditions that enable the experience of being as such and thus that enable the sort of experience that, among the animal kingdom, might be thought to be unique to humans: the sort of experience that

All of these preconditions are rooted fundamentally in the phenomenon that Heidegger describes under the title of 'care': *Dasein* is a being whose being matters to it, who cares about its being, who

analysis can open the way towards a genuinely ethical or critical theory of signs.

make clear precisely why the tools of the structuralist are inapplicable here.

Heidegger made it central to his existential analysis of *Dasein* in *Being and Time* [1].

this paradox points at the heart of a renewed semiotics of conscience.

**2. Heidegger: conscience as the call of being**

accompanies *being‐a‐self*.

18 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

Conscience, as Heidegger describes it, turns out to be a 'primordial' result of the phenomeno‐ logical structure of care. To see how, one needs beforehand Heidegger's concept of *angst*. The primordial anxiety that Heidegger refers to with this term is also a basic function of *Dasein*'s being as care: we are always worried about how our lives are going for ourselves; our exis‐ tence is given over to us in such a way as to make us responsible for it, whether we like it or not. Anxious about anxiety itself, we 'flee' this ultimate concern into the relative safety and peace of other people's conceptions of what we should do and what values we should hold. To avoid having to take responsibility for ourselves, we 'fall prey' by allowing ourselves to become lost in the public discourse of 'the they'—of others in general. Such anxiety is awak‐ ened by the short amount of time we have before our deaths, and thus by the definitiveness of the projects we choose to act upon for defining who we amount to. To escape, we embrace what Heidegger calls an 'inauthentic' mode of being, defining ourselves dishonestly by the categories and values handed to us conveniently by others.

In the clamour of this everyday situation with its gossip and idle chatter, or, in semiotic terms, with its semiotic web of dissimulated and meaningless meanings, conscience is dis‐ closed as an urgent and persistent *call*. Continuing the tradition of interpreting conscience as a voice, Heidegger analyses the phenomenon into three moments: the call (that is, the message), the caller and the one summoned by the call. Heidegger's key claim is that these three moments are all in fact one entity ontologically: *Dasein* as care. He writes: 'the caller is *Dasein* anxious…about its potential… The one summoned is also *Dasein*, called forth to its ownmost potential…And what is called forth by the summons is *Dasein*, out of falling prey to the they…' (p. 2772 ). And thus: 'The call of conscience…has its ontological possibility in the fact that *Dasein* is care in the ground of its being' (p. 278).

<sup>2</sup> Pagination here and henceforth is from the German edition (Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag; 2001).

The anxiety of care thus cuts both ways, it seems, for Heidegger, pushing us both to fall prey to others, and also to retrieve ourselves for an *authentic* mode of being that grasps clearly the respon‐ sibility we bear for ourselves which we are unable genuinely to escape from. The more we cover over our possible authenticity by immersing ourselves in the publicness of others, the 'louder' the call potentially is, since the disjunction between *Dasein*'s situation and its potential gets starker.

Thus, conscience, for Heidegger, is not a psychological faculty, added on, by whatever mechanism, to *Dasein*'s cognitive architecture to give it a moral compass for navigating a social environment; it is rather a fundamental necessity of its being, of any being that is like it ontologically. If *Dasein* had no conscience, it would have no experience of being at all; it would not be a site of the disclosure of a world. That is not to say that *Dasein* cannot be psy‐ chopathic; i.e., can feel no regret and no empathy in its mistreatment of others; but whether it is psychopathic or not, it is concerned for its being, and thus calls itself back from its flight away from its responsibility for itself.

Note that Heidegger is importantly wholly unspecific about the form of life that an authentic mode of being should take; if he were not, he would precisely not be describing an authentic mode of being that is chosen by *Dasein* itself in the full realisation of its responsibility for itself.

(It is worth remarking that the vocabulary of conscience slips out of Heidegger's texts after the publication of *Being and Time* in 1927. A 'call of being' remains, however, a continual refrain throughout his later texts. For illustration, take this powerful but enigmatic passage from his *Letter on Humanism* (first published in 1947): 'The human being is the shepherd of being. Human beings…gain in that they attain the truth of being. They gain the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by being itself into the preservation of being's truth. The call comes as the throw from which the thrownness of *Dasein* derives' [3]. I have argued elsewhere [4] that the motif of the call of being retains all the conceptual import of the analysis of conscience in *Being and Time*, and thus that this figure of thought remains an integral part of Heidegger's thinking throughout his philosophical engagement).

## **3. The triune sign**

In order to submit the concept of conscience to semiotic analysis, I will use Heidegger's pheno menological researches as a guide. Whilst this methodology may still, at this point, appear *ad hoc*, it will quickly become clear how conscience is a *sui generis* semiotic phenomenon that does not stand in the familiar relationships to other signs, and thus cannot straightforwardly be submitted to structuralist methods of analysis.

Peirce distinguished the following three elements of the sign: 1. the representamen—the sign vehicle, or form that the sign takes; 2. the interpretant—the sense conveyed by the sign; 3. the object—the referent that the sign stands for [5]. Applied to the concept of conscience as Heidegger's phenomenological analyses would have it, these distinctions yield:

1. The representamen/sign‐vehicle is no word, no gesture, no grapheme. Heidegger rather in‐ sists: 'The call is lacking any kind of utterance. It does not even come to words, and yet it is not at all obscure and indefinite. *Conscience speaks solely and constantly in the mode of silence*' (p. 273). This cannot mean, however, that conscience does not sign. Rather, in apparent contradiction to Hjelmslev's maxim 'there can be no content without an expression, or ex‐ pressionless content; neither can there be an expression without a content, or content‐less expression' [6], silence is its vehicle, its form of expression. Phenomenologically, talking of silence here, is not, of course, to assume that conscience could ever have been conceived by thinkers as making a *noise*. The point rather is to draw attention to the fact that the call of conscience *adds nothing more* to that which is there already as the concernful—that is, caring—being of *Dasein*. I.e., properly speaking, the vehicle of the conscience‐sign just is *Dasein* as authentically concerned about its falling prey. It has no more form or content than that.

The anxiety of care thus cuts both ways, it seems, for Heidegger, pushing us both to fall prey to others, and also to retrieve ourselves for an *authentic* mode of being that grasps clearly the respon‐ sibility we bear for ourselves which we are unable genuinely to escape from. The more we cover over our possible authenticity by immersing ourselves in the publicness of others, the 'louder' the call potentially is, since the disjunction between *Dasein*'s situation and its potential gets starker. Thus, conscience, for Heidegger, is not a psychological faculty, added on, by whatever mechanism, to *Dasein*'s cognitive architecture to give it a moral compass for navigating a social environment; it is rather a fundamental necessity of its being, of any being that is like it ontologically. If *Dasein* had no conscience, it would have no experience of being at all; it would not be a site of the disclosure of a world. That is not to say that *Dasein* cannot be psy‐ chopathic; i.e., can feel no regret and no empathy in its mistreatment of others; but whether it is psychopathic or not, it is concerned for its being, and thus calls itself back from its flight

Note that Heidegger is importantly wholly unspecific about the form of life that an authentic mode of being should take; if he were not, he would precisely not be describing an authentic mode of being that is chosen by *Dasein* itself in the full realisation of its responsibility for itself. (It is worth remarking that the vocabulary of conscience slips out of Heidegger's texts after the publication of *Being and Time* in 1927. A 'call of being' remains, however, a continual refrain throughout his later texts. For illustration, take this powerful but enigmatic passage from his *Letter on Humanism* (first published in 1947): 'The human being is the shepherd of being. Human beings…gain in that they attain the truth of being. They gain the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by being itself into the preservation of being's truth. The call comes as the throw from which the thrownness of *Dasein* derives' [3]. I have argued elsewhere [4] that the motif of the call of being retains all the conceptual import of the analysis of conscience in *Being and Time*, and thus that this figure of thought remains an

integral part of Heidegger's thinking throughout his philosophical engagement).

In order to submit the concept of conscience to semiotic analysis, I will use Heidegger's pheno menological researches as a guide. Whilst this methodology may still, at this point, appear *ad hoc*, it will quickly become clear how conscience is a *sui generis* semiotic phenomenon that does not stand in the familiar relationships to other signs, and thus cannot straightforwardly be

Peirce distinguished the following three elements of the sign: 1. the representamen—the sign vehicle, or form that the sign takes; 2. the interpretant—the sense conveyed by the sign; 3. the object—the referent that the sign stands for [5]. Applied to the concept of conscience as

1. The representamen/sign‐vehicle is no word, no gesture, no grapheme. Heidegger rather in‐ sists: 'The call is lacking any kind of utterance. It does not even come to words, and yet it is

Heidegger's phenomenological analyses would have it, these distinctions yield:

away from its responsibility for itself.

20 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

**3. The triune sign**

submitted to structuralist methods of analysis.


In sum, then, for the conscience‐sign, the sign vehicle, the sense and the referent of the sign *are all the same thing*: *Dasein* in its authentic mode. The moments of the conscience‐sign are ontologically identical. This makes conscience, I suggest, unique among signs, *sui generis*; it is a *triune* sign.

It might be riposted that in this case it cannot be a sign at all, at least not in the traditional sense because a sign, at the very least, must refer to something other than itself. But this would be a difficult view to sustain: not only is it self‐evident that in conscience something is given to understand, hence signified, and thus that there must be some semiosis going on; also, it appears plausible—as I have attempted to show—to separate out in the analysis of conscience the different moments corresponding to Peirce's triadic analysis of the sign. A semiotic analysis of conscience is possible. Thus, a better conclusion would seem to be that we have here a case of a liminal sign, a sign at the boundary of semiosis, a sign from the point at which semiosis begins or ends. A sign that stands right on the boundary of the 'unlimited semiosis' that weaves the semiosphere.<sup>3</sup> Conscience, I suggest, is a special sort of sign, but a sign nonetheless.

<sup>3</sup> Lotmann coins this very useful term in his [7], defining it as 'the semiotic space, outside of which semiosis cannot exist'. He conceives it as the set of structural preconditions of any semiotic operation at all: 'only the existence of such a universe‐the semiosphere‐makes the specific signatory act real.'

Interpreting conscience in this way, however, does draw into question Saussure's principle of the arbitrariness of the sign [8]. Once the signified and the signifier are united in the way indicated, there is no room for any arbitrariness in the representation of the sign: the call of conscience cannot in principle take any form other than that which it in fact takes. Again, however, this need not be propounded as a counterexample, so much as a limiting case. The conscience‐sign is just especially dense, a sort of black hole of semiosis. On a Peircean taxonomy it could possibly be construed as a special sort of *indexical* sign, indexicals being, for Peirce, those signs that support a wholly non‐arbitrary and thus natural or direct connection between the representamen and the object, and thus 'direct the attention to their objects by blind compulsion' [9]. The immediacy of 'blind compulsion' perhaps captures well the irresistible urgency of the summons of conscience. But unlike other indexicals, in the con‐ science‐sign, not only is there such a direct relation between the representamen and the object as to be a relation of identity, the interpretant is also ontologically identical to its representa‐ men and object. That it is semiotically *sui generis* is, I think, a more convincing conclusion.

It is also worth highlighting that in this account of conscience the emitter and the interpreter of the call are one and the same, too—albeit, for Heidegger, the same entity in different modes: 'the caller is *Dasein* anxious…about its potential… The one summoned is also *Dasein*, called forth to its ownmost potential' (p. 277).

## **4. Semiosis: a con‐science analysis**

Now since the unusual is often what best shows us what is usual, just as pathologies illuminate functional health, it is worth attempting to see what the possibility of the sort of sign that I have roughly suggested conscience to be indicates about the processes of semiosis and meaning in general.

In the first place, it is important to distinguish what could be termed internalist and externalist theories of conscience. An externalist theory would be one in which the originator of the conscience‐sign would be something ontologically separate from the interpreter. Cardinal John Henry Newman's claim that conscience is the 'voice of God' [10] would be an example of the commitments of such a theory. On an account like this, conscience is interpreted by the agent to which the voice is addressed, but the voice itself originates from 'outside' the agent, in this case, in the agency of God. On Erich Fromm's two consciences theory, on the other hand, the authoritarian conscience derives from the external persona of the authority figure, and the humanistic conscience derives from humans' internal capacity for love, freedom and flourishing [11]. So this would be an example of a theory of conscience that is both internalist and externalist in different respects. For a purely semiotic account, however, this distinction is irrelevant, since we have only to do with the significance of the sign itself and its interpreta‐ tion rather than the provenance or emission of it.

Suppose that Heidegger is right about the phenomenology of conscience as we outlined it above. In that case, it would appear that the conscience‐sign arises at the intersection between two 'modes of disclosure': inauthentic and authentic being. In each of these modes, things, all things, are disclosed as determined in a particular way—either by the publicness of the 'they', or by *Dasein*'s 'ownmost' potential; that is, things take on a particular significance or meaning depending on how *Dasein*'s care for itself is manifesting itself. But as the two fundamental modes of disclosure, this must mean that *semiosis in general* is a function of *Dasein*'s concern for itself; i.e., significance as such is a particular and general result of the projects, cares, concerns, inclinations, motivations—and all those psychological phenomena that can go under the rubric of *desire* in its widest sense—that *Dasein* manifests. Derrida moots such a view in the opening section of *Of Grammatology* [12], despite his insistence that the structures of language are basic to meaning. Language acts as a repository of meaning, certainly, but it is not more, on this view, than a *medium* of the origination of meaning—not the originator itself. Heidegger saw the same thing: 'In this way language is the language of being, as clouds are the clouds of the sky. With its saying, thinking lays inconspicuous furrows in language. They are still more inconspicuous than the furrows that the farmer, slow of step, draws through the field' [13]. Language, even in its widest sense of semiosis in general, is not ontologically prior to meaning and signification; it is rather the system or expression of significance and meaning that itself is grounded in human concern for self. It is the latter that first makes possible humans' particularly human experience. The cares that humans have and the projects grounded therein thus first make semiosis pos‐ sible, and sustain it. Language merely records its particular configurations for posterity.

Interpreting conscience in this way, however, does draw into question Saussure's principle of the arbitrariness of the sign [8]. Once the signified and the signifier are united in the way indicated, there is no room for any arbitrariness in the representation of the sign: the call of conscience cannot in principle take any form other than that which it in fact takes. Again, however, this need not be propounded as a counterexample, so much as a limiting case. The conscience‐sign is just especially dense, a sort of black hole of semiosis. On a Peircean taxonomy it could possibly be construed as a special sort of *indexical* sign, indexicals being, for Peirce, those signs that support a wholly non‐arbitrary and thus natural or direct connection between the representamen and the object, and thus 'direct the attention to their objects by blind compulsion' [9]. The immediacy of 'blind compulsion' perhaps captures well the irresistible urgency of the summons of conscience. But unlike other indexicals, in the con‐ science‐sign, not only is there such a direct relation between the representamen and the object as to be a relation of identity, the interpretant is also ontologically identical to its representa‐ men and object. That it is semiotically *sui generis* is, I think, a more convincing conclusion.

It is also worth highlighting that in this account of conscience the emitter and the interpreter of the call are one and the same, too—albeit, for Heidegger, the same entity in different modes: 'the caller is *Dasein* anxious…about its potential… The one summoned is also *Dasein*, called

Now since the unusual is often what best shows us what is usual, just as pathologies illuminate functional health, it is worth attempting to see what the possibility of the sort of sign that I have roughly suggested conscience to be indicates about the processes of semiosis and

In the first place, it is important to distinguish what could be termed internalist and externalist theories of conscience. An externalist theory would be one in which the originator of the conscience‐sign would be something ontologically separate from the interpreter. Cardinal John Henry Newman's claim that conscience is the 'voice of God' [10] would be an example of the commitments of such a theory. On an account like this, conscience is interpreted by the agent to which the voice is addressed, but the voice itself originates from 'outside' the agent, in this case, in the agency of God. On Erich Fromm's two consciences theory, on the other hand, the authoritarian conscience derives from the external persona of the authority figure, and the humanistic conscience derives from humans' internal capacity for love, freedom and flourishing [11]. So this would be an example of a theory of conscience that is both internalist and externalist in different respects. For a purely semiotic account, however, this distinction is irrelevant, since we have only to do with the significance of the sign itself and its interpreta‐

Suppose that Heidegger is right about the phenomenology of conscience as we outlined it above. In that case, it would appear that the conscience‐sign arises at the intersection between two 'modes of disclosure': inauthentic and authentic being. In each of these modes, things, all

forth to its ownmost potential' (p. 277).

22 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

meaning in general.

**4. Semiosis: a con‐science analysis**

tion rather than the provenance or emission of it.

On this view, Saussure's proposal of a general theory of signs [14], then, would amount to a semiotic equivalent of Heidegger's phenomenological 'existential analyses'. Here, Heidegger interprets the 'world' of *Dasein*'s experience in terms of the networks of meaning generated by *Dasein*'s concernful projection onto future possibilities of action, projections which express its concern for itself. For example, the thing becomes significant as a hammer only within the context of the potential hammering‐uses with which *Dasein* might concern itself: put‐ ting up a house for shelter, putting up a work of art to appreciate, etc. Wholly independent of these sorts of concern, the thing cannot *be* a hammer at all. The linguistic sign 'hammer' functions, on the other hand, merely as the fixer, not the determiner, of this web of potentiali‐ ties, enabling the communication, by conventional codes, between *Daseins* of the hammer's significance to its concernful being‐in‐the‐world.

The two fundamental modes of disclosure—authenticity and inauthenticity—amount thus to two basic determinations of the semiosphere as a whole: authentic and inauthentic semiosphere. If conscience is the sign that discloses to inauthentic *Dasein* the mode of being of authentic‐ ity, then we are warranted in drawing the following stark conclusion: *conscience is the signing of semiosis as such, the sign of signs*. It reveals the entirety of the semiosphere as determined inauthentically or authentically. It would be for this reason that it is a sign *sui generis*; it stands above and apart from the semiosphere as the sign which represents the semiosphere itself to concernful thinking and communication, thus imbuing it with an overarching meaning. It is the vertical limit, the stopping point, so to speak, of 'unlimited semiosis' that is only unlimited 'horizontally'. There is a sense then, insofar as it *transcends* the signing‐process whilst signing itself, that is it analogous to the *voice of God*, at least to the extent that it performs the function of ultimately determining the semiosphere's overriding meaning. Just as the concept of the voice of a transcendent God is oxymoronic, so the sign of conscience is both sign and beyond signification as its ultimate arbiter.

The same conclusion can be reached from a different direction. Our semiotic deployment of Heidegger's insights produced the result that *Dasein* in its authentic mode is the representa‐ men, the object and the interpretant of conscience all at once. But given our phenomeno‐ logical interpretation of semiosis in terms of *Dasein*'s concernful disclosure, and given the existential semiotic reduction—without remainder—of the subject to a structured network of signs (Duits, Tarasti et al. [15, 16], but also Derrida, Barthes, etc.), there is nothing else for conscience to sign but the semiosphere as such. *Dasein* can be construed as reducible without remainder to the possible structures that conform the semiosphere. Thus, the authentic *Dasein* signified in conscience is not ontologically distinguishable from the structures that conform authentic semiotic disclosure. Conscience must be construed to signify the semiosphere such as it authentically is.

## **5. Towards ethical semiosis**

In this final part, I want to point towards what I take to be the possibility of a genuinely ethi‐ cally engaged semiotics that is rooted in this conclusion. The hope is that this would amount adequately to a *critical semiotics*, a semiotics with the conceptual resources to justify claims critical of systems of signs, of processes of semiosis, of individual signs and of the semio‐ sphere as such, and thus to point towards better semiotic alternatives.

The normativity of conscience, I suggest, binds *Dasein* in two distinguishable aspects: as *inter‐ preter* and as *agent*.

#### **5.1.** *Qua* **interpreter**

In the first place, it is important to be clear about the nature of the normative demand that conscience makes. Heidegger, as we have seen, construes it as a 'summons' to the authen‐ tic mode of disclosure. A summons, in the usual sense, has judicial power behind it; in this case, however, rather than being summoned to face judgement, the summons constitutes the judgement. But what is the justification for the summons? What is its warrant? Why should *Dasein* obey? The answer for Heidegger is that *Dasein*'s being as *care for itself* cannot but both summon and heed the summons; it cannot ultimately tolerate its lostness in the 'they'. Its call is warranted because *Dasein* of necessity accepts the presupposition on which it is based: that *Dasein* cares about its existence. But such a conception runs into obvious difficulties connected to the rigor of this binary opposition authentic/inauthentic. For example, what if *Dasein* authentically decides—that is, decides with the finitude and facticity of its life wholly disclosed to it—to lose itself in the 'they'? What should we call *Dasein* then—authentic or inauthentic? Or authentically inauthentic? Secondly, if the warrant of the call of conscience is constituted by *Dasein*'s concern for itself, then does not *Dasein* have to be already in the mode of being of authenticity in order that the call be made? For if *Dasein* were wholly inauthentic it would be no longer concerned with its being as such.4 Is it the case, then, that *Dasein* is

<sup>4</sup> Stephen Mulhall pursues this point in detail in his [17].

authentic as such? But then Heidegger insists that inauthenticity is the mode of being that *Dasein* inhabits always already and for the most part. Must it not be the case then, that *Dasein* is better understood as being in both modes simultaneously? A better picture, I suggest, might see authenticity and inauthenticity not as two exclusive modes, but as two poles of a con‐ tinuum on which the more *Dasein*'s semiosphere is configured in accordance with *Dasein*'s ultimate projects, the closer *Dasein* is to authenticity—ultimate projects being those aspects of *Dasein*'s motivational set that are conformed in full realisation of its being‐towards‐death. In this way, *Dasein*, as concerned being‐a‐self, would continually be summoned towards the 'outer layers' and a 'greater perspective' of semiotic disclosure. And this summons would be conscience. The significances of any 'inner' layer would be able to be criticised from the perspective of a more authentic 'outer' layer; criticised, in the light of *Dasein*'s self‐concern, in terms of their justifiability.

An example would help here. Suppose, perhaps heeding Barthes' analysis in *The Fashion System*, I am enthralled by fashionable clothes [18]. There is no doubt that such clothes and the various forms of media, publication and celebrity concerned with them constitute an intricate semiotic web. Nonetheless, allowing my purchasing power, my sense of self‐identity, the com‐ fort—both physical and emotional—I feel in the presence of others, etc., to be so thoroughly determined by this semiosis might be something that, from a more fundamental perspective on the possibilities of my life, I may object to. On the other hand, I might not; I might decide, from an authentic perspective, that the fashion system is what I want to devote my life whole‐ heartedly to. In any case, the possibility of criticism is opened up. Beneath entire systems of meaning, individual signs may be subject to criticism from the same account. Suppose I construe myself authentically as post‐gender, or as post‐nationality, etc. I may find wholly unhelpful and to be avoided the application of the signs 'male' and 'female', the adjective 'English', etc. I may want to resist carving the world up in this way. And this may be true both in regard to myself and in regard to others. I may take signs such as 'Jew' or 'Muslim' to con‐ note in my culture in a way incompatible with a more authentic perspective on human being that I endeavour to maintain.

#### **5.2.** *Qua* **agent**

The same conclusion can be reached from a different direction. Our semiotic deployment of Heidegger's insights produced the result that *Dasein* in its authentic mode is the representa‐ men, the object and the interpretant of conscience all at once. But given our phenomeno‐ logical interpretation of semiosis in terms of *Dasein*'s concernful disclosure, and given the existential semiotic reduction—without remainder—of the subject to a structured network of signs (Duits, Tarasti et al. [15, 16], but also Derrida, Barthes, etc.), there is nothing else for conscience to sign but the semiosphere as such. *Dasein* can be construed as reducible without remainder to the possible structures that conform the semiosphere. Thus, the authentic *Dasein* signified in conscience is not ontologically distinguishable from the structures that conform authentic semiotic disclosure. Conscience must be construed to signify the semiosphere such

In this final part, I want to point towards what I take to be the possibility of a genuinely ethi‐ cally engaged semiotics that is rooted in this conclusion. The hope is that this would amount adequately to a *critical semiotics*, a semiotics with the conceptual resources to justify claims critical of systems of signs, of processes of semiosis, of individual signs and of the semio‐

The normativity of conscience, I suggest, binds *Dasein* in two distinguishable aspects: as *inter‐*

In the first place, it is important to be clear about the nature of the normative demand that conscience makes. Heidegger, as we have seen, construes it as a 'summons' to the authen‐ tic mode of disclosure. A summons, in the usual sense, has judicial power behind it; in this case, however, rather than being summoned to face judgement, the summons constitutes the judgement. But what is the justification for the summons? What is its warrant? Why should *Dasein* obey? The answer for Heidegger is that *Dasein*'s being as *care for itself* cannot but both summon and heed the summons; it cannot ultimately tolerate its lostness in the 'they'. Its call is warranted because *Dasein* of necessity accepts the presupposition on which it is based: that *Dasein* cares about its existence. But such a conception runs into obvious difficulties connected to the rigor of this binary opposition authentic/inauthentic. For example, what if *Dasein* authentically decides—that is, decides with the finitude and facticity of its life wholly disclosed to it—to lose itself in the 'they'? What should we call *Dasein* then—authentic or inauthentic? Or authentically inauthentic? Secondly, if the warrant of the call of conscience is constituted by *Dasein*'s concern for itself, then does not *Dasein* have to be already in the mode of being of authenticity in order that the call be made? For if *Dasein* were wholly inauthentic

Is it the case, then, that *Dasein* is

sphere as such, and thus to point towards better semiotic alternatives.

it would be no longer concerned with its being as such.4

Stephen Mulhall pursues this point in detail in his [17].

as it authentically is.

24 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

*preter* and as *agent*.

**5.1.** *Qua* **interpreter**

4

**5. Towards ethical semiosis**

So much for the normativity of *Dasein* insofar as it interprets and discloses. *Qua agent*, *Dasein* must also heed the summons. Lacan [19] uses the term '*objet petit a*' to refer to the object of desire that is so 'scopically' basic such as to constitute the subject as such. Without wishing to do too much violence, either to Lacan's concepts or to Heidegger's, I think that this concept can be usefully imported into a discussion of the ethics of authenticity. The Heideggerian conscience—just like Lacanian psychoanalysis—is really telling us never to give up on our ultimate desire, to be resolute in our projection onto the possibilities of being that are chosen in the light of authenticity. This is the existential imperative, the *enkratic* principle. The *objet petit a*, the telos of such ultimate projects, configures the semiosphere as the lack around which it is arranged. Conscience thus calls for a particular semiotic configuration that it is up to us to realise as embodied *agents* in a factical world. I.e., the disclosure that the call of conscience is calling forth is one that our actions are required to realise, as the means to our ultimate *teloi*.

In the language of practical reasoning—more familiar to moral philosophers—, conscience, on the analysis I have proposed, summons us *qua* agents to do *that which we take ourselves to have overriding reason to do*. Our ultimate desires, configured psychoanalysis tells us, around the ultimate ends of our subjectivity, ground reasons for acting in ways to attain or realise those ends. On this broadly instrumentalist account of practical reason, the more fundamental a desire is, the more overriding the reasons it grounds. The *objet petit a*, as the end of our ultimate desire, thus provides us with reasons for action that override all other reasons for action that we might have. Whilst what we take ourselves to have reason to do might not be the same as what we actually have reason to do (this is the thrust of the fero‐ cious contemporary debate between 'externalism' and 'internalism' about practical reason in moral philosophy), conscience, as the call resulting from the *internal* configuration of subjectivity, takes no notice of this: it calls us to do what *we take ourselves* to have overrid‐ ing reason to do.

#### **5.3. The everyday notion of conscience**

It may be rejoined that the analysis of conscience we have given misses many of the phenom‐ enological facts that are captured by the ordinary or everyday notion of conscience. It may be said that, no matter for what has been given so far, a semiotics of conscience must also capture the notions of guilt, of bad conscience, of the generally moral nature of conscience, as well as the fact that the call of conscience seems to sound only with regard to *specific deeds*—not all the time, or continually, as the analysis we have presented so far might seem to indicate. Certainly, a semiotic account of these everyday features of the notion of conscience needs to be given if our analysis is to be considered in any way comprehensive. Again, we can fol‐ low Heidegger's lead here; he clearly distinguishes the existential interpretation of conscience from its 'vulgar' interpretation.

There are two ways in which the everyday notion of conscience and the existential inter‐ pretation might be related. On the one hand, one could argue that there is in fact more than one type of conscience—a plurality of consciences. Or, alternatively, one might argue that the everyday interpretation is the inauthentic disclosure of the existential call of conscience. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the latter that Heidegger proposes.

On this account, everyday, or inauthentic, *Dasein* misconstrues or misinterprets the con‐ science‐sign. Our semiotic tools give us a new way of characterising this mistake that *Dasein* makes. For the everyday notion of conscience:


Thus *Dasein*'s responsibility is alluded to, but not in the sense of its responsibility for its being as such, but rather, merely, in the sense of its responsibility for a particular being—the deed that it ought not to have done.

In the language of practical reasoning—more familiar to moral philosophers—, conscience, on the analysis I have proposed, summons us *qua* agents to do *that which we take ourselves to have overriding reason to do*. Our ultimate desires, configured psychoanalysis tells us, around the ultimate ends of our subjectivity, ground reasons for acting in ways to attain or realise those ends. On this broadly instrumentalist account of practical reason, the more fundamental a desire is, the more overriding the reasons it grounds. The *objet petit a*, as the end of our ultimate desire, thus provides us with reasons for action that override all other reasons for action that we might have. Whilst what we take ourselves to have reason to do might not be the same as what we actually have reason to do (this is the thrust of the fero‐ cious contemporary debate between 'externalism' and 'internalism' about practical reason in moral philosophy), conscience, as the call resulting from the *internal* configuration of subjectivity, takes no notice of this: it calls us to do what *we take ourselves* to have overrid‐

It may be rejoined that the analysis of conscience we have given misses many of the phenom‐ enological facts that are captured by the ordinary or everyday notion of conscience. It may be said that, no matter for what has been given so far, a semiotics of conscience must also capture the notions of guilt, of bad conscience, of the generally moral nature of conscience, as well as the fact that the call of conscience seems to sound only with regard to *specific deeds*—not all the time, or continually, as the analysis we have presented so far might seem to indicate. Certainly, a semiotic account of these everyday features of the notion of conscience needs to be given if our analysis is to be considered in any way comprehensive. Again, we can fol‐ low Heidegger's lead here; he clearly distinguishes the existential interpretation of conscience

There are two ways in which the everyday notion of conscience and the existential inter‐ pretation might be related. On the one hand, one could argue that there is in fact more than one type of conscience—a plurality of consciences. Or, alternatively, one might argue that the everyday interpretation is the inauthentic disclosure of the existential call of conscience.

On this account, everyday, or inauthentic, *Dasein* misconstrues or misinterprets the con‐ science‐sign. Our semiotic tools give us a new way of characterising this mistake that *Dasein*

1. The representamen/sign‐vehicle is a specific utterance: 'You should not have done that!' Its specificity does not mean that it actually comes to language and breaks the mode of silence; rather its specificity serves to conceal what is authentically disclosed in conscience, namely, *Dasein* as authentically concerned. *Dasein* is thus misled to focus, using language familiar from the later Heidegger, on beings, things, rather than on its being as such.

2. The sense/interpretant is the *badness* or *wrongness* of the deed that was done, the sense that *Dasein* has been *immoral*, and done something *impermissible*. *Dasein ought not* to have done it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the latter that Heidegger proposes.

makes. For the everyday notion of conscience:

ing reason to do.

26 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

**5.3. The everyday notion of conscience**

from its 'vulgar' interpretation.

3. The object/referent is *Dasein*'s impermissible deed itself, whatever it might have been. This is what the everyday conscience‐sign is drawing *Dasein*'s attention back to.

Several important conclusions can be drawn from this analysis of the everyday conscience‐ sign. In the first place, it is clear how significant the misunderstanding of the conscience‐sign of inauthentic *Dasein* is. It is significant enough for it to totally dissimulate the original sense of conscience and thus conceal the urgency of retrieving itself from the 'they'. Structurally, this dissimulation operates by breaking up the original ontological unity of the semiotic moments of the conscience‐sign. In its everyday version, the semiotic moments are differ‐ entiated such that the sign becomes *just one sign among others*, a standard Peircean symbol, rather than *sui generis* and triune. Its special particularity and urgency is thereby lost. In Heideggerian language, being as such is concealed in favour of the disclosure of particular beings. Given the semiotic account above, it could be added: semiosis as such is concealed in favour of particular semiotic events. Thus the proper significance of the conscience‐sign collapses. Calling it the 'voice of God' only serves to compound, rather than to overturn, the dissimulation.

This is not a random misfortune for *Dasein*, argues Heidegger. Rather, it is one way that *Dasein* copes with the anxiety it experiences about its responsibility for itself. Its responsibil‐ ity for its being as such is dissimulated to resemble a liability for a mere deed, which is at least superficially comforting for *Dasein*. The conscience‐sign is deliberately, if not consciously, misunderstood—a misunderstanding which is just another way of *Dasein* caring for itself. *Dasein* cleverly, if unknowingly, figures out a way of avoiding having to heed the conscience‐ sign as it authentically signs.

Given the moral connotations of the everyday conscience‐sign, the foregoing analysis warrants a comment on the status that should be afforded to moral thinking. Suppose the *enkratic* principle as outlined above conflicts with the demands of morality as ordinarily understood—i.e., suppose, for any given agent, that the former prescribes one action, whilst the latter prescribes another, and the given agent cannot pursue both. What should the agent choose? Whilst we may not be in a position to answer this question decisively, it can at least be pointed out that the normativity of the call of conscience *subtends* the normativity of ordinary morality, since whilst the agent may have good reason to adhere to the demands of ordinary morality, whatever they may be in any given situation, the agent has, on the account above, an *overriding* reason to adhere to the prescriptions of its ultimate concerns. In other words, it will always be more *rational* for the agent to heed the authentic call of conscience above considerations of ordinary morality if there is ever a contradiction between the two. The *enkratic* principle is thus more fundamentally binding than any ordinary moral principle could be. Indeed, on this account, ordinary morality might tend to appear, as Heidegger thought, as a dissimulation of the authentic norma‐ tivity of existence.

## **6. Concluding remarks**

In conclusion, the semiotic analysis of the conscience‐sign has revealed its uniqueness and importance amongst signs. This has made the lacuna of it being ignored hitherto by semioti‐ cians all the more striking and curious. Heidegger, of course, traced this sort of ignorance in every instance back to the inevitable inauthenticity of everyday thinking, even of the most rigorous philosophical thinking. It has also disclosed fertile paths for new research:

It indicates that the source of semiosis as such is our concern for ourselves. Daniel Chandler begins his well‐known introductory text on semiotics with the words 'We seem as a species to be driven by a desire to make meanings' [20]. And this is characteristic of what could be construed to be the semioticians most basic mistake: it is not that we desire to make meanings; rather, *we desire—and that creates meanings*. Concern is the origin of semiosis. Elsewhere, I have tried to reduce semiotic configurations down to their original starting points in the teleologi‐ cal schemes that are grounded by such concern [21].

It also opens up the possibility of an ethically engaged semiotics that can propound fundamental normative justifications. Indeed, once conscience has been legitimately construed as the sign‐ ing of signification as a whole, it is not clear how semiotics can avoid becoming ethical—in the sense of critical. That it has endeavoured, by and large, to remain purely 'theoretical', practi‐ cally neutral, is, on this account, not a strength but a weakness. Understanding that processes of semiosis are always rooted in concern for self and that concern for self has essentially a norma‐ tive dimension or aspect compels a way of thinking about semiotics that is inherently critical. In this case, the semiotic analysis of conscience has the potential to reorientate fundamentally semiotics research.

## **Author details**

#### Rufus Duits

Address all correspondence to: rufus.duits@gmail.com

St Paul's School, London, UK

#### **References**


[4] Duits R. Raising the Question of Being. Universal Publishers\*\*\*; 2005

**6. Concluding remarks**

28 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

semiotics research.

**Author details**

St Paul's School, London, UK

University Press; 2001

Rufus Duits

**References**

In conclusion, the semiotic analysis of the conscience‐sign has revealed its uniqueness and importance amongst signs. This has made the lacuna of it being ignored hitherto by semioti‐ cians all the more striking and curious. Heidegger, of course, traced this sort of ignorance in every instance back to the inevitable inauthenticity of everyday thinking, even of the most

It indicates that the source of semiosis as such is our concern for ourselves. Daniel Chandler begins his well‐known introductory text on semiotics with the words 'We seem as a species to be driven by a desire to make meanings' [20]. And this is characteristic of what could be construed to be the semioticians most basic mistake: it is not that we desire to make meanings; rather, *we desire—and that creates meanings*. Concern is the origin of semiosis. Elsewhere, I have tried to reduce semiotic configurations down to their original starting points in the teleologi‐

It also opens up the possibility of an ethically engaged semiotics that can propound fundamental normative justifications. Indeed, once conscience has been legitimately construed as the sign‐ ing of signification as a whole, it is not clear how semiotics can avoid becoming ethical—in the sense of critical. That it has endeavoured, by and large, to remain purely 'theoretical', practi‐ cally neutral, is, on this account, not a strength but a weakness. Understanding that processes of semiosis are always rooted in concern for self and that concern for self has essentially a norma‐ tive dimension or aspect compels a way of thinking about semiotics that is inherently critical. In this case, the semiotic analysis of conscience has the potential to reorientate fundamentally

[1] Heidegger M. Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: SUNY; 1996

[2] Langston D. Conscience and Other Virtues. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State

[3] Heidegger M. Letter on humanism. In: McNeill W, editor. Pathmarks. Cambridge: Cam

rigorous philosophical thinking. It has also disclosed fertile paths for new research:

cal schemes that are grounded by such concern [21].

Address all correspondence to: rufus.duits@gmail.com

bridge University Press; 1998. pp. 239‐276


## **Mental Models are Compatible with Logical Forms**

Miguel López‐Astorga

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/67436

#### Abstract

The mental models theory is a current cognitive approach claiming that human intellectual activity is essentially about semantic possibilities and that syntax and logical form are not relevant. Many experimental results support this theory and its predictions. So, it appears to be justified to assume its main theses. However, in this paper, I argue that the acceptance of the mental models theory does not necessarily have to lead to a rejection of logical forms. Clear relationships between the theory and standard logic can be easily found, and I try to show this in two ways. On the one hand, I claim that the models that the theory assigns to sentences are compatible with truth tables. On the other hand, I also defend that the definitions of a connective by means of another one that can be given in standard logic hold in the mental models theory too, since the sentences that are equivalent in the former have exactly the same models in the latter.

Keywords: logical form, mental models, semantics, standard logic, syntax

#### 1. Introduction

The mental models theory (MMT) is a very important framework explaining human reasoning. Its main theses are to be found in many works (e.g., [1–14]). However, the most important aspects of it for this paper are related to language. The theory states that what is most relevant to individuals in a sentence is its content and meaning and not its syntax or its logical form. This is so because people reason and make inferences mainly reviewing the semantic possibilities that can be attributed to sentences, and not considering their formal structure.

MMT has become a very successful theory, since many experimental results seem to support its assumptions and confirm its predictions. Indeed, it appears to be able to account for human reasoning in a way in principle impossible for standard propositional calculus. True, the natural

© 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

deduction system proposed by Gentzen [15] cannot explain certain usual responses given by people in reasoning tasks. For example, in that calculus, there is a rule that people do not often use. That rule is the disjunction introduction rule, that is, the one that enables to infer a formula such as [p ∨ q] (where ∨ stands for disjunction) from a formula such as [p], and, as said, individuals do not apply it in many occasions (e.g., [13]). Another example can be the difficulties related to the principle of explosion (ex contradictione quodlibet sequitur). Following standard calculus, given a contradiction such as, for instance, [p ∧ ¬p] (where ∧ represents conjunction and '¬' is negation), every formula that one can imagine can be derived, and this is something that, obviously, people do not usually do (e.g., [5], p. 204) And a third case can be that of the infinite conclusions that can be built in standard calculus. In this calculus, from a formula such as, for instance, [p ∧ q], an indeterminate number of formulae can be derived, some of them being, for example, [p ∧ q ∧ q], [p ∧ q ∧ q ∧ q], [p ∧ q ∧ q ∧ q ∧ q], and so on (e.g., [9], p. 202).

Of course, more examples of problems of standard logic in explaining human reasoning can be given. However, what is important for this paper is that, as shown below, MMT proposes a framework in which those problems either disappear or make no sense. I will not challenge this fact here. My basic aim is just to argue that although MMT is assumed, that does not in general mean that logic and logical forms have to be ignored, since it is easy to find correspondences between the combinations of possibilities that MMT assigns to some of the traditional connectives in standard logic (e.g., the conditional, conjunction, and the inclusive disjunction) and the truth values and the definitions that this last logic attributes to those same connectives. Actually, this idea is not absolutely new. In papers such as, for example, those of López-Astorga [16, 17], work in a similar direction has already been done. However, in this paper, I will try to indicate the relationships between MMT and standard logic in a clearer and more obvious way.

Thus, to achieve my goals, I will begin by describing the general theses of MMT that are relevant for my argumentation, that is, its general theses on connectives such as the conditional, conjunction, the inclusive disjunction, and their negations. Then, I will show that the possibilities or models that, following MMT, correspond to those connectives and their negations are evidently compatible with the truth tables in standard logic for those very connectives and their negations. Finally, I will also propose that the models that MMT assigns to the aforementioned connectives are consistent with the definitions of them by means of other connectives that are valid in standard logic as well. So, the first section is about some general theses of MMT.

#### 2. MMT, some logical operators, and their negations

As said, logical form is ignored by MMT [5]. According to it, what is interesting in language and reasoning is just the combinations of semantic possibilities, which are in general called 'models' by the theory, related to every sentence. However, the word 'semantic' does not have in this theory the same meaning as in standard logic. In describing a model, letters such as 'p' or 'q' can be used, but just to shorten. Based on theses such as those of Peirce [18], MMT claims that the models are 'iconic', and that they reproduce the complete structure of a situation in the world (e.g., [6], pp. 135–136; [9], p. 207).

Another important point of the theory is that it states that people do not always identify all the models that can be linked to a sentence. To detect all of them, it is necessary to make certain effort, and individuals do not often make enough effort (see, e.g., [6], p. 138, Table 9.2). Nevertheless, for simplicity, I will work here only with ideal circumstances in which individuals identify all of the possible models. Likewise, I will use a form to express the models different from the usual form of MMT. The reason for this is just that the form that I will use here enables to make the equivalences to standard logic explicit in a clearer way. Usually, the theory describes the different models or semantic possibilities as follows:

(I) p q

deduction system proposed by Gentzen [15] cannot explain certain usual responses given by people in reasoning tasks. For example, in that calculus, there is a rule that people do not often use. That rule is the disjunction introduction rule, that is, the one that enables to infer a formula such as [p ∨ q] (where ∨ stands for disjunction) from a formula such as [p], and, as said, individuals do not apply it in many occasions (e.g., [13]). Another example can be the difficulties related to the principle of explosion (ex contradictione quodlibet sequitur). Following standard calculus, given a contradiction such as, for instance, [p ∧ ¬p] (where ∧ represents conjunction and '¬' is negation), every formula that one can imagine can be derived, and this is something that, obviously, people do not usually do (e.g., [5], p. 204) And a third case can be that of the infinite conclusions that can be built in standard calculus. In this calculus, from a formula such as, for instance, [p ∧ q], an indeterminate number of formulae can be derived, some of them being, for example, [p ∧ q ∧ q], [p ∧ q ∧ q ∧ q], [p ∧ q ∧ q ∧ q ∧ q], and so on (e.g., [9], p. 202).

Of course, more examples of problems of standard logic in explaining human reasoning can be given. However, what is important for this paper is that, as shown below, MMT proposes a framework in which those problems either disappear or make no sense. I will not challenge this fact here. My basic aim is just to argue that although MMT is assumed, that does not in general mean that logic and logical forms have to be ignored, since it is easy to find correspondences between the combinations of possibilities that MMT assigns to some of the traditional connectives in standard logic (e.g., the conditional, conjunction, and the inclusive disjunction) and the truth values and the definitions that this last logic attributes to those same connectives. Actually, this idea is not absolutely new. In papers such as, for example, those of López-Astorga [16, 17], work in a similar direction has already been done. However, in this paper, I will try to indicate

the relationships between MMT and standard logic in a clearer and more obvious way.

standard logic as well. So, the first section is about some general theses of MMT.

2. MMT, some logical operators, and their negations

world (e.g., [6], pp. 135–136; [9], p. 207).

32 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

Thus, to achieve my goals, I will begin by describing the general theses of MMT that are relevant for my argumentation, that is, its general theses on connectives such as the conditional, conjunction, the inclusive disjunction, and their negations. Then, I will show that the possibilities or models that, following MMT, correspond to those connectives and their negations are evidently compatible with the truth tables in standard logic for those very connectives and their negations. Finally, I will also propose that the models that MMT assigns to the aforementioned connectives are consistent with the definitions of them by means of other connectives that are valid in

As said, logical form is ignored by MMT [5]. According to it, what is interesting in language and reasoning is just the combinations of semantic possibilities, which are in general called 'models' by the theory, related to every sentence. However, the word 'semantic' does not have in this theory the same meaning as in standard logic. In describing a model, letters such as 'p' or 'q' can be used, but just to shorten. Based on theses such as those of Peirce [18], MMT claims that the models are 'iconic', and that they reproduce the complete structure of a situation in the


Obviously, [I] represents a possibility in which both [p] and [q] happen. In [II], [p] happens but [q] does not. Exactly the opposite occurs in [III]: [p] does not happen and [q] does. Finally, in [IV], neither [p] nor [q] happens. Thus, for example, if [p] means that 'Johns is smart' and [q] that 'John studies', [I] refers to a scenario in which John is smart and studies, [II] denotes a situation in which John is smart but he does not study, [III] is the case in which John is not smart but he studies, and [IV] shows the circumstance in which neither John is smart nor he studies.

But, as stated, I will refer to these possibilities in a way that will allow a smoother writing. That will be this one:


There is no doubt that the use of brackets and commas will make it possible that the writing is not continually interrupted and the sentences are not constantly cut. And, in this way, the complete sets of possibilities that, based, for example, in Table 9.2 in Ref. [6], p. 138, are attributed by the theory to the mentioned connectives that can be expressed in this simpler manner:

Conjunction, that is, 'and' in sentences of the type 'p and q', for example, 'John is smart and he studies': (p, q).

Conditional, that is, 'if… then…' in sentences of the type 'if p then q', for example, 'if John is smart then he studies': (p, q); (¬p, q); (¬p, ¬q).

Inclusive disjunction, that is, 'either… or… or both of them' in sentences of the type 'either p or q or both of them', for example, either John is smart or he studies or both of them: (p, q); (p, ¬q); (¬p, q).

As far as the denied sentences are concerned, MMT provides a method to detect its models: taking into account the set consisting of [I]–[IV], the missing model(s) in the positive form of the sentence is (are) the model(s) of the negative form of that very sentence (see, e.g., [10, 11]). Accordingly, the complete sets of possibilities corresponding to the denials of the previous connectives are these ones:

Denied conjunction, that is, the case of the sentences of the kind 'it is not the case that p and q', for example, 'it is not the case that John is smart and he studies': (p, ¬q); (¬p, q); (¬p, ¬q).

Denied conditional, that is, the case of the sentences of the kind 'it is not the case that if p then q', for example, 'it is not the case that if John is smart then he studies': (p, ¬q).

Denied inclusive disjunction, that is, the case of the sentences of the kind 'it is not the case that either p or q or both of them', for example, 'it is not the case that either John is smart or he studies or both of them': (¬p, ¬q).

In this way, with all this machinery, MMT can explain the habitual response that people give in most of the reasoning tasks used in the cognitive science literature. For example, given an inference with the premises 'if p then q' (e.g., 'if John is smart then he studies') and 'not-q' (e.g., 'John does not study'), if all of the models of the conditional are detected, that is, (p, q), (¬p, q), and (¬p, ¬q), it is only possible to infer 'not-p' ('John is not smart'), since 'not-q' appears only in the third model, that is, in [IV], and, in that model, 'not-p' appears too and 'p' does not appear (see, e.g., [1], p. 283).

Likewise, MMT can also account for the reasons why the disjunction introduction rule is not usually applied. People do not deduce 'either p or q or both of them' (e.g., 'either John is smart or he studies or both of them') from a premise such as 'p' (e.g., 'John is smart') because, as indicated, the former refers to the models (p, q), (p, ¬q), and (¬p, q), and, as it can be noticed, in the third model, that is, in [III], the premise 'p' is false ('not-p' appears). So, contrary to what standard propositional calculus provides, from a premise, in principle, it is not possible to draw a disjunction in which that same premise is one of the disjuncts, since the disjunction is related to a possible scenario in which the premise is false (see, e.g., [13]).

Furthermore, it is clear that problems such as that of the principle of explosion or that of the possibility to derive infinite conclusions, as said, make no sense in this framework, as, simply, those kinds of deductions are not possible given the semantic machinery of MMT. However, another relevant concept of the theory further stresses the important role that semantics plays in the human intellectual activity. That is the concept of modulation. Modulation is 'the process in the construction of models in which content, context, or knowledge can prevent the construction of a model and can add information to a model' ([9], p. 202). This certainly means that semantics or pragmatics can remove some models, make other models hard to identify, and better describe other models. An example can be useful to show how modulation works. Let us consider this conditional sentence:

'If the workers settle for lower wages then the company may still go bankrupt' ([8], p. 663, Table 4).

Because the structure of this sentence is 'if p then q', one might think that, given 'not-q', that is, in this case, 'the company does not go bankrupt', 'not-p', that is, 'the workers do not settle for lower wages', should be concluded. Nevertheless, this is not so for this sentence, since modulation modifies the models corresponding to it. Now, the models are not the previous ones mentioned for the conditional in general, but (p, q), (p, ¬q), and (¬p, q). The reason is evident: (¬p, ¬q) is not a possibility for this conditional because it is not possible that 'the workers do not settle for lower wages', that is, 'not-p', and, at the same time, 'the company does not go bankrupt', that is, 'notq.' On the other hand, (p, ¬q) must be added because it is possible that 'the workers settle for lower wages', that is, 'p', and that, at the same time, 'the company does not go bankrupt', that is, 'not-q.' In this way, the final result is that, given the conditional and the information that 'not-q', 'not-p' cannot be derived, since, in this particular case, the only model in which 'not-q' appears is a model in which 'p' appears too (see, e.g., [8], p. 663, Table 4; [19], pp. 287–288).

Obviously, all this demonstrates that MMT has a great potential and that, as stated, can account for most of the answers that people often give in reasoning tasks. And, as also indicated, these facts will not be challenged in this paper. My intention is only to show that this theory does not lead necessarily to a rejection of syntax and logical forms as important parts of human communication and thought. In this way, in the next section, I will argue that the models assigned by MMT to the connectives reviewed are clearly consistent with the truth tables of standard logic. As also said, to make the explanation clearer and simpler, I will only consider ideal situations in which all the models of a sentence are detected. In the same way, and for the same reason, I will ignore the situations in which the models change because of modulation as well.

## 3. The combinations of possibilities of MMT and the truth tables

Really, it is almost trivial to claim that the models of conjunction, the conditional, the inclusive disjunction, and their denials are related to the truth tables of standard logic, since it is evident that such models correspond to the cases in which the logical structures to which they are attributed are true in a truth table. Nonetheless, it can be interesting to make this explicit in order to show that, indeed, it is necessary to acknowledge the role played by logical form even though the main theses of MMT are correct.

A first important point in this regard is that, following papers such as, for example, those of López-Astorga [16, 17], the different combinations of possibilities can be transformed into well-formed formulae of standard logic by means of conjunction. It is enough to link their elements with a conjunction and consider them to be conjuncts of that conjunction. Thus, [I]– [IV] can be transformed into these formulae:

(I) p ∧ q (II) p ∧ ¬q

the sentence is (are) the model(s) of the negative form of that very sentence (see, e.g., [10, 11]). Accordingly, the complete sets of possibilities corresponding to the denials of the previous

Denied conjunction, that is, the case of the sentences of the kind 'it is not the case that p and q', for example, 'it is not the case that John is smart and he studies': (p, ¬q); (¬p, q); (¬p, ¬q).

Denied conditional, that is, the case of the sentences of the kind 'it is not the case that if p then

Denied inclusive disjunction, that is, the case of the sentences of the kind 'it is not the case that either p or q or both of them', for example, 'it is not the case that either John is smart or he

In this way, with all this machinery, MMT can explain the habitual response that people give in most of the reasoning tasks used in the cognitive science literature. For example, given an inference with the premises 'if p then q' (e.g., 'if John is smart then he studies') and 'not-q' (e.g., 'John does not study'), if all of the models of the conditional are detected, that is, (p, q), (¬p, q), and (¬p, ¬q), it is only possible to infer 'not-p' ('John is not smart'), since 'not-q' appears only in the third model, that is, in [IV], and, in that model, 'not-p' appears too and 'p' does not appear

Likewise, MMT can also account for the reasons why the disjunction introduction rule is not usually applied. People do not deduce 'either p or q or both of them' (e.g., 'either John is smart or he studies or both of them') from a premise such as 'p' (e.g., 'John is smart') because, as indicated, the former refers to the models (p, q), (p, ¬q), and (¬p, q), and, as it can be noticed, in the third model, that is, in [III], the premise 'p' is false ('not-p' appears). So, contrary to what standard propositional calculus provides, from a premise, in principle, it is not possible to draw a disjunction in which that same premise is one of the disjuncts, since the disjunction is

Furthermore, it is clear that problems such as that of the principle of explosion or that of the possibility to derive infinite conclusions, as said, make no sense in this framework, as, simply, those kinds of deductions are not possible given the semantic machinery of MMT. However, another relevant concept of the theory further stresses the important role that semantics plays in the human intellectual activity. That is the concept of modulation. Modulation is 'the process in the construction of models in which content, context, or knowledge can prevent the construction of a model and can add information to a model' ([9], p. 202). This certainly means that semantics or pragmatics can remove some models, make other models hard to identify, and better describe other models. An example can be useful to show how modulation works.

'If the workers settle for lower wages then the company may still go bankrupt' ([8], p. 663,

Because the structure of this sentence is 'if p then q', one might think that, given 'not-q', that is, in this case, 'the company does not go bankrupt', 'not-p', that is, 'the workers do not settle for lower wages', should be concluded. Nevertheless, this is not so for this sentence, since modulation

q', for example, 'it is not the case that if John is smart then he studies': (p, ¬q).

related to a possible scenario in which the premise is false (see, e.g., [13]).

connectives are these ones:

34 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

studies or both of them': (¬p, ¬q).

Let us consider this conditional sentence:

Table 4).

(see, e.g., [1], p. 283).


This clearly means that it can be thought that there are logical forms related to the models of MMT. However, even one more step is possible. Following, in the same way, the general theses provided in papers such as those cited, given that the models are really possibilities, they can be linked in turn by means of disjunction. For instance, if the models of the conditional correspond, according to what has just been said, to the formulae [p ∧ q], [¬p ∧ q], and [¬p ∧ ¬q], it can be stated that its models set can be expressed by means of this more complex formula: [(p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ ¬q)]. This clearly makes sense, since, because the models are, as indicated, possibilities, it is not hard to consider them to be disjuncts in a disjunctive formula (remember that, in a disjunction, only one disjunct needs to be true).

But, if this is so, the correspondences to standard logic are obvious. As mentioned, the formula that can be assigned to the conditional is [(p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ ¬q)], and this last formula and [p ! q] (where ! stands for conditional relationship) are true in exactly the same cases in standard logic. Indeed, if, as, for example, in López-Astorga [16, 17], we assume that 'v(α)' refers to the truth value of [α], it can be claimed that

$$\mathbf{v}(\mathbf{p}\rightarrow\mathbf{q}) \;=\;\mathbf{v}[(\mathbf{p}\land\mathbf{q})\lor(\neg\mathbf{p}\land\mathbf{q})\lor(\neg\mathbf{p}\land\neg\mathbf{q})] \tag{1}$$

And this is evident because v(p ! q) = 0 if and only if v(p) = 1 and v(q) = 0 (where '0' denotes that the formula is false and '1' represents the case in which the formula is true), and, in the same way, v[(p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ ¬q)] = 0 if and only if v(p) = 1 and v(q) = 0 as well.

On the other hand, if we think about conjunction, all of this is even clearer. The reason is that, if the model of conjunction is transformed into a well-formed formula of standard logic in accordance with what has been indicated, the result is a formula that exactly matches the way conjunction is expressed in this last logic: [p ∧ q]. Thus, there is no doubt that

$$\mathbf{v(p \land q)} = \mathbf{v(p \land q)}\tag{2}$$

Furthermore, as it is well known, v(p ∧ q) = 1 if and only if v(p) = 1 and v(q) = 1, and this seems to apply to both the formula in standard logic and the model in MMT.

In connection with disjunction, its formula would be, obviously, [(p ∧ q) ∨ (p ∧ ¬q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q)], and, again, it is clear that

$$\mathbf{v}(\mathbf{p}\lor\mathbf{q}) = \mathbf{v}[(\mathbf{p}\land\mathbf{q})\lor(\mathbf{p}\land\neg\mathbf{q})\lor(\neg\mathbf{p}\land\mathbf{q})] \tag{3}$$

In both cases, the value of the formula is 0 if and only if v(p) = 0 and v(q) = 0.

As far as denials are concerned, the situation is not different. Based on the accounts and arguments above, it can be said that the negated conjunction can be related to a formula such as [(p ∧ ¬q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ ¬q)], and equivalence is evident here too, since

$$\mathbf{v}[\neg(\mathbf{p}\land\mathbf{q})] = \mathbf{v}[(\mathbf{p}\land\neg\mathbf{q})\lor(\neg\mathbf{p}\land\mathbf{q})\lor(\neg\mathbf{p}\land\neg\mathbf{q})] \tag{4}$$

Indeed, these two formulae are false in just a circumstance: if and only if v(p) = 1 and v(q) = 1.

With regard to the denied inclusive disjunction, the formula would be hence [¬p ∧ ¬q], and once again

$$\mathbf{v}[\neg(\mathbf{p}\land\mathbf{q})] = \mathbf{v}(\neg\mathbf{p}\land\neg\mathbf{q})\tag{5}$$

Both v[¬(p ∨ q)] = 1 and v(¬p ∧ ¬q) = 1 if and only if v(p) = 0 and v(q) = 0.

be linked in turn by means of disjunction. For instance, if the models of the conditional correspond, according to what has just been said, to the formulae [p ∧ q], [¬p ∧ q], and [¬p ∧ ¬q], it can be stated that its models set can be expressed by means of this more complex formula: [(p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ ¬q)]. This clearly makes sense, since, because the models are, as indicated, possibilities, it is not hard to consider them to be disjuncts in a disjunctive

But, if this is so, the correspondences to standard logic are obvious. As mentioned, the formula that can be assigned to the conditional is [(p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ ¬q)], and this last formula and [p ! q] (where ! stands for conditional relationship) are true in exactly the same cases in standard logic. Indeed, if, as, for example, in López-Astorga [16, 17], we assume that 'v(α)'

And this is evident because v(p ! q) = 0 if and only if v(p) = 1 and v(q) = 0 (where '0' denotes that the formula is false and '1' represents the case in which the formula is true), and, in the same way, v[(p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ ¬q)] = 0 if and only if v(p) = 1 and v(q) = 0 as well.

On the other hand, if we think about conjunction, all of this is even clearer. The reason is that, if the model of conjunction is transformed into a well-formed formula of standard logic in accordance with what has been indicated, the result is a formula that exactly matches the way conjunction is expressed in this last logic: [p ∧ q]. Thus, there is no doubt

Furthermore, as it is well known, v(p ∧ q) = 1 if and only if v(p) = 1 and v(q) = 1, and this seems

In connection with disjunction, its formula would be, obviously, [(p ∧ q) ∨ (p ∧ ¬q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q)],

As far as denials are concerned, the situation is not different. Based on the accounts and arguments above, it can be said that the negated conjunction can be related to a formula such

Indeed, these two formulae are false in just a circumstance: if and only if v(p) = 1 and v(q) = 1. With regard to the denied inclusive disjunction, the formula would be hence [¬p ∧ ¬q], and

to apply to both the formula in standard logic and the model in MMT.

In both cases, the value of the formula is 0 if and only if v(p) = 0 and v(q) = 0.

as [(p ∧ ¬q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ ¬q)], and equivalence is evident here too, since

vðp ! qÞ ¼ v½ðp ∧ qÞ ∨ ð¬p ∧ qÞ ∨ ð¬p ∧ ¬qÞ� (1)

vðp ∧ qÞ ¼ vðp ∧ qÞ (2)

vðp ∨ qÞ ¼ v½ðp ∧ qÞ ∨ ðp ∧ ¬qÞ ∨ ð¬p ∧ qÞ� (3)

v½¬ðp ∧ qÞ� ¼ v½ðp ∧ ¬qÞ ∨ ð¬p ∧ qÞ ∨ ð¬p ∧ ¬qÞ� (4)

formula (remember that, in a disjunction, only one disjunct needs to be true).

refers to the truth value of [α], it can be claimed that

36 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

that

and, again, it is clear that

once again

Finally, the case of the negated conditional is not difficult either. Its formula is clearly [p ∧ ¬q] and it is also clear that

$$\mathbf{v}[\neg(\mathbf{p}\rightarrow\mathbf{q})] = \mathbf{v}(\mathbf{p}\wedge\neg\mathbf{q})\tag{6}$$

There is only one scenario in which these two last formulae can be true: if and only if v(p) = 1 and v(q) = 0.

So, given these arguments, it is hard to hold that the models of MMT have nothing to do with standard logic and its logical forms. It is true that, from critical perspectives, it has already been said that MMT reproduces the truth tables of standard logic (e.g., [20]). However, the difference between this paper and such perspectives is that this paper is not so critical of MMT. It assumes its main theses and only tries to show that those theses do not actually lead, as its proponents often claim, to a rejection of logical forms. In this section, I have shown that, true, very simple logical forms (in which only negations, conjunctions, and disjunctions are included) can be attributed to the models of MMT. Nevertheless, this idea is further supported in the next section, in which I argue that the definitions of the logical operators by means of other different logical operators that are correct in standard logic are also valid in MMT.

#### 4. The definitions of the logical operators and MMT

Certainly, standard logic enables to define each logical connective linking two clauses by means of any other connective along with the negation. Thus, in the case of the conditional, these definitions hold:

$$\mathbf{p} \rightarrow \mathbf{q} \equiv\_{\mathbf{q}\mathbf{f}} \mathbf{\neg(p \land \neg \mathbf{q})} =\_{\mathbf{q}\mathbf{f}} \mathbf{\neg p} \lor \mathbf{q} \tag{7}$$

(e.g., 'if John is smart then he studies' is equivalent to both 'it is not the case that John is smart and he does not study' and 'either John is not smart or he studies or both of them').

The reason is, of course, that, according to the truth tables in this logic,

$$\mathbf{v}(\mathbf{p}\rightarrow\mathbf{q}) \;=\;\mathbf{v}[\neg(\mathbf{p}\land\neg\mathbf{q})] \;=\;\mathbf{v}(\neg\mathbf{p}\lor\mathbf{q})\tag{8}$$

But this leads us to another important point about MMT, since the model sets that can be assigned to the expressions in natural language with these three logical structures are, in principle, the same. As said, the models of [p ! q] are (p, q), (¬p, q), and (¬p, ¬q), and these are the same as those of [¬(p ∧ ¬q)] and [¬p ∨ q]. Indeed, if the only model of [p ∧ ¬q] is (p, ¬q), the models of [¬(p ∧ ¬q)] must be, as explained, the remaining ones, that is, (p, q), (¬p, q), and (¬p, ¬q). Likewise, the models of an expression such as [¬p ∨ q] are clearly (¬p, q), (¬p, ¬q), and (p, q), that is, in different order, again, the same as those of the conditional.

But something similar happens to the definitions corresponding to conjunction. Those are the following:

$$\mathbf{p} \wedge \mathbf{q} \; \equiv \, \_{\mathrm{df}} \neg (\mathbf{p} \rightarrow \neg \mathbf{q}) \; \; \equiv \, \_{\mathrm{df}} \neg (\neg \mathbf{p} \lor \neg \mathbf{q}) \tag{9}$$

(e.g., 'John is smart and he studies' is equivalent to both 'it is not the case that if John is smart then he does not study' and 'it is not the case that either John is not smart or he does not study or both of them').

Here, it is true too that

$$\mathbf{v}(\mathbf{p}\wedge\mathbf{q}) = \mathbf{v}[\neg(\mathbf{p}\rightarrow\neg\mathbf{q})] = \mathbf{v}[\neg(\neg\mathbf{p}\lor\neg\mathbf{q})] \tag{10}$$

Nonetheless, what is actually interesting about this for this paper is that while [p ∧ q] has just a model, (p, q), that is, exactly the only model of both [¬(p ! ¬q)] and [¬(¬p ∨ ¬q)] as well. As stated, a conditional such as [p ! q] has three models: (p, q), (¬p, q), and (¬p, ¬q). Therefore, a conditional such as [p ! ¬q] has to have these models: (p, ¬q), (¬p, ¬q), and (¬p, q). And the only model of a denied conditional such as [¬(p ! ¬q)] can only be (p, q). In the same way, if the models set of [¬p ∨ ¬q] are (¬p, ¬q), (¬p, q), and (p, ¬q), only a model is possible for [¬(¬p ∨ ¬q)]: (p, q) again.

Furthermore, the case of the inclusive disjunction is not different. Its definitions are these ones:

$$\mathbf{p} \lor \mathbf{q} \quad =\_{\text{fl}} \neg \mathbf{p} \to \mathbf{q} \quad =\_{\text{fl}} \neg (\neg \mathbf{p} \land \neg \mathbf{q}) \tag{11}$$

(e.g., 'either John is smart or he studies or both of them' is equivalent to both 'if John is not smart then he studies' and 'it is not the case that John is not smart and he does not study').

And here, it is also correct that

$$\mathbf{v}(\mathbf{p}\lor\mathbf{q}) = \mathbf{v}(\neg\mathbf{p}\to\mathbf{q}) = \mathbf{v}[\neg(\neg\mathbf{p}\land\neg\mathbf{q})] \tag{12}$$

Nevertheless, as far as my aims in this paper are concerned, the most relevant point is that the models of the three formulae match in this case as well. As said, the models of [p ∨ q] are (p, q), (p, ¬q), and (¬p, q), and it is evident that those of [¬p ! q] are (¬p, q), (p, ¬q), and (p, q), that is, exactly the same models. On the other hand, if the model of [¬p ∧ ¬q] is (¬p, ¬q), it is clear that those of [¬(¬p ∧ ¬q)] are also (p, q), (p, ¬q), and (¬p, q).

Thus, it is hard to question that certain correspondences and equivalences related to logical forms in standard logic are present in MMT too. As stated, this does not mean that this last theory is wrong. It only implies that, although MMT wants to ignore logical form, it cannot do that absolutely. All of its other theses can be correct and it is very possible that it describes the real mental processes why the human mind reasons and interprets language. However, as shown, this does not necessarily remove the role that the formal structures and syntax can play.

#### 5. Conclusions

(¬p, ¬q). Likewise, the models of an expression such as [¬p ∨ q] are clearly (¬p, q), (¬p, ¬q), and

But something similar happens to the definitions corresponding to conjunction. Those are the

(e.g., 'John is smart and he studies' is equivalent to both 'it is not the case that if John is smart then he does not study' and 'it is not the case that either John is not smart or he does not study

Nonetheless, what is actually interesting about this for this paper is that while [p ∧ q] has just a model, (p, q), that is, exactly the only model of both [¬(p ! ¬q)] and [¬(¬p ∨ ¬q)] as well. As stated, a conditional such as [p ! q] has three models: (p, q), (¬p, q), and (¬p, ¬q). Therefore, a conditional such as [p ! ¬q] has to have these models: (p, ¬q), (¬p, ¬q), and (¬p, q). And the only model of a denied conditional such as [¬(p ! ¬q)] can only be (p, q). In the same way, if the models set of [¬p ∨ ¬q] are (¬p, ¬q), (¬p, q), and (p, ¬q), only a model is possible for [¬(¬p ∨

Furthermore, the case of the inclusive disjunction is not different. Its definitions are these ones:

(e.g., 'either John is smart or he studies or both of them' is equivalent to both 'if John is not smart then he studies' and 'it is not the case that John is not smart and he does not study').

Nevertheless, as far as my aims in this paper are concerned, the most relevant point is that the models of the three formulae match in this case as well. As said, the models of [p ∨ q] are (p, q), (p, ¬q), and (¬p, q), and it is evident that those of [¬p ! q] are (¬p, q), (p, ¬q), and (p, q), that is, exactly the same models. On the other hand, if the model of [¬p ∧ ¬q] is (¬p, ¬q), it is clear that

Thus, it is hard to question that certain correspondences and equivalences related to logical forms in standard logic are present in MMT too. As stated, this does not mean that this last theory is wrong. It only implies that, although MMT wants to ignore logical form, it cannot do that absolutely. All of its other theses can be correct and it is very possible that it describes the real mental processes why the human mind reasons and interprets language.

p ∧ q ¼df¬ðp ! ¬qÞ ¼df¬ð¬p ∨ ¬qÞ (9)

vðp ∧ qÞ ¼ v½¬ðp ! ¬qÞ� ¼ v½¬ð¬p ∨ ¬qÞ� (10)

p ∨ q ¼df¬p ! q ¼df¬ð¬p ∧ ¬qÞ (11)

vðp ∨ qÞ ¼ vð¬p ! qÞ ¼ v½¬ð¬p ∧ ¬qÞ� (12)

(p, q), that is, in different order, again, the same as those of the conditional.

following:

or both of them').

¬q)]: (p, q) again.

And here, it is also correct that

those of [¬(¬p ∧ ¬q)] are also (p, q), (p, ¬q), and (¬p, q).

Here, it is true too that

38 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

However, what does appear to be true is that the human intellectual activity does not follow Gentzen's calculus [15]. Examples such as the ones mentioned above (that of the disjunction introduction rule, that of the principle of explosion, or that of the possible infinite conclusions) are clear proofs in this regard. But this does not prove, at the same time, that no kind of logic or syntactic forms can be related to the human thought. This paper has shown that, even accepting a purely semantic theory such as MMT, it is possible to continue to speak about logical forms and to find links between the mental activity and such forms. In this way, given that standard logic is about more than just Gentzen's system [15], the rejection of the latter does not have to lead to the rejection of the former. Thus, while standard propositional calculus does not work to account for the human mind, maybe some aspects of standard logic linked to its truth tables can do that.

In fact, following arguments such as, for example, those of López-Astorga [16, 17], it can be said that, by trying to avoid logical forms, MMT really gives a procedure to recover them. Based on this idea, it can also be stated that MMT reveals that the true forms of conjunction, the conditional, and the inclusive disjunction are, in principle, [p ∧ q], [(p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ ¬q)], and [(p ∧ q) ∨ (p ∧ ¬q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q)], respectively, and that, therefore, the human mind does use logical forms, albeit such forms are simple enough so that they only include conjunctions, disjunctions, and denials.

An objection against this idea can be that MMT assumes that, as explained, in certain circumstances, many people do not identify all the models corresponding to a sentence, this being what allows the theory to account for the reasoning mistakes. Following an example indicated above, it can be claimed that, according to MMT, the inferences that have as premises sentences such as, for instance, [p ! q] and [¬q] are sometimes difficult for individuals because, as indicated, to make them and conclude [¬p], it is necessary to detect the third model of the conditional (¬p, ¬q), which does not always happen (e.g., [1], p. 283). In this way, one might think that this idea refers to processes and facts that actually have no relationship to logical forms. However, from a syntactic perspective, it can also be thought that an individual that does not detect the third model of the conditional is just an individual that fails to note that its logical form is [(p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ ¬q)], and that, because he (or she) has not identified all of its possibilities, attributes to a logical form such as, for example, [p ∧ q] (if the usual arguments given by the proponents of the theory are taken into account, this would be the most probable case) or [(p ∧ q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q)]. So, this aspect of the theory is not really in conflict with a possible role of logical form either.

Likewise, modulation would not be a problem. If we consider the example taken from Johnson-Laird and Byrne ([8], p. 663, Table 4) again, that is, 'If the workers settle for lower wages then the company may still go bankrupt', we have to acknowledge that its logical form is not actually the one of the conditionals, but, following that indicated above, [(p ∧ q) ∨ (p ∧ ¬q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q)]. But, as said, this is not a difficulty either, since it can be interpreted that what it truly shows is that MMT has theoretical mechanisms such as that of modulation that help detect the real logical forms of sentences. In fact, an old problem in logic is, as it is known, the one of the translation of sentences in natural language into well-formed formulae, as there is no exact correspondence between the expressions in natural language (e.g., 'if… then…', 'either… or…', or '…and…') and the logical operators (see, e.g., [16, 17]). And, obviously, from this point of view, it can be claimed that what modulation really seems to reveal is the way the true logical forms of the sentences can be found, and not that logical form is not necessary (see, e.g., [16]). Thus, in the particular case of the aforementioned example, what modulation appears to indicate is that, in spite of the fact that the sentence is expressed by means of the words 'if' and 'then', it is actually an inclusive disjunction. This is so because the formula [(p ∧ q) ∨ (p ∧ ¬q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q)] is the one corresponding to this last operator. Hence perhaps it would be better to express the sentence as follows: 'either the workers settle for lower wages or the company will go bankrupt.'

So, that this paper has been mainly focused on ideal situations in which all of the models are identified and modulation plays no role does not seem to be a clear limitation of it. Thus, the paper appears to demonstrate that, although, as stated, Gentzen's calculus [15] is not the criterion for the human mind, it is worth continuing to carry out studies in the same direction as, for example, those of López-Astorga [16, 17], that is, studies on the relationships that can exist between the models of MMT and logical forms.

Finally, maybe it is also important to mention the relevance that this problem of logical forms and their semantic possibilities can have in very different fields. On the one hand, given that MMT is a cognitive theory, it is absolutely clear that it is relevant in Psychology of Reasoning. On the other hand, speaking about syntax and semantics is always speaking about linguistics. Thus, the arguments provided in this paper can be interesting in several kinds of studies on language, including, for example, Philosophy of Language. As far as this last point is concerned, it can be stated, in addition, that the identification of both the semantic possibilities to which sentences refer and their logical forms can make it possible that a computer program or a software tool can work more easily from sentences in natural language (which could be translated into logical forms and the program or software could work considering just these last forms). Furthermore, it is obvious that identifying logical forms is identifying deep forms in linguistic messages. Therefore, the possibilities of researches in this direction are diverse and, as said, it seems that the analyses about the connections between semantic models and syntactic forms must be continued and taken into account.

#### Author details

Miguel López-Astorga

Address all correspondence to: milopez@utalca.cl

Institute of Humanistic Studies "Juan Ignacio Molina," University of Talca, Talca, Chile

## References

one of the conditionals, but, following that indicated above, [(p ∧ q) ∨ (p ∧ ¬q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q)]. But, as said, this is not a difficulty either, since it can be interpreted that what it truly shows is that MMT has theoretical mechanisms such as that of modulation that help detect the real logical forms of sentences. In fact, an old problem in logic is, as it is known, the one of the translation of sentences in natural language into well-formed formulae, as there is no exact correspondence between the expressions in natural language (e.g., 'if… then…', 'either… or…', or '…and…') and the logical operators (see, e.g., [16, 17]). And, obviously, from this point of view, it can be claimed that what modulation really seems to reveal is the way the true logical forms of the sentences can be found, and not that logical form is not necessary (see, e.g., [16]). Thus, in the particular case of the aforementioned example, what modulation appears to indicate is that, in spite of the fact that the sentence is expressed by means of the words 'if' and 'then', it is actually an inclusive disjunction. This is so because the formula [(p ∧ q) ∨ (p ∧ ¬q) ∨ (¬p ∧ q)] is the one corresponding to this last operator. Hence perhaps it would be better to express the sentence as follows: 'either the workers

So, that this paper has been mainly focused on ideal situations in which all of the models are identified and modulation plays no role does not seem to be a clear limitation of it. Thus, the paper appears to demonstrate that, although, as stated, Gentzen's calculus [15] is not the criterion for the human mind, it is worth continuing to carry out studies in the same direction as, for example, those of López-Astorga [16, 17], that is, studies on the relationships that can

Finally, maybe it is also important to mention the relevance that this problem of logical forms and their semantic possibilities can have in very different fields. On the one hand, given that MMT is a cognitive theory, it is absolutely clear that it is relevant in Psychology of Reasoning. On the other hand, speaking about syntax and semantics is always speaking about linguistics. Thus, the arguments provided in this paper can be interesting in several kinds of studies on language, including, for example, Philosophy of Language. As far as this last point is concerned, it can be stated, in addition, that the identification of both the semantic possibilities to which sentences refer and their logical forms can make it possible that a computer program or a software tool can work more easily from sentences in natural language (which could be translated into logical forms and the program or software could work considering just these last forms). Furthermore, it is obvious that identifying logical forms is identifying deep forms in linguistic messages. Therefore, the possibilities of researches in this direction are diverse and, as said, it seems that the analyses about the connections between semantic models and syntactic

Institute of Humanistic Studies "Juan Ignacio Molina," University of Talca, Talca, Chile

settle for lower wages or the company will go bankrupt.'

40 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

exist between the models of MMT and logical forms.

forms must be continued and taken into account.

Address all correspondence to: milopez@utalca.cl

Author details

Miguel López-Astorga


**Semiotics and Gesamtkunstwerk**

[17] López-Astorga M. Evolved mechanisms versus underlying conditional relations. Studies

[18] Peirce C S. Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, A. Burks,

[19] López-Astorga M. Logic, pragmatics, and types of conditionals. Frontiers of Philosophy

[20] Braine M D S, O'Brien D P, editors. Mental Logic. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associ-

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42 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

ates, Inc., Publishers; 1998. 481 p.

editors. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 1931–1958. 944 p.

#### **The Art of 'Scoring' Cosmopoiesis in Archaic Melic Verse: How the Singing-Poets of the Hellas of Yore Musically Mapped Their** *Lebenswelt* **The Art of 'Scoring' Cosmopoiesis in Archaic Melic Verse: How the Singing-Poets of the Hellas of Yore Musically Mapped Their** *Lebenswelt*

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.69213

Fionn Bennett Fionn Bennett

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.69213

[…] it is not clear in what respect the poet's song and voice are literally θέσπις ἀοιδή.

—Andrew Ford.

#### **Abstract**

Among the Hellenes in archaic 'Song culture', it was axiomatic that when the 'inspired' *aoidos* declaimed 'sacred song' (θέσπις ἀοιδή), the voice of the divine itself sounded forth. But what credited such a claim? What property of 'melic verse' encoded the voice of the Gods? Pursuant to what semiotic rationale? To answer these questions, this chapter looks at (1) what counted as the 'divine' for the early Hellenes, (2) how the 'inspired' *aoidos* was able to 'source' it, (3) how he made it afford intelligence about cosmopoiesis and, finally, (4) how he gave this intelligence an expression that was legible to his listeners. The case is made that information about cosmopoiesis was encoded in the *melodies* and *metre* that accompanied the ordinary words used in melic verse. The semiotic rationale behind this claim was a mimetic correlation between (i) the 'arithmology' used to compose melodies and rhythms and (ii) the 'arithmology' used to quantify the blends of cosmic energies that powered the song's subject matter into its 'complexion'. Hence, listening to 'sacred song' amounted to hearing two narratives about the object of the song: one in the 'ordinary' words of mortals recounting what it means '*sub species hominis*', the other in melody relating its 'sacral', cosmopoietic significance.

**Keywords:** archaic melic verse, sacred song, hieroglossia, semiotics and *mousiké*, encoding environmental affordance, semiotics and arithmology

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

## **1. Introduction**

'The very voice of the divine itself sounds forth in what is heard'. This is the tenor of what Plato says in the *Ion* and in *Laws* about a variety of melic verse now generally called 'sacred song' (θέσπις ἀοιδή) when sung by an 'inspired' singing-poet or *aoidos*. 1 Modern first-time readers of the relevant passages would quite naturally assume this is said for dramatic effect or that it reflects some sort of tradition consecrated *fable convenue* or literary convention. However, better-informed and more context sensitive readings are not so dismissive. They tend to suppose that this sort of claim was meant to be taken literally and therefore ought to be treated as such.2 What encourages them to say this more than anything else is the abundance of similar sounding language in the surviving works of Alcman, Hesiod, Pindar, Theognis, Bacchylides and many others. And let us not presume that what is purported by these self-styled 'emissaries of the Muses' boils down to no more than the predictably self-serving rhetoric of an 'aedic ideology'. That would suppose that poetry and song listening publics were less convinced of the validity of the claim than the performers who made it, and until the fifth century BCE there is very little proof of that.<sup>3</sup>

But if this 'conceit' should be taken literally, what could justify such a bold statement? What *property* of verse encoded what counted as the voice of the divine? What semiotic engineering was required to make 'θέσπις ἀοιδή' a signifier of something as incommensurably otherworldly as the voices of the immortals? Alternately, what 'theory of the sign' lent this conceit the credence it evidently enjoyed?

To wend our way to some sort of clarity on this semiotic *punctum caecum*, I begin by placing a question mark beside those passages in the works of Plato where he suggests that the answer is to be found in the *melody* and *metre* modulating the ordinary words used in poetry. A good example of the kind of passage I refer to can be found in Plato's *Laws*.

*[…] the gods, in pity for the human race thus born to misery, have ordained the feasts of thanksgiving as periods of respite from their troubles; and they have granted them as companions in their feasts the Muses and Apollo the master of music, and Dionysus, that they may at least set right again their modes of discipline by associating in their feasts with gods. […] Now, whereas all other creatures are devoid of any perception of the various kinds of order and disorder in movement (which we term rhythm and harmony), to men the very gods, who were given, as we said, to be our fellows in the dance, have granted the pleasurable perception of rhythm and harmony, whereby they cause us to move and lead our choirs,* 

<sup>1</sup> On 'ὁ θεὸς αὐτός ἐστιν ὁ λέγων', cf. *Ion*, 534d, *Phaedrus*, 245a & *Laws*, 719c. On 'sacred song' (θέσπις ἀοιδή or θεσπιῳδία), cf. [1, 2]: 178-193 & [3]: 21-26.

<sup>2</sup> Cf. [4]: 38*ff*., [5]: 13, [6]: 36, 40, 64, [7]: 100*ff*., [8]: 28*ff*., [9]: 10-11, 16-17, 80-81. Comp. [2]: 178*ff*., [10], [11]: 116*f*., [12]: 78-79 & [13]: 34. For more sceptical or opposed views, cf. [14]: 171-172, [15–18]. For an up-to-date bibliography on the whole question, cf. [19]: 64n.18.

<sup>3</sup> Cf. [20]: 54n.56 on [12, 21, 22] and others who have studied the gradual transformation of poetic practices entrained by the pressures on rhapsodes to tailor their productivity and performances to the tastes of civil authorities and the general public and how this resulted in the view that Singing-Poets were 'lying' when they claimed they were emissaries of the Gods. Needless to say, we are unconcerned with poetic productivity in this 'disenchanted', post-archaic age. Also beyond the scope of this chapter, are what can be called the 'lays of men' ([3]: 17), which, in so far as they are 'non-sacral', should be contrasted with 'θέσπις ἀοιδή'.

*linking us one with another by means of songs and dances; and to the choir they have given its name from the "cheer" implanted therein. Shall we accept this account to begin with, and postulate that education owes its origin to Apollo and the Muses?4*

**1. Introduction**

46 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

there is very little proof of that.<sup>3</sup>

the credence it evidently enjoyed?

θεσπιῳδία), cf. [1, 2]: 178-193 & [3]: 21-26.

should be contrasted with 'θέσπις ἀοιδή'.

question, cf. [19]: 64n.18.

such.2

1

2

3

'The very voice of the divine itself sounds forth in what is heard'. This is the tenor of what Plato says in the *Ion* and in *Laws* about a variety of melic verse now generally called 'sacred song'

of the relevant passages would quite naturally assume this is said for dramatic effect or that it reflects some sort of tradition consecrated *fable convenue* or literary convention. However, better-informed and more context sensitive readings are not so dismissive. They tend to suppose that this sort of claim was meant to be taken literally and therefore ought to be treated as

But if this 'conceit' should be taken literally, what could justify such a bold statement? What *property* of verse encoded what counted as the voice of the divine? What semiotic engineering was required to make 'θέσπις ἀοιδή' a signifier of something as incommensurably otherworldly as the voices of the immortals? Alternately, what 'theory of the sign' lent this conceit

To wend our way to some sort of clarity on this semiotic *punctum caecum*, I begin by placing a question mark beside those passages in the works of Plato where he suggests that the answer is to be found in the *melody* and *metre* modulating the ordinary words used in poetry. A good

*[…] the gods, in pity for the human race thus born to misery, have ordained the feasts of thanksgiving as periods of respite from their troubles; and they have granted them as companions in their feasts the Muses and Apollo the master of music, and Dionysus, that they may at least set right again their modes of discipline by associating in their feasts with gods. […] Now, whereas all other creatures are devoid of any perception of the various kinds of order and disorder in movement (which we term rhythm and harmony), to men the very gods, who were given, as we said, to be our fellows in the dance, have granted the pleasurable perception of rhythm and harmony, whereby they cause us to move and lead our choirs,* 

On 'ὁ θεὸς αὐτός ἐστιν ὁ λέγων', cf. *Ion*, 534d, *Phaedrus*, 245a & *Laws*, 719c. On 'sacred song' (θέσπις ἀοιδή or

Cf. [4]: 38*ff*., [5]: 13, [6]: 36, 40, 64, [7]: 100*ff*., [8]: 28*ff*., [9]: 10-11, 16-17, 80-81. Comp. [2]: 178*ff*., [10], [11]: 116*f*., [12]: 78-79 & [13]: 34. For more sceptical or opposed views, cf. [14]: 171-172, [15–18]. For an up-to-date bibliography on the whole

Cf. [20]: 54n.56 on [12, 21, 22] and others who have studied the gradual transformation of poetic practices entrained by the pressures on rhapsodes to tailor their productivity and performances to the tastes of civil authorities and the general public and how this resulted in the view that Singing-Poets were 'lying' when they claimed they were emissaries of the Gods. Needless to say, we are unconcerned with poetic productivity in this 'disenchanted', post-archaic age. Also beyond the scope of this chapter, are what can be called the 'lays of men' ([3]: 17), which, in so far as they are 'non-sacral',

example of the kind of passage I refer to can be found in Plato's *Laws*.

 What encourages them to say this more than anything else is the abundance of similar sounding language in the surviving works of Alcman, Hesiod, Pindar, Theognis, Bacchylides and many others. And let us not presume that what is purported by these self-styled 'emissaries of the Muses' boils down to no more than the predictably self-serving rhetoric of an 'aedic ideology'. That would suppose that poetry and song listening publics were less convinced of the validity of the claim than the performers who made it, and until the fifth century BCE

1

Modern first-time readers

(θέσπις ἀοιδή) when sung by an 'inspired' singing-poet or *aoidos*.

Unquestionably, the main interest of this passage concerns Plato's 'conservative', not to say 'reactionary', views on the importance of music, melody and rhythm for educational purposes. But something else comes across quite distinctly in this passage which is highly relevant to early Hellenic ideas on the semiotics and semantics of the 'musical arts' like 'μουσοποιά', 'μελοποιία' and 'θεσπιῳδία'. For it would seem that the goal of the 'inspired' singing-poet was to semantically and narratologically 'bi-nature' what one heard in his 'sacred song' and do so by 'over-signifying' what it related about its subject matter in 'profane', ordinary words ('πεζός λόγος') with a second, 'hieratic' or 'hieroglossic'<sup>5</sup> meaning encoded in melodised tones and metred rhythms.

What finality was subserved by 'over-signifying' verse with this melodically and metrically encoded hieratic meaning (σημεία, αἶνος, ἔννοια)? To judge from a close reading of texts like the one above, one might assume that it was primarily 'parainetic', *i.e.*, to instil in listeners certain tradition-hallowed values, norms and aspirations and thereby federate them around community binding 'ultimate sacred postulates'. Less narrowly focused readings, however, notably those that consider the point of prefacing melic verse with a hymnic 'proem',<sup>6</sup> would assume that something more fundamental was aimed at. Namely to express or 'epi-*phon*-ise' the song's subject matter 'κατὰ τὴν τοῦ θεοῦ ἐνέργειαν', *i.e.*, to the power of the 'cosmic' agencies to which it is beholden for its Being-in-the-world. The reference to Apollo and Dionysus in the passage above credits this view in as much as these appellations are, in the final analysis, metonyms for 'starry Ouranos' and 'all-bearing Gaia' and the role these 'Ouranides' (Oὐρανίωνες) play in the 'unveiling' (ἀνακάλυψις) of the world (cf. *infra*, note 21). A point which is important to stress here because it suggests that what made melic verse the 'voice of the divine' was its ability to signify or 'mime' the role played by Ouranos and Gaia in giving to the object sung about its Being-what-it-is. And even if it is not feasible here to go into all the scholarship from Dieterich [29] to Clay [30] on early ideas about *Mutter Erde*, it should be made perfectly clear right from the outset that what will be said in the following about the 'Sacred' or the 'divine' will be devoid of the least worth or meaning if it is confused in any way, shape or degree with any posterior acceptations of these words. And by 'posterior acceptations' I do not merely mean 'monotheological' models of a 'supreme being' or any of their 'post-theological' *Aufhebungen*. Nor do I refer only to the ideal of the divine in

<sup>4</sup> *Laws*, 653c-654a. Comp. *Symposium*, 187a-e, Homer, *Il*., 1.603*f*., Hesiod, *Theogony*, 36-55, Pindar, *Pyth*., 1.1-10 & *Pyth*., 3.88-95 & – somewhat asyndetically – Theognis, 15-18.

<sup>5</sup> For what I mean by 'hieroglossia' cf. Robert [23]: 'the hierarchical relationship between two or more languages in which one is held to be the primordial idiom in the ordering of the representation of the world and the other, or others, receive the core of their meaning from the first. In other words, the value of the words of one language will be validated by their reference to another'. While Robert and I agree on this, we differ on what the expression 'primordial idiom' can mean. For unlike Robert, I do not think it must refer only to a second 'language', *e.g.*, Chinese as opposed to Japanese. It can also refer to another *medium*, *e.g*., 'music' as opposed to 'ordinary speech'.

<sup>6</sup> On the hymnic proem as a ritual 'performative utterance' whose aim was to summon various cosmopoietic agencies, cf. [24]: 6-7, [25]: 8-9, [26]: 493-94, [27]: 47-53 & [28]: 305*ff*.

'*polis* religion' in which the Sacred was '*devocavit e coelo, et in urbibus collocavit*'.<sup>7</sup> I am also, and even above all, referring to the 'astrocentric' paradigm of cosmopoiesis usually referred to as the 'harmony of the spheres'. This is a cosmopoietic ideal that emerged in the course of the fifth century BCE and differs radically from earlier cosmopoietic models in that prior to then 'life-bearing Gaia' (γαῖα ϕερέσβιος) was as much a cosmopoietic agency as Helios, Zeus or Apollo.8 In any event, all we care about in the following is the semiotics of the way 'sacred song' 'epi-*phon*-ised' the voice of the divine because the melodies and rhythms accompanying and modulating the 'mere words' in melic verse encoded intelligence about the way Ouranos and Gaia gave to the subject matter of song its Being-what-it-is.

What, then, is the semiotic rationale that is operative in the claim that melodies and rhythms literally 'lend a voice' to the 'divine'? Alternately, *how* can melody and rhythm 'mime' the powers that produces the cosmos and its content and therefore constitute a semiotic resource or 'signary' that one *must* use when it is one's intention to 'epi-phon-ise' the 'divine nature' (θεία δύναμις, θεία μοίρα) of the object of sacred song?

The first point to be addressed by raising these questions is the extreme difficulty of providing them with adequate answers. This is mainly due to a total lack of anything anyone could consider reliable, first hand evidence. In fact, all we have is a mass of tantalisingly suggestive bits and pieces which, partially revelatory though each may be in their own way, are nonetheless extremely difficult to join together in such a way as to reconstruct the Humpty-Dumpty of which they are the debris. And the challenge is made all the greater when we make allowances, as we must, for the fact that none of the terms of our heuristic can be matched to anything resembling a stable, univocal referent. This is so because we have to assume that from the Bronze Age to the end of the Archaic period, anything referred to as 'music' or 'song' (*e.g.,* 'μουσική', 'μολπή', 'μελοποιία', 'ῥαπτὰ ἔπεα' etc.) was subject to lively discussion among both theorists and practitioners, and not just as concerns their 'signifying function' in sacred song. Consequently, it would be rash to suppose that it is riskfree to speak of any of our key terms *singulare tantum*, even in a narrowly circumscribed timeframe.

To get around the hurdles this represents, we have no alternative but to resort to the same *faute de mieux*, 'cladistic' strategy resorted to by all philologists when confronted with a similar goal. In other words, we will assume that a certain logic is operative in, through and as all the evidence we have suggesting that, in some sense, the 'Immortals' really did sing forth in 'sacred song' and that this basic underlying logic is legible in varying ways and degrees in each of the bits of testimony we have. Consequently, what is required to elucidate the enigma at hand is to (a) identify the various expressions of the basic underlying logic, (b) look at what is opaque or obscure about each of them in the light of what is less opaque or obscure in other expressions of the same basic idea and, finally, (c) describe how each seem to be *membra* 

<sup>7&#</sup>x27;Wrested from the heavens, and relegated to the municipality' (Cicero, *Tusculane disputations*, V, iv, 10).

<sup>8</sup> To have a sense of this difference, consider all the celebratory references to 'life-giving Gaia' (γαῖα ϕερέσβιος, γαῖαν παμμήτειραν, αἰθέρα καὶ γαῖαν πάντων γενέτειραν) in Hesiod (*Theogony*, 693), Pherecydes (DK7B2), Aeschylus (*Persians*, 618, Fragment 44), Euripides (*Phoenicians*, 685*f., Bacchae*, 275*f*.) and *Homeric Hymn to Earth Mother of All*, then compare this with the cerebral astro-centrism of Plato's *Timaeus*, 36e, 90a, *Republic*, 529d & *Laws*, 898e as well as Aristotle's *Metaphysics*, 1072a10*ff*. & *Ethica Nicomachea*, 1177b27-34. Cf. also [28]: 179*ff*., [29], [30]: 15-26, [31] II: 251-60, [32] & *infra* note 20.

*disjecta* of one 'originary' *unitas multiplex*. To this end, I will attempt to supply what I hope will be considered uncontroversial answers to the following questions.


#### **2. The vocation of the** *aoidos* **and the finality of his art**

Readers of literature on Indo-European Comparative Poetics will know that it is common to characterise the archaic *aoidos* as his community's 'tribal encyclopaedist'.<sup>9</sup> This basically means that he was the memoriser of the survival guaranteeing lessons learned from the collective experience of his client community communicated in allegorical form via the heroic feats of the tribe's great men.10 This is true. Little else can be made of all the myths and legends that singing-poets were supposed to learn by heart and of which emblematic works like the *Iliad* are clear and eloquent testimony. But this pre-occupation was very much '*en abyme*' relative to a far greater imperative. Namely that of attempting to 'homologise' or synchronise the entire way of life of the singing-poet's community to the existence-structuring periods and cycles of its natural environment. This is why his *métier* was sometimes said to consist of practicing 'meteorology' (μετεωρολογία).11 What this means is that it was his job to 'explore happenings in the celestial Empyrion and the Earth's vasty deeps' in order to make the 'signs of the sacred' (διοσημεῖαι) dappling his tribe's *Umwelt* 'afford' intelligence about the cosmoscreating, cosmos-orchestrating agencies at work in, through and *as* the natural environment where his community dwelt.12

Why this was then considered necessary or important hardly needs explaining. In marked contrast with today, people then did not have the technological capabilities we have to lull ourselves into the false idea that nature is a minor factor in the world we dwell in and that whenever it poses us a problem we can always just 'geo-engineer' 'nature resilient' and even 'nature resistant' living spaces. To the contrary, they were convinced that life itself and the

'*polis* religion' in which the Sacred was '*devocavit e coelo, et in urbibus collocavit*'.<sup>7</sup>

and Gaia gave to the subject matter of song its Being-what-it-is.

terms *singulare tantum*, even in a narrowly circumscribed timeframe.

(θεία δύναμις, θεία μοίρα) of the object of sacred song?

Apollo.8

48 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

8

note 20.

even above all, referring to the 'astrocentric' paradigm of cosmopoiesis usually referred to as the 'harmony of the spheres'. This is a cosmopoietic ideal that emerged in the course of the fifth century BCE and differs radically from earlier cosmopoietic models in that prior to then 'life-bearing Gaia' (γαῖα ϕερέσβιος) was as much a cosmopoietic agency as Helios, Zeus or

song' 'epi-*phon*-ised' the voice of the divine because the melodies and rhythms accompanying and modulating the 'mere words' in melic verse encoded intelligence about the way Ouranos

What, then, is the semiotic rationale that is operative in the claim that melodies and rhythms literally 'lend a voice' to the 'divine'? Alternately, *how* can melody and rhythm 'mime' the powers that produces the cosmos and its content and therefore constitute a semiotic resource or 'signary' that one *must* use when it is one's intention to 'epi-phon-ise' the 'divine nature'

The first point to be addressed by raising these questions is the extreme difficulty of providing them with adequate answers. This is mainly due to a total lack of anything anyone could consider reliable, first hand evidence. In fact, all we have is a mass of tantalisingly suggestive bits and pieces which, partially revelatory though each may be in their own way, are nonetheless extremely difficult to join together in such a way as to reconstruct the Humpty-Dumpty of which they are the debris. And the challenge is made all the greater when we make allowances, as we must, for the fact that none of the terms of our heuristic can be matched to anything resembling a stable, univocal referent. This is so because we have to assume that from the Bronze Age to the end of the Archaic period, anything referred to as 'music' or 'song' (*e.g.,* 'μουσική', 'μολπή', 'μελοποιία', 'ῥαπτὰ ἔπεα' etc.) was subject to lively discussion among both theorists and practitioners, and not just as concerns their 'signifying function' in sacred song. Consequently, it would be rash to suppose that it is riskfree to speak of any of our key

To get around the hurdles this represents, we have no alternative but to resort to the same *faute de mieux*, 'cladistic' strategy resorted to by all philologists when confronted with a similar goal. In other words, we will assume that a certain logic is operative in, through and as all the evidence we have suggesting that, in some sense, the 'Immortals' really did sing forth in 'sacred song' and that this basic underlying logic is legible in varying ways and degrees in each of the bits of testimony we have. Consequently, what is required to elucidate the enigma at hand is to (a) identify the various expressions of the basic underlying logic, (b) look at what is opaque or obscure about each of them in the light of what is less opaque or obscure in other expressions of the same basic idea and, finally, (c) describe how each seem to be *membra* 

To have a sense of this difference, consider all the celebratory references to 'life-giving Gaia' (γαῖα ϕερέσβιος, γαῖαν παμμήτειραν, αἰθέρα καὶ γαῖαν πάντων γενέτειραν) in Hesiod (*Theogony*, 693), Pherecydes (DK7B2), Aeschylus (*Persians*, 618, Fragment 44), Euripides (*Phoenicians*, 685*f., Bacchae*, 275*f*.) and *Homeric Hymn to Earth Mother of All*, then compare this with the cerebral astro-centrism of Plato's *Timaeus*, 36e, 90a, *Republic*, 529d & *Laws*, 898e as well as Aristotle's *Metaphysics*, 1072a10*ff*. & *Ethica Nicomachea*, 1177b27-34. Cf. also [28]: 179*ff*., [29], [30]: 15-26, [31] II: 251-60, [32] & *infra*

7'Wrested from the heavens, and relegated to the municipality' (Cicero, *Tusculane disputations*, V, iv, 10).

In any event, all we care about in the following is the semiotics of the way 'sacred

I am also, and

<sup>9</sup> [33]: 36*ff*., [34]: 150, [35]: 189*ff*., [36], [37]: 68-84.

<sup>10</sup>[27]: 4-6, [36]: 26, [38]: 57, [39] & [40]: 193.

<sup>11</sup>[41]: 3*ff*., [42]: 414*f*., [43]: 393*ff*., [44]: 141*f*. & [45]: *passim*.

<sup>12</sup>On exploring 'τὰ περὶ τῶν οὐρανίων παθημάτων καὶ περὶ τῶν ἐν Ἅιδου', cf. Plato, *Ion*, 531c, *Theatetus*, 173e, *Republic*, 596c, Hesiod, *Theogony*, 119, 669, Pindar, *Nem*., 10.87*sq*. Sophocles, *Oedipus Tyrannus*, 300-301 as well as [34]: 154*ff*., [46]: 139-140, [47]: 130*ff*., [48]: 385*ff*., [49]: 47*ff*. & [50]: 99*ff*.

benefits of everything good it had to offer depended intimately and directly upon being as harmonised as it was possible to be to the cycles and cadences of the astro-meteoro-geological processes of which their *Lebenswelt* was a product.<sup>13</sup> But if this is clear, what is not, is the way the singing-poet distilled the 'intelligence' (εὖ εἰδώς, σύνεσις) that was needed to realise this harmonisation.

Certainly, we cannot rule out the possibility that at least some of them may have practiced geomancy and generated geognosy more or less the way Earth systems scientists do so today. In any event, we know that there existed a form of 'reasoned reflexion' (ἔμϕρονος ζήτησις) called 'omen science' (τεκμαίρεσθαι), which because it consisted of 'the discovery of nonevident truths by means of evident signs' ([55]: 240*ff*.) seems to resemble what we today call 'empirico-inductive reasoning'. Still, it would be unwise to focus too narrowly on this manner of analysing 'sacred signs' (διοσημεῖαι) to conduct *meteorologia*. Not, however, because ratiocination as 'sophisticated' as this could not be conjured out of the conceptuality and linguistic resources then available to *meterorologoi*. <sup>14</sup> Rather because the 'τεκμαίρεσθαι' just referred to was not the only way to make the *Lebenswelt* 'afford' insight into the *modus operandi* of the agencies that give it the aspect in which guise it appears to us when we notice it. For alongside this 'conjectural' or 'inductive' mode of reasoning there existed another approach to nature study and *meteorologia*, one usually referred to as 'intuitive' or 'inspirational' reasoning (ἐμπνοίησις, ἐνθουσιαστική, μαντικὴ ἔνθεος, χρησμολογία). What is more, it would appear that this alternative way of interfacing with the *Lebenswelt* and emptying it of the mysteries of its *Dasein* was considered altogether more reliable than the aforementioned reasoned reflection.<sup>15</sup>

Here I refer to the well-nigh universal belief that singing-poets and oracles were unable to vaticinate as they ought to unless they were 'out of their wits' (ἔκϕρων) or 'beside themselves' (ἔξω ἑαυτοῦ). The *locus classicus* for this *doxa* is of course the passages of Plato's *Ion* devoted to the 'theoleptic fit' rhapsodes needed to undergo to become the mouthpiece of the divine. Unfortunately, however, this dialogue divulges nothing of any use for elucidating the utility of being '*witless*' for practicing *meteorologia*, which is, again, ransacking the firmament and the Earth's vasty deeps to make them afford intelligence about the mysteries they conceal about cosmopoiesis, coming-to-be and complexity. That is why it would be better to stick to the 'aetiologies' of 'inspiration' (ἐνθουσιασμός) we find in the natural philosophies (περὶ ϕύσεως περὶ τῆς ὅλης οὐσίας) of the Pre-Socratics, especially those Armand Delatte discusses in his still valuable 1934 study entitled '*Les conceptions de l'enthousiasme chez les philosophes présocratiques*' [59].

<sup>13</sup>Cf. Hesiod, *WD*, 42, Homer, *Il*. 2.484-7, *Homeric Hymns to Demeter*, 216-217, Pindar, *Nem*., 11.44, Sermonides Fr. 1, Simonides, 527, Archilochus Fr. 130, Theognis, 133-36, 1075 & Plato, *Republic*, 274c-d. For commentary and analysis, cf. [11]: 30, [51]: 189, [52]: ch. 7 ('Fate in Sophocles'), [53]: 152-153 & [54]: 10*ff*. [52]: 164 & [53]: 149, 162 can also be profitably consulted as regards the strategies that were resorted to to reconcile 'strong program' fatalism with the exercise of a mortal agent's free will.

<sup>14</sup>Cf. [56]: 28, [48]: 321-22 & [57]: 3*ff*. who all indicate that the relative 'scientific' backwardness of the early Hellenes was due not so much to an inability to 'progress' the way we define it today as to a desire to make progress in a direction and by means that science as we understand it is useless to attain.

<sup>15</sup>This comes across distinctly in Alcmaeon of Croton, DK24A1: 'περὶ τῶν ἀϕανέων, περὶ τῶν θνητῶν σαϕήνειαν μὲν θεοὶ ἔχοντι, ὡς δ᾽ ἀνθρώποις τεκμαίρεσθαι'. For commentary cf. [58]: 19-22, [31] I: 344*ff*., [25]: 234*ff*.

## **3. Poetic 'inspiration' (ἐνθουσιασμός) and 'nature study' (μετεωρολογία)**

benefits of everything good it had to offer depended intimately and directly upon being as harmonised as it was possible to be to the cycles and cadences of the astro-meteoro-geological processes of which their *Lebenswelt* was a product.<sup>13</sup> But if this is clear, what is not, is the way the singing-poet distilled the 'intelligence' (εὖ εἰδώς, σύνεσις) that was needed to realise this

Certainly, we cannot rule out the possibility that at least some of them may have practiced geomancy and generated geognosy more or less the way Earth systems scientists do so today. In any event, we know that there existed a form of 'reasoned reflexion' (ἔμϕρονος ζήτησις) called 'omen science' (τεκμαίρεσθαι), which because it consisted of 'the discovery of nonevident truths by means of evident signs' ([55]: 240*ff*.) seems to resemble what we today call 'empirico-inductive reasoning'. Still, it would be unwise to focus too narrowly on this manner of analysing 'sacred signs' (διοσημεῖαι) to conduct *meteorologia*. Not, however, because ratiocination as 'sophisticated' as this could not be conjured out of the conceptuality and linguistic

was not the only way to make the *Lebenswelt* 'afford' insight into the *modus operandi* of the agencies that give it the aspect in which guise it appears to us when we notice it. For alongside this 'conjectural' or 'inductive' mode of reasoning there existed another approach to nature study and *meteorologia*, one usually referred to as 'intuitive' or 'inspirational' reasoning (ἐμπνοίησις, ἐνθουσιαστική, μαντικὴ ἔνθεος, χρησμολογία). What is more, it would appear that this alternative way of interfacing with the *Lebenswelt* and emptying it of the mysteries of its *Dasein* was considered altogether more reliable than the aforementioned reasoned reflection.<sup>15</sup>

Here I refer to the well-nigh universal belief that singing-poets and oracles were unable to vaticinate as they ought to unless they were 'out of their wits' (ἔκϕρων) or 'beside themselves' (ἔξω ἑαυτοῦ). The *locus classicus* for this *doxa* is of course the passages of Plato's *Ion* devoted to the 'theoleptic fit' rhapsodes needed to undergo to become the mouthpiece of the divine. Unfortunately, however, this dialogue divulges nothing of any use for elucidating the utility of being '*witless*' for practicing *meteorologia*, which is, again, ransacking the firmament and the Earth's vasty deeps to make them afford intelligence about the mysteries they conceal about cosmopoiesis, coming-to-be and complexity. That is why it would be better to stick to the 'aetiologies' of 'inspiration' (ἐνθουσιασμός) we find in the natural philosophies (περὶ ϕύσεως περὶ τῆς ὅλης οὐσίας) of the Pre-Socratics, especially those Armand Delatte discusses in his still valuable 1934 study entitled '*Les conceptions de l'enthousiasme chez les phi-*

13Cf. Hesiod, *WD*, 42, Homer, *Il*. 2.484-7, *Homeric Hymns to Demeter*, 216-217, Pindar, *Nem*., 11.44, Sermonides Fr. 1, Simonides, 527, Archilochus Fr. 130, Theognis, 133-36, 1075 & Plato, *Republic*, 274c-d. For commentary and analysis, cf. [11]: 30, [51]: 189, [52]: ch. 7 ('Fate in Sophocles'), [53]: 152-153 & [54]: 10*ff*. [52]: 164 & [53]: 149, 162 can also be profitably consulted as regards the strategies that were resorted to to reconcile 'strong program' fatalism with the exercise of a

14Cf. [56]: 28, [48]: 321-22 & [57]: 3*ff*. who all indicate that the relative 'scientific' backwardness of the early Hellenes was due not so much to an inability to 'progress' the way we define it today as to a desire to make progress in a direction and

15This comes across distinctly in Alcmaeon of Croton, DK24A1: 'περὶ τῶν ἀϕανέων, περὶ τῶν θνητῶν σαϕήνειαν μὲν

θεοὶ ἔχοντι, ὡς δ᾽ ἀνθρώποις τεκμαίρεσθαι'. For commentary cf. [58]: 19-22, [31] I: 344*ff*., [25]: 234*ff*.

<sup>14</sup> Rather because the 'τεκμαίρεσθαι' just referred to

harmonisation.

50 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

resources then available to *meterorologoi*.

*losophes présocratiques*' [59].

by means that science as we understand it is useless to attain.

mortal agent's free will.

By Delatte's reading of the pre-Socratic aetiologies of inspiration he analyses, being 'ἔκϕρων' had nothing to do with being 'delusional', a pathology which was indeed sometimes confused with 'enthusiasm' (ἐνθουσιασμός) but was nonetheless not at all the same thing.16 What it really meant is that the individual undergoing a 'theoleptic fit' or an '*orgia*' with Muses and Sirens had been liberated from the limitations placed upon anyone who interfaces with their natural environment with no more than ordinary powers of perception.<sup>17</sup> Indeed, while 'unhinged' (ἔξω ἑαυτοῦ), he specifically filters out of his apprehension of his surroundings everything that can be sensed via the perceptual channels the rest of us rely on to sense it. However, this does not mean that he thereby stops interfacing with his *Umwelt* or that while doing so he is not perceiving anything. All it means is that he is using another sort of perceptual channels to do so. Channels which allow the inspired *meteorologos* to, as it were, 'sense past' the complexity adorning the perceptible side of his *phaneron* so that he can 'clairaudiently auscultate' it and in so doing source or 'incubate' (ἐγκοιμάομαι) insight into the way this latter is given its perceptibility.18 And by using the words 'clairaudiently auscultate', I am not just allusively doffing my hat in the direction of R. Murray Schaeffer's *Tuning of the World*. I am doing so in a very literal sense and for a very specific purpose. Namely to make allowances for those 'otherworldly sounds' ('θαύματ᾽ ἀκοῦσαι', 'χθόνιαι θεαὶ αὐδήεσσαι') or strange 'rumours' ('ὀμϕαί', 'ὄσσαι', 'ὀπὶ καλῇ' etc.) that inspired oracles, prophets and *aoidoi* said they heard whilst 'witless' and were wont to impute to various divine interlocutors.

Of course, the Pre-Socratic natural philosophers were sceptical of the idea that anything like a Muse actually existed. They did not withal maintain that when 'inspired' oracles and *aoidoi* were 'beside themselves' and *claimed* that they were hearing Muses, they were not hearing anything or that they were delusional. To the contrary, they assumed that something was indeed heard. But if that be so, if these 'inspired' hearers were not lying or hallucinating, what *were* they hearing? What property of the *Umwelt* emitted the 'rumours' that only the

<sup>16</sup>For the opposition between mantic 'enthusiasm' and delirium attributed to mental illness ('μανίας ὑπὸ νοσημάτων ἀνθρωπίνων'), cf. Plato, *Phaedrus*, 244bd, 265a, *Timaeus*, 71d, *Ion*, 538a, *Republic*, 364b & *Laws*, 772d.

<sup>17</sup>This is what Plato meant in *Phaedrus* 265a in his reference to 'mania' as 'madness arising from a divine release from customary habits' (ὑπὸ θείας ἐξαλλαγῆς τῶν εἰωθότων νομίμων γιγνομένην).

<sup>18</sup>On this point, I am following Delatte's gloze of Empedocles Frr. B110, B129, B132 and Democritus Frr. B112, B116, B129 (cf. [59]: 26-27, 52-56) on the way the 'possessed sorcerer' (μαινόμενος ἔνθεος) was supposed to have engaged in commerce (ἐμπελάζειν) with the instrumental cause of possession (μαντικὸν ῥεῦμα καὶ πνεῦμα). It seems clear that this consisted of a form of what was called 'far thinking' or 'deep thinking' ('δολιχόϕρονες', 'ϕρὴν βαθεῖα', cf. Empedocles DK31B11) in which the inspired *sophoi* takes leave of normal ways of interfacing with the natural surrounding ('τὰ παρόντα') by substituting the ordinary organs of sense perception with one called the '*prapides'* (πραπίδες) which, it seems, was located, like the '*thymos'* (θυμός) and the '*phrenes'* (ϕρένες), in the midriff. Evidently it was the ability of the inspired *sophoi* to 'stretch' (ὀρέγεσθαι) the powers of perception peculiar to this organ past the perceptible surface of 'τὰ παρόντα' and into their normally imperceptible interiors (βυθοί) which allowed him or her to become 'ἄτμος ἔνθεος' or 'ἐμπιμπλαμένη τοῦ πνεύματος', *i.e.*, capable of divining the cosmopoietic dynamic at work inside the observed object and which deposits it into its outward manifestation.

'inspired' *meteorologos* could apprehend and that needed to be 'tuned in to' to practice geomancy and distil geognosy? The fact that a great variety of appellatives and epithets were used to refer to it ('μαντικὸν ῥεῦμα καὶ πνεῦμα', 'πῦρ ἀείζωον', 'κεραυνός', etc.) would suggest that it is unwise to refer to the source of these 'otherworldly sounds' with a single, univocal term. It is nonetheless without hesitation that I follow Delatte in privileging the appellative 'ἀναθυμιάσεις', a word usually translated as 'exhalations'. To have a sense of the way these 'exhalations' were essential to cosmopoiesis—and therefore to using melodies and metre to 'score' it in 'θέσπις ἀοιδή'—a reminder of early ideas on cosmogony and ontogenesis cannot be avoided.

## **4. The mechanics of cosmopoiesis and the 'unveiling' (ἀνακάλυψις) of the world**

Given the scholarly firepower marshalled behind the view that '*eine Kosmos-'Idee' ist dem frühgriechischen Denken fremd*',19 there is little chance that anything one could say on this matter will not be controversial. It is nevertheless enough for our purposes merely to develop the point we made above about the 'divinity' of the Sky and the Earth.20 Though it is well known that the latter enjoyed this status because, in mythopoeic thought, the 'unveiling' (ἀνακάλυψις) of the cosmos was considered to be the fruit of their union or 'hierogamy',21 it is less well known that these cosmocrators or 'ἀρκτικαὶ αἰτίαι' did not interact with one another directly. They did so via the energies they precipitate at each other, notably in the form of those we call hot and cold, dry and wet, high and low pressure, etc. [41–45]. What is more, these energies were useless for cosmopoiesis unless they encountered each other in the midst of a pre-cosmic, immaculately quality-free medium usually referred to as 'aether' (αἰθήρ) or 'the impossible-to-experience' (τὸ ἄπειρον) or 'the self-natured' (τὸ αὐτοϕυής) or simply 'the void' (χάσμα μέγ').22 This is so because it was only where and when the energies radiating from the Sky and the Earth meet and blend in this undifferentiated milieu that this latter gets 'agitated', 'fretted', 'tempered' (πληγή) or 'concocted' (πέσσεσθαι) until

<sup>19&#</sup>x27;A single '*kosmos*-idea' is foreign to early Greek thought', [60]: 60, [34]: 150*ff*., [61]: 205 & [62]: 417*ff*.

<sup>20</sup>For evidence of nature worship in earlier times, cf. Democritus, DK68A75, Prodicos of Ceos, DK84B5, Aristophanes, *Peace*, 406*ff*., Plato, *Apology*, 26d, *Cratylus*, 397cd, 408de, *Laws*, 715e-716b, 886a, 821b, 899b, 950d, *Epinomis*, 985b, 988b, Aristotle, *Metaphysics*, 1074b 1-14, *De Caelo*., 284a 2-18 & Fragment 10. See also [63]: 446-7, [4]: 116, [64]: 170-71, 177-8, [47]: 23, 131, [65]: 14-15, nn.27-29, [66, 67]: 165 & [68]: 102*ff*.

<sup>21</sup>Cf. *Derveni Papyrus*, cols. 14-15, Pherecydes of Syros, DK7B2, Aeschylus, Fr. 44, 1-5, Pindar's Fragment 31 (=Aelius Aristides, 2.142) and Alcman's cosmogony as per [5, 69]: 134-35 & [70]: 5*ff*. Cf. also [41]: 28*ff*., [64]: 63, [71]: 82*ff*., [72]: 256-7, 389*ff*. & [67]: 165. Cf. [73]: 419*ff*. on the way this basic cosmopoietic model is obscured in much of the relevant evidence by the 'diachronic skewing' that resulted from attempts to reconcile or overlook tensions within the tradition of Archaic metapoetics.

<sup>22</sup>Cf. [13]: 22 & [70]: 5-6 on the use of 'αὐτοϕυής' as a 'conventional' way of referring to an initial, 'pre-cosmic stuff' or 'πρώτη ϕύσις πρὸ τῆς οὐρανοῦ γενέσεως'. To this epithet, and to others like it (*e.g*., χάος, νύξ, τι μεταξὺ, χώρα), applies the predicates Theophrastus used to describe Anaximander's 'Boundless', namely 'something whose nature is definable neither qualitatively nor quantitatively' (ϕύσις ἀόριστος καὶ κατ' εἶδος καὶ κατὰ μέγεθος). Cf. also [74]: 1171-1183 & [30]: 15*f*.

it yields 'complexions' (συμπεπλεγμένα) and 'complexity' (σύμπλεξις).23 And not just the 'complexity' we today would identify as the naturally occurring meteorological phenomena that decorate our natural surroundings. For the proverbial 'unveiling' that Helios gave Gaia to make her 'presentable', he also gives to each of all-bearing Gaia's 'offspring' (τέκνα)24 so that they too are unveiled.

'inspired' *meteorologos* could apprehend and that needed to be 'tuned in to' to practice geomancy and distil geognosy? The fact that a great variety of appellatives and epithets were used to refer to it ('μαντικὸν ῥεῦμα καὶ πνεῦμα', 'πῦρ ἀείζωον', 'κεραυνός', etc.) would suggest that it is unwise to refer to the source of these 'otherworldly sounds' with a single, univocal term. It is nonetheless without hesitation that I follow Delatte in privileging the appellative 'ἀναθυμιάσεις', a word usually translated as 'exhalations'. To have a sense of the way these 'exhalations' were essential to cosmopoiesis—and therefore to using melodies and metre to 'score' it in 'θέσπις ἀοιδή'—a reminder of early ideas on cosmogony and ontogen-

**4. The mechanics of cosmopoiesis and the 'unveiling' (ἀνακάλυψις) of** 

Given the scholarly firepower marshalled behind the view that '*eine Kosmos-'Idee' ist dem frühgriechischen Denken fremd*',19 there is little chance that anything one could say on this matter will not be controversial. It is nevertheless enough for our purposes merely to develop the point we made above about the 'divinity' of the Sky and the Earth.20 Though it is well known that the latter enjoyed this status because, in mythopoeic thought, the 'unveiling' (ἀνακάλυψις) of the cosmos was considered to be the fruit of their union or 'hierogamy',21 it is less well known that these cosmocrators or 'ἀρκτικαὶ αἰτίαι' did not interact with one another directly. They did so via the energies they precipitate at each other, notably in the form of those we call hot and cold, dry and wet, high and low pressure, etc. [41–45]. What is more, these energies were useless for cosmopoiesis unless they encountered each other in the midst of a pre-cosmic, immaculately quality-free medium usually referred to as 'aether' (αἰθήρ) or 'the impossible-to-experience' (τὸ ἄπειρον) or 'the self-natured' (τὸ αὐτοϕυής) or simply 'the void' (χάσμα μέγ').22 This is so because it was only where and when the energies radiating from the Sky and the Earth meet and blend in this undifferentiated milieu that this latter gets 'agitated', 'fretted', 'tempered' (πληγή) or 'concocted' (πέσσεσθαι) until

19'A single '*kosmos*-idea' is foreign to early Greek thought', [60]: 60, [34]: 150*ff*., [61]: 205 & [62]: 417*ff*.

23, 131, [65]: 14-15, nn.27-29, [66, 67]: 165 & [68]: 102*ff*.

20For evidence of nature worship in earlier times, cf. Democritus, DK68A75, Prodicos of Ceos, DK84B5, Aristophanes, *Peace*, 406*ff*., Plato, *Apology*, 26d, *Cratylus*, 397cd, 408de, *Laws*, 715e-716b, 886a, 821b, 899b, 950d, *Epinomis*, 985b, 988b, Aristotle, *Metaphysics*, 1074b 1-14, *De Caelo*., 284a 2-18 & Fragment 10. See also [63]: 446-7, [4]: 116, [64]: 170-71, 177-8, [47]:

21Cf. *Derveni Papyrus*, cols. 14-15, Pherecydes of Syros, DK7B2, Aeschylus, Fr. 44, 1-5, Pindar's Fragment 31 (=Aelius Aristides, 2.142) and Alcman's cosmogony as per [5, 69]: 134-35 & [70]: 5*ff*. Cf. also [41]: 28*ff*., [64]: 63, [71]: 82*ff*., [72]: 256-7, 389*ff*. & [67]: 165. Cf. [73]: 419*ff*. on the way this basic cosmopoietic model is obscured in much of the relevant evidence by the 'diachronic skewing' that resulted from attempts to reconcile or overlook tensions within the tradition of Archaic

22Cf. [13]: 22 & [70]: 5-6 on the use of 'αὐτοϕυής' as a 'conventional' way of referring to an initial, 'pre-cosmic stuff' or 'πρώτη ϕύσις πρὸ τῆς οὐρανοῦ γενέσεως'. To this epithet, and to others like it (*e.g*., χάος, νύξ, τι μεταξὺ, χώρα), applies the predicates Theophrastus used to describe Anaximander's 'Boundless', namely 'something whose nature is definable neither qualitatively nor quantitatively' (ϕύσις ἀόριστος καὶ κατ' εἶδος καὶ κατὰ μέγεθος). Cf. also [74]:

esis cannot be avoided.

52 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

**the world**

metapoetics.

1171-1183 & [30]: 15*f*.

Naturally, and importantly, these *doxai* about cosmogony and ontogenesis entailed key epistemological corollaries, notably regarding what counted as 'genuine knowledge' (γνησίη γνώμη) about the 'true nature' of what one encounters in one's average, everyday Being-in-the-world. Knowledge like this was believed to be unobtainable just by observing things with the normal means of perception or by extrapolating 'polymathically' from data furnished in this way. One has 'γνησίη γνώμη' when one knows the way cosmopoietic agencies *give* phenomena the 'complexions' in which guise they are perceived,25 and to attain that knowledge, one has to be capable of 'δολιχόϕρονες' or 'ϕρὴν βαθεῖα'. This means that one needs to apprehend what one perceives from the perspective of what is going on in the 'abyss' (βυθός) which is dissimulated by the perception's outward manifestation.26 This is so because it is only there that one can ascertain the 'blends' of Sky and Earth energies that give phenomena their 'complexion'.

Now all this is relevant to the aforementioned 'exhalations' because, in the final analysis, they are the 'instrumental cause' of the complexity-synthesising process going on in these 'depths' and therefore what *meteorologoi* needed to study to know what deposits complexity on to the natural environment's outward appearance.27 And, in turn, this is relevant to the divinatory techniques utilised in *meteorologia* and 'wonder study' (τερατοσκοπία) because the reason their practitioners entered a 'theoleptic fit' was to 'auscultate' the perceived environment in

<sup>23</sup>Knowledgeable readers will know that the use of variants of 'σύμπλεξις' to translate 'complexity' and the 'complexions' of various perceptibles (μετ' αἰσθήσεως ὄντα) is an Aristotelian choice of word. This I believe is legitimate given that what Aristotle expresses with this sort of terminology is essentially identical to what his predecessors say using other words. A case in point is Columns 14-15 of *The Derveni Papyrus*. Here we find a reference to the birth of Chronos as a by-product of the way Sky and Earth 'smite against each other' (κρούεσθαι πρὸς ἄλληλα). But in the same columns, it is perfectly clear that *everything* is 'born from the sun to the earth because of the way they smite each other'. Similar imagery can be found in numerous other sources, for example, the 'unveiling' (ἀνακάλυψις) of Gaia that Pherecydes describes in DK7B2, the 'impregnation' of 'Chthona' in Aeschylus Fr. 44, 1-5 and Alcman's cosmogony as per [5, 69]: 134-135 & [70]: 5*ff*. Hence, we do not betray the ideas of earlier cosmologists simply by privileging an Aristotelian choice of words.

<sup>24</sup>Aeschylus, *Persians*, 619, Pherecydes, DK7B2 & Philolaus, DK44B1 & B2. Cf. also [75]: 212-213.

<sup>25</sup>Though not easy to discern on a hasty reading, this is what Empedocles DK31B3 is at pains to make clear. For what it says is that we should not trouble over whether one kind of perception is superior to all the others. All that matters is apprehending how *all* perceptible phenomena are manifest 'in *the way by which* each is manifest' (ᾗ δῆλον ἕκαστον). The same point is made in Heraclitus DK22B17.

<sup>26</sup>This is what Anaxagoras refers to in his famed aphorism 'phenomena are the perception of the unperceivable' (ὄψις γὰρ τῶν ἀδήλων τὰ ϕαινόμενα) (Anaxagoras, DK59B21a). Comp. Leucippus, DK67A9, Democritus, DK 68B9, B11, B117 & Heraclitus DK22B54 & B123.

<sup>27</sup>Particularly useful on this point are the studies on Aristotle's *Meteorologica* by [43, 45] who make it clear that Aristotle's goal in this work was to match descriptions of observable, naturally occurring meteorological phenomena with an account of the way exhalations should behave if they are the efficient causes of the described phenomena. Hence what we observe as comets, auroras, lightening, thunder, wind, rain and seismic activity are really just the outward appearance of exhalations undergoing cooling or heating, desiccating or liquefying, compression or rarefication as they rise or descend between a supreme above and a supreme below.

order to apprehend the 'amazing sounds' made by 'exhalations' as they circulate to and fro (ἄνοδος καὶ κάθοδος) across a vast ethereal gulf in order to 'cook' pre-cosmic aether in to complexions, complexity and cosmos.28 Without an ability to do that, the pretention that *meteorologia* was of any use or importance to anyone was vain for the whole point and sole worth of the exercise was to discern the cosmos-orchestrating powers at work in, through and as the natural environment so that ancient listeners could harmonise themselves thereto.

So much then for our summary reminder of the cosmology, ontology and epistemology that counted for folks in archaic 'Song culture' and subtended their belief that when the 'inspired' *aoidos* intoned 'sacred song', the very voice of the divine itself rang out. The question now becomes one of establishing how the insight gained by this more-than-normal, 'clairaudient' mode of interfacing with the *Umwelt* passes *from* something only the 'inspired' *meteorologos* can sense *to* something he relates in verse and that his audience understood.

## **5. Encoding cosmopoiesis and making it intelligible**

This is critical. The 'amazing sounds' that 'inspired' *meteorologoi* heard whilst in the throes of a theoleptic trance were heard by no one else. What is more, the 'signs' (σημεία) that came out of their mouths when 'vaticinating under the urging of divine guidance' (θείῃ πομπῇ χρεώμενος) were, if not necessarily pure gibberish, nonetheless never more than 'latently meaningful' (οὐ συνετὰ συνετῶς).29 Hence, the 'intelligence' (εὖ εἰδώς, ἐννέπειν) *meteorologoi* learned from the Muses while on their katabatic 'divine pilgrimage'30 could not be of the least relevance to the 'non-inspired' members of their community, much less the foundation for their entire 'encyclopaedia', unless it was somehow made 'legible' (σύνετος, ἐνδεικτικός) to them.31 So, again, how did target audiences access and decode what the singing *aoidos* had to say when he wanted to relate to others what Sirens and Muses had related to him?

Before offering a response to that question, it should be made clear that the 'melic verse' composed and performed by an inspired *aoidos* was not the only medium in which one could 'mime' sacred referents and in so doing transmit 'hieroglossic' meaning (σημεία). To be convinced of that, one has only to read what Koller and Kowalzig say about Hellenic dance, Hegel and Heidegger about Hellenic architecture, Vernant and Burkert about Hellenic statuary and Gentili and Gadamer about *all* the arts. In addition, even if 'melic' verse was the main 'delivery system', we cannot assume withal that the 'unmarked', 'ordinary speech' in verse ('γυμνὸς λόγος', 'πεζὸς λόγος') could not be used to 'epi-phon-ise' hieratic meaning in the absence of melodies and rhythms. Proof enough of this can be found in the fact that we do indeed know about early ideas on cosmogony in the surviving works of Homer, Hesiod and Alcman, all of it communicated through words bereft of any detectable musical accompaniment. Still, this 'unmarked'

<sup>28</sup>Despite the evident misgivings of the dialogue's author, we see a good description of this process in *Cratylus* 412d-413c. 29It is in this sense that we must understand passages on the semantics of 'oracular utterance' or 'λέγεις ὡς ἐν ἐκστάσει ἀποϕοιβώμενος' like the ones we find in Euripides, *Iphigenia in Aulis*, 466, Herodotus, 2.57 and Heraclitus DK22B93 on which cf. [25]: 234-238.

<sup>30</sup>On this 'θείων θεωριῶν', cf. [49]: 47*ff*., [48]: 385-389, [50]: 99*ff*. & *supra* note 12.

<sup>31</sup>From Sappho Fr. 16, Theognis 769-772 and Herodotus 2.57, we know that inspired performers were well aware of the need to satisfy this expectation.

way of communicating cosmopoietic information was less important than the 'marked' features of verse from which the former is distinguished. And by 'marked features of verse', I am not referring to 'allegory' and other 'metaphorical' uses of language which 'hint at' (δι' αἰνιγμῶν εἰρῆται) a gnomically-charged 'under-thought' (ὑπόνοια). I am referring instead to the *melodised tones* and *metred rhythms* which accompanied and modulated the 'naked words' (γυμνὸς λόγος) in melic verse and which in so doing 'over-signified' the latter by 'bi-naturing' (διϕύεται) what it should be taken to mean because it was thanks to these melodies and rhythms that the hearers were apprised of the cosmopoietic dynamics (θεία δύναμις) that gave to the song's subject matter its time, place, nature, character, destiny and Being-in-the-world.

But how can melodies and rhythms 'mime' the cosmopoietic dynamics that produces the cosmos and its content and therefore constitute an 'apophantic' resource one *must* utilise when it is one's intention to 'epi-phon-ise' one's objects to the power of what gave them their Being-inthe-world? This brings us back to the semiotic question of the property of melic verse which was supposed to count as the very voice of the divine itself. It also invites us to explain how this property assured some sort of 'co-naturality' (συγγένεια) between signs and signifieds. For in the place and at the time that interests us, in 'Song culture', it was axiomatic that signs were meaningless unless they were consubstantial with their denotata. Obviously such a link or 'co-naturation' could not work or seem to work without the help of something which was common *both* to the 'nature' of the signified cosmopoietic dynamics *and* to whatever property of heard verse was supposed to count as its substance made 'sacred song'. What, then, was the mediating *tertium quid* which assured this 'co-naturality' between signifying melodies and rhythms,32 on the one hand, and on the other, their 'divine' signified?

## **6. 'Scoring' com-***plex***-ity**

order to apprehend the 'amazing sounds' made by 'exhalations' as they circulate to and fro (ἄνοδος καὶ κάθοδος) across a vast ethereal gulf in order to 'cook' pre-cosmic aether in to complexions, complexity and cosmos.28 Without an ability to do that, the pretention that *meteorologia* was of any use or importance to anyone was vain for the whole point and sole worth of the exercise was to discern the cosmos-orchestrating powers at work in, through and as the

So much then for our summary reminder of the cosmology, ontology and epistemology that counted for folks in archaic 'Song culture' and subtended their belief that when the 'inspired' *aoidos* intoned 'sacred song', the very voice of the divine itself rang out. The question now becomes one of establishing how the insight gained by this more-than-normal, 'clairaudient' mode of interfacing with the *Umwelt* passes *from* something only the 'inspired' *meteorologos*

This is critical. The 'amazing sounds' that 'inspired' *meteorologoi* heard whilst in the throes of a theoleptic trance were heard by no one else. What is more, the 'signs' (σημεία) that came out of their mouths when 'vaticinating under the urging of divine guidance' (θείῃ πομπῇ χρεώμενος) were, if not necessarily pure gibberish, nonetheless never more than 'latently meaningful' (οὐ συνετὰ συνετῶς).29 Hence, the 'intelligence' (εὖ εἰδώς, ἐννέπειν) *meteorologoi* learned from the Muses while on their katabatic 'divine pilgrimage'30 could not be of the least relevance to the 'non-inspired' members of their community, much less the foundation for their entire 'encyclopaedia', unless it was somehow made 'legible' (σύνετος, ἐνδεικτικός) to them.31 So, again, how did target audiences access and decode what the singing *aoidos* had

to say when he wanted to relate to others what Sirens and Muses had related to him?

Before offering a response to that question, it should be made clear that the 'melic verse' composed and performed by an inspired *aoidos* was not the only medium in which one could 'mime' sacred referents and in so doing transmit 'hieroglossic' meaning (σημεία). To be convinced of that, one has only to read what Koller and Kowalzig say about Hellenic dance, Hegel and Heidegger about Hellenic architecture, Vernant and Burkert about Hellenic statuary and Gentili and Gadamer about *all* the arts. In addition, even if 'melic' verse was the main 'delivery system', we cannot assume withal that the 'unmarked', 'ordinary speech' in verse ('γυμνὸς λόγος', 'πεζὸς λόγος') could not be used to 'epi-phon-ise' hieratic meaning in the absence of melodies and rhythms. Proof enough of this can be found in the fact that we do indeed know about early ideas on cosmogony in the surviving works of Homer, Hesiod and Alcman, all of it communicated through words bereft of any detectable musical accompaniment. Still, this 'unmarked'

28Despite the evident misgivings of the dialogue's author, we see a good description of this process in *Cratylus* 412d-413c. 29It is in this sense that we must understand passages on the semantics of 'oracular utterance' or 'λέγεις ὡς ἐν ἐκστάσει ἀποϕοιβώμενος' like the ones we find in Euripides, *Iphigenia in Aulis*, 466, Herodotus, 2.57 and Heraclitus DK22B93 on

31From Sappho Fr. 16, Theognis 769-772 and Herodotus 2.57, we know that inspired performers were well aware of the

30On this 'θείων θεωριῶν', cf. [49]: 47*ff*., [48]: 385-389, [50]: 99*ff*. & *supra* note 12.

which cf. [25]: 234-238.

need to satisfy this expectation.

natural environment so that ancient listeners could harmonise themselves thereto.

can sense *to* something he relates in verse and that his audience understood.

**5. Encoding cosmopoiesis and making it intelligible**

54 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

Because of the disparate, ambiguous and inconsistent tenor of the evidence, it is certain that anything one will say about what this *tertium quid* could be or consist of will encounter reserves, objections and reprimands. Still, to judge from the bulk of the extant evidence, it seems certain that when inspired *aoidoi* wanted to 'score' cosmopoiesis they began by attributing a *numerical value* to the attributes (πάθη, διαϕοραί, ἕξεις) of the beings it created. More precisely, each of the ever-varying com-*plex*-ions (συμπεπλεγμένα) exhibited by various states of Sun and Earth roasted aether were distinguished from one another—and from the imperceptible aether whence they issue—by receiving 'ratios' (λόγοι) which *quantitatively define* the blend (κρᾶσις) of cosmopoietic principles (ἀρχαί) whose mixture accounts for the way each complexion appears to us when observed. For, again, this is all that com-*plex*-ity was considered to be, a blend of the energy of the Sun and of the Earth which together 'concoct' pre-complexed, diaphanous aether into the perceptibles (μετ' αἰσθήσεως ὄντα) populating our sensoria.

Why was this way of quantifying the energies that produce the cosmos relevant to melic verse and its use as a way to 'epi-phon-ise' the divine? Quite simply because the 'numeri-

<sup>32</sup>For space reasons, we cannot look at the use of metered rhythms to 'epi-phonise' the sacred, which, in any event, has been thoroughly and expertly presented in Georgiades [76].

cal signature' of the blend of Sky and Earth energies that created the song's subject matter was replicated in the 'arithmology'33 used to structure the melodised tones (μέλος) and metred rhythms (ῥυθμός) modulating 'sacred song'. As a result, this latter was transformed into a 'phonic replica' (ἀγάλμα ϕωνή) of the cosmopoietic dynamic that gave to the song's denotatum its com-plex-ion. Though some of the details of the method used are to a certain extent discernible in the fragments of Anaximander, Heraclitus, Empedocles and other pre-Socratic natural philosophers,34 it is better to explain all this in relation to the 'arithmology' of Philolaus of Croton. Not because the historical Philolaus himself provides us with a clearer use of arithmology and its utility for descriptive phenomenology than his peers. The paucity of direct, attested, reliable information about his views makes this impossible. On the other hand, there are sure signs that Philolaus' use of arithmology in his cosmology and phenomenology was the basis for Aristotle's more complete and detailed theorising about phenomenology (περὶ αἰσθήσεως καὶ αἰσθητῶν).35 Hence, to illustrate the way the *aoidoi* of yore 'scored' complexity, and therefore the 'coming-to-be' that powered it, our approach will be the following:


What then is there to say about Aristotle's phenomenology and the role played by arithmology in it which helps us on this question?

## **7. On the 'arithmology' of Aristotle's** *De Sensu* **- and its Philolaic Palimpsest**

Mercifully because all that interests us about Aristotle's περὶ αἰσθήσεως or 'descriptive phenomenology' is the insight it offers into archaic methods for scoring cosmopoiesis, we are spared the hazardous task of involving ourselves in certain controversies about what his

<sup>33</sup>Though I will use this term throughout in the rather general way that Delatte [77] & Burkert [78] use it, I recognise that Zhmud [79] is right to think it is better to use 'number symbolism' to identify what the former refer to and reserve the qualifier 'arithmology' for the pseudo-science inaugurated by Speusippus.

<sup>34</sup>*Inter alia*, cf. [78]: 417 on Anaximander and for the others, cf. [80]: 126-127, 137-138 (Heraclitus), 196, 217 (Empedocles), 201 (Parmenides) & 209-10 (Anaxagoras).

<sup>35</sup>Cf. [81]: 263 on the view shared by Burkert [78] & Huffman [82] that Aristotle is a relatively reliable source as concerns Philolaus. Cf. also [83]: 84.

theorising on the matter actually consisted of.36 For the same reason, we are unconcerned with the details of the way Aristotle's phenomenological discourse pertains to his views on imagination, cognition and the way the *sensus communis* correlates sensory data from a plurality of sense organs to form a unified idea of what the percipient is perceiving. Indeed, for our very specific purposes it is enough to identify and comment on the main stages involved in the way Aristotle's phenomenology defines 'simple sensations' (ἁπλᾶ αἰσθητά) when they are apprehended 'accurately' (ὅταν ἐνεργῶμεν ἀκριβῶς περὶ τὸ αἰσθητόν, *De Anima*, 428a13).

cal signature' of the blend of Sky and Earth energies that created the song's subject matter was replicated in the 'arithmology'33 used to structure the melodised tones (μέλος) and metred rhythms (ῥυθμός) modulating 'sacred song'. As a result, this latter was transformed into a 'phonic replica' (ἀγάλμα ϕωνή) of the cosmopoietic dynamic that gave to the song's denotatum its com-plex-ion. Though some of the details of the method used are to a certain extent discernible in the fragments of Anaximander, Heraclitus, Empedocles and other pre-Socratic natural philosophers,34 it is better to explain all this in relation to the 'arithmology' of Philolaus of Croton. Not because the historical Philolaus himself provides us with a clearer use of arithmology and its utility for descriptive phenomenology than his peers. The paucity of direct, attested, reliable information about his views makes this impossible. On the other hand, there are sure signs that Philolaus' use of arithmology in his cosmology and phenomenology was the basis for Aristotle's more complete and detailed theorising about phenomenology (περὶ αἰσθήσεως καὶ αἰσθητῶν).35 Hence, to illustrate the way the *aoidoi* of yore 'scored' complexity, and therefore the 'coming-to-be' that powered it, our approach

**1.** First we will summarise Aristotle's phenomenology and, after that,

**2.** Identify in it what can only be an Aristotelian use of arithmology then,

**3.** In what remains, identify what can only be a genuinely Philolean use of arithmology to

**4.** Justify the assumption that Philolaus' use of arithmology to score com-*plex*-ity offers insight into the way versecraft was practiced in earlier times because some variant of his arithmology was used as a 'template' for composing the 'music' which accompanied melic verse so that, thanks to this accompaniment, the latter was believed to contain the voice of

What then is there to say about Aristotle's phenomenology and the role played by arithmol-

Mercifully because all that interests us about Aristotle's περὶ αἰσθήσεως or 'descriptive phenomenology' is the insight it offers into archaic methods for scoring cosmopoiesis, we are spared the hazardous task of involving ourselves in certain controversies about what his

33Though I will use this term throughout in the rather general way that Delatte [77] & Burkert [78] use it, I recognise that Zhmud [79] is right to think it is better to use 'number symbolism' to identify what the former refer to and reserve the

<sup>34</sup>*Inter alia*, cf. [78]: 417 on Anaximander and for the others, cf. [80]: 126-127, 137-138 (Heraclitus), 196, 217 (Empedocles),

35Cf. [81]: 263 on the view shared by Burkert [78] & Huffman [82] that Aristotle is a relatively reliable source as concerns

**7. On the 'arithmology' of Aristotle's** *De Sensu* **- and its Philolaic** 

will be the following:

56 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

the divine.

**Palimpsest**

score complexity and, finally,

ogy in it which helps us on this question?

201 (Parmenides) & 209-10 (Anaxagoras).

Philolaus. Cf. also [83]: 84.

qualifier 'arithmology' for the pseudo-science inaugurated by Speusippus.

In its simplest form, one could define the first stage of the process thus: one starts by dividing the realm of the sensible into five 'families of sensibles' (τὰ ὑπὸ τὴν αὐτὴν αἴσθησιν), *i.e.,* seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting (*De Anima*, III, i). After that, the challenge is to define the *full range* of each 'family of sensibles'. This is done by establishing a *maximal and minimal intensity of sensory stimulus* above or below which a normally functioning organ of sense either senses nothing because of the exiguity of the stimulus or is destroyed by the excessive intensity of the stimulus.<sup>37</sup> Between these two 'extremes' (ἄκρα, ἔσχατα, ἀντικείμενα), one finds all the 'com-*plex*-ions' (συμπε-*πλεγ*-μένα) it is possible to synthesise by blending the two qualitative 'extreme opposites' (μεγίστη διαϕορά, τελεία διαϕέροντα) at the top and bottom of the scale in differing 'proportions' or 'ratios' (λόγοι τῶν ἄκρων).38 Hence, in the family of sensibles defined by the extreme opposites called brightness or darkness, a blend of the extremes in which brilliant white is superior to pitch black by a ratio of three parts to two will result in a shade of pale grey whose 'λόγος τῶν ἄκρων' is 3:2.

Once the full range of possible 'simple sensations' (ἁπλᾶ αἰσθητά) has been established in this way for each family of sensibles, it then becomes necessary to *systematically differentiate* the *varieties* of complexions arrayed between these two 'qualitative opposites'. More precisely, the task is to identify a variety of complexions Aristotle calls 'εἴδη πεπερασμένα' or 'definite forms of sensation'. There are two reasons why it is important to limit the different families of sensibles to a finite number of 'definite forms'. The first concerns the fact that the interval between the extremes delimiting each genre of sensible is a *continuum* (συνεχές) comprising *all* the different complexions a given class of sensibles can produce as 'blends', in varying proportions, of its delimiting extremes. However, because this continuum can be divided into an *infinite* number of ratios, using the latter to represent different complexions is of little use for distinguishing between perceptible forms *which are appreciably different from one another* unless the continuum in which these forms are seried is 'discretised' (τέμνεται) into a *finite* number of 'intervals' (διαστήματα) covering segments of the continuum which are neither too small nor too large to isolate a *single*, *self-same* 'simple sensation' (ἁπλᾶ αἰσθητόν) *noticeably* unlike any other in the continuum (*De Sensu*, 445b27-446a21).

<sup>36</sup>This is particularly to be appreciated as concerns the long-running 'literalism-spiritualism debate' pitting Richard Sorabji's 'physiological' reading of Aristotle's theory of perception against Myles Burnyeat's 'formalist' reading. For a summary of the positions and the issues, cf. [84]: 328-30. Proof that this debate was never more than a side-show is the fact that most recent studies on Aristotle's phenomenology have gone back to David Ross's simple, succinct, clear and undoubtedly correct analysis. Cf. [85] and [86] and then compare with [87]: 143-145.

<sup>37</sup>For a succinct and elegance summary, cf. [87]: 143 on *De Anima*, 424a2-10, 26-b1, 426a27-b8, 429a29-b3, 435a21.

<sup>38</sup>For the idea that any given sensation is a com-*plex*-ion (συμπε-*πλεγ*-μένον) generated as a mixture of the two 'extremes' (ἀντικείμενα, ἔσχατα) which embrace or enclose the family of sensibles the given sensation belongs to, cf. *De Sensu*, 445b24-27, 447b1, 448a10 as well as *De Anima*, 407b32, *Physics*, I, v-vii, *De Gen. et Corr*., 324a5-9, 329a25*ff*. & *Metaphysiscs*, 1067a7, 1069b2-8. For the way these "μεγίστη διαφορά" are distinguished as either 'penetrative' (διακριτικός) or 'compressive' (συγκριτικός), cf. *Metaphysics*, 1057b8-34, *De Sensu*, 439b26-27, 440b18-21, 442a14.

To illustrate how this works in practice, consider the following illustration: everything contained in the continuum delimited by the extremes, we today would call ultraviolet and infrared belong to the family of sensibles called colours. But to identify the segment of the continuum corresponding to the colour yellow, it has to be distinguished both from the hues higher up on the spectrum that are more green than yellow and from the hues lower down on the spectrum that are less yellow than orange. Until that happens, until the chromatic form called yellow is isolated from the chromatic forms on the scale other than yellow, it is not possible to use a ratio to identify the interval on the scale which is yellow and nothing else besides. Hence, the first reason for limiting families of sensibles to a finite number of 'definite forms' was to be sure that ratios are useful for descriptive phenomenology because they stand for intervals of a 'qualitative continuum' corresponding to perceptible forms (εἴδη) which are *sui generis* because they are *perceptibly* different from all the other perceptibles belonging to the same qualitative continuum.

The second reason why these continua of sensibles need to be divided into a finite number of 'definite forms' (εἴδη πεπερασμένα) might seem to a hasty reading to concern essentially aesthetic considerations. In reality, however, it is about a great deal more, namely to have at one's disposal *a means to systematically and methodically define and organise the entire universe of sensibles according to a single template*. To see why it is fair to say this, we only need to look at the way Aristotle distinguishes between perceptible forms which are 'defined' (πεπερασμένα) and those which are not with the help of the arithmological distinction he makes between ratios he qualifies as 'definite', 'well-ordered' or 'rational' (ἐν ἀριθμοῖς εὐλογίστοις, τεταγμένος, κατὰ λόγον) and opposing them ratios he describes as 'undefined', 'disordered' and 'irrational' (κατ' ἀορίστως, ἀτάκτος, ὅλως oὐκ ἐν λόγῳ, *De Sensu*, 439b29-440a15, 440b20-21, 442a16). What makes the former category of ratios 'rational' and 'pure' (καθαραί) is quite simply the fact that they replicate the ratios of the concords of the heptapartite 'diatonic' pitch scale.39 In other words, no ratio not expressible in the proportions 1:2, 2:3 or 3:4 can be considered anything but 'irrational' and 'impure'.

Not surprisingly, this manner of discriminating among 'rational' and 'irrational' or 'pure' and 'impure' ratios has implications for discriminating among 'pure' and 'impure' *phenomena* in that *no* simple perception (ἁπλᾶ αἰσθητόν) in *any* class of sensibles can be considered 'pure' or 'rational' unless the mixture of contrary qualities they are synthesised out of can be expressed as one or another of the ratios of the heptatonic pitch scale. And just as the 'pure' tones of the heptatonic pitch scale are said to yield 'concords' (συμϕωνίαι) which are 'attractive' or 'pleasant' (ἥδιστα, ἡδονή), perceptions of forms in classes of sensibles *other than sound* too are 'attractive' when the ratios of their constituent blends of contraries replicate those of the pure concords of the heptatonic pitch scale. Hence, Aristotle's descriptive phenomenology consists of distinguishing 'pure', 'regular', 'exact' and 'attractive' 'simple perceptions' (ἁπλᾶ αἰσθητά) for *every* class of sensible by how well the ratios of the heptatonic pitch scale are replicated in the ratios which define complexions in classes of sensibles *other* than musical arrangements of sound. And we can be certain that this 'heptachotomic' organisation of perception does indeed apply to *every* family of sensibles, and therefore to the *totality* of phenomena, despite the fact that it is only in his analysis of colours and tastes that Aristotle makes this point clearly and

<sup>39</sup>For clarity's sake, be it noted that this expression should be considered a simplified variant of what specialists refer to as 'the tetrachordal intervallic structures at the base of the organisation of musical sounds in Greece' ([88]: 31) or 'the whole number ratios that govern the concordant intervals in music' ([82]) or 'the basic divisions of the octave by fifths and fourths from the extremes' ([89]: 442).

explicitly (*De Sensu*, 439b19-440a6, 442a17-29). A consideration of his use of the word 'commensurability' (συστοιχία) at *De Sensu*, 447b26-448a19 helps us see why this is so.

To illustrate how this works in practice, consider the following illustration: everything contained in the continuum delimited by the extremes, we today would call ultraviolet and infrared belong to the family of sensibles called colours. But to identify the segment of the continuum corresponding to the colour yellow, it has to be distinguished both from the hues higher up on the spectrum that are more green than yellow and from the hues lower down on the spectrum that are less yellow than orange. Until that happens, until the chromatic form called yellow is isolated from the chromatic forms on the scale other than yellow, it is not possible to use a ratio to identify the interval on the scale which is yellow and nothing else besides. Hence, the first reason for limiting families of sensibles to a finite number of 'definite forms' was to be sure that ratios are useful for descriptive phenomenology because they stand for intervals of a 'qualitative continuum' corresponding to perceptible forms (εἴδη) which are *sui generis* because they are *perceptibly* different from all the other perceptibles belonging to the same qualitative continuum. The second reason why these continua of sensibles need to be divided into a finite number of 'definite forms' (εἴδη πεπερασμένα) might seem to a hasty reading to concern essentially aesthetic considerations. In reality, however, it is about a great deal more, namely to have at one's disposal *a means to systematically and methodically define and organise the entire universe of sensibles according to a single template*. To see why it is fair to say this, we only need to look at the way Aristotle distinguishes between perceptible forms which are 'defined' (πεπερασμένα) and those which are not with the help of the arithmological distinction he makes between ratios he qualifies as 'definite', 'well-ordered' or 'rational' (ἐν ἀριθμοῖς εὐλογίστοις, τεταγμένος, κατὰ λόγον) and opposing them ratios he describes as 'undefined', 'disordered' and 'irrational' (κατ' ἀορίστως, ἀτάκτος, ὅλως oὐκ ἐν λόγῳ, *De Sensu*, 439b29-440a15, 440b20-21, 442a16). What makes the former category of ratios 'rational' and 'pure' (καθαραί) is quite simply the fact that they replicate the ratios of the concords of the heptapartite 'diatonic' pitch scale.39 In other words, no ratio not expressible

in the proportions 1:2, 2:3 or 3:4 can be considered anything but 'irrational' and 'impure'.

Not surprisingly, this manner of discriminating among 'rational' and 'irrational' or 'pure' and 'impure' ratios has implications for discriminating among 'pure' and 'impure' *phenomena* in that *no* simple perception (ἁπλᾶ αἰσθητόν) in *any* class of sensibles can be considered 'pure' or 'rational' unless the mixture of contrary qualities they are synthesised out of can be expressed as one or another of the ratios of the heptatonic pitch scale. And just as the 'pure' tones of the heptatonic pitch scale are said to yield 'concords' (συμϕωνίαι) which are 'attractive' or 'pleasant' (ἥδιστα, ἡδονή), perceptions of forms in classes of sensibles *other than sound* too are 'attractive' when the ratios of their constituent blends of contraries replicate those of the pure concords of the heptatonic pitch scale. Hence, Aristotle's descriptive phenomenology consists of distinguishing 'pure', 'regular', 'exact' and 'attractive' 'simple perceptions' (ἁπλᾶ αἰσθητά) for *every* class of sensible by how well the ratios of the heptatonic pitch scale are replicated in the ratios which define complexions in classes of sensibles *other* than musical arrangements of sound. And we can be certain that this 'heptachotomic' organisation of perception does indeed apply to *every* family of sensibles, and therefore to the *totality* of phenomena, despite the fact that it is only in his analysis of colours and tastes that Aristotle makes this point clearly and

39For clarity's sake, be it noted that this expression should be considered a simplified variant of what specialists refer to as 'the tetrachordal intervallic structures at the base of the organisation of musical sounds in Greece' ([88]: 31) or 'the whole number ratios that govern the concordant intervals in music' ([82]) or 'the basic divisions of the octave by fifths

and fourths from the extremes' ([89]: 442).

58 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

## **8. The ratios of the diatonic pitch scale as a template for defining 'εἴδη πεπερασμένα'**

Typically, Aristotle uses the predicate 'commensurable' (ἐν τὴν αὐτῇ συστοιχίᾳ) when referring to qualities which may be 'different in form' (ἕτερα καὶ ἀνόμοια τῷ εἴδει) but are nonetheless 'of the same family' (ταὐτὰ καὶ ὅμοια τῷ γένει, συγγενῆ, ὁμόϕυλα) and as such can be affected by and turn into one another but cannot turn into or be affected by qualities belonging to *other* families of sensibles 'except incidentally'.40 However, when specified (τέμνεται) in terms of the ratios of the heptatonic pitch scale, phenomena belonging to *different* families of sensibles become 'commensurable with one another' (σύστοιχα ἀλλήλοις) *if and because they are defined by one and the same ratio*. In other words, the qualities 'sweet', 'dry', 'white' and 'soft' all unquestionably belong to different families of sensibles. However, but because the *ratio* of the interval each of them occupies in their respective qualitative spectrum is identical, they are all *eo ipso* 'σύστοιχα ἀλλήλοις'.<sup>41</sup> As a result, Aristotle's descriptive phenomenology is the product of two kinds of 'commensurability': one an 'intra-generic' commensurability *specific to a single 'family of sensibles'* and the other a 'trans-generic' commensurability, superposed upon the former, which is *based on the ratios of the diatonic pitch scale*. The following diagram illustrates how this looks graphically in that the vertical lines represent 'intra-generic' commensurability while the lateral dotted lines indicate 'trans-generic' commensurability.

**Figure 1.** Intra- and trans-generic 'commensurability' in Aristotle's *De Sensu*.

<sup>40</sup>*De Gen. et Corr*., 323b25-26, *Physics*, 188a32-b8, 224b28*ff., Categories*, 14a20-22, *Post Analytics*, 75a38-b17, *Topics*, 123b1- 124a9, 153a35-b24, *De Anima*, 416a 34, *De Sensu*, 447b1-3 & *Metaphysics*, 1057a27-30.

<sup>41</sup>A more detailed but very clear presentation of the same point can be found in [90]: 71-72, especially in his remarks on *Post Analytics*, 78b34-79a6.

To even a cursory glance, it will be obvious to the trained eye that this diagram can make no claim to being 'accurate' as concerns the magnitudes of the intervals that 'heptasect' the vertical lines in it as a function of the basic divisions of the octave indicated on the right hand side.42 However, it at least has the merit of illustrating approximately how Aristotle's *De Sensu* uses 'the whole number ratios that govern the concordant intervals in music' as a template by which to define simple sensations (ἁπλᾶ αἰσθητά) which are pure, clear, pleasant and well-ordered *no matter what family of sensibles they may belong to*. As for the other, 'impure' simple sensations unaccounted for in this diagram—, their comparative inferiority is not due to the fact that the blends of qualitative opposites they were synthesised out of cannot be mimed as a ratio; it is due to the fact that their ratios are merely 'κατὰ λόγον τῷ μᾶλλον καὶ ἧττον', *i.e.,* quantifications of blends of qualitative opposites *not* expressible in the whole number ratios 1:2, 2:3 or 3:4.

A longer, more patient treatment of what we have just seen would have given us the occasion to assess some of the voluminous commentary devoted to Aristotle's *De Sensu*. For example, the question of how well Aristotle mastered mathematical harmonics in his fifth-century Athens and, relatedly, whether or not something like a proper 'science' of harmonic even existed at that time [81]. We could also have pondered over why he failed to notice or seemed not to care about certain aporias which were attendant upon his use of arithmology for descriptive phenomenology. For example, the difficulties entailed by using a single ratio to stand for intervals which themselves perforce constitute infinitely divisible continua [93]. But as engrossing as curiosities like these may be in their own right, dwelling upon them will not help us with what matters here, which is ascertaining how all this pertains to 'scoring cosmopoiesis' *the way the composers of melic versets used to do it*. For that is all that interests us about Aristotle's use of arithmology in his descriptive phenomenology—the light it sheds on the way the 'inspired' *aoidoi* of archaic Hellenic 'Song culture' used melodies and rhythms to 'musically map' their *Lebenswelt* and in so doing lend a voice to the cosmic agencies which synthesise the 'sacred signs' (διοσημεῖαι) adorning the mesocosm that hosts our existences. To justify seeing Aristotle as a useful reference for such a light-shedding mission, let us remind ourselves of the still outstanding stages of the heuristic we proposed above, namely: (1) distinguishing between what is *and is not* Aristotelian in Aristotle's use of arithmology in his *De Sensu*; (2) contending that what is not Aristotelian in it is Philolaic and, finally; (3) arguing that what is specifically Philolaic about it does not mean that it cannot withal be considered a means for mapping cosmopoiesis the way it was done by melic versifiers if not 'from time immemorial' at least back to the Bronze age. To expedite the first of these three objectives, let us start with a reminder of what Aristotle says about the 'so-called Pythagoreans' in Book A of his *Metaphysics*.

#### **9. Aristotle and the 'so-called Pythagoreans' in the** *Metaphysics*

Though Aristotle was clearly in a hurry to discharge what he had to say about them, his haste does not prevent us seeing him make exactly the same point about the 'so-called

<sup>42</sup>For a systematic treatment on this matter, cf. [91, 92]: 160*ff*., [81]: 12*ff*. & [89]: 133*ff*. It is not unimportant to our point to mention that for practical musical purposes, *e.g*., tuning a lyre, being 'accurate' about the basic divisions of the octave was often irrelevant given the diversity of 'culturally determined conceptions of musical agreeability' and the consequent proliferation of 'minor resonances' to satisfy these differing criteria ([89]: 136).

Pythagoreans' as the one Plato makes in the *Philebus* about 'the ancients, who were better than we and lived nearer the gods', for in both cases, it is a question of men who had come up with the idea of using the properties and ratios of a musical pitch scale as a means to represent everything in the universe on the assumption that those same properties and ratios structure and arrange everything in the cosmos that is not musical.43 Alternately, they believed that in the same way that musical tones are blends of extremes delimiting a pitch scale, the substance, parts and attributes of everything peopling the perceptible universe too are synthesised out of blends of opposites delimiting various families of non-musical commensurables.<sup>44</sup>

Even though Aristotle does not identify his sources when speaking of the so-called Pythagoreans, the exegetes who have compared what he says of them in Book A with the attested fragments of Philolaus of Croton have little doubt that the latter's books must be the main source. Granted, this 'likelihood', plus the conspicuous resemblance of Aristotle's use of arithmology in *De Sensu* to the applications of arithmology routinely attributed to the Pythagoreans, is insufficient grounds for assuming that Aristotle had simply 'copied' what he found in his reading of Philolaus. In any event, making such an assumption would be tantamount to ignoring his robust rejection of various aspects of Pythagorean arithmology. For example, their alleged failure to make it subserve a worthy 'final cause',45 their supposedly unsatisfying explanation of the way 'numbers' define sensibles,46 their omission of a viable 'material cause' and, finally—and altogether incomprehensibly—the way they are supposed to have 'ontologised' numbers.<sup>47</sup> Still, despite these objections, and the efforts Aristotle makes to distinguish his use of arithmology from that of the Pythagoreans,48 it cannot be denied that the idea of using 'numerical values' to define 'pure', 'attractive', 'rational' 'definite forms', and doing so the way Aristotle does it in *De Sensu* and elsewhere, is in large measure borrowed from what he found in Philolaus [78, 81, 82, 94].

But if this were so, if it were true that Aristotle's use of arithmology in his *De Sensu* differs but in details from what Philolaus would have said if he had developed a descriptive phenomenology of his own, what guarantee do we have that any of what we have just described reflects anything but Philolaus? The question matters to us because we are looking for reliable information about the way inspired singers of sacred song (θεσπιῳδοί) are supposed to have made melic verse the very voice of the divine because the melody and metre they used in composing it encoded the cosmopoietic significance of what they sang about. Hence, if in reading Aristotle's use of arithmology in his descriptive phenomenology we can be sure we find Philolaus, that would not be of much use to us if what the latter says about using ratios to score complexity was not shared by others, and more particularly by the *aoidoi* and rhapsodes who composed and performed the 'sacred song' in which guise the voices of Muses and Gods

To even a cursory glance, it will be obvious to the trained eye that this diagram can make no claim to being 'accurate' as concerns the magnitudes of the intervals that 'heptasect' the vertical lines in it as a function of the basic divisions of the octave indicated on the right hand side.42 However, it at least has the merit of illustrating approximately how Aristotle's *De Sensu* uses 'the whole number ratios that govern the concordant intervals in music' as a template by which to define simple sensations (ἁπλᾶ αἰσθητά) which are pure, clear, pleasant and well-ordered *no matter what family of sensibles they may belong to*. As for the other, 'impure' simple sensations unaccounted for in this diagram—, their comparative inferiority is not due to the fact that the blends of qualitative opposites they were synthesised out of cannot be mimed as a ratio; it is due to the fact that their ratios are merely 'κατὰ λόγον τῷ μᾶλλον καὶ ἧττον', *i.e.,* quantifications of

60 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

blends of qualitative opposites *not* expressible in the whole number ratios 1:2, 2:3 or 3:4.

says about the 'so-called Pythagoreans' in Book A of his *Metaphysics*.

quent proliferation of 'minor resonances' to satisfy these differing criteria ([89]: 136).

**9. Aristotle and the 'so-called Pythagoreans' in the** *Metaphysics*

Though Aristotle was clearly in a hurry to discharge what he had to say about them, his haste does not prevent us seeing him make exactly the same point about the 'so-called

42For a systematic treatment on this matter, cf. [91, 92]: 160*ff*., [81]: 12*ff*. & [89]: 133*ff*. It is not unimportant to our point to mention that for practical musical purposes, *e.g*., tuning a lyre, being 'accurate' about the basic divisions of the octave was often irrelevant given the diversity of 'culturally determined conceptions of musical agreeability' and the conse-

A longer, more patient treatment of what we have just seen would have given us the occasion to assess some of the voluminous commentary devoted to Aristotle's *De Sensu*. For example, the question of how well Aristotle mastered mathematical harmonics in his fifth-century Athens and, relatedly, whether or not something like a proper 'science' of harmonic even existed at that time [81]. We could also have pondered over why he failed to notice or seemed not to care about certain aporias which were attendant upon his use of arithmology for descriptive phenomenology. For example, the difficulties entailed by using a single ratio to stand for intervals which themselves perforce constitute infinitely divisible continua [93]. But as engrossing as curiosities like these may be in their own right, dwelling upon them will not help us with what matters here, which is ascertaining how all this pertains to 'scoring cosmopoiesis' *the way the composers of melic versets used to do it*. For that is all that interests us about Aristotle's use of arithmology in his descriptive phenomenology—the light it sheds on the way the 'inspired' *aoidoi* of archaic Hellenic 'Song culture' used melodies and rhythms to 'musically map' their *Lebenswelt* and in so doing lend a voice to the cosmic agencies which synthesise the 'sacred signs' (διοσημεῖαι) adorning the mesocosm that hosts our existences. To justify seeing Aristotle as a useful reference for such a light-shedding mission, let us remind ourselves of the still outstanding stages of the heuristic we proposed above, namely: (1) distinguishing between what is *and is not* Aristotelian in Aristotle's use of arithmology in his *De Sensu*; (2) contending that what is not Aristotelian in it is Philolaic and, finally; (3) arguing that what is specifically Philolaic about it does not mean that it cannot withal be considered a means for mapping cosmopoiesis the way it was done by melic versifiers if not 'from time immemorial' at least back to the Bronze age. To expedite the first of these three objectives, let us start with a reminder of what Aristotle

<sup>43</sup>*Metaphysics*, 985b32-986a7, comp. *Philebus*, 17de.

<sup>44</sup>*Metaphysics*, 986b3-8: 'τἀναντία ἀρχαὶ τῶν ὄντων […] ἐκ τούτων ὡς ἐνυπαρχόντων συνεστάναι καὶ πεπλάσθαι ϕασὶ τὴν οὐσίαν'.

<sup>45</sup>*Metaphysics*, xiii, vi, 8, viii, 9-10, xiv, iii, 15, iv, 2 & vi, 1-2.

<sup>46</sup>*Metaphysics*, 1054a9-19 & 1077b18-1078a31.

<sup>47</sup>For justly severe criticisms of Aristotle on this obvious misreading of the Pythagoreans, cf. *inter alia*, [41]: 69, [82]: 56-64, [94]: 402-403, 456, [95]: 27 & [96, 97]: 164.

<sup>48</sup>This is especially evident in Aristotle's attempts to make *physical matter* rather than 'numbers' the substrate that gets determined by ratios (cf. *De Sensu*, 440b14-23, *Metaphysics*, 989b29, 1069b9, 1089b27).

were supposed to have graced the ears of their audiences. So, once again, why suppose that in reading Aristotle's use of Philolaic arithmology, we are reading anything but Philolaus?

#### **10. Philolaus and musical practices in archaic song culture**

As with so much of what concerns us here, the most serious obstacle to a straightforward answer to the question is the scarcity of relevant and unambiguous data. Some things, however, are not subject to doubt. For example, we cannot suppose that the 'science' of harmonics inaugurated by Philolaus, but more likely Archytas (Barker [90]: 29), was without precedent just because Plato, the Academy and Aristotle were so impressed by what they understood of Pythagorean 'mathematical harmonics' and so unimpressed by anything known about harmonics and its applications up to that time.

But if this means that Philoausian harmonics was not unprecedented, what precedents could we be speaking about? Certainly not ones that are traceable back to the 'oriental centres of learning' that some continue to invoke for *any* accomplishment it was once common to identify as a specifically Hellenic innovation [98]. In any case, not as concerns analysing musical arrangements of sound arithmologically and engineering what results from that analysis into a template for applications like descriptive phenomenology or scoring cosmopoiesis [94, p. 315]. For finalities like that Pythagorean speculation on the numerical nature of harmony is indebted to musical practices and theorisation going back to Indo-European times.49 About this there can be no doubt. It is inconceivable that the archaic Hellenes could have produced and tuned musical instruments as sophisticated and elaborate as we know they were without some sort of arithmology and an arithmology that must have served as the basis of Philolaic and 'Pythagorean' 'number symbolism'.50 We can also be certain that this same archaic arithmology was essential to the claim that 'music' lent a voice to the divine by being a means to 'mime' what the object of song owes to the cosmopoietic agencies which 'separated it off' (ἀποκριθῆναι) from pre-cosmic aether by 'cooking' it into a stand-alone, com-plex-ed being. And, finally, and even in the absence of any incontrovertible first hand evidence, we can be sure that these assumptions are as valid for legendary *aoidoi* like Orpheus, Tiresias, Musaeus and Bakis as they are for Hesiod, Alcman and the singers of sacred song alluded to in the *Homeric Hymn to Apollo* [5, 99].

Emphasising which is not tantamount to denying the early Pythagoreans all the credit that Plato's Academy, Aristotle and modern 'mathematical harmonics' enthusiasts think they deserve for 'revolutionising' music analysis. And not just for launching harmonics down the developmental path leading to Euclid's *Sectio Canonis* and Aristoxenus' *Elementa Harmonica*. Also by having contributed to doing to harmonics and music theory what the pre-Socratic natural philosophers are reputed to have done to 'the science of Being', namely wresting a

<sup>49</sup>It is revealing that even '*ex oriente lux'* zealots cannot deny this (cf. [99]: 381).

<sup>50</sup>For Philolaus' debt to 'empirical harmonics', cf. [81]: 266 whose careful analysis of the terminology used by Philolaus in the latter's key Fragment 6a makes it clear that 'every significant term in these sentences, with one exception [*scil*. the 'epogdoic'], belongs to the vocabulary of musicians'. Cf. also [89]: 114: 'For all we know, Philolaus' cycle through the four notes of the framework could well reflect the first steps that he carried out when tuning his lyre'.

de-supernaturalised, de-deified, disenchanted concept of Being from superannuated, mythopoeic *doxai* about the Gods ([96, p. 45*ff*.], [100, p. 204*f*.]).

Still, there can be no doubt about the debt of Pythagorean arithmology and 'number symbolism' to an extremely old bardic tradition, and there is no shortage of ways to credit this view. For example, even Leonid Zhmud, who questionably affirms that the heptatonic tone scale is a Pythagorean 'invention' [94, p. 292], nevertheless admits that it was, in some sense, latent in the techniques used by the archaic makers of musical instruments while plying their trade. And M.L. West, Andrew Barker and Carl Huffman make substantially the same point about Alcman, Lasus of Hermione and Epigonus of Ambracia while emphasising that even though there is no reason to suppose there was anything 'Pythagorean' about the way the latter theorised about music, that did not prevent them coming up with ideas on the links between harmonics and cosmopoiesis whose 'arithmology' differed but in details from the 'Pythagorean diatonic' [5, 90, 82].

So, once again, there is no question but that the so-called Pythagoreans brought something original both to music theory and to its applications outside music theory and singularly in epistemology, cosmology, ontology, phenomenology and ethics. Still, like Fraenkel [72], Burkert [78] and Lohmann [101], I believe that it is less accurate to say that the Hellas provided fertile grounds on which specifically Pythagorean ideas on harmonics and their extramusical applications could take root than it is to characterise those ideas as a distillate or *Aufhebung* of 'theoretical' potential that was latent in that terrain.51 Something we are at pains to stress here because it is critical to everything we said above about Aristotle's phenomenology and the way it is representative of earlier, 'archaic' ideas on 'scoring complexity' and 'miming' the 'ballet' (χορεία) of the cosmopoietic agencies that power the universe into its perceived aspect. For in reading Aristotle's phenomenological discourse in *De Sensu*, we do indeed discern the use of unmistakably Philolaic ideas on harmonics as a template for scoring phenomena as 'definite forms' (εἴδη πεπερασμένα). But precisely because we are seeing that, we are seeing a great deal more. In other words—and albeit only approximately, selectively and at the level of general principles—, we are seeing the way early Hellenic *aoidoi* and 'musicians' (μελοποιοί, μουσοποιοί) composed and performed melic verse when it was their intention to make 'sacred song' a means to hear the divine in and as melodised tones and metred rhythms. To illustrate how we can be relatively certain of this, even in the absence of solid proof and incontrovertible testimony, let us go back to the diagram in **Figure 1** on page 15.

For the reasons given above, the manner of melodically mapping complexity illustrated in it must in the final analysis be considered a schematic rendering of *Aristotle's* 'descriptive phenomenology'. It is not withal a melodic signary that legendary singers of sacred song like Orpheus, Eumolpe or Tiresias would have disapproved of.52 But approve of it though they might, they would no doubt nonetheless have pointed out that something is missing from it. Namely, any reference to what occupies or at least ought to occupy *the spaces above* 

were supposed to have graced the ears of their audiences. So, once again, why suppose that in reading Aristotle's use of Philolaic arithmology, we are reading anything but Philolaus?

As with so much of what concerns us here, the most serious obstacle to a straightforward answer to the question is the scarcity of relevant and unambiguous data. Some things, however, are not subject to doubt. For example, we cannot suppose that the 'science' of harmonics inaugurated by Philolaus, but more likely Archytas (Barker [90]: 29), was without precedent just because Plato, the Academy and Aristotle were so impressed by what they understood of Pythagorean 'mathematical harmonics' and so unimpressed by anything known about har-

But if this means that Philoausian harmonics was not unprecedented, what precedents could we be speaking about? Certainly not ones that are traceable back to the 'oriental centres of learning' that some continue to invoke for *any* accomplishment it was once common to identify as a specifically Hellenic innovation [98]. In any case, not as concerns analysing musical arrangements of sound arithmologically and engineering what results from that analysis into a template for applications like descriptive phenomenology or scoring cosmopoiesis [94, p. 315]. For finalities like that Pythagorean speculation on the numerical nature of harmony is indebted to musical practices and theorisation going back to Indo-European times.49 About this there can be no doubt. It is inconceivable that the archaic Hellenes could have produced and tuned musical instruments as sophisticated and elaborate as we know they were without some sort of arithmology and an arithmology that must have served as the basis of Philolaic and 'Pythagorean' 'number symbolism'.50 We can also be certain that this same archaic arithmology was essential to the claim that 'music' lent a voice to the divine by being a means to 'mime' what the object of song owes to the cosmopoietic agencies which 'separated it off' (ἀποκριθῆναι) from pre-cosmic aether by 'cooking' it into a stand-alone, com-plex-ed being. And, finally, and even in the absence of any incontrovertible first hand evidence, we can be sure that these assumptions are as valid for legendary *aoidoi* like Orpheus, Tiresias, Musaeus and Bakis as they are for Hesiod,

Alcman and the singers of sacred song alluded to in the *Homeric Hymn to Apollo* [5, 99].

49It is revealing that even '*ex oriente lux'* zealots cannot deny this (cf. [99]: 381).

notes of the framework could well reflect the first steps that he carried out when tuning his lyre'.

Emphasising which is not tantamount to denying the early Pythagoreans all the credit that Plato's Academy, Aristotle and modern 'mathematical harmonics' enthusiasts think they deserve for 'revolutionising' music analysis. And not just for launching harmonics down the developmental path leading to Euclid's *Sectio Canonis* and Aristoxenus' *Elementa Harmonica*. Also by having contributed to doing to harmonics and music theory what the pre-Socratic natural philosophers are reputed to have done to 'the science of Being', namely wresting a

50For Philolaus' debt to 'empirical harmonics', cf. [81]: 266 whose careful analysis of the terminology used by Philolaus in the latter's key Fragment 6a makes it clear that 'every significant term in these sentences, with one exception [*scil*. the 'epogdoic'], belongs to the vocabulary of musicians'. Cf. also [89]: 114: 'For all we know, Philolaus' cycle through the four

**10. Philolaus and musical practices in archaic song culture**

monics and its applications up to that time.

62 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

<sup>51</sup>Cf. [78]: 298 & [101]: 5-6.

<sup>52</sup>Even though Wersinger does not mention these legendary *aoidoi* by name in her patient analysis of 'le terme *sustoichia'* ([102], p. 232*ff*.), what she says in her gloze of the sources and testimonia she scrutinises nevertheless significantly substantiates the point we are making here.

*and below the diagram* and which are 'hyphenated' by the vertical lines in it. A remark which is not intended to suggest that Orpheus' illustrious successors had neglected to think of putting something in these spaces. However, where Aristotle would have made use of them to be sure that what is between them semiotically subserves his formal, final, proximal and material causes and Plato would have used them to rhapsodise *ad more geometrico* about the 'harmony of the spheres', the inspired *aoidoi* in song culture would have opted for a simpler alternative. They would have placed this diagram *en abyme* in relation to the 'Ouranides' (Oὐρανίωνες) by reserving the space above for 'starry Ouranos' and the space below for 'all-bearing Gaia'. They would have done that because as far as they were concerned nothing ever crossed—or ever will cross—the stage of the mesocosm hosting our existences that is not a 'passion' or 'birthling' (πάθημα, τέκνα) of the 'sacred marriage' of the Sky and the Earth. Consequently, this 'marriage' is something one *must* signal when it is one's desire to sing of things to the power of the agencies to which they are beholden for their time, place, nature, character, destiny and Being-what-they-are.

The semiotic implications of this view for what is going on in this diagram speak for themselves. For placing the sign system depicted in it *en abyme* relative to these divinities and their cosmos-creating relationship entails more than transforming the vertical lines in it into so many 'hyphens' which conjoin Ouranos above and Gaia below. It entails transforming them into mediums *in, through* and *as* which the cosmos-synthesising dynamics of Ouranos, Gaia and their 'sacred marriage' receive a 'melodic signature' and in the guise of that signature convert any 'sacred song' containing it into the very voice of the divine. That was the point of using the ratios of the diatonic pitch scale to 'heptasect' the qualitative continua these lines stand for. It was a question of being able to 'mime' different 'complexions' in melodised tone and metered rhythms. However, this 'mimesis' was not just 'eikastic'. In other words, the goal was not merely to define or specify different complexions by distinguishing their particular perceived aspects from those of other complexions belonging to the same family of sensibles. It was also, and above all, to quantify the contribution made by the Sky and the Earth to the blend of energies which give complexions and complexity what they appear to be when observed.

In any event, if this sign system could not do that, if in quantifying complexions as 'ratios of qualitative extremes' it did not *always, already, also and thereby* 'co-mime' what blends of Sky and the Earth energies made those complexions be by blistering pre-cosmic aether into their perceptible forms, it could not be a way of 'scoring complexity' that an 'inspired' singer of 'sacred song' could have taken seriously.

## **11. Concluding remarks**

Readers who cast a critical eye back upon what was said in the foregoing will no doubt have reservations about some aspects of what they read. Most likely they will be particularly pronounced as concerns our portrayal of the way melic verse in archaic song culture was used to 'score' cosmopoiesis. For if the point of composing sacred song was to sacralise its referents by 'epiphonising' their cosmopoietic significance, one would have to assume that this applies to subject matter that could be literally epic in scale and complexity. Why then did we limit our demonstration of the semiotics of the process whereby this happens to the way *individual* musical notes stand for *individual* ἁπλᾶ αἰσθητά? Alternately, why was not anything said about the way musical notes could be concatenated and counterpointed in such a way as to epiphonise the cosmic significance of highly complex situations and subject matter in which multiple *composite referents* interact dynamically over time and space with other *composite referents*?

*and below the diagram* and which are 'hyphenated' by the vertical lines in it. A remark which is not intended to suggest that Orpheus' illustrious successors had neglected to think of putting something in these spaces. However, where Aristotle would have made use of them to be sure that what is between them semiotically subserves his formal, final, proximal and material causes and Plato would have used them to rhapsodise *ad more geometrico* about the 'harmony of the spheres', the inspired *aoidoi* in song culture would have opted for a simpler alternative. They would have placed this diagram *en abyme* in relation to the 'Ouranides' (Oὐρανίωνες) by reserving the space above for 'starry Ouranos' and the space below for 'all-bearing Gaia'. They would have done that because as far as they were concerned nothing ever crossed—or ever will cross—the stage of the mesocosm hosting our existences that is not a 'passion' or 'birthling' (πάθημα, τέκνα) of the 'sacred marriage' of the Sky and the Earth. Consequently, this 'marriage' is something one *must* signal when it is one's desire to sing of things to the power of the agencies to which they are beholden for their time, place, nature, character, des-

The semiotic implications of this view for what is going on in this diagram speak for themselves. For placing the sign system depicted in it *en abyme* relative to these divinities and their cosmos-creating relationship entails more than transforming the vertical lines in it into so many 'hyphens' which conjoin Ouranos above and Gaia below. It entails transforming them into mediums *in, through* and *as* which the cosmos-synthesising dynamics of Ouranos, Gaia and their 'sacred marriage' receive a 'melodic signature' and in the guise of that signature convert any 'sacred song' containing it into the very voice of the divine. That was the point of using the ratios of the diatonic pitch scale to 'heptasect' the qualitative continua these lines stand for. It was a question of being able to 'mime' different 'complexions' in melodised tone and metered rhythms. However, this 'mimesis' was not just 'eikastic'. In other words, the goal was not merely to define or specify different complexions by distinguishing their particular perceived aspects from those of other complexions belonging to the same family of sensibles. It was also, and above all, to quantify the contribution made by the Sky and the Earth to the blend of energies which give complexions and complexity what they appear to be when observed.

In any event, if this sign system could not do that, if in quantifying complexions as 'ratios of qualitative extremes' it did not *always, already, also and thereby* 'co-mime' what blends of Sky and the Earth energies made those complexions be by blistering pre-cosmic aether into their perceptible forms, it could not be a way of 'scoring complexity' that an 'inspired' singer of

Readers who cast a critical eye back upon what was said in the foregoing will no doubt have reservations about some aspects of what they read. Most likely they will be particularly pronounced as concerns our portrayal of the way melic verse in archaic song culture was used to 'score' cosmopoiesis. For if the point of composing sacred song was to sacralise its referents by 'epiphonising' their cosmopoietic significance, one would have to assume that this applies

tiny and Being-what-they-are.

64 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

'sacred song' could have taken seriously.

**11. Concluding remarks**

Other readers will wonder why we spoke of 'melodised tone' and 'metered rhythm' together when the only 'sign system' we discussed was one based on the diatonic pitch scale. This could give the impression that 'melic verse' could not 'mime' cosmopoiesis except as melodised tones and that 'metered rhythm' must therefore have played no more than an auxiliary role in the signifying process. This is most regrettable given that it has been argued to great effect that 'the self-declaration by things themselves about their very Being' can be signified through metered rhythms all on their own.<sup>53</sup> Still other readers will feel that space should have been devoted to way the inspired *aoidos* was like and yet unlike the inspired oracles who did not or could not 'sing' and therefore required the assistance of various hermeneutic middlemen (ἑρμηνέων ἑρμηνῆς) to give a legible expression to the intelligence they incubated whilst in a theoleptic fit.

To the readers who raise these objections and others that are just as legitimate, I offer the admittedly lame excuse that only so much can be covered in an article length treatment of the semiotic *punctum caecum* we explored and that some of the resulting insufficiencies will be redressed in a planned book length study devoted to this chapter's *Sache selbst*. I will also add that their reading will not have been in vain if it has succeeded in making them see some merit in the modest point this chapter wanted to make and which I resume thus.

People listening to the 'sacred song' composed and performed by an 'inspired' *aoidos* were hearing the 'melodic signature' of the cosmopoietic dynamics that gave the object of the song the 'complexion' in which guise it was accessible to the 'non-inspired' audience. The semiotic rationale behind this claim was a mimetic correlation between (i) the arithmological characteristics of the melodies and rhythms structuring the sounds one heard in the song and (ii) the arithmology used to give a quantitative expression to the blends of cosmic energies that powered the song's subject matter into its complexion and its Being-in-the-world. As a result, the listener was hearing two narratives about the object of the song: one in the profane, ordinary words of mortals recounting what it means *sub species hominis*, the other in melody and metre relating its sacral, cosmopoietic significance. This is why it is so apt to refer to 'sacred song' or θέσπις ἀοιδή as a form of 'hieroglossia'. For the goal of the hieroglossia peculiar to 'θέσπις ἀοιδή' was to 'oversignify' the ordinary acceptations of the object of verse signified in prosaic words and narrative and do so by telling a separate narrative about the same object in a language whose form was 'musical' rather than 'lexical' and whose semantics were 'hieratic' rather than 'profane'.

<sup>53</sup>On '*das Substantielles sich-bekunden der Dinge selbst'*, cf. [32]: 63-69, [34]: 125-126, [76]: 42-45.

#### **Author details**

#### Fionn Bennett


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**Author details**

66 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Semiotics

Address all correspondence to: fionn.bennett@univ-reims.fr

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Fionn Bennett

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