Symbols

To resume my discussion from an earlier post on what I deem the most fundamental keys of understanding ever uncovered by secular scholarship -- I mean the taxonomy of phenomena propounded by Charles Sanders Peirce -- we ought to consider in more depth a few of the implications of what Peirce was fonding of calling "the Triad" (nothing to do with Chinese mafiosi, incidentally!). The triad of eternal, all-embracing categories, which Peirce termed Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, is everywhere manifest. Comprehending the categories, as I also mentioned earlier, is no ordinary task, because the method of reasoning required to "get at" the Peircian architectonic is quite different from the Cartesian nominalism in which we have all been steeped. They are only learnt by a proliferation of examples, and in fact there will never be an "Aha!" moment when the student knows with apodictic certainty what the Categories mean in their totality.

Yet we should strive to understand them nonetheless. Peirce tried many names for his Categories, but settled on prosaic-sounding ordinals because, in their most general sense, that is what they are. Firstness is anything in the class corresponding to the first phenomenon that we perceive or experience. In one of his first writings on the subject ("On a New List of Categories," 1867), Peirce called it "Quality," because that term comes closest, th0ugh still without being perfectly exact, to embodying what Firstness is. All qualities are Firsts, be they visual, tactile, olfactory, aural, or psychological. We experience everything -- whether a mental picture or concept, or a tangible experience -- first in terms of its qualities as they present themselves to our senses. If personalities could be classified according to the dominant Category they embody, then artists, musicians, and entertainers are preponderantly Firsts. The present time is also a First.

Secondness, which Peirce variously characterized as reaction and resistance, is the second thing to impinge upon our senses. It embodies things material inasmuch as they derive their substance from reaction and resistance to other things. The very act of discerning a First will involve a Second -- a notion obtruding upon our thoughts, a physical object resisting our senses, and the like. Secondness is the domain of the material, the existential, the tangible, the reactive, and the inert. The businessman, the accountant, the banker, the manual laborer, the manager -- these are all Seconds in the world of work and personality. The past time -- absolute, unyielding -- is a cardinal Secondness.

Thirdness is the third and final category that presents itself, and is also the most important. It is the Category involved in mediation (that is, of uniting Firstness and Secondness through the operation of some law or habit of mind). It is the most abstract and consequently the most neglected of the three. To acknowledge Thirdness is, as Peirce repeatedly showed, to acknowledge God, for Thirdness among other things involves final (as opposed to efficient) causation, and God is the ultimate final cause. Logicians, mathematicians, scientists, and jurisprudents tend to be (though are not always) Thirds. The future is a Third.

Now a word on another pair of terms which Peirce (and many other philosophers) deem to be of great importance: nominalism and realism. Philosophers don't always agree on the scope of these two terms, but for Peirce, the distinction between nominalists and realists was pivotal. The nominalist believes only in the reality of things existential -- that is, he confines his mode of inquiry and his worldview -- to the realm of Firstness and Secondness. He denies the reality of abstractions like law and motive. He denies the validity of Thirdness, in other words, and sees the world as opposites in conflict. His reasoning is always either-or.

The realist incorporates Thirdness into his reasoning. He believes in the reality of abstracts -- laws, principles, purposes, and the like.

In the Middle Ages, when the schoolmen were laying the first foundations of the science of logic (distilled mostly from Aristotle), they coalesced into two great camps, the realists, led by one John Duns Scotus, and the nominalists, led by William of Occam (he of "Occam's Razor," a beguiling fallacy if there ever was one). Duns Scotus, who was nicknamed "Doctor subtilis," was quite possibly -- along with Roger Bacon -- the most subtle mind of his age. His works -- even that small portion that have been translated into English from Church Latin -- are noteworthy for their quodlibetical nuances, which Peirce imbibed when few other scholars were interested in things Medieval (medieval history and studies was long a neglected subject in the American academy until Haskins came along).

It was, however, the Occamites who managed to get the upper hand in Medieval universities and purge the ranks of Scotus' epigones. So vivid was the obloquy directed at the realists that Scotus' surname Duns (probably representing the village in Scotland where he came from) became synonymous with with willful ignorance -- the "dunce cap" is a legacy of that debate.

As to the most important application of the Categories, Peirce was one of the two founders (the linguist Saussure was the other) of the modern discipline of semiotics, the study of signs. A sign is anything that represents something (an object or ground) to some mind, producing a mental representation called an interpretant. In Peirce's most famous taxonomy, he resolved signs into three basic types -- icons, indexes, and symbols (in point of fact, there are other ways of classifying signs in Peirce's system; this particular trio evaluates signs in terms of the manner in which they have signifying force).

Each of these three sign types represents its object in terms of one of the three categories. Icons are Firstnesses; their power of representation is bound up in some quality of the thing represented. Thus icons are usually likenesses of some type, such as pictures or onomatopoeic words (words that "sound" like what they represent). Broadly speaking, icons act as signs by virtue of similarity to the thing represented.

Indexes are signs that derive their force from directing the mind's attention to the thing represented, by some kind of physical or mental deixis ("pointing out"). A pointed finger is a good example of an index; so are demonstrative adjectives and pronouns ("this," "those," etc.). Terms that have meaning by virtue of a part referring to a whole (so-called synechdoche), like "all hands on deck" (where "hand" refers to the entire person) are also indexical. Where icons derive their force from similarity, indexes derive theirs from contiguity.

But these two sign classes are in fact what Peirce termed degenerate. Symbols are signs in the fullest sense because they operate in their entirety the way all signs operate in part, namely, by deriving their power to signify solely from some associative habit of mind. For example, the "plus sign" is a pure symbol, as are the overwhelming majority of words in all languages. With all such symbols we find that the relationship between the sign and its object is purely arbitrary; there is nothing inherently more correct about denominating the canine animal "dog," "chien" (French), "perro" (Spanish), "Hund," (German), "sobaka," (Russian), or "nay" (Tamil), for example; all are essentially arbitrary configurations of sound the utterance of which, for their respective speaking communities, will ineluctably summon up the interpretant of a dog. Mental habit is a form of Thirdness, and so the symbol is Thirdness embodied in the sign.

But these divisions are not absolute, as the realist mode of thought has to acknowledge. All words in fact are symbols, and all partake in one degree or another of iconicity and indexicality as well. Consider, for the fact, that in all languages, words denoting the simplest and most commonly-uttered concepts are typically the shortest and phonologically least complex. Pronouns, common verbs like "be" and "go," determiners, and common nouns for the most familiar objects (like "man," "boy," "dog," etc.) are some examples of this. On the other hand, word-symbols denoting more complex things tend to be longer and more phonologically challenging. This is highly iconic, and is found in all languages.

Likewise, even the most obviously indexical word-signs, onomatopoeia, have an element of arbitrary symbolism; or else why does a rooster say "cock-a-doodle-do" in English but "kikiriki" in Spanish? The sound of a blow in English is "Pow!" or "Wham!"; in Spanish it is "Paf!" And so forth.

But why should any of this be of concern to we of the LDS faith? Because a grand consequence of realism and of the semiotic that flows therefrom is that the universe is meaningful, that all things have signification to some mind (or Mind). Where the nominalist sees mere inert, lifeless reaction, the realist perceives purpose and meaning. He sees no contradiction between the laws of physics and of mind because, as Thirdnesses, they are both really the same thing. The realist also sees that mind and matter are the same, that the latter is merely a deadened, habit-bound version of the former; and all of this, which squares perfectly with latter-day revelation, is to be gleaned from the magisterial musings of Peirce.

Herein lies the repudiation of the materialist, the existentialist, the atheist, the socialist -- nominalists all --that the universe, including human society, is not a mere congeries of reactive substances, susceptible to rigid Cartesian determinism and manipulation. It is in fact a grand Symbol and composite of symbols, dynamic, meaningful, purposeful, evolutionary, and perfused with mind or intelligence. It is the embodiment of the three Categories, behaving as all symbols do, working out its own meaning and destiny, progressing (like a train of thought-symbols) to ever higher states of perfection and consistency.

This is, as best I can represent it at this late hour and with limited materials on hand, a distillate of the Peircian categories and a few of their consequences. Perhaps most pleasing to the realist is that there is no conflict between reason and religion; Peirce's nifty little paper, "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" is worthwhile in this connection. So is "The Law of Mind," concerning which I may have more to say in a future entry.

It's snowing and sleeting by turns outside, and I must arise early to convey my beloved to preschool. Good night.