4.10—
The Nature and Scope of This Semiotic Analysis

The preceding sections of this chapter have been devoted to the development of an analysis of symbols and their semantic and syntactic properties. In the ensuing chapters this analysis will be applied towards an assessment of CTM's claims about the nature of cognition. Before proceeding to that assessment, however, it is important to clarify the nature and status of the semiotic analysis that has been presented here.

The new terminology is intended to resolve perilous ambiguities in the uses of (a ) the word 'symbol' and (b ) expressions used to predicate semantic and syntactic properties of symbols (for example, 'refers to', 'means', 'is a count noun'). For purposes of careful semiotic analysis, the technical terms are meant to replace the ordinary locutions rather than to supplement them. Thus the sortal terms 'marker', 'signifier', and 'counter' do not name different species of symbol, nor do they signify different objects than those designated by the word 'symbol'. Rather, these terms serve collectively as a disambiguation of the word 'symbol' as it is applied to discursive signs, and each sortal term is designed to correspond to one usage of the word 'symbol'.

Similarly, the modalities of interpretability (under a convention), authoring intention, actual interpretation, and interpretability-in-principle have been referred to as "ways of being" a marker, signifier, or counter. But this does not mean that there is such a thing as just being a marker, signifier, or counter, and—over and above that—additional properties of being interpretable as one, being intended as one, and so on. For there is no such thing as simply being a symbol. Symbol is not a natural but a conventional kind, and to say that something "is a symbol" (a marker) is to relate it in some way to the conventions that establish marker types.

But there are several ways in which an object can be related to such conventions: it can be interpretable as a token of a type by virtue of meeting the criteria for that type, it can be intended by its author as being of that type, it can be interpreted as being of that type, or it can simply be such that one could have a convention that would establish a type such that this object would be interpretable as a token of that type. The case is much the same for semantics and syntax: there is no such thing as a marker simply being meaningful or simply referring to an object. To say that a marker has a meaning, or that it refers to something, is to say something about interpretation and interpretive conventions. We can say that

the marker is of such a type that it is interpretable, under English semantic conventions, as referring to Lincoln. We can say that its author intended it to refer to Lincoln, or that someone who apprehended it construed it as referring to Lincoln. And we can say that one could, in principle, have a convention whereby it would be interpretable as referring to Lincoln. But there is no additional question of whether a symbol just plain refers to Lincoln. Expressions such as 'refers to Lincoln', 'is a marker', 'is a P ', or 'is an utterance of the word dog ' are ambiguous. The process of disambiguation consists of substituting the four expressions, 'is interpretable as', 'was intended as', 'was interpreted as', and 'is interpretable-in-principle as' for 'is'.

So, for example, if someone asks of an inscription, "What kind of symbol is that?" we should proceed by supplying four kinds of information: (1) We should provide a specification of how it is interpretable as a marker token by virtue of meeting the criteria for various marker types. For example, we might point out that it is interpretable under English conventions as a P or under Greek conventions as a rho. (2) If the mark was in fact inscribed by someone, we should say what kind of marker it was intended to be: for example, that it was intended as a P , or that it was intended as a rho, or that it was intended precisely to meet the criteria for both P and rho. (3) If someone has interpreted the inscription as a marker token, we should say who did the interpreting and what they took it to be. We might say, for example, that Jones took the symbol to be a P , while Mrs. Mavrophilipos took it to be a rho. (4) We should point to the fact that such a mark might be used in all kinds of ways—namely, that one could, for example, develop new marker conventions whereby that mark might count as a token of some new type.

Similarly, if someone asks what an inscription means, a full response would involve the following: (1) A list of the meanings that the inscription could be used to bear under the semantic conventions of various linguistic groups. (For example, English speakers use the marker string p-a-i-n to mean pain while French speakers use it to mean bread.) (2) A specification of what the author of the inscription intended it to mean. (The deceased lawyer in the thought experiment, for example, might have used it to mean bread, while I, the author of the example, intended precisely that it be interpretable as meaning either bread or pain.) (3) A specification of how anyone who apprehended the symbol interpreted it. (For example, Lestrade took it to mean pain and Holmes took it to mean bread.) (4) A reference to the fact that one could, in principle, use markers of that type to refer to anything whatsoever.

And similarly for counters, if one were to inquire as to the syntactic properties of an inscription such as 'p & q', a complete answer would require four kinds of information: (1) A list of ways that string could be interpreted as bearing a syntactic structure in different symbol games. (It could be a series of syntactically unrelated markers on an eyechart, for example, or a conjunction in the sentential calculus.) (2) A specification of how the inscription was intended by its author. (For example, the optometrist intended those markers as items on an eyechart, and did not intend them to bear any syntactic relation to one another.) (3) A specification of how such persons as apprehended the symbols took them to be syntactically arranged. (Say, Jones took them to constitute a propositional calculus formula of the form 'p and q', while Mrs. Mavrophilipos took them to just be individual letters.) Finally, (4) an allusion to the fact that one could devise any number of symbol games with quite a variety of syntactic structures such that this inscription would be interpretable as being of the syntactic types licensed by the rules of those games.

Now there are other uses of the term 'symbol'—for example, those employed in Jungian psychology and cultural anthropology. Similarly, there are other senses in which a marker might be said to "mean something." Holmes's companion Dr. Watson might, for example, inquire of Holmes, "What does the deceased attorney's inscription mean?" and Holmes might reply, "What it means, Watson, is that the housekeeper is a murderess." In this case, Watson's query, "What does it mean?" amounts to asking "What conclusions about this case can we draw from it?" and Holmes's answer supplies the relevant conclusion.

Yet it is important to emphasize that there is no general sense of "being a symbol" or "meaning such-and-such" over and above those captured by our technical terms. For suppose that someone were to ask what the first mark on the eyechart was, and we told him about how it was interpretable under various conventions, how it was intended by the doctor who drew it, how it was interpreted by various people who saw it, and pointed out, finally, that one could develop all sorts of conventions that could apply to marks with that shape. Suppose, however, that our questioner was not satisfied with this, but insisted upon asking for more. Suppose he said, "I don't want to hear what conventional types it meets the criteria for, or how it was intended, or how anyone construed it, or how it could, in principle, be interpreted. I just want to know what kind of symbol it is ." Suppose that it was clear from the way that he spoke that he thought that there was just some kind of brute fact about

an object that consisted in its being a marker of a particular type, quite apart from how it met the criteria for conventionally sanctioned types, how it was intended, and so on. How would we construe such a question?

There are, I think, two basic possibilities. The first is that the questioner is just confused, and does not realize that the relevant uses of the expression 'is a symbol' have effectively been replaced by our technical terminology. If this is the case, he would seem to be suffering from a misunderstanding of what is meant when we say that something is a rho, or a P , or a token of some other marker type. He is much like the person who misunderstands the use of the word 'healthy' when it is applied to food and demands of us that we tell him what "makes vitamin C healthy" without telling him how it contributes to the health of a body.

The second possibility is that the questioner has some special use of the expression 'is a symbol' in mind. He might, for example, be asking for an answer cast in the vocabulary of some particular psychological or anthropological tradition. (We might, for example, respond to a query about something on the wall of an Irish church in the following fashion: "This is the Celtic cross, a fine example of syncretic symbolism. In it one finds the Christian cross, the symbol of salvation through the death of Christ, cojoined with the Druidic circle, symbolizing the sun, the source of life and light.") Or he might have some more novel use of words in mind. He might, for example, just use the word 'symbol' in a way that did not make appeals to conventions. Allen Newell, for example, apparently identifies symbols with the physical patterns that distinguish them. Newell writes, "A physical symbols system is a set of entities, called symbols, which are physical patterns that can occur as components of another type of entity called an expression (or symbol structure)" (Newell and Simon [1975] 1981: 40, emphasis added). In another place, Newell (1986: 33) speaks of symbols systems as involving a physical medium and writes that "the symbols are patterns in that medium."

I shall discuss the proper interpretation of Newell's usage at length in chapter 5, but the basic point I wish to make may be summarized as follows: In characterizing symbols in this way, Newell is using the word 'symbol' differently from the way it is normally used in English, not unlike the way someone might just use the word 'healthy' to mean "full of vitamins." (By the same token, one could use the word 'symbol' to designate all and only objects that have odors pleasing to dogs. Why one should wish to abuse a perfectly good word in such a fashion, however, is quite another matter.) This kind of idiosyncratic use of words may be confusing, but it need not be pernicious so long as the writer (a ) does

not draw inferences that are based upon a confusion between his idiosyncratic usage of the word and its normal meaning (e.g., inferring that food that is healthy_v [i.e., full of vitamins] must be healthy [i.e., conducive to health]), and (b ) makes his own usage of the word adequately clear that his readers are not drawn into such faulty inferences. Thus there is nothing troublesome about using the word 'charm' to denote a property of quarks because (a ) physicists have an independent specification of the meaning of 'charm' as applied to quarks, and (b ) no one is likely to mistakenly infer that quarks would be pleasant guests at a soirée.

Similarly, it is possible to use words such as 'means' and 'refers to' in novel ways. One could, for example, become so enamored of causal theories of reference that one began to use sentences like "The word 'dog' refers to dogs" to mean something like "Tokens of 'dog' stand in causal relation R to dogs." This would, of course, be an enterprise involving linguistic novelty: the locutional schema 'refers to' is not generally used by English speakers to report causal relationships per se. But the idiosyncratic usage of the locutional schema might be an efficient way of expressing something that is important and for which there is no more elegant means of expression. So long as the writer makes his usage of words clear and does not make illicit inferences based on nonoperative meanings of words, his idiosyncrasy need not be construed as being pernicious. But if, for example, someone uses 'refers to' to mean "is larger than," he cannot draw an inference like that below from (A) to (B) just by virtue of the meanings of the sentences

(A) The title 'Great Emancipator' refers to Abraham Lincoln.

(B) Abraham Lincoln is also known as the Great Emancipator.

If one used such a novel definition to try to show that one could derive "X is known as Y " from "X is greater than Y ," one would be arguing fallaciously.

Nor can the inference from (A) to (B) be drawn by virtue of the meanings of the sentences if one just defines 'refers to' in causal terms. That is, if one uses (A) to mean "Tokens of 'Great Emancipator' stand in causal relation R to Abraham Lincoln," one cannot infer from (A) that Abraham Lincoln is also known as the Great Emancipator. One might, however, be able to infer (B) from the conjunction of the two claims (A^* ): "Tokens of 'Great Emancipator' stand in causal relation R to Lincoln" and (C): "For every signifier token M and every object N , if M stands in causal relation R to N , then M refers (in the ordinary sense) to N ." But

(A^* ) and (C) jointly entail (B) only because (A^* ) and (C) jointly entail (A), and (A) entails (B). (A^* ) alone does not entail (A), however, even if there is a causal relation R that always in fact holds between signifiers and their referents.