Lost in the Cosmos

difficulty with the behaviorists is that they rule out mind, self, and consciousness as inaccessible either on the doctrinal grounds that they do not exist or on methodological grounds that they are beyond the reach of behavioral science.
    It is not necessarily so. The value of Charles Peirce and social psychologists like George Mead is that they underwrite the reality of the self without getting trapped in the isolated autonomous consciousness of Descartes and Chomsky. They do this by showing that the self becomes itself only through a transaction of signs with other selves—and does so, moreover, without succumbing to the mindless mechanism of the behaviorists.
    The other semiotic foe is French structuralism—some of its proponents, at least—and its whimsical stepchild “deconstruction.” The structuralists, in high fashion—at least until recently—seek to apply the methods of structural linguistics to such diverse matters as literature, myth, fashion, even cooking. Whatever the virtues of structuralism as a method of linguistics, ethnology, and criticism, it is the self-proclaimed foe, on what seem to be ideological grounds, of the very concept of the human subject. Lévi-Strauss boasts of the dehumanization which his structuralism implies. Michel Foucault argues that with the coming of semiotics the concept of the self has vanished from our new view of reality.
    But this may not be the case.
    I do not feel obliged to speak of the deconstructionists.
    Finally, a terminological confusion needs to be straightened out. There is an almost intractable confusion about the terms sign and symbol. We may know what we mean when we say there is a difference between my dog’s understanding of the word ball —to go and look for it—and your understanding of the same utterance—you may say “Ball? What about it?”—but we need to agree on what words to use to express the difference. Some writers (e.g., Peirce and Langer) would call the former ball a sign and the latter ball a symbol. Others would call the former a signal, the latter a sign. Though I have followed Peirce’s usage in earlier writings, I propose here to use the word signal for the former and, following Saussure, the word sign for the latter, and to avoid symbol as much as possible. This usage seems advisable for two reasons. One is that symbol for most people seems to connote something emblematic like the flag or the cross and not the radical sense in which the common nouns of language are understood as symbols by Peirce, Cassirer, and Langer. The other reason is that the latter usage will be easier to reconcile with Saussure’s valuable dissection of the sign into its two elements, signifier (signifiant) and signified (signifié).
    * Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (New York: Airmont Publishing Co., 1965), p. 187.
    † New Directions in the Study of Language, ed. Eric H. Lenneberg (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1964), p. 131.
    * Philip E. L. Smith in Cro-Magnon Man, ed. by Tom Prideaux (New York: Time-Life Books, 1973), p. 7.
    * I will not try to decide here whether what the word apple conjures up in your mind, its signifié, is a percept or a concept, because it is somewhere in between, A percept refers to an individual apple. A concept is an abstraction from all apples, a definition of apple. But the signifié of apple is both and nejther. What comes to mind when I hear apple, what in fact the word articulates within itself, is neither an individual apple nor a definition of apple but a quality of appleness, such as John Cheever intended in his title, World of Apples. Perhaps it should be called a “concrete concept” or an “abstract percept,” or what Gerard Manley Hopkins called inscape.
    Let us take note of a notorious philosophical farrago without attempting to resolve it: Why is it that when we look at an apple, we believe we are looking at an apple out there, and not at sensory impression, a picture, in our brain? This puzzle can hardly be addressed here, since it is nothing less than the main source of the troubles which have dogged solipsist philosophers from Descartes and Locke to the present day. My own conviction is that semiotics provides an escape from the solipsist prison by its stress on the social origins of language—you have to point to an apple and name it for me before I know there is such a thing—and the existence of a world of apples outside ourselves.
    * The semioticist most acutely aware of this devolution of