The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy

Author:Walker Percy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

* C. W. Morris: “Languages are developed and used by living beings operating in a world of objects, and show the influence of both the users and the objects. If, as symbolic logic maintains, there are linguistic forms whose validity is not dependent upon nonlinguistic objects, then their validity must be dependent upon the rules of the language in question.” Characteristically, semioticists do not find it remarkable that sign-using animals should have developed symbolic logic “whose validity is not dependent on non-linguistic objects.” It is therefore not worth investigating how this could have come about but only necessary to note that it has and to define this unusual activity as the “syntactical dimension” of semiotic.

† Nor should one be confused by the encyclopedists’ disavowals of determinism in favor of the probability approach, which is supposed to resolve the nomothetic-ideographic dichotomy of object-science and history. For, as becomes abundantly clear, the laws of probability are relied upon quite as heavily as strict causality. As Nagel insists, although laws connecting micro-states may be statistical in character, that does not mean that laws connecting macro-states are not strictly deterministic.

‡ For example, the methodological negation of mental entities and the inability to take account of Gestalt qualities.

* J. F. Anderson: “This is the last word of symbolism; it is the last word because symbolism moves in the order of univocal concepts, concepts which are merely given an ‘analogical’ reference by the mind; and through univocal concepts one can never acquire any proper and formal knowledge of reality as such, because reality as such is analogical. Follow the via symbolica as far as you like; follow it as far as it goes; it will never lead beyond agnosticism, either in metaphysics or theology.”

* “It will be convenient to have special terms to designate certain of the relations of signs to signs, to objects, and to interpreters. ‘Implicates’ will be restricted to Dsyn, ‘designates’ and ‘denotes’ to Dsem and ‘expresses’ to Dp. The word ‘table’ implicates (but does not designate) ‘furniture with a horizontal top on which things may be placed,’ designates a certain kind of object, denotes the objects to which it is applicable, and expresses its interpreter.”

Note the ambiguity of the term “expresses its interpreter.” “Implicates,” “designates,” and “denotes” are purely semantical-syntactical terms with no biological analogue. But what are we to take “expresses” to mean? Is it to be taken in the biological sense of a sign “announcing” its significatum to its interpreter or in the symbolic sense of “expressing a meaning”?

* For example, in answer to the charge that his “Snow is white” sentence seems to imply a naïve realism when it lays down the condition “if and only if snow is white,” he writes: “…the semantic definition of truth implies nothing regarding the conditions under which a sentence like (1) snow is white can be asserted. It implies only that, whenever we assert or reject this sentence, we must be ready to assert or reject the correlated sentence (2): the sentence ‘snow is white’ is true.

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