ONT Re: Aristotle's Approximation
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Return with us now to the thrilling signs of yesteryear ...
And let us now break through the glossy glass
to see what we can see through its dim facets.
| Words spoken are symbols or signs (symbola)
| of affections or impressions (pathemata) of
| the soul (psyche);
|
| written words are the signs of words spoken.
|
| As writing, so also is speech not the same for all races of men.
|
| But the mental affections themselves,
| of which these words are primarily signs (semeia),
| are the same for the whole of mankind, as are also the objects (pragmata)
| of which those affections are representations or likenesses, images, copies (homoiomata).
|
| Aristotle, 'On Interpretation', 1.16.a.4-7,
|'Aristotle, Volume 1', Translated by H.P. Cooke & H. Tredennick,
| Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.
Anticipating, in unabashed anachronism, what Peirce will later write,
we may imagine that we see Aristotle presenting a prescient picture
of the sign relation, a bit like so:
| s (sema, semeion, symbolon)
| /
| /
| /
| (pragma) o-------@
| \
| \
| \
| i (pathema)
I do not know how this strikes you, but for my part these deep taproots --
pragma for object in every sense, pathema for a passionate experience's
impression on the soul, sema and semeion signifying everything from the
mark that we make on the world, to a gravestone, to an augury of cranes
in the sky, and symbolon, the coin that friends break on parting for an
unknown time, to be recast together as a token of recognition when once
they encounter one another again -- are so much more evocative than our
Latin-derived English approximations, and they promise to teach volumes
more than I can ever tell. I still remember the time when I first read
this passage, and think that I began to understand the pragmatic way of
thinking for the first time then and there.
Let us gaze too upon the 2-adic faces that Aristotle
perceives in this visage of the 3-adic sign relation:
| s (sema, semeion, symbolon)
| <???> . /.
| . / .
| . / .
| (pragma) o-------@ . <sema, semeion, symbolon>
| . \ .
| . \ .
| <homoioma> . \.
| i (pathema)
Aristotle derives a couple of 2-adic relations from the 3-adic sign relation:
1. The pathema (an impression on the pysche, and thus one kind of interpretant sign)
is a copy, counterfeit, image, likeness, resemblance, or semblance of the pragma.
2. The sign can be a "sign of" this pathema in many diverse ways,
from the more natural semeion to the more artificial symbolon.
3. What about the 2-adic relation between the pragma and the sign?
Aristotle does not single it out for separate mention, and the
consequences of that omission have been enormous for semiotics,
since it seems to have led many succeeding generations to view
the 2-adic relation of object to sign as composite, derivative,
or redundant, as if it could always be recomposed from knowing
the other two relations. In Peirce's terms, this would amount
to a particular brand of degenerate 3-adic relation, one where
the sign is a feature of a likeness of the object, or where it
is a fragment of a likeness of the object.
Jon Awbrey
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Reference Material
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/inquiry/fall95/awbrey.html
http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journals/Details/issue/abstract/ab017772.html
http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/awbrey/integrat.htm
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