If, out of a taste (also medieval) for summing up systems of definitions in trees of the Porphyrian kind, one begins to construct (for every author who mentions the barking of the dog or similar utterances) taxonomies of the various species of utterances and sounds, one becomes aware that, depending on the author, the moaning of the sick and the barking of the dog occupy different positions. Which leads us to suspect that, when different authors spoke of the latratus canis, they had in mind a different zoosemiotic phenomenon, and that this difference in classification implied a difference in underlying semiotics.
Sometimes, to discover the soul of a philosophical system we must latch on to symptoms at its periphery. Which amounts to saying that sometimes we can better understand the Thomistic system through the implications it produces in a quaestio quodlibetalis than by starting with the Summae Theologiae (to which, however, we must obviously return). This may not be true in every case, but one thing that is sure is that an inquiry into the barking of the dog demonstrates that not only is there a medieval semiotics, but there are in fact many.
4.2. Latratus Canis
4.2.1. Names and Signs
To account for the embarrassing position of the latratus canis in medieval linguistic theories we must bear in mind the fact that Greek semiotics, from the Corpus Hippocraticum to the Stoics, draws a clear distinction between a theory of names (in other words, of verbal language) and a theory of signs. The signs (semeia) are natural phenomena, which today we call symptoms or indices, whose relationship to what they signify is based on the mechanism of inference: if such and such a symptom, then such and such a malady; if this woman produces milk, then she has given birth; where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Words, on the other hand, bear a different relationship to the things they name or the concept they signify, and this relationship is the one sanctioned by the Aristotelian theory of definition. It is a relationship of equivalency or mutual substitutability.
Now, these two semiotic lines begin to merge in the Stoics, and this fusion will be explicitly recognized by Augustine (in the De magistro, in the De doctrina christiana, and in the De dialectica).21 In Augustine a science of the signum as the supreme genus takes shape, of which both symptoms and words, the mimetic gestures of actors and the blare of the military trumpet, are species. Still, not even in Augustine is the dichotomy definitively resolved between the relationship of inference, which binds a natural sign to the thing it is a sign of, and the relationship of equivalence, which binds a linguistic term to the concept it signifies or the thing it designates.
By now medieval semiotics is aware of both lines of thought, but is not yet fully capable of perfecting their unification. This is why, as we shall see, the latratus canis will occupy a different position in different classifications, depending on whether they are classifications of signs in general or of voces. Because the classification of signa is Stoic in origin, while the classification of voces is Aristotelian.
4.2.2. The Stoic Influence: Augustine
In his De doctrina christiana (II, 1–4), Augustine proposes his famous definition of the sign. A sign is something which, over and above its sensible aspect, brings to mind something different from itself, like the spoor left by an animal, the smoke from which one infers the presence of fire, the moan that indicates pain, the bugle that communicates orders to a troop of soldiers. Signs are therefore either natural or given. Signa naturalia are those that make something manifest independently of any intention, like the smoke that indicates fire or the tracks left by the animal or even the anger that shows in a face without the angry person wishing to show it. The signa data on the other hand are those emitted in order to communicate the movements of the mind or the contents of one’s thought. We only signify in order to produce in the mind of someone else what we already have in our own. But, on the one hand, what is in the mind of the person emitting the sign is not necessarily a concept; it can also be a psychological state or a sensation; on the other hand, the sign produces something in the mind of the addressee, not necessarily a concept. This is why Augustine places among the signa data both the words of Scripture (in addition of course to human words) and the signs produced by animals, and, in a humane touch, he evokes for us not only the utilitarian relationship between the rooster and the hen in search of food but also the cooing of the turtle dove calling for her mate.22
He leaves us no choice, then, but to attribute to him the classification shown in Figure 4.1.
Figure 4.1
Except that at this point Augustine realizes that he has gone too far, and in his final paragraph he corrects himself, leaving in suspense the question as to whether the call of the dove or the groans of the sick are truly to be considered phenomena of signification. If it were not for this correction, the “language” of the dove would have been firmly situated alongside the words of Holy Scripture. And since it is the latter that he is concerned with, he chooses to shelve the other issue for the time being.
4.2.3. The Stoic Influence: Abelard
One solution to the riddle of the dove will make its appearance (albeit somewhat problematically) with Abelard. In his Dialectica (I, iii, 1), the classification he espouses (which in any case does not depart from the Augustinian distinction) can be reduced to the Aristotelian-Boethian model (to be discussed later): meaningful voces may be divided into those than are meaningful naturaliter and those whose meaning proceeds ex impositione or ad placitum (“by convention”); and among the natural utterances he cites the barking of the dog (as an expression of anger).23
But in his Ingredientibus, another opposition is associated with that between naturaliter and ex impositione, namely, that between significativa and significantia.24
In order for a word to be significativa it must be an institutio. This institutio is not a convention (like the impositio); instead it is a decision that lies behind both the impositio and the natural significativeness, and could come very close to intentionality. Words signify in fact by means of the institution of human will, which orders them ad intellectum constituere, that is, to produce concepts. Seeing that by his day the barking of the dog must have become a canonical citation, Abelard declares that it is significant of anger and pain, just like a human expression designed to communicate something, because it is instituted by nature, in other words by God, to express this meaning. Thus, the bark can be distinguished from those phenomena that are merely significantia, that is, symptomatic, such as, for example, that same bark that, heard from a distance, allows us merely to conclude that there is a dog somewhere over yonder.
If a man, then, hears a bark and infers that there is a dog present, this is a symptom being used, by inference, to draw a signification, but the fact that it becomes significant does not imply that it has been instituted as significative. On the other hand, when the dog barks, it does so to express a specific concept (anger or pain or rejoicing), in other words, in order to constituere intellectum (produce concepts) in our minds. Abelard does not say that the dog does so of its own free will: the dog is acted upon by another will, belonging to the natural order (a sort, we might say, of agent will).25 But it is still an intentional agent. Abelard is quite clear: a thing is significative because of the act of will that produces it as such, not because of the fact that it produces meanings.
Accordingly, Abelard’s taxonomy should be translated as in Figure 4.2.
Figure 4.2
Apropos of which, it could be said that where there is institutio, there is some form of code, a correspondence (natural or conventional) between signans and signatum, which cannot be simply a matter of conjecture. But the voces significantes remain a matter for conjecture and therefore inference, and in this sense Abelard sticks to the Stoic distinction that distinguishes between speech act and index or cue.
4.2.4. Boethius’s Reading of De interpretatione 16a
This distinction, however, is not so evident in the semiotics clearly derived from Aristotle. Now, if we are to appreciate most of the discussions that follow, we must take as our point of departure, as the Middle Ages did, De interpretatione 16a, where, with the purpose of defining nouns and verbs, Aristotle makes a number of statements about signs in general. Let me attempt a translatio media, which, while taking into account our current versions, endeavors above all to give an account of those aspects that particularly struck the translators and interpreters of the Middle Ages:
The sounds of the voice (ta en te phone) are symbols (symbola) of the affections (pathematon) of the soul, just as the letters
