Now, recognizing a phoneme certainly means identifying it as the token of a type. This recognition might be founded on a phenomenon of primary semiosis, that of «categorial perception» (see Petitot 1983, 1985a, 1985b). But what most interests me is that, above and beyond the laboratory experience, to perceive a phoneme as such amid the confusion of the sound environment I must make the interpretative decision that it is indeed a phoneme and not an interjection or groan or sound emitted by chance. It is a matter of starting from a sound substance in order to perceive it as the form of an expression. The phenomenon can be rapid, even unconscious, but this does not alter the fact that it is interpretative.
Moreover, we can categorize a phonation or a string of phonations as phonemes without having yet ascertained to which phonological system they belong. It is enough to think of international conferences: someone comes up and starts talking; she emits one or two introductory sounds, and we have to decide what language she is speaking. If she says [ma], we might be dealing with an adversative in Italian, or a possessive in French. Naturally people speak in an uninterrupted flow, so even before we make an interpretative decision about the first phoneme that someone has emitted, we are already in the context of the spoken string. We are of course guided by the accent, by a meaning that we attribute tentatively to the phonations. But what should be stressed here is that this is in fact a matter of interpretation, whereby we decide both about the material identity of the stimulus and about the functional identity of the stimulus.33
There is therefore a perceptual process both in the recognition of a dog and in the recognition of the word dog scribbled on a sheet of paper.
However, I do not think we can say that it is the same thing to perceive a photo of a dog as the hypoicon of a dog, and as a consequence to perceive the dog as the token of a perceptual type, and to perceive a scribble on the wall as a token of the word dog. In cases of trompe l’oeil, I might even think I am perceiving a real dog directly without realizing that it is a hypoicon; with the written word, I can perceive it as such only after I have decided that it is a sign.34
6.15 Alpha and Beta Mode: a Catastrophe Point?
Having now established a few fixed points, let us try to take up the thread of our discourse. Basic semiosic processes take place in perception. We perceive fixed points because we construct cognitive types, interwoven no doubt with culture and convention but nonetheless largely dependent on determinations from the stimulating field. To understand a sign as such, we must first bring perceptual processes into play, that is to say, we must perceive substances as forms of expression.
But there are signs whose expression plane, in order to be recognized as such, must be perceived (even if by virtue of surrogate stimuli) through basic semiosis, so that we could perceive them as signs even if we decided we were not dealing with the expression of a sign function. In such cases I shall talk of alpha mode.35
On the other hand, there are cases where to perceive a substance as form I must first of all presume that it is an expression of a sign function, deliberately produced with a view to communicating. In such cases I shall talk of beta mode.
It is through alpha mode that we perceive pictures (or photos, or a film image: note the reaction of the first spectators at the Lumière brothers’ projection of a train arriving at the station) as if they were the «scene» itself. It is only on subsequent reflection that we establish the fact that we are confronted with a sign function. It is thanks to beta mode that the word house is recognized without being confused with hose: we favor the assumption that this must be a linguistic expression, and that this linguistic expression must find itself in a rational context, which is why, on having to decide whether the speaker has said The house in which I live is a hundred yards away or The hose in which I live is a hundred yards away, we tend (under normal circumstances) to favor the first interpretation.
I define as alpha mode that mode in which, even before deciding we are confronted with the expression of a sign function, we perceive through surrogate stimuli a given object or scene which we then elect as the expression plane of a sign function.
I define as beta mode that mode in which, in order to perceive the expression plane of sign functions, it is necessary first to presume that we are in fact dealing with expressions, and the supposition that they are indeed expressions orients our perception.
The alpha/beta distinction does not correspond to that between motivated and conventional signs. The face of a clock is a motivated expression of planetary movement, or of what we know about it (we are dealing with a case of ratio difficilis), nevertheless we must first perceive that face as a sign (beta mode) before being able to read it as a motivated sign (and so the position x of the hands is in motivated correspondence with the position y of the sun in the sky, and vice versa). Alpha mode would let me perceive only a circular form across which two little rods move, and this is how a primitive who has never seen a clock would see one.
It is obvious that, whatever the circumstances, we must first perceive the substance of the expression, but in alpha mode a substance is perceived as form even before this form is recognized as the form of an expression. All that is recognized, as Greimas would put it, is a «figure of the world.» In beta mode, on the other hand, a form must be interpreted as the form of an expression before it can be identified.
Just how fuzzy is the boundary between the two modes is revealed by the two drawings in figure 6.8 (Gentner and Markman !995)-
The first impact is perceptual. Confronted with the surrogate stimulus that offers me two basic parallelepiped structures set above two circular structures, I perceive a generic «land vehicle.» Of course, in this phase too, if I have never had any experience of a vehicle, it would be hard for me to identify it as such. Montezuma, who had no knowledge of wheeled vehicles, might have «seen» something else in these drawings, for example, two eyes under a strange shape of helmet. But he would still have interpreted surrogate stimuli in the light of one of his own cognitive types.
When I move on from the perception of a vehicle to the interpretation of the various vehicles in play as motorcar, motorboat, and tow truck, much encyclopedic knowledge has already intervened. I have already entered Thirdness. Once I have perceived «vehicle,» I must proceed from the recognition of the percept (owing to surrogate stimuli) to the interpretation of a scene. I then recognize it as the hypoiconic representation of a real scene, and I begin to use the image as an expression that refers me to a content.
Figure 6.8
Only at that point can I elaborate macropropositions that put the two scenes into words: I note an inverse symmetry between them (in the first drawing, the car is being towed by the truck; in the second it is the car that is towing the motorboat), and, if I possess an «Unlucky Weekend» script, I can also put the sequence back in order by putting the second drawing in place of the first.
But what interests us here is that only after having interpreted the two scenes as hypoicons can I understand the circle depicted in both images as a sun (otherwise it could have been any other circular object, or a circle, in the geometric sense of the term), and, above all, only then can I understand the two squiggles in the second image as birds (out of context, I might have understood them as hills or as a clumsy transcription of the number 33). This example strikes me as a very useful one for demonstrating the oscillations that continuously intervene, in our interpretation of hypoicons, between the alpha and beta modes. That sun and those birds were not perceivable the way the vehicles were. First I had to decide that they were two signs that stood for something, and only afterward did I try to understand them as if they were surrogate stimuli (very poorly defined). In a certain sense, in order to interpret those signs as signs of surrogate stimuli, I had to appeal to the principle of charity.
6.16 From Perceptual Likeness to Conceptual Similarities
It seems clear
