1.2.6.
Finally, certain languages — for instance, Italian —adopt expressions such as colpire nel segno (to hit the target, to touch the sore spot), mettere a segno (to score, as in to score an uppercut), fare un segno dove si deve tagliare (to draw a dressmaker’s pattern for where the cloth is to be cut), passare ilsegno (to overstep the mark): signs as targets, termina ad quae, to be used as markings in order to proceed in a thorough way (per filo e per segno). The aliquid in this case, rather than standing for, stands where a certain operation is to be addressed. It is an instruction rather than a substitution. In this sense, the North Star is a sign for the sailor. The structure of the link is inferential, but with some complications: if p now, and if therefore you will do z, then you will obtain q.
1.3. Intension and extension
Too many things are signs, and too different from each other. This tur-moil of homonymies is complicated by a further equivocation. Is tne sign «res, praeter speciem quam ingerit sensibus, aliud aliquid ex se faciens in cog-nitationem venire» (Augustine, De Doctrine Christiana 2.I.I), or, as in elsewhere suggested by the same Augustine, is the sign something by which we indicate objects or states of the world? Is the sign an inten-sional or an extensional device? Let us attempt an analysis of a typical semiotic maze. A red flag with a Hammer and Sickle is equivalent to Communism (p q). But if someone carries a red flag with a Hammer and Sickle, then that person is probably a Communist (p q).
If we take a statement such as at home I have ten cats, what is the sign? Is it the word cats (domestic felines), the global content of the sentence (in my house I keep ten domestic felines), the reference to the fact that it just so hap-pens that within the world of our actual experience there is a specific house where there are ten specific cats? Or is it the fact that, if I have ten cats at home, then I must have enough space for them, then I prob-ably cannot keep a dog, and then I am an animal lover? Furthermore, in all these cases, what constitutes the sign? Is it the concrete occurrence or the abstract type? Is is the phonetic utterance [kat], or the phonological and lexical model /cat/? Is it the fact that hic et nunc I have ten cats at home (with all the possible inferences), or the class of all the facts of this nature, so that anyone who somehow happens to have ten cats at home will show himself or herself to be an animal lover who cannot possibly keep a dog?
1.4. Elusive solutions
Some people claim that the word sign can be applied only to linguistic entities. Malmberg, for instance, decides to call a symbol any element representing something else, and to keep the term ‘sign’ to indicate «those units which, like the signs of language, have a double articulation and owe their existence to an act of signification» (where signification means intentional communication) (1977:21). Every sign is a symbol, but not every symbol is a sign. This decision, in itself moderate, does not determine, however, (a) to what extent signs are relatable to symbols and (b) which science should study symbols and which categories should be employed. Furthermore, the difference between extension and intension is not clarified, even though the study of signs is presumed to be intensionally oriented.
This distinction between areas is suggested at times on the basis of more radical epistemological intentions. Harman, for instance, argues as follows:
Smoke means fire and the word combustion means fire, but not in the same sense of means. The word means is ambiguous. To say that smoke means fire is to say that smoke is a symptom, sign, indication, or evidence for fire. To say that the word combustion means fire is to say that people use the word to mean fire. Furthermore, there is no ordinary sense of the word mean in which a picture of a man means a man or means that man. This suggests that Peirce’s theory of signs would comprise at least three rather different subjects: a theory of the intended meaning, a theory of evidence, and a theory of pictorial depiction. There is no reason to think that these theories must contain common principles. (1977:23)
Harman’s argument clashes, first of all, with the linguistic usage. Why have people used the word sign for more than two thousand years to define phenomena which should be divided into three different categories? Second, Harman’s objection goes against the consensus gentium of the philosophical tradition. From the Stoics to the Middle Ages, from Locke to Peirce, from Husserl to Wittgenstein, there has been a con-stant attempt to find a common basis for the theory of linguistic meaning and for the theory of pictorial representation, and also for the theory of meaning and the theory of inference.
Finally, the objection goes against a philosophical instinct, very adequately summarized by Aristotle in terms of the ‘wonder’ which in-duces persons to philosophize. What is the ‘meaning’ of the expression at home I have ten cats? Is it its propositional content or what can be inferred from the fact that I have ten cats? One could answer that the second phenomenon has nothing to do with linguistic meaning, since it belongs to the universe of proofs which can be articulated by using the facts represented by the propositions. Yet, is the antecedent evoked by language so easily separable from the language which represented it? When we examine the problem of the Stoic sëmeîon (σημειον), we shall see how ambiguous and inextricable is the relationship among a fact, the proposition which represents it, and the sentence which expresses that proposition. In any event, what makes the two problems difficult to separate is precisely the fact that in both cases aliquid stat pro aliquo. The banner of standing for may vary, yet we still face a peculiar dialectic of Presence and absence in both cases. Is this not a good enough reason to ask whether a common mechanism, however deep, might govern both Phenomena?
A man wears a badge with a Hammer and Sickle at his buttonhole. Are we facing a case of ‘intended meaning’ (the man wants to say that he is a Communist), of pictorial representation (the badge represents ‘sym-bolically’ the union of workers and peasants), or of inferential proof (if he wears the badge, then he must be a Communist)? The same event falls within the scope of what Harman sees as three different categories. It is true that the same phenomenon can be the object of quite different theories: the badge can be studied by inorganic chemistry in terms of the material of which it is made, by physics in terms of its being subjected to gravitational laws, by economics in terms of its being an industrial prod-uct which is bought and sold. But, in our case, the badge is the object of the three (presumed) theories of meaning, of representation and of evi-dence only inasmuch as it does not stand for itself. It does not stand for its molecular composition, its tendency to fall down, its capability of being packaged and transported. It stands for something which is outside it-self. In this sense it gives rise to wonder, and it becomes the same abstract object of the same theoretical question.
1.5. The deconstruction of the linguistic sign
The following critiques have characteristics in common: first, when they speak of sign in general and consider other kinds of signs, they point to the structure of the linguistic sign. Second, they tend to dissolve the sign into entities of greater or lesser purport.
Ι.5.Ι. Sign vs.figura
As an entity, the sign is too large. Phonology’s work on linguistic signifiers, seen as the result of the articulation of lesser phonological units, starts out with the Stoic’s discovery of the stoichéia (στοιχέία), it reaches maturity with Hjelmslev’s postulating the existence of figurae, and is crowned by Jakobson’s theory of distinctive features. This theoretical achievement does not in itself question the notion of linguis-tic sign, but with Hjelmslev there arises the possibility of identifying
figurae at the content level as well:
If, for example, a mechanical inventory at a given stage of the procedure leads to a registration of the entities of content ‘ram’, ‘ewe’, ‘man’, ‘wo-man’, ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘stallion’, ‘mare’, ‘sheep’, ‘human being’, ‘child’, ‘horse’, ‘he’, and ‘she’ —then ‘ram’, ‘ewe’, ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘stallion’, and ‘mare’ must be eliminated from the inventory of elements if they can be explained univocally as relational units that include only ‘he’ or ‘she’ on the one hand, and ‘sheep’, ‘human being’, ‘child’, ‘horse’, on the other. (1943:70)
The discovery of a content articulation leads Hjelmslev to argue that languages cannot be described as pure sign systems:
By the aims usually attributed to them they are first and foremost sign sys-tems; but by their internal structure they are first and foremost something different, namely, systems of figurae that can be used to construct signs. The definition of a language as a sign system has thus shown itself, on closer analysis, to be unsatisfactory. It concerns only the external functions of a language, its relation to the nonlinguistic factors that surround it, but not its proper, internal functions. (Ibid., p. 47)
The sign (or the
