Alfred Lang | | |
Conference Presentation and Handout 1992 | ||
Semiotic tools for an isomorphic conception of perception and action, mind and culture | 1992.07 | |
30 / 13KB Last revised 98.11.10 | ||
XXV. International Congress of Psychology, International Union of Psychological Science. Brussels, 19.7.92. Typoscr. 2 + Pp. | © 1998 by Alfred Lang | |
Scientific and educational use permitted | ||
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I. How to integrate culture in a psychological construction
II. How to construct continuity for carrying psychological causation
- Triadic Semiosis in an understanding based on Charles S. Peirce
- Structure-Process Phasing
- The Semion as the fundamental triadic relation structure
- REFerence Ñ INTerpretance Ñ REPresentance
- The Semiotic Function Circle
Semiotic Ecology
Abstract
Individual ontogenetic development is conceived of as continuous spiralling series proceeding in sequences of four steps. These are or should be the general fields of psychological interest: (a) perception: structure formation in memory under environmental influence; (b) mental processes: structure changes within the mind; (c) action: structure formation in the environment guided from the mind; (d) culture: environment maintenance and evolution done by others, producing this coherent complex of meaning that assures the functioning of individual and social systems. All four steps are equally conceived as structure forming or sign processes in the tradition of triadic semiotics of C.S. Peirce.
Psychology has predominantly investigated the influence of "given" entities (stimuli, situations) on people (organisms, minds, responses). With few exceptions, interest in the results of human action is restricted to their indicative function for what the stimuli have attained. However, this generalised cause-effect or Fechnerian paradigm dominating the whole discipline is an unrealistically narrow understanding of the human condition.
(1) In fact, major parts and aspects of the human environment are entities produced, and this in a systematic manner, by human action. The relationship between people and their environment is a two-way process. So the influence of people on the world is or should as well be of psychological interest in itself.
(2) On methodological grounds, the strategy of finding the principles governing the so-called mental processes by investigating the effects of stimuli on responses runs all the risks of a circular argument. If what is called "stimuli" is generally not something simply given but rather a product of human action, then the mental organisation of the subjects to be investigated is virtually packed into the research paradigm in the form of the mental organisation of the investigator. For example, one of the major characters of perceptual-cognitive organisation is the figure-ground- or unity formation principle. As a consequence of this we understand stimuli, situations as well as the individual or the organism as an elementary units. But this is meaningful only in a restricted sense, because the latter would neither live nor mentally function without continual exchange with its environment and the former, in so far as they are made by humans, are made as units. It is indeed very difficult if not impossible or arbitrary to specify the boundaries of both the individual and the situation; both are in fact relational rather than substance terms and should be treated as such.
(3) The generalised Fechnerian paradigm, in addition, is limited to only a section of the ecological function circle of information exchange between individuals and their environment. Individual ontogenetic development can be conceived of as continuous spiralling series proceeding in sequences of four steps in each circle going from perception to mental processes to action to culture and then starting anew. These steps are presently either practically omitted from systematic psychological interest (culture) or treated among them in quite different and incompatible ways. The conceptual tools for dealing with perceptual or actional or inner-mental processes have few particulars in common.
However, if it is true that perceptual processes result in some transient or lasting structure formation within the mind (memory or psychological organisation at large) which then in turn is a crucial determinant of behavior or action of the same individual, it is also true that any action of an individual produces a transient or lasting formation in the environment which can be described in material-energetic and informational terms and which in turn is an important determinant of further perception and action of the same and/or other individuals. Collectively and as an organised whole of objective and symbolic entities these environmental traces of actions are called culture. Whilst perception leaves structures in the mind, action results in a modified environment or evolving culture. Insofar as the internal mind implies characters of the environment and the environment bears traces of the actors' characters and in turn is indirectly determining other actions, a correspondence between the minds and the external structures is assured. No mind is thinkable without such a relation to the environment, neither is culture conceivable without its corresponding (internal) minds. Culture therefore is aptly described as an "external mind". Internal and external mind together are a logically inseparable ecological unit in spite of mind and culture being incorporated in different physical structures.
On this background conceptual tools are wanted which enable us to treat the four steps in the ecological unit formation process and to conceive of psychological functioning of the ecological unit in a consistent and systematic manner. In elaborating on Jakob von Uexküll's Function-Circle it is proposed to apply triadic semiotics in the tradition of Charles S. Peirce to all four steps. Semiosis or triadic sign process is advanced as a candidate for the basic and irreducible psychological process unit suitable to describe structure formation and change both within and between individuals and their cultural surrounds. As a process, semiosis refers to a logically inseparable triad of components which would lose their meaning when separated from the triad and which include exactly a referent or source, an interpretant or mediator, and a representant or result.
The four steps of psychological functioning can briefly be sketched as follows: (a) IntrO-Semiosis or perception: how does a particular structure formation come about in the memory of an individual under the influence of his/her environment; (b) IntrA-Semiosis or mental processes, in the widest sense: how does structure change occur within the mind in itself; (c) ExtrO-Semiosis or action: how do living systems attain structure change in their environment; (d) ExtrA-Semiosis or culture processes: how does the environment become and evolve as that relatively coherent complex of meaning, objects and symbols, that assures the functioning of individual and social systems as well as the stability and change in cultural traditions.
Representant of an action is always an external structure which, either as such or after further processing by other people serves as a referent for an ensuing perception. Representants of perceptions are mental structures which in turn serve as referents for action processes. Dynamic memory structures serve as interpretants both in the case of perception and of action. Whereas the semiotic components of perceptions, actions and cultural processes are directly accessible, this is not so with the parts of the internal processes. The latter can only indirectly become manifest, i.e. by further semioses which are of course action processes and their results.
The present conception will be illustrated with research from a field called People with their Things in their Rooms and which includes the psychology of things, of residential activities and of urban settings. The conception appears pertinent to several branches of psychology, among them general, developmental, social, environmental, and cultural psychology. In addition it appears to obviate the venerable mind-body-problem, because all structures formed by semiosis are neither simply material nor simply mental.
In their lighter (or darker?) hours, it seems, many psychological researchers agree that there might be some rather fundamental conceptual flaws in this science.
In this theoretical note, I would like to focus on two such issues:
The first of these pertains to the fact that 20th century psychology has given little systematic attention to culture in spite of the fact that humans live in a largely self-constructed environment.The second issue concerns the psychological continuum required to carry psychological causation.
This appears to be more abstract. However, I hope, you agree that any function or description of change that claims to be more than a formal statement, e.g. a mathematical equation, presupposes something that carries the function. Some entity that exists right through the change, that remains its identity while changing all the way.
This is what living systems, including humans, do in their development. What type of through-going existence carries psychological phenomena in their change?
This is a question, Kurt Lewin had been asking in the early twenties. Still today, there is neither a reasonable nor an accepted answer.
It would be strange, indeed, if psychological phenomena would arise from nowhere or nothing and go into nothing or nowhere or if they would change their existence in mid-process, as is assumed in so much of our theorising.
We shall see that the two issues are intimately related. I am proposing to approach them with the help of semiotic tools constructed in the wake of Charles Peirce´s evolutionary triadic semiotics.
Culture and Semiosis
I. How to integrate culture in a psychological construction
The generalised Fechnerian paradigm
Psychology in its history as an empirical science, with few exceptions, has investigated the influence of some "given" entities (called stimuli, situations) on people as indicated by their reactions or responses. With few exceptions, interest in human behavior or action is in its indicative function for the effects, some part of the world has upon the subject investigated.
I call this the general Fechnerian paradigm, because its methodology is laid out according to a generalised psychophysical function of the type R = f (S), and both, R and S are only instrumental in so far as the function is to reveal some disposition or regularity or lawfulness that the psychologist wants to determine.
The methodology in this general sense is quite the same whether
However, this general Fechnerian paradigm, as convincing and useful it has been for roughly 150 years, is completely unrealistic and misleading:
It is unrealistic, because humans live in a largely self-produced environment.It is arbitrary in the worst possible sense to cut out one section or phase of something that is obviously more extended and connected.
If you represent the world as seen from the viewpoint of a researcher by the sheet of paper, then, as a psychologist interested in understanding the human condition, you can distinguish and draw on the sheet in addition to the researcher (who, of course, is also a part of the whole represented by the sheet)
• human individuals or persons• acting by hands and voice etc.
• to create or modify their environment, a system of artifacts
• which in turn are available for perception by ear and eye etc., both for the originator and for others, individuals and groups. The accepted term to designate that artefactual complement to the person is culture.
This particular rendering of that psycho-ecological function circle or spiral of any given system consisting of and individual and its environment (Umwelt) has been composed using Empress Irene od Byzanz (from the Hagia Sophia, 12th c., top), King Wilhelm II of Sicily confering the model of the dome to Maria (from the dome in Monreale, 12th c., bottom) connected by anonymous ear, eye, hand, and A. Colzani singing Falstaff (left and right). The connection among the 4 phases of the circle is depicted by an impossible figure with virtual contours based on ideas by Penrose and by Schuman and Kanisza.
The generalised Fechnerian paradigm is also misleading and even deceiving for several reasons. I can only mention here only the, in my opinion, perhaps most pernicious of them.
The omission of the culture phase of the human cycle coerces of the general Fechnerian methodology into circularity. I argue by example:
Whenever an experimenter presents some stimuli or situation to a subject, say in a perception or any other experiment or design leading to the registration of some reaction, then, obviously, any such design of stimuli or situations is conditional upon the actional, cognitive and perceptual disposition of the experimenter .So, to put it very laconically, the experimenter puts his own "psychology" into the experiment which he imputes to the be that of his subject. This does not solve, but rather, spoof the mind-body problem.
For the generalised Fechnerian paradigm also leads into dualism's dilemma:
if you understand it dualistically, the mind is a phantom entity between two material domains, the stimulus and the response,if you understand it monistically, the mind reduces to matter and you have to give up either determinacy of matter or freedom of choice.
Culture or external sign complexes as complements to Persons
Function Circle (von Uexküll 1908/1920)
- I believe we should think psychology always in terms of function circles as illustrated by my emblematic Irene of Monreale
- This conception is based on the well-known function circle of Jakob von Uexküll
- However, we have to supplement von Uexküll´s model due to the facts of culture
- Humans (and to a limited extent also some other animals) systematically modify their environment in a way pertinent to their own further "career" and influential to the fate of their companions and progeny
+ Humans do not only read or interpret signs existent in a given world, but, in addition,
- they leave traces of their actions or create specific constellations of signs in their surrounds to be taken up later on and elsewhere by themselves and others
- and they accommodate their means of reading, organising and creating such signs according to what they are offered by their ancestors and contemporaries within a more or less coherent community
+ Functionally equivalent to bodily and behavioural signs and coordinated behavior in social instincts,
- cultural change thus provides for a system of external control structures in the environment
- and complementary internal perceptual and actional systems in the individuals exposed to the former
+ Ecological Units as Person-Culture-Complexes in recursive development
Development as a Four-Step Function Spiral
+ I Propose the term "Ecological Unit" for that evolving complex consisting of individuals (or groups) and their environment understood in terms of some function circle
- This is particularly the case with persons and their cultural environment
+ I venture the double thesis
- that there is nothing in persons that could be conceived of without specifying its relations to some external, mostly cultural fact
- and that there is nothing in the human environment that could be conceived of, or, that could realise its potential, without some corresponding entity within persons
- Person and Culture are thus relational rather than substance terms and both should be dealt with accordingly
+ The consequence is that we have to deal with both together, as a unit or whole
- we cannot really understand the parts when taken separately
+ We can conceive of the ecological unit as a set of structures that carry some processing repeatedly through for steps
- perception, or IntrO from culture to mind
- mental processes or IntrA, conjectured " operations" within the mind
- action processes, or ExtrO from mind to culture, and
- ExtrA, i.e. processes within culture, ordinarily invovling other persons in a manner as just described
+ In addition, we have to deal with ecological units as evolving entities
- i.e. the circle is spiralling
+ what is attained either externally in the environment or internally in any person
- has a potential of becoming an essential or partial precondition of any later phase in the process we call development
+ Ecological units are thus of a recursive nature and have, each of them, a principally unique history,
+ however coordinated and common these many histories are, due to
- a highly similar biogenetic endowment of persons and to
- a largely shared cultural environment for those living in contact and mutual exchange
+ Ecological units, in contrast to many other system theories, are thought to be indirectly "self"Ðreferential
- internal, personal systems refer in an important measure to external facts
- and external, cultural processes necessary refer to Ñ are made by, and co-determine in turn Ñ individual person systems
- the two subsystems of the unit being as well dependent upon as partially autonomous of each other
+ An essential point to keep in mind is that we conceive of psycho-ecological processes to create building blocks which in turn function as co-controls for further processes of the same kind
- Whether building blocks or structures are within or around the persons is of no import
- psycho-ecological processes always spread across the unit as a whole
- Indirect "self"-reference, in my opinion, is indispensable for understanding development
II. How to construct continuity for carrying psychological causation
+ Triadic Semiosis in an understanding based on Charles S. Peirce
+ So we have conceptually clarified to some extenxt our provisional phenomenological view on person-culture units (as illustrated by Irene of Monreale)
- by seeing them as function circles,
- perceptual and actional subsystem taking a mediating function
- We now have to think of ways they can fulfil that role
- Can we find a solution of the psychological causation problem?
+ It is impossible in the time available here to give more than an intuitive sketch of a semiotic-ecological conception
- it appears to work in already a number of "applications" to processes of exchange between people and their physical and social environment
+ We understand mediation as semiosis
- "Semiosis" or "sign process" is a term with a variety of meaning in the literature
+ Semiosis in our view designates a triadic process or function whereby one entity together with another entity determines a third entity in such a way that any of the three is misconceived if their triadic relation is ignored.
- Our understanding, for those informed, reverts to the original sign conception of Charles Sanders Peirce in that it goes behind the presently dominating notion of signs heavily influenced by Saussure, Morris and Information- or Communication- theory
+ It should be evident on the surface that triadic semiosis proposes a type of causation that seems much more akin to what we observe in the biological and psychological realm
- because it avoids the necessary and automatic consequences with given sufficient conditions
- Triadic semiosis gives open processes an opportunity
- it thinks of an influencing and of a receiving agency and gives both their own worth
+ dyadic causation, the type we assume in the typical natural law, is a special case
- namely that of a passive receiving agency
+ Of course, semiosis does not negate natural law
- Semiosis refers to those events wherbye two perfectly deterministic systems interact in a way that could not be" foreseen" bei either of them
- It pertains to chance events and to the role of accumulated experience and thus is the major device to understand evolution
+ The term "sign" can refer either to the triadic relative as a whole or to just one of the three terms
- Because of this ambiguity I tend to avoid the term
- Anyhow, it might help understanding, if you use a broad sign concept, to say that what people do in a semiotic-ecological understanding, is nothing but producing and "reading" signs
+ Structure-Process Phasing
+ The important point to emphasise, I said it before, is that semiosis in our understanding has two faces, a structural or building block and a functional or process aspect
+ seen as a structure or relative the triadic entity is a sort of memory
- in that it binds, in a particular way, three components, each of which can also function in any of a number of other semioses
- seen as a process or function it has a potential to procreate other semioses or signs
- So the sign, in the Peircean understanding, is structure and force, matter and form, passive and active
- In Peirce´s conception, a sign is anything that has the potential to co-determine, under suitable circumstances, another sign. And so in an infinite continuum.
+ For both the triad and its three aspects or components it is mandatory
+ that they have a material aspect Ñ there is no sign that is not concretely embodied
- but it would make no sense to speak of signs as material entities that, as such, could be described and classified
+ At the same time the sign is nothing spiritual
- where there is no embodiment, there is no sign
- where there is no suitable milieu for a sign to develop its effects, there is no sign either
+ If A can produce an effect on B by means of sign processes such as spoken or written sentences, by giving her road map or by presenting him with a toy, a car or a house,
+ why should it be less true that A can produce effects on C by intermediary of B
- we need a chain of semioses going from A´s action to B´s perception
- from B´s perception to B´s action
- and from B´s action to C´s perception etc.
- So it is suitable to conclude that the mental processes "within" B have exactly the same function as those words and things mediating between A and B or B and C
+ So what we describe materially as brain processes, to mention a major embodiment, must semiotically be constructed as signs
- Or what we describe phenomenologically in trying to make a picture of our mental experiencing is nothing but an aspect of sign processes
- and necessarily expressed in terms of signs, such as verbal report or diagrammatic drawing or computer simulation or the like
- Indeed, Peirce insisted on writing time and again that thought or persons and even groups of persons might best be conceived as signs
- Remember that semiosis includes a temporary or permanent storing of some information including the potential to bring that information to life in suitable conditions
+ So is triadic semiosis a candidate for what we are seeking:
- the through-going carrier of change in some entity remaining essentially itself?
+ It is impossible here to go into the differences between triadic and dyadic semiosis
- or types of causation connected with them
+ I can only try to briefly specify these conceptual tools
- first in a general, abstrac way
- and then in their role in the function circle or spiral described above
+ The Semion as the fundamental triadic relation structure
REFerence Ñ INTerpretance Ñ REPresentance The Semion
+ The Semion is the basic building block and instrument of what the function circle is and how it works
- Its name is inspired by the chemical active building block, the Ion
- it has both structure and specific valencies that come to"life" under sutiable circumstances
+ it is a construction that can be applied on all levels of a hierarchy of semiosis
- i.e. semions are composed of semions
- and semions combine to form semions
The semion is an abstraction from the process character of semiosis, an attempt to point out the the logic and the structural aspect of the essentially triadic character of the sign process.As its diagram shows, the semion is a unit constituted by three mutually dependent constituents. It can be described under three parrticular aspectswhereby each of them refers to the other two. Those aspects or components of semiosis are:
http://www.cx.unibe.ch/psy/ukp/langpapers/overview.html
The Reference
In a process view, it might be considered the source or origin of a semiosis. Peirce spoke of it as the object:
The Interpretance
is the mediating instanc, a receiving and proceeding agency:
Asimilar set of actional dispositions would characterise action capabilities of other body parts such as hands, legs, mouth etc.
TheRepresentance (later named the Presentance)
In a process view, the representance is a kind of result of semiosis: it is correspondes to that new or semiosically modifed structure that represents the encounter of the other two components of the triad:
Be aware that I deviate from Peirce in 2 respects:
Yet there are a number of passages in his writings, especially in earlier periods of his work, that fit well with my use. Yet
The version I prefer is nearer to common sense (interpretation as mediation)and it lends itself easier to the types of chaining and constancies required in psychological applicarionsand also avoids, quite in the spirit of Peeirce, I think, mentalisitc understandings.
The semion provides for a fruitful reformulation of the Morrisian subdisciplines of semiotic. Morris has actually deviated from Peirce´s central point that the triadic relation implicit in semioses cannto be reduced to a set of three dyadic relations. My formulation of the semion makes clear that all these fields must be based on triadic relatives
The Semiotic Function Circle Semiotic Function Circle
- • IntrO-Semiosis or the perceptual production of internal structures- • IntrA-Semiosis of the conjectured "mental" processes semiotically conceived
- • ExtrO-Semiosis or the actional production of culture
- • ExtrA-Semiosis or the modification of external structures by others
The present psychological thinking has been developed in connection with trying to understand
- why humans construct and use houses and towns and homes the way they do- and why they design and use things the way they actually do.
- And why they do both of these in a highly culture specific way,
- somewhat differently so in places all over the world
- although rather similarly so within each culture
Naturally I was no able to give you an impression of both in the short available time
- of the basic concepts of a broader than usual semiotic approach, and- of its practicality and usefulness in a concrete research field.
Yet I hope I have rised some curiosity into the idea that an improved cooperation between psychology and semiotics might be profitable for both.
Semiotic is capable of developing a kind of psychological thinking wherein the traditional psychological stdructures and processes within the person and the cultural processes essential to the human condition, both for the individual and for any group, are treated in essentially the same manner.
This might seem to be counterintuitive and against almost all tradition in the Western world in the wake of split Cartesian between mind and matter, subjects and objects.But is inuitiion really a good guide in all phases of the scientific process?
