40.4) First published in Great Britain in 1994 by 7 DH Pinter Publishers 25 Floral Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2E 9DS, United Kingdom University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1994 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may not be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means or process, without the prior permission in writing of the copyright holders or their agents. Except for reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, photocopying of whole or part of this pub- lication without the prior written permission of the copyright holders or their agents in single or multiple copies whether for gain or not is illegal and expressly forbidden, Please direct all enquiries concerning copyright to the Publishers at the address above. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data ACIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1 85567 195 X (hb) 1 85567 194 8 (pb) Printed in Canadache chapters in this book are reworkings of studies that have ared in the following sources: chapter 1 in the Journal of Social Biological Structures, chapter 2 in Semiotica; chapter 3 in New ‘rections in Linguistics and Semiotics, edited by James E. Copeland ouston: Rice University Studies); chapters 4 and 6 in the American ‘mal of Semiotics, chapter 5 in Modern Language Notes, chapter 7 In the Georgetown University Round Table Monographs, andl chapter 8 Jin The Semiotics of Culture, edited by Henri Broms and Rebecca finan (Helsinki: Arator 1988). Chapters 1, 8, 12, and 13 have also appeared in A Sign Is Just a Sign (Bloomington: Indiana Unt ‘versity Press 1991). 1 am grateful to the editors and publishers for allowing me to use the studies as the basis for the chapters of the t volume. Thanks also to Enza Antenos, Frances Koltowski, ‘4nd Danila Danesi for their assistance with proofreading. _ THOMAS A. SEBEOKknowledgments ix -oduction: Thomas A. Sebeok and the Science of Signs xi Study of Signs 3 "A Biological Approach to the Study of Signs 5 Messages 9 The Sign 10 Signs and ‘Reality’ 14 Species of Signs 17 General Features of Signs 17 Six Species of Signs 20 Signal 22 Symptom 24 Icon 28 Index 31 Symbol 33 Name 37 On the Being, Behaving, and Becoming of Signs 38vi Contents 3 Symptom Signs 43 The Meaning of Symptom 44 The Peircean View 48 Symptoms and the Medical Origins of Semiotics 50 Interpreting Symptoms 54 4 Indexical Signs 61 Indexicality 62 Features of Indexicality 66 Manifestations of Indexicality 70 The Study of Indexicality 74 5 Iconic Signs 81 Iconicity 81 ‘The Incidence of Iconicity 83 Features of Iconicity 85 The Study of Iconicity 88 6 Fetish Signs 93 The Origin of Fetishism as ‘Deviation’ 94 The Fetish in Psychology and Sexology 95 The Fetish in Semiotics 101 7 Language Signs 105 The Study of the Verbal Sign 106 Verbal and Non-verbal Signing 113 8 Language as a Primary Modelling System? 117 Modelling System 118 Uexkiill’s Model Revisited 121Contents vii "Language as a Modelling System 124 Concluding Remarks 126RCEL DANESI troduction: Thomas A. Sebeok and the Science of Signs ‘Signs ~ any mark, bodily movement, symbol, token, etc., used to indicate and to convey thoughts, information, commands, etc. — are the basis for human thought and communication. It is not commonly known that the science of signs, semiotics, grew out of attempts by the first physicians of the Western world to under- stand how the interaction between the body and the mind oper- ates within specific cultural domains. Indeed, in its oldest usage, the term semiotics was applied to the study of the observable pat- tern of physiological symptoms induced by particular diseases. Hippocrates (460?-377? n.c.) — the founder of medical science ~ viewed the ways in which an individual in a specific culture would manifest and relate the symptomatology associated with a disease as the basis upon which to carry out an appropriate diagnosis and then to formulate a suitable prognosis. The physician Galen of Pergamum (a.p. 180?-200?) similarly referred to diagnosis as a process of semiosis. In Italy the term semeiotica continues, in fact, to be used in medical science to refer to the study of symptoms. It was soon after Hippocrates’ utilization of the term. semeiosis to refer to the cultural representation of symptomatic signs that it came to mean, by the time of Aristotle (384-22 B.c.), the ‘action’ of a sign itself, or the correlative act of sign interpretation. So, from the dawn of civilization to the present age, it has always been recognized in Western culture ~ at least implicitly — that there is an intrinsic connection between the body, the mind, and culture, and that the process that interlinks these three dimen-xii Introduction sions of human existence is semiosis, the production and interpre- tation of signs. The raison d’étre of semiotics is, arguably, to investi- gate whether or not reality can exist independently of the signify- ing codes that human beings create to represent and think about it. Is the physical universe a great machine operating according to natural laws that may be discovered by human reason? Or, on the contrary, is everything ‘out there’ no more than a construction of the human mind projecting itself onto the world of sensations and perceptions? Although an answer to this fundamental question will clearly never be possible, one of the important offshoots of the search for an answer has been a systematic form of inquiry into how the mind’s products and the body’s natural processes are interrelated. And no one has probed this question more produc- tively and extensively than the author of the present volume, Thomas A. Sebeok, one of this century’s greatest semioticians. Semiotics is the term commonly used to refer to the study of the innate capacity of human beings to produce and understand signs of all kinds (from those belonging to simple physiological signal- ling systems to those which reveal a highly complex symbolic struc- ture). The etymology of the term is traceable to the Greek word sema, ‘mark sign,’ which is also the root of the related term seman- tics, ‘the study of meaning.’ In all the main conceptualizations of semiosis, the primary components of this mental process are seen to be the sign (a representative image or icon, a word, etc.), the object referred to (which can be either concrete or abstract), and the meaning that results when the sign and the object are linked together by association. It would appear that the human cognitive system operates on the basis of this triadic nexus. Indeed, many semioticians now would claim that it underlies the very structure of the mind. Thus, for instance, the word cat is a verbal sign that can be seen to relate the animal (its object) to the meaning ‘cat’ (the domesticated carnivorous mammal with retractile claws that kills mice and rats, etc.). Similarly, the use of the index finger to point to an object in a room creates a concrete existential mean- ing relation between the so-called indexical sign (the pointing finger) and the object. Following the mathematician Charles Sand- ers Peirce, most semioticians now add the notion of interpretant to.Introduction xiii the process of semiosis. This is Peirce’s term for the individual’s particular interpretation of the triadic relationship that inheres in semiosis. One of Sebeok's more significant contributions to the theory of semiosis has been to argue convincingly that this process inheres in the mind’s innate ability to transform sense impressions into memorable experiential models. Although all species partici- pate by instinct in the experimental universe, humans are particu- larly well equipped with the capacity to model their sense impres- sions cognitively. It is when these mental transformations of our bodily experiences are codified into signs and sign systems that they become permanently transportable in the form of cognitive units, pheno-menologically free from their physiological units of occurrence. Indeed, the work of Sebeok on semiosis has made it possible, more than ever before, to relate the world of bodily experience to the world of abstraction and thought, by having shown the latter to be a kind of evolutionary ‘outgrowth’ of the former. If I had to sum up in a phrase what Thomas A. Sebeok has taught a whole generation of semioticians, I would choose the following one: he has shown us that life is semiosis. His tetralogy of books published over a decade — Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs (1976), The Sign and Its Masters (1979), The Play of Musement (1981), and I Think I Am a Verb (1986) — have shown us how semiosis works in the human species. These have become contem- porary classics in the field. Sebeok's concern is in all things living; and, therefore, even the most complex philosophical issues are, for him, worthy of the attention of all human beings. It is prima- rily through his masterful control of language that he is able to reach a broad audience. His language always makes complicated matters understandable. And his sense of humour imbues his prose with ebullience and vivacity. His books are simultaneously enter- taining and thought provoking; usable by student and scholar alike; and for the professional semiotician they have become textual coordinates charting the entire theoretical and methodological terrain of semiotics. In a word, he has ‘demystified’ semiotics and made it a more widely known and accepted method of scientific inquiry within the behavioural, cognitive, and social sciences.