Would you be comfortable with the idea that marks and noises have no ‘ground floor’ anchoring in the ‘way things really are’? After all, words like mark and noise are already redolent with meaning, and not just one meaning. For instance, we might like using these words to draw a nice distinction between one kind of meaning, the intended use of a word, and another kind, when we see or hear it as an abstract pattern , or as isolated bits. Noise in this context can be chosen to contrast with signal. Signal is ordered, informative, while noise is supposed arbitrary, disordered.
At times we need to see words as marks and noises, but they are only marks and noises when we need to construe them that way. If I am using a pen to compose a sentence, I may need to see each letter as a series of marks in order to focus on attempting to render each character legibly. In the context of that effort, there are no words. But if I am typing it, there is no mark, because there is no need for me to treat it that way. And if instead of trying to hone my speaking in the aftermath of a lisp or mouth surgery, I simply have a voice synthesizer read my typed words, there is no need for me to hear those words as ‘noises’.
Right. And the deactivated sign still belongs to a use. Even when we just stare at it, we do that within some context of relevance and significance, and whatever that context involves provides the meaning of the ‘deactivated’ sign.
An alarm, and “the fact of crisis” tend to be one-and-the-same thing psychologically. Perhaps not for an Eagle, but i understood the OP to be saying Vervet monkeys don’t even have the word “Eagle”. This alarm is what humans would use “Eagle!” for. Its proto-language, i guess.
But anyway, back to the specific quote: I think people do often interchange signs with their denotation. That tends to be what Names are, for instance. “Amadeus Diamond” isn’t just a sign for me, that is who I am as far as anyone calling me out is concerned. No?
If that were the case, there couldn’t ever be such a thing as a false alarm. If later a vervet monkey were to figure out there wasn’t an eagle, that individual would also have to figure out that what there was was a warning cry and not an eagle, even if the situtional focus impressed eagle on it. Could vervet monkeys single out a repeat offender? The monkey who cried eagle? No longer react to a warning cry from a specific monkey?
What I suggest is that an eagle evokes the concept eagle, while a warning cry evokes the concept eagle and the concept warning cry, with a situational focus on the concept eagle, for obvious reasons:
Vervet monkey lookout: “eagle”!
Vervet monkey: What a perfectly executed warning cry.
Eagle: Yum.
(A casual google indicates that some monkeys using warning cries in the absence of predators to steal food. It fits my intuition, so I won’t research further; but it’s perfectly possible that I’m wrong about this.)
The suggestion was pretty clumsy. I am not saying this is all we use signs for, but in those situations where we are supposed to intution that we do not have time to calculate (i.e fire alarm, get the F-out) we do not go from the Alarm to the Fire. We hear the Alarm, and infer (immediately) that we are now trying to outpace a fire.
False alarms aren’t a problem for this, I don’t think. Psychology glitches all the time, and our psychological set and setting can be hijacked. Which you cover regarding the “later” monkeys in our eg. I think it all works..
Yes, certainly. I propose to cover this stuff as an in-the-moment mental state devided by foregrounded conceptual content and the conceptual background. In the fire alarm example, I think I would forground learned behaviour not the fire. I’d look for signs of fire, so I don’t run towards it. I’d avoid elevators. I’d look for the escape paths. And so on. That gels with @Banno’s meaning is use, I’d say.
I’d expect the same thing for the “eagle” cry: it triggers behaviour. What behaviour that is would depend. @j_j quotes Percy as saying the monkies, on hearing an eagle cry, look up. That suggests the warning cry makes them look for an eagle so to plan their escape route. That would be unnecessary if the “warning cry” is the eagle.
It’s complex, I say, and we’re not crafting good theory by conflating the sign and the thing.
I mean Saussure doesn’t do that. He mostly just ignored the thingly world, and just looked at language as a semiotic system, so the concept a sign refers to is part of the sign as the signified. But the signified is not the thing; it’s the concept.
And here we are talking about monkeys and fires and caring about danger in the real world. We can’t just copy-paste an abstraction-level up and think it still makes sense. We need to be careful.
That’s my input. (Not that I think you’re wrong; I don’t.)
I think we have gone into this in the thread already. Are you looking at little black shapes or experiencing their “meaning” ? You can thematize the sign or “live it” as its import.
“Meaning is use” is a bumpersticker without elaboration. This thread explicates the bumper sticker.
I respect your take, but I suggest that the copula approach is illuminating. I take the obvious qualifications for granted. We humans slip in and out of the “life” of the sign constantly. For you to read this requires a “forgetting” that these marks are “just” little shapes on the screen.
Right. The basic or dominant meaning is “fire is here.”
But a boy may cry wolf. A butterfly may dress to indicate “poison here” to predators, when it is not poisonous. But it “is” poisonous in the life-saving way that matters when its ploy works.
Well, yes. I didn’t think you meant that one of those others monkeys might get eaten by the warning cry. The conflation is rhetorical, not semantic. It makes it hard to talk about those obvious qualifications (which is not a problem as long it doesn’t make you miss connections), and easy to talk about… what?
For instance, the three questions at the end of your original post:
No. Literally. I don’t know what you’re saying here.
Primacy of the concept, maybe? I didn’t think this through fully.
Maybe. Too early to tell. The following helped a little:
To the degree that it starts to make sense, it also starts to feel wrong. See my proposition about the conceptual foreground and background of an active mental state. The foreground is always framed by the background. The foreground “eagle” would be framed by the warning cry on the one hand, and by the eagle on the other. That seems a rather important different, since a conceptual eagle has quite a few details not filled in (and some of those details that aren’t filled in guide what you imagine in the case of the warning cry, and what you pay attention to in the case of the eagle).
I feel the copula-approach glosses over and makes it hard to talk about the above, and I feel it’s a very important aspect that shouldn’t be glossed over. (Depends on the context, though.)
Maybe. It’s the hope of the name, the hope that we can do justice to a thing in thought and speech. It’s the impossible ambition to convey a thing’s particularity without remainder and without classification.
Rather than a naming of or identification with the individual eagle, it could be what is almost the opposite: a proto-category, since it’s presumably the same cry for any eagle of a certain type.
Yes, but in this case an “is” would be one of judgement/predication. The “is” of identity, if it can be applied at all, is partial, meaning something along the lines of “the cry and the eagle are tied together (only) via the monkey”.
But really, my first instinct is to go with @Banno’s translation:
It dissolves the reference puzzle completely—there is no reference, and there is no copula in sight.
On the other hand…
Maybe Banno’s imperative reading is compatible with a lived identity. From the outside we can look at the use, but if you’re late for work you experience transparency to the point of identity between 09:15 and I-am-late-for-work-!
Enter Adorno. He would grant your phenomenology, but draw a different lesson from it, locating the truth where the fusion—the “tacit copula”—comes apart:
The power of language proves itself by the expression and thing stepping out of each other in the reflection. Language becomes an office of truth only in the consciousness of the non-identity of the expression with what is meant.
So I am not imagining the cry as a name. It is “lived,” I suggest, an as ontological extension of the relevant eagle itself. It’s like a force field “glued on” to the eagle.
The cry is the arrival of this outer boundary of the eagle, while there is still time to escape. The monkey looks up and expects to see the dangerous core of the eagle.
I agree that the cry has a kind of generality. Every eagle is ontologically extended by/as this cry.
Yes. Percy was strongly influenced by Peirce. The sign needs an interpreter.
We have the human luxury of living the cry as a cry. For us the monkey “symbol” is a mere “signal.” The cry “causes” the monkey to look up.
I don’t approach this personally as a reference puzzle. You might say that ( for me ) it’s about getting a grip on “lived” or “immersed” meaning in its lived intensity.
If I look at the moon through a telescope, I see the moon. The telescope is the moon.
@Banno 's approach would presumably ( against his direct realist tendencies) have me staring at a telescope. Likewise the car in the rearview is the car behind me, or the rearview mirror is not functioning at its full intensity. In the context of these examples, we might discuss the compression of several entities into one.
Yes, transparency is the perfect concept here. I’m suggesting that the cry is transparent for the monkey.
I agree with Adorno. We might even speak of thinking as the power of death. The lived flowing unity is frozen and pried into layers. But I might project “truth” as a mere direction, a limit point nowhere in the sequence.