Transcript powerpoint

Session 11
Moving out of ‘cultural’ semiotics…?
Where do you draw the boundary of
the concept ‘communication’ itself ?
Communicative behaviour
can be defined as those
acts by which one
organism triggers another.
Charles F. Hockett (1916-2000)
To define communication as
the triggering of a response is
to make the term so nearly
equivalent to behaviour and
interaction in general as to lose
its specific value as a scientific
and moral conception.
If the strict ethnographic approach
requires us to extend the concept of
communication to the boundaries
granted it by the participants of a
culture, it also makes it necessary to
restrict it to those boundaries.
Dell Hymes (1927-2009)
The ontological primacy of the sign: does communication presuppose
signs, or do signs presuppose communication?
We should not start by taking
for granted that signs are the
prerequisites of
communication, but treat
communication as including all
processes in which human
activities are contextually
integrated by means of signs.
The starting-point, therefore, should not be: what does the word ‘communication’ mean in such and such
culture/language? Rather our starting-point should be: what general definition of ‘communication’ can best
accommodate the whole range of our, i.e. human, communicational experience? A ‘culture-neutral’ definition
of communication cannot be based on the assumption that signs have invariant (non-contextual) meaning. It is
not that only certain kinds of behaviour can be defined as ‘communicative’, i.e. because they are compatible
with the definition of the term ‘communication’. It should be the other way round: any two activities that are
integrated presuppose contextualization, i.e. the creation of signs. If signs are created and not given in
advance, then the sign ‘communication’ cannot be given in advance, either. In other words, the sign
‘communication’ itself is a created sign, i.e. the result of contextualization.
Thomas A. Sebeok (1925-2001)
Biosemioses between bacterial entities
started more than one thousand million
years ago and are thus at the root of all
communication. Bacterial communication is
exclusively chemical.
Both in form and as to variety of their
communicative transactions, animals are the
most diverse of living creatures.
All living things communicate nonverbally.
Only homo sapiens communicates both
verbally and nonverbally. The term ‘language’
should not be used to designate any
nonverbal communicative device. There is no
such thing as ‘ape language’.
Language is our
Rubicon, and no
brute will dare to
cross it.
Max Müller (1823-1900)
‘Must Monkeys Mean?’ (Harris 1984)
Is there any place for ‘meaning’ in the monkeys’ signalling
systems? One cannot approach the question from the
starting-point of the Saussurean linguistic system. The
linguistic sign cannot be the measurement of whether
meaning is involved in primate communication, or
We have no plausible alternative but to use an
whether it is just a matter of stimulus-response.
anthropomorphic conceptual framework in our analyses of
animal communication. We cannot somehow avoid the risk
of anthropomorphism – whatever they may be – by trying t
talk about primate signals in a terminology which draws no
implicit comparison between human and animal
communication. Any such attempt must be self-defeating.
The task of describing what primate signals ‘mean’ is alread
difficult enough, without depriving ourselves of the most
useful conceptual tools we have for the purpose.
So the investigator appears to be in a predicament.
Although he knows it is not reasonable to assume that
he is dealing with a communication system structured
like a human language, in order to get his semantic
description of that system off the ground at all he is
obliged to look for meanings of the kind that will
translate, however crudely, into human terms.
The important point to realize here is that when an observer assigns a meaning to a
particular primate signal, say ‘alarm’, this should not be construed as implying that if
the monkey did speak English, he would agree with the meaning-assignment ‘alarm’,
or that if humans were to assign the same meaning as the monkeys assign to this
call, we, the humans, would assign the meaning ‘alarm’ to it; what it should be
taken to mean is that the monkey’s behaviour on hearing the signal is comparable to
the way human beings might act if they received a signal to which they assigned the
meaning ‘alarm’. In short, it is the observer who attributes meaning to the monkey’s
behaviour, not the monkey.
Apes, Language and the Human Mind (Savage-Rumbaugh,
Shanker & Taylor, 1998)
When I observe a bonobo, it is as though I am standing
at the precipice of the human soul, peering deep into
some distant part of myself. Kanzi can read my facial
expressions as well as, if not better than, any human
being I have ever known. When Kanzi presses a symbol
on his keyboard, it is like he is "talking", "saying
something", "naming" objects. Even when he does
nothing, he quietly notes everything I say.
Kanzi & Sue SavageRumbaugh (1946-)
My only question to you is: what is
your philosophy of language, or
respecively, what theory of
communication do you subscribe to?
What Kanzi and company tell us is not that bonobos too
are by nature potential language users "just like us". On
the contrary, it is not until the hapless monkey's world is
artificially restructured by direct human control that the
monkey can be made to begin to grasp (in human
judgement) some of the rather complex ways it is
possible to use vocal sound to integrate other activities.
As to what monkeys "think" of this form of oppression,
the world is still waiting for a monkey to "say".
biosemiotics
The question of meaning is the crucial one to all living
beings. There is a comprehensive world at hand, from
which each animal can carve out its specific habitat. Each
animal moves within its habitat and confronts a number of
objects, with which it has a narrower or wider relationship.
Animals can never enter into a neutral relationship with
objects. That relationship is determined by their Umwelt.
Each species (including homo sapiens) assigns a different
(species-related) meaning to an object in its Umwelt.
Imagine how a flower-stem can play the role of an
ornament (in the Umwelt of a girl picking flowers), of a
path (in the Umwelt of an ant using the stem as an ideal
path), of an extraction-point (in the Umwelt of a cicadalarva that uses the stem to extract its sap), of a morsel
of food (in the Umwelt of a cow that grasps the stem
and flower to eat it).
Jakob von Uexkuell
(1864-1944)