To Take the Writer’s Meaning: An Unpublished Manuscript on “Peirce and Modern Semiotic” by Walker Percy

Ketner, Kenneth Laine

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-77968-3_7

To Take the Writer’s Meaning: An Unpublished Manuscript on “Peirce and Modern Semiotic” by Walker Percy

Kenneth Laine Ketner²

Chapter
First Online: 01 August 2018

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Abstract

Percy has been studied under several headings: Catholic, Southerner, Existentialist. Two such aspects, however, have been neglected: the strong influence of Charles Sanders Peirce, plus Percy’s deep competence in laboratory science. His typescript essay, “Peirce and Modern Semiotic (1959),” presented here, shows that Percy was well ahead of his contemporaries in understanding the scientific and philosophical importance of Peirce’s Semeiotic, the Theory of Semeioses. Percy particularly pointed to the experiential importance of “taking the other’s meaning.” He regarded that common phenomenon as vital, and genuine—a kind of event that behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner or Charles Morris explained away as nothing but a dynamic dyadic causal (or S-R) process. Percy’s essay definitively blocks those reductions.

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Notes

1.
Since the 1950s, considerable work in logic has come to establish that Peirce’s NonReduction Theorem is indeed an implicit principle of First-Order Logic of Relations. This history is introduced and summarized in Ketner et al. (2011); See also His Glassy Essence and articles collected in Samway 1995.
2.
See the chapter “For a Semiotic Anthropology.”
3.
See also their U.S. Patent 6,819,474 Quantum Switches and Circuits.
4.
Morris 1946, p. 19.
5.
Sellars 1948, p. 94.
6.
Op. cit., p. v.
7.
Ibid., p. 288.
8.
Neurath et al. 1955, p. 81.
9.
Op. cit., p. 7.
10.
Ibid., p. 10.
11.
Peirce 1932, 5.484 (as quoted by Morris ). Hereafter CP, with volume number and paragraph number, thus: CP 5.484 [meaning Volume 5, paragraph 484].
12.
Op. cit., p. 6.
13.
Encyc., op. cit., pp. 84–85.
14.
There is some ambiguity about the word pragmatics, since it is used both in the sense of a “metascience” and so limited to the study of scientists and their signs and objects (ibid., p. 70), and in the sense of a natural science co-ordinate with other natural sciences, hence as the name of the general behavioral science of signs and their users (ibid., pp. 80, 108.). It is in the second sense that I use it here.
15.
CP 1.345.
16.
I shall use Morris’s terminology: sign as the general term, signal and symbol as species of signs.
17.
CP 2.305.
18.
CP 2.299.
19.
CP 2.286.
20.
Op. cit., p. v.
21.
Ibid., p. 348.
22.
CP 2.293.
23.
Op. cit., p. 14.
24.
Ibid., p. 28.
25.
Carnap , it is true, distinguishes between pure (formal) semantics , the construction and analysis of semantical systems, and descriptive semantics, the study of historical languages. But a natural science of meaning, besides describing the structure of historical languages, must also make clear exactly in what sense it uses the word “giving” when it says that Germans “give” the word Mond to the moon. Is this “giving” a kind of response? If it isn’t, what is it?
26.
Reichenbach 1956, p. 265.
27.
Op. cit., p. 28.
28.
CP 2.247.
29.
I omit the first of the three signs, the icon, as being least relevant to a behavioral semiotic.
30.
CP 2.305.
31.
CP 2.249.
32.
CP 2.293.
33.
Symbol is regarded by Peirce as a particularly apt word, since its root meaning, throw together, was early and often used by the Greeks to mean a convention or contract.
34.
CP 2.293. The symbol in use, according to Peirce, denotes that particular balloon and signifies a character (that of balloons in general).
35.
Op. cit., p. 25.
36.
Ibid., p. 25.
37.
Ibid., p. 288.
38.
Ibid., p. 288.
39.
CP 2.292.
40.
Op. cit., p. 35.
41.
Thus Peirce was not discontent with Ockham’s slogan that universals are nothing but words, since he, Peirce, believed the words were as good universals as any (CP 2.301).
42.
Stepping out of the role of Peirce’s spokesman, I would suggest that the symbol-relation is actually tetradic, since a convention, and intersubjectivity, requires two people. See W. Percy, “Symbol, Consciousness, and Intersubjectivity,” this Journal, Vol. LV (1958) pp. 631–641. [KLK: “this Journal” was The Journal of Philosophy, see MB, essay number 12. That remark indicates Percy was planning to submit “Peirce and Modern Semiotic” to The Journal of Philosophy.]
43.
[KLK: There is no last page in the manuscript (number 101, Percy Archive, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill). This is my conjectured ending; just these three words offer a proper closing.]

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Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA
Kenneth Laine Ketner

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International Academy of Pathology, The University of British Columbia Hospital, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Leslie Marsh

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Ketner, K.L. (2018). To Take the Writer’s Meaning: An Unpublished Manuscript on “Peirce and Modern Semiotic” by Walker Percy. In: Marsh, L. (eds) Walker Percy, Philosopher. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77968-3_7

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77968-3_7
Published: 01 August 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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