The Peirce Seminar Papers: Essays in Semiotic Analysis. Vol. 4. Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Language and Peircean Sign Theory, Duke University (June 19-21, 1997) (review)

Roman Jakobson’s discovery of the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce’s theory of signs and Jakobson’s application of elements of this theory in Slavic and general linguistics from the late 1950’s on initiated a scholarly dialogue on the semiotic foundations of grammar and discourse, and of language change, which continues to produce interesting and occasionally significant advances in understanding, as the latest volume in The Peirce seminar papers testifies.

This volume comprises 22 contributions, printed in the order in which they were presented at the conference. Several of the papers are followed by comments made by other participants, a few additionally by the authors’ responses to such comments, as is customary in proceedings. The conference brought together linguists interested in Peirce and Peirce scholars with an interest in language, and both categories of participants made worthwhile contributions. In this review I will mention only the papers that are of the most general interest. For the reader’s convenience I label my remarks on the individual papers with a key word that highlights the topic to which each contribution seems most relevant. But there is much in these papers that goes beyond what such simple labels can suggest.

Iconicity

Tony Jappy, ‘Iconicity and inference: Peirce’s logic and language research’ (41–76), tells the sad story of ‘the iconicity movement (1965–1985)’ in linguistics which was inspired foremost by Jakobson’s Quest for the essence of language (1965). Jappy shows how Jakobson’s basically Saussurean sign conception hampered his understanding of Peirce’s theory, how Jakobson’s restricted understanding of Peirce’s ideas determined their reception by others who encountered them mainly or exclusively through his writings, for instance, John Lyons, and how later, functionalists such as Talmy Givón and John Haiman deliberately and explicitly modified this received understanding, recasting the content of the adopted Peircean terms in an essentially post-Saussurean perspective. The good news is, as Jappy demonstrates, that the extraordinary potential of Peirce’s ideas for linguistics remains relatively untapped. Jappy offers several short illustrations of the application of Peircean concepts in linguistic analysis, but the greatest value of his paper may be in its account of key aspects of Peirce’s thinking that are essential to linguistics: the clarification of the relation between logic and linguistics, the importance of inference, the role of Peirce’s categories in cognition, and, not least, the nature of iconicity and its status in Peirce’s logic of icons.

Teleology of change

T. L. Short, ‘Teleology and linguistic change’ (111–58), analysis of teleology that addresses some of the issues that have made this notion problematic to many. The central part of the paper is an analysis of ‘purposefulness’, which accepts the vagueness of the ordinary-language use of the word purpose and discloses that expressions such as have a purpose, exist for a purpose, act for a purpose, serve a purpose, be used for a purpose all imply acts or processes of selection. This approach enables Short to dispense with the distinction between teleology of purpose and teleology of function; instead he draws a distinction between teleological processes (which have a goal) and finious processes (which have no overall purpose, but are directed by processes of selection); see also Shapiro (1991:30). Biological evolution, to take Short’s example,

is without a purpose. . . . As it has no purpose, no telos, it is not a teleological process. . . . So also the species that evolve are without a purpose. For they were not selected for any of their effects. However, limbs, organs, morphologies, sometimes coloration, and many other organic features, dispositions, reflexes, instincts, etc., have purposes: any of these selectively retained in the course of evolution because its effects provided some edge in the competition for survival has a purpose, namely, the effects for which it was selected...