Date: Sun, 7 Sep 1997 10:47:24 -0400 (EDT)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC:Canetti's Lion



I am engaged in another project right now and can't devote the time to
this I would like, but here are a few points in response to Mr. Polis.

On Fri, 5 Sep 1997 open1-AT-execpc.com wrote:

> We traditionally distinguish natural and artifical signs.  Natural signs, like 
> smoke, signify because of their causal relation to the thing signified, fire.  
> Artifical signs, like "cow," signify by cultural convention.  While "cow" may 
> have its diachronic dimension, it functions synchronically as an instrument of 
> intent.  In uttering "cow" under typical circumstances, the speaker intends 
> some cow(s) in *rerum natura*, and intends to evoke the same intent in the 
> audience.

I don't understand how you are using the terms "diachronic" and
"synchronic" here. And you seem to be using "intent" where I would use
"reference". In any case, your "traditional" distinction between "natural"
and "artificial" is exactly what is under question in my post.  Just
reaffirming it while ignoring my objections is not effective argument.
> 
> The Uzi has complex signification.  It may bespeak the possessor's threatening 
> intent, but, unlike a Nazi arm band, it is also causally connected with that 
> intent. 

An oversimplified distinction between natural and artificial signs leads
naturally to a fuzzy distinction between Nazi armbands and Uzis.  Then it
is implied that I am the one unable to do justice to the complexity of
signification.

 This complex signification is the source of its confused 
> interpretation as an agent.  An agent has intent and the capacity to make that 
> intent operational.  The Uzi *signifies* intent and provides the capacity to 
> make that intent operational.  Still, to signify intent is not to have intent. 
> So, the Uzi, while related as an insturmental cause to the intent, is not an 
> agent.
> 
> Howard Hastings wrote:
> > 
> > However, I can't agree with Dennis that we are not chickens.  I would say,
> > rather, that human populations are rather consistently mobilized to fly or
> > to fight by carboard hawks.  And this kind of social control is possible
> > because signs can be said to have a kind of agency.
> 
> First let me say that I think that we can be, and historically have been 
> manipulated into certain acts to which would not have given consent if we knew 
> facts that were withheld "in the interests of national security." 

French, Germans, and British were rather easily mobilized into WWI without
facts being withheld.  What made the populations of these countries
manipulable were icons of traditional religious and national authority
they had learned at home and in school.  "Withheld facts" were not what
allowed McCarthyism to be so effective in the U.S.

 This 
> admission in no way justifies the view that "signs can be said to have a kind 
> of agency," unless one broadens "agency" in such a way as to remove the note
 of originating intent from its definition.

It seems as if my point is obliquely recognized in this last statement.
But as the following suggests, it has not been adquately grasped.
> 
> Of course, if one has non-intentional view of agency, then there is no note of 
> originating intent to remove from its definition.  For a determinist (in the 
> sense of believing future to be completely immanent in any antecedent 
> state) the intent of agents is epiphenomenal, and their role is purely 
> insturmental.  In such a view, there is no essential difference between the 
> action of a human agent as the instrument of historical or physical forces 
> beyond his or her control, and the action of an Uzi when the trigger is pulled.
> 
Even this account of determinism seems to regard intentions as "uncaused" 
and detached from any chain of cause and effect.  And how could agents be
"purely instrumental" (the means to an end) where there is no intent and
so no end?  

> I think that this kind of determinism is (1) unfalsifiable, and so 
> unscientific, 

 Then are you saying, by implication, that your "intentionalism" is scientific 
and "falsifiable?"  You don't want to go there, Mr. Polis.

In your argument (and on other threads as well) it seems to me your
"intentionalism" is rather used like the "rule of faith" of the early
Church Fathers, refereeing the validity of interpretations without itself
coming into question.

For example, the following point

and (2) does not do justice to Aristotle's phenomenological 
> distinction between what is beyond our control and can only be wished for, e.g. 
> health, and that which is in our control and can be willed, e.g. exercise and a 
> healthy diet.  Since we have mutually exclusive alternative courses of action 
> that are equally in our power, our choice of one instantiates a new line of 
> temporal development not fully immanent in the state prior to our decision.  
> This intentional instantiation of a not-fully-immanent course of action is what 
> I mean by agency.

This is no refutation of determinism, even as you have defined it. 1) it
begs the question of what criteria are implicated in any act of choice and
where such criteria come from. The coherence of your account of agency
depends on your ignoring this question. 2) you merely point out that
determinism as you have defined it is incompatible with an Aristotlian
view of agency.  Someone who touts "falsifiability" ought to know that he
can't simply dismiss other's arguments by showing they do not square 
with Aristotle.  Nor can he advance his own in this manner. This is 1997,
not 1297.
   
> I suspect that many on this list do not share this view.  In particular, it 
> seem to me that a necessary condition for effective action in the world is that 
> we have some real knowledge of the world, and so I would be surprised if any 
> anti-realist subscribers would see agency as outlined above.
> 
Sounds like a lot of people on "this list" do not believe that "some real 
knowledge of the world" is "a necessary condition for effective action."
Well I, for one, do not believe we can argue back from "effective action"
to "real knowledge."

I am wondering how you define "effective action" here.  If we consider
growing crops, building cities, sailing the seas, and making babies 
"effective action" we might be surprised to discover that people have done
this with a rather different sense of agency than Mr. Aristotle.  And they
have done it with what even Aristotle would consider "false knowledge."
Looks like "real knowledge" is down on its knees here begging for
definition too.

> > I.e., There is no intrinsic connection between intentions and signs.
> 
> Signs only function as signs when they evoke intentional states.  Smoke is only 
> a mixture of combustion products in itself.  Only in its potential relation to 
> knowledge is it a sign.  Thus, intent is of the essence of signification.  
> Communicative signs have the further essential relation that they are intended 
> to re-create the author's intent in the recipient.

Even if it were true that "signs only function when they evoke intentional
states", this would not mean that the intention animating the sign were
that of the person who made it.  Having signs is not the same thing as
having the intentions of those made them, or else such intentions
would not have to be reconstructed on the basis of convention and
context and imputed to someone.  

And such reconstructions can be mistaken.  It is possible to
presume there are intentions where there are none, as when a student writes 
"save" on the blackboard as part of a spelling assignment and later a
janitor does not clean the blackboard because he things the word a message
left for him.  If signs can signify without intent, then "intention"
cannot be the essence of signification.  I would say that "signification"
is the essence of signification.  If it is here objected that intentions
are still imputed, even by the janitor, I will point out such imputed
intentions are always subject to what is excluded in distinctions between
natural and artificial signs--viz. "indication", that which links smoke to
fire by repeated association. Signs have a power to work automatically and
independently of intentions or they could not be signs.  This is the sense
in which signs may be said to have "agency." (Here I am only repeating a 
well known argument.)  To elevate intention over signification in
interpretation is increase, not lessen, the chance of missing intentions
and gaining real knowledge.
> 
> > The
> > former must be reconstructed on the basis of the latter, as these are
> > understood by a culturally and historically situated interpreter. How a
> > sign behaves or "acts" for an interpreter depends upon the cultural and
> > behavior codes the interpreter employs to decode it.
> 
> Certainly.  Signs are intrinsically relational.  Conventional signs depend on 
> the conventional context.  This does not relieve them of their intentional 
> basis.
> 
> > It is as possible for
> > a picture of an Uzi or an Uzi in a museum to seem as threatening as
> > person who pulls one out of her brief case. It possible for the latter not
> > to seem threatening at all.
> 
> OK.  So?  If it is seen as threatening, it is as so as evocative of past or 
> possible future use of Uzis and other insturments of terror by agents.
>  
So you moved me to write this post in the first place by a reductive
distinction between an Uzi in hand and an Uzi in a museum, a distinction
which ignores the priority of signification over intention. You grant that
signs are "relational" and dependent upon "conventional context" and that
signs are not intrinsically related to intentions and that the situation
of sign usage is "complex".  And yet your own examples of how signs
"typically" work tend to ignore all of this, proceeding as if intentions
are simply manifest in signs and unproblematically transfered from one
mind to another by them.  "Cow" functions as a sign because it was
intended to, not because, thanks to a number of structural preconditions,
it CAN so function.  

Rather than moving from sign to intent, your examples always move from
intent to sign, as if one could simply have the former and relate it to
the latter.  Thus we "know" what an Uzi in hand means and we "know" what
one in a museum means and can classify them as signs with no reference to
any specific context or interpreter.  We can posit "ideal" or "typical"
or "essential" communication and ignore "accidents" as if they had nothing
to teach us about what is essential in communication, as if we always
already began the search for meaning with the very thing we were looking
for.

Howard Hastings
GMU