Abstract
This chapter will attempt to illustrate how a semio-linguistics approach specific to cognitive semiotics can make a concrete contribution to certain themes at the heart of the contemporary debate on cognition. Our topic will be subjectivity, and this chapter will put forward an enactivist explanation founded on a semiotic theory of effective action grounded on pragmatism. The central idea is that our ability to be subjects, that is, our ability to make ourselves the object of our own thoughts, is intrinsically linked to the semiotic capacity to lie and to the benefits which this capacity brings for the purposes of building strategic thought linked to effective action. This idea will be founded on a semio-linguistic theory of the person.
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth saying that the word “enunciation” does not even appear in the English translation of the Problems in General Linguistics by Benveniste. Instead, the word used by the translator is “utterance”. However, “enunciation” has become more and more popular in semiotics and linguistics, so we prefer to use the French sounding word. More, the English translators of Semiotics and Language by Greimas and Courtes (1979) translate the French “énoncé” as “utterance”. This is a real mess, because, following the original translations, “utterance” would mean both the act of enunciation and the product of it! Therefore, we will use “enunciation” in order to mean the act of utterance which produces the sentence or the statement (“énoncé”). On the contrary, we will use “enunciate” in the general sense of “that which is uttered”. In contrast to enunciation, the enunciate “is the state resulting from enunciation, independently of its syntagmatic dimensions (sentence or discourse)” (Greimas and Courtes 1979: “Utterance”). In addition, we will not follow the decision of translating “enoncé” with utterance because, in the English language, “utterance” is much more related to the act than it is to the product of the act. Where possible, we will use “sentence” in order to express the product of the act of enunciation (“enunciate”), but “sentence” has a pure linguistic meaning, while an “enunciate” can also be an image or a picture.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
See Bianco 2008.
- 5.
Psychologists such as Julian Jaynes (1976), classical antiquity philologists such as Bruno Snell (1948) and semiotics scholars such as Ugo Volli (1994) – and this without considering the cognitive science literature which moves practically in a diametrically opposite direction from Benveniste’s - have done much work on this “objective testimony of the subject’s identity”, as Benveniste called it, which seemed absent to him in the period he was writing in.
- 6.
‘Delocutive’ means that which is outside locution, i.e. what is neither locutor nor interlocutor. We will shortly see how ‘he’, which is both the third person and the non-person, is capable of acting as extensive term within the linguistic category of ‘person’ with its ability to represent all positions. This is a reading inspired by the linguistic theories of Hjelmslev and Guillaume, which overtly contradicts Benveniste’s idea, according to which ‘he’ is the exclusive form of the ‘non-person’.
- 7.
- 8.
Iliad I, 193, 198.
- 9.
Snell comments (1948/1953: 57): “The poet had no need here of any ‘apparatus’. Achilles simply controls himself. Athena’s action is a disturbance for us but for Homer she was necessary here. We would expect a ‘decision’, namely reflection and action by Achilles. In Homer, by contrast, man is still not exponent of his decision”. For an important reactivation of linguistic and philosophical ideas connected to Iliad, see Piazza 2019.
- 10.
Signifier surface refers to the fact that one can consider the signifier (or expression plane) without the signified (meaning or content plane). This separability is significant in that we can use the signifier to convey meaning that is not related to how the world is (and for this reason can be used in order to lie).
- 11.
Theogony, verses 886–7.
- 12.
See Detienne and Vernant 1974: Chaps. 3 and 4.
- 13.
See Detienne and Vernant 1974: 14–5.
- 14.
For a comparison, see Paolucci 2017.
- 15.
Notwithstanding the later fame of the ‘structural linguistics’ formulation, Saussure never spoke of ‘structure’ but always and only of ‘system’.
- 16.
Federico Albano Leoni (2009) recently showed that not even our phonatory system functions as Jakobson believed.
- 17.
Where “non-A” can be interpreted also as the polar opposite of A, “B”. “non-A” is simply that which is not A”, “the absence of A”.
- 18.
For Hjelmslev, the ‘he’ (NE: 37) defines the neutral category which is then transformed into the extensive term even though the participatory correlation it indicates (‘you’ versus ‘I-he’), and the opposition between a precise term (you) and two vague terms (I-he) differs from what has been and will be proposed here (‘I-you’ versus ‘he’) which, on the other hand, involves two precise terms and one vague one. What interests us here is the person correlation on which to found enunciation theory and not the general structure of linguistic correlations at a grammar level, which is what Hjelmslev was studying. But obviously what is important to us at this level is that the person correlation is a participatory opposition and not a privative opposition, as it was for Benveniste.
- 19.
See Pianigiani 1907.
- 20.
See Descola 2005.
- 21.
Benveniste 1966: 230.
- 22.
See Latour 2005.
- 23.
See Maillard 1974: 61.
- 24.
- 25.
See Deleuze 1969.
- 26.
It is, for example, not like this in Italian.
- 27.
See Gentili 2017.
- 28.
- 29.
Paolo Leonardi (personal communication) reminded me that there is a tradition that half goes back to Russell, and, later, Quine, Sloat, Burge, Fara and others that considers names to be predicates. This tradition does not think like the Stoics do, but still does not assume the centrality of the subject.
- 30.
It is of even greater interest in Peirce who, in his introductory essay, On a New List of Categories, and then again in the anti-Cartesian essays in which he founded semiotics, was inspired precisely by predication and the Aristotelian model incarnated in the S is P form (“the stove is black”). This model was then completely abandoned with the Logic of Relatives watershed, which had revolutionary consequences which have perhaps not yet been fully understood, including for Peirce’s semiotics theory.
- 31.
Frege has a similar idea and he also uses the chemical metaphor. However, Frege refers to concepts and not to language.
- 32.
See Burch 1991.
- 33.
- 34.
Peircean terminology in the Logic of Relatives is much differentiated and often not coherent (cp. Fabbrichesi Leo 1992: 136–137). For instance, Peirce distinguishes between relative, relation, relationship, and relate (CP 3.466). Our argumentation will be referring to the extraordinary exposition from 1897, in which a relative is a rhema based on a determined form of relation of the form “_is a lover of_”. In this case, the rhema (or relative) is dyadic (form of relation) and the positions that are constructed by its valence are the relative terms or correlates of the relative in its form of relation. In this case, the relative would be equivalent to the small Tesnierian drama, with its verbal valence, and the relative terms, or correlates, would be equivalent to the actants (we do not distinguish here between actants and circumstants in Tesniere, cf. Petitot 1985: Chap. 4). Cp. MS 544 and CP 3.456.552.
- 35.
This was, on the other hand, exactly Peirce’s theory in On a New List of Categories (CP 1.545–59).
- 36.
It is very clear here how predication is retraced to a specific case in Logic of Relatives, that relating to monadic predicates. Aristotelian theory of language and the proposition founded on predication are thus revealed to be a specific case of Stoic theory of the proposition founded on the event expressed by the verb. This latter takes account of the former as a specific case, but the contrary is not true.
- 37.
See Tesnière 1959: 79–83.
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Paolucci, C. (2021). For a Cognitive Semiotics of Subjectivity. In: Cognitive Semiotics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42986-7_2
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