eJournals Kodikas/Code 28/1-2

Kodikas/Code
kod
0171-0834
2941-0835
Narr Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/61
2005
281-2

Indicative Signs - Crime, health and weather from the angle of semantics

61
2005
Karl Bühler
kod281-20025
* copy editor: Adam Christian von Wald Indicative Signs * Crime, health and weather from the angle of semantics Karl Bühler 1. Modern semantics is in it’s pioneer stage. After staking and marking the range’s borderlines in a working definition, one needs a sound division from inside. Nowhere are there clear cut classes or species of signs; one should be prepared for a kind of factor analysis. Furthermore, one should be prepared to realize that a sign is what we make of it. Signs are for us and not we for signs. One and the same perceptible thing might be used either as a symptom or signal or symbol; or in all three (and even more) directions at once. This holds true for each living word in social contact (cf. the chapter on language in action). Nevertheless, there are some practical fields of sign usage where one or the other factor is obviously dominant. My idea is that field studies within those regions could be fruitful in general semantics. After all, it still holds true what Socrates in Plato’s dialog ‘Kratylos’ says in discussing ‘What is language? ’: ‘If you want to know’, he says, ‘what the make up of a piece of garment is you go to the weaver or you might even go to the carpenter who has constructed the weaver’s loom.’ Now, the following three field studies are not on language but on non-verbal signs. There is no danger that anyone of us has fallen to mysticism when he occasionally remarks that signs are ‘telling’ this or that, he means signification and nothing more. The reverse is true that ‘telling’ words behave and function in many respects as if they were non-verbal signs; revealing without or even against the speaker’s intention what he is really after. So, let us assume from the beginning that language is the most refined and complicated, the most airy and least stuffy, and the most flexible and keenest of them all. I mean: systems of signs in practical use. Sometimes some people prefer to say it ‘with flowers’. It isn’t exactly flowers one would start with but rather such things as circumstantial evidence in court rooms or symptoms of health and illness or even signs in matters of tomorrow’s weather. They have this in common: they are natural signs, marked as indicative and over centuries have been somewhat put together by practical experts. Colloquial language is careless with terms like ‘indication’. What does it mean from the angle of semantics? Examples picked out at random: There is smoke here - something seems to be burning; there are puddles all over the ground - looks like there has been a heavy rain; the barometer is rapidly going down - there will probably be a storm. In a formula: present perceptible things hint to either present, past or future facts, which at the moment are imperceptible. They make us infer ‘it probably is, or was, or will be’ and so on. Both “significans” K O D I K A S / C O D E Ars Semeiotica Volume 28 (2005) No. 1-2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Karl Bühler 26 and “significatum” are facts (at least in our samples). Should we then restrict at once the general concept ‘indication’ to concrete single facts I linked by cause and effect? One point is clear: that sort of ‘hinting’ goes back and forth in time and in other cases all over the map of reality. As to time, there is no reason to prefer or exclude either historians or those who venture to forecast from using presently perceivable things as signs. As to the map of reality, there is no reason to exclude astronomers who use perceptible things on earth to hint to how it probably looks or does not look on the surface of the planet Mars or somewhere else in the depths of the universe - provided of course, like always, they have data enough. General semantics as such is not interested in the material data. As to reality? Well, if a mathematician says: this characteristic of my equation indicates (hints to) this or that final solution of a genuine problem of mathematics, let him have it. Untroubled by keeping the concept ‘indicative signs’ pure and unconfused, such a mathematician means to say ‘it’s a kind of guess or hunch’. If his inference will be mathematically verified he should use a stronger word instead of ‘mere indication’. Whether or not pure mathematics explores exactly what we call reality will not distract us from minding our own business in semantics. Some formalists hold it’s all semantics in pure mathematics and not a bit of reality like in physics; and with logic it is the same. Alright; one also hears it the other way around. But all that belongs, if somehow to semantics at all, then certainly to the chapter on symbols. No problems arise from fictional stories; they summarily speak within the bracket ‘as if’ it were reality; why should a ‘symptom’ within this bracket change its nature to become a sign of reality? This is and remains after all the point that genuine indicative signs signify directly on the grounds of their own existence. Symbols are also perceptible things and enter reality, but don’t do what they do, th.i. represent something in the way of signs, they don’t do it directly on the grounds of their appearance here and now or out of the mouth of a speaker. Between the indigenous characteristics of a California orange, on the one hand, and the trade mark put on it, on the other hand, there is half-ways the same difference (the other half of the truth later). And what about falsifications? Let jurists answer; they speak of doing it first as semanticists and then explain how existing laws have dealt with an undisputable fact of semantics. That much is general. On circumstantial evidence. 2. There was an astounding regularity of habits in the life of the man whom Bayly murdered (cf p …) An idyllic life of a childless couple of dairy farmers. Each morning that man would come downhill from his farmhouse to the highway with cream cans on a sledge and put some cream cans on the road side for collection by the factory lorry. He always placed them near enough to the edge of the bank to enable the lorry-man to swing the cans aboard without leaving the vehicle. But on the fatal morning, though the cans were there as usual, they were placed a little farther back, with the result that the lorry-man had to get off the van and climb up on the bank to bring them forward’ (310/ 11). That’s all; yet the police said ‘foul play’ and they were right. The murderer was not familiar enough with that particular habit of his victim and made the slip of placing the cans some inches away from the edge. The lesson is: habits work (sometimes) with clocklike precision. After the lorry-man had testified it was the first time in years that he had to descend from his vehicle at this place, the police were right to guess ‘perhaps foul play’. If an unusual Indicative Signs 27 phenomenon like a comet in the sky appears, then primitive people call it a sign. Here the lorry-man was astounded and the police called it a sign. - Similar to this is a second incident within the same (indeed remarkable) murder case: The criminal wanted to make things look as if this farmer had murdered his own wife and disappeared. So the murderer removed the best brown suit and a pair of boots and two riffles from the wardrobe; in New Zealand, you know, a man never leaves his riffles behind. Alright; but the missing boots were not the victim’s boots at all. For, a neighbor who lived farther away from the highway to which there was only ‘an unmade clay road’ had formed the habit of leaving a pair of his boots at the victim’s house, so that when going to town he could travel clean shod’ (ibid.). Now, would a man running away choose a pair of boots not made for him? The police again suspected ‘foul play’, and they were right. Well, one must know an awful lot of details in order to deceive detectives. That is in a complicated murder case. F.W. Crofts, the detective analyzer of the quoted case says: ‘It is the simple crimes which are hard to detect. Bayly committed many errors. Probably any one of them alone would have hanged him’ (335). There would be no end of samples, if this were to be a textbook either for detectives or murderers or lovers of detective stories. Let us have two more specimens of circumstantial evidence for a later generalization, specimens of purely physical ‘traces’, a field where modern scientific analysis in police laboratories does wonders in completing the shrewdness of detectives. Traces are not only fingerprints and bloodstains but also such things as cuts on wood by a saw or knife. The murderer had removed some bloodstains from timber by paring or shaving the wood with his pocket knife and this pocket knife was found on him. Now, what followed in the police laboratory is typical and usually an easy task. I mean technically: to make enlarged photographs both of the scrapes on wood and the little irregularities of the knife’s edge, then to conveniently cut the wood picture and apply it to the cut-line of the knife edge picture in the right way. ‘The sergeant placed the two photographs together so that that of the wood scrapes was applied to that of the edge of the knife. Slowly he moved the former along the latter. And then suddenly he was rewarded for his trouble. At one point ridges and furrows exactly coincided! ’ (p. 321) Evidence: this individual knife and this individual piece of wood had met once before. In a trial, that is to be demonstrated to the seeing eyes of a jury. Usually there will be no demand for a complimentary demonstration showing that similar knife edges would not do the same trick and fit like this one does. In a parallel demonstration showing that an empty pea-rifle shell found in a pocket of the murderer’s Dungaree trousers was one that had been discharged in his own rifle - that complimentary test had to be presented. And was found to be satisfactory. So fitting tests provide an infinite variety of indicative signs and not only in judicial proofs, for that matter. 3. The context of evidence. There is a famous book “The microbe hunters”; well, detectives are evidence hunters. Results, if any, must be shaped into a judicial proof. General semantics is interested in how the mass of single indications gets organized into a ‘body of evidence’. Here one can learn something about the context of indicative signs. In the eventual trial the accuser proffers the collected items of evidence in a narration of what happened. Our question is in what way the significance of signs supports the definite accusation. Being compounded now those ‘mute and stubborn witnesses’ either corroborate or weaken one another or otherwise change the evidence entirely. We expect a compound to do that. One thing is sure: juries all over the world have brought in verdicts of guilty in spite of obvious gaps in evidence. As to the convincing force of united indicative signs it does not Karl Bühler 28 seem to be just a kind of sum total out of the single items; nor does is fully depend on how many paragraphs in the whole story are supported by the evidence. This last statement is more important from the angle of semantics. The whole matter of compound significance, however, shall be developed here on two trial cases. Both of them are outstanding because the accusation proffered unusual sum totals of circumstantial evidence and the two cases are different from one another in the following point. In the Bayly case evidence supported fairly well each paragraph of the accuser’s story and an abundant mass of circumstantial evidence was concentrated on the question: where is the corpse? In striking contrast this question had no answer at all in the Landru case. 4. Bayly succeeded in misleading the police for a while and hosts of farmers combed the countryside to find the man who had allegedly murdered his wife and run away. But then the cream cans! Significance: a third person was probably involved - or maybe more. This new ‘clue’ was solidified later on by the discovery of the error with the boots. With two more steps suspicion was fixed on Bayly: bloodstains found in the missing farmer’s woodshed and traces discovered of a sledge leading from the fence around the missing man’s farm toward Bayly’s house. They were unusual traces, of course. Now, where is he or his corpse? Testimonial evidence from two other neighbors: they had observed unusual clouds of smoke ascending in the sky from Bayly’s cowshed during the critical evening. One of them said: ‘He had never seen anything like it before, and so impressed was he that he called another man named Brooker, and they watched it together. At times they could scarcely see the shed for the smoke. Off and on Herbert looked at it until he went to bed some three-quarters of an hour later. During the whole of that period the smoke had continued to pour out’ (l: cp. 322). Significance: Something that produced an awful lot smoke was burned in Bayly’s cowshed at that time. Was it the corpse? Well, ashes and remnants of human bones and parts of a watch, and a cigarette lighter were found on the premisses. It was the victim’s watch; for it could be traced to a watchmaker by the number on the usual place inside, who had sold it to him years ago, according to the watchmaker’s account-book. The cigarette lighter had a wick in it of wool exactly like a strain of wool in his wife’s sewing-basket from which he had helped himself to after the original wick had been used up (one of the witnesses had watched him do this). Even parts of an artificial set of teeth were found in the high grass around Bayly’s house and identified by a dentist as having been the victim’s. These are only small selections out of the circumstantial evidence in Bayly’s case. We have selected and placed them in a certain order. The clever defenders of B. could easily point out those ‘gaps’ in the ‘chain’ of proofs, but only after retiring for 71 minutes the jury brought in a verdict of guilty and B. was hanged. The Landru case in Paris: Ten women and a boy disappeared between 1915 and 1919; Landru was accused of having murdered them and having ‘succeeded in concealing so completely the fate of his victims, that concerning it nothing can be declared with certainty’. Indeed, it is not too much to say that, in each case considered apart and by itself, conviction would have been impossible. No jury could have been asked to bring in a verdict of guilty had each case stood alone. No proof existed that the supposed victims were even dead, nothing to show they had not simply gone about their business, as Landru protested that they had, and were not, as his advocate suggested, quietly living somewhere or another ignorant even of the accusation brought against their supposed murderer and, therefore, not coming forward to show themselves and prove his innocence.’ 1 ‘No proof’ means that no traces of a struggle, bloodstains, remnants of the bodies or instruments of murder were found and no Indicative Signs 29 testimonial evidence to that effect either. But there was testimonial evidence that each of them had lived with him for a while, a lonely spinster or widow who had gone on a trip with him to a isolated country house of his outside of Paris. Then she was seen no more. He had disposed of their savings and sold their property and furniture. Furthermore, there was a collection of ‘such things as the false hair of women, who, according to Landru, had parted from him to go travelling in foreign countries; the identity papers of little servant girls who, according to Landru, had left him to seek for fresh posts they would have no chance of obtaining without those papers; the cherished trifles, china ornaments, and so on, elderly widows had clung to all their lives till now when, according to Landru, they had confided them to him before departing about their business; small pieces of family jewelry that had been the pride of equally elderly spinsters and their proof of social standing, but that now, too, had found their way to the garage where was stored this strange collection, almost every item once the property of a woman who had known Landru and now was known to none’ (123/ 4). And last but not least, there was Landru’s note-book wherein he had entered to a penny his expenses day for day during all these years. For example on April 4, 1918 amongst other items: Voiture, Invalides, 3.00, billets, 3.10 & 4.95 … 11.05 The tickets were for Madame and himself, as is explained; for himself tour-retour (4.95) for Madame one-way only (3.00), railroad tickets Paris-Gambais (his country-house), from where Madame left him to go about her business. ‘Every time you find a figure in my notebook, you call it an assassination’, he cries during the trial, and when told that his explanations are not simple, he answered: ‘You mean you do not take them simply’; or ‘I could hardly buy a return ticket for a lady’ (149). Police investigations searching for traces and remnants of bodies during the next two years were without any result. Psychologically the Landru case was also unique. There wasn’t a shadow of suspicion during those years; neither in Paris nor in his Gambais environment; nor were the victim’s acquaintances particularly alarmed when the women disappeared. Strange as it appears that could be explained by the social habits of these lonely women and the extraordinary wartime conditions in Paris. One more fact should be stressed that neither testimonial evidence nor Landru’s appearance and conduct during the trial unclosed the springs of murder. In spite of all that, ‘the jury … returned a verdict of guilty, adding, somewhat surprisingly, a recommendation to mercy that, equally surprisingly, the relatives of the murdered women signed as well. In fact, everyone seems to have signed except Landru himself, who refused with his usual aloof and cold indifference’ (151). Guilty or not guilty? Notes 1 E.R. Punshon in Anatomy of Murder p. 120.