K O D I K A S / C O D E 44 (2021) · No. 1 - 3 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Semiotic Notes on the Process of Understanding. Semiotische Anmerkungen zum Verstehensprozeß Plädoyer für eine Deutungstheorie des Zeichens (1996) Abstract: Eschbach discusses in this unpublished text important aspects and elements of the Process of Understanding. Instead of following the widespread misconception that understanding is a quasi-natural activity similar to eating or sleeping, the essay gives vivid examples of acts of understanding. Eschbach underlines that the traditional, dyadic model of meaning is inadequate to describe our actual naming habits and must be replaced by a qualitatively different model. It defines in a graphic representation the sign process and its three relational foundations 1. the immediate object, 2. the representative, and 3. the immediate interpretant, so that the sign can be notated as a triadic relation. The essay summarizes with notes on the immediate and the dynamic object. The immediate object is the idea or thought on which the sign is directly based, the understanding in which it is founded. The dynamic object is the object of the sign, insofar as it is the thing or situation on which that idea or thought and the understanding rest. I. There is a widespread misconception that understanding is a quasi-natural activity similar to eating or sleeping. To this misconception have contributed in particular, lexicologists, semanticists, analytic philosophers, and semioticians, who since antiquity have employed a static, dyadic model of signs, as reflected in the Latin mnemonic aliquid stat pro aliquo. According to the dyadic approach, this signifies that something can be stated clearly and precisely in its scope of meaning. If the meaning of a certain sign escapes us at the moment, we open the tenth volume of the Großer Duden (German dictionary) and are instructed by this dictionary of meanings for a ‘ collection bag ’ or ‘ bell bag, ’ namely one with a small bell attached to a pole, in which church collections are gathered. Visually, this explanation of the term is supported in the style of the Comenian Orbis Pictus by the illustration of one such bag. The fact that there are also bell bags that do not have a bell, or not one attached to a pole in any case, and would be more correctly called baskets, might cause a degree of irritation because we have deviated in our everyday experiences, but we are also used to accepting Duden ’ s authority for the correct spelling of a word. The current discussion about the spelling reform 1 , however, as well as a look over the shoulders of the Duden 1 Note from the editor: 1996. Commission, proves that our lexicons can provide us with nothing more than a snapshot of linguistic habits, to which, in the best case, a specific statistical significance can be attributed, whereby no reasonable person today would still speak of the possibility of timedeprived definability of linguistic signs after the pragmatic turn led by Ludwig Wittgenstein, which gave us insights including that the meaning of a sign is to be sought in its usage. I would like to illustrate this with a short example: In early New High German, any adult person of the female gender was called ‘ wib, ’ whereas noble ladies were called ‘ frouwa. ’ This naming convention changed over time in that ‘ wib ’ underwent a narrowing of meaning and sank to a pejorative term in the form of ‘ weib ’ , while ‘ frouwa ’ underwent a broadening of meaning to become a neutral term for all adult females. What is the lesson of this example? The lesson is as simple as it is momentous: the traditional, dyadic model of meaning is inadequate to describe our actual naming habits and must be replaced by a qualitatively different model. Semiotic theory of meaning was long neglected because of being mistakenly thought of as trivial and settled. This was the case until Lady Victoria Welby, the self-taught correspondence partner of the founder of modern semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce, asked a crucial question: ‘ What is meaning? ’ in her groundbreaking book of 1903. She gave a threefold answer, distinguishing between ‘ sense, ’ ‘ meaning ’ and ‘ significance. ’ This will inform our further discussion, since Lady Welby clearly showed that these three types of meaning asymptotically approached their goal, the determination of the meaning of a sign, in the process of progressive clarification of meaning, without ever quite reaching it. Lady Welby ’ s semiotics differs from all traditional, dyadic sign theories in one essential respect: Her semiotics is not an identification mechanism with the help of which something is determined or named as something, also referred to as nomenclature models, but a theory of permanent sign production, which puts her in agreement with the Charles S. Peirce. He made a decisive semiotic breakthrough with his novel relational-logical approach. Qualitatively, Peirce ’ s approach meant he no longer pretended to read signs from reality, but instead explicitly stated that he, as an interpreter, produced signs and sign relations that do not exist as such in reality. Because this aspect is critical, I would like to reiterate as did the great Geneva semiologist Ferdinand de Saussure and the linguistic psychologist Karl Bühler that one cannot observe signs as a natural scientist observes an object, but rather you need a “ pointe de vue ” as de Saussure said, which is applied to the object of thinking. The semiotic way of looking at things rids us of the fiction that one can pick up a sign prefabricated by whoever created it in whatever way, and would be accurately described as a model of sign constitution, in so far as in the sign process, the semiosis, as Peirce says, the sign is produced for the very first time. In order to not lose oversight, I would like to unite the essential elements of the sign process in a graphic representation at this point: This scheme is to be read as follows: In the act of attention, the sign interpreter will lift a particular piece out of the continuum of experience. Peirce knows that we can say nothing about things in and of themselves. Still, only saying something about things for us, this very first step of attentional focusing implies that we necessarily and invariably bring a particular way of looking at the object of our experience, what Jürgen Habermas elaborated on in his book Knowledge and Human Interests (Erkenntnis und Interesse) and what the largely unknown Polish philosopher Ludwik Fleck vividly brought out in his work Genesis 34 Semiotic Notes on the Process of Understanding and Development of a Scientific Fact ( “ Die Entstehung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache ” ) based on medical material. Without going into a multitude of other relevant references, I would nevertheless like to point out that the thesis of the theory-guidedness of observation has now been widely accepted by a philosophy of science. The dynamic object is subjected to interpretation in a primary act of interpretation. But because the objects of experience do not come directly into our head, or in other words, because there is no direct relation between the immediate object and the immediate interpretant, we have to basically and systematically apply as mediation a material representamen (like sound waves or chalk on the blackboard), which bridges the immaterial sign object (and/ or) and the immaterial interpretant. The sign process thus comprises relational foundations 1. the immediate object, 2. the representative, and 3. the immediate interpretant, so that the sign can be notated as a triadic relation of (0, R, I). The aspect which will concern us more intensively in the following, namely the aspect of the interpretant relation, appears to us - as indicated in the scheme - in three forms in Peirce, as immediate interpretant, as dynamic interpretant, and as final or logical interpretant. Peirce explains the three interpretant types, which represent distinguishable stages in the otherwise continuous, unfinishable process of interpretation, in the following way: “ I define a sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former. A sign thus has a triadic relation to its object and its interpretant. It is necessary to distinguish the Immediate Object, or the Object as the Sign represents it, from the Dynamical Object, or efficient but not immediately present Object. It is likewise requisite to distinguish the Immediate Interpretant, i. e. the Interpretant represented or signified in the Sign, from the Dynamic Interpretant, or effect produced on the mind by the Sign; and both of these from the Normal Interpretant, or effect that would be produced on the mind by the Sign after sufficient development of thought. ” (C. P., 8.343) II. Scientific hermeneutics is not a historically late and abruptly appearing art product of the human mind. It grows out of an anthropological heritage. The detachment of the drive from preformed motor activity, which is peculiar to the human species, and the associated weakening of biological unambiguity of behavior form the basis for the genus-typical ways Semiotic Notes on the Process of Understanding 35 in which humans deal with each other and with the world. Because of an open drive structure and a “ language which in turn fits it ” (Plessner, 1978: XVIII), humankind is characterized by biological ambiguity. This means: The biological ambiguity of behavior forces humans from the beginning to always interpret their environment, the behavior of their fellow humans, and their own behavior. Human perception and action are fundamentally accompanied by interpretation, shaped by a lack of biological unambiguity in human behavior, and forced to compare different possibilities of interpretation. They require the storage of one ’ s own and traditional, foreign experiences in memory - the formation of memory - and the choice of one of the identified possibilities of interpretation in current actions. Thus, every conception generated by external perception is a mixed product of the impressions forming in perception and of an indeterminately large number of elements of memory images that can be evoked and organized in different ways depending on the occasion, situation, mood, and other influences. Perception and interpretive activity are linked from the outset and before - often even without - these primary interpretive activities come into the realm of consciousness, which builds itself on this uncertain ground. Uncertainty - about the verifiability of one ’ s own experience - is for all individuals furthermore the social stock of knowledge handed down as allegedly secured prior knowledge, which each of us considers socio-historical apriori, into which he grows without noticing it at first and to which he refers in his actions. It is these traditional knowledge and orientation systems to which each of us refers in most of our actions and views. In contrast, only a very small part - the smallest part - of our knowledge of the world is based on personal experience. Most of our knowledge and actions are based on handed-down experiences which, on the one hand, expand our knowledge and embed it together with others in a knowledge community, but which, on the other hand, may well be stereotyped as far removed from reality or even elements of a collective delusional system that we have - for the time being - adopted. To the genus inheritance part belongs - likewise committed to the starting position shaped by biological ambiguity of behavior - the schooling and handing down of interpretation techniques and abilities in the primary socialization, but also beyond it: the everyday, regular interaction, of human individuals with their fellow human beings and their environment, is the result of this schooling, in which - primarily through learned language, but not exclusively through it - the socio historically handed-down patterns of interpretation and contexts of meaning are acquired, and in which each new member of the species rehearses both in a socially already interpreted world and in proven, routinized modes of interpretation of the particular community to which he or she belongs. Probably the most striking hermeneutic facts, which can be found equally in all times and all societies, are religions or religious interpretations of the world, in which not only different figures of interpretation, but also techniques of interpretation, traditions of interpretation, contents of interpretation, and the symbolic forms of these contents are practiced and passed on repeatedly. Despite this starting point, which is common to all people and societies, and despite the specialists in interpretation that can be found in all times and societies (in religions and/ or jurisprudence, among priests, magicians, kings, advisors, artists), what we 36 Semiotic Notes on the Process of Understanding call scientific hermeneutics today has a very specific origin that can be reconstructed in concrete historical terms. Over a long history, the ancient and Judeo-Christian interpretations of the world, constructions of reality, cultural products, ways of thinking, and social skills constitute the specific scientific horizon of interpretation of the term ‘ hermeneutics. ’ Like the occidental sciences, which are committed to the same cultural area and of which it is a product, it is simultaneously culture-dependent and universal in its claim. Hermeneutics as a technique, skill, and methodology of interpretation of symbolic human expressions, forms of expression, and products of action develops into a scientific procedure and scientific art of interpretation based on an elaborate system of writing and texts that can be written and handed down. Without this basis, and before its development, scientific hermeneutics was not possible. Their first formal preconditions are 1. discursivity, i. e. the material fixity and thus the tradability of symbolic or symbolically interpretable human utterances (this means all, not only the linguistic products of action); 2. the linguistic version, written fixation and thus the tradability of the interpretation of these symbolic utterances. Only through these preconditions can the objectives of scientific interpretation be achieved: the continuity of attention to a fixed object of interpretation - lifted out of the flow of action processes; based on this, the extensive interpretation of the object of interpretation, i. e. the search for and construction of all conceivable interpretations and thus of both the general potential of the meaning of the object of interpretation and the respective socio-historically conditioned horizon of interpretation of the interpreters; finally, the extensive verification of the fixed interpretations on likewise fixed text by the group of interpreters, which tends to be historically continuable and expandable. Scientific hermeneutics is thus the product of writing and written documentation of human actions, attitudes, and sensations. The development of written systems, for its part, represents a further evolutionary step towards the development, differentiation, and explication of human systems of action, orientation, meaning, and interpretation. Scientific hermeneutics has a decisive share in utilizing this potential of writing and textual documentation. It results from historical development and shows itself in a - not yet finished - history of development. It also constitutes historical thinking by the moment of the tradability of interpretations and by documentation of actions, events, and products. By fixing human expressions, it preserves them, documents them in their uniqueness, makes them distinguishable from other documents, places the documents and their interpretations ‘ in temporal order ’ and refers to the collection and stringing together of documents to change, and succession. The collection of historical documents and their interpretations represent at the same time 1. the material of history, 2. the historicity of interpretations, and 3. the constitution and development of historical thinking. The art theory of scientific understanding is necessarily an art theory of historical understanding. The formal presuppositions of scientific hermeneutics are based on the fixity and retrievability of the data to be interpreted and the interpretations. However, understanding and interpretation of human actions, products, and interpretations of actions have their roots in people ’ s everyday interactions with each other and their environment. Understanding and interpretation are not only historically but also systematically before any Semiotic Notes on the Process of Understanding 37 scientific attitude: they are performances of interaction and consciousness that are performed as a matter of course in everyday life - in any historical everyday world. These performances of understanding are intersubjectively unfolded from earliest childhood. I. e., understanding is at the same time genetically laid out and in its concrete formation a skill imparted in dependence on the general structure of human socialization and the culturally specific selective training of attention. At the same time, these prescientific comprehension skills - the so-called everyday hermeneutics - are quite complicated in structure and stratification. They have a phylogenesis, a phylogenetic history, a cultural and social history - and they have a historical, ontogenesis embedded in a sociohistorical a priori. These comprehensions, which have always accompanied and constituted human interaction and their conditions of origin and function, are normally not discussed as a problem in science, certainly not in everyday life. Instead, they are practiced as a matter of course in science and everyday life. As something always taken for granted, they do not come into the view of consciousness: Although they structure consciousness performances that guide action, they can hardly be brought into consciousness reflectively, even in everyday activities and pressure to act. In their acquisition and application, they are typified and routinized, whereby this routinization and typification of understanding performances and skills psychologically relieves those who act. At the same time, routinizations and typifications are the preconditions of every social interaction. They constitute the trust of the interaction partners that each of them performs the same services, participates in a common interaction repertoire, has the same formal competencies, and accordingly can follow and understand socially acceptable meanings. The problem of scientific hermeneutics thus consists primarily in the fact that it is an idealizing and at the same time case-specific oriented reconstruction of not only the interaction and the products of interaction, but also, in connection with this, of the prescientific, everyday achievements and skills of understanding and their premises, rules, and results. III. In everyday communication, we are usually spontaneously content with what we hear and only in rare cases have to ask how someone meant something. When confronted with written texts, it happens much more frequently that difficulties in understanding arise, and it doesn ’ t even have to be extraordinary texts that cause us to falter. I remember recently pondering over an elementary school report and having to ask an expert for advice to understand the conventionalized text. Semiotically, the question of the end of interpretation ‘ would ’ have to be answered differently again, because strictly speaking, the interpretation of a text only leads to a new text, which entails and demands a new interpretation ad infinitum. To bring this out of the thin air of theory onto the ground of facts, consider newly enacted laws. They are usually followed by regulations and a cascade of commentaries, which in turn give rise to new commentaries, until after some time, if necessary, there is an amendment to the law, which gives rise to new regulations and commentaries. The infinite interpretation could be proven and explained by numerous 38 Semiotic Notes on the Process of Understanding other examples. I would only like to take up the exegesis of the holy scriptures, which has led to an unmanageable flood of signs. To offer an inconclusive interpretation, the semiotically indispensable principle of permanence requires some explanations and clarifications to exclude possible misunderstandings. First, it should be pointed out in this context that the principle of permanent interpretation is a direct consequence of a certain semiotic axiomatic structure. According to common opinion, the meaning of a sign owes itself to a social convention or explicit positing. Apart from a few exceptional cases, however, this is not true, for the constitution of a sign does not, as a rule, take place in such a way that two or more people determine the meaning of a sign expressis verbis. It is somewhat true that we are born into an already existing community of interpretation and adopt its habits of signification. We have to imagine the acquisition of a semiotic competence not in the sense of a constantly growing lexicon but in the sense of the development of semiotic creativity, which enables us to reconstruct hitherto unknown signs in the categories of our cultural community of interpretation in a meaningful way and to create in an individually creative way new signs, which are novel to the members of our community of interpretation, but not close to them. To explain this semiotically elementary fact, I would like to refer to the so-called meaningful errors that children repeatedly make in the process of language acquisition. As a further example of semiotic creativity, I want to mention the wide field of artistic activities in which have developed principles of deviation, alienation, and reshaping to special mastery, without doing something particularly different from everyday communication. If, however, sign users in the free play of semiotic forces reconstitute signs in every semiotic act, which must then be reconstructed by communication partners using the same semiotic principle so that communication can succeed, it is no longer meaningful to assume a fixed lexically specifiable sign meaning. Instead, meanings should be considered vague and fuzzy, and instruments capable of mastering vagueness in the act of communication should be developed. The processuality and continuity of sign interpretation must also be considered from the perspective of another semiotic axiom, that all thinking is thinking in signs. This principle, which to my knowledge was first formulated by Charles Sanders Peirce in the course of his critique of intuitionism, states that our thinking is not presuppositionless or capable of creating something out of nothing, but always presupposes signs which it applies interpretatively to the respective situation of action, thereby changing it and insofar providing occasion and material for further interpretation. This principle of continuity ensures on the one hand that at least potentially all previous knowledge finds its way into our interpretations, which Merton put into the vivid metaphor “ We all stand on the shoulders of giants ” which in its original version goes back to Bernard of Chartres, and on the other hand ensures that the process of interpretation does not come to a standstill as long as humankind exists. The permanent process of interpretation thus very much acquires the character of an archaeology of knowledge, to take up an expression of Michel Foucault, without thereby losing its innovative impetus, insofar as each singular process of interpretation finds a specific situation that has never existed before in this form and will never return in this form again. Thus, interpreting is not a passive reaction to what already exists, but a creation of something entirely new. Our interest in understanding the world interpretatively is therefore the actual epistemological motor of our spiritual orientation. Semiotic Notes on the Process of Understanding 39 The principle inconclusiveness of sign interpretation has led various authors to overextend the process of interpretation fatally, considering the absence of a univocal meaning as a legitimation to postulate the equivocation of all meanings in free flotation from meaning to meaning, in associative rambling and reminiscences, fantasies, word games, etymologies, and image compositions. Two of these tendencies to let interpretation drift in an uncontrolled and uncontrollable way, namely so-called deconstructivism a la Derrida and hermetic semiosis of the mystics and alchemists have been examined in detail in Umberto Eco ’ s essential work The Limits of Interpretation. Since Eco has pointed out with greater clarity the errors of the principle of the deconstructionist and the alchemist approach, I do not wish to recount this critique here, but merely to refer to this excellent work and highlight the consequences that are fruitful for our context of the discussion. Rather than denying the existence of univocal meaning in the sense of the modern theory of drift, or asserting the universal linkage of everything to everyone in the sense of the Hermeticists, critical semiotics rests on the fundamental principle that a sign is something through the knowledge of which we learn more (cf. C. P., 8.2332). In contrast, Hermetic semiosis emphasizes that the sign is something through which we learn something else. In Peirce ’ s semiotics, “ to experience more ” means that in the process of interpretation, i. e. in the transition from one interpreter to the next, the sign is determined more and more precisely, both in terms of its extension and its intensity. So we may say that in the course of the sign process the interpretation approaches asymptotically the last, logical interpretant, which is why in an advanced stage of the process of cognition, a more exact knowledge of the sign object is attained than at the beginning of the interpretation. Every sign potentially contains the totality of the conclusions that can be derived from it, only as a possibility that could actualize itself under certain conditions as the reality of a sign. The in-principle infinite interpretation process is usually interrupted repeatedly by the need for action. Still, despite these interruptions, the rule is that in each phase of semiosis, one has more exact knowledge of the content of what is represented than in the preceding phase and at the starting point. In contrast to this understanding of unlimited semiosis, for modern theories of drift, a sign is not something through which we gain more knowledge, but something in which we are confronted with something else, repeatedly. Eco has defined drift as a case of connotative neoplasm. The connotative neoplasm lives from the fact that, precisely because of the denial of a fixed, unambiguous, identical signifier, virtually everything can be brought into the relation of similarity with everyone. Peirce explicitly warns against this, calling it an aberration: “ There is no greater nor more frequent mistake in practical logic than to suppose that things which resemble one another strongly in some respects are and the more likely for that to be alike in others. ” (C. P., 2.634). Vivid literary examples of infinite drift, which use, among other things, the exuberant similarity principle just criticized, can be found in Eugène Sue ’ s The Wandering Jew or in Umberto Eco ’ s Foucault ’ s Pendulum. I would like to take the liberty here of making a critical remark about Umberto Eco ’ s intellectually questionable path in his second novel, in that he exaggerates the free play of the signifiers into the grotesque and links and intertwines everything with everything so that in the end a gigantic world conspiracy of the Jews and Freemasons, the Rosicrucians and the KGB looks out. But what is meant as an intellectual game and criticism by boundless exaggeration could be taken seriously by other readers with terrible implications. The 40 Semiotic Notes on the Process of Understanding atrocious propaganda of the Nazis quite successfully used similar motifs of a Jewish world conspiracy. The pseudo-connotative infinite sign strings arising from a logical error named by Peirce are not to be made one with the infinite sign processes identified by Peirce. These occur like out-of-control cell division in the spreading of metastases, which occur according to the regulatory mechanism of intersubjective verification. If the control over the growth of semioticity is lost in the course of semiosis, the sign loses its normal function. That associative sliding from meaning to meaning, which is typical for the interpretative drift, arises in a comparable way to processes in metastasis. The infinite semiosis is therefore not to be equated with a boundless free, arbitrary interpretation. The transformation of signs into other signs, which are supposed to be better, i. e. more clarifying, than the initial sign, is not a solipsistic but a social action; concerning its validity, it is dependent on general acceptance, which must come sooner or later if it is to endure. However, this socially dimensioned semiotic meliorism, which manifests itself in belief, conviction, and assent, does not guarantee a factual reference and does not, by itself, lead to an ontology of the real, even in the long run. This was never the opinion of Peirce either, who did not hold at all that sign interpretation as such, the mere translation of signs into other signs leads to knowledge of the real or any progress in this knowledge. Sign interpretation understood as a mere, immanent clarification of concepts, for which the factually real appears only as utopian fiction, is precisely that sign idealism, which he did not tire of denouncing as nominalism, as a sin of modern philosophy, which makes it impossible for it to explain a fact of natural science. Instead, it is knocked into shape until it assumes the form needed for anominalistic purposes. There is no transition from the sign idealism of sign-immanent understood semiotic processes to sign-determined knowledge of reality. Proper signification differs from false signification in that it has not only a fundamentum in mente but also a fundamentum in re. Peirce expressed this fact terminologically by differentiating between the immediate and the dynamic object in the concept of the object of the sign. The immediate object is the idea or thought on which the sign is directly based, the understanding in which it is founded. The dynamic object is the object of the sign, insofar as it is the thing or situation on which that idea or thought and the understanding rest. To say that signs always refer only to signs as true and false at the same time, at least in need of supplementation by the additional statement that a sign linkage has truth value only because it has a fundamentum in re, which as such is not thought of to its full extent as a sign, but also as a sign ground, as a being in the mode of the sign. This is different from claiming that interpretation is merely the clarification of something in another and always involves other signs, whereby the something spoken of in each case is ultimately unfixable. Such an assumption remains in that epistemological idealism of signs, which constantly calls signs the conditions of the possibility of experience but does not show how experience and reality as a process of signs happen in concrete. This amounts to a plea for an interpretive theory of the sign in which the possibilities of epistemology, hermeneutics, and relational logic are fruitfully united. Semiotic Notes on the Process of Understanding 41