Frances, I can't believe we're referring to the same Roy Harris. His integrationist approach to communication in Signs, Language and Communication begins with his lengthy discussion of what he calls the "fallacy of verbalism". Chapter 2. Harris does not put language before semiotics but considers it as a subset of semiotics. There are, for him, three modes of contextualizing and thus creating signs (which never pre-exist a specific context): Biomechanical (p. 28) = our physical and mental capacities; macrosocial = communication practices of a group or community; circumstantial = what is possible as communication in particular circumstances. These three modes interact in varying ways to create signs. Verbalizing is just one possible way -- not restricted to "words". I could go to almost any page in this Harris book to cite examples of his rejection of verbalizing as the fundamental and necessary mode of semiotics and communication. The same view will be evident in his influential "The Necessity of Artspeak" and and in his many other Integrationist publications. Nowhere will you find Harris to be a "verbalist" or what he would call "segregationalism".
I could copy out parts of his text but it would take too much space -- in fact, a whole book. That book would be Harris' Signs, Language and Communication. Unless I totally misunderstand what you say, I believe you have missed the essential point of Harris' theory. Harris does not accept the independence of a sign. To communicate -- by whatever means -- is to make signs. Communication and sign-making are one and the same. Verbalism and even non-verbalism presume fixed, independent signs. But neither is valid when the sign is made in the process of communicating. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Frances Kelly <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, February 6, 2011 9:43:57 AM Subject: RE: Signs of Signs of Signs Frances to William... You asked where in his texts does Harris claim that signs are only "verbal" and that you could not find this claim, presumably by searching in the present book under discussion and perhaps in his other writings. Off the top of my head it cannot be recalled if he stated the claim specifically with the term "verbal" or not, but my search at least in his book for such a claim and term will continue. In any event and although Harris may not specifically state in his book that signs are only "verbal" it is clear to me that this is his implied claim, because he holds that all signs are only of language, and to call a sign lingual is to call a sign verbal. His theory of integrationism is simply one of integrational linguistics; and there is only one linguistic language system at the present, which is verbal language that is made up of verbal signs. He denies that there can be any sign other than as language, and therefore any sign must only be verbal. It is my tentative stance that linguistics currently is only of lingual verbal language, but which linguistics may potentially be developed into accounting for some other virtual languages and variable languages, such as visual language and vital language for example. This future development of an expanded lingua is a good promise of nominalism and by extension of integrationism. If his theory of language signs is framed to now accommodate other than verbal lingua, this has not yet been found by me in his text.
