Frances to William and others... My noted replies are interleaved in your comments. You have given some intriguing ideas. The blending of metaphysical philosophy or the humanities with empirical science is most appealing to me. The advances of neurology into art would seem to be one such instance. The thorn however is what will act as a bridge that might narrow or even close the shifting and drifting gap between the poles of philosophy and science. It is not likely that integrationism meets that bridging need.
-----Original Message----- From: William Conger [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, 16 March, 2011 3:31 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Signs of Signs of Signs: Integrationist Principles [List 1] WC: I think your summaries are correct. My interest in Harris is centered on his idea about the creation of signs (regardless of Peirce's tokens, signs, symbols). His ideas may be similar to Peirce except he says Peirce sees tokens, etc., as preexisitng their uses. I think Harris' Integrationism is perfectly suited to the way artworks function, both for artists and for beholders. Artists make "empty signs" or meaningless things within the context of culturally defined artworld and beholders -- including the artist -- project associations, names, images, coded forms, narratives to those things. In my view beholding artworks requires a visual-verbal process because it's impossible for a normal human brain to experience anything without constructing one or many identities for it, real or imaginary. There is no such thing as pure abstraction, non-objective form, utterly self-referential stuff. FK: It agreeably seems that some obviously unclear artworks like the acceptable forms of justly found products, such as installed gallery urinals for example, must have proper propositional meaning "read" into them, usually by learned expert percipients who may be makers or takers of artworks, as if these artworks were reviewed to be narrative fictions or literary discourses; and the thesis of integrationism likely helps here. For obviously clear artworks or even for natural aesthetic objects and for other kinds of cultural aesthetic objects like religion, then these "aesthetic objects" may indeed broadly exist as signs independent of any particular cultural context or wokable situation or mental determination. FK: The integrationist thesis however does not clearly state whether the basic stuff of signs can itself exist as signs, or exist for nonhumans before humans, or for normal mature humans only, or if humans can arbitrarily resist and reject stuff already established as signs. The evolving particles of a particular kind of possible atom for example will naturally engage together in referred relations by internal acts of intrinsic representation, which even gravity and their habit of informed contact with one another is seemingly an abstract sign situation within their own inner context. WC: Integrationism is the linguistic version of this idea. There can't be a sign that preexists a referent and there are no referents that preexist their signs. That is the same condition as a painting as an empty sign or as meaningless until it is experienced in some subjective context. Interestingly, neuroscience has discovered "mirror neurons" that cause us to unconsciously imitate the feelings and actions of others, to have empathy. An artwork is a culturally contrived object that functions as a mirror to our own mirror neurons. We construct ourselves when we behold artworks by subconsciously imagining ourselves metaphorically "as if" the artwork. This is analogous to constructing communication in Harris' Integrationism. He could have enlisted the support of neurology by mentioning how mirror neurons enable people to construct their communications with "empathy" helping to assure mutual understanding. FK: The idea of finding or making a meaningless "empty sign" is perhaps akin to a realist "zero sign" which would be an empty class holder waiting to be filled with members of the class or as parts of the whole. The realist term "sign" for example is an empty class filled with "icons" and "indexes" and "symbols" as its members. The "empty sign" or "zero sign" in situations of art or nonart like tech and science of course admits usual types and general kinds into the semiotic mix of signs, which is an objective globalization that integrationism seemingly attempts to avoid. In "zero sign" situations of accepted semiosis a referred meaningless object furthermore can exist without the form of its sign vehicle being present to sense. For example, if the soldiers are told to attack at noon only if there is no smoke signal on the hill top at noon, then a referred object is signified by a sign to the signers in the absence of a sign vehicle, even if smoke signals were never experienced in the past by the signers. The missing sign vehicle still bears information by referring to an object for any signer, even if the sign never has any meaning. All signs are dependent on material objects and referential objects to be signs, but not on defined meanings or intended signers or specified contexts or applied usages. FK: For integrationism to limit signs as being only verbal language symbols made intentionally by normal mature humans in collective social contexts, and to deny that natural objects are intrinsically signs which bear referred information to nonhuman signers like atoms or animals or galaxies, is to justly restrict integrationism to being a narrow linguistic thesis, where it admittedly is useful for addressing matters of "practical" concern. In its pretense to be "theoretical" or even global, the aspirations of integrationism merely take subjective nominalism to an unrealistic solipsist extreme. The thesis would have us believe that objective scientific logic cannot adequately account for the stuff sensed in the world. There is however a need for some psychologism in logic, because only psychology and its neurology can account for the initial "desire" that scientists have for wishing to seek truth in the first place, and logic alone cannot account for that feeling, not even by the means of abductive conjectural hypotheses. WC: I've said it before and I'll say it again. The next step in art theory, art philosophy, aesthetics, will need to utilize the cross disciplinary advances in both the humanities and the sciences. Neurology, a basic awareness of how the brain functions is essential to any serious inquiry. Old fashioned philosophical guesswork is obsolete. Linguistics is essential, per Harris or someone else, because language is central to all human inquiry; it mediates all experience, right brain feelings and intuition and abstract visuality and left brain analysis, lexicality, verbalization. Of course, History, philosophy, literature, as an amalgam of cultural studies, is crucial. FK: It might be immature to dismiss the process of "guessing" as being unimportant to research and inquiry. It is after all the preparatory key to making theses and theories. All that humans can sense indirectly is the seeming haze of likely stuff, and then guess that the haze of stuff represents a truly real fact. The phenomenal haze is a phenomenal sign of the phenomenal stuff. The human mind can never know with absolute exact certainty the stuff or the fact or the truth or even the full meaning of a sign. The human mind after all is phenomenal and not epiphenomenal. The individual and communal mind can only interpret and infer what it guesses might in fact truly exist. Only our buddies can help assure us that we are not likely suffering a deluded illusion. For pragmatism all sense is based on fallibility. FK: The process of practicing the pragmatist theory of phenomenology entails the "observation" of hazy stuff felt sensed in mind, and then the "expression" of those found feelings felt sensed in reports to others similarly engaged for some agreed opinion. It is because an observed phenomenon in the subjective mind cannot be tested empirically with experimentation that phenomenology must remain somewhat philosophical and metaphysical. It is however the preparatory fundamental basis of all art and science. The thesis of integrationism may find a place in this phenomenal mix, because it is the collective community of learned experts
