The more I think about this the more I'm of the view that language is indeed the necessary function that mediates all conscious imagery and symbols. I'm saying that there's no visual awareness that is not entangled with language and that there's no language that's not visual-spatial. It seems that visual pathways in the brain run through language centers. any image we see comes pre-packaged with verbalization....not necessarily correct or useful or specific. But the more language and visuality mix up together the more we try to specify what we see with language ands the more our seeing prompts language. Can't have one without the other. No such thing as a purely non-verbal conscious experience, image, sensation. What's an exception? WC
----- Original Message ---- From: Frances Kelly <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, March 16, 2011 11:36:48 AM Subject: RE: Signs of Signs of Signs: Metasigns Frances to William and others... According to the integrationist thesis, all "communicational signs" can be used as "metasigns" which are signs used to signify or codify other signs. The idea of "metasigns" is presumably akin to "meta languages" that are used as tools in many disciplines to talk about referred objects, to include "object languages" or other languages themselves as referred objects. The examples stated on page 100 in the book to show this activity include photographs in a catalogue of pictures, where the photos are "metasigns" showing the depicted pictures; and pictures in a manual of traffic control devices, where the pictures are "metasigns" explaining the installed devices on streets. Now, if all signs are held by integrationism to be only verbal language signs, then nonlingual "devices" like photographs and pictures are not signs, yet they are seemingly held to function as "metasigns" and other nonlingual signs of some kind. In order for the "metasigns" to be integrational signs at all they must be lingual symbols, but in their capacity as codifying "metasigns" these lingual symbols actually function as nonlingual indexes that indicatively point to another sign as its referred object; and if that referred object is held to be a sign, then it also must be a symbolic lingual sign. It would seem that the integrationist thesis has no adequate umbrella typology of signifying devices to account for nonverbal language symbols or for nonlingual devices. If nonlingual devices like photos and symptoms and gestures for example are held to signify and refer and indicate but are not held to be signs, then it is not clear to me just exactly what these moderating and mediating devices indeed are. If the thesis has the goal of holding only mental constructs as signs and then only as the lingual symbols of verbal languages, then this entails that any objects of sense intended to act as signs for able humans must be reduced to symbols, otherwise all objects of sense will remain as other than signs. This approach would deny to nonhumans any signing ability whatsoever, and to signs any objectivity whatsoever. It is ironically a nominalist approach to signs reminiscent of the previous works found in soviet semiotics by its socialist scholars. This loose jargon about "metasigns" and "devices" that appear in the book is merely one of several ambiguities that have surfaced in the thesis.
