International Catholic University
This lecture will continue the discussion of the liberal arts, their history and their philosophy. We have considered in our first lecture the relation between learning and the liberal arts and the reason for thinking that the liberal arts are preeminently the arts of learning. In our second lecture we looked at the tradition of the liberal arts through antiquity in the Middle Ages in particular and saw how two groups of arts were distinguished. Today we will look at the linguistic arts of the Trivium. In fact this third lecture and the fourth will both be devoted to discussion of the linguistic arts of the Trivium.
In the gift of speech that we possess we have the best known instance of man's use of signs and symbols. It is a common possession so characteristic that man stands out as preeminently the talking animal. This gift of speech is so prized that ways have been devised of taking it down and preserving it. Libraries of the world are filled with what men have found it possible to express. Here if anywhere, in language and its use, the liberal arts are to be found as the arts of signs and symbols. Now in this lecture and the next we want to consider the linguistic sign with the purpose of showing what arts are necessary for its use. The ancients, as we have seen, claimed that there are three primary arts: the arts of the Trivium, of grammar, logic and rhetoric. I hope to show that there is ground for such a claim -- that there are indeed three distinct and different arts for the use of language. However that is not my main purpose here in this lecture, and my use of history will be only by way of illustration, except insofar as traditional distinctions may further the analysis.
The validity and usefulness of the distinctions are to be judged by what they contribute to understanding the linguistic sign and its use. In recent years much work has been devoted to the analysis of the sign, especially in the systematic and scientific elaboration of semiotics, as its called. It's the science of signs. Here again I should be concerned with these discussions only incidently insofar as they can contribute to the analysis of the sign and its function. Although I would hope to make some contribution to various signs, the object of my concern is as it were at a pre-scientific level. It is at the beginnings of these disciplines and with what they already presuppose. I would like if possible to reach the pre-scientific level of experience which provides the data that these sciences seek to analyze and the problems they endeavor to solve. What is given, what is presupposed by these sciences of linguistics, in semiotics and modern logic, what is given and presupposed by these sciences is open to anyone who wants to look at the fact of signs and their operation.
With this word of warning I can state my major contention here as follows. If we look closely and dispassionately at the operation of the linguistic sign we find that at least three different aspects or elements must be distinguished. No less than three can describe what happens in the operation of a sign. No more than three are needed. Each of these three calls for a different kind of sensitivity, for a different skill, for its use. All three meet the conditions of a liberal art, and they correspond in a general way to the traditional distinctions of the Trivium. For this reason I propose to retain the traditional names and call them the liberal arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric.
For the analysis of the sign it is best for our purpose to begin with a group of words making a statement. Words are not of course the only instances of signs, but they are the most familiar and the most readily available. In their written form they are secondary to speech, and linguists frequently warn of the mistakes that come from taking written rather than spoken language for analysis. The spoken word lasts little longer than the time it takes to pronounce and can be recorded only by fairly elaborate device. But what is much more important, it operates fully as a sign only in conjunction with the tone of voice in which the word or phrase is uttered and the gestures or facial expressions that accompany it. All these must be taken into account in the analysis of the spoken sign, and yet it is only with the greatest difficulty that they are susceptible of verbal analysis. I refer especially to the gestures and the tone of voice that we use in talking.
Yet the warning of the linguist can help save us from mistaking what is primarily given in the sign process. From written discourse we are apt, too apt, to take the isolated word as the basic and primary unit and analyze it, that word, as a typical sign. Yet from observation of the spoken language it becomes clear that this isolation of the word by itself isn't an analytical device. Words do not stand alone in the spoken discourse: they are part of a context, and where they do occur in isolation some larger context is understood. We know a language by knowing groups of words not just isolated words. Even the function of individual words can be determined ultimately only by the way they perform with other words. Thus a dictionary best shows the sense of the word by providing examples of its use.
If words function thus in groups it would seem to buttress the claim of the modern logician that the logic of sentences is prior to the logic of terms. A group of words as an example of a sign possesses the further advantage of avoiding and postponing the complex question of the different kinds of words. Connectives such as or and if obviously do not function in the same way as names. In taking any one word as a sign we are thus at once limiting our analysis to but one kind with the resulting danger that our analysis may apply only to that one kind of sign. But with a group of signs, a group of words, provided it is large enough we may catch all the important kinds.
With this as an introduction let us consider a group of words operating as a sign. To have as much control as possible over the example we can take as an expression that applies to this lecture -- say the statement that a lecture lasts about fifty minutes. What do we mean when we say that this expression is a sign? In the first place, although not always the first thing to be consciously observed, it is a material or physical thing. In this case it consists of a number of sounds made by percussions of air. It is also something more. In fact if it were no more than this, no more than a number of sounds, as a material thing we would not call the expression a sign at all. The something more that it provides is something other than itself: a reference by which we are sent to the meaning of the statement that a lecture lasts fifty minutes.
This something other almost always appears with a group of words, although in the case of certain isolated words it would be very difficult to see. This other is very difficult to describe without getting caught in the difficulties of philosophy. To call it a reference, a direction, a meaning is to use terms that have philosophical history in the efforts to explain the signifying process. Yet the fact, however philosophies may endeavor to account for it, is indubitable. The expression as a sign is something in itself, sound and words if you will, but it also provides something more than itself. It is also evident that the other which is given by the sign is not present in the same way that the sign is present as a thing. There is a sound in words. Our original example consists of a small number of sounds in words. Whereas the other that it presents consists of all the words sounding during a fifty-minute period.
The sign thus provides us with two different kinds of presentations. It occurs as a thing, sounding words. And it presents something else which is not present in the same way. The lecture lasts fifty minutes. We haven't spoken fifty minutes. That's something else that's referred to; it's a whole that doesn't yet exist. We might say that the sign is present to us immediately as a thing, the spoken words that you hear, whereas its other is presented immediately through that. This would suffice for indicating the two different kinds of presences, although it leaves untouched the difficulty of the mediation. Subsuming both under knowledge, since both involve a knowledge of some kind, we could describe the sign as a thing which in addition to itself makes something other come to be known. In any case, what we need from such notions as presentation, presence, or knowledge, is some way of describing the fact that the sign is a thing which gives us potentially or actually something more than itself. In the ordinary use of the sign the other that it presents is the predominant element. In the operation of the sign we attend not to what it is in itself but to the other to which it directs us. This fact led the ancients to draw a sharp distinction between signs and things. Signs as material sounds, as sounding words direct us to something other to a certain thing -- to the fact that a lecture lasts fifty minutes.
Now with this we can begin to distinguish the elements of the sign. In our preliminary search for the most general notion of a linguistic sign we have been compelled to distinguish two elements or aspects. That aspect under which the sign is considered as a thing enjoying an existence on its own which I shall call simply the sign thing. Sometimes it is called the sign vehicle, but this already emphasizes a function of carrying us to something else; it's a vehicle, which is more than we want at this point. There is nothing particularly difficult in this aspect of the sign. In written language it consists of certain marks with differing shapes on some kind of writing material. But it may consist by the percussion of air making a certain sound, as in talking, bell ringing, or in any kind of sound instrument used for signaling, or in electrical impulses of wave frequencies, of any kind that can be converted into sights or sounds within human range. In a footprint it consists of a certain impression made in the earth. In smoke signals, in the visible mass of gas particles. In flags, in the cloth of certain colors and shapes.
The first element that we distinguish in the sign is the sign thing. The material, individual, sound in the case of the spoken words or a written word, a bell ringing, any kind of signal, a cloud in the sky -- any of these things, each of them a material thing. For that reason I'll just call it a sign thing. The second element is considered more difficult to grasp. There is certainly more in the sign than just the sign thing, but once we begin to look closely at the sign the something more seems to consist of many things. The expression that a lecture lasts fifty minutes presents us with something other than itself. Something other than a thing that exists in its own right, since this lecture lasting fifty minutes hasn't yet lasted, hasn't yet existed, hasn't completed its existence. But it functions as a sign without our need to check up and see whether a lecture in fact lasted fifty minutes.
The other that's presented in the sign, by the sign thing, is thus not the other existing in itself as a material thing. If we call the sign a label, which is outside and beyond the sign, it exists or is present in one way in the sign and in another way in itself. The other way which the sign presents, or the other which the sign presents as it exists in the sign, I shall call the sign object. Given the context simply the object. It has been called by many names. The Stoics in the ancient world called it the lekton. The Scholastics called it the annunciable. Some moderns called it designatum or signatum. I call it an object to distinguish it both from the linguistic expression and from the fact which it expresses. In the case of our example the temporal length of the lecture. Both of these may exist or are capable of existing apart from the signifying process in a way that the sign itself does not. It is one or it is the fact but different from that fact since it is what may send the reader to check the temporal length of the lecture. It is capable of expression in many different forms, as many as there are languages for expressing it. It is what is presented, thrown forward, hence an object where an assigned thing functions as a sign.
A lecture lasts fifty minutes: a spoken expression saying something about the length of the lecture. How and where the sign object exists is a fascinating object. Does it exist only in the mind? Or does it exist somewhere outside the mind? No less difficult and interesting is the relation between the object and the extramental thing that it expresses outside the sign process. That a lecture lasts fifty minutes is something that's presented by the sign. Now whether or not in fact the lecture lasts fifty minutes is something that can be checked, has to be checked to verify. But all we want now is what the sign itself is.
We have found so far the sign thing and the sign object which somehow corresponds outside the sign, the fact or thing that is presented within the sign as an object. It sounds a bit difficult or subtle, but you see I'm talking about a lecture lasts fifty minutes. That signifies the length of time that a lecture takes. Now does a lecture take that much? Does this lecture take that much? That's the fact outside the sign itself, although no mention has been made of it except indirectly.
The operation of a sign also involves a user; verbal discourse has both a speaker and a hearer, listener -- a writer and a reader in the case of the written sign. In functioning the sign makes some kind of impression upon both the speaker and the hearer. In one respect this impression is utterly personal, private, as diverse as the user of the sign. Your reacting and understanding and the rest to the expression that the lecture lasts fifty minutes is probably different if you are not a lecturer, or if you are. The occurrance of the sign and its user consists of many diverse mental acts, no one of which is another. In this sense there is always a subjective aspect to the sign, either actual or potential. But since it is subjective in the user, it is also outside the sign as such. For this reason, if it's outside the sign it's not germaine to our inquiry right now. This investigation can be left to psychology. However the mark of the user does remain in a way within the sign and provides evidence for the presence of yet a third element distinct from both the sign thing and the sign object.
That there is a third element will become clear if we take another consideration of our example. We had the indicative statement: A lecture lasts about fifty minutes. Change it only slightly: Does a lecture last about fifty minutes? The sign thing is changed by the substitution of the word does, and if you can hear it, the question mark at the end of it. See the interrogation that I've made by the sound of my voice. What about the sign object? In both cases it's the length of the lecture, how many minutes the lecture takes. Sign object remains the same yet the two expressions are different signs in that they make different demands. The sign thing has changed from the lecture lasts fifty minutes to the question does the lecture last fifty minutes?
The indicative statement contains something more than the object: it consists the assertion that a lecture lasts fifty minutes. And this assertion is true or false. The interrogative expression contains as something more than the object a request for information. Does a lecture last fifty minutes? The same object in other words is presented for different considerations. The two expressions make different demands. It may be objected that after expelling concern for the reader or the listener we have immediately brought him back.
But my point is that we are now dealing with an element present in the sign itself, and it is because of this element that a certain effect is produced on a hearer or a reader. It is not the effect on the hearer as a subjective experience but the element in the sign that makes the effect that is our concern. To locate the basis for the different effects insofar as they exist in the sign we need only look at the sign, not at the hearer. The difference in our example is manifested in the sign thing as the difference between an assertion and a question -- in writing the difference between an expression that ends with a period and one that ends with a question mark. But the difference lies not so much as such but in the attitude that is demanded towards it. The difference in relation established between an actual or potential user of the sign of that object.
Now it's immediately difficult to describe this third aspect without referring to the user, just as it's difficult to describe the sign object without referring to the correlative aspect outside the fact. Yet both elements in the sign are distinct from each other. There is also difficulty in getting a good name for this third element. Those that touch on this element usually tend to overemphasize the subjective user's understanding of it -- not the use indicated by the sign itself but how the user responds to the way he is asked to respond. To avoid this reference to the user, I shall call this third element simply the sign use and depend on the context to make clear that I'm talking about an element in the sign which indicates in some way how it is to be used and not on what some user is doing with it.
Our analysis of the sign has thus yielded three elements: sign thing, sign object, sign use. Collecting the three we can accordingly define a sign in general as a thing which presents an object in some respect or capacity where object and respect are to be taken in a special way that has been indicated. To make this clearer let us consider a series of three examples. A simpler one than this business of the lecture lasting fifty minutes. Take the expression of a person at a dinner table asking his companion to pass the bread. The expression, pass the bread, is sounding words in English that have a meaning that refer to the bread as a sign object, asking for it to be passed. So, pass the bread is making a request. The expression pass the bread makes a request which gets the bread passed. Consider smoke in the sky. It's a visible material thing, yet also between smoke in the sky there is a real relation of smoke to fire and knowing that smoke indicates fire -- just as clouds have a real relation to rain, so seeing rain clouds in the sky indicates that rain is in the offing.
Before pursuing the analysis of the three elements of the sign that we have distinguished, sign thing, sign object, sign use, we should note that in the actual functioning of the sign all three elements are always present. There is always something that presents something other in a certain respect that makes a certain demand. One element, however, one of these three, may well predominate over another so that we react first to it. It sometimes may occur, for example, that on receiving a letter we first remark on some peculiarity in the handwriting. Now at that moment what's predominant? Well, the sign thing, where you are looking at the writing itself, not at what the writing is saying.
The action of a crowd seeking to get out of a theater after hearing the cry of fire is primarily response to the sign use. If there is a fire here, it's time to get out. The crowd is concerned neither with the quality of the efforts as a sign thing nor with the fire but with the necessity of getting away from that fire. In such a sign as a mechanical description of a plant, what we want to recognize is what that plant is. The sign's function is primarily to identify the plant under discussion.
But although one element is predominant in these instances the other two are also always present. The peculiar handwriting in the letter still presents some kind of object for some kind of consideration. The cry of fire has a certain character as a sign thing presents a certain object, namely the presence of fire. The botanical description consists of ink marks on a page that are used for identifying and knowing the plant that is described. What we have in each case is a unity of all three elements in which the predominance of one at any moment never eliminates the presence of the other two. Just as our experience of the physical world is sensibly of three dimensional things, so the sign that is given in the sign process is triatic. A threefold relation. To each of the directions corresponds one of the elements that we have distinguished.
However, in addition to these three, the sign is also related to things lying outside the sign object to the user, the hearer, the responder to the sign use. In their ordinary use which we know best signs are used by persons about things. This is to say that there are only two different classes of things outside the sign itself with which it is involved: the users of it and what the signs present to the users -- what they stand for, what they are about, in short things, including signs as things if you want. We should accordingly expect to find within the sign two different elements or aspects by which the relation to these two classes of things is established, elements which I've called respectively sign use and sign object. To claim that more than three elements are needed is to go beyond the sign and to bring in the users -- and, while correlative in reality, outside the sign.
This is certainly necessary to refer to the user and to refer to the reality. It's certainly necessary to describe the total sign situation in which the sign accomplishes its work. Often it is crucially important for the full understanding of the sign to know who is talking, who is being addressed, as well as the thing that is being talked about. All of us makes such distinctions all the time, more or less consciously in ordinary conversation.
But however important, they become irrelevant these considerations once we limit our study exclusively to the sign itself abstracted from what is external to it. It's much more difficult to show why no less than three elements are necessary. It sometimes appears in mathematics and modern logic that signs are manipulated without concern for anything except their character as sign things. No concern for their objects or the respects in which they are to be taken or used. It may even be claimed that the operations are carried on without any concern for what they mean. It can be shown, I think, that insofar as this is true it is due primarily to the kind of signs that are employed. And this kind of sign appears predominantly in mathematics as you will see later.
At this point it may prove helpful to consider a simple example so as to see how our three elements are still present. Two of the oldest laws in logic are the law of excluded middle and the law of non contradiction. They may be written as P or non P. Spoken as P or non P. Or P stands for anything that is true or false. Or to the other non contradiction, not both P and not P. For instance, it is either raining here or it is not raining here. Then a system is possible, proof with a few actions, a few simple rules of operation that these two laws are equivalent, that they have the same truth value. Actual truth is not the point. But what we want to see now is how these expressions as functioning as signs exhibit at least three distinct elements. The element of the sign thing is obvious and consists as the sounds or words on the board. Either it is raining or it is not raining. When communicating they function to make something known. See that they are stating something about the rain, that it is happening or it is not. The something that we come to see and know is the sign object. This is not identical with the sign thing for we may express the same equivalence, either raining or not raining, in many different languages or in the artificial language of logic and mathematics. What I'm claiming now is that the expression of the law now is functioning as a sign presents something, the sign object, other than the sounds the sign thing, to be known and seen in some way, the sign use.
Of the three elements the sign use may seem to be extraneous and unnecessary. It might be objected that sign thing and sign object alone are sufficient. An example is brought forward of the word in its dictionary meaning or a diagram in its object. Such examples are misleading. They omit the complex of which the word and the diagram occur. It's only in context that they function fully as signs. The effect of the context provides a third element and is the sign use. The worth and validity of these distinctions appears most clearly in seeing what can be done with them. To see how they function in actual use is also to see that each performs a distinct function requiring a different scale for its effective use -- in other words, that each provides a basis and matter for a distinct liberal art.
To isolate one of the elements in this threefold unity which is the sign, it is useful to attempt fixing two of them and allowing the third to vary. Through the varying effects the sign then achieves it is easy to locate the specific function of the one varying element and to see the kind of art that is necessary for its use. Start with the easiest: let us try to fix the sign object and sign use and allow the sign thing to vary. For this purpose perhaps the simplest example is that of naming one and the same thing in two different languages. Even this involves difficulties. We must be sure that we have the same thing presented, the same sign object, and for the same consideration the sign use. We must also suppose that the two languages are sufficiently developed and have behind them sufficient experience to describe or name the situation that we are positive. Although it may be difficult, we know that the fact does occur. Two people speaking different languages do manage to communicate so that they can get the same object for the same purpose.
Now as an example we may consider a diagrammatic introduction to a foreign language. Suppose we have a picture of a hat and under this expression we write, this is a hat. We have the same sign thing in the diagram of the hat and we write under it besides this is a hat, sombrero. Now what have we got? One same sign thing. What's the sign use? Learning a foreign language. How is it accomplished? By fixing the sign thing, the diagram of the hat and then making two other sign things that indicate the same thing. Now the sign thing is fixed, and it's fixed by presenting a picture of a hat and then writing under it in the one case sombrero, in another case that it is a hat. And we manage to understand that a piece of headgear which we recognize by the picture is called a sombrero in Spanish, hat in English.
By the simplified picture a diagram is of course a sign. It differs from the verbal expression under it in having some likeness and shape with its object such as a word does not. The word hat, sombrero, neither has any likeness to the hat itself. This characteristic provides the basis for distinguishing among kinds of signs. Some kinds of signs, as we will see more in detail later, are such as present in themselves some aspect of the sign object that they represent. This distinction among kinds of signs becomes especially important when we turn to mathematics and its language. Here however we are concerned only with the function in learning a foreign language.
One function of the likeness in the diagram is to make sure that we have the same object, the hat, the headgear. To function with this purpose we must possess the ability to use it as a sign. There is little evidence, for instance, that a dog ever makes anything out of a picture. It's most difficult to get a dog ever to watch a TV picture. My cat sometimes watches it but I think it's watching just the motions not recognizing cats, dogs or people. Now since a picture of a hat does have a likeness with its object which the word does not, the diagram or picture provides one way of fixing the object. In this case we have fixed the sign object, the piece of the headgear which is called hat in English and sombrero in Spanish.
It should also be noted that the use of this device supposes a certain context which determines its use. We pick up the book and understand what it is trying to do, to teach us Spanish. When we see the picture and the word under it we are able to understand its purpose. Actually this is an extremely laconic device, a kind of shorthand. To put it into words requires something like this, you want to learn some Spanish? Well, you see this picture? It provides an object which represents a piece of headgear for both the Spanish and the English speaking peoples. But in Spanish it is called the sombrero. This is very laconic: just to explain it in as few words as we can is much more involved. Now of course much more than this is required since such an enunciation of it already supposes the whole context of what it is to learn a foreign language and how this may be done through a book devoted to this purpose employing pictures for identifying the sign objects. However all this is only to say that the users of the book can take this as fixed. That is, that the sign use is determined by the context and the respect or consideration for which its objects are presented for an English speaking person to learn Spanish.
With the sign object and sign use so fixed and held steady we can consider the difference between saying as in sombrero and it is a hat. The main difference is obviously the presence of different sign things -- now these sounding words. But much greater differences could be found by taking languages not related within the Indo European language, languages as English and Spanish are. Take English and Chinese they have very different sort of sound things going on. But the difference is sufficiently great to show what happens when the sign things vary. The two languages use different sounds and patterns which appear in the example as different combinations of letters. They are not put together in the same way. The distinct sounds or letters are not the same for saying the same thing.
One little example like this alone is not sufficient to show even the most obvious differences between the sign things used in different languages. The sounds which the written language is first assigned are things. Different languages may employ different sounds as signs. Any one language is only a selection from the range of sounds which the voice could utter but even when the sounds employed are roughly the same, as things they are capable of entering into different relations with each other and forming different structures. Thus besides using different properties of sound, language may combine these sounds according to different rules. One language may utilize word position as a significant element as English does. Another may not as in Latin. The result is that different languages exhibit different structures of sign things. Now all of this is indeed very obvious but it is worth laboring for the sake of making the point that in using a language we must be able to handle and manipulate the sign things of that language according to the rules of their formation and organization.
Such a function requires an art, since we are then engaged in making a construct out of a certain set of sign things. Of course it is not the only thing that is required, since these sign things in functioning as signs also possess objects and uses with which they accomplish the work of signs. But even without the sign thing, in the art of its use we cannot have the others, at least in a language of external structure with a significant expression. Even if there is such a thing as a purely mental sign, what the ancients called the interior word or objective concept, it cannot be manifested except through an exterior construct. The making of such a construct demands an art. Art, as we have seen, is a making. And, so to speak, to write a language is to make a constructive as to employ an art. In the case of managing the sign things which are the words of language, it demands an art. And the art of dealing with the sign things of the language is traditionally known as the liberal art of grammar. As manifested wherever there is a use of sign things, it is a common art and should be distinguished from the science of grammar with which scholars and linguists work. Anyone who can speak a language employs the grammar of that language more or less well, more or less badly, but he is using the grammar.
Linguists like Chomsky say that there is an internal grammar, a universal grammar of language. And then as you learn a particular language you have also sought a particular art. This grammar has a power of constructing and using sign things. It is both an art and a liberal art according to the notion established in the previous sections. For this reason I shall retain its traditional name and call it the liberal art of grammar. The need for this art is revealed by its absence, or rather its weakness, since any use of language supposes to some extent the presence of the art. The broken and halting language of the foreigner is immediately evident. He may well know what he wants to say but he lacks the ability to catch the sign object and sign use in the sign things of the language. He lacks a mastery of the sign things, their words and their combinations proper to the language which he is attempting to speak. In being ungrammatical his speech reveals an unsure grasp of the art of grammar of that language.
A liberal art is an art that frees. It's an art of freedom, as the Latin word liberal shows. Now what's the freedom that grammar gives us? It's the freedom not to be tied to any one individual structure. It's as though one were able to say only one group of sentences and repeat them over and over and over: that's not the case. Even a child just beginning to learn to speak is able to form and express sentences that have never been expressed before. And how many can a user of the language enunciate? An infinite number. The skill which the part of grammar gives the language user is a skill that frees him to speak anything he wants to speak, to understand anything that can be said to him, and understood by him. It's a great freedom, and in this sense the liberal art of grammar is liberal, as the other ones are (as I shall show later on), in producing such a liberating capacity. The arts of the mind make it free, and hence they are liberating arts.
Combining the understanding that we have already obtained of art with the additional note of the liberating factor, we can venture a definition of the liberal art. If art is having the right knowhow of things makeable, the note that now has to be added is that the thing made is one that transcends space and time. Thus a liberal art can be defined as having the right knowhow of making things that transcend space and time. And this is a true of the art of using language which is the liberal art of grammar.