Walker Percy's Philosophy of Language

Footnotes


1"Language," of course, is a term that has been used to describe many possible referents, both human and non-human communication. By the term "language," here, and in the question, we mean symbolic language as uniquely manipulated by mankind. Below, we will make clear why human language stands alone as per discussion of the the "triad." All future references to the term "language" below should be interpreted as referring to "triadic" symbolic language, unless otherwise explicitly stated.

2"Naming and Being" (SS, 132). This essay is probably the best original introduction to Percy's ideas on language for the non-specialist. Otherwise, Percy's three non-fiction works from which the below material will come will be abbreviated as follows: The Message in the Bottle (1975) as [MB]; Lost in the Cosmos (1983) as [LC]; and Signposts in a Strangeland (1991) as [SS].

3Our discussion of the "dyad "and the "triad" below find their source in "A Semiotic Primer of the Self" (86-127, LC).

4Percy alludes to the work of American logician and philosopher Charles Peirce (1839-1914), one of the fathers of semiology, for his original inspiration for "triadic theory." It is probably within Percy's essays, "Is a Theory of Man Possible?" and "The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind" in SS that he acknowledges Peirce most at length. (See Kaja Silverman's The Subject of Semiotics (1983), pp. 14-25 for a more extended, critical treatment of Peirce's ideas as a whole).

Other figures to whom Percy acknowledges debt include Ferdinand de Saussure, Hans Werner, Susanne Langer, and Martin Heidegger, along side of Ernst Cassirer, Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, and Soren Kierkegaard. "Semiology" is the formal, scientific study of signs and their signification.

5David Crystal, editor of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1987), notes: "there is no agreed total for the number of languages spoken in the world today. Most reference books give a figure of 4000 to 5000, but estimates have varied from 3000 to 10,000" (284).

6Percy's essays in which discussion of triadic language is found include the following: "The Delta Factor," "Toward a Triadic Theory of Meaning," "The Symbolic Structure of Interpersonal Process," and "Semiotic and a Theory of Knowledge" from MB; "A Semiotic Primer of the Self" from LC; and "Is a Theory of Man Possible?" and "The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind" from SS.

As an aside we might note that there is a very real sense in which Percy's language theory, because of its larger cosmological context, envelops all other language and literary theories, including literature itself. Moreover, besides language's organization as a "triad" via the symbol-meaning relationship, it is also interesting to note other "triadic" dimensions of language. For example, as Richard Restak notes, human language takes the shape of three forms: speech, sign, and script. Likewise, Walter Ong in his work offers that communication has passed through three stages during the history of mankind: the oral-aural, the chirographic-typographic, and the electronic.

7"Symbol, Consciousness, Intersubjectivity" (MB, 274). This is one of Percy's more thoughtful technical essays.

8"Semiotic and a Theory of Knowledge" (MB, 261).

9"Semiotic and a Theory of Knowledge" (MB, 263).

10 I choose not represent post-structuralist thought in this statement, for what I hope is the obvious reason that language as an activity is necessary for the articulation of post-structuralism itself. I do, however, intend later to address post-structuralist criticisms of language in an essay I am writing on Percy's semiotics of "self" to appear in the WPProject at a future date.

11Symbol, Consciousness, Intersubjectivity" (MB, 272).

12"The Symbolic Structure of the Interpersonal Process" (MB, 203). As among many semioticians themselves-the field being multi-disciplinarian-and even within the longer course of Percy's career writings, there is and has been variability in the meaning of the term "sign" (as Percy himself notes). The author has chosen here in a quote from Percy's 1975 essay collection to modify Percy's statement to represent a change which he himself sanctions at a later date in his footnote to "A Semiotic Primer of the Self" (LC, 1983).

Here, Percy proposes to use the term "signal" to denote the dyadic communications of animals (e.g. the bird's instinctually-encoded response to the stimulus of its relative's warning call about a nearby danger, for instance, a cat). In contrast, he proposes to use "sign" solely to represent triadic human communication, which involves the expression of "meaning."

At this time, he also proposes to use the term "symbol" only sparingly, because it too connotes something other than the notion of "sign," as say, we have cultivated so far above in the main text. For instance, we speak of a flag as a "symbol" of a country. "Signs" on the other hand are readable and exist in a much more complex environment alongside of other signs, for example, as in the text before you. We will continue, however, to honor Percy's use of the term "symbol" in his quotes from his pre-1983 essays, where we would normally want to use the term "sign." This distinction is not as crucial as that between "signal" (non-triadic) and "sign/symbol" (both triadic). We will likewise continue to use Percy's term "symbolization," for both "symbols" and "signs" are forms or types of triadic symbolization.

Because the general reader, the author feels, would more readily identify with the term "symbol," we have used it initially to introduce him or her to the unique properties of language, before weaning him or her to the term "sign."

13See "Song of Myself," stanza 24 from Whitman's Leaves of Grass, one of his more self-celebratory anthems.

14Specific essays in which Percy mentions the Welt and Umwelt include: "The Symbolic Structure of Interpersonal Process," in MB; "A Semiotic Primer of the Self" in LC; and "Is a Theory of Man Possible?" and "The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind" in SS. The terms have their origin in Existential thought.

15"Symbol, Consciousness, and Intersubjectivity" (MB, 265).

16"Semiotic and a Theory of Knowledge" (MB, 257).

17"Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism" (MB, 281).

18"Symbol, Consciousness, and Intersubjectivity" (MB, 271).

19"Symbol, Consciousness, and Intersubjectivity" (MB, 274).

20Essays in which Percy specifically treats intersubjectivity include: "The Symbolic Structure of Interpersonal Process," "Semiotic and a Theory of Knowledge," and "Symbol, Consciousness, and Intersubjectivity" in MB.

21Hergenhan, B.R. An Introduction to Theories of Personality (1984), p. 171.

22"Semiotic and a Theory of Knowledge" (MB, 246). The term "semioticist," like that of "language" above in footnote two, is one used variously within different disciplines. Here, I have modified the term to reflect Percy's stated referent in this essay.

23Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation (1991), p. 10-11.

24In the last chapter of his Pulitzer prize winning book, Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), Douglas Hofstadter speculates that, after the successful mirroring of the mind in Artificial Intelligence, "perhaps the next step after AI will be the self-application of science: science studying itself as an object" (699). We might offer Percy's findings as presented below as one, perhaps significant, part of the answer.

25"Culture: The Antinomy of the Scientific Method," (MB, 230). Within this essay does Percy most directly argue the main idea of this section of our chapter.

26For other essays where Percy critiques and analyzes modern science, see the following essays "The Delta Factor," "The Loss of the Creature," "The Message in the Bottle," and "Culture: The Antinomy of the Scientific Method" from MB; and "Is a Theory of Man Possible?" and "The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind" in SS. The latter two essays are probably the most thorough in their scope.

27Noam Chomsky, the renowned linguist who revolutionized modern linguistics with his Theory of Generative Grammar agrees: "Any objective scientist must be struck by the qualitative differences between human beings and other organisms, as much as by the difference between insects and vertebrates" (Language and Responsibility [1979], 95). It is in his essay "A Theory of Language" [MB] where Percy most directly addresses the ideas of Chomsky.

See also linguist Derek Bickerton's statement: "the trouble [of the Continuity Paradox] is that the differences between language and the most sophisticated systems of animal communication that we are so far aware of are qualitative rather than quantitative" (Language and Species [1990], 8). As explained in Bickerton's first chapter, the Continuity Paradox reflects the idea that there are no identifiable existing animal language systems that could serve as an intermediary between human and animal communication in the former's evolution.

28Cf. Percy's assertion: "no space-time event, however intricate, no chemical or collodial interaction, no configuration of field forces, can issue in an assertory event [e.g. E=MC2]. As Cassirer put it, there is a gap [or gulf] between the responses of animals and the propositions of men which no amount of biological theorizing can bridge" (MB, 219). Cf. also, the ending of "The Mystery of Language" (MB, 158).


Henry P. Mills
All Rights Reserved, 1995