Re: Semiotic Ecology and Affinities >>> direct perception etc.

From: Alfred Lang (alfred.lang@psy.unibe.ch)
Date: Mon Aug 28 2000 - 08:09:15 PDT


Let me question the idea of discussing in detail at this time the
mediation (vs. direct perception) problem, i.e. before we have a good
grasp of generative semiosis in the function circle.

Some background elucidations however may help and I also want to
answer some other open questions.

This one is a plea to excuse me and some reasons that I cannot really
understand what a notion of "direct perception" of "qualities" by an
"individual subject" could ever mean. I know as a psychologist by
formation, I should.

Perhaps you consider the fact that the process in question can only
take place when light or vibrating air etc. has been transported some
structural features from the thing to be perceived to the surface of
some sense organs, and that these features are also changed by some
characteristics of the periphery of that organ, say, the gross and
fine anatomy of the eye, the ear, the positions and movements of the
head and organs and their change, and so on. So far agreement with
and some gains from Gibson. Then also consider the fact that the
process in higher organisms directly involves hundreds of millions of
in themselves very complex and highly interactive neurons with at
least three times as much connections for each of them in a
continuing process of change; each of them and/or groups of them in
conjunction having to power to retain some trace of what occurred to
them for later use (what is called memory). These are, to use
metaphor, rather individuals organized in huge and differentiated
societes than parts of a mechanical machine or its electronic
equivalent. The process in addition involves dozens of transmitting
substances in various places and built up, redistributed and consumed
in fractions to multiples of seconds which are modulating those
transactive neuronal processes etc. I liken these to the mass media
in their capacity to stir and change moods and fashion waves etc.

Consider then that "qualities" of things (size, shape, color,
strength, pattern, progression, etc.) are of course not concrete
things, but rather are abstractions from those things perceived,
indeed, abstractions gained on the basis of dispositions of or
produced by exactly such perceiving systems the function of which is
to be explained by analysis of the process; such abstractions, in
addition, are co-resulting from centuries of technical and scientific
praxis dealing with those perceptive experiences and their
elaborations in a particular set of cultural traditions. Consider
that values of these qualities may be changed by events in the
mediating environment such as the position of the sun, clouds,
environmental noises etc. etc. (remember: Gibson had nothing to say
on the so-called constancies nor on the so-called illusions).

Consider finally that the "individual subject" is one of those
notions everybody uses all the time but which is entirely dark and
utterly in need of explanation, since it is not a given and a fixed
"thing" but probably mostly a result of among other things exactly a
myriad of processes or a function of that of what it is taken to be
the or a central constituting factor: "the" "subject" (literally:
that "subjected"). So it cannot, in fact, explain anything, awaiting
itself to be explained since dozens of centuries. As a notion it is
simply a posited idea, devoid of any good chance to being understood
in a consistent and senseful manner within that long tradition in the
communities of thinkers by all those using the term as long as it has
not found asserted foundation in observation.

My overshort "doing away" with Gibsonian concepts in my short reply
of yesterday may have sounded presumptuous. I highly appreciate
Gibson's and some of his follower's courageous profference of an
alternative to the mainstream in the perception field. But I doubt
that it can carry. So I had to open the above a peephole into some of
my reasons for difficulties.

My understanding of people in their world is certainly rather of the
"mediation" type, in general at least. How the latter relates to the
semiotic function circle is to be worked out. Unfortunately I have
also some (less!) difficulties with the mediation concept. It cannot
be overlooked that Vygotsky conceived of mediation as taking place
between the "subject" and the "object". So some of my remarks above
also pertain to understanding mediation. But let's delay judgment to
after a careful comparison of the notions.

As I said, my thinking has something in common with the Gibsonian's.
Like Gibson and in addition to the ecological view I attempt to
understand as much as possible in one unitary construction of
concepts. But unlike him I see the cultural as unreducible to the
physical or the logical. On the other hand, I see also no reasonable
argument of assuming a deep break in the becoming of our world when
humans or languages enter the field. But this should not suffice to
bring the two approaches together. Our "ecologies" are worlds apart.
In my understanding, neither culturality nor the meaning problem have
a genuine place in the Gibsonian approach as is the case with natural
science in general. But I find both essential not only for
understanding the human condition, but the latter already for
understanding live.

My solution to this difficulty with the sciences missing the reality
of life and culture -- so heavy a load on modern science and life,
yet so thoroughly tabooed -- is to find already life unreducible to
the physical; because it is based on chains of historical
singularities on this planet and the ensuing evolutions. Historicity
pertains as well to live as to individuals and to cultures. In this I
follow Herder who in 1770 ("On the origin of language") wrote that
language could well be understood as a reorganization of what the
predecessors of modern humans already had attained: no need to posit
something entirely new or different, such as given by God or suddenly
entering this world from realms transcendent. "Schon als Tier hat der
Mensch Sprache", is the then shocking entry sentence of this book:
"Already as animals humans have language." This is in my view
compatible with the bioevolutive emergence of new centers in the
brain, language or otherwise specialized, since nobody has ever
claimed a fundamental break in evolution based on, say, the emergence
of the forebrain, of the nervous system in general, or of the
capacity for individual organisms to gather and use individual
experience.

As to Kant's schematisms, Herder's critique is also pertinent. He
derided the schematisms as "a between ladder, [...] nothing at its
bottom nor at its top", an "aerial ghost" to fly down for mediating
between two aprioric fictions, the empirical and the transcendental,
the phenomenal and the noumenal. Let fiction be where it makes fun
and invents or illustrates insight, but not where it forces to
amendments with more fictions. Go and look at the nice illustration
in my Herder paper, even if you cannot read the German text, of
phillosophers and their ways of being in and dealing with clouds
(http://www.psy.unibe.ch/ukp/langpapers/pap1994-99/1998.02_herder_m'bild.htm).
And keep in mind that Herder had been Kant's student and highly
appreciated the person Kant while finding his transcendental
philosophy metaphysical fiction.

Structures from the large molecules onward through the genuine
evolutions on to, say, the spatial form and arrangements of black
spots on the paper in the libraries are not and cannot be accounted
for by physico-chemical law. These laws only account for their
possibility, not for the reality of these structures, such being
complexions of atoms extremely improbable to come about, yet making
an important and crucial portion of all the structures on earth and
the most consequential of all. For such to really come about,
additional grounds are required and these grounds or conditions have
evolutively emerged. I pursue this line of double critique towards
physicalistic and linguistic / logicistic reduction until someone can
show that either or both really work. But simply to believe that they
work is not my bread. Did the scientist not promise to replace
beliefs by asserted warrantabilities, to use Dewey's more modest term
instead of knowledge or truth? To believe that cultural tools operate
essentially different from and independent of non-cultural tools
introduces that miserable break into our understanding the world and
of ourselves and splits the people attempting understanding in two
separate groups both of which ride on illusions. And while one of the
two congregations indulges in the doubtful funs of endless
constructivisms the other shovels away the soil from under our feet,
all the while promising us to attain paradise here.

I should add that in spite of loading lots of difficulties on myself
and perhaps even more on my (new) readers by all this I don't really
feel guilty of not being able to understand some notions that so many
people find self-evident and have acquired the habit of using them
all the time. I can only promise that once eaten through that sour
wall of that scientific and philosopical close and looking onto or
even dwelling out in the concrete there will be numbers of pseudo
problems (philosophical, e.g. the mind-body-"problem, and scientific,
e.g. the primacy-of-cognition-or-emotion-"problem") dissolved into
nothing and some views on the human condition become clear and
simple. (Here I have another case of my language and cultural
lacunes: Do the British or Americans use the same story? I wanted to
reverse the tale of the Schlaraffenland, a promised land of milk and
honey encircled by huge walls of plum relish through which you have
to eat your way to get inside. My problem rather seems to be how to
get out of a promised, but in fact one of those "really existing"
close, of which I no longer want to be a prisoner because the honey
and milk therein I find largely turned sour and the plum relish sweet
the more I approach openings to look out. (Of course, speaking of the
"close", I only think of those delightful tourist areas in the center
of many British cities, where you can enter and leave at your
delight, at least until nightfall.)

By the way, "The 'concrete mind' heuristic" is a paper written in
1989 shortly before semiotic entered my ecological understanding
people in their world. It has not really been rewritten for its
publication delayed to 1993. Its principal stance -- that what is
called the mind or the psychic organization is better understood as
being located as much between as within the individuals -- is still
valid. I find the paper also still worth reading for the broad
picture, but my understanding of the structures and processes
involved has deeply improved with semiotic. E.g. I don't use the term
"information" any more except in its literal sense that one structure
can have an influence in forming another.

In the hope of not only informing you, but eventually in-forming some
of you, if you like,

Alfred

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Alfred Lang, Psychology, Univ. Bern, Switzerland --- alfred.lang@psy.unibe.ch
Website: http://www.psy.unibe.ch/ukp/langpapers/
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