Relevance as the Moving Ground of Semiosis

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

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Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is very well written and shows a clear and consistent structure. It offers an extensive survey of the debate on the issue and develops an original theoretical option, which is grounded in a constant dialogue with the scholarship.

There are two minor points that, in my opinion, should be improved.

1. In the first part of the paper, at the beginning of chapter 3, the author writes:

"Husserl’s interest in the foundations of logic and mathematics made him recognize by 1913 that the meaning of practically all our linguistic utterances in everyday life is “occasional” in that it can only be understood in conjunction with the extra-linguistic (e.g. perceptual or social) situation [17,18]. Among other semioticians, Bühler [19], who was influenced in part by Husserl [20], pointed out that real-life linguistic meaning behaves nothing like any ideal of “meaning-constancy” postulated by pure logic, or by what Sperber and Wilson would later call a “code model” of communication".

This "pragmatic" understanding of Husserl's theory of meaning should be explained, at least in a footnote, since it seems to be at variance with the common interpretation of Husserl's theory of meaning. Actually, the early Husserl clearly advocates an understanding of meaning as fully "ideal", namely as context-independent. It is not by chance that a marxist author as Adam Schaff, in his "Einfuerung in die Semantik", devotes several pages to a radical criticism of Husserl's idealistic theory of meaning. The author of the paper herself, seems to share a "soft" version of this criticism when she attacks, in the vein of Schuetz, Husserl's eidetic.

I'm not saying that a "pragmatic" interpretation of Husserl's theory of meaning is necessary wrong but still needs an explicit justification for the reasons I tried to explained before.

2. In the paper, the author often speaks of sign and, especially, of "semiosis", but a clear definition of what a sign is or of how semiosis works seems to be missing. Maybe the author could add something in this respect so that she can integrate this semantic level in the broader semantics of the paper.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper makes a strong case of describing the notion of relevance as a double movement of passive, imposed interpretive openness and at the same time of ‘active’ openness. It does so from a phenomenological, as well as, semiotic perspective, foregrounding the adaptation of Husserlian phenomenology by Alfred Schütz against analytical conceptions.

Strengths

Both the confrontation between analytical and phenomenological claims and the topic of interpretive reference are important and deserve the most probing investigations. Overall, the paper succeeds in making a significant contribution to both. It rightly questions the reductive tendencies of analytical approaches to natural language, exemplified here by Sperber and Wilson’s “cognitive-scientific framework”. (ll. 124ff.) One could add here as founding paradigm case the Fregean reduction of language to the sense-reference relation in sharp contrast to Husserl’s linguistic meaning chain from meaning intention and its pre-predative intuition and core forms, to merely verbal Bedeutung to its intersemiotic meaning fulfilment in Sinn. Likewise persuasive is the critique of the code-based approach to NL, though it is not grounded in semiotics, as alleged, but rather in semiologie. A strong point is the author’s (authors’) pointing out the difficulty faced by propositional logic and natural science in investigating the presuppositions of their own ground for arguing the case of relevance. (ll. 155ff.) Here, the strongest critique to my mind is presented by Apel, as well as Habermas, in their questioning of the conditions of the assumptions underlying the very notion of objectivity. And ‘Yes’, on Schütz’s extended conception of relevance. (ll. 215ff.) In my view, this should be enlarged upon early in the essay. After all, Schütz is the mainstay of the argument, as he should be. A neat point is the accent on the metaphoric character of natural language, including the paper’s central term relevance. (ll. 264ff.) Likewise, the reference to Schütz’s Forms of life and the structure of meaning, resumed by Wittgenstein in the PI as ‘ground’. The section on Bergson is to the point, even if it could perhaps be compressed in comparison with the more pressing issues of type and typification. Yes, on “sedimentation” as a geological metaphor. (ll. 535f.) The three core sections of the paper, on passive, active openness, and the “interplay of the two tendencies” are persuasive, even if, as I believe, they require some further backup and qualifications. As suggested below, Kant, Peirce, and Husserl should be invoked more strongly on the notion of schematization without which type and typification could not have been developed.

 

Criticisms

l. 25     disentangle     entangle suggests that the author wishes to complicate complexities further rather than clarify them.

l. 33     add the idea of underdetermination?

l. 39     a sound as a word. See Husserl’s distinction between word sound consciousness (Wortlautbewusstsein) and word meaning consciousness (Worbedeutungsbewusstsein)    (Husserl 2005, pp.28; 32)

l. 52     typification. Schütz via Husserl. I strongly suggest that the author(s) here refer to the important paper by Dieter Lohmar “Husserl’s Type and Kant’s Schemata …” (2003) If not here, certainly later in the paper.

ll. 66ff.            Thesis statement: too brief. state full thesis, including the two identified tendencies. The reader needs this for being able to appreciate the arguments to follow.

 

ll. 84f. old-school hermeneutics.        More precisely: what is the deep conflict between hermeneutics and Chomsky? Perhaps that it is not syntax that drives semantics but rather the reverse. Semantic meaning complexities arise in Husserlian meaning intention in search for a suitable syntax. Without semantics, Chomsky’s syntactic

            house crumbles, as do his misguided stipulation of a brain language centre and catastrophe theory of the sudden birth of natural language.

ll. 90    code.   Not centrally a Peircean semiotic notion. Introduced from semiologie?

ll. 125  linguistic communication.      Strengthen critique of Sperber and Wilson by contrast with the Husserlian commitment to NL as communication via “mindreading” as introjection (Husserl 2000, p. 277)

l. 138   paradigm.       Add summary reasons: it lacks Husserl’s approximation as a necessary more or less; (2002, p. 38; 44; 2005, pp. 41ff.) nor can it handle intentionality because of its externalist premises, etc.

ll. 329  relevance is ‘grounded’.         Before the section on temporality and process, it would make sense to this reader if human topographical metaphoricity were defended a little more convincingly. The clue here, so far carefully avoided, is schematism in its Kantian double sense of ground of human conceptuality and its applications in all our interpretations, nonverbal and verbal. Peirce turns Kant’s schemata into non-transcendental diagrammatical reasoning as “skeletonization” (CP 3.559). In Husserl, Kant’s schemata morph into type and typification. (see Lohmar 2003)

l. 568   infinite “fullness”       This is why Kant writes “schemata not images” underlie our concepts. Percepts are already schematizations. (Johnson and Lakoff 1999) Fullness is an empirical leap of faith; by contrast since Kant, we are schematizing creatures. What we can control (but rarely do so consciously) is the degree of schematization which we wish to employ in our interpretations. Yes, on “pre-Kantian anachronism”.

l. 618   we select … I think this requires a serious phenomenological rebuttal via Husserl’s linguistic coercion (Sollenstendenz). (2005, pp. 57, 74f. 104, 170) Cf. also Wittgenstein’s Abrichtung, Deleuze and Guattari’s order-words; or Lecercle’s idea of language as violence. In addition, I have suggested the concept of the linguistic linkage compulsion (LLC): during the 250ms (Pulvermüller et al. 2009) of comprehension of the word sounds ‘red carpet’ we are incapable of thinking any alternatives such as ‘brown cat’. Rather than selecting anything at this stage we are at the mercy of Husserl’s Zumutung. Resistance is a secondary response via interpretation and the author’s double movement.

l. 643   potentially infinite …  Useful here to refer to Halliday’s concept of “meaning potential” (1978, passim.)

l. 738   we aim for “rightness”          which resumes Kant’s central theme of reflective-teleological reasoning where we aim for intelligibility rather than truth in the Critique of Judgment, a crucial but hardly recognized revolutionary moment in Kant.

 

General remarks

I suggest that the early parts of the paper be tightened. As to Schütz’s work on the Problems of Relevance, this should be foregrounded, including his types of relevance, to balance the early accent on Sperber and Wilson. Lohmar (2003) is essential for the claims made, as are Kant’s schematism and Peirce’s skeletonization in the context of Husserl’s type and typification and their adoption by Schütz.

Author Response

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