苏珊·佩特里利 | 维多利亚·维尔比：表意学与语言
摘 要
表意学作为一种超越逻辑-认识论的边界的符号活动分析方法，它超越了单纯的描述主义，证明了符号与价值的关系。意义是在表达和传播互动中产生的，它涉及符义和语言秩序的价值、作为表意的意义，以及伦理、审美和符用价值，作为感觉和意味的意义。超越在严格的认识论方面研究意义和语言，表意学致力于质疑感觉，研究表意问题，并证明意义生产过程对人类行为的含义。韦尔比还用“解释哲学”、“翻译哲学”、“意味哲学”等词语来界定其表意学。维多利亚·维尔比的意义理论或表意学理论的这些方面和其他方面都是本文研究的对象。
关 键 词
传播，解释，意义，符号伦理学，感觉，意味，价值
1 Introducing Welby and her significs
i. What is significs?
The expression “significs” was introduced by Victoria Lady Welby (1837–1912) for her special approach to the study of sign and meaning towards the end of the 19th century. With significs Welby thematizes the capacity for questioning as the pathway to understanding, the humanization of experience, and responsible action. Researching at a time when evolutionary theory had unexpectedly overturned the conception of life and, together, humankind’s place in the world, Welby indicates cultural revolution as a long-term project for social change.
She investigates the relations between sign, sense, and value, between critical linguistic consciousness and ethical-pragmatic engagement. A method for the analysis of sign activity beyond logico-gnoseological boundaries in fact, significs transcends pure descriptivism and evidences the relation of signs to values. Meaning is engendered (and not merely transmitted) in expression and communicative interaction, in dynamical processes of becoming, and as such not only involves value of the semantic and linguistic orders, meaning as signification (to say it with Charles Morris, 1964), but also value of the ethic, aesthetic and pragmatic order, meaning as sense and significance. Beyond the study of meaning and language understood in strictly gnoseological terms, significs is committed to interrogating sense, to the problem of significance, and to evidencing the import of meaning producing processes for human behaviour. Other expressions used by Welby to qualify her significs include “philosophy of interpretation”, “philosophy of translation” and “philosophy of significance” (Welby, 1983 [1903], p. 89, 161; Petrilli, 2009, pp. 273–275).
Welby took her distance from the traditional terms of philological-historical semantics, for example as developed by Michel Bréal (Petrilli, 2009, pp. 253-300). Nor did she limit her attention to what is generally known as speech act theory or text linguistics. Instead, she focused on the generative nature of signifying processes and on their capacity for development and transformation as a condition of human experiential, cognitive and expressive capacities. Even more characteristically, she thematized the development of values as a structural aspect in the development of signifying processes.
The “significal method” arises from the association of the study of signs and meaning to the study of values. The conjunction between signs and values is not only the object of study of significs, but also provides its perspective. As such, significs is applicable to everyday life as much as to the intellectual, to the ethical and emotional spheres of sign activity, therefore to problems of meaning, language, communication and value in the broadest sense possible.
Welby responded critically to prejudicial and stereotypical discourse of her time, the Victorian age, and to the tendency to submit unquestioningly to the strongholds of truth, morality, and justice – whether the Church and its so-called “Ecclesiasts,” or secular power represented by Queen Victoria (her godmother). She served at the Queen’s court as Maid of Honour for two years, after her mother’s death in the Syrian desert, on the last of their numerous travels across unknown lands. Rather than a conventional education, Welby’s books were the world and the inspiring life she led in unusual, often difficult, circumstances. She soon determined that authority should be interrogated; social practice should be significant for the sake of the community as much as of the single individual; human behavior endowed at all moments with sense and purport; and that signifying, expressive, and communicative practices called for interpretation, critique, and responsibility.
After investigating problems of interpretation relatively to the Sacred Scriptures, Welby's interest in ethical-theological discourse focused more closely on linguistic-philosophical problems and found expression in a series of essays published towards the end of the nineteenth century. These include “Meaning and Metaphor“ (published in The Monist, 1893) and “Sense, Meaning, andInterpretation“ (published in two parts in the journalMind, 1896), a book of reflections, Grains of Sense (1897), and her monographs, What Is Meaning? Studies in the Development of Significance(1903) and Significs and Language. The Articulate Form of Our Expressive and Interpretative Resources (1911a). Editorial events that have contributed to the revival of significs today include republication of these works. What Is Meaning? was reproposed in 1983 and the volume Significs and Language, containing Welby's 1911 monograph together with a significant selection from her other writings, published and unpublished, in 1985. In those same years an anthology of writings by Welby appeared in Italian translation, Significato, metafora, interpretazione (Welby,1985b), followed by another two, Senso, significazione, significatività (2007) and Interpretare, comprendere, comunicare (Welby, 2010). The first monograph ever on Welby appeared in 1998, Victoria Welby. Significs e filosofia del linguaggio, by S. Petrilli.
A large collection of papers by Welby has now been made available in the volume Signifying and Understanding. Reading the Works of Victoria Welby and the Signific Movement (1048 pp., see Petrilli, 2009). This volume presents papers from the Welby Collection at the York University Archives (Toronto, Canada), together with a selection of texts published during her lifetime. However, a significant part of Welby's work is still hosted yet unpublished in the archives. A large corpus of other printed matter by Welby or relating to her is available in the Welby library housed in the London University Library, London (UK). In addition to writings by Welby and her correspondence with preeminent figures of the time, Signifying and Understanding also includes acomplete description of the materials available at the Welby Archives in York and three updated bibliographies listing all her writings as well as writings on Welby, her significs, as well as on the Signific Movement in the Netherlands and its developments. This movement was originally inspired by Welby through mediation of the Dutch poet and psychiatrist F. van Eeden (1860-1932), and flourished across the first half of the twentieth century (cf. Schmitz 1990; Heijerman-Schmitz 1991). Signifying and Understanding also features an anthology of writings by first generation significians like Frederik van Eeden, Gerrit Mannoury, L. E. J. Brouwer, and David Vuysje.
After her death, more than as an intellectual in her own right, Welby's name continued circulating among the international community of researchers thanks above all to her correspondence with Charles S. Peirce (see Hardwick, 1977). She was in the habit of discussing her ideas and to this end entertained epistolary exchanges with numerous personalities of the day. Welby’s main work is What Is Meaning?, positively reviewed for The Nation by Charles Peirce, founder of American pragmatism and father of modern semiotics – Welby, the founding mother. This review begins the Welby-Peirce correspondence, representing just one instance of a fascinating corpus of exchanges entertained by Welby with numerous major figures including, in addition to Peirce, Bertrand Russell, James M. Baldwin, Henry Spencer, Thomas A. Huxley, Herbert G. Wells, Max Müller, Benjamin Jowett, Frederik Pollock, George F. Stout, Leslie Stephens, Ferdinand C.S. Schiller, Charles K. Ogden, Henry and William James, Mary Everest Boole, Julia Wedgwood, H. G. Wells, Michel Bréal, André Lalande, Henri Bergson, Henri Poincaré, Rudolph Carnap, Otto Neurath, Harald Höffding, Ferdinand Tönnies, Frederick van Eeden, Giovanni Vailati, Mario Calderoni and many others. Part of this correspondence was edited and published by Welby's daughter Mrs. Henry (Nina) Cust, in two volumes, Echoes of Larger Life, 1929, which collects letters written between 1879 to 1891, whilst Other Dimensions, 1931, covers the years from 1898 to 1911. Other selections with various interlocutors have also been made available in Signifying and Understanding (Petrilli, 2009). We could claim that developments on significs are not necessarily attached to any individual name, but one who deserves special mention is Charles K. Ogden Charles Ogden, a promising proselyte of significs, who discovered Welby and her significs as a young university student at Cambridge, and whose research was significantly influenced by her, even though he mentions her but briefly in his epochal book with Ivor A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 1923. Ogden promoted significs as a university student during the years 1910-1911, had met Welby personally at that time and was dedicated to spreading her ideas. Through Welby, Vailati introduced Peirce to Italy. Through van Eeden, significs spawned the Signific Movement in the Netherlands, flourishing across the first half of the twentieth century. Despite this important network of relations, used for the formulation, circulation, and discussion of ideas, Welby’s correspondence is mostly unpublished. What remains of her unpublished papers, including correspondence–saved from the 1938 fire that ravaged Denton Manor, her homestead in Grantham, Lincolnshire (England)–is entrusted to the York University Archives (Canada). Again, a substantial selection of her published and unpublished writings is available in the volume Signifying and Understanding. Reading the Works of Victoria Welby and the Significs Movement (Petrilli, 2009).
ii. Some central themes
With “significs,” Welby underlined how the problem of meaning was not circumscribed to a discipline, subject matter, or specialized role, whether scholar, scientist, artist, professional of some sort, but also concerned the ordinary person in everyday life: What does it signify for me? for us?What is the sense? The value of a given experience? What are its implications now or in time past and future?
Significs studies meaning in all its forms, relations, and practical implications, in language as in all human expression, action, and creation. Significs is a philosophy of significance, interpretation, and translation, which emphasize three distinct but interrelated dimensions of “significating” processes, a synthesis applicable to science and philosophy.
Welby’s studies on meaning ensued from her initial concern with religious, moral, and theological issues. She addressed problems of interpretation relative to the Sacred Scriptures. Her interest in ethical-theological discourse translated into social and pedagogical interests and merged with her linguistic and philosophical studies. She examined language and meaning thanks to her early awareness of the inadequacies of religious discourse, cast in outmoded linguistic forms. Pervasive linguistic confusion stemmed from a misconception of language as a system of fixed meanings. This could only be resolved by recognizing the live nature of language, which flourishes and changes with developments in knowledge and experience. She promotes the critique of language and together the need for education committed to the development of critical linguistic consciousness. The interpretive function is an a priori condition for relations among human beings and with the world at large.
A tendency to triadism in human thought is described by Welby which recurs in her theory of meaning: she distinguishes between “sense” (organic response to environment and expressive element in experience), “meaning” (intention, purpose), and “significance” (consequence and implication of some event or experience). Correlate triads include, for reference: “verbal”,“volitional”, “moral”; psychic processes: “instinct”, “perception”, “conception”; knowledge and experience: “consciousness”, “intellect”, “reason”; consciousness: “planetary”, “solar”, “cosmic”. Peirce associates Welby’s meaning triad to his distinction between “Immediate”, “Dynamical” and “Final Interpretant”.
Education is a central central concern in signfics. Welby in fact promoted a “significal education”, systematic training in critical and creative reflection from early school-days, in identifying problems and asking questions–answers being a platform for new questions: to develop an inquiring spirit is more significant than providing ready-made answers, the dynamic reality of the question sweeps the mind forward to new and wider horizons. Significs implies education for meaning and value, development of expression and interpretation, enhancement of significance. It teaches us to make distinctions, detect confusions, establish connections, associations, and link all parts of growing experience, to apply the principle of translation.
The figurative dimension of meaning implies the capacity for establishing associations, comparisons, parallels among different spheres of experience, different sign systems, and calls for a critique of imagery. For Welby, “ambiguity” and “plasticity” of language are signifying resources. She interrogates definition as a solution, which she considers illusory, distinguishing between “rigid” and “plastic definition.” She describes two types of ambiguity: polysemy, plurivocality, polylogism, a positive attribute constitutive of the word and condition for expression and understanding; obscurity, expressive inadequacy, cause of confusion and equivocation. She critiques the fallacy of literal, univocal, “plain meaning” and the correlate concept of “hard dry facts.”
Welby’s philosophy of translation is based on her theory of meaning and interpretation. Prefiguring twentieth century translation theory, translation not only occurs among different languages, but within the same language and among different sign systems, verbal and nonverbal. Breaking new ground, she describes translation as a cognitive-interpretive method. Sign processes translate across systemic and typological boundaries as the condition for the acquisition of knowledge, experience, and practical skills. Significs evidences the relation between significance, interpretation, and translation, and therefore between translation and the ethical dimension of otherness-driven signifying processes, resulting in the enhancement of significance. The search for sense involves relating knowledge and meaning to self and translating into the pragmatic terms of action. Translating also means to “moralize”, to “humanize” the capacity for interpretation and relation.
Welby introduces the original concept of “mother-sense” (“primal-sense”, “original-sense”, “racial-sense”, “native-sense”). Mother-sense is an inheritance common to humanity, without gender limitations. It is the generating matrix of the human capacity for signification, experience, expression, knowledge, consciousness, and worldview, for interpretation and creativity. The faculty of critique and rational construction, the rationalizing intellect presupposes mother-sense, its condition of possibility. Welby distinguishes between “mother-sense” and “father-reason,” i.e. “sense” and “intellect,” two modalities in sense-generation, in modeling sense, though strictly interrelated in relations of complementarity: neither logic of reason, nor sense of logic, nor well-reasoned logic, nor logical sensing, but reason-becoming and sense-becoming, beyond bivalent logic. Sexual identity is ambiguous, consonant with Peirce’s “logic of vagueness”. Mother-sense recovers the relation between “intuitive knowledge” and “rational knowledge.” Critique is a condition for healthy communication, but to flourish must recover the connection with mother-sense.
Mother-sense and otherness are central in Welby’s description of subjectivity and its dialogic nature. She distinguishes between “self ” and “Ident.” The subject’s identity is multiplex and emerges in the dialogic relation among its parts. The “I” or “Ident” develops with the self, in a relation where multiple selves model the different and interconnected faces of the “Ident”. Ident is associated with mother-sense; self is one of its possible “representations”. The vocation of identity is otherness. As centrifugal material, dialogical and intercorporeal interrelatedness in becoming, the Ident transcends centripetal forces polarized in the self, yet necessary for it to subsist as self, as “ephemeron”. As the knower, the Ident is unknowable. TheIdent is an orientation toward the self insofar as it is other. As such it continuously supersedes the limits of the world-as-it-is and of the already-given subject that inhabits it. The more self-reflective behavior is multifaceted, the greater its capacity for critique and metadiscursivity.
iii. Implications for the ethics of communication
“Significs” is rich in implications for the ethics of communication (Arnett, Holba, Mancino 2018). In dialogue with the Peircean tradition in sign and language studies, with Charles Morris’s focus on the relation of signs to values, with Thomas Sebeok’s global semiotics and developments in biosemiotics, with Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism and Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of otherness, with Adam Schaff ’s, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi’s, and Augusto Ponzio’s studies on signs and ideology, the implications of significs have been developed with “semioethics” (Petrilli & Ponzio 2003; Petrilli, 2014).
Welby was concerned with the entire signifying universe, with a special interest in signifying processes in the human world, particularly in verbal expression, but without falling into the trap of anthropocentric oversimplification. She in fact was focused on verbal expression, the language of the “man of the street” as well as of the intellectual, but with reference to the larger context, what we may also call the great “biosemiosphere”, in which language is engendered. However, she knew that to deal with her special interest area adequately, it was necessary to understand its connections to the larger context: consequently, she extended her gaze to ever larger totalities, beyond the verbal to the nonverbal, beyond the human to the nonhuman, beyond the organic to the inorganic. From this point of view, Welby may be considered as prefiguring contemporary global semiotics and developments in the direction of biosemiotics as conceived by Thomas Sebeok who enquires into the connection between semiosis and life and asks the question, “Semiosis and Semiotics: What Lies in Their Future?” (in Sebeok, 1991, pp. 97–99). Moreover, given its special focus on significance in human behaviour, Welby’s significs may be read as proposing a new form of humanism, by contrast with semiotic analyses conducted exclusively in abstract gnoseological terms.
With its focus on the relation between sign, value and behaviour, in particular the sign’s ultimate value, or significance, on the connection therefore between sign and value in all its aspects – pragmatic, social, ethic, aesthetic, etc., significs is particularly concerned with the effects and implications of the conjuction between signs and values for human behaviour.
The special slant in Welby's studies on signs and meaning in the direction of the relation to values and the broad scope of her special perspective enables us to read “significs” as a prefiguration of “semioethics”. This expression was introduced by myself with Augusto Ponzio as the title of our monograph of 2003, in Italian, Semioetica (now forthcoming in English translation), and as the title of an essay commissioned to us by Paul Cobley for The Routledge Dictionary ofSemiotics, 2010.
In so far as it is focused on the pragmatical-ethical implications of humansignifying processes, significs is a major source of inspiration at the origin of “semioethics” with which it overlaps. As emerges from Welby’s own words as reported above, attention on the interpretive-translational dimension of sign activity and the connection with values is programmatic for significs from its very inception.
“Semioethics” is a neologism which has its origins in the early 1980s with “ethosemiotics” and subsequently “tel(e)osemiotics” to name an approach or attitude we deem necessary today more than ever before in the context of globalization and global communication. Semioethics is not intended as a discipline in its own right, but as a perspective, an orientation in the study of signs. By “semioethics“ we understand the propensity in studies on signs, semiotics, to recover the ancient vocation of the latter as “semeiotics“ (or symptomatology), which focuses on symptoms. A major issue for semioethics is “care for life” in a global perspective (see Sebeok, 2001) according to whichsemiosis and life converge (see Ponzio & Petrilli, 2005, p. 562). This global perspective is made ever more urgent by growing interference in planetary communication between the historical-social and biological spheres, between the cultural and natural spheres, between the semiosphere (Lotman) and the biosphere.
The semioethic approach to communication underlines the importance of listening to the other, of difference, of caring for the other, of dialogue, of recognition of otherness as the basis of communication. Value theory is essential for communication ethics. Whether a question of individual or community, of interpersonal relations or relations through social media characteristic of the global world today, communication is oriented by values, ideologies, social planning. Rather than alienation with respect to the social relations of communication, whether in the private or public sphere, healthy communication requires critique, creativity, consciousness of the values informing human action and signifying behavior. The communication globe is not adequately understood in descriptive terms alone. To evidence the relation between communication, values, and human action is to expand strictly epistemological-cognitive boundaries of signs and meaning into the ethical-pragmatic, where signs and values are thematized in their interrelatedness. The implications are extraordinary: the other cannot be evaded and indifference is neither wise nor desirable. Communication ethics calls for critical thinking, responsible action, and responsiveness to the other, for the betterment of human understanding and life.
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作者简介：
苏珊·佩特里利，国际符号学协会副主席（2014至今），意大利巴里大学哲学与语言学理论教授，她的研究方向是：符号学，表意学，马克思主义符号学。
编辑︱李佳效
视觉︱欧阳言多
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