The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

8. TOWARD A TRIADIC THEORY OF MEANING

IT IS A MATTER for astonishment, when one comes to think of it, how little use linguistics and other sciences of language are to psychiatrists. When one considers that the psychiatrist spends most of his time listening and talking to patients, one might suppose that there would be such a thing as a basic science of listening-and-talking, as indispensable to psychiatrists as anatomy to surgeons. Surgeons traffic in body structures. Psychiatrists traffic in words. Didn’t Harry Stack Sullivan say that psychiatry properly concerns itself with transactions between people and that most of these transactions take the form of language? Yet if there exists a basic science of listening-and-talking I have not heard of it. What follows is a theory of language as behavior. It is not new. Its fundamentals were put forward by the American philosopher Charles Peirce three-quarters of a century ago. It shall be the contention of this article that, although Peirce is recognized as the founder of semiotic, the theory of signs, modern behavioral scientists have not been made aware of the radical character of his ideas about language. I also suspect that the state of the behavioral sciences vis-à-vis language is currently in such low spirits, not to say default, that Peirce’s time may have come.

If most psychiatrists were asked why they don’t pay much attention to the linguistic behavior, considered as such, of their patients, they might give two sorts of answers, both reasonable enough. One runs as follows: “Well, after all, I have to be more interested in what the patient is saying than in the words and syntax with which he says it. “ And if, like most of us, he has been exposed to the standard academic behavioral sciences, he might add, again reasonably enough: “Well, of course we know that conversation is a series of learned responses, but these are very subtle events, occurring mostly inside the head, and so there is not much we can say about them in the present state of knowledge.”

Both explanations are familiar, reasonable, and dispiriting. But what is chiefly remarkable about them is that they are contradictory. No one has ever explained how a psychiatrist can be said to be “responding” to a patient when he, the psychiatrist, listens to the patient tell a dream, understands what is said, and a year later writes a paper about it. To describe the psychiatrist’s behavior as a response is to use words loosely.

Charles Peirce was an unlucky man. His two most important ideas ran counter to the intellectual currents of his day, were embraced by his friends — and turned into something else. William James took one idea and turned it into a pragmatism which, whatever its value, is not the same thing as Peirce’s pragmaticism. Peirce’s triadic theory has been duly saluted by latter-day semioticists — and turned into a trivial instance of learning theory. Freud was lucky. The times were ready for him and he had good enemies. It is our friends we should beware of.

What follows does not pretend to offer the psychiatrist an adequate theory of language sprung whole and entire like Minerva from Jove’s head. It is offered as no more than a sample of another way of looking at things. I hope that it might either stimulate or irritate behavioral scientists toward the end that they will devise operational means of confirming or disconfirming these statements — or perhaps even launch more fruitful studies than this very tentative investigation. What follows is adapted freely from Peirce, with all credit to Peirce, and space will not be taken to set down what was originally Peirce and what are the adaptations. Here again Peirce was unlucky, in that his views on language were put forward as part of a metaphysic, i.e., a theory of reality, and in a language uncongenial to modern behavioral attitudes. To say so is not to put down Peirce’s metaphysic. But the problem here is to disentangle from the metaphysic those insights which are germane to a view of language as behavior.

First I shall give a brief statement of what I take to be Peirce’s theory of language considered as a natural phenomenon, i.e., not as a logic or a formal structure but as overt behavior open to scientific inquiry. There shall follow a loose list of postulates which I take to be implied by Peirce’s triadic theory of signs. These “postulates,” unlike the arbitrary postulates of a mathematical system, are empirical statements which are more or less self-evident. From them certain other statements can be deduced. Their value will depend both on the degree to which the postulates are open to confirmation and the usefulness of the deduced statements to such enterprises as the psychiatrist’s understanding of his own transactions with his patients.

Peirce believed that there are two kinds of natural phenomena. First there are those events which involve “dyadic relations,” such as obtain in the “physical forces…between pairs of particles.” The other kind of event entails “triadic relations”:

All dynamical action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects…or at any rate is a resultant of such action between pairs. But by “semiosis” I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.

If A throws B away and B hits C in the eye, this event may be understood in terms of two dyadic relations, one between A and B, the other between B and C. But if A gives B to C, a genuine triadic relation exists. “Every genuine triadic relation involves meaning.” An index sign is part of a dyadic relation. An index refers to the object it denotes by virtue of really being affected by that object. Examples of indexes: a low barometer as an index of rain, the cry of warning of a driver to a pedestrian. A symbol, however, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. “The index is physically connected with its object…but the symbol is connected with its object by virtue of…the symbol-using mind.”

Dyadic events are, presumably, those energy exchanges conventionally studied by the natural sciences: subatomic particles colliding, chemical reactions, actions of force-fields on bodies, physical and chemical transactions across biological membranes, neuron discharges, etc.

Triadic events, on the other hand, characteristically involve symbols and symbol users. Moreover, a genuine triadic relation cannot be reduced to a series of dyadic relations. Peirce seems to be saying that when a symbol user receives a symbol as “meaning” such and such an object, we may not understand this event as a sequence of dyadic events or energy exchanges even though dyadic events and energy exchanges are involved: sound waves in air, excitation of sensory end-organ, afferent nerve impulse, electro colloidal synaptic event, efferent nerve impulse, muscle contraction, or glandular secretion.

Peirce’s distinction between dyadic and triadic behavior has been noted before, but so pervasive has been the influence of what might be called dyadic behaviorism that Peirce’s “triadic relation” has been recognized only to the degree that it can be set forth as a congeries of dyads. Morris, for example, interprets Peirce’s triad as implying that in addition to response and stimulus there is a third factor, a “reinforcing” state of affairs. This is like saying that Einstein’s special theory will be accepted only to the degree that it can be verified by Newtonian mechanics. Like Newtonian mechanics, dyadic theory can account for perhaps 98 per cent of natural phenomena. Unfortunately the phenomenon of talking-and-listening falls in the remaining 2 per cent.

What would happen if we took Peirce seriously? That is to say, if we retain the posture of behavioral science which interests itself only in the overt behavior of other organisms, what are we to make of observable behavior which cannot be understood as a series of dyadic energy transactions? What has happened in the past is that we have admitted of course that there is such a thing as symbol-mongering, as naming things, as uttering sentences which are true or false, as “rules” by which names are assigned and sentences formed. We have admitted that such activity is a natural phenomenon and as such is open to scientific investigation. But what kind of scientific investigation? We have gotten around the difficulty by treating the products of symbol-mongering formally, by what Carnap calls the formal sciences (logic, mathematics, syntax), while assigning the activity itself to a factual science, in this case learning theory, which has not, however, been able to give an account of it. It is no secret that learning theorists will have no truck with symbols and meaning. Most textbooks of psychology do not list the word symbol in their indexes. Indeed, how can learning theory, as we know it, give an account of symbolic activity? If we are to believe Peirce, it cannot. For the empirical laws of learning theory are formulations of dyadic events of the form R =f(O), in which R = response variables and O = stimulus variables.*

The question must arise then: If triadic activity is overt behavior and as such is the proper object of investigation of a factual behavioral science and is not formulable by the postulates and laws of conventional behaviorism, what manner of “postulates” and “laws,” if any, would be suitable for such a science? Or is the game worth the candle? For, as George Miller says, whenever the behavioral scientist confronts language as behavior, he is generally nagged by the suspicion that the rule-governed normative behavior of naming, of uttering true and false sentences, may somehow be beyond the scope of natural science. Shall we as behavioral scientists accordingly surrender all claim to language as a kind of behavior and yield the field to formalists, logicians, and transformational linguists? Have we not indeed already settled for a kind of tacit admission that there exists a behavior for which there is no behavioral science?

To give some simple examples:

Two events occurred in Helen Keller’s childhood. One can be reasonably well understood by learning theory. The other cannot.

Helen, we know from Miss Sullivan, learned to respond to the word cake spelled in her hand by searching for a piece of cake.

Even though we were not present and could not have seen the events inside Helen’s head if we had been, we nevertheless feel confident that learning theory can give a fairly adequate account of the kind of events which occurred. B.F. Skinner would have no difficulty explaining what happened and most of us would find his explanation useful.

But a second event occurred. One day Helen learned in great excitement that the word water spelled in one hand was the name of the liquid flowing over the other hand. She then wanted to know the names of other things.

Theorists of language behavior have been unable to give a coherent account of this event. When one tries to fit this triadic event onto a dyadic model, queer things happen. Ogden and Richards, for example, found themselves with a triangle, two sides of which represented proper “causal” relations between symbol and reference and between reference and referent. A dotted line was drawn between symbol and referent. The dotted line stood for an “imputed relation” between word and thing as contrasted with the “real” relation between word and organism, and organism and referent. The next step was to see man’s use of symbols as somehow deplorable. Korzybski constructed a curious quasi-ethical science of “general semantics” in which he berated people for the wrong use of symbols. Stuart Chase compared symbol-using man unfavorably with his cat Hobie.

One might suppose that a science of language behavior must first determine what sort of behavior is taking place before issuing moral judgments about it.

Three men have a toothache.

One man groans.

The second man say, “Ouch!”

The third man says, “My tooth aches.”

Now it may be unexceptionable to say that all three men emitted responses, the first a wired-in response, the second and third learned responses.* But if one wishes to give a nontrivial account of language behavior, it does not suffice to describe the second and third utterances as learned responses. What kind of a learned response is a sentence and how does it differ from other responses?

Nor does it suffice to describe the two events in Helen Keller’s childhood as instances of learning by reinforcement.

The greatest obstacle to progress in semiotic has been the loose use of analogical terms to describe different events without specifying wherein lies the similarity and wherein lies the difference. To use a term like response analogically is to risk a spurious understanding of matters that are in fact little understood and difficult to investigate.

One recalls Chomsky’s reaction to Skinner’s Verbal Behavior:

Anyone who seriously approaches the study of linguistic behavior, whether linguist, psychologist, or philosopher, must quickly become aware of the enormous difficulty of stating a problem which will define the area of his investigation, and which will not be either trivial or hopelessly beyond the range of present-day understanding and technique.

The following is a loose set of postulates and definitions which I take to be suitable for a behavioral schema of symbol use and which might be adapted from Peirce’s theory of triads. Recognizing the peculiar difficulties that regularly attend such enterprises — not the least source of confusion is the fact that unlike any other field of inquiry language is fair game for everybody, for formal and factual scientists, for logicians, linguists, learning theorists, semanticists, syntacticians, information theorists, and, alas, even for philosophers — I accordingly offer these propositions with the minimal expectation that they will at least suggest an alternative, a way of thinking about man’s use of signs which is different from the standard treatment and, I trust also, less dispiriting.

The Peirce scholar will note certain omissions and divergencies. There are two main departures from Peirce’s theory. (1) No account whatever is given here of Peirce’s ontology of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness in terms of which his semiotic is expressed. This omission I take to be justified by the desirability of using only those concepts which have operational significance for behavioral science. Accordingly, what is offered is not a comprehensive theory of signs but only a very tentative account of sentence utterance, that is, sentences considered as items of behavior. (2) The emphasis is clinical, that is, upon mistakes, misperceptions of sentences in their transmission from sender to receiver. There are two reasons for this emphasis. One is that the clinical encounter, that of therapist and patient, is the recurring paradigm in this essay. The other is that mistakes suggest a useful method of exploring this treacherous terrain. There are different kinds of mistakes and there are different kinds of variables in the communication process. Perhaps one may be taken as evidence of the other. A good way to study auto mechanics is to study auto breakdowns. Vapor locks, short circuits, transmission failures may be the best evidence that there are such things as carburetors, electrical systems, and gears — especially if the mechanic can’t lift the hood.

1. The basic unit of language behavior is the sentence.

A word has no meaning except as part of a sentence. Single-word utterances are either understood as sentences or else they are not understood at all. For example, when Wittgenstein’s Worker A says to Worker B, “Slabs!” Worker B understands him to mean, send slabs! — or perhaps misunderstands him to mean, I already have slabs.

If I say the word pickle to you, you must either understand the utterance as a sentence — this is a pickle, this is a picture of a pickle, pass the pickles, tastes like a pickle — or you will ask me what I mean or perhaps say, “What about pickles?”

1.1. A sentence utterance is a coupling of elements by a coupler.

The subject-predicate division* is not the only kind of coupling which occurs in sentences.* Not only can symbols be coupled with symbols; symbols can also be coupled with things or classes of things. Peirce’s example: A father catches his child’s eye, points to an object, and says, “Balloon.”

1.2. A sentence utterance is a triadic event involving a coupler and the two elements of the uttered sentence.†

1.21. If a dyadic relation is abstracted from a triadic relation and studied as such, the study may have validity as a science, but the science will not be a science of triadic behavior.

For example, a neurologist may study the dyadic events which occur in the acoustic nerve of a person who hears the sentence The King of France is bald. The result of such a study may be a contribution to the science of neurology, but it will not be a contribution to the science of triadic behavior.

A logician may abstract from the speaker of a sentence, study the formal relation between the terms of the sentence and what is entailed by its assertion. His study may contribute to the science of logic, but it will not contribute to the science of triadic behavior.

A professor writes a sentence on the blackboard: The King of France is bald. The class reads the sentence.

If one wishes to study this sentence utterance as an item of behavior, it does not suffice to abstract from the professor and the class and to study the semantics and syntax of the sentence. If one considers the sentence utterance as an item of behavior, one quickly perceives that it is a pseudo sentence. The sentence may have been uttered but it does not assert anything. For one thing, the phrase the King of France does not refer to anything, since there does not presently exist a king of France. For another thing, a second condition of bona fide sentence utterance is lacking. As Peirce said, asserting a sentence is something like going before a notary and assuming responsibility for it. No one imagines that the professor has done this.

Many of the philosophical puzzles about sentences have arisen from the failure to distinguish between actual sentence utterances and professors uttering pseudo sentences in classrooms.

1.3. A name is a class of sounds coupled with a thing or class of things.

There is no necessary relationship between a name and that which is named beyond the coupling of name and thing by namer.

1.31. It is the peculiar property of a name, a class of sounds, not only that it can be coupled with a class of things but also that in the coupling the sound is transformed and “becomes” the thing.*

The word glass sounds brittle but it is not. The word brittle sounds brittle but it is not.

The word sparkle seems to sparkle for English-speakers but not for Germans. The word funkeln seems to sparkle for Germans but not for English-speakers.†

1.311. A symbol must be unlike what it symbolizes in order that it may be transformed and “become” what is symbolized.

The sound cup can become a symbol for cup. A cup cannot be a symbol for cup.

1.4. The coupling relation of a sentence is not like any other world relation. Yet — indeed for this very reason — it may symbolize any world relation whatever, subject only to the context of utterance and the rules of sentence formation.

1.41. A sentence may mean anything it is used to mean.

Thus, the sentence baby chair uttered by a two-year-old can be reliably understood by its mother as asserting within different contexts any number of different relationships. It can also be understood as a command or a question. Some possible meanings of the two-word telegraph sentence baby chair:

That is a baby chair (chair for the baby).

That is a little chair.

Baby is in his chair.

Baby wants his chair.

Where is baby chair?

Bring baby chair.

Bring chair for baby.*

1.42. The coupling relation of a sentence is not isomorphic with the world relation it symbolizes.

It is true that the sentence John loves Mary is a coupling of sentence elements (a child could say John Mary and be understood if John was loving Mary at the time) referring to a dyadic relationship between John and Mary.

But it is also true that although the sentence John gives a ring to Mary refers to a triadic relation obtaining between John, the ring, and Mary, the sentence is still a coupling of elements: (1) we are speaking about John; (2) we are saying something about him.

It is also true that although the sentence John plays bridge with Mary and Ted and Alice refers to a tetradic relation obtaining between John and Mary and Ted and Alice, the sentence is still a coupling of elements: (1) we are speaking about John; (2) we are saying something about him.*

1.5. When one studies dyadic behavior, i.e., the learned response of an organism to stimuli, it is proper to isolate certain parameters and variables. These include: amplitude of response, latency of response, frequency of stimulus, reinforcement, extinction, discrimination, and so on.

But if one considers triadic behavior, i.e., the coupling of a sentence by a coupler, a different set of parameters and variables must be considered.

There follow below some of these parameters and variables.

1.51. Every sentence is uttered in a community.

The community of discourse is a necessary and nontrivial parameter of triadic behavior.

This is not the case in dyadic behavior. For example, to speak of a “community” of organisms responding to each other by signals may be true enough, but it is also to use words trivially, analogically, and contingently. Thus, it may not be false to say that an exchange of growls between polar bears takes place in a community of polar bears. It is trivial to say so, however, because it is possible to think of bears responding to stimuli outside a community, e.g., to the sound of splitting ice, in the same way we think of bears responding to growls.

But it is impossible to think of an exchange of sentences occurring otherwise than between two or more persons.

1.511. In triadic behavior, the dimension of community can act as either parameter or variable.

It is a parameter, for example, in an ongoing encounter between therapist and patient: the community does not change.

It is a variable when the community varies. The meaning of a sentence can very well be a dependent variable, depending on the independent variable, the changing community.

For example, the patient utters the following sentence to the therapist: My wife bugs me. This sentence may be uttered as a constative sentence asserting a state of affairs between patient and wife.

On the following day, however, at a group session at which both patient and wife are present, the same sentence is both uttered by patient and received by all present with another or at least an added meaning. The new meaning, moreover, is a function of the new community. Thus, it not only asserts a relation between patient and wife; it is also delivered and received as an attack, a bugging of wife and a wife being bugged.

1.52. A signal is received by an organism in an environment. A sentence is received and uttered in a world.

When Helen Keller learned that water was water, she then wished to know what other things “were”—until the world she knew was named.

1.521. An environment has gaps for an organism, but the world is global, that is, it is totally accounted for, one way or another, rightly or wrongly, by names and sentences.

A chicken will respond to the sight of a hawk but not to the sight of a tree. But a child wishes to know what a tree “is.”

A chicken does not know whether the earth is flat or round or a bowl, but a man, primitive or technological, will account for the earth one way or another.

1.522. Sentences refer to different worlds.

A sentence may refer to the here-and-now world, a past world, a future world, an imaginary world, a theoretical world.

There are often cues or referring words in the sentence which indicate its world.

That is a balloon. (Present world)

President Kennedy was assassinated. (Past world)

Communism will disappear. (Future world)

Once upon a time there lived a king. (Fictional past world)

There was this traveling salesman. (Fictional world, joke)

In this dream I saw a burning house. (Dream world)

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. (Hypothetical world)

The square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the opposite sides. (Abstract world)

Once upon a time is a referring phrase which clearly specifies its world for the listener. That in That is a balloon is a referring word which indicates something being looked at or pointed at. But not all sentences have referring words which specify the world of the sentence. In any case a world must be supplied by the listener. Some sentences are ambiguous. Thus a patient may say to his therapist:

This traveling salesman was hoping to meet a farmer’s daughter.

The sentence may be: (1) the beginning of a joke, (2) an account of a dream, (3) a facetious but nonetheless true declaration of lust by the patient, who is in fact a traveling salesman.*

1.523. Since a sentence entails a world for both utterer and receiver, both utterer and receiver necessarily see themselves as being placed vis-à-vis the world, A sentence utterer cannot not be placed vis-à-vis the world of the sentence. If he is not placed, then his relation to the world of the sentence is the relation of not being placed.

Some sentences are uttered and received in the everyday world of marketplace and fireside.

Broker: IBM is up two points.

Husband: The baby is crying, dear.

Other sentences, e.g., scientific propositions, are uttered, so to speak, out of the world, that is to say, from a posture abstracted from the everyday world, or as the scholastics used to say, sub specie aeternitatis. From this posture world items tend to be seen not as consumer articles or sources of need-satisfactions but rather as specimens to be classified or events to be arrayed in causal chains. Even concrete sentences, uttered from this posture, are received as propositions in hypothetico-deductive systems.

Chemist A to Chemist B: The temperature is now 102!

This sentence is not a comment on the weather but is rather an evidential sentence, perhaps an observation of a pointer reading at the end of an experiment which serves to confirm a hypothetico-deductive system.†

The peculiar vocation of the therapist requires that he listen to both kinds of sentences, distinguish one from the other, and respond accordingly.

Thus the sentence

After what happened yesterday, I’ve decided that life is not worth living.

is open to one of several readings. It may be the serious expression of a decision by one man in the world to another. Perhaps the patient intends to commit suicide. More likely, it is uttered by way of a general complaint and to pass the time of day. But perhaps also it could be uttered as a data sentence, i.e., a product of the joint patient-therapist investigation of the patient’s illness. The patient is saying: I have indeed reached a decision but rather than act on it by committing suicide I am going to play the language game of analysis and offer it as data. The therapist in turn is required to decide on the spot whether the sentence (1) is a cry for help, (2) asserts commonplace low spirits, (3) offers data for the language game of analysis, or (4) is all three.

It will be seen in this context that Sullivan’s description of the psychiatrist as a participant-observer is in fact an accurate characterization of the semiotic options available in the therapist-patient encounter.

1.53. Every sentence is uttered and received in a medium.

The medium is a nontrivial parameter or variable in every transaction in which sentences are used. The medium is not necessarily the message, but the message can be strongly influenced by the medium.

In learned or instinctive behavior, stimulus S1 is received by an organism which in turn responds as it has learned or been wired to respond. To a similar stimulus S2 it responds similarly according as S2 resembles S1. A dog responds to his master’s whistle or to a recording of his master’s whistle in the same way.

But the sentence utterance I need you can provoke varying responses according as the medium varies through which it is transmitted.

If the President says to me, “I need you!” my response will vary according as the message reaches me over television or by way of a person-to-person phone call — even though the acoustic and phonemic properties of the two utterances may be identical.

1.54. Every sentence has a normative dimension.

The true-or-false property which Aristotle ascribed to propositions is only one of the norms of sentence utterances. A sentence may be true or false, significant or nonsensical, trite or fresh, bad art or good art, etc.

Behavioral scientists are uncomfortable with the normative because natural science has traditionally had nothing to do with norms. As a consequence, behavioral scientists are usually content to yield the field, to leave true-or-false propositions to logicians, bad sentences to grammarians, metaphors to poets.

Yet sentences are items of behavior and these items have normative dimensions. Therefore a behavioral account of sentence utterances must give an account of these norms.

Behavioral scientists need not have made themselves so miserable. For the fact is that the normative dimension of language behavior is not an awkward addendum to be stuck onto the elegant corpus of behavioral science. No, the normative dimension of sentence utterance is a fundamental property of the coupling of the elements of the sentence, whether the sentence be a true-or-false proposition or a good-or-bad work of art.

A sentence utterance is not like other world events and is not isomorphic with the world event or relation the sentence is about. A world event or relation is generally either an energy exchange (sodium reacting with water) or a real relation (China being bigger than Japan). But a sentence is a coupling of elements by a coupler. It is bothersome to call a world event or relation good or bad. What is good or bad about sodium reacting with water or China being bigger than Japan? But, since a sentence is a coupling of elements by a coupler, these elements can be coupled well or badly.*

World events and relations are neither true nor false but sentences can be. Yet true-or-false is only one normative dimension of sentences.

Here are some others.

Clouds are fleece is false as a literal statement, true in a sense as a metaphor, bad in the sense of being a trite metaphor.

That is a sparrow may be a true assertion of class relationship but it may also be perfunctory, a bored assignment of a commonplace object (English sparrow) to a commonplace class.

That is a dusky seaside sparrow may assert a similar relationship, yet it may be uttered with all the excitement and sense of discovery of a bird-watcher coming upon an occasional species.

Even nondeclarative sentences have normative dimensions.

Patient says to therapist, “Don’t you dare plot against me!” An imperative sentence and therefore neither true nor false but inappropriate because, let us stipulate, the therapist harbors no such plot.

Said Emperor Henry IV to Pope Gregory VII at Canossa, “I apologize.” A performative sentence, hence neither true nor false but possibly sincere or insincere.

Patient to therapist: “I see what you mean.” It is possible that the norm in question here is not whether the patient is telling the truth but whether he is uttering a sentence or a nonsentence, i.e., making a polite sound.

2. The receiver of a sentence can take or mistake the sentence.

Note that an organism cannot in this sense be said to make a mistake in responding to a stimulus in its environment, unless the word mistake is used in an analogical sense.

But can’t a bass be said to make a mistake in taking an artificial lure? Yes, but the bass does not mistake the lure except in a trivial analogical sense, however tragic the consequences for the bass. For the bass responds to the lure willy-nilly according as the lure resembles what the bass has learned or been wired to respond to.

An organism responds to a stimulus Sn according as it has learned to respond to S, a class of stimuli. The probability of response to Sn can be expressed statistically by a bell curve. The response to Sn is the more likely as Sn resembles S.

If, however, you say to me, “The Russians are coming!” it can happen that I can perfectly understand the sentence according as I have learned to understand English syntax and semantics. Yet I can utterly mistake your sentence. I may understand you to be reporting an invasion, whereas in truth you are reading a movie marquee.

In this use of the word mistake, I also exclude other errors, for example, slips, misconceptions, lies, false propositions.

A Freudian slip might be described as a dyadic irruption of unconscious forces into triadic behavior and as such does not concern us here. A slip is intrapsychic. A mistake is interpersonal. A mistake is a miscoupling of sentence elements in which I couple the elements of your sentence in some fashion other than the way you coupled them. If you say to me, “I enjoyed beating you” instead of “I enjoyed meeting you,” no mistaking of sentences has occurred. I understand you well enough. What has occurred is an irruption of your feelings into your polite triadic behavior. Such an event is interesting enough but is not germane to a study of triadic behavior as such.

If I see a piece of paper in the woods, take it for a rabbit, and say, “Look, there’s a rabbit,” haven’t I made a mistake?

Also, isn’t a lie a mistake? Suppose I did in fact see a rabbit but do not want you to shoot it and accordingly say, “Oh, that’s just a piece of paper.” Wouldn’t you be telling the truth if you replied, “You are mistaken”?

Perhaps these are mistakes and perhaps it is true enough to say that a bass mistakes an artificial lure for a minnow.

Rather than argue the semantics of the word mistake, let us simply define the word for our present purposes. We shall understand the word in its root sense of taking amiss. More specifically, a mistake is the coupling of a sentence by its receiver in some fashion other than its coupling by its utterer. I wish, in short, to set apart triadic mistakes, the taking amiss by one person of another person’s utterances.

2.1. A sentence may be mistaken by mistaking any one of the parameters of the sentence. A parameter of a sentence utterance is a variable which is constant for a particular discourse but may vary from one discourse to another.

Some of the parameters of sentence utterances are: the mode of coupling of its elements, the community of discourse, the medium of communication, the world to which the sentence refers, the placement of utterer and receiver of the sentence vis-à-vis its world, the normative mode (true-false, stale-fresh, appropriate-inappropriate, crazy-sane, etc.).

2.11. The receiver of a sentence can mistake it by miscoupling its elements, that is, by coupling the wrong elements or by coupling the right elements in the wrong mode or parameter.

Wrong elements:

Wittgenstein’s Worker A: “Five slabs!” (meaning, send up five slabs).

Wittgenstein’s Worker B (a new man who, unaccustomed to A’s orders, supposes that A is taking inventory and is reporting that he has five slabs): “Very good! I’ll check them off!”

Wrong parameter:

NASA scientist on Wallops Island to native islander: “Look, the sky is violet!”

Islander, receiving the sentence as an ordinary world-news item, whereas in truth the scientist is making an observation which confirms the success of an experiment — the discharge by rocket of strontium chloride into the upper atmosphere: “Yes, it’s a lovely sunset.”

2.111. The receiver of a naming sentence can receive the name correctly and look at the same object the namer looks at yet nevertheless mistake the sentence by making the wrong world-slice (abstraction) of the class of objects named.

Father (pointing to a half dollar with an eagle on it): “That’s a half dollar,”

Child (later, pointing to chicken): “Half dollar!”

2.112. There is an interface between scientist and layman such that a sentence uttered by the former is subject to characteristic miscouplings by the latter.

Professor of medicine on grand rounds approaching the bed of a patient and picking up the chart: “Hm, a case of sarcoidosis.”

The sentence — [This is] a case of sarcoidosis—is coupled one way by its utterer, another way by a medical student who hears it, and yet another way by the patient himself. A proposition asserting class membership, logically speaking, the sentence is so understood by the three persons. Yet, triadically speaking, each understands it differently.

Professor’s coupling: This is a case of sarcoidosis. Which is to say, this patient is a man who has something wrong with him, a disorder of unknown etiology and uncertain course but with sufficient signs and symptoms and pathology in common with other such cases to warrant the class name sarcoidosis, a name however which serves as nothing better than a shorthand method of speaking of an ill-defined illness.

Medical student’s coupling: This is a case of sarcoidosis. Which is to say, the patient is assigned to the disease-class sarcoidosis Platonically. The patient is understood to participate in a higher reality than himself, namely, his disease. Later the student will refer to the patient by some such sentence as “I have a case of sarcoidosis on the third floor.”

Patient’s coupling: This is a case of sarcoidosis. I have been invaded by an entity, a specter named sarcoidosis.

2.1121. The lay-science interface often leads to a reversal of roles wherein the scientist-therapist “laicizes” his sentences, while the layman-patient “scientizes” his, with characteristic miscouplings attendant upon both.

Patient: “I’ve been looking forward to our beating — er, meeting today.”

Therapist: “You were thinking of beating me?”

Patient: “Well, I have been reacting negatively lately.”

Therapist: “I wonder who is beating up on who.*

Freud of course would have been concerned with the slip and the intrapsychic mechanism which produced it. In Peircean terms he was interested in the dyadics which irrupted into triadic behavior. But what increasingly interests us is how patient and therapist talk about the slip and how one understands or misunderstands the other.

Perhaps no one trait of patient-psychiatrist talk is more commonplace than this lay-science reversal, the patient Platonizing his sentences by a Good Housekeeping psychological jargon (“reacting negatively”), the therapist vulgarizing his (“who is beating up on who”) in the reverse expectation that the real is to be found in the common tongue. In a kind of minuet, patient and therapist change places. The question is, How does the switch work? What kind of a scientist does the layman become by his Platonizing? Does the common tongue bring the real closer for the therapist?

Freud was thinking about unresolved and disabling conflicts within the psyche. But what is beginning to dawn on us is that the very technique designed to probe and resolve such conflicts may in itself loom so large for the patient, be offered with such dazzling credentials, that he may fall prey to a technique and be further impoverished. In speaking of the earlier transaction, the Freudian slip, one is accustomed to using a traditional dyadic language: conflict, intrapsychic dynamism, repression, cathexis, resolution, etc. In the later transaction across the lay-science interface one finds oneself using such expressions as: falling prey to, impoverishment, loss of sovereignty, inauthentic, etc.

2.12. The receiver of a sentence can mistake it by mistaking the world to which it refers.

Thus it is not enough for the receiver to “know what the sentence means,” in the sense that a professor can write a sentence on the blackboard and every student can explain its syntax and semantics, that it is a declarative sentence, etc. One must also know whether it is a report, a story, an account of a dream, a joke, a quotation.

Salesman to boss: “There was this traveling salesman who met a farmer’s daughter—”

Boss: receives sentence as the beginning of a joke whereas in truth it is a report, the salesman’s seriocomic explanation of how he happened to lose an account.

By its very nature classical psychoanalysis with its encouragement of the analysand to “say what comes to mind” is peculiarly susceptible to sudden and uncued shifts of contexts and attendant misunderstandings. Miscouplings of sentences are more apt to occur here because parameters are more apt to become variables. The patient can shift “worlds” and communities at his pleasure. Indeed he is obliged to.

Therapist (after a long silence): “What comes to mind?”

Patient: “The center does not hold.”

Is the patient misquoting Yeats, describing his mental health, talking about the state of the union, or doing all three? Is the sentence uttered seriously or in a playful allusive way? It is the analyst’s business to know — that is, to catch on to the world mode of the sentence.

2.13. The receiver of a sentence can mistake it by mistaking the placement of the utterer vis-à-vis the world of the sentence.

Scene: a room under the University of Chicago stadium in 1943, during the early days of the Manhattan Project.

Fermi’s assistant: “Dr. Fermi, the radiation count of the pile is two forty-two!”

Fermi: “Very good!”

The assistant is uttering an alarm, calling attention to danger to life and limb. The sentence calls for appropriate behavior: turn the pile off, let’s get out of here. Other such sentences, might be “Vesuvius is about to erupt,” or “The safety valve is stuck.”

Fermi, however, receives the sentence as having been uttered, not in the ordinary world of predicaments, but rather as a confirmatory report of a pointer reading.*

If one diagrammed each triadic event, Fermi’s coupling and his assistant’s coupling, one could depict the assistant speaking to Fermi within the world and calling his attention to an imminent threat from one sector of the world. Fermi’s reading of the sentence, however, would place both Fermi and the assistant outside this world in a transcending abstracted posture from which world events are read as data for theory.

Similarly:

Therapist (after a long silence): “What comes to mind?”

Patient: “I’ve decided to break off the analysis.”

Therapist: “Tell me about it.”

Instead of replying, the patient rises, shakes hands, and leaves.

The therapist mistakes the placement of the patient vis-à-vis the world of the sentence I’ve decided to break off the analysis. He, the analyst, assumes that the patient has uttered one more sentence in the language game of analysis, i.e., a game where sentences are reports of data to be examined rather than announcements of actions to be taken. Whereas in truth the patient has shifted the world of discourse from the language game of analysis to the language of the everyday world, where, when one announces his departure, one departs.

2.14. A sentence can be mistaken in its normative mode, that is, by being received in a normative mode other than that in which it was uttered.

Therapist (after a long silence): “What comes to mind?”

Patient (seeing the curtain at the window stir in the breeze): “There’s a rat behind the arras.”

Therapist: “Who’s the rat?”

Patient: “Polonius.”

Therapist: “Don’t forget that Hamlet mistook Polonius for the king.”

Patient (agitated): “You mean — it’s oedipal? Hm. No. Yes. It is!”

Note that it is impossible to characterize the sentence There’s a rat behind the arras by the conventional propositional norm of true-or-false. There is no rat behind the curtain. But neither patient nor analyst supposes that the sentence asserts anything about a rat. The sentence is rather, like so much of the talk in analysis, an allusive ambiguous assertion with more than one referent. It is, let us stipulate, (1) a playful allusion to the circumstance that both patient and analyst saw a performance of Hamlet the night before, (2) a reference to a dream, (3) a surfacing of unconscious oedipal feelings.

A mistake in the triadic sense can occur here if the therapist mistakes one of the parameters of the patient’s sentences, e.g., a normative parameter: suppose he had taken the sentence about the rat as a true-or-false proposition and gotten up to look for the rat. Or suppose he took the sentence as no more than an allusion to last night’s playgoing when in truth it may refer to far more serious matters.

Up to this point we have not diverged from the conventional analytical quest: the decoding of the patient’s sentence toward the end of identifying and resolving unconscious conflicts. One does not dispute the validity of this enterprise. But we have other fish to fry. We want to observe this conversation not through the analyst’s eyes, which see the patient as a psychic malfunction, but through a zoom camera which zooms back in order to see the encounter as it occurs, between two sentence couplers, in a world, in an office where a certain language game is played, next to a street where other language games are played.

Through such a zoomed-back camera, we fancy we can see things a bit differently. Thus, instead of seeing the patient through the analyst’s eyes as a dyadic creature whose distress may be traced to “repression” and “resistance” to the disclosure of unconscious contents, we see a certain sort of educated lay person who is very much aware of the language game being played here, very much aware of the analyst’s theories, very much aware of the difference between being in the world of the analyst’s office and being in the world of the street outside.

We suspect by the same token that the agitation manifested by the patient in the last sentence of the conversation may have a very different source than the dyadic distress ordinarily attributed to him. Conventionally the patient is supposed to resist the attribution to him of oedipal feelings. But is it not possible that in this case what was thought to be dyadic misery may turn out to be triadic delight? So that, far from being like one of Freud’s Victorian patients who “resisted” the disclosure of such unconscious contents, this patient may be a horse of an entirely different color, namely, late-twentieth-century man who likes nothing better than to exhibit the proper pathology, in this case the central pathology of the Master himself. “It’s oedipal!” exclaims the patient with every sign of delight.

Our business is to say what is right and what is wrong here. What is right is that Freud was right and that the patient does indeed do well to confront his oedipal feelings. What is wrong is a certain loss of sovereignty by the patient. We must trace out the connection between valid theory and falling prey to valid theory. For is it not true that the patient’s chief claim to humanity here rests on the honorable credentials of his pathology? “Hurray!” he is saying. “I am certified human after all! I have oedipal feelings!”

A Tertium Quid:

The Lady Novelist?

Tolstoy once said that a talented lady novelist could spend five minutes looking through the window of a barracks and know all she needed to know about soldiering.

If she can see so much in five minutes, how much more must the talented therapist see after, say, a hundred hours with his patient?

So here is the real question, or rather the main specter which haunts every inquiry into language as behavior. Granted the shortcomings of the two major methodological approaches to the talking patient — the analytic-psychical and the organismic-behavioristic — is not the sole remaining alternative the novelistic? Instead of “novelistic” we could say phenomenological, for the novelist must first and last be a good phenomenologist, and to most behavioral scientists phenomenologists are closer to novelists than to scientists. But is it not the case that when all is said and done and all theories aside, what happens is that the therapist gets to know his patient pretty well, understands him, intuits him, can talk with him and about him — and that behavioral theory can never say much about it?

Let us at least articulate our unhappiness. Unhappiness changes. We are no longer miserable about the old quarrel between classical behaviorism and classical psychoanalysis or about the more intricate quarrels and rapprochements of their followers. For it has become more and more evident that our main emotion when confronted by both Freud and Skinner, say, is not partisan feelings — for both are “right” in their way — but rather epistemological embarrassment. Both men put forward dyadic models, one for organisms interacting in an environment, the other for invisible “forces” interacting within a psyche. The question now is not which approach is right but how both can be right at the same time. To us now, Freud’s and Skinner’s models stand to each other like the two worlds on each side of Alice’s looking-glass. Both worlds are demonstrably right and useful in their way, but how do you get from one to the other?

Is the lady novelist the only tertium quid?

But first, what does the lady novelist see if we put her down, not outside a barracks window, but on the other side of a viewing mirror through which she can see therapist and patient who were talking about the rat behind the arras and related oedipal feelings? She notices first off, let us say, that the patient does get excited. But far from its being the case that he is upset and is “resisting” the disclosure of unpleasant unconscious contents, she has the distinct impression that the patient is delighted. Moreover, being a good novelist and well attuned to the intellectual fashions of the day, she has the distinct impression that the patient’s pleasure has something to do with the fact that he has produced a kind of behavior which measures up to, or fits in with, the very theory to which he and his analyst subscribe. Perhaps it also occurs to her that the patient is in a sorry fix indeed if his chief claim to happiness is that occasion when he manages to be sick in the right way.

Suppose that the lady novelist is right. Is she then the tertium quid? Is her way the only way to get at what is going on? And if it is, has not all the fun gone out of the game of behavioral science and the scientific method itself lost its splendid rigor?

Have we not in fact come back to George Miller’s original misgiving, which haunts all behavioral scientists when the subject of words and meanings is raised? Must we not then let it go at that, surrender the field to Tolstoy’s lady novelist, or to Husserl, which is to say the same thing?

Perhaps. But Charles Peirce did propose a radical theory of signs which undertook to give an account of those transactions in which symbols are used to name things and to assert sentences about things. In view of the heroic and generally unavailing attempts during the past fifty years to give such an account through one or another dyadic theory, it might be worthwhile for once to approach triadic behavior with a genuine triadic theory.

Such a theory might bestow order and system upon the phenomenologizing which to the behavioral scientist must seem closer to novel writing than to a science of behavior.

For example, the oedipal patient’s agitation may be given some such preliminary reading as follows:

The patient’s agitation is not dyadic misery — resistance to the disclosure of unacceptable unconscious contents — but triadic delight. This delight, moreover, is quite as fundamental a trait of triadic behavior as organismic “need-satisfaction” is in dyadic behavior. It is a naming delight which derives from the patient’s discovery that his own behavior, which until now he had taken to be the unformulable, literally unspeakable, vagary of one’s self, has turned out not merely to be formulable, that is to say, namable by a theory to which both patient and therapist subscribe, but to be namable with a name which is above all names: oedipal!

As such, the patient’s delight has good and bad, authentic and inauthentic components, which must be traced out and identified within an adequate triadic theory. Thus, the patient’s sentence It’s oedipal! must be investigated for Platonic and even magical components in its mode of coupling as well as for its valid intersubjective celebration of an important discovery. Perhaps the patient’s sentence can be paraphrased in some such terms as: “At last I have succeeded! At last I have produced a proper, even a classical, piece of psychopathology!”

Accordingly, the patient’s behavior with its strong normative components must be evaluated on a normative scale which is in turn an integral part of the triadic theory in question. It is impossible in other words to avoid the subject of the patient’s impoverishment and loss of sovereignty.

In his astounding achievement of applying the scientific method to the irrational contents of the unconscious, Freud did not have time to consider what goes on between doctor and patient, nor how a technique itself can loom large as part of the intellectual furniture of a later age, much less how it could come to pass that one can fall prey to the very technique one seeks help from.

But that does not excuse us from investigating these matters.

* Actually the dyads should be segmented in some such order as O =f(S), in which O = the organic variables and S = the stimulus variables; Ib = f(Ia), in which I = the intervening neurophysiological variables within the organism; and R = f(O), in which R = response variables, or measurement of behavior properties.

* “Ouch” is a learned response. A German wouldn’t say “Ouch” but perhaps “Aie,” a Yiddish speaker “Oy.”

* Or the NP-VP division of transformational linguists. Or Strawson’s division of a sentence into what you are talking about and what you are saying about it.

* Nor are language couplings the only kind of couplings which occur. There are other kinds of symbols and other kinds of sentences, e.g., the coupling of a map with the territory, the coupling of van Gogh’s painting The Cypresses with what is symbolized (which is not merely the cypresses but forms of feeling as well). But here we are concerned primarily with language sentences.

† In Chapter 9 I describe symbolusing behavior as characterized by a tetradic structure. Thus, if one were to observe an utterance of a symbol — or, as I would say here, of a sentence — one would notice that there is not only an utterer and a coupling of sentence elements, but also a listener or receiver of the sentence. “The second person is required as an element not merely in the genetic event of learning language but as the indispensable and enduring condition of all symbolic behavior. The very act of symbolic formulation, whether it be language, logic, art, or even thinking, is of its very nature a formulation for a someone else. Even Robinson Crusoe, writing in his journal after twenty years on the island, is nevertheless performing a through-and-through social and intersubjective act.”

Today, ten years later, I would broaden the notion of coupling “symbol” and “object” to the utterance of sentences in general, whether symbol and object, naming sentences, or traditional declarative sentences with subject and predicate.

This “tetradic behavior,” involving an utterer, a receiver, symbol and object, is contrasted with the “semiotic triangle” of Ogden and Richards, involving a sign which affects an interpreter which in turn responds with behavior relevant to an object or referent.

I find it convenient here, however, to observe Peirce’s distinction between dyadic relations and triadic relations. It will be seen that no substantial change has been made. What matters is the difference in “valence” between the semiotic relations encountered in symbol use and those in signal use, whether the difference is between triads and tetrads or dyads and triads.

Thus, the “semiotic triangle of Ogden and Richards with its “causal” relations between sign and interpreter and between interpreter and referent is clearly, in Peirce’s scheme of things, a pair of dyads.

The tetrad I proposed can, if one wishes to deal with atomic rather than molecular events, be split apart along its interface between utterer and receiver of a sentence, yielding a coupling of sentence elements by utterer and a subsequent coupling by receiver. The tetradic model, I see now, is appropriate only in successful communication, i.e., those transactions in which the same elements are coupled by both utterer and receiver and in the same mode of coupling. Unfortunately this is not always the case.

In short, in Chapter 9 I deal with the “molecular” structure of the communication process, whereas I am here dealing with the “atomic” structure.

* It is this transformation of symbols and their subsequent confusion with things that Count Korzybski used to rage against. “Whatever you choose to say about this object,” he would say, holding a pencil aloft, “don’t say ‘this is a pencil.’ “ “Whatever you say the object ‘is,’ well it is not” (p. 35).

In point of fact, I have never seen anyone mistake a word for a thing or try to write with the word pencil, though the magic use of words undoubtedly occurs in primitive societies and perhaps an analogous misuse in modern technological societies.

Korzybski tended to treat the peculiar features of symbol use as misbehavior to be gotten rid of by a therapeutic semantics which was almost an ethical science.

In a triadic theory of meaning it is to be hoped that symbolic transformations and sentence couplings with the verb is will not be put down as instances of bad behavior or human stupidity but rather will be regarded as a fundamental property of sentence utterance.

What needs to be explored is not human perversity as such but rather a parameter variable of symbol use. All sentences entail couplings. The mode of coupling is a normative dimension in which couplings may be used truly or falsely in propositions, well or badly in poetry, as a transparent vehicle of meaning or as an opaque simulacrum which distorts meaning.

† Werner and Kaplan note that the word chair is not merely a sign or label for chairs: “…the material, phonemically unique sequence, ch-ai-r, is articulated into a production whose expressive features parallel those ingredients in the percept ‘chair.’…Only when the vocable has become imbedded in an organismic matrix, regulated and directed by an activity of schematizing or form-building, does it enter into a semantic correspondence with the object (referent) and does it become transformed from the status of a sign to that of symbolic vehicle.”

* Cf. Braine: He and others have noted that an early stage of language acquisition in children features two-word utterances comprising a “pivot” word and an “open” word. Thus a child using the “pivot” word there might combine it with any number of “open” words and say there ball, there man, there doggie, etc. Then in a few months a second stage is reached in which the child combines two “open” words. Thus instead of saying there car or there man, the child might say man car, meaning “A man is in the car.”

Braine noted a pause or juncture between the two “open” words. Thus baby chair or baby book, uttered without a juncture, is presumably a pivot-open construction meaning “(There is) a little chair” or “(There is) a little book.” Whereas the utterance baby#chair, uttered in a certain context, is reliably understood by the mother to mean “The baby is in his chair.” The symbol # represents a juncture or pause.

This open-open construction is a very large class and represents, to my way of thinking, nothing less than the child’s graduation from the naming sentence (there ball) to the syntactical, “subject-predicate” sentence.

Let us agree with Chomsky that a child’s linguistic behavior cannot possibly be accounted for by traditional learning theory with its notions of “stimulus control,” “conditioning,” “generalization and analogy,” “patterns,” “habit structures,” or “dispositions to respond.”

The question, however, is whether the sole alternative to learning theory is Chomsky’s “innate ideas and innate principles,” specifically in this case a “language acquisition device,” a kind of magic black box interposed between input and output which contains not only the principles of universal grammar but the capacity of generating the grammar of one’s own language.

I wonder whether Chomsky’s LAD (language acquisition device) is nothing more nor less than the unique human ability to couple sentence elements, to couple symbols with things, symbols with symbols, which couplings may be understood to mean whatever context allows them to mean.

Indeed, may not grammar itself be defined as the primitive coupling plus whatever inflection, particles, and patterns may be required to supplant the diminishing context and the intuitive grasp by the mother of the child’s couplings? Thus the child’s sentence baby#chair may be understood infallibly by the mother to mean The baby is now in his chair. But as the intimate mother-child relationship declines and as it becomes necessary for people to talk to strangers over telephones about

babies and chairs which at least one party cannot see, it becomes necessary to add such words as the, is, in, his, etc.

If one must speak of a universal grammar, it is surely impossible to avoid the basic phenomenon of the sentence as a coupling and the basic division of couplings into two sorts, whether the language be English or Algonquin: (1) an object beheld by both speaker and hearer and pointed at and understood as one of a class of like objects and named by a sound which is understood as a class of like sounds — thus the pointing at and the utterance of the single-word sentence by father to son: balloon. (2) the coupling of symbol and symbol, e.g., baby#chair to signify vvhatever world relation or event is beheld in common by speaker and hearer.

* According to Veatch, mathematical logicians habitually confuse logical relations with “real” relations — here we would say sentence relations with world relations. Veatch calls the sentence coupling “an intentional relation of identity.” Thus the relation of John to Bill asserted in the sentence John is larger than Bill is a world relation which can be expressed by the isomorphic form xRy. Mathematical logicians persist in setting forth the sentence in the form xRy, whereas in truth the sentence relation is of the form S is P.

Lord Russell and the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus believed that the sentence must be in some sense isomorphic with the fact asserted by the sentence. The later Wittgenstein changed his mind and came to believe that sentences were plays in a language game and could mean whatever they were used to mean.

* Transactions between analyst and patient are especially open to sudden shifts of context, missing referring words, uncued worlds, since the rules of this language game require the patient to say “what comes to mind.”

† Here again, the uncritical use of analogical terms has impeded inquiry into distinctively human modes of meaning. Thus, when instrumentalists like Dewey describe scientific research as socially useful activity like farming and marketing, they state a not very interesting similarity at the expense of a much more interesting difference. What concerns us here is how the farmer sees himself vis-à-vis the world, and how the scientist sees himself. The two are not necessarily the same.

More interesting still is how the layman sees himself vis-à-vis the world of science. Is it possible, for example, for a layman to benefit in one sense from the goods and

services of scientific technology while in another sense falling prey to them, e.g., coming to see himself as a consumer of these same goods and services as a passive beneficiary of a more or less esoteric, not to say magic, enterprise? “They will soon come up with a cure for cancer,” one hears. The question is, Who is “they,” and how does the speaker see himself in relation to “them”?

* Here I am making the case that sentence utterances are triadic events about dyadic events. My utterance Sodium reacts with water is a triadic event about a dyadic event.

It is also true, of course, that a sentence utterance, a triadic event, can be about another sentence utterance, also a triadic event.

Thus, a coupling can be about another coupling. A therapist makes an analysis of a patient’s dream, to which the patient replies, “That’s a lie!” The patient is making a coupling about the therapist’s coupling. Note that the patient’s sentence addresses itself to a normative dimension of the analyst’s sentence. Sentences about other sentences tend characteristically to be judgments about the norms of the latter. E.g.: “That’s a lousy painting,” “Nixon’s speech last night was not his best,” “Kennedy wowed them in Berlin,” “Stalin lied,” “That’s a bad metaphor,” “So that’s a sparrow. So what?”

The only point is that a sentence coupling, being what it is, can be about anything whatever. Since the coupling China is larger than Japan is wholly unlike the relationship of China and Japan, it can assert that relationship. Note that a map cannot. A map is isomorphic but it asserts nothing, unless some assertory claim is appended, e.g., the signature of the cartographer.

Note that those mathematical logicians who believe that propositions are isomorphic with the reality they refer to have found it necessary to invent another mark which shows that the propositional relation is asserted, e.g., Frege’s assertion mark.

But it is of the very nature of a sentence coupling that it not only signifies a relation which is unlike itself but also asserts it.

* For the spirit if not the letter of this conversation I am indebted to Gottschalk.

* The classical world-mistake involving a lay-science interface was the Roman soldier’s mistaking Archimedes’ complaint when the former spoiled Archimedes’ geometric figures in the sand:

Archimedes (concerned about the mathematical world represented by his figure in the sand): “Don’t step on my right-angle triangle!”

Soldier (receiving the remark as a calculated insult to the Roman empire): “Take this!” (And runs him through with his sword.)