As a long time fan and student of Locke, and a student of Peirce since 1971, I have to agree with John Deely's arguments here. I lack his scholarship, but I think his arguments about continuity of terminology are well grounded. I have no question that Locke was not using the medical sense, or anything similar to it, but one much closer to that used by Peirce. In fact, as Joe Ransdell once remarked, it really gives a different understanding of Locke to appreciate the importance of Book IV, especially in comparison to the degraded version of Locke we tend to teach in philosophy classes.
John
At 02:44 AM 2014-03-28, Deely, John N. wrote:
Coinage and Actual Spelling of Lockeâs Term âSemioticsâ
Everyone agrees that âsemioticsâ in whatever variants comes originally from John Lockeâs Essay concerning Humane Understanding, published in December of 1689 but bearing the date of 1690. Kees refers to the 1690 text, but he cites only the 1975 [supposedly âcriticalâ] Oxford edition, which, along with most editions made after Lockeâs death, âcorrectedâ, i.e., silently distorted, both the text and the intention of its author in the matter of his proposal that the doctrine of signs be called semiotica, i.e., ÏημιÏÏική, âsemioticsâ.
It is well known that the main Greek term for âsignâ is Ïημείον. The etymologically âobviousâ spelling for the study of signs thus would be ÏημειÏÏική, except for one slight detail: that is not the name that Locke gave to his proposal precisely because he wanted to distinguish his proposal for a ânew general scienceâ from the specific branch of medicine already known in his time as ÏημειÏÏική, i.e., âsemeioticsâ transliterated.
In ancient Greek philosophy the only signs commonly recognized were what would come to be known after Augustine as natural signs, Ïημεία. The main study of signs of this type (outside of divination, âastrologyâ) was in medicine, where by Lockeâs time symptomatology had already been named ΣημειÏÏική. Kees (p. 73) cites the 1625 Anatomy of Urine by James Hart (though Kees does not include the work in his Bibliography), where âsemeiotics [is] the art that teaches us the nature, causes, and substance of a disease by its signs.â Kees then tells his readers (p. 73) that âin essence, Locke proposes to apply the method developed for interpreting the symptoms of diseases to all knowledge, and his Essay, particularly Book 4, is an attempt to do this.â Although good enough as a guess, Kees on this point needs to attend to the third phase of inquiry, where a developed guess is tested against the facts. The only way for Kees to maintain his abduction on this point is by avoiding what would best be termed âretroductionâ (âinductionâ in Peirceâs sense of that term details in the full TAJS review), i.e., a sccholarly testing of his hypothesis.2
Tested against the facts, what Kees tells his readers on this score turns out to be factually false generating for his readers aa needless perplexity, since the facts in question have been on public record for some years now before Kees published his Guide for the Perplexed.
To begin with, Locke did not propose ΣημειÏÏική as his name for a general doctrine of signs. He proposed rather ΣημιÏÏική, which would transliterate into Latin as âsemioticaâ, and into English as âsemioticsâ. Further, he did not propose ΣημιÏÏική as an extension to all knowledge of âthe method of interpreting symptoms of diseasesâ, as Kees (p. 73) would have his readers believe. Locke proposed Semiotics as an entirely new science (or âdoctrine of signsâ, as he synonymously stated expressly) embracing the whole of speculative knowledge as well as of practical knowledge (under which latter branch alone would symptomatology belong), conventional signs as well as natural signs a general sciencce, in cognizant contrast to the special science of symptomatology.
Now take note of this fact. Not only did Locke use his own new spelling, ΣημιÏÏική, to name the general study of signs, in the original 1690 edition of his Essay. He undertook personally to oversee the completion of four subsequent editions for publication; and in every one of these five editions prepared within his own house and lifetime, the spelling ΣημιÏÏική is retained.
Only after his death in 1704 do we find ΣημιÏÏική replaced by ΣημειÏÏική, usually (always so far as I have been able to examine editions) with no explanation given. Unless the editors had themselves examined all five of the Locke editions between 1689 and 1704, scholars could readily assume that ΣημειÏÏική was the âcorrectâ form according to established Greek orthography. But Locke was not writing from that point of view. He was writing from the point of view of an entirely new proposal for Logic and Philosophy, that thinkers recognize and develop a new general science of signs via a distinction of the means whereby all knowledge is acquired and developed which would unite in a transdisciplinary perspective both speculative and practical fields of knowing a distinction which would nott confuse this ânew scienceâ with the already extant special science of symptomatology.
Lockeâs proposal was not received by his fellow moderns, early or late, with any enthusiasm, with the partial exception of Berkeley, who nonetheless did not systematically take up the proposal. (See âReception of the Proposal among the Modernsâ in Four Ages of Understanding, pp. 592-93.) Often enough, when a later modern abridged version of the Essay was published, the concluding chapter on semiotics would be omitted. The modern preoccupation with âepistemologyâ took the center stage of philosophical attention among the philosophers, not Lockeâs proposal for the doctrine of signs (still less Poinsotâs systematic Treatise on Signs published the year of Lockeâs birth, but in Latin, and in Spain).
So the answer is readily available to Keesâs implicit perplexity (p. 75) as to why in the world has âsemioticsâ become âthe variant most commonly used todayâ, instead of the variant âsemeioticâ (let alone âsemeioticsâ) preferred (not really by Peirce himself, but for some years now) by the self-styled Peirceans after Fisch:
The term âsemiotÂicsâ as a name for the doctrine of signs had a powerful advantage when the time finally came that authors began to think seriously about the prospects and thematic development of such a doctrine. It not only had the Greek pedigree of a derivation from Ïημείον, it had the further advantage of derivation therefrom by way of medicine, âvery likely the most deeply rootedâ, as Sebeok put it (1975: 181), âleg upon which semiotics rests.â And its spelling, however inferior from the point of view of the purist of Greek orthography, has the advantage of directly reflecting the spelling Locke chose for naming the doctrine of signs, ÏημιÏÏικὴ, in its distinction from the medical specialization of similar nomination, ÏημειÏÏική.
An observation made by Sebeok as far back as 1971 provides some amusement in the present context:
A minute holdout dismisses both [âsemioticâ and âsemioticsâ], in favor of semeiotics, on the argument that âthe spelling is better etymology than semiotics, and it avoids the ambiguity of semi-. Semi-otics would be nonsense.
Would Kees have the would-be Peirceans continue to cling to a variant spelling (âsemeioticâ or âsemeioticsâ) which in fact confuses the general study Locke proposed with a specific branch of medical science? Such a âclinging toâ is counterproductive, both etymologically and theoretically.
The title of Kees Chapter 5 could have been fully correct and appropriate had he followed what Ransdell never cited by Kees, an oddity considering Ransdellâs looming online presence regarding Peirce had plaainly and accurately said in his 1989 inquiry âIs Peirce a Phenomenologist?â (original English version online at <http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/ransdell/phenom.htm>): âLogic is identified with Peirceâs general theory of representation (theory of signs), for which Peirceâs usual technical term is âsemioticâ.â
End of Post 2 re title of Chap. 5.
2 See Section 4c. below, âThe Semiotic Spiralâ, p. ff.
Professor John Collier [email protected]
Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa
T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031
Http://web.ncf.ca/collier
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
