Pragmatism and The Forms of Sense Language Perception Technics American and European Philosophy

Innis
P h il o s o p h y
cont i n ue d f ro m f ron t fla p
to present debates about the “biasing” of “ This is a work of rst-rate scholarship and deep-cutting philosophy,
Making sense of the world around us is a
perception by language and technics, Innis also replete with important insights and fruitful suggestions. The author brings
into sharp focus, above all else, language and what he calls (following process involving both semiotic and material
seeks to provide a methodological model of Ernst Cassirer) technics by drawing upon diverse traditions—principally Robert E. Innis
Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense

mediation—the use of signs and sign systems
how complementary analytical resources from the pragmatism of Peirce and Dewey, the phenomenology of Husserl,
Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, the work of Cassirer and Langer in the (preeminently language) and various kinds of
American pragmatist and various European
philosophy of symbolism, and that of Bühler and others in linguistics. He tools (technics). As we use them, we experience
traditions can be deployed fruitfully in the shows how these and related phenomena (for example, perception, action,
them subjectively as extensions of our bodily
Language, Perception, Technics

pursuit of new insights into the phenomenon agency, and consciousness) are at once fully embodied and irreducibly
symbolic. His explorations of linguistic and other forms of sense ought to selves and objectively as instruments for
Pragmatism
of meaning-making. be of interest to a wide audience.”
accessing the world with which we interact.
—Vincent Colapietro, Penn State University
Emphasizing this bipolar nature of language
Robert E. Innis is Professor of Philosophy at and technics, understood as intertwined

American and European Philosophy Series
the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. Other books in the series
and the “forms of sense,” Robert Innis studies the
multiple ways in which they are rooted in and
Forms of Sense
The Primal Roots of American Philosophy: transform human perceptual structures in both
Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Native American Thought their individual and social dimensions.
by Bruce Wilshire
The book foregrounds and is organized around

The Purest of Bastards
Works of Mourning, Art, and Affirmation in the Thought of Jacques the notion of “semiotic embodiment.” Language
Derrida Language, Perception, Technics and technics are viewed as “probes” upon which
by David Farrell Krell
we rely, in which we are embodied, and that
themselves embody and structure our primary

You Must Change Your Life
Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense modes of encountering the world. While
by John T. Lysaker making an important substantive contribution
The Pennsylvania State University Press Penn

ISBN 0-271-02223-X
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University Park, Pennsylvania
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Innis Front Matter 9/26/02 11:24 PM Page i
Pragmatism
and the
Forms of Sense
Innis Front Matter 9/26/02 11:24 PM Page ii
General Editors: CHARLES E. SCOTT and JOHN J. STUHR

Associate Editor: SUSAN M. SCHOENBOHM
Devoted to the contemporary development of American and European philosophy in the
pragmatic and Continental traditions, AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
gives expression to uniquely American thought that deepens and advances these traditions
and that arises from their mutual encounters. The series will focus on new interpretations
of philosophers and philosophical movements within these traditions, original contribu-
tions to European or American thought, and issues that arise through the mutual influence
of American and European philosophers.
Editorial Advisory Board
MITCHELL ABOULAFIA, University of Colorado • BETTINA BERGO, Worcester

Polytechnic Institute • ROBERT BERNASCONI, University of Memphis • JUDITH
BUTLER, University of California at Berkeley • EDWARD CASEY, SUNY at Stony Brook
• VINCENT COLAPIETRO, The Pennsylvania State University • DAN CONWAY, The
Pennsylvania State University • SIMON CRITCHLEY, University of Essex • FRANÇOISE
DASTUR, Université de Paris XII • PAUL DAVIES, University of Sussex • MIGUEL DE
BEISTEGUI, University of Warwick • GÜNTER FIGAL, Universität Tübingen (Eber-
hard-Karls-Universität) • RUSSELL GOODMAN, University of New Mexico • DAVID
HOY, Cowell College • DOMINIQUE JANICAUD, Université de Nice • MARK
JOHNSON, University of Oregon • DAVID FARRELL KRELL, DePaul University •
JOHN LACHS, Vanderbilt University • LADELLE MCWHORTER, University of Rich-
mond • KRZYSZTOF MICHALSKI, Boston University • JEAN-LUC NANCY, Uni-
versité de Strasbourg 11 (Université des Sciences Humaines) • KELLY OLIVER, SUNY
at Stony Brook • STEFAN GEORGIEV POPOV, University of Sofia • SANDRA
ROSENTHAL, Loyola University • HANS RUIN, Stockholm University • DENNIS
SCHMIDT, Villanova University • CHARLENE SEIGFRIED, Purdue University LAEB
• SHANNON SULLIVAN, The Pennsylvania State University • JOHN SALLIS, The
Pennsylvania State University • RICHARD SHUSTERMAN, Temple University •
KENNETH STIKKERS, Southern Illinois University • GIANTERESIO VATTIMO,
Università degli Studi di Torino • FRANCO VOLPI, Università degli Studi di Padova
• DAVID WOOD, Vanderbilt University
David Farrell Krell, The Purest of Bastards: Works of Mourning, Art, and Affirmation in
the Thought of Jacques Derrida
Bruce Wilshire, The Primal Roots of American Philosophy: Pragmatism, Phenomenology,
and Native American Thought
John T. Lysaker, You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Pholosophy, and the Birth of Sense
Innis Front Matter 9/26/02 11:24 PM Page iii
Robert E. Innis
Pragmatism
and the
Forms of Sense
The Pennsylvania State University Press

Innis Front Matter 9/26/02 11:24 PM Page iv
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Innis, Robert E.
Pragmatism and the forms of sense : language, perception, technics /
Robert E. Innis.
p. cm. — (American and European philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-271-02223-X
1. Meaning (Philosophy). 2. Language and
languages—Philosophy. 3. Technology—Philosophy.
4. Perception (Philosophy). 5. Pragmatism. 6. Semiotics.
I. Title. II. Series.
B840 .I56 2002

121'.68—dc21 2002012189
Copyright © 2002 The Pennsylvania State University

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,
University Park, PA 16802-1003
It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free

paper for the first printing of all clothbound books. Publications on uncoated
stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for
Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48–1992.
Innis Front Matter 9/26/02 11:24 PM Page v
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense 1
Part One: Framing Language
1 On the Perceptual Roots of Linguistic Meaning 19

2 From Indication to Predication: On Fields and Situations 51
3 Paleo-Pragmatism’s Linguistic Turn: Lessons from
Giovanni Vailati 99
Part Two: The Senses of Technics
4 Technics and the Bias of Perception: The Tacit Logic of

Embodied Meanings 131
5 Pragmatist Aesthetics as Critique of Technology 167
6 Form and Technics: Nature, Semiotics, and the
‘Information Revolution’ 203
References 239
Index 253
Innis Front Matter 9/26/02 11:24 PM Page vi
Innis Front Matter 9/26/02 11:24 PM Page vii
Preface
This book continues the types of investigations into the forms of meaning-
making undertaken in my Consciousness and the Play of Signs (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1994). There the main goal was to explore
how the play of signification defined our fundamental modes of being-in-
the-world and of giving structure to our experience. I argued in that book
that the ‘play’ of signs is not a ‘free’ play. It is anchored in and exemplified
by a deep bond between ‘perception,’ rooted in the actively striving body of
an inquiring organism, and ‘semiosis,’ understood quite generally as the pro-
duction and interpretation of signs, which occurs, albeit nonexplicitly, even
on the perceptual level. Combining descriptive and conceptual procedures,
Consciousness and the Play of Signs was most concerned with supplying a
comprehensive way of thinking about the frames of meaning-making quite
generally. Its focus was, in that sense, more formal than phenomenological.
The present book explores the bond between perception and semiosis more
concretely by foregrounding language and technics as paradigmatic and
indispensable embodied forms of sense-giving and sense-reading.
The books are complementary and independent ‘rotations’ of their
themes yet are grounded in the same set of interlocked concerns. The pre-
sent book, like its predecessor, brings into dialogue and exploits the con-
ceptual resources of quite different intellectual traditions. Its deepest
commitments, also like its predecessor’s, are to the centrality of the prag-
matist tradition’s rethinking of how to go about things in philosophy and to
the philosophical relevance of a rather sober and appropriately configured
and nuanced semiotics.
The literature on the topics treated in this book represents a kind of
Mount Everest of scholarship. I have tried to indicate helpful parallel,
supporting, and contrasting materials on many of the themes and issues,
but I have also wanted to avoid what the Italians call citazionismo, a dis-
play of references that ultimately distracts from the discussion at hand by
Innis Front Matter 9/26/02 11:24 PM Page viii
viii Preface
embroiling it in such a labyrinth of qualifications, supplementations, and

intellectual dues-paying that the main focus of the matter at hand becomes
irretrievably blurred. I have attempted to keep the melodic lines of the
argument clear, but they are themselves of sufficient number that I have
adopted a policy of sober prudence when I was uncertain whether added
qualifications, appeals for support, or critical attack were called for.
I have been concerned with the topics of this book for a long time, both
in my courses and in research. As a result, core portions of the chapters of
this book have appeared (or been heard) elsewhere in preliminary and
sometimes radically different forms. The Peirce Seminar, the Institute for
Human Sciences in Vienna, the American Association for Italian Studies,
the German Semiotic Society, the German Phenomenological Society, the
American Semiotic Society, and the International Association for Semi-
otic Studies have been fruitful venues for the critical development of ideas.
The basis documents upon which the present discussion builds have been
substantially reconfigured, expanded, and thematically connected for
incorporation into this book. I want to thank all those, including my stu-
dents, who offered me the chance to try out these intertwined sets of ideas
and have, in the case of published materials, granted permission to reuse
them here.
Chapter 1, “On the Perceptual Roots of Linguistic Meaning,” origi-
nally appeared as “Peirce and Polanyi: Perceptual Consciousness and the
Structures of Meaning,” in The Peirce Seminar Papers: Essays in Semiotic
Analysis, ed. Michael Shapiro and Michael Haley (New York: Berghahn
Books, 1999), 4:531–61.
Chapter 2, “From Indication to Predication: On Fields and Situations,”
originally appeared as “Bühler und Gardiner: Von der Indikation zur
Prädikation,” in Bühler-Studien, ed. Achim Eschbach (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 2:117–55. It incorporates as an appendix materi-
als from my article “Articulation as Emendation: Philipp Wegener’s Anti-
formalist Theory of Language,” which originally appeared in Semiotik:
Interdisziplinäre und historische Aspekte, ed. Udo L. Figge (Bochum:
Brockmeyer, 1989), 289–99.
Chapter 3, “Paleo-Pragmatism’s Linguistic Turn: Lessons from Giovanni
Vailati,” is based upon my essay “Giovanni Vailati: Pragmatism and the
Analysis of Meaning,” which originally appeared in Differentia 3–4:177–98
(1990).
Chapter 4, “Technics and the Bias of Perception: The Tacit Logic of
Embodied Meanings,” is a greatly expanded and reconfigured version of
Innis Front Matter 9/26/02 11:24 PM Page ix
Preface ix
an essay of the same title, but without the subtitle, that originally
appeared in Philosophy and Social Criticism 11 (1): 67–89 (1984).
Chapter 5, “Pragmatist Aesthetics as Critique of Technology,” draws
upon, fuses, and expands two essays, “Dewey’s Aesthetic Theory and the
Critique of Technology,” which originally appeared in Phänomenologi-
sche Forschungen 15:7–42 (1983), and “Aesthetic Rationality as Social
Norm,” also from Phänomenologische Forschungen 20:69–90 (1987).
Chapter 6, “Form and Technics: Nature, Semiotics, and the ‘Informa-
tion Revolution,’” draws upon, fuses, and expands two essays, “Cassirer’s
Soft Edge,” which originally appeared in the Semiotic Review of Books 10
(1): 10–12 (January 1999), and “Form and Technics: Nature, Semiotics,
and the ‘Information Revolution,’” originally given as a lecture at the
meeting of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, Dresden,
October 1999.
I am grateful to John Stuhr and Vincent Colapietro for substantial and
edifying comments on an early version of this book. My wife, Marianne,
was flexible in making travel plans in order to accommodate unforeseeable
bursts of work on the final drafts of the manuscript. Finally, I want to
acknowledge the generosity of the University of Massachusetts Lowell for
granting me sabbatical leave just when the fat really went into the fire.
Lowell, Massachusetts
Innis Front Matter 9/26/02 11:24 PM Page x
Innis Introduction 9/24/02 9:46 PM Page 1
Introduction
Anyone who has ever used a ‘probe’ or ‘instrument’ of any sort—knitting

needle, hammer, dentist’s drill, paint brush, fountain pen, bifocals, micro-
scope, bicycle, violin, algebraic formula, musical notation system, written
script, and so forth—has experienced the strange shift of feeling that
occurs when we realize that we have ‘fused’ in some ways with the probe.
On the one hand, it has seemingly become part of our body or our per-
ceptual system, our field of consciousness, as a whole. It appears, like the
language we use or the bicycle we are riding, to have become ‘transpar-
ent.’ On the other hand, it clearly has opened a new ‘access structure’ to
the world. It has extended us toward the world in a new way, given us a
new power of being, knowing, and acting.
The probe, we discover on reflection, is ‘Janus-faced,’ or ‘bipolar,’ or
‘bidirectional.’ It intersects with ‘us’—the subjective pole, the users of the
2 Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense
probe, who feel it as an integral part of our existence—and it points away

from us toward the ‘world’—the objective pole that it puts us in contact
with. It gives a new ‘quality’ or ‘affective feel’ or ‘affective tone’ to our
experiencing that John Dewey made a focal point of his thought. This
new quality often is only uncovered by contrast, when the course of expe-
riencing is interrupted and has to be reconstructed. The same point is
made by Heidegger’s famous analysis of the broken hammer in a much
discussed section of Being and Time. By reason of its bipolarity, the probe
likewise also gives a new ‘quality’ or ‘affective feel’ or ‘affective tone’ to
the world.
Michael Polanyi, the philosopher-scientist and author of the master-
work Personal Knowledge, examined in many formats under the rubric of
‘tacit integrations’ and of ‘indwelling’ this felt shift and its epistemologi-
cal and practical implications. He reconstituted, with different means,
what had become a commonplace topic—the problem of embodiment—
in the tradition of phenomenological analysis stemming from Heidegger
and extended by Merleau-Ponty (and later by Don Ihde and a host of oth-
ers). In Polanyi’s formulation, taking off from some fertile clues from
Gestalt psychology’s thematization of the figure/ground and parts/whole
relationships, we subsidiarily ‘attend from’ probes, understood in the
most general sense as ‘vectors,’ while we, by an integrative act, focally
‘attend to’ whatever they allow us directly to ‘grasp,’ whether perceptu-
ally, affectively, motorically, theoretically, aesthetically, religiously. This
from-to structure, Polanyi claimed, is a universal feature of consciousness
and the essentially integrative process of meaning-making with which it is
identified, in all its forms: “[A]ll thought contains components of which
we are subsidiarily aware in the focal content of our thinking, and . . . all
thought dwells in its subsidiaries, as if they were parts of our body. Hence
thinking is not only necessarily intentional, as Brentano has taught: it is
also necessarily fraught with the roots that it embodies. It has a from-to
structure” (Polanyi 1966, x).
In a central chapter of his Experience and Nature John Dewey argued
that the systematic use of language and tools is the mark of human men-
tality ([1925] 1988a, 133). On Polanyian terms, they would be the ultimate
embodied roots with which human thinking is fraught. A tool, according
to Dewey, is intrinsically relational, anticipatory, predictive, subsidiary.
Indeed, in a comment reminiscent of Heidegger, Dewey claimed that
“without reference to the absent, or ‘transcendence,’ nothing is a tool.” As
for language, Dewey asserted in a remarkable formulation that, being “the
Introduction 3
tool of tools,” it is, in the deepest sense, “the cherishing mother of all sig-
nificance” (146). Both tools and language make, in multiple ways, the
absent present. We attend from them for attending to something. This
position on language and tools Dewey was able to sustain without the
slightest temptation to a universalistic logocentrism, which would reduce
all significance or meaning to the dimension of language, or to some exu-
berant glorification of the ‘technical’ or ‘instrumental.’ Indeed, for Dewey
(and also for Whitehead) the ground floor, so to speak, of all our mean-
ingful encounters with the world, prior to and embodied in our use of lan-
guage and tools quite generally, is a qualitative matrix, a field of ‘tones’
and ‘affects’ that ‘color’ every activity and every object. Dewey’s essen-
tially ‘pragmatic’ position is matched by Ernst Cassirer’s key ‘semiotic’
insight into the nature of ‘tools’ quite generally: they exemplify the uni-
versal spiritual power and need for ‘mediation’ for human dealing with
the world. Semiotic mediation, through signs and sign systems, with lan-
guage standing indispensably in the middle, and material mediation,
through tools, machines, processes, go together. Cassirer affirmed, in a
remarkable parallel to Dewey’s way of putting the matter, that “all spiri-
tual mastery of reality is bound to this double act of ‘grasping’ (Fassen):
the conceptual grasp (Begreifen) of reality in linguistic-theoretical thought
(Denken) and its material grasp (Erfassen) through the medium of effec-
tive action (Wirken); to, that is, the conceptual as well as the technical
process of giving-form to something (Formgebung)” (Cassirer 1930, 52;
my translation).
Taking their lead from these claims, the chapters of this book focus on
the ‘probal’ nature of language and technics as embodied in, and as
embodied forms of, perception. They study the nature, scope, and impli-
cations of this phenomenon from a variety of points of view. They use and
validate the heuristic fertility and conceptual power of a novel mix of ana-
lytical frameworks. These are taken, primarily but not exclusively, from
‘American’ and ‘European’ philosophical traditions that are rarely in con-
versation with one another. They exploit for our specific purposes, and
bring into relation, the work of thinkers who stand rather outside the list
of ‘usual suspects’ who come to mind when ‘European’ philosophy is
brought into dialogue with a putatively distinctively ‘American’ way of
philosophizing about issues of common concern. In this case the common
concern is the reciprocating roles of language, technics, and perception in
shaping and forming the various individual and social ‘matrices of mean-
ing’ in which human beings make sense of themselves and their worlds.
Language and technics are treated in this book as twin ‘forms of sense,’
that is, vast weblike systems of meaning-making in which we dwell, into
which we have extended ourselves, and upon which we must fatefully
rely. They are also ‘forms of sense’ in that they shape, form, and mold the
very channels in which our body-based perceptual systems grow and
develop. Language and technics are alike in not just shaping but also
growing out of their perceptual, actional, and social roots. Neither lan-
guage nor technics, consequently, is an autonomous system. They have
their ‘roots’ in the skill-equipped body of an incarnate human being, with
which they become inextricably intertwined. The various chapters of this
book attempt, by means of what Justus Buchler called a method of ‘rota-
tion,’ to throw new light quite generally on how the forms of meaning-
making consciousness define, as well as are defined by, a variety of
linguistic and technological embodiments.
Readers accustomed to pigeonholing positions and philosophical
schools and traditions will quickly notice some rather unfamiliar faces and
voices around the table. They may want to know why these interlopers,
if such they be, have been allowed to crash the intellectual party. C. S.
Peirce, John Dewey, G. H. Mead, and A. N. Whitehead, who figure in
varying degrees prominently in the following discussions, are easily
enough ‘placed,’ even if not uniformly appreciated in the ways I try to
show. But what about the rest of the cast of characters who take part in
this philosophical play? The dialogue, I think, can be edifying for all.
A reader perusing the chapters in Part One of this book, “Framing
Language,” might initially be puzzled to see, in Chapter 1, Michael
Polanyi, the proponent of tacit knowing and of the ‘primacy of percep-
tion,’ paired up with Peirce, whose central philosophical contention was
that ‘semiosis,’ the production and interpretation of signs, not perception,
qua tale, was the defining matrix of meaning, including linguistic mean-
ing. But, in fact, they share a deep commitment to the paradigmatic role of
perceptual consciousness in defining the structures of meaning. An exam-
ination of their work will show us that language is always fraught with the
perceptual roots that it embodies. Further, what can a pragmatist and
philosophically oriented semiotic analysis of language learn from a reflec-
tion on the work of three language theorists—Philipp Wegener, Karl Büh-
ler, and Alan Gardiner—whose writings have been, at best, marginalized
or relegated to footnotes, at least in Anglo-American philosophy? We
will see in Chapter 2 that they have extraordinary pertinence in buttress-
ing and enriching from the linguistic point of view any genuinely prag-
Introduction 5
matist attempt to understand our ‘life in language’ as ‘action in a situation’

or ‘action in a linguistic field’ and not just as a free play of signifiers—a
position they share with Mead’s deep and nuanced social interactionist
project and with Dewey’s own approach to language. Moreover, Gio-
vanni Vailati, an Italian thinker who died (in 1909) four years before
Peirce and one year before James, represents, we will see in Chapter 3, a
remarkable instance of how ‘the linguistic dimension’ or ‘linguistic turn’
is an integral part of the inner trajectory of ‘paleo-pragmatism,’ with
which Vailati was familiar, and not just a neo-pragmatist fad. Vailati,
whose work is an important illustration of the penetration of pragmatism
into a non-American cultural milieu, is proof positive that a properly for-
mulated pragmatism is just as ‘language analytic’ as the most die-hard
language analyst could wish. Peirce and Vailati, in fact, had the same sci-
entific and logical education before turning to philosophical and semiotic
inquiries. And Vailati’s activist rejection of ‘mere’ philosophy parallels
Dewey’s own contention that philosophy, as ‘criticism of criticisms,’ must
not restrict itself to the ‘problems of philosophers.’
The chapters in Part Two, “The Senses of Technics,” raise similar types
of questions about the scope and nature of technological embodiment as
a form of sense.
Can Polanyi’s supposed universal from-to structure of consciousness
be applied to, and throw sufficiently powerful light on, the problem of the
‘biasing’ of perception by our indwelling, or embodiment, in ‘technical’
extensions of ourselves? As a matter of fact, the ‘from-to’ structure that
grounds a general notion of meaning (and already explored with respect
to language in Part One) allows us to develop a distinctively configured,
but by no means monopolistic, perception-based schema for studying the
‘spaces’ in which technical ‘form-giving’ takes place. It shows that such
form-giving is first and foremost a productive process of tacit integrations
that gives rise to artifacts with emergent properties, including the artifacts
that we ourselves are.
Moreover, that there is a Deweyan ‘philosophy of technology,’ or at
least a Deweyan take on technology, has been powerfully and convinc-
ingly argued especially by Larry Hickman (1990, 2001). Hickman has
rooted his analysis for the most part in a serious reflection on the impli-
cations of Dewey’s notion that there is a universal ‘pattern of inquiry’ and
that progress in technology and progress in democracy are inextricably
tied together through common foundation on this inquirential structure.
In this way, inquiry, technology, and democracy cannot be separated.
While I am in full agreement with this position, what if nevertheless the

best (though not necessarily the only) application of Dewey’s thought to
the analysis of technology is really through his aesthetics? What if his
focusing on ‘art as experience’ gives us an opening to think normatively,
and not just descriptively, about ‘technology as experience’ from an aes-
thetic point of view? Doing so allows Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics,
which Richard Shusterman (2000) has been so perspicuously developing,
to be brought into dialogue with, and reinforced and enriched by, not
only Whiteheadian categories that bear on the ‘civilization of experience’
(Hall 1973) but also key concepts taken from the critical aesthetics of
Adrian Stokes and the anthropological aesthetics of André Leroi-
Gourhan. The focus here on ‘aesthetic rationality as social norm’ opens a
pragmatist theory of technical embodiment, which is clearly and most
extensively delineated in Dewey’s Art as Experience, to categorial enrich-
ment, differentiation, and novel exemplification.
Moreover, readers of Ernst Cassirer’s great trilogy on the ‘philosophy
of symbolic forms’ or his later reconstructive summary, An Essay on
Man (1944), might think of him as a philosopher of culture or of the
semiotics of culture, but would scarcely connect him with an analysis of
technology or technics. But, in fact, there are both implicit and explicit
dimensions of ‘technics’ in Cassirer’s great philosophical and semiotic
project that complement as well as extend the ways of thinking about
technology represented by Polanyi’s tacit model and Dewey’s pragmatist
aesthetics. These latter deepen and thicken Cassirer’s work just as he
deepens and thickens theirs. Cassirer’s great merit, as well as Peirce’s, is
to have seen that all ‘form-giving’ is either embodied semiosis or defined
by the frames in which semiosis takes place. Semiosis as the production of
meaning productively schematizes the types of spaces in which material
production itself occurs. Material production, Cassirer’s semiotics tells us,
is itself the production of meaning—or production within the matrices of
meaning-making.
The argument of this book, consequently, proceeds in the following
way.
Chapter 1 takes up the problem of what lessons for ‘framing language’
we can learn from the paradigmatic role perceptual consciousness and
perceptual meaning play in the thought of C. S. Peirce and Michael
Polanyi. This chapter studies some of the profound implications that
result from tracing the birth of meaning—including, but not restricted to,
Introduction 7
linguistic meaning—to its perceptual roots. This chapter shows that for
both Peirce and Polanyi ‘perception,’ in a sense to be determined, is not to
be seen as a first and relatively impoverished step in cognitive processes
that is surpassed by later steps. Perception for both Peirce and Polanyi
takes place in signs and by means of signs. But in one sense all signs and
sign systems are also embedded in perceptual fields. Although they make
clear, however, that not all ‘semiosic happenings’ or ‘meaning events’ are
‘perceivings’ in any restricted sense, both Peirce, with his notion, which
Dewey clearly recognized, that each sign type has its own qualitative dis-
tinctness and ‘feel,’ and Polanyi, with his notion of ‘indwelling,’ help us
see the ‘biasing’ or ‘torquing’ of perception by our embodiment not just
in different Peircean ‘speculative’ instruments but in all our exosomatic
organs or extensions. This is a theme that is foregrounded in Chapters 4,
5, and 6, which focus on ‘the senses of technics.’
Chapter 2 argues for the heuristic fertility and philosophical relevance
of the cognate language theories of Karl Bühler, Alan Gardiner, and
Philipp Wegener. Their approaches to language foreground the semantic
and social dimensions. Like Mead and Dewey especially, for them the
problem of the genesis and structure of meaning is intimately connected
with the problem of communication and communicative action. Language
as meaning-giving, they show, cannot be studied apart from the total per-
ceptual, behavioral, and social situations and fields in which it is found.
These fields and ‘situations’—a term familiar from Dewey—frame lan-
guage just as much as language frames them. Language is thought of as a
‘tool’ for use within and for disambiguating situations and as a system of
actions. It is not an autonomous play of signifiers over which we have no
control. There is no ‘runaway language’ any more than there is a ‘runaway
technology.’ Our indwelling in language is made possible by specific types
of abstractive acts, which language also, paradoxically, makes possible.
Their mutual affirmation of the ‘nonautonomy’ of language connects their
positions, with different analytical instruments, to the main themes of
Chapter 1, on language’s perceptual roots, and points ahead to themes of
the following chapter. At the same time, Bühler and Gardiner, both
acknowledging Wegener’s pathbreaking studies, throw new light on a
number of central issues for ‘framing language’: how to thematize the fun-
damental relations making up the speech act, the premises and implications
of a specific way of thinking about the constitution of the linguistic sign,
the complexities attendant upon and the point of distinguishing between
word-meanings and things-meant, how to model metaphor, and the pred-

icational matrix of the sentence. Their treatment of these topics reveals in
a rather startling manner the philosophical implications and bite of their
attempts to thematize key aspects of the language animal and the remark-
able tool it avails itself of to articulate itself and its world. (An appendix to
this chapter discusses the ‘proto-pragmatic’ and ‘proto-semiotic’ work of
Philipp Wegener, a common source for both Bühler and Gardiner and still
an important resource for us, as Susanne Langer also saw.)
Chapter 3 rehabilitates a practically forgotten voice—outside Italy—in
the great pragmatist movement of reflection on the matrices of meaning.
Giovanni Vailati is a faithful interpreter, presenter, and extender of the
principal Peircean theses. Vailati was deeply impressed by Peirce’s prag-
matic (pragmaticistic) analysis of meaning and by its connection with the
development of the experimental sciences on the one hand and of mathe-
matical or formal logic on the other. Vailati developed, as did all the prag-
matist thinkers, an aggressively antifoundationalist philosophical program
that had distinctive consequences for his approach to language. Central is
his recognition of the role of implicit definition or definition by abstrac-
tion in our ways of talking about the world. This applies especially to phi-
losophy itself. For pragmatism entails, according to Vailati, a kind of
radical conceptual surgery while admitting an open-ended development
of theories and explanatory concepts sufficiently flexible and creative to
deal with an ever-changing and evolving experience, both individual and
social. And he shows us how we can assimilate it to a semiotic analysis of
perception and its embodied forms, a central theme of this book. This
chapter selects and foregrounds the distinctive features of Vailati’s prag-
matist project and confronts it, at crucial points, with its principal inter-
sections with and links to Peirce’s and Dewey’s philosophical analyses: the
revolutionary importance of modern ‘experimental’ science for modeling
the mind-world relation, the combination of the descriptive and the con-
structive dimensions in the inventory of language forms, the role of gen-
erative metaphors in inquiry and self-reflection, and the concern with a
comparative analysis, both semantic and syntactic, of natural and artificial
sign systems, exemplified in the ‘grammar of algebra.’ At the same time,
Vailati’s language-critical approach to language led him to develop his
own version of a ‘rhetoric of suspicion’ that is rather different from the
vapid neo-pragmatist position and procedures. Vailati’s affirmation of the
fusion of our intellectual powers with, and their dependence upon, our
means of expression continues, strengthens, and deepens the theme of
Introduction 9
‘semiotic embodiment’ central to this book and shows the open-ended

nature of the pragmatist project in philosophy.
Chapter 4, one of three that make up Part Two, advances a new ‘rota-
tion’ of the theme of semiotic embodiment. It follows up and extends the
analytical power of Polanyi’s model of tacit knowing, which we will have
looked at in the context of language in Chapter 1, for discerning how our
‘indwelling’ in exosomatic organs of a ‘technical’ nature is also a form of
meaning-making, a form of sense. Exosomatic organs, just as language
forms, are extensions of our ‘bodies.’ They have their own tacit and mate-
rial ‘logics,’ their own trajectories. We become so fused with them that we
cannot avoid being subjected to their operational conditions. I show in
this chapter that the ‘bias of perception,’ the reason ‘why we attend to the
things to which we attend,’ is based on the universality of the indwelling
relationship and in the capacity of human beings to subordinate a set of
subsidiarily intended particulars to the ‘achieving,’ as Polanyi put it, of
comprehensive entities. This process, if we follow Polanyi’s lead, occurs
beyond the conscious and explicit control of the perceiver and is, in effect,
as all-pervasive as language. The Polanyian differentiation of varieties of
the from-to relation (functional, phenomenal, semantic, ontological),
along with his pivotal semiotic and aesthetic distinction between ‘indica-
tion’ and ‘symbolization,’ gives us a powerful ‘analytical engine.’ It also
raises the ‘normative’ question of ‘taking the measure’ of this embodied
meaning-making.
This is the subject of Chapter 5. This chapter studies the results, both
positive and negative, of placing primarily the grid of Dewey’s pragmatist
aesthetic theory over the phenomenon of technology—that is, the system
of ‘tools’ that ‘mediate’ quite generally between humankind and nature.
Dewey, too, has, as already indicated, a theory of embodiment in which the
human senses are individualized and specialized by our ‘pouring of our-
selves’ into media of all sorts. “A medium as distinct from raw material is
always a mode of language and thus of expression and communication,”
Dewey ([1934] 1987, 287) writes. Media are “means that are incorporated
in the outcome” of any act of expression—and, by extension, of techno-
logical production—so much so that “esthetic effects belong intrinsically
to their medium” (197). The parallel between technology, art, and lan-
guage is grounded in the fact that they are shaping processes. These shap-
ing processes and their shaped products have their own rhythms and their
own logics with their own ‘qualitative feels.’ This chapter, consequently,
complements and confirms the Polanyian exploration of the ‘biasing’ of
perception by technics but also illustrates the centrality of the concept of

‘quality’ in a semiotically informed pragmatism. Furthermore, it brings
other voices, as indicated, into the conversation and shows how the issue
of ‘aesthetic rationality as social norm’ is a theme common to Dewey and
a group of other thinkers.
Polanyi’s perception-based and Dewey’s aesthetics-based analyses and
critiques of technologically constituted forms of sense are completed or
complemented by Ernst Cassirer’s semiotic-based project, the subject of
Chapter 6. It takes its point of departure from his (still untranslated)
1930 essay, “Form und Technik” (Form and technics), in which he
extended and applied the mature semiotic framework developed in his
three-volume masterwork, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923,
1925, 1929). This essay uses Cassirer’s semiotic framework to thematize
the fundamental ways in which ‘technics’ builds worlds. Technics is for
Cassirer a distinctive ‘way of world-making’ and a multileveled ‘sym-
bolic form’ in its own right. It actively projects—indeed, inscribes—a
pattern of intelligibility upon the world. The result is ‘stamped forms’ of
every sort: from chipped stone to the ‘automatic’ processes of modern
computing systems. Chapter 6 explores and develops Cassirer’s analyti-
cal framework, which is remarkably consistent, and brings it into dia-
logue with some powerful and exemplary attempts to interpret and to
‘take the measure of’ technics, focusing especially on the domains of
‘nature’ and ‘information technologies.’ To that effect, the work of Paul
Levinson (1988, 1997, 1999), Albert Borgmann (1992, 1999), J. David
Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999), David Rothenberg (1993), and others
will be subjected to a critical reading in light of Cassirer’s comprehensive
and nuanced theory of signs.
The discussion of Cassirer completes the ‘arc’ from the examination of
the ‘perceptual,’ ‘affective,’ and ‘qualitative’ matrices of world-building
and meaning-making in previous chapters to the establishment of distinc-
tively ‘semiotic’ frames of the form-worlds, comprising perception, lan-
guage, and technics. The semiotic trajectory charted in Cassirer’s essay
and in his other writings is precisely a movement from the concrete to the
abstract, from the realm of ‘sensible signs’ to the putative ‘disembodi-
ment’ that occurs in the production of ‘mindful artifacts’ and ‘abstract’
technologies. But, as shown in different ways in the intervening chapters,
embodiment in general, and semiotic embodiment especially, is a perma-
nent feature of human being-in-the-world. Perception and affectively
Introduction 11
charged perceptual meanings spiral out into and permeate linguistic and
technical forms. They in their turn spiral ‘down’ into perception, shaping,
potentiating, and distorting it. The inquiring, form-giving, and meaning-
making organism is ‘put into play’ by its embodiment in systems of lan-
guage and systems of technics. It is the ‘interplay’ between perception,
language, and technics and the proper conceptual tools for understanding
their complex relations that has driven the at times polyphonic investiga-
tions presented in this book.
Thus, the book has a twin focus in another sense—besides the obvious
focus on language and technics. It is dedicated to a development of new
aspects of the pragmatist tradition and to a broadening and enrichment of
the discussion on the philosophical side of semiotics. In this sense the
chapters in Part One, “Framing Language,” on the language theories of
Karl Bühler, Alan Gardiner, Philipp Wegener, and Giovanni Vailati are
meant to show how rich the resources of rather differently configured
‘takes’ on language can be for the semiotic dimension in pragmatism,
which all too often absorbs everything into an admittedly very powerful
Peircean scheme, as I fully affirm in Chapter 1. The semiotic approach to
language that emerges is admittedly a rather sober sort, lacking the rhetor-
ical gyrations and pyrotechnics of much of the structuralist and post-
structuralist traditions and the hermetic and inbred character of parts of
the Anglo-American tradition. The great stream of commentaries on
Wittgenstein has flowed to a great extent without any recognition that
perhaps many of his primary insights, while certainly important and even
essential, are by no means unique (see Bartley 1985 for the Bühler con-
nection). All the thinkers whose work is mined in various ways in the first
part of this book—Dewey, Peirce, Polanyi, Mead, Bühler, Gardiner,
Wegener, Vailati—are linked together by, and throw a powerful light on,
a common theme: the interplay of formal and informal, explicit and tacit,
semiotic and nonsemiotic factors in language’s diverse meaning-making
powers and dimensions. They help us ‘frame’ language (and language
theory) in an epistemologically and semiotically sophisticated way and
show just how it functions as a ‘form of sense.’ Furthermore, the range of
thinkers whose work is mined in Part Two of the book, “The Senses of
Technics”—principally Polanyi, Dewey, and Cassirer but also a rather
large group of pertinent but relatively neglected thinkers such as Adrian
Stokes and André Leroi-Gourhan—give us the tools for getting a
descriptive and normative handle on many new aspects of, and modes of
describing, the ‘transformations’ of the sensorium attendant upon our

embodiment in exosomatic organs or artifacts of a more ‘material’ nature.
Relying progressively on the work of Polanyi, Dewey, and Cassirer to
uncover the perceptual, aesthetic, and semiotic contours of ‘technics’
allows us to integrate, incorporate, and situate a range of materials that
enrich what has become a wide and multivoiced discussion of the power
and role of technics in shaping the human life-world in all its dimensions.
In short, the conceptual resources brought into relation in this book
represent permanently valuable—even paradigmatic—contributions to
our topics. Running parallel to the method of rotation is, therefore, a
method of ‘retrieval and continuation.’ I have wanted in each of the chap-
ters to show the continuing relevance of certain approaches to topics (not
just or even purely philosophical) that vex us now. I want to show the
descriptive and critical power of certain types of conceptual frameworks
and systems of distinctions. My aim is to speak with the various positions
about the interlocked set of themes that run like threads through the fabric
of the book. The method, consequently, is a kind of critical reconstruction
and application, involving what Hans-Georg Gadamer in his hermeneu-
tics called a ‘fusion of horizons.’ A particular way of doing philosophy
also emerges from and has informed the various chapters: historical
retrieval with systematic and theoretical intent. The organizing aim that
links all the studies together is to indicate just where present theoretical
options and concerns could be enriched by attending more closely to the
resources and approaches discussed and exploited here. As a result, the
book constantly ‘spikes out’ to a wide range of supporting or parallel posi-
tions, not all of them traditionally ‘philosophical.’
Taken together, the chapters indicate the broad scope and cultural
implications of the types of philosophical investigations that take with
equal seriousness both the ‘primacy’ of perception and action, which is
central to pragmatism in its many forms, and the claim of what, within the
framework of Peirce’s theory of signs, has been called ‘unlimited semio-
sis,’ that is, that there is no ‘greatest upper bound’ to meaning-making.
Meaning-making, it will be seen, is situated in an open set of intersecting
and labile fields: affective, perceptual, linguistic, technical, aesthetic. And
these fields cannot be understood purely formally. They are sociohistori-
cally structured, just as reflection on them is sociohistorically structured.
Human beings, it has been said, are ‘language animals.’ Homer, in a
famous formulation, called us “those animals that divide their voice.”
Aristotle, admittedly in a different rhetorical mode, defined us as living
Introduction 13
beings having the power of logos, the power of the ‘rational’ word and all
that this entailed in terms of the power to set things in relation or in order.
This process of dividing the voice brings with it two other divisions. As
Bruno Snell showed in his classic, The Discovery of the Mind (1953), and
R. B. Onians in his equally classic Origins of European Thought (1951),
the mind itself—and, indeed, not just the self-concept but the self itself—
arises from and is carried along by a process of division or differentiation.
The power of articulation is the power of self-articulation, a coming to
consciousness of oneself as a speaking being. Articulation is, on the one
side, a process of formulation of categories and concepts. It proceeds as a
self-ramifying process of significations growing out of previous significa-
tions. It appears to have no greatest upper bound. It creates the very pos-
sibility of systematic self-reflection, giving it not just concepts but an
‘object’ to apply itself to—that is, our very selves. The power of articula-
tion is, on the other side, also the power of building an objective world of
things and their relations. The ‘dividing’ of the world takes place in great
part in terms of our language-defined or language-informed systems of
intersubjective, that is, social, articulation. We become so intertwined
with these systems that they take on the appearance of being ‘the world
itself,’ which has come under ‘the power of the word.’ These three ‘divi-
sions’ are inextricably connected: the division of our articulatory powers
and the systems of signs that carry them, the operative and thematic divi-
sion of the mind or self that is ‘supported’ by these powers and systems,
and the division of the ‘objective’ world in terms of the ‘meanings’ that
the systems of signs enable us to ‘access’ or create.
Human beings are also tool-using animals. Their use of tools is not ran-
dom or ad hoc. Indeed, it could be said that paralleling our dividing of the
‘voice’ in our roles as language animals, there is a corresponding ‘dividing’
of our bodies and our minds in the development of skills and the forma-
tion of habits of action. Humans not only treat the body, epitomized in
the human hand, as a paradigmatic tool. They construct an ‘exosomatic’
body, a body ‘outside’ the body, to do, as it turns out, not just the body’s
work but also the mind’s. These ‘extensions’ of the body divide the body,
using its own self-ramifying process of differentiation, the ‘logic’ of any
particular form of tool-use spawning further articulations, and even rev-
olutionary transformations, of its ‘space.’ Arnold Gehlen specified the
moments of this great process of ‘organ-projection’ as ‘substitution,’
‘extension,’ and ‘compensation.’ Tools, under which I include also
‘machines’ and the harnessing of natural ‘processes’ (combustion, for
example, or fermentation), are rooted in the matrix of the lived body and
also constitute an external matrix for the body to find its ‘place.’ This
‘intertwining’ of body and system of exosomatic ‘instruments’ introduces
a variety of systems of biases into the human life-world. This occurs on
both sides of the ‘tool’: on the side of the tool user, who is embodied in the
tool, and on the side of the world, which is ‘worked up’ by the tool. In
short, the tool ‘torques’ us as it ‘torques’ the world. It ‘inscribes’ itself
upon the body of the user as it inscribes itself upon the body of the world.
Although the book’s argument is primarily conceptual and is most con-
cerned to develop new sets of categories, it proceeds at all times with a
close eye to illuminating examples and possibilities of interpretive appli-
cation. In this sense the book has a double-bladed approach to its topics
and themes. The ‘upper blade’ is a blade of concepts, categories, distinc-
tions, and relations that makes significant cuts into the subject matter
with which it deals. The ‘lower blade’ consists of exemplifying instances,
Wittgensteinian perspicuous representations, that indicate the scope and
range of application of my conceptual tools—indeed, the types of issues
and problems that the conceptual resources adduced in this book can illu-
minate or put into a new pattern. I am not concerned, however, to estab-
lish new facts, to find out some detail that might be unknown. Rather, I
am concerned to delineate the meanings of the facts, the proper way of
‘taking’ them, which makes them appear in a new way. As a result, I have
had recourse to a wide and at times rather unorthodox range of examples
that both have engaged me and have paradigmatically manifested the
point of the distinctions put forth in the book. Readers can easily supply
their own examples, since what I am primarily interested in are frame-
works of interpretation.
I am well aware that there is a large literature on all the themes mooted
in this book and also on most of the figures who have functioned as con-
ceptual resources. I will indicate in the course of the discussions points of
intersection and differences in conceptual schemes and weightings. But
my goal is constructive, not polemical. I am not so much concerned to
show who is wrong as to show what types of philosophical approaches
are right. To be sure, every position entails a counterposition. But, as will
become clear in the sequel, I am more arguing for than arguing against.
What I am arguing for is, then, the analytical, descriptive, and normative
power of a set of overlapping and mutually reinforcing ways of thinking
about our embodiment in language and technics as forms of sense. I am
exploring, and attempting to justify, what I consider to be pivotal forms of
sense about the forms of sense.
Introduction 15
So, our guiding question is: What can we learn about the forms of
sense, about meaning and the roots with which it is fraught, by thinking
about language and technics with the combined pragmatist and semiotic
conceptual resources presented in this book?
Innis Part 1 9/24/02 9:47 PM Page 17
PA R T O N E
Framing Language
Innis Chapter 1 9/24/02 9:49 PM Page 19
On the Perceptual Roots of

Linguistic Meaning
1. Between Perception and Semiosis

Peircean sign theory contends that semiosis, or sign-action and sign-inter-
pretation, encompasses all of mental life, even at the lower threshold of
perception, where the embodied subject first encounters the world.1
1. A more extensive treatment of this theme, relying on the conceptual resources not just of
Peirce, but of Dewey, Polanyi, Bühler, Cassirer, and others, will be found in Innis 1994b and
1988b, where Peirce is brought into dialogue, albeit in German, with James, Husserl, and Büh-
ler. See also Parker 1998 and Hausman 1993 for nuanced and grounded accounts of perception,
within the context of Peirce’s philosophical framework and the reference materials cited there.
Corrington 1993 has, throughout, stimulating discussions of the issue of perception and its rela-
tion to semiosis.
Peirce’s central idea, formulated at the very beginning of his intellectual

journey and remaining active in his thought at its very end, is that “the
content of consciousness, the entire phenomenal manifestation of mind, is
a sign resulting from inference” (Peirce [1868] 1992c, 53). A fortiori, then,
perceptual processes, culminating in the ‘uttering’ of a perceptual judg-
ment, already are sign processes, giving rise to and conditioning those
further ‘meanings’ or diversified and multileveled streams of ‘interpretant
signs’ that make up the course of life. Ernst Cassirer, writing sixty years
later in the masterful third volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,
remarked, independently of Peirce though for cognate reasons, that “the
‘sign’ is never a merely accidental and outward garment of the thought,
but . . . the use of the sign represents a basic tendency and form of thought
itself” (1957, 57), including the primary stratum of perception. Cassirer
charts in great detail and with systematic vigor the ‘semiotic grammars’ of
expression, representation, and pure signification as permanent dimen-
sions of semiosic consciousness. Each dimension is defined by a progres-
sive ‘dematerialization’ of signs and sign systems and a distancing from
the perceptual and intuitive world, culminating in the world of pure rela-
tions characteristic of mathematics and mathematical physics. Neverthe-
less, for Cassirer, as for Peirce, all access to the world is through signs and
‘meaning,’ and there is no ‘reality’ accessible outside the play of signs,
even on the perceptual level. Indeed, what Elmar Holenstein wrote about
the significance of structuralism, which has theoretical roots in a branch
of general linguistics, applies quite generally to a semiotically oriented
epistemology and theory of perception within which any language theory
must be situated: they “draw our attention to the root-like attachment of
the world’s subjective constitution to sign systems” (Holenstein 1976, 5).
Although we might, on reading such texts, also think of Jacques Derrida’s
poststructuralist project or of Josef Simon’s parallel ‘philosophy of the
sign’ (Simon 1995), with their critiques of all pretenses to get ‘outside’ of
signs, Peirce’s sign theory, as developed over a lifetime, is wedded to a
realist epistemology, although it is a realism of a very special sort, with
key elements derived from medieval scholasticism.2
2. Kelly Parker (1998, 219–22) engages this issue under the rubric of “extra-semiotic” enti-
ties. Arguing against David Savan’s characterization of Peirce as a “mild” semiotic idealist, Parker
claims that Peirce in fact held a form of “extreme semiotic realism” (220). He writes:
Peirce’s theory of perceptual judgment requires the hypothesis of an independent exter-

nal world. Perception, for Peirce, is a representation of some object by one’s present self
On the Perceptual Roots of Linguistic Meaning 21
In spite of a quite different starting point and conceptual apparatus,

Michael Polanyi has given under the rubric of ‘tacit knowing’ a comple-
mentary ‘realist’ and ‘inferential’ account of perception and of the struc-
ture and genesis of perceptual meaning that intersects at key points with
Peircean sign theory. Polanyi’s account adds new features to the Peircean
model and unfolds some of its implications in novel and more explicit
ways. Polanyi has definitively shown, in my opinion, that perception, as a
tacit, acritical process, both models and exemplifies fundamental aspects of
the field of consciousness as such within which language and all sign sys-
tems function.3 It is one of the deepest common insights, albeit differently
formulated, of the Peircean and Polanyian positions that ‘perception’ is
to one’s future self, which interprets the object as a perceived event: ‘In a perceptual
judgment the mind professes to tell the mind’s future self what the character of the pre-
sent percept is’ (CP 7.630). Now what gets represented in a perceptual judgment often
comes without any warning, and enters the stream of cognition contrary to all expecta-
tion. I flip a light switch and experience a loud pop and darkness rather than the expected
bright light. I have no control over the process by which I represent these phenomena to
myself, but the process is indeed describable in semiotic terms. (220)
The problem is clearly presented and raises the question of just how we are to think of ‘what
exists independently’ of semiosis. Parker thinks that on Peircean principles we have to “embrace
the metaphysical hypothesis that there is indeed a system of individual enduring things, con-
nected through dyadic reactions, which exist independently of semiosis. These extra-semiotic
individuals are the dynamical object of my perceptual judgment, and make their presence known
in unexpected intrusions into the semiotic flow of cognition” (220). Parker does not think that
when Savan argues that “Peirce’s alleged ‘mild semiotic idealism’ makes the characters (though
not the existence) of the extra-semiotic world depend on the sign-system” (221), we have enough
of a qualification to ensure the “truth” of the perceptual judgment, which, he argues, is depen-
dent on the fact that “some parts of this world may not be incorporated into any sign until the
end of semiosis. Their characters would not be known until that mythical moment, but they must
be something independent of their representation: existence has the special characteristic ‘of
being absolutely determinate’ (CP 6.439). Until the end of semiosis and the realization of a per-
fect symbol, our knowledge of these characters very well might be radically mistaken” (221). The
pons asinorum of a semiotic epistemology that escapes what Dewey called “intellectual lockjaw”
is found in this complex of issues. The following discussion proceeds in full awareness of the
alternatives and their implications, though I am not happy with the putative need to pin on
Peirce a label that is too closely wedded to traditional attempts to construct a theory of knowl-
edge. A properly focused philosophical semiotics perhaps will explode the whole list of alterna-
tives. I have tried to show more extensively how to mediate between these at times razor-sharp
or subtle alternatives in Innis 1994b. Hausman (1993, 140–93) helpfully speaks of Peirce’s “evo-
lutionary realism” and clearly foregrounds the relations between Peirce’s pragmaticism and his
semiotic (57–93). Evolutionary realism is brought into dialogue with analytic philosophy’s ver-
sion of the linguistic turn in the final chapter of Hausman’s book. I will be concerned more the-
matically with paleo-pragmatism’s linguistic turn in Chapter 3.
3. I have explored this notion at length in chapter 4 of Innis 1994b, where the aesthetic
dimension is also brought into the discussion.
both an instance and an exemplar of semiosis or meaning-making. In one

sense, for both of them perception—or the perceptual stratum—is the
matrix and condition of all ‘later’ or ‘higher’ semiosic events such as lan-
guage and art, which drive the expanding spiral of semioses and the con-
struction of those webs of signs by means of which we ‘articulate’ both
ourselves and our worlds and are enabled to double back on ourselves and
control and evaluate our conduct. Peirce and Polanyi offer us powerful
analytical tools for ‘placing’ the emergence of meaning and for under-
standing, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “the contingent arrangement by
which materials begin to have meaning in our presence, intelligibility in
the nascent state” (1983, 206–7).
Polanyi’s account of perception is embedded in his comprehensive
attempt to develop an account of the ‘tacit logic of consciousness,’ based
on a logic of tacit inference. This thoroughgoing inferential focus he
shares with Peirce. While admitting a certain ‘primacy of perception,’
Polanyi also seemingly paradoxically affirms the centrality or pivotal
nature of language and other meaning-carrying systems as vehicles of the
distinctively human ‘world-building’ process of ‘articulation.’ “All
human thought comes into existence by grasping the meaning and mas-
tering the use of language. Little of our mind lives in our natural body; a
truly human intellect dwells in us only when our lips shape words and our
eyes read print” (Polanyi [1962] 1969e, 160). Nevertheless, “the logic of
language itself—the way language is used—remains tacit. Indeed, it is easy
to see that the structure of tacit knowing contains a general theory of
meaning which applies also to language” (Polanyi [1964] 1969c, 145). It is
precisely in the essentially tension-filled cooperation between the ‘tacit’
and the ‘explicit’ that mental growth and the cognitive mapping of the
world is effected. While, to be sure, language and other formal systems
involve a kind of ‘break’ with perception, they nevertheless do not con-
stitute an autonomous ‘layer’ of meaning or sense applied like a veneer to
a perceptual field that otherwise remains the same. In fact, for Polanyi, the
structures discerned in perception are both extended into the systems of
expressions and define the basic parameters of our dwelling in and use of
them. Polanyi is thus able to affirm a kind of continuity from ‘perception,’
broadly understood, to the highest reaches of formalization. His last
work, appropriately entitled Meaning (1975), tried to show this in detail,
though many of its main theses were already foreshadowed in his indis-
pensable classic, Personal Knowledge (1958), and many essays. Not only
does speech have “the fundamental structure of all meaningful uses of
consciousness in animals and men” (Polanyi [1967] 1969d, 181), but this
structure is perspicuously and exemplarily present in perception. Rather
than ‘read’ perception in terms of language, Polanyi ‘reads’ language in
terms of perception, which is itself ‘read’ in terms of meaning. We thus have
a kind of Polanyian analogue to the Peircean notion of semiotic closure.
In the space of a single chapter I cannot undertake a comprehensive and
detailed comparison of the work of Peirce and Polanyi. I will focus, as
already indicated, primarily on the paradigmatic role perceptual con-
sciousness and perceptual meaning plays in their thought and will try to
indicate, schematically and allusively, some of the profound implications
that result from tracing the birth of meaning—including linguistic mean-
ing—to its perceptual roots. What can we learn from Peirce and Polanyi
about perceptual meaning and its structures? Rather than see ‘perception’
as a first and relatively impoverished step in cognitional processes that is
‘surpassed’ by ‘later’ steps, we will see that a reflection on the structures
and processes of perception and the generation of perceptual meaning
reveals permanent and eminently accessible truths about the most funda-
mental features of the production and appropriation of meaning quite
generally and upon the work specific to language and other expression
systems.
2. Peirce on the Perceptual Matrix

Christopher Hookway has rightly noted that “the theory of perception
. . . occupies a fundamental role in Peirce’s epistemology” (1985, 151) and
that such a theory must be “phenomenologically plausible” (155). What,
then, are the essential descriptive features of Peirce’s theory, and what
types of categories, observations, and distinctions does he adduce?
The pivot of Peirce’s account of perception, and, as we shall see, a
major point of connection between his work and Polanyi’s, is formulated
in the following text, where perception is assimilated to abductive or
ampliative inference, that is, the introduction of novelty in a chain of rea-
soning, which normally is aided, indeed supported, by a formalism.
Abductive inference shades into perceptual judgment without any

sharp line of demarcation between them; or, in other words, our
first premisses, the perceptual judgments, are to be regarded as an
extreme case of abductive inferences, from which they differ in
being absolutely beyond criticism. The abductive suggestion

comes to us in a flash. It is an act of insight, although of an
extremely fallible insight. It is true that the different elements of
the hypothesis were in our minds before; but it is the idea of
putting together what we had never before dreamed of putting
together which flashes the new suggestion before our contempla-
tion. (Peirce 1958 [hereafter CP, cited by volume and paragraph
number], 5.181)
What induces for Peirce the abductive inference or perceptual judg-

ment? We find ourselves inserted into a world through our bodies and
accessing the world through a dynamically oriented sensory system that
is impinged upon in multiple ways, ‘interrupted’ and imbalanced by
altersense and set into ‘intentional motion’ by reason of our being put into
a ‘situation of perplexity,’ to speak in Deweyan language. But what we
are, on Peircean principles, first and foremost conscious of is not a somat-
ically mediated and atomistically presented sensory array as such but the
patterns, orders, and structures in it.4 In this sense Peirce develops a
‘holistic’ approach to perception that restores to us, with great sophisti-
cation, the commonsense world of perception and avoids the psycholo-
gist’s fallacy to which talk of ‘sense-data’ and ‘primitive givens’ is subject.
As Martin Heidegger, a thinker seemingly far from Peirce (but who, nev-
ertheless, was reading Peirce in German shortly before his death), has
laconically noted:
We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g., tones and

noises, in the appearances of things. . . . Rather we hear the storm
4. Kelly Parker (1998, 125), speaking of Peirce’ account of consciousness as a sequence of

infinitesimal cognitions, writes:
With this account of consciousness, Peirce eliminated several of the major flaws that
attend prevalent accounts of the continuity of the self. First, the notion that ideas and
perceptions are individual atomic data is destroyed by Peirce’s insistence that the act of
cognition or perception is an infinitesimal part of a continuous thought process. Sec-
ond, an implicit ambiguity in the term ‘consciousness’ has been cleared up: ‘conscious-
ness’ is commonly taken to refer both to immediate awareness in the present, and to the
faculty that unifies the whole history of a life. The infinitesimal account shows that in
fact these are two sides of the same coin. It shows how the whole history of a life may
be mediately present in the latest infinitesimal cognition.
Vincent Colapietro (1989) has given a fine and sensitive treatment of how to think about the self
in Peircean terms, with many references to unpublished manuscripts.
whistling in the chimney, we hear the three-motored plane, we hear

the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen. Much
closer to us than all sensations are the things themselves. We hear
the door shut in the house and never hear acoustical sensations or
even mere sounds. In order to hear a bare sound we have to listen
away from things, divert our ear from them, i.e., listen abstractly.
(1975, 26)
In her helpful and provocative Charles Peirce’s Pragmatic Pluralism San-

dra Rosenthal remarks that “what we ordinarily perceive, what instigates
action in the ongoing course of experience, are not appearances but
appearing objects” (1994, 55). These objects, patterns, and orders are the
‘percepts,’ indeed what Peirce called the “parish of percepts,” which are
the starting points of inquiry as it unfolds in its articulate phases: linguis-
tically, mathematically, scientifically, aesthetically.
Peirce accepted from James the notion that the inquiring, perplexed,
and self-moving organism needs to disaggregate the global manifold,
marked by continuity, that it finds itself not so much over against as
within. At the same time, in being appropriated to or caught up in its sur-
rounding language and other expression systems, it finds itself living in an
already linguistically prestructured world where ‘cuts’ have already been
made in the ‘sea of indeterminacy’ within which we live. On the Peircean
position, as human beings we begin and develop our cognitive engage-
ment with the world normally from within, and by learning to avail our-
selves of, a system of already accomplished cuts and their relational
contexts. Within the ‘cut world’ we find it necessary both to ‘realize’ for
ourselves, or grasp the ‘fittingness’ of, the traditional cuts and to make
further modified cuts, and this process, whether exemplified in the recog-
nition of types and qualitative unities or in the application of a term,
resembles, indeed models, the more explicit and differentiated process of
hypothesis formation or abductive inference. Perceptual judgments are
first cuts that are stabilized, crystallized, potentiated, and induced, by lan-
guage and other expression systems.
Peirce’s account of perception oscillates, with rather different effect,
between the image of synthesis, of the production of a novel unity and
focus within experience, and the image of segmentation. The reliance on
the category of synthesis stems from his Kantian background, while the
emphasis on segmentation arises from multiple sources, especially James
but also from Peirce’s deep-seated synechism or commitment to the
metaphysical ultimacy of continuity. Perception for Peirce is the work of
synthesis because the perceptual field is characterized by the appearing of

unities or ordered wholes that are themselves complexes, with internal
structures. Unity-in-diversity or wholes composed of ‘parts’ must be
‘held together’ or must have been ‘brought together’ by some ‘act’ or
‘process.’ Now, ‘percepts’ on the Peircean position are the interpretant-
signs in and by means of which physical objects are known. The recog-
nition of the objectivity of the percept, its veridical character and its
power to reveal its object, is manifested in both the continuity and law-
ful sequence of the modes in which the object, as conceived, manifests
itself in our future experience, but also in our intrinsically hazardous
‘practical’ commitment of ourselves to comport ourselves toward it in
confident and lawlike ways. For Peirce, the ‘logical status’ of a perceptual
judgment is defined by these two experiential or pragmatic marks.
Let us take a simple illustration.
While writing at my desk I ‘see’ my pencil with the green eraser or at
least that part of it that is not covered by a book. It is a distinct unit in the
global perceptual field, separated off—that is, segmented—from the field
where it has its own ‘place.’ In Jamesian terms it is a thematic unity within
a field that itself fades off into an indefinite margin. I am not, however,
explicitly conscious of synthesizing the features of the perceived pencil into
a unity: its linearity, its hexagonal shape, the metal band holding the green
eraser, its tapering writing point. But the ability to hold this ‘de-fined’ unit
together is, on Peircean terms, a synthesis that proceeds by distinguishing
the object from all other objects in the field such that I can ‘re-cognize’ it.
I determine my percept as veridical, however, by being able to reach out
and take up the pencil and to write with it, adding to the visual features
now tactile and motor elements, since I can determine by feel that the
pencil is made of wood, covered with glossy paint, and that the imple-
mentation of its balance by its being long enough to fit in one’s hand is
matched by the ‘expected’ weight of the pencil when it is taken up and
inserted into the writing task at hand. Thus, Peirce writes that “to predi-
cate a concept of a real or imaginary object is equivalent to declaring that
a certain operation, corresponding to the concept, if performed upon that
object would . . . be followed by a definite general description” (CP 6.132;
see Rosenthal 1994, 29). Perception, effected in the perceptual judgment,
contains implicitly or commits us to a description.
‘Being a pencil’ is rooted in the felt unity of the percept, and ‘it is a pen-
cil’ is our linguistic expression of the perceptual judgment. The percept, as
the making known or the appearing of the perceptual object, is the inter-
pretant sign of the object, and hence an instance of thirdness, and is

defined by its distinctive ‘quality’ or firstness, which marks it as a kind of
thing or type and that opposes us, as a secondness, in any attempts to
‘think it away’ or to misuse it. The case of perceiving a ‘pencil,’ to be sure,
involves reliance on pregiven perceptual categories that are carried over
into the percept, a kind of poneception, and an anticipation that the per-
cept will continue to reveal the perceptual object in the future, a kind of
anteception. There is a dialectic of remembered percept and anticipated
percept within the formation of the present percept. As Peirce puts it, per-
cipuum, antecipuum, and ponecipuum are “the direct and uncontrollable
interpretations of percept, antecept, and ponecept” (CP 7.648). Of course,
the habitual and acritical nature of perceptual processes cloaks the gene-
sis of original sense when a novel unity is constituted in, or coalesces in,
the perceptual field. In such cases we experience a shift over which we
have no control, a sense of things coming together that we then ‘recog-
nize’ as having happened. Perception, for Peirce, in this sense is ‘opera-
tive,’ but not ‘thematic,’ resembling in many ways Husserl’s account of
‘passive genesis,’ the formation of unities in the life-world without the
cognitive elaborations and explicit positings of a thematically objectifying
ego. Perception is for Peirce something that is first and foremost ‘under-
gone.’ But, paradoxically, what is undergone is the continuous process of
encountering already synthesized complexes or internally differentiated
unities in the continuous flow of experiencings. We find ourselves caught
up in a series of ‘events’ or ‘outcomes’ that involve no explicit conscious
control but that nevertheless bear witness to a functioning spontaneity.
For Peirce the percept is the interpretant of a preceding set of percep-
tual ‘signs’ that may or may not be consciously accessible, a point that
Polanyi also makes, though not in such terms. The percept is, in this sense,
the meaning of the preceding signs as well as the conclusion of a set of pos-
sibly and often inaccessible premises. Rosenthal writes that the “percep-
tual meaning is an organization of characters by which one intends the
meaning of an object as that to which essential properties must apply and
to which nonessential properties may or may not apply, and these two
types of applicability are built into the very sense of, or the meaning of,
the concepts by which we delineate a world of perceptual objects. This
meaning must be prior to the very possibility of denotable instances”
(Rosenthal 1994, 36). It is an ‘open’ meaning, indeed, the formulation of a
‘type’ that allows us to recognize ‘tokens.’ Now we find out what the
premises leading to the abductively arrived-at perceptual meaning are or
must have been by attending to what we de facto perceive. Peirce claims

that the eruption of meaning in the perceptual field is a “subconscious
process” not subject to logical analysis (CP 5.185). Indeed, “this process of
forming the perceptual judgment, because it is subconscious and so not
amenable to logical criticism, does not have to make separate acts of infer-
ence, but performs its act in one continuous process” (CP 5.185). The per-
cept wherein the perceived object becomes known, moreover, arises from
the “time-binding” operation that is the very course of life itself. Although
there is a certain amount of “arbitrary spontaneity” ([1892] 1992b, 329) in
mental action, we nevertheless experience a fundamentally stable world,
for the division of the experiential manifold into qualitative unities also
establishes law-governed reactive relations between the perceiver and the
perceptual objects themselves. Thus arise “self-analyzing” (Rosenthal
1994, 47) habits of all sorts, the ultimate logical interpretants, as the ratio-
nal purport of the interpreting sign, which is the configured unity of the
percept-perceptual judgment structure, making up the percipuum.
When Peirce speaks of the acritical nature of the inferential process of
perception, he does not mean that the result of the process cannot be crit-
icized. This would make nonsense of his critical commonsensism or prag-
matic realism that Peter Skagestad (1981) discusses with such insight and
acumen. It may be that the perceptual judgment is “a judgment absolutely
forced upon my acceptance, and that by a process which I am utterly
unable to control and consequently am unable to criticize” (CP 5.157).
But, once made, the judgment can, and must, be reflected on or criticized,
which it, at any rate, always is by reason of the presence of secondness or
the ‘outward clash’ in all cases of veridical perception. Hookway and
Parker make this notion the guiding idea in their discussions of Peirce’s
theory of perception and its epistemological implications. This reflection
is demanded by the very norms of coherent or consistent action or con-
duct. The inferential process involves typification and a kind of abduc-
tively effected ‘migration of properties’ from object to object in a
continuous process that we are forced, Peirce thinks, to call interpreta-
tion, involving as it does the judgment of the ‘fit’ between a concept and
an individual instance. Polanyi will argue that this process involves at
every step the personal and tacit appraisal of the knower. Peirce writes
that the very abductive nature of the perceptual judgment confers on it
“characters that are proper to interpretations,” and “the fact is that it is not
necessary to go beyond ordinary observations of common life to find a
variety of different ways in which perception is interpretative” (CP
5.184). Here is point of deep affinity between Peirce and Nietzsche.
In the context of discussing James’s analysis of perception as uncon-

scious but ampliative inference in his Principles of Psychology Peirce
schematizes the form of perceptual abduction as follows:
A well-recognized kind of object, M, has for its ordinary predicates

P1, P2, P3, etc., indistinctly recognized.
The suggesting object, S, has the same predicates, P1, P2, P3, etc.
Hence, S is of the same kind M.
The first premise, Peirce contends, is in our minds habitually, but this, he
thinks, would not of itself make the inference unconscious. What makes
it unconscious is that “it is not recognized as an inference; the conclusion
is accepted without our knowing how” (CP 8.64–65). Polanyi draws
attention to this characteristic when he notes that “the conditions in
which discovery usually occurs and the general way of its happening cer-
tainly show it to be a process of emergence rather than a feat of operative
action” (1964, 33). And Rosenthal notes that the “shading of scientific
abductions into everyday perceptual claims is a continuity not of content
organized but of method of organization” (1994, 148 n. 56).
Rosenthal has importantly drawn attention to the fact that “this prim-
itive synthesis” (1994, 60) effected in the perceptual judgment is a defin-
ing element in all cognition. “All cognition for Peirce involves the
perceptual in the sense that it logically involves an iconic presentation of
the cognized object” (46), for, as Peirce has noted, “icons have to be used
in all thinking” (Peirce 1976, 4.21). If, as Rosenthal contends, icons, func-
tioning as schemata in cognitional processes, involve “elements of first-
ness, secondness, and thirdness, or image, activity, and rule” (1994, 136 n.
29) we can see why a reflection upon “the logic of perceptual awareness”
(51) can reveal the contours of consciousness as such and allow us to
affirm an essential continuity between ‘perceptual consciousness’ and the
so-called higher forms. Perceptual consciousness avails itself of schemata
because no percept is absolutely precise or identical with the perceptual
object qua tale. A schema allows us to grasp or represent the organizing
structures of the object without affirming a coincidence between the
appearing and the appeared, and it allows us to recognize and even con-
struct future instances of a concept. Peirce notes that the mathematician
uses the schematizing power of “diagrammatical reasoning” to introduce
novelty into the deductive process. This is accomplished “through the
formation in the imagination of some sort of diagrammatic, that is, iconic
representation . . . as skeletonized as possible” (CP 2.778), though it also
involves visual and muscular imagery, a point also made by Einstein and
many others.5 The key point, however, is that schematic structures ulti-
mately have to be understood, as Rosenthal puts it, not as a “generaliza-
tion of imagined instances but as a product of a predictive rule” (1994, 24).
Theorematic reasoning, which characterizes mathematics, depends upon
experimentation with individual schemata, which, as Rosenthal puts it, are
“specially constructed” for the purpose.
The mathematician’s use of schemata is paradigmatic for knowing quite
generally and for perception in particular. In one sense the percept is a dia-
gram of its object, without being for all that a picture or copy. As a con-
struct it allows us freely to vary the modes in which the object appears,
giving us, as Rosenthal says, “a predictive rule generative of the action-
image matrix of a schematic structure” (1994, 24) and facilitating, and even
making necessary, by means of its variability and flexibility the perception
of new relationships. In his deeply unsettling article, “From the Icon to the
Symbol” (1973), René Thom put the matter in the following way:
While exploring a new theory, while juggling with this new mate-
rial, the mathematician sometimes sees an expression, or a rela-
tion, turning up again and again with embarrassing insistence. He
will then be tempted to introduce a new symbol to condense this
expression into a single form and so continue the work on a new
basis. This simple procedure may sometimes lead to success. More
often he will be struck by the idea of new expressions to condense,
new figures to construct and name through suspecting a priori
their properties. To introduce a new symbol, that is, injecting a
new letter on to the paper, promotes a kind of tearing away, with
the establishing of a new semantic field which will be the support
of the new actant and so free the mental movement from the obses-
sional presences which impede it. ([1973] 1985, 290)
This ability to “suspect a priori,” an essential property of expression sys-

tems, is embodied in schematic structures upon which we can experiment
and is present at the very heart of perceptual consciousness.
5. Arthur I. Miller has devoted nuanced and historically sophisticated studies to this topic.
See especially Miller 1984, 187–315, and 1996, 263–324. Miller has seen the vast implications of
an internally differentiated notion of imagination and followed up its exemplary instances in
insightful and well-documented case studies.
The diagrammatic reasoning of the mathematician, which relies on

external systems of expressions, functions as both model and extension of
the perceptual process itself. While mathematical reasoning depends upon
the thematic invention of an appropriate formalism that functions as a
necessary support and scaffolding for the reasoning process, enabling it to
derive novel theorems, perception likewise must be understood as
embodied in and relying on equivalent formal structures that are in no
way ‘inner’ in any Cartesian or Lockean sense. They are formed in the
abductive process of making sense of experience by the development of
habits and by the essential ‘openness’ of habit as ultimate logical interpre-
tant. Series of percepts that aspectually ‘make present’ the perceived
objects in the utterings of perceptual judgments are ‘linked’ by shared
schematic structures that mediate between the conceptually articulated
percept and the perceptual object or domain. Rosenthal (1994, 26) cites a
passage (ms 31 293, p. 14) that bears upon the problem of how meaning is
constructed in perception. Peirce writes: “The Diagram remains in the
field of perception or ‘imagination’ and so the Iconic Diagram and its ini-
tial Symbolic interpretant taken together constitute what we shall not too
much wrench Kant’s term in calling a schema, which is on the one side an
object capable of being observed, while on the other side it is a general.”
Peirce’s notion here anticipates the later work of Mark Johnson (1987;
Lakoff and Johnson, 1999) on image-schemata, which mediate between
concepts and percepts and function as essential conditions for the rise and
development of linguistic meaning, including the vast and intricate sys-
tems of metaphors within which we articulate our fundamental relations
to the world.
Moreover, Peirce held that in corollarial reasoning taking place in lan-
guage, as distinct from theorematic reasoning taking place in a technical
formalism, “the very words serve as schemata” (CP 4.233), that is, heuris-
tic devices that further the introduction of novel patterns and relations.
Giovanni Vailati, the most creative of the Italian pragmatists, developed
this insight, we will see, in great and illuminating detail. Words indeed
carry the ‘aspects’ of things, but prior to words we have living habits and
living dispositions to sort or order experience in certain ways. Rosenthal
remarks that “the series of possible schemata for the application of a con-
cept to experience is ‘fixed’ prior to the imposition of linguistic structure”
(1994, 32). On this position, linguistic structures would ‘build upon’ as
well as depend upon and incorporate “the dynamics of lived experience at
its most rudimentary level, a dynamics that in turn reflects a semiotic
structure operative at its most fundamental level. The significance of the

logic of language lies in the fact that it grounds itself in those most rudi-
mentary semiotic structures by which humans experience a world of
appearing objects. Hence, an examination of such epistemic foundations
should lay bare the basis for the logic of linguistic structure” (27). This is
what Rosenthal, paraphrasing Peirce, means when she writes that “mean-
ing beneath the level of language” employs schemata, for, in a Peirce text
that she cites, Peirce also asserts that “meaning enters into language by
determining it” (ms 1105, p. 4; Rosenthal 1994, 26). This is one of Polanyi’s
central notions, which he will trace not to the operative force of schemata
as such but to the ever-present tacit component that underlies and is
potentiated by articulation in all its forms. Mark Johnson, I noted earlier,
traces it to the image-schemata rooted in the fundamental invariant fea-
tures of our bodily existence, which are taken up into the ‘mind.’6
If any of the notions noted above have phenomenological plausibility,
we are forced to agree with Rosenthal that “the difference between the
perceptual and the conceptual is not a difference in kind but a difference
in the proportions of sensory content and relational structure” (1994, 46),
not in the absolute presence or absence of either. Cassirer makes the same
point abundantly (see, for example, Cassirer 1944, 130–36, for a compen-
dious discussion of materials he developed at length elsewhere). At the
perceptual pole we have a predominance of sensory content, while at the
conceptual pole we have a predominance of relational structure. But at no
point are we free of mediating semiotic structures. Perceptual schemata
exemplify the “universalizing aspect of sense” and “the indeterminateness
of meaning” quite generally, a central and complicated Peircean position
(Rosenthal 1994, 159 n. 111). Peirce had claimed that “no concepts, not
even those of mathematics, are absolutely precise” (CP 6.496; see Rosen-
thal 1994, 35). Even at the farthest limits of abstraction, behavior, instan-
tiated in living habits of interpretation, remains for Peirce the matrix of
6. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) have now given, as a further step in their collaboration, a full
and opinionated, even at times polemical, survey of what is at stake here. While I am by no means
comfortable with their puzzling coziness with a reductionistic form of ‘cognitive science,’ they
do at any rate chart the confluence of issues and currents that have led to a thoroughgoing reflec-
tion on “the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought.” My own studies here could
be seen as adding to their discussion voices that perhaps have not played the role they could have.
In general, many of Lakoff and Johnson’s ‘findings’ were clearly anticipated by the thinkers
treated in the first part of this book. This is by no means a criticism, but it does indicate the cen-
trality of the problems they are foregrounding and the presence in the philosophical tradition of
resources other than the ones they use to investigate the nature and scope of embodiment.
the patterns of relations that make up conceptual meaning (Rosenthal

1994, 27). Meaning exists within purpose and within purposeful behavior,
a point that Dewey resolutely foregrounded in his organism-based theory
of inquiry but that, as Vincent Colapietro showed (1989, 99–118), is
absolutely central to Peirce’s semiotic account of the self’s development of
autonomy and inwardness (see Innis 1994b, 44–69).
Rosenthal also rightly, and uncontroversially, notes that conceptual
meaning “must include within itself the emotional, energetic, and logical
interpretants,” that is, firstness, secondness, and thirdness: feeling core or
sensuous content, pattern of reaction, structure. But it is clear that this
threefold structure is also there, differently proportioned, in perceptual
meaning and in the dispositional habits that constitute it. These disposi-
tional habits are creative, ampliative, abductive. They do more than “unify
three preexistent elements—sensory cues, acts, and resultant structure”
(Rosenthal 1994, 31). They generate structure by in fact synthesizing sen-
sory cues and reactions by ‘making sense of them.’ But, first and fore-
most, this making sense is not a feat of operative action. It is an event that
carries us away.
Peirce pinpoints this feature when he speaks of consciousness as a bot-
tomless lake. It is an image that ‘exhibits’ the experienced quality of the
flow of perceptual consciousness. “I think of consciousness as a bottom-
less lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see
but a little way. But in this water there are countless objects at different
depths; and certain influences will give certain kinds of those objects an
upward impulse which may be intense enough and continue long enough
to bring them into the upper visible layer. After the impulse ceases they
commence to sink downwards” (CP 7.547). Such a metaphorical charac-
terization captures something essential about perceptual consciousness in
particular, but I think that, in fact, it also captures something essential
about the very flow of conscious life in general. Semiosic happenings are
experienced as ‘e-vents,’ as ‘out-comes’ wherein the interpreting subject is
put into ‘intentional movement’ by processes over which he or she has no
control. The experience of meaning quite generally is exemplified in the
appearing of perceptual meaning, for perception is precisely the deter-
mining of those both accessible and inaccessible streams of signs that are
only recognized as signs in the result. We can attempt, through abstraction
and through systematic reflection, to isolate the determining signs that are
included in the interpreting sign, and thus make them determinate, but
they are not always retrievable in a satisfactory manner, though the mark
of human life in signs is to bring more and more of the operative signs that
control conduct into awareness.
Thinking, of which perception is a fundamental layer or stratum, Peirce
writes, is “a kind of conduct, and is itself controllable, as everybody
knows. Now the intellectual control of thinking takes place by thinking
about thought. All thinking is by signs; and the brutes use signs. But per-
haps they rarely think of them as signs. To do so is manifestly a second
step in the use of language” (CP 5.534). It would seem to follow that the
advent of language effects a shift in perception, first of all by making it
problematic on a different logical level and by allowing it to become self-
critical in a new way by trying to fix and to make explicit the actual per-
ceptual signs we are interpreting and whose meaning is the perceptual
object itself. These signs, as Dewey ([1896] 1998c) argued, are the total
state of the inquiring organism, and in this sense ‘perception’ is ineradica-
bly wedded to bodily existence in all its modalities. Polanyi also makes
much of this.
But even if we speak of all the ‘premises’ of the abductive perceptual
inference as being accessible to consciousness, the process of perception is
still acritical in that it involves a performative commitment on the part of
the perceiver. For while we might experience a kind of self-organizing
activity within the perceptual flow, the to-be-organized, the organizing,
and the organized must be distinguished. Take the following passages,
which also rely on a powerful metaphor to model our consciousness of an
object. Speaking of “two sorts of elements of consciousness,” Peirce dis-
tinguishes between separate notes in a piece of music and the air or
melody, the “orderliness in the succession of sounds” ([1878] 1992a, 128).
The orderliness is not ‘immediately given’ but is what results from a medi-
ation. We experience both the succession and the melodic line. The
melodic line is the mediate object, the succession of sounds the immedi-
ate object. “These two sorts of objects, what we are immediately con-
scious of and what we are mediately conscious of, are found in all
consciousness” (128–29). The perceived melody, then, is a “congruence in
the succession of sensations that flow through the mind,” and, analo-
gously, thought “is a thread of melody running through the succession of
our sensations” (129).
Which melody? That is the melody as taken, for while in one sense the
configuration of ‘sensations’ organizes itself according to the laws of the
association of ideas, which Peirce never repudiated (see Innis 1988a), the
essential continuity of the perceptual continuum demands a ‘re-marking’
on the part of the perceiver, grounding, in effect, a polyphonic notion of

perceptual experience and the ‘pragmatic pluralism’ argued for by Sandra
Rosenthal. The melodic threads of experience are multiple. Peirce writes
that “just as a piece of music may be written in parts, each part having its
own air, so various systems of relationship of succession subsist together
between the same sensations” ([1878] 1992a, 129). By “the same sensa-
tions” Peirce does not mean discrete sense-impressions or sense-data but
the flow of experiencing, the flow of experienced vectors, out of which
coalesce objects, regularities, patterns, order. The Jamesian ‘free water of
consciousness’ flows around objects as ‘ob-stacles’ and in flowing around
them ‘de-fines’ them as what they are. Indeed, I think that Peirce’s model
of perceptual consciousness is in full agreement with James’s model of
consciousness as being related to experience as a ‘sculptor’ is related to a
block of stone. The point is to ‘free the form,’ to perform, in short, what
seems like an oxymoron: an analytical synthesis.
Speaking of such a phenomenon as the Schroeder stair, which is analo-
gous to the famous ‘Necker’ cube so beloved of cognitive psychologists,
Peirce illustrates another feature of perceptual processes: a kind of expe-
rienced shift that ‘changes the look’ of the perceived object and can, so
Peirce thinks, be brought under conscious control, although Peirce’s
description perhaps reduces the degree of automatism in the process a bit
too much. I would like to note a peculiarity of Peirce’s choice of descrip-
tive language in such a case. Peirce writes that “the perceptive judgment,
and the percept itself, seems to keep shifting from one general aspect to
the other and back again” (CP 5.183). This “general aspect” refers to a
phenomenal quality that defines the object, how it ‘looks.’ A percept,
then, gives us the look of things by binding the configured elements
together, resolving the ‘puzzling look of things’ by forming an interpre-
tation that makes sense of them. This forming of a classification of the
object as [x] is contained in the perceptual judgment itself, thus connect-
ing abductions and perceptions. “If the percept or perceptual judgment
were of a nature entirely unrelated to abduction, one would expect that
the percept would be entirely free from any characters that are proper to
interpretations” (5.184). But, in fact, the percept is thoroughly imbued
with interpretation, emerging as it does in the field of consciousness as
something with a distinctive quality.
Perception, as well as a fortiori perceptual abduction, both exemplifies
the fundamental dimensions of semiosis and is clarified by advertence to
the principal division of signs that lies at the heart of Peircean semiotics,
that is, the division of signs into icons, indexes, and symbols. The percep-
tual field itself, with its systems of objects-in-relation, is rightly modeled
along these lines, as I have discussed in a broad comparative context else-
where (Innis 1994b). But I think it best to speak of iconic, indexical, and
symbolic aspects or elements of the percept. Nevertheless, the percept, as
qualitative unity and as making known the perceptual object, has an
iconic or qualitatively defined core.
The sensory core of the percept is a qualitative type, as Rosenthal
rightly notes, calling this “feeling core” that is “there” in experience “the
logically or epistemically final basis and ultimate referent for all cognitive
activity” (1994, 32). It has, or rather is, a distinctive ‘feel’ and is known in
and by this feeling, which ‘interprets’ it. Any schema must have a feeling
element if concepts are to be applicable to experience. Hookway, for his
part, comments: “Differences in the subject matter of the percept are . . .
reflected in systematic differences in its qualitative character” (1985, 158).
It is, in every case, the qualitative character of “structured complexity”
(159). Further, as structured, the complex must have parts. How are the
parts related to the whole and to the perceiver ‘uttering’ the perceptual
judgment? The presence of parts in a configuration ‘indicates’ the con-
figuration, not by being separable from it but by individualizing the per-
ceptual object. When I say, “That is a yellow pencil,” I am referring to
something standing over against me that can ‘react’ with me and to me and
that is characterized by just these properties, dimensions, locations, which
I can point out and which, in being pointed out, show themselves to be
pointing something out. Indexicality is intrinsic to the perceptual judg-
ment, giving it and its object a peculiar ‘thereness,’ grounding the ‘out-
ward clash’ and in so doing introducing what Hookway calls a “brute
unintelligible element into our experience” (170), a notion that perhaps
must be taken with a grain of salt. The reason is that the properties crite-
rially displayed by the percept must themselves be apprehended as con-
tinuously instantiated by the perceived object, for objects are defined in
terms of continuity of reactions. Indexes are ‘marks’ that, experienced as
continuous, allow us to identify and to reidentify objects in the flow of
experiencing and to bind them together in the unified manifold that has a
distinctive feel. The unity of feeling is a feeling of unity. The binding is the
result of the perceiver’s work of mediation, of synthesis, of sym-ballein.
But thirdness for Peirce is ‘in’ the percipuum, not imposed on it ‘from the
outside,’ for in his view “thirdness pours in on us through every avenue
of sense” (CP 5.158). It is discovered by the veridical ‘cuttings’ of the con-
tinuum of experience that ‘replicate,’ in Thomian fashion, the self-gener-

ating cuttings of ‘forms’ and morphological structures of greater or lesser
stability out of nature itself. Already at the level of perception, then,
Peircean sign theory, implementing a semiotic realism, takes direct aim at
nominalism and all its implications.
I want now to indicate where central elements in Polanyi’s work inter-
sect with, confirm, amplify, and perhaps even correct these Peircean
analyses and emphases.
3. From Gestalt to Meaning

Polanyi’s mature epistemological model is based on an expansion and
transformation of some central observations of Gestalt theory, which he
thought had startling implications not only for the analysis of scientific
knowing but for knowing quite generally (see Innis 1992b). Gestalt the-
ory, represented for example by Wolfgang Köhler, denied, in full conso-
nance with Peircean pragmatism, that the world was primarily given to
us as an indifferent mosaic or an indifferent continuum. “It exhibits,”
Köhler wrote, “definite segregated units or contexts in all degrees of
complexity, articulation and clearness.” Moreover, these units “show
properties belonging to them as contexts or systems [and] the parts of
such units or contexts exhibit dependent properties in the sense that,
given the place of a part in the context, its dependent properties are deter-
mined by this position” (Köhler 1938, 85).
In his classic presentation Gestalt Psychology Köhler formulates his
main point in a manner that bears directly upon the present topic of
discussion.
Gestalt psychology holds [that] sensory units have acquired

names, have become richly symbolic, and are now known to have
certain practical uses, while nevertheless they have existed as units
before any of these further acts were added. Gestalt psychology
claims that it is precisely the original segregation of circumscribed
wholes which makes it possible for the sensory world to appear so
utterly imbued with meaning to the adult; for, in the gradual
entrance into the sensory field, meaning follows the lines drawn by
natural organization; it usually enters into segregated wholes.
([1947] 1959, 82)
Polanyi conceived of his project as a transformation of a classic theme of

Gestalt psychology: the particulars of a pattern or a musical tune have to
be jointly apprehended. If these particulars are observed separately, they
form no pattern or tune (1958, 55–57), a point gestured at by Peirce in his
melodic analogy. This joint apprehension gives rise to the ‘segregated
wholes’ that Köhler referred to in the preceding passage. Polanyi’s goal
was to delineate the structures and implications of this joint apprehension
by establishing and developing a pivotal distinction that marks one of his
most fertile contributions to philosophy: that between focal and sub-
sidiary awareness. Polanyi saw that in such variegated instances as the
development of motoric skills, the grasp of visual patterns, the construc-
tion of a medical diagnosis, the formulation of a hypothesis, and so forth,
we see a common pattern: we attend from (are subsidiarily aware of) a
field of movements, visual particulars, symptoms, articulate clues while
we attend to (are focally aware of) what they ‘mean.’
Take the development, first, of motoric skills, which play a central role
in Polanyi’s thought and which help to ground his “structural analogy
between knowledge and skill” (Polanyi [1961] 1969b, 130). It is a well-
known fact of everyday experience that a motoric achievement such as
walking a tightrope or performing on the parallel bars is a feat of coordi-
nation. What are being coordinated are sets of proprioceptively appre-
hended actions and movements. Now, the feat of coordination involves
bringing these movements to bear upon the performance that one has in
mind and that lies at the focus of our attention. This bringing to bear is,
Polanyi noted, a process of ‘integration’ wherein the particular move-
ments, accessible kinesthetically and (to speak in phenomenological
terms) prethematically, are brought into a unity: the completed perfor-
mance itself as a ‘comprehensive entity’ or Buchlerian ‘natural complex.’
We know from experience that in the performance of motoric skills we
can paralyze the action as a whole if we concentrate on the constituent
actions in themselves, keeping them, rather than the task at hand, at the
center of one’s attention, a process called ‘destructive analysis’ by Polanyi.
We have to rely on the actions and feelings, use them in an instrumental
manner, commit ourselves ‘acritically’ to them. As Polanyi put it in terms
of conscious functions, we must ‘attend from’ these particulars while
‘attending to’ what we are doing. This incipient ‘from-to’ structure, espied
in numerous other instances, becomes the structural key to Polanyi’s
whole epistemology and the source of its immense heuristic fertility. Since
to learn a skill is a cognitive achievement, to think of skills as paradigmatic
outcomes of cognitive strivings is already to shift the focus of the theory

of knowledge. Skills control conduct. Knowing-how precedes and
grounds knowing-that.
The recognition of a physiognomy—a face or its moods, for instance,
but also the ‘facies’ of diseases and of species of insects and flowers—man-
ifests, on Polanyi’s view, a similar structure. In Polanyi’s reckoning, the
various features of the face, symptoms of the disease, characteristics of the
insect or flower function as a not completely specifiable and complex set
of clues on which we have to rely in order to recognize—in an act iso-
morphic with Peircean abduction—the face, mood, disease, insect, or
flower. We do not, according to Polanyi, go, in summative fashion, from
one isolated item to another and from their collection, as necessary and
sufficient conditions, ‘deduce’ the object by an act of explicit inference
from explicitly formulated premises. Rather, we attend, for example,
‘from’ the features ‘to’ the face or the mood. We do not focus on the fea-
tures in themselves but rely on them, in the same fashion as we rely on our
consciousness of our bodily movements for achieving a coherent action in
the construction of a skill. Just as we can bring an action to a halt by turn-
ing our attention to its constituent particulars, so focusing our attention
on the particulars of visual wholes such as those mentioned above, but
easily extended to line drawings, geometrical figures, and so forth, will
cause them to disintegrate as phenomenal unities.
A third paradigmatic example, exploited also by Merleau-Ponty, is the
use of a probe by a blind man or, with appropriate modifications, by a sur-
geon or dentist. Here we have an illustration of another important aspect of
this from-to structure. A probe is first of all an object external to our body,
and we can feel it as external to us by attending to the pressure of it on our
hand. However, we do not use the probe in order to feel it, but to feel by
means of it, using it as an instrument. It has, as Heidegger saw clearly and
continued to emphasize, an um . . . zu—an in-order-to—structure. When
we no longer directly and objectively feel the probe in our hands and fingers
but ourselves feel what the probe is itself touching so that we come to know
this object both ‘directly’ and ‘mediately,’ we can then be said to be attend-
ing from the pressures and impacts made by the probe on our body to what
these pressures and impacts mean. That is, we have to bring these pressures
and impacts to bear on a focus, on an object or comprehensive entity,
through an act of ‘integration.’ We perform an abductive act, and this act is
the result of a distinctive fusion of perceiver and instrument, which Polanyi
characterizes as indwelling or embodiment. Indwelling and embodiment
will become central to a Polanyian analysis not just of language but also of
technological meaning-making.
Now, in performing these integrative acts—and others like them—
Polanyi thinks that we either rely on or come into possession of, or
achieve, a kind of knowledge that we cannot put (fully) into words, a
kind of knowledge that is, in short, ‘tacit,’ ‘unspecifiable,’ ‘inarticulate,’
‘unformalizable.’7 This tacit character is especially obvious in such cases
as bicycle riding, swimming, walking, speaking, where we are not aware,
except after long and difficult analyses of something that we do easily, of
the rules or laws that we are obeying in performing an action. Likewise,
Polanyi notes, the actual, operative topographic knowledge of the human
body possessed by a surgeon is itself inarticulate, although it may rely on
detailed and complex articulate mapping of the human body. This knowl-
edge, Polanyi contends, is the result of a massive preconceptual act of
integration, a feat of imagination built up over the course of long dealing
with the three-dimensional internal structure of the human body. No sum
of direct, explicit knowledge or awareness of the discrete parts will gen-
erate the three-dimensional—relational—Gestalt that is the image of the
human body. Rather, we must say that the surgeon must attend from these
discrete items to their integrating center. Otherwise, he will have no
‘praxical’ grasp of the structure itself. Therefore, both the bicycle rider
and the surgeon are in possession of tacit knowledge, and what we can say
about this knowledge is in itself inadequate to transmit it, which can only
be done by practice and initiation. The differentiation between ‘theoreti-
cal’ and ‘practical’ surgery that characterized the medieval medical faculty
is an epistemological monstrosity or at least curiosity, a preference for the
‘seminary mind’ over the ‘laboratory mind,’ which Peirce was committed
to opposing. Articulate formal statements—which may indeed be possible
and certainly desirable—are meant only to guide us into the realm itself,
to function, as Polanyi put it, as maxims that have to be applied in the
concrete consciousness of the knower.
Upon the basis of considerations such as the foregoing, Polanyi distin-
guished four ways of schematizing the from-to relation of parts to
7. Ben-Ami Scharfstein (1993) has treated the varieties of ways that ‘words fail’ in a star-
tling, indeed, disturbing, book. Under the rubric of ‘ineffability’ he has marshaled an absorbing
array of instances in which articulation ‘breaks.’ Scharfstein’s book is a kind of natural history of
semantic failure—which builds on recognizably achieved successes. How we manage to ‘cope’
epistemologically with defective articulation is tackled in Scharfstein 1989, which is permeated by
a humane, though skeptical pragmatism.
wholes, the operative core of his cognitional model: functional, phenom-

enal, semantic, and ontological. I can only gesture, ever so briefly, at the
rich implications of this schema, which is implicit in the Peirce texts cited
earlier concerning our apprehension of a melody, but which Polanyi
makes thematic.
First, the functional aspect emphasizes quite generally the specific role
all subsidiary (subsidiarily attended from) particulars play as vectors, as
‘indicators’ of a focus upon which they bear. They are the proximal terms
from which we attend to the distal terms into which they are integrated or
to which they ‘point.’ Their role is distinctively ‘instrumental,’ in a uni-
versal sense of that term, in being defined by their relation toward some-
thing else. Epistemologically their role is to guide us, to move us, to ‘bias’
us toward a term or focus. They are not restricted to any domain.
Second, while attending from them in attending to their focal unity, we
find that the subsidiary particulars undergo a change of appearance.
Indeed, Polanyi asserts that the subsidiary clues upon which we rely are
known in the appearing of a whole. For example, “the clues offered by
processes within our body, of which we become aware in terms of things
perceived outside, may be completely unconscious” (1958, 44), so that
they are actually only known by our becoming aware of a perceptual
object. Again, visual illusions such as the Necker cube, the duck-rabbit
that so exercised Wittgenstein, and other multistable phenomena illus-
trate the shift of appearance attendant upon different integrations of par-
ticulars. What these particulars are is known in the configurations, and,
indeed, from the phenomenal point of view they are different particulars
in each case, while remaining physically identical. This phenomenal char-
acter corresponds to Peirce’s notion that a perceptual whole has a qualita-
tive character that gives it its distinctive unity and feel.8
Third, Polanyi combines the functional and phenomenal structures
into a general semantic structure. “When something is seen as subsidiary
to a whole, this implies that it participates in sustaining the whole, and we
8. I have explored this topic in more detail in Innis 1999, parts of which are strewn through-
out the present discussion. Peirce (CP 1.419) writes: “There is a point of view from which the
whole universe of phenomena appears to be made up of nothing but sensible qualities. What is that
point of view? It is that in which we attend to each part as it appears in itself, in its own suchness,
while we disregard the connections. Red, sour, toothache are each sui generis and indescribable. In
themselves, that is all there is to be said about them.” Of course, this does not stop us from trying
to display them, even if we cannot capture them in words. Dewey saw the centrality of Peirce’s
theory of quality for philosophic method, and this topic will recur persistently in the course of our
discussions.
may now regard this function as its meaning, within the whole” (1958,
58). For example, the ‘meaning’ of the impacts on our hands when using
a probe or cane is the term of an interpretive act, a ‘reading,’ as is the deci-
phering of a script, the construing of a poem or letter, or the perceiving of
a painting. In Personal Knowledge, while admitting that wholes are mean-
ings, Polanyi distinguished between two kinds of wholes and two kinds of
meanings: an explicit sign/object whole and the kinds of wholes exempli-
fied by physiognomies, tunes, and patterns. Such a distinction will also
bear upon the types of meanings defining technological embodiment
structures. Polanyi writes:
The distinction between two kinds of awarenesses allows us to

readily acknowledge these two kinds of wholes and the two kinds
of meaning. Remembering the various uses of a stick, for pointing,
for exploring or for hitting, we can easily see that anything that
functions effectively within an accredited context has a meaning in
that context and that any such context will itself be appreciated as
meaningful. We may describe the kind of meaning which a context
possesses in itself as existential, to distinguish it especially from
denotative or, more generally, representative meaning. In this sense
pure mathematics has an existential meaning, while a mathematical
theory in physics has a denotative meaning. The meaning of music
is mainly existential, that of a portrait more or less representative,
and so on. All kinds of order, whether contrived or natural, have
existential meaning; but contrived order usually also conveys a
message. (1958, 58)
In other writings Polanyi calls these two types of meanings the ‘physiog-
nostic’ and the ‘teleognostic.’ The ‘denotative’ is a specification of the lat-
ter (see, for example, Polanyi [1961] 1969b, 129–30). So, in general, where
there is order, there is meaning. Perceptual objects are existential or phys-
iognostic meanings, since they are ordered contexts. In this Polanyi and
Peirce are also in full agreement.
Fourth, the notion that an object is an ordered context implies for
Polanyi that objects quite generally exemplify ‘emergence,’ that is, that
objects have ontologically and conceptually distinct levels. Objects are
not their constituent particulars. They are the ‘meanings’ of these partic-
ulars. “Since tacit knowing establishes a meaningful relation between two
terms, we may identify it with the understanding of the comprehensive
entity which these two terms jointly constitute. Thus, the proximal term
represents the particulars of this entity, and we can say, accordingly, that
we comprehend the entity by relying on our awareness of its particulars
for attending to their joint meaning” (Polanyi 1966, 13). Here again, as
with Peirce, is a specific correlation of being and meaning, an assertion of
meaning in the most basic stratum of consciousness and a widening of the
very notion of an object, derived from a ‘logic of consciousness.’
By relying on the distinction between focal and subsidiary awareness
and classifying meanings on the basis of the kinds of subsidiaries inte-
grated into a whole, we can develop a powerful and differentiated model of
meaning. Different types of subsidiaries give rise to different types of
meanings or ordered contexts, such as perceptual, motoric, affective, con-
ceptual, aesthetic meanings. Perceptual meanings arise from the integration
of sensory cues. Motoric meanings arise from the integration of bodily
movements and actions, encompassing bodily and practical skills of all
sorts. Affective meanings arise from the integration of feelings. Conceptual
meanings arise in the great feat of ‘articulation’ achieved by ‘language’ in
the broad sense of that term that includes all ‘external’ systems of repre-
sentation. Aesthetic meanings arise from the ‘thickening’ of the expressive
means or sign-configurations.
The fundamental structure of consciousness is, for Polanyi, composed
of focal and subsidiary awareness and tacit integrating acts of conscious-
ness. How do these elements in Polanyi’s epistemology apply to the prob-
lem of the continuities between perceptual and linguistic meaning?
Polanyi, complementing Peirce, first and foremost traces “the strange
fact that language means something” to the “exercises of an integrative
power” ([1967] 1969d, 193). In itself this integrative power is inarticulate,
even though the medium within which it is operating is maximally artic-
ulate, formal, and symbolic. As Polanyi puts it in Personal Knowledge, “a
symbolic formalism is itself but an embodiment of our antecedent unfor-
malized powers” (131). These unformalized powers constitute our “facul-
ties for recognizing real entities, the designations of which form a rational
vocabulary” (114). Polanyi shares with Peirce a thoroughly realist claim
concerning the relation of words and conceptual schemes and accordingly
an adamant rejection of conventionalism and nominalism. Representative
meaning-systems both mediate to us tacitly apprehended meanings and
rely upon a tacit component. “When we come to a deliberately chosen
system of signs, constituting a language, we must admit that these have a
denotative meaning which is not inherent in a fixed context of things or
actions” (91). Indeed, in a comment that calls to mind Peirce’s notion of

collateral experience, Polanyi writes that “words convey nothing except
by a previously acquired meaning. . . . our knowledge of things denoted
by words will have been largely acquired by experience. . . . [That is,] the
words will have acquired their meaning by previously designating such
experience” (92).
Polanyi claims that “every time we use a word for denoting something,
we perform and accredit our performance of an act of generalization
and . . . , correspondingly, the use of such a word is taken to designate a class
to which we attribute a substantial character” (1958, 80). On this position,
with which Peircean semiotics is in general agreement, generals—general
structures—are real and are ‘mapped’ in our language-systems. This “act of
generalization” bears upon a really existing configuration, which, however,
could not be known as such independently of the language-generated medi-
ating system. As expressions, to take two homely examples, both ‘knuckle
fat’ and ‘elbow grease’ bear upon or bring into focus a ‘center’ to which we
attend, with language playing a ‘subsidiary,’ indeed Peircean ‘schematic,’
role, for “the focus of all articulation is conceptual, with language playing
only a subsidiary part in this focus” (101). But while subsidiary, these lin-
guistic schemata, which formulate a form of perceiving, are also constitutive
of what is perceived. The focus is perceived as because it is conceived as and
vice versa. Both expressions really ‘fit’ the experienced configurations. In
line with Peirce’s notion that the perceptual judgment is aspectual, we can
see that on Polanyian principles the perceiver attends from rather different
“allegedly recurrent features” (112) to the whole upon which the sub-
sidiaries bear. ‘Knuckle fat’ in fact belongs not to the conceptual system car-
ried by English but to (at least) the Danish conceptual system. It brings into
focus rather differently weighted, but really existing, features of the experi-
ential unit, focusing on pressure and the wearing down of materials rather
than the reciprocating motion of a joint. ‘Articulation’ and ‘perception’ are
joined here in an inseparable fashion. It seems to me that we can rightly say
that ‘knuckle fat’ and ‘elbow grease’ schematize experience and that we
attend from the schematizing linguistic expressions to the object-meant.
Linguistic schemata are subsidiarily apprehended and, like probes, become
assimilated to us and become parts of our intentional existence.
Polanyi is also well aware, although he does not use the Peircean ter-
minology but refers instead to his own notion of a ‘tacit triad,’ of the tri-
adic nature of meaning and of the sign-object-interpretant relation. When
he speaks of “our power for comprehending a text and the things to
which the text refers, within a conception which is the meaning of the
text” (1958, 100), he does so, not to foreground the triad, but to fore-
ground a feature of the feat of articulation intrinsic to his theory of tacit
knowing. Dwelling in a text, that is, in the sign-bearing and meaning-
bearing marks, our focal attention is on its meaning or sense, which is not
something tangible but is “the conception evoked by the text. . . . The
conception in question is the focus of our attention, in terms of which we
attend subsidiarily both to the text and to objects indicated by the text”
(92). Just as there is a logical gap between perceptual clues and what they
mean, so there is a logical gap between a text and the objects ‘indicated’ by
it. The text is an ordered context that generates other ordered contexts
upon which it ‘really’ bears. Language is a heuristic aid in stabilizing these
contexts in the flux of perception and increases our mental power over
experience. In this sense Polanyi has formulated in a different way the role
of both corollarial and theorematic thinking in the work of ‘articulation,’
which he richly elaborates in his masterful chapter “Articulation” in Per-
sonal Knowledge, with extensive discussion, relying on, among others,
the work of Polya, of heuristics and the logic of problem solving.
Polanyi’s and Peirce’s realistic theories of perception constrain any
attempt to look upon language as ‘merely’ conventional. The realist
thrust of language is rooted in the realist nature of perception. But the
realism is not a naive realism. Peirce would agree with the following pas-
sage from Polanyi: “A particular vocabulary of nouns, adjectives, verbs,
and adverbs, thus appears to constitute a theory of all subjects that can be
talked about, in the sense of postulating that these subjects are all consti-
tuted of comparatively few recurrent features, to which the nouns, adjec-
tives, verbs and adverbs refer” (1958, 80). Intrasystematically, the
constellation of grammatical and semantic relations constitutes a closed
universe, which will be more closed to the degree that the domains
referred to by the vocabulary are formalized or to the degree to which the
language is no longer in common use. Extrasystematically, conceptual
innovations do take place when the vocabulary is either enlarged or inter-
nally modified to make way for new concepts. As Dewey remarked,
meaning is self-moving from case to case ([1925] 1988a, 148). In the latter
case, verbal speculation and verbal confrontations can reveal unexpected
affinities between disparate realms that, without the linguistic sifting and
rearranging, would have been obscured, which is precisely Peirce’s and
Thom’s point and a deep lesson to learn from George Polya’s work on
heuristics. Since the linguistic speculation is, as significant, fundamentally
conceptual, it “may therefore reveal an inexhaustible fund of true knowl-

edge and new substantial problems, just as it may also produce pieces of
mere sophistry” (Polanyi 1958, 95). The criterion, distinguishing substance
from sophistry, is ourselves and our sense of rightness and correctness. All
we can do is, in the last analysis, draw out our evidence and commit our-
selves on its basis. There is no external, automatic procedure.
The intrinsic selectivity of language, its grasp and foregrounding of
pertinent features, is based upon our veridical powers, rooted in percep-
tion, albeit aided by linguistic probes, to grasp the “recurrent features”
spoken of in the preceding passage. In other words, for Polanyi and for
Peirce, classification is rooted in mental powers we acknowledge and
accredit by using our language confidently. This is the fiduciary compo-
nent in Polanyi’s theory of knowledge that is his analogue to Peirce’s
affirmation of the life-enhancing role of instinct.
Further, and in the same fundamental vein, Polanyi foregrounds the
acritical nature of our very appropriation of a language, which parallels
the acritical nature of perception and perceptual commitment as such.
“Our most deeply ingrained convictions are determined by the idiom in
which we interpret our experience and in terms of which we erect our
articulate systems. Our formally declared beliefs can be held to be true in
the last resort only because of our logically anterior acceptance of a par-
ticular set of terms, from which all our references to reality are con-
structed” (1958, 287). Initially, of course, our acceptance of these terms is
not just acritical but uncritical. Indeed, whether we are concerned with
learning a natural language or being initiated into a technical, specialized
language, our first movement is to pour ourselves into it and use it, just as
we pour ourselves into any probe or instrument or set of movements.
Later it is possible, as Peirce also noted, because of the very capacity of
language to turn back on itself and examine its own content, to reexamine
the terms, submit them to critical review and, perhaps, modification, orga-
nize their implications, and decide whether we still want to describe our-
selves and our world according to the idiom’s exigencies. But in no case
can we get a look at the ‘world’ as it really is apart from our means of con-
struing it: that is, talking about it and affirming it to be so and so.
Polanyi argues for a certain form of the linguistic relativity thesis, with-
out the cognate conclusion that languages are fully closed or hermetically
sealed. Indeed, languages are systems of hypotheses that ‘bind’ the expe-
riential world, amplifying the primary articulation of the world on the
perceptual level. “Different languages are alternative conclusions, arrived
at by the secular gropings of different groups of people at different peri-

ods of history. They sustain alternative conceptual frameworks, inter-
preting all things that can be talked about in terms of somewhat different
allegedly recurrent features” (Polanyi 1958, 112). If such is the case, then
denotation is an art or a skill. “To classify things in terms of features for
which we have names, as we do in talking about things, requires the same
kind of connoisseurship as the naturalist must have for identifying speci-
mens of plants or animals. Thus the art of speaking precisely, by applying
a rich vocabulary exactly, resembles the delicate discrimination practised
by the expert taxonomist” (81). The use of an articulate instrument, there-
fore, is identical in structure with perceptual processes, though it obvi-
ously cannot be reduced to perception as such. On Polanyian terms, we
are embodied in our languages and symbolic systems just as really as we
are embodied in external tools and instruments, exemplified in the fusion
of perceiver and probe or rider and bicycle. The very material character of
the probe defines what can be mediated by means of it, and we select
appropriate materials for the probe in light of the task at hand. A stainless-
steel probe does a very different type of work than a cast-iron probe. A
hard-maple probe may be preferred to a pine probe, but only by reason of
the lack of other suitable materials. In general, to affirm the ‘tool charac-
ter of language,’ as Polanyi, Bühler, and Dewey, for example, do, is not to
fall under the objection leveled by Gadamer that we are not related to lan-
guage the way we are related to tools, which can be taken up and put down
at will. (See Innis 1988a for a Polanyian reading of Bühler.) Gadamer is
right in affirming that we cannot shed language, once learned, and that it
is out there ahead of us, predefining for us access to the world, but accept-
ing Polanyi’s great tool analogy does not, strictly speaking, imply an
‘instrumental’ position on language. Language for Polanyi is constitutive,
even while it is dependent upon its tacit underpinnings and supports. It
supports the tacit dimension, potentiating it, even while the tacit dimen-
sion supports it.
Polanyi writes of the “curiously insubstantial character of the joint
meaning ascribed to a group of objects by a general term. . . . Compared
with optical illusions or stereoscopic images, general conceptions are
abstract, featureless. The focus in terms of which we are aware of the
members of a class appears vague and almost empty” ([1962] 1969e, 168).
Likewise for Peirce, all concepts have an essential (appropriately under-
stood) vagueness, as do all images. Vagueness for Peirce is not a sign of
weakness, but of richness. The vagueness of any concept, Vincent Potter
points out in many places (Potter 1996, chaps. 10–12; see also Liszka 1996,
93–98), brings the personal judgment of the language user into play and
guarantees a term’s semantic plenitude, as exemplified in Peirce’s analysis
of theological language and his development of a ‘theosemiotic.’ (See also
on this Orange 1984, Raposa 1989, and Corrington 1993.)9 Vagueness for
Peirce is connected with, but is not identical to, the virtuality of meaning.
If all interpretant signs were precise, knowledge could not grow. The very
temporal nature of knowledge and the fact that no state of affairs repeats
itself exactly and hence that its individualizing traits enter into our con-
crete knowledge of it leave open the possibility of modifying the term or
applying it to a new instance. We are, in fact, simultaneously aware of
both the recurrent features and the qualitative distinctiveness of the indi-
vidual object. For Peirce, however, not only is language intrinsically
vague, but so are percepts and images. The vagueness of theological lan-
guage, foregrounded by Potter and others, is rooted in the vagueness of
perception and imagination, which are as ‘aspectual’ and ‘open’ as lan-
guage itself is.
4. Embodiment in Language
It is clear that for Peirce and Polanyi perception, while exemplifying semi-
osis and functioning as its primary stratum, is embedded in wider semiotic
happenings that I have only been able to hint at in the course of this chap-
ter.10 Perception for both of them takes place in signs and by means of
9. Scharfstein (1993) tries to trace the sense of semantic plenitude back to analogous types
of experience, some of them ordinary, as in the sense of mastery of a skill, others extraordinary,
as in aesthetic intuition and creation and putative instances of mystical union. His approach is
sober, sensible, insightful, and drawn toward a modest reductionism, which he finds himself
forced to defend without being certain that it ultimately hits the mark.
10. Peirce’s theory of signs (semeiotic) is meant to be entirely general, not based on language.
Language is subject, then, to general semiotic conditions and constraints, just as perception is.
The task for a Peircean philosophy of language qua tale, with which I am not concerned here, is
to show how advertence to the great schema of the classification of signs works itself out and is
instantiated in language and to compare the semiotic powers of all sign systems to one another.
The first task is accomplished by a semiotics-based philosophy. The second task is accomplished
by a philosophy-informed general and comparative semiotics. It is clear that these two tasks are
inextricably intertwined. I have tried to indicate directions and options in the introductory essays
to the classic texts collected in Innis 1985 and throughout Innis 1994b. Rather different ways of
seeing Peirce’s implications for language theory are found in Shapiro 1991 and Keller 1998. Itko-
nen (1991, 283, 284) has a brief, but highly pertinent, set of comments on Peirce. Jappy 1999,
signs, and in one sense all signs and sign systems are signs embedded in
perception. But it is clear that for neither of them are all semiosic hap-
penings perceivings. Nevertheless, the evolution of external sign systems
necessitates that they be perceptually accessible in order to be used, and it
is here that Polanyi’s analytical model, with its distinction between focal
and subsidiary awareness and its notions of indwelling and embodiment,
is extremely helpful. Since, on Peircean principles, each sign type must
have its own qualitative distinctness and through its stream of interpre-
tants makes its object present in a way proper to itself, Polanyi’s notion of
indwelling helps us see the ‘biasing’ of perception by our embodiment in
different Peircean speculative instruments. These instruments obtain a
kind of ‘transparency’ by being made extensions of our embodied sensory
systems. They have, as Don Ihde pointed out, an ‘echo’ effect. This echo
effect is defined by the tacit background or field of subsidiarily appre-
hended sign configurations that make the object known in a variety of
ways. When Polanyi, in The Tacit Dimension (1966, 7), speaks of the
‘probal’ nature of language, he is pinpointing the fact that just as we pro-
ject ourselves out to the end of the probe, passing through it to the object,
so we project ourselves into language and through it to the world. But the
probe, and thus language, is an essential condition of accessing the object
to begin with, which is not known or even knowable without it. In that
sense, to embody ourselves in a language—or in fact in any sign system—
is to interiorize it and make it part of our mental existence.
Cassirer has a remarkable passage, even with the image of the blind
man’s stick, bearing on these issues.
By learning to name things a child does not simply add a list of

artificial signs to his previous knowledge of ready-made empirical
objects. He learns rather to form the concepts of those objects, to
come to terms with the objective world. Henceforth the child
stands on firmer ground. His vague, uncertain, fluctuating percep-
tions and his dim feelings begin to assume a new shape. They may
be said to crystallize around the name as a fixed center, a focus of
thought. Without the help of the name every new advance made in
Short 1999, Itkonen 1999, Réthoré 1999, Thelin 1999, Haley 1999, and Pape 1999 offer theoret-
ically valuable explorations of Peircean themes dealing with language. They all stem from the
1997 Peirce Seminar at Duke University. The comprehensive references accompanying these
papers will lead the interested reader in all necessary directions.
the process of objectification would always run the risk of being

lost again in the next moment. The first names of which a child
makes conscious use may be compared to a stick by the aid of
which a blind man gropes his way. And language, taken as a whole,
becomes the gateway to a new world. (1944, 132)
Indeed, speaking of the shaping and molding of the objective world by

speech activity, Cassirer asserts that “[o]ur perceptions, intuitions, and
concepts have coalesced with the terms and speech forms of our mother
tongue” (133). Peirce, for his part, writes that “since man can think only
by means of words or other external symbols . . . in fact, therefore, men
and words reciprocally educate each other; each increase of a man’s infor-
mation involves, and is involved by, a corresponding increase of a word’s
information” ([1868] 1992c, 54). This is a fateful process, involving deep
existential and cognitive commitments. Since for Peirce “experience can
only mean the total cognitive result of living” (CP 7.538) and since “prag-
maticism makes thinking to consist in the living inferential metaboly of
symbols whose purport lies in conditional general resolutions to act”
(5.402 n. 3), the experience of thinking, as well as its actional matrix, is
dependent upon its ‘symbolic’ (semiotic) carriers in which it is embodied.
As Polanyi pointed out in a passage in The Tacit Dimension, which I will
have reason to cite again further on in different contexts: “All thought
contains components of which we are subsidiarily aware in the focal con-
tent of our thinking, and all thought dwells in its subsidiaries, as if they
were parts of our body. Hence thinking is not only necessarily inten-
tional, as Brentano has taught: it is also necessarily fraught with the roots
it embodies. It has a from-to structure” (1966, x). Not only, then, is per-
ception embodied in language; language is embodied in perception.
From Indication to Predication
On Fields and Situations
To read together, with pragmatist eyes, Karl Bühler’s 1934 synthetic mas-
terpiece, Theory of Language (hereafter TL), and Alan Gardiner’s 1932
treatise, The Theory of Speech and Language (hereafter TSL), is more
than an exercise in the history of ideas or an act of historical piety. Rather,
it throws powerful and sober light on some at times neglected central
premises and results of an adequate approach to language. Elements from
their work can add some new twists to philosophical reflections on lan-
guage that are consonant with or based upon pragmatist principles. Inde-
pendent of their relevance to supporting and supplementing a pragmatist
take on language, however, the convergence alone of Bühler’s and Gar-
diner’s two valuable and classic projects and their bearing on a common
range of topics and issues are surprising. Bühler’s language theory involved
a highly differentiated combination of philosophical, semiotic, and psy-
chological categories and analyses, as befitted his varied intellectual back-
ground and training in medicine, philosophy, and psychology. Gardiner,
for his part, lacked professional training either in general linguistics, phi-
losophy, or psychology. He was in fact a world-famous Egyptologist,
although he had made a deep study of Saussure’s Course in General Lin-
guistics, which, as is well known, has had a profound influence on twen-
tieth-century thought.1 An important link between them is a common
debt to the pioneering work of Philipp Wegener, whose development of
the notion of a ‘situation’ is of prime importance.2
The semantic and social approaches of Bühler and Gardiner to lan-
guage are resolutely in the pragmatist vein. The problem of the genesis
and structure of meaning is intimately connected with the problem of
communication and communicative action. Language for them, as it was
for Dewey, is not first and foremost an instrument of monologic thought
but a means of social cooperation and interaction, a topic that recurs time
and again throughout their work. They furnish clear support, from out-
side of technical philosophy, for Dewey’s assertion that “to understand is
to anticipate together. . . . To fail to understand is to fail to come into
agreement in action; to misunderstand is to set up action at cross pur-
poses” ([1925] 1988a, 141). Emphasizing at every turn that mental and
personal categories and intrinsic references to the powers of socially con-
stituted subjectivity are indispensable for and pervasive in language the-
ory, both Bühler and Gardiner rejected as fundamentally misguided the
thesis, sometimes connected with later developments of the Saussurian
tradition, that language is autonomous, a pure system of signifiers to be
studied apart from the total perceptual, behavioral, and social situation in
which it is found and which is best thematized according to the categories
of formal logic or of an abstract algebra (see Leroy 1967, 77 ff.). Syntax,
Gardiner writes, must not labor under the domination of formal logic
(TSL, 212). “Lingua docet logicam,” writes Bühler (TL, 244).
1. Bühler, a polymath of the first order, who was nurtured within the great scientific and
humanistic tradition of the German university system, wrote about Gardiner’s book, published
at his insistence two years before Theory of Language, that in relation to his own work it was
“the most interesting attempt in which a similar project is consistently carried out” (TL, 22).
2. In order not to make a dense discussion even denser, I am attaching as an appendix to this
chapter a short article on Wegener (Innis 1989, 289–99) rather than trying to embed its content
into the body of the text. It can be considered as a rather long scholarly footnote.
From Indication to Predication 53
The historical and philosophical trajectories of these works, particu-

larly Bühler’s, are checkered.3 With these I will not be concerned. My
goal is to keep an eye directly on the pivotal concepts and distinctions of
their language theories and to note, when appropriate, where they inter-
sect with, supplement, or buttress the linguistic dimension in a broadly
conceived ‘classical’ version of pragmatism, the main lines of which have
by now been quite extensively studied.4 I will deal with five core issues
that are central to any language theory of no matter what philosophical
provenance, pragmatist or not, but that are especially supportive of a gen-
eral pragmatist orientation: (1) how to thematize the fundamental rela-
tions making up the speech act, (2) premises and implications of the
constitution of the linguistic sign, (3) the relations between words and
meanings, (4) how to model metaphor, and (5) the predicational matrix of
the sentence. These topics reveal in a rather startling manner the philo-
sophical implications and bite of their attempts to thematize key aspects
of the language animal and the remarkable tool it avails itself of to articu-
late the world.
1. Situating the Speech Act: Between the

Organon-Model and the Four-Factor Theory
The famous pivot of Bühler’s language theory is his organon-model of a
speech act or speech event. It is perhaps the most well-known and heuris-
tically fertile of his theoretical accomplishments. It finds an exact parallel
3. Two comprehensive collections indicate the range of Bühler’s language theory and its
matrices: the two volumes of Bühler-Studien (Eschbach 1984a) and Karl Bühler’s Theory of Lan-
guage (Eschbach 1988a). These books contain extensive bibliographies of literature in many lan-
guages. I have also treated the issues of this chapter in a number of previous publications. See
especially Innis 1980, 1982, 1984b, 1985, 1986b, 1988a, 1988b, 1992a, 1994b, 1998a.
4. The linguistic dimension in pragmatism and its relation to philosophy’s ‘linguistic turn’
in the twentieth century constitute a complex and much disputed topic. Hausman (1993,
194–225) has confronted Peirce’s “evolutionary realism” with the linguistic turn. Rosenthal
(1986) provides helpful synthetic comments. Sleeper (1986) foregrounds the linguistic dimension
in Dewey and makes many helpful critical comparisons with other thinkers. He writes: “The
conventional wisdom fails to recognize that Dewey was working out a full-scale theory of dis-
course, a philosophy of language, of the sort required for understanding how the symbols we use
relate to the world in which we use them. We have paid scant attention to Dewey’s carefully
worked out semiotic and the bearing of that semiotic on his semantic theory. We are aware, as
Quine has remarked, that Dewey was already maintaining that ‘meaning’ is ‘primarily a property
in Gardiner’s four-factor theory of a speech act, the explication of which,

in his conception, is the proper theme of language theory. Bühler had
taken from Plato’s Cratylus, and from his own independent reflections
(see TL, 24 and 25 n), the key idea, which Dewey also foregrounded, that
language signs are fundamentally instruments or tools by which a speaker
gets a listener or addressee to grasp or attend to objects and states of
affairs or effects a change in his behavior (see also TSL, 54, for the use of
the ‘tool’ or ‘instrument’ model for words). As Bühler pointed out in
section A of “The Axiomatization of the Language Sciences” (1933), the
act of speech, which clearly has some prefigurements in the animal realm,
arises when the cooperative or coordinative activity of a group needs a
diacritikon, arising out of a perceptual surplus of one of the members, to
steer either the behavior or the perception of the members of the group.
The original function of language as a medium of communication lies at
the heart even of Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938) and is
fully in agreement with Mead’s symbolic interactionism. Language
effects, on Dewey’s position, the “transformation of the biological into
the intellectual and the potentially logical” ([1938] 1986, 51). But first and
foremost “it compels one individual to take the standpoint of other indi-
viduals and to see and inquire from a standpoint that is not strictly per-
sonal but is common to them as participants or ‘parties’ in a conjoint
undertaking” (52). Gardiner, for his part, had taken from Philipp
Wegener’s 1885 work, Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprach-
lebens (hereafter Grundfragen), perhaps even more than Saussure’s
Course the chief influence on his work—he dedicated the book to
Wegener—the observation that “the purpose of speech is always to influ-
ence the will or the perception of someone in a way which the speaker
considers to be of importance” (Grundfragen 67; see TSL, 237).5 Indeed,
of behavior,’ while Wittgenstein ‘still held his copy theory of language’” (5). Tiles (1988) and
Burke (1994) follow the thread of language through Dewey’s work. Mead’s reflections on lan-
guage are embedded in his general reflections on the genesis and nature of symbolization. Rosen-
thal and Bourgeois (1991) devote a chapter to ‘the life of language.’ Joas 1997 and Cook 1993
should be consulted for sympathetic and nuanced accounts of Mead’s work as a whole, includ-
ing the place of language in it. Myers (1986, 256–62) synthesizes James’s take on the relation
between language and meaning. Bird 1986 has helpful comparative comments on James’s treat-
ment of ‘meaning.’ Stevens 1974 remains one of the most lucid accounts of James’s reflections on
‘the foundations of meaning.’ These works will lead one directly back to the foundational texts.
5. Wegener’s entire book appeared in Abse 1971, 111–293. Page references are to the Eng-
lish translation. Abse’s own contribution to this volume, “Language Disorder in Mental Dis-
ease,” unfortunately lies outside the scope of the present discussion, but is well worth consulting.
self-seeking and altruism were “the human attributes from which speech
obtains its driving force” (TSL, 68), a point repeatedly stressed by Wegener
throughout his groundbreaking studies, which also had a strong influence
upon Bühler. It should be noted that Dewey also specified egocentrism
versus participation as the pole defining possible sharing of a situation.
To explain a complete act of speech, consequently, Bühler and Gardiner
delineated four inextricably connected elements or factors: the speaker
and his intentions and purposes, the listener to whom the act of speech is
directed, the linguistic signs mediating between the partners in the semi-
otic exchange, and the objects or states of affairs upon which the linguis-
tic signs bear. Now, as Gardiner put it, for an act of speech, using a
pregiven set of socially constituted and produced signs, to attain its goal
or to realize its purpose, “all four factors must be in the same situation,
that is to say accessible to one another in either a material or a spiritual
sense” (TSL, 49). This material or spiritual accessibility is Gardiner’s anal-
ogon to Bühler’s two-field theory of language, with its radical, indeed
functionally insuperable, distinction between “perceptual pointing and
presenting”—the deictic field—and “abstraction and the conceptual grasp
of the world” (TL, v)—the symbolic field. This distinction, Bühler read-
ily admitted, parallels the Kantian distinction between intuition and con-
cept, which also guided Ernst Cassirer’s analysis of language in the first
volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Deixis and symbolization
are also indispensable, and not conflatable, components of a Peircean
account of language as a distinctive form of semiosis.
While Bühler granted that the doctrine of linguistic fields was not
something new in itself, he did think that his semiotically grounded and
related two-field theory—based on the distinction between deixis and
symbolization as two radically different modi of signification—was a real
advance, just as Gardiner, following Wegener, insisted upon the indis-
pensability of shared situations for the success of any speech act. “The
general conditions of speech,” Gardiner writes, “remain the same at all
times and all places. Wegener’s standpoint, like my own, is dominated by
the notion of the importance of the ‘situation,’” for in light of the intrin-
sically social orientation of speech, insofar as its original goal and target is
the listener, “a listener’s comprehension is based primarily upon the situ-
ation in which he finds himself; this provides the foundation for all his
His goal is to draw out the implications of Wegener’s work for analytic theory, a topic on which
I am not able to pass a grounded judgment.
deductions” (TSL, 127). Now, for Bühler, his two fields are “the two
sources that in every case contribute to the precise interpretation of utter-
ances” (TL, 149), namely, the situation (in Bühler’s sense), which as intu-
itive is determined through deixis in all its forms and which involves some
sort of material or existential connection between the speaker and hearer,
and the general context, the ‘syntactic’ or syntagmatic or semantic matrix
in which symbols are to be ordered, involving a ‘spiritual’ connection
between speaker and hearer. Syntactic and semantic structures constitute
and generate the contextual field, which Bühler even called a Gewebe, or
web, paralleling Gardiner’s decision to say that “concrete speech is noth-
ing more than another name for ‘text’” (TSL, 329). The web of meaning
is itself a web of fields and contexts.
For any linguistic sign to succeed in its communicative function, then,
Bühler and Gardiner argued, following Wegener’s lead, that it must be
embedded either in a ‘situation’ or a ‘field’ shared by the interlocutors.
No philosophy of language worthy of the name can ignore this existential
condition, which corresponds to the lived fore-structure of the linguistic
subject, thematized by Heidegger as fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-
grasping.6 Now, it is clear that the field or the situation, while social and
objective, is something external to the individual linguistic signs them-
selves. As Bühler showed at length in the second part of Theory of Lan-
guage, in an analysis still not adverted to in philosophical accounts of
‘indexical terms,’ the originary use of deictic terms—here, there, I, you,
this, that—would be bereft of sense without the initial spatial and tempo-
ral bond—a Peircean existential connection—between speaker and hearer.
The original role these terms play in language games is to identify some-
thing by a fusion of their conceptual content and the actual presence of
the ‘object’ referred to, including the linguistic subject. Indeed, prior to
any philosophy of the subject, ‘I’ refers, by the physical quality of the
voice itself, to the speaker. Whatever else this ‘I’ is, is another matter. The
deictic field, first of all a social field, is the primary home of these terms.
This is the situation of presence, in Gardiner’s terminology. It makes up,
so to speak, the basis situation for semiotic exchange, and it is within this
situation that the fundamentally diacritical function of language, indeed of
6. “Take the affirmation He was a very stately man. Around the word stately cluster mem-
ories and valuations of various and peculiar kinds, memories with which ethical and aesthetic
judgments are inextricably mixed. In this region of speech words are paramount and there are no
real synonyms. Substitute dignified, majestic, or imposing, and the thing said, though not alto-
gether different, is modified to an appreciable extent” (TSL, 54).
all sign use, first becomes clear. The central focus of Wegener’s language
theory, and a fortiori of Gardiner’s, is that a linguistic utterance is funda-
mentally a diacritical act that segments a shared mental or social space—
or time—and asserts, in the first case deictically, something new. But this
novelty must not be looked for merely or exclusively within the linguis-
tic signs themselves and their conceptual contents. Deixis is a matter of
referring. We must look in the direction the signs are pointing. As Gar-
diner sees the matter, it is the situation that “alone can effectuate the ref-
erence of a word” (TSL, 60), though there is a sharp distinction between
‘situation’ and ‘thing-meant’ (82), for the situation is not a factor of speech
“but the setting in which speech can alone become effective” (49). This, of
course, is a central Deweyan and Meadian point. Gardiner spends very
little time on Bühler’s fundamental distinction between the deictic field
and the symbolic field, though there are sure points of entry in his own
language theory for such a distinction. As Gardiner puts it, “verbal con-
text [that is, the linguistically defined deictic and symbolic fields] is not in
itself a situation, but together with gesture and tone of voice is the princi-
pal means of showing the situation” (51). The emphasis on gesture and
tone of voice, moreover, intersects with his extensive treatment of elocu-
tional form. Elocutional form plays a role in the differentiation of the tri-
chotomy of semantic functions that Bühler’s organon-model is meant to
display and ground.
‘Situations’ and ‘fields,’ while overlapping, are not identical categories.
There is a parallel, even isomorphism, between Gardiner’s ‘situation of
presence,’ the basis situation, and what Bühler calls demonstratio ad oculos,
that is, the indexical pointing out of something that lies within the shared
visual field. But Gardiner’s further distinctions between the situation of
common knowledge, the linguistic situation, and the situation of imagina-
tion are not exactly the same, either in intent or in effect, as Bühler’s chief
distinctions. The ‘situation of common knowledge’ and the ‘linguistic
situation’ encompass what Gardiner calls ‘spiritual accessibility’: the
necessity of a shared language or framework or participation in a common
code or form of life, itself considered as the bearer of a common field of
meanings that are the shared conceptual instruments used to focus upon
the world, to give it sense, and to bring it under intellectual control. They
also refer to all those shared items of knowledge that make it possible to
converse without spelling everything out, a crucial factor in understand-
ing the differentiation of subject and predicate and the root of Gardiner’s
exploitation of Wegener’s notion of a predicational nexus as the key to the
sentence. The ‘situation of imagination’ overlaps Bühler’s demonstratio

am Phantasma or ‘imagination-oriented deixis,’ but it is not thematized
within the framework of a theory of language-defined deictic fields, as
Bühler’s is. Gardiner’s situation of imagination in fact comprises—as in
his example He must have known that his speculations would end badly—
all four situations at once: the situation of the utterance, the situation of
common knowledge, the linguistic situation, and the situation of imagi-
nation as a kind of mental precondition for the imaginative projection of
the modally qualified assertion. Here we have, developed in rather sub-
lime philosophical innocence, a big chunk of Wittgensteinian insights on
language as belonging to and being conditioned by forms of life. These
four situations manifest the complexity of the linguistic subject in a
straightforward way and take aim at accounts of language that ignore all
those surrounding factors that enable it to do its work.
One of the most philosophically rich points of Bühler’s and Gardiner’s
approaches is a clear, systematic, and nonmystifying account of the fun-
damental radical trichotomy of linguistic and semantic functions that
form the matrix of a fully human speech event. Bühler presented a now
famous schema for visualizing the structure of a total linguistic action and
for illustrating the necessity of at least a trichotomy of semantic functions.
This schema later became the starting point of Roman Jakobson’s poten-
tiation into six (adding to Bühler’s representational, expressive, and
appellative functions the poetic, the phatic, and the metalingual) in his
famous essay “Linguistics and Poetics” (in Innis 1985). The schema does
much more than relate the various semantic functions to their funda-
ments. It also illuminates the role of diacritical abstraction in the very
constitution of the linguistic sign, as we shall see.
Bühler explains the diagram shown in Figure 1 in the following fashion:
The circle in the middle symbolizes the concrete acoustic phe-

nomenon. Three variable factors in it go to give it the rank of a sign
in three different manners. The sides of the inscribed triangle sym-
bolize these three factors. In one way the triangle encloses less
than the circle (thus illustrating the principle of abstractive rele-
vance). In another way it goes beyond the circle to indicate that
what is given to the senses always receives an apperceptive com-
plement. The parallel lines symbolize the semantic functions of
the (complex) language sign. It is a symbol by virtue of its coordi-
nation to objects and states of affairs, a symptom (Anzeichen, indi-
objects and states of affairs
representation symbol
m sign
pto al
sym
sender receiver
on app
essi eal
e xpr
Fig. 1
cium: index) by virtue of its dependence on the sender, whose

inner states it expresses, and a signal by virtue of its appeal to the
hearer, whose inner or outer behaviour it directs as do other com-
municative signs. (TL, 28)
The representational, the expressive, and the appellative (or conative)

functions of language, which are limned and grounded here, are identical
to those distinguished by Gardiner, for in addition to being directed to the
perception or to the behavior of the addressee, a linguistic sign can also
reveal, spontaneously or intentionally, the interiority and subjectivity of
the speaker. That is, in Peirce’s terms, it is an index.
Gardiner, for his part, also offers a diagram (Fig. 2). Just what semantic
relation or function is operative in any particular utterance must be estab-
lished inferentially by the hearer upon the basis of a multiplicity of clues.
The three general types of utterances or classes of linguistic action are not
mutually exclusive. One speech event can accomplish all three functions at
the same time (indeed all six, or even seven if we accept Karl Popper’s
notion that the ‘argumentative function’ is a separate one). Gardiner notes
that they tend to merge into one another, a position that parallels Bühler’s
contention that the speech-action is a unity and that the various functions
ascribed to it are abstract moments read off from it. “All four factors of
speaker, listener, words, and things are invariably interacting, so that any
type of sentence cannot fail to possess, at least in rudimentary form, also

the characteristics of the other types” (TSL, 190). Indeed, “the total situa-
tion, including the nature of the thing referred to by the words, must
always be taken into account in determining sentence-quality, and the lis-
tener’s interpretation is always a matter of reasoning” (199), even if,
because of the mechanization of speech, “the listener is seldom aware that
he has been engaged in any such logical process” (199). Contemporary
work on text theory bears this out.
I noted that while Bühler and Gardiner both recognized a multiplicity
of linguistic functions and that while their work is open to expansion
through the differentiation of further functions, as Jakobson saw, the pre-
dominant, though not exclusive, focus of their own analyses was the rep-
resentational function, the intersubjective exchange of signs to mediate in
a speech situation an intelligible content, meaning, or sense concerning
objects and states of affairs. In the terms of speech-act theory, they are
concerned with locutionary acts.
These insights are strong reminders of the complexity of a speech event
and a safeguard against attempts to interpret language as a free-floating
chain of signifiers. Certain strands of ordinary-language philosophy, of
Wittgensteinian and non-Wittgensteinian orientation, arrived, by differ-
ent means, at fundamentally the same results.
2. The Constitution of the Linguistic Sign

Signs themselves, the production and exchange of which in various modal-
ities effect a linguistic action, joining together speaker and addressee, have
a complex and philosophically illuminating constitution for Bühler and
Gardiner, both of whom accepted in their own ways, but without capitu-
lating to associationism, the Saussurian image of the two-faced, or Janus,
character of words, which make up a vast stock of articulatory and sense-
giving possibilities. They also took rather different stances toward Saus-
sure’s cardinal distinction between langue and parole. Bühler focused on
the socially produced ideality aspect of langue, and Gardiner on the
act/event character of parole. Word-signs and the rules of their syntactic
combination and intonation constitute for them, as for Saussure, the
domain of langue, the transsubjective region or system of commonalty
that can be incorporated into dictionaries and lexica and systematized in
books of grammar. As Gardiner puts it, using an image also used by Bühler
UTTERANCES
Sentences
SPEAKER LISTENER
(1) Exclamations demands calling for
information action
(3) Questions (4) Requests
THINGS
(2) Statements
Fig. 2
and that has now become rather common, words are like coins (TSL,
120), instituted to effect the exchange of ideas and the mutual communi-
cation of wishes, desires, commands, inquiries, and so forth, and as such
they constitute a vast virtual domain of sense. The virtuality of meaning
is, as is well known, a central notion in Peircean semiotics. The actual
domain of sense-giving, however, is the utterance (see Voloshinov 1973),
which Gardiner, under the rubric of the sentence, classified as the primary
unit of speech or parole and which Bühler, in his axiomatization of the
principles of linguistic research, showed to be the essential second com-
ponent in his two-class model of universal representational instruments,
composed of lexical units of sense organized in a field of relations consti-
tuting the sentential and syntactic structures, although Bühler also con-
ceived of utterances as actions (Handlungen), a key notion in his language
theory as a whole.
It is a common thesis of both Bühler and Gardiner, arrived at rather
differently, however, that linguistic signs as socially objective unities and
as complete units of sense and the primary units of articulate meaning
exist only in and through the consciousness of the speakers of any partic-
ular language—as a real possession of consciousness—while the material
tokens of the signs, embodied in particular sets of articulate sounds,
merely remind us, as Gardiner puts it, of the words themselves as psychi-
cal entities, which exist as types. Both Peirce and Saussure made similar
points, which is of more than cursory philosophical interest. These types,
so writes Gardiner, are crystallizations of effective communicative
exchanges that have taken on stable external forms and that can, indeed
must, be recognized on the basis of diacritical marks even if, as is normally

the case, we are unable to specify formally and explicitly the criteria we
are using to distinguish such units. Not only are meanings normally
‘transparent,’ the carriers of meaning also are. Phonological analysis, as
Voloshinov also argued, is not an intrinsic component of everyday lin-
guistic exchange. Nevertheless, as Bühler showed definitively, these crys-
tallized, though not reified, structures are grasped by, and rest upon, a
peculiar act of abstraction, and a word or linguistic structure for him, just
as for Gardiner, cannot be identified with its material realization. As
Bühler insisted in Theory of Language, “whenever something is a sign, it
is only abstract factors by virtue of which the concrete thing functions
‘as’ a sign” (40), a position echoed in his seminal essay “Phonetik und
Phonologie,” with its central idea of the principle of abstractive relevance,
one of the pivotal notions of his language theory. “In the case of meaning-
bearing signs things are such that the sensible thing, this perceptually
accessible something existing here and now, does not have to enter into its
semantic function with the whole fullness of its concrete properties.
Rather is it the case that only this or that abstract moment is relevant for
its calling to function as a sign. Put in simple words, that is the principle
of abstractive relevance” (Bühler 1931, 38; my translation).
Gardiner can write that “it is only inaccurately, though by a sort of
necessary inaccuracy, that the name of ‘words’ is given to the articulate
sounds which pass between speaker and listener. There is no more funda-
mental truth in the entire theory of speech” (TSL, 69). Although Gardiner
was relatively innocent of phonology, which numerous philosophers
influenced by the Saussurian trajectory (Merleau-Ponty and Derrida
come most readily to mind) have adverted to and exploited, taking it as an
accepted fact that sign-users can perform the necessary diacrisis, in prac-
tice he recognized, though he did not try to indicate its philosophical bite,
the crucial distinction between phones and phonemes. He noted that
because psychical life—the locus of meaning—is “completely inalienable”
and because the “impossibility of transferring thought is absolute and
insurmountable,” it is only by an inference, that is, an abductive leap,
from his own thought that the listener can conclude that the speaker has
been thinking of the same thing, “for what passes in speech between the
two persons concerned is mere sound, bereft of all sense. . . . It follows
that the physical results of articulate speech, not possessing the side of
meaning, cannot be actual words” (69). The “articulate sounds appear to
be physical, audible, copies of one aspect of their psychical originals” (70).
These psychical originals are “something relatively permanent, wide-

spread, and capable of being possessed in common by a multitude of indi-
viduals”; that is, they make up a common stock, and hence “words
transcend, and are altogether less evanescent entities than, the sounds
which issue from a speaker’s mouth and vanish into nothingness soon
after they have reached the listener’s ear” (TSL, 70). Here Gardiner is reit-
erating the type/token thesis that underlies general semiotic theory (see
Eco 1976, 178–88) and appropriating Saussure’s idea of a sign—as a social
convention with a fundamentally psychic reality—for his own use. Thus,
while phonology and an attendant theory of abstraction based on it
played a central role in Bühler’s work—“The phenomenon of abstraction
takes a key position in sematology, one to which we shall repeatedly have
to return” (TL, 45)—Gardiner was satisfied with rather cursory allusions
to the factor of ‘selective attention,’ “another, more equivocal name” for
which is “‘abstraction’” (TSL, 48 n, with a reference to Th. Ribot’s L’évo-
lution des idées générales). Still, in the “Retrospect 1951” he referred to
the fact that “had I been able to carry out my project of a second volume,
I should have supplemented my conception of an ‘area of meaning’—to
be taken up below—with that of an ‘area of sound.’ Within the latter all
the identifiable variations would have been grouped, the recognized ‘best’
pronunciation occupying the centre, while pronunciations which did not
allow of the word’s identification would have been banished outside the
periphery” (TSL, 338). Although this text refers, in the first instance, to
the diacritical function of phonemes, Gardiner’s extensive discussion of
elocutional form—accent, emphasis, rhythm, speed of articulation, high-
low pitch, and so forth—shows him to be well aware of what later
research called suprasegmental phonemes. Bühler had also seen that,
within specific cases in which the diacritical functions of phonemes have
been extinguished but where the situation is clear—that is, in certain cases
of the empractical use of language—“some complex of characteristics or a
single feature suffices to identify them” (TL, 285; see TSL, 203 ff.),
though, to be sure, “the social calling of the acoustic images in intersub-
jective exchange categorically requires a certain degree of uniformity”
(TL, 286). Otherwise there would be no diacrisis.
Accordingly, Bühler had distinguished two radically different types of
sense-bearing moments in the linguistic sign—internal to the linguistic
sign itself—phonemic and Gestalt moments. The grasp of these manifests
two very different powers of subjectivity: the power of diacritical abstrac-
tion and the power of Gestalt apprehension. Words, on Bühler’s account,
have both a Klanggesicht (an acoustic face) and a phonematische Signale-

ment (set of descriptive phonemic features). These two characteristics are
social facts, guaranteeing with some other determinants what Gardiner
called the locutional and elocutional (we might say ‘expressive’) forms of
an utterance. The locutional form—of a word at least—is fundamentally
dependent upon its phonemic markers, but is also carried, when the situ-
ation makes this form of recognition impossible, by tonal or Gestalt
moments and by inferences from the situation or linguistic context. Inas-
much as, Gardiner says, “intonation has . . . priority everywhere over
syntax” (TSL, 161)—indeed even over word-form, as, for example, in the
expression the bóy king, where boy, when accented, functions adjectivally
even though it is a noun—Gardiner also thought that the Klanggesicht of
a word and of a whole utterance could carry the essential semantic weight.
Especially in his discussion of commands and exclamations Gardiner has
given a good analysis of just how elocutional form constitutes the seman-
tic core of a word or linguistic string. Although this problem lies outside
the explicit scope of this chapter, it should be noted that Dewey also rec-
ognized this ‘musical element,’ not just in language but also in art.
Neither Bühler nor Gardiner inordinately magnified and extended the
Saussurian thesis that langue is composed of a system of differences (Saus-
sure 1986, 120), which have no substantial reality in themselves, being
defined by mutual oppositions, a theme popular with later structuralist
currents and that was also explored at length and illuminatingly by Mer-
leau-Ponty (see Merleau-Ponty 1964c, 3–83). Bühler’s organon-model of
language, and Gardiner’s idea concerning the essentially instrumental
character of words, demand that the diacritical moments be coded,
socially constituted—hence objective and intersubjective—elements in
which the linguistic sign-users participate. Bühler assimilated them to
species, as thematized in the Scholastic tradition, but eschewed ontologi-
cal aspects of the species problematic. The ideality of the abstract elements,
which function as a social bond, is socially produced and historically vari-
able. It is valid only for specific periods of time and for specific groups
who are constituted by their use of the same elements and the same code.
Bühler was more interested in the implications of the radical and paradig-
matic distinction between phonetics and phonology for concept forma-
tion and for modeling acts of abstraction than in doing concrete
phonological work himself. Phonology pointed directly to the perceptual
powers of the linguistic subject and to his abilities to discriminate amidst
an ever-changing flow of sound phenomena stable units of sense, much as,
to speak in Gardinerian terms, a botanist or a taxonomist recognizes

species and classes of animals and plants amidst an ever changing proces-
sion of distinct and different individuals. As Bühler wrote: “Phonemes
belong to the class of marks, features, criteria, notae; they are phonetic
marks in the sound image of the word and correspond to the features of
the things, which have always been known in logic and were called prop-
erties, in Latin ‘notae’” (TL, 278).
Now, for Bühler, “it is more important to recognize how phonological
analysis has newly been reworked to become a procedure that shows
promise of becoming exemplary for a broad range of tasks in the analysis of
intersubjective processes, and that it leads to a new concept of elements”
(TL, 275). Our grasp of words as units of sense (Sinneinheiten) parallels in
a remarkable fashion our apprehension of meaning-spaces and object
domains upon which words, as distinctive units, bear. There is a sort of
structural isomorphism between the expression plane and the content plane
in Bühler, a position that is implicit in Gardiner but explicit in Bühler.
Showing the heuristic fertility of phonology is one of Bühler’s major
contributions.
If linguists and theoreticians of language today feel renewed

courage to intervene on their own terms in the epoch-making strife
among the best thinkers on the problem of abstraction, they can
adduce good reasons for doing so. If one is able to divert the eye of
the theorist of abstraction from the things that are named to the
naming character of the naming words, to the acoustic structures
themselves, one will gain new opportunities to shed light on the
problem. There is a simple reason for this: these structures are not
just found ready-made, but are produced by the epistemic subject.
They are produced by every speaker of a language precisely so
that his interlocutors can recognize each as this or that phonetic
structure and distinguish it from others. That is the great opportu-
nity for those who want to attack the problem of abstraction anew
in their capacity as linguists, using the constitutive facts of phonol-
ogy. (TL, 288)
Indeed, the essentially mentalistic, though also essentially social, ori-

entation of Bühler’s and Gardiner’s language theories, which is even
limned in their discussion of the fundamentally psychic nature of the lin-
guistic sign, becomes especially clear in their theories of word-meanings,
between which there are not only remarkable parallels but also insights of
critical importance for a pragmatist reflection on the epistemological
problem of how language bears upon experience.
3. Words and Meanings

A pragmatist approach to language would accept one of Gardiner’s central
and most important theses, which now has become commonplace in light
of the Wittgensteinian revolution and for which Bühler has an equivalent:
that words are bearers of meaning-areas rather than bearers of strictly
defined Platonic forms or essences. As Gardiner put it, in a way that binds
Dewey’s pragmatism, Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, and
Wittgenstein’s deep reflections on language, “every word is a heritage
from the past, and has derived its meaning from application to a countless
number of particulars differing among themselves either much or little.
When now I utter such a word, I throw at the listener’s head the entire
residue of all its previous applications. Indeed, how could I do other-
wise?” (TSL, 35). Accordingly, “in uttering a word, the speaker necessar-
ily offers to the listener the whole range of its meaning” (35), the
specifications coming either from the extralinguistic situations, including
the situations of common knowledge, the Bühlerian Umfelder (sur-
rounding fields), or from the synsemantical environment, a Bühlerian
context, in which the word is found. “If the words Help yourselves! are
heard in a sermon, a very different interpretation will be given to the verb
help than if the same words are heard at a tea-party” (35). In his discussion
of the appearance of ‘meaning-spheres’ both in perception and in lan-
guage, Bühler had also noted: “When it becomes manifest that our knowl-
edge is ordered in spheres, this indicates in general that there are many
cases in which words are used when the extension of a concept, that is, the
domain of application of the ordering sign, is somehow delimited, and not
the content” (TL, 221).
Indeed, Gardiner pointed out that “we can perhaps best picture to our-
selves the meaning of a word such as horse by considering it as a territory
or area over which the various possibilities of correct application are
mapped out.” While, as Gardiner notes, horse excludes cow as “off the
map” (TSL, 36), since in everyday, nontechnical language they have no
area in common, “within the legitimate range of the word-meaning horse
the various things meant will be differently grouped, some rather near the
borderline, and others distinctly central” (37). Prancing steeds, towel
horses, and gymnasium horses all fall within the domain of application,
but certainly not all lie close to the center of the semantic space. As we
move from toy horses through gymnasium horses to towel horses, there
is an increased feeling of strain—note the subjective reference—since “in
terms of our map, these applications grow increasingly peripheral” (37).
The most important Bühlerian analogue to a Gardinerian meaning-area is
perhaps the notion of a synchytic concept, that is, a concept that has no
sharp boundaries and bears remarkable similarities, perhaps not at all acci-
dental, to the ideas developed so fruitfully by Wittgenstein as “family
resemblances.” Our words remain in currency even when the objects to
which they apply have become maximally differentiated and multiply
formed by the advance of culture. If we try, for example, to pin down pre-
cisely the range of objects to which the word-meaning book can apply—
notebooks, magazines, bound volumes of magazines, hard- and softcover
books, even manuscripts—we see a continuous interweaving of charac-
teristics and properties but no strict Platonic ‘essence.’ “The meaning of a
word is not identical with an ‘idea’ in the Platonic sense” (44), a point that
lies at the heart of Dewey’s and Wittgenstein’s projects. “Word-meanings
possess nothing of that self-consistency and homogeneity which are char-
acteristic of ‘ideas.’ Ideas, if attainable at all, are the result of long and toil-
some search on the part of philosophers” (44), whose tasks vis-à-vis
meanings are not merely legislative but also, perhaps even predominantly,
interpretive and hermeneutical. Dewey engages the essentialistic doctrine
of primary linguistic meaning in a severe critique of essences as freestand-
ing objects. Essence is for him the “distilled import of existence” (Dewey
[1925] 1988a, 144). It is, as formulated in language, the “significant thing
about it, its intellectual voucher, the means of inference and extensive
transfer, and object of esthetic intuition. In it, feeling and understanding
are one; the meaning of a thing is the sense it makes” (144).
Neither Bühler nor Gardiner, however, held to any naive realist mirror
conception of knowledge, which is much opposed by the pragmatist
approach. “Speech is, in fact, at once a reproductive and a creative activ-
ity” (TSL, 251), and “the speaker always creates a considerable propor-
tion of the things-meant as he proceeds with his speech” (252).7 In fact,
“the thing-meant is itself never shown, but has to be identified by the lis-
7. Dewey writes in a cognate passage in “Does Reality Possess Practical Character?”:
If one believes that the world itself is in transformation, why should the notion that
knowledge is the most important mode of its modification and the only organ of its
guidance be a priori obnoxious? . . . If knowing be a change in a reality, then the more
tener on the basis of the word-meanings submitted to him for that pur-
pose,” the end result being that the listener grasps in his “mind’s eye the
real article intended” (34).8 Quoting Husserl’s Logical Investigations to
the effect that “the expression denotes (names) the object through its
meaning” (LI ii, 49), Gardiner captures, in effect, though not terminolog-
ically, Frege’s pivotal distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung (with
which Husserl was eminently familiar), though there are occasional epis-
temological crudities in Gardiner’s formulation of the issues, something
that rarely occurs in Bühler, who had a technical philosophical education.
Nevertheless, Gardiner’s formulations are insightful even if perhaps a little
misleading for the epistemologically naive. For example, as he put it, “of
great importance for the theory of speech is the fact, already noted, that
the verbal formulation of all but the simplest things itself involves an
alteration of them, a crystallization as it were” (TSL, 55). Since, however,
the map is not the territory but an abstraction, it is not quite apt to con-
nect crystallization with the alteration of something preexisting the effort
at articulation. This crystallization is, in fact, a metabasis eis allo genos,
which Cassirer made the focal point of his own approach to language. A
veritable transformation and reconfiguration of direct experience is the
result of the arrival of articulation and of the selective attention built into
the construction of articulate units of sense. Here one could profitably
return to Polanyi’s profound reflections on the tacit matrix of articulation,
knowing reveals this change, the more transparent, the more adequate, it is. And if all
existences are in transition, then the knowledge which treats them as if they were some-
thing of which knowledge is a kodak fixation is just the kind of knowledge which
refracts and perverts them. ([1908] 1998a, 125, 126)
8. Gardiner puts a special weight on the fact that it is by reason of its dependence on the
richness of the thing-meant that also the scope of the linguistic indications of it must be
restricted. “Frequently the word cannot be dismissed without serious injury to, or even total loss
of, the vital features of the thing spoken about. . . . Here, then, we have the tool figuring as a nec-
essary and inseparable part of the manufactured goods. If words are always instrumental, some-
times at least they are instruments of a very exceptional kind. . . . The fact of the matter is that
many of the things about which one speaks are so intangible, so elusive, that the presence of the
word itself is necessary if the thing is to be focused at all. . . . Any abstraction, however, can
hardly be held in mind unless the word denoting it persists as its outward and perceptible sign.
. . . Even in abstract statements, the word-meaning can never be identical with the thing-meant,
no matter how closely welded together the two may be. A word-meaning may crystallize in our
minds a thought which has long eluded expression, but that thought is substantival in nature, and
the word-meaning is adjectival. The word-meaning can only describe what is meant—not be it.
The fact of word-consciousness does not contradict the instrumental character of speech which
I have been at such pains to demonstrate” (TSL, 54–55).
which had used the conceptual resources supplied by Bühler and Gar-
diner (Polanyi 1958, 69–131).
The apprehension of experience through articulate units of sense,
embodied in material carriers of meaning, is also illuminatingly thema-
tized by Bühler by recourse to the model of perceptual apprehension,
though neither for him nor for Gardiner does language, being structurally
under the law of mediation, have any simplistically conceived iconic or
mimetic relation to experience itself. This is also, we will see, the very
heart of Cassirer’s account of language as symbolic form and ‘information
technology’ par excellence. The diacritically important phonic elements in
the linguistic sign are analogous to the defining marks or notae appre-
hended in the classification of perceptual types and to the semantic prop-
erties or markers that, taken together, constitute the meaning-space of the
linguistic sign. The linguistic sign itself is not just actively constituted by
an act of abstraction, but its purpose is to allow both the speaker and
addressee alike to perform an act of abstraction with respect to the object
domain itself. Thus Bühler can say concerning the fusion and interpene-
tration of language and experience:
The linguistic fixation and formulation of the perceived states of

affairs is prepared and rooted in the processes that we usually call
perceptions and which we tend to distinguish from the ‘following’
formulation in language in a manner that is rather more sharply
defined than the facts of the matter permit. . . . As an orientation
implement that becomes manifest in verbal intercourse, human
language potentiates the performance of the often unformulated
natural signals and symptoms that we gather from things and com-
municative partners through perception.9 (TL, 252)
Bühler and Gardiner were concerned with rather different aspects of

the structure of symbolization, and accordingly they emphasized rather
different factors. Bühler’s peculiar focus remained bound to the paradig-
matic and heuristic role of phonology, while Gardiner persistently
brought the necessity of application to the fore. In his earliest book-
length semiotically oriented work, Die Krise der Psychologie, Bühler had
9. This theme is discussed with detail and nuance in Bühler’s Die Krise der Psychologie
within the framework of a semiotic model of perception and lies at the heart of the formal fea-
tures of sense-giving and sense-reading established in my Consciousness and the Play of Signs.
insisted on “the clearly recognizable and never mistaken duality of phonic

image and word-meaning . . . ; this analogy and the complex relation
between sign and meaning which is derived from it is ever to be found in
the most complex variations in all sense-filled experiences” (33).
This idea is given visual form in a schema presented in Theory of Lan-
guage (see Fig. 3). It is not the flatus vocis itself, represented on the left
side of diagram, but only its socially constituted and shared relevant
moments, symbolized by the shaded part, that are apprehended as signif-
icant, and it is not the total object but only the relevant moments, sym-
bolized by the shaded part, that are intended by the word-sign through its
selective and abstracting conceptual focus. Gardiner puts the matter this
way: “When a word is applied in speech, one particular tract of its area of
meaning becomes protruded, as it were, to characterize the thing-meant.
. . . The word-meaning and the word-form must be conceived as casting
jets of light upon the thing as intended by the speaker, revealing its true
characters as so intended or meant” (TSL, 149).
Fig. 3
Hence, the application of any linguistic sign to experience will demand

acts of selective attention, of abstraction, since the language user must
determine the appropriateness and scope of an application. Because of the
absolute nonidentity of all individual objects in the world, it is up to the
language user to select out those criterial characteristics that ground the
application. The point, as I have already noted, has been well made by
Polanyi in his chapter on ‘articulation,’ which is dependent on both Büh-
ler’s and Gardiner’s books: “To classify things in terms of features for
which we have names, as we do in talking about things, requires the same
kind of connoisseurship as the naturalist must have for identifying speci-
mens of plants and animals. Thus the art of speaking precisely, by apply-
ing a rich vocabulary exactly, resembles the delicate discrimination
practised by the expert taxonomist” (1958, 81).
Gardiner thematizes two different ways of determining the relation of
word-meaning to the thing-meant. “Either the word expresses the class of
the thing-meant, or else it qualifies the thing-meant in the manner that a

predicative adjective might qualify it” (TSL, 37). A word’s class-name
character comes from the fact that its nature requires it to be “utilizable
over and over again in many different contexts and situations” (TSL, 38),
a requirement thematized by Polanyi under the principles of poverty and
iterability, and in this sense “every word without exception is a class-
name” (37), including, Gardiner insists—polemicizing against Bühler—
exclamations (118–19, 315–19). Gardiner gave no account of how we may
conceive of the processes by which classes are themselves generated,
something Bühler does in the semiotic mode, and it seems that the rather
more extensive discussion of meaning-areas in Gardiner can be fruitfully
supplemented by Bühler’s systematic exploitation of the phonological
model and in this way saved from a charge of nominalism.
The properly adjectival character of not just every word but also of
every utterance, a key to Gardiner’s insistence on the centrality of predi-
cation, arises from the fact that “a word expresses the speaker’s reaction to
the thing spoken about,” a reaction that qualifies—as an adjective does—
the thing-meant, which may be known in other ways. The so-called
“‘parts of speech’ are really distinctions in the ways in which the things
meant by words are presented to the speaker” (TSL, 39), and these dis-
tinctions can be thought of substantivally if it should be necessary. In the
last analysis these two ways of looking upon words are the same, “for the
class is an assemblage of things united by virtue of a common attribute,”
although, as Gardiner says in a passage reminiscent of one of Wittgen-
stein’s most discussed points, “there is no reason why that attribute
should not take the complex form ‘being of the type A or B or C or D’”
(43–44). Indeed, “the meanings of words often cover applications between
which it is impossible to discover any point of resemblance,” as in the
application of the word file to the “stiff, pointed wires on which docu-
ments are run for keeping and also to the front-rank men followed by
other men in a line straight behind them” (43). Gardiner’s claim is well
taken even if the example perhaps leaves something to be desired. Resem-
blance here—as Nelson Goodman and Max Black also noted—is due to a
peculiar abstractive act that focuses merely upon the factor of linearity,
something that surely overspills the classes of “men in line” and “docu-
ments in order,” and perhaps it would be better to say here that resem-
blance is imposed or constructed rather than merely passively read out of
the things-meant. This is an idea of general epistemological import,
belonging to a participatory theory of knowledge.
There is, then, with Bühler and Gardiner a common and indeed rather
straightforward insistence upon the creative, selective, abstractive aspect
of the linguistic apprehension of experience. Different demands of con-
sciousness—and of social life—elicit different criteria of linguistic appre-
hension and application. As Gardiner put it, we do not use a chronometer
to meet an appointment for tea, and likewise, for Bühler, the normal use
of language in everyday intercourse is neither magical nor scientific, but
something in between, fluctuating as the conditions for making oneself
understood and for effecting one’s understanding shift and change. In line
with Bühler’s and Gardiner’s essentially instrumental and pragmatist con-
ception of word-signs, such semiotic tools are particular sorts of lenses or
filters that are themselves adaptable and functional.
Due to Gardiner’s failure to finish his second volume, which was to be
devoted to the theory of the word, a detailed comparison between him
and Bühler on this topic is not possible.10 The chief characteristics of
words for Bühler—that they have a phonematic structure and are capable
of being related in fields (TL, 297)—are only hinted at in Gardiner’s work.
While I have already noted the limited extent of Gardiner’s awareness of
phonology, his situation theory does still allow us to see a Gardinerian
analogue to Bühler’s more highly differentiated and developed field the-
ory. The point of intersection concerns Gardiner’s notion that words—as
the paradigmatic socially constituted units of language—when joined
together into a unified utterance, that is, a sentence, converge upon the
sentence as, so to speak, “planes . . . each at a somewhat different angle”
(TSL, 91). Indeed, a word discloses “its own individual feel and associa-
tions” (90), with its “own separate applications and lines of development”
(92) which it brings to its place in the sentence. In line with his general
thesis of the primacy of feelings and feeling-qualities in linguistic matters
(86)—they are “of paramount importance” (86)—Gardiner can insist that
which feeling-qualities are diacritical is a matter to be determined by each
language’s historically developed structure and by the situation of the
utterance itself. Now, in addition to the root-meaning or radical meaning
of a word, Gardiner recognized, as do most general linguistic theorists,
‘form-meaning’ as a second kind of meaning. “Word-form is the name of
10. Gardiner uses many different images and concepts to characterize words: words are
class-names; words are predicates; words are psychical entities; words are the unities of speech;
words are like “beams of light” (TSL, 51); words are indications of the thing-meant; words are
of more general use than sentences in that they are practical and unlimitedly combinable, can be
combined in other than customary ways and can be applied to new situations (128).
a special kind of meaning which attaches to words over and above their
radical meaning” (130), and, in semantic matters, “felt inner word-form is
decisive” (131). Thus we are confronted with “a fact of high grammatical
importance. The form of a word, like its meaning, is a fact of language, not
of speech” (134). This position is paralleled later in Gardiner’s work by the
further contention that sentence-form, too, is a fact of language, not of
speech (184). But, as we will see, it is “function, not form, which makes a
set of words into a sentence” (184). This is the ultimate foundation of
Gardiner’s opposition to using formal logic as a model for syntax (212), a
truth whose import is still not fully recognized in the language sciences.
Indeed, while inner word-form is a kind of varying overmeaning (TSL,
153), syntax always predominates over word-form, and, further, “intona-
tion has a similar priority everywhere over syntax” (161). Thus, a word,
or any symbol—I am thinking of Bühler’s distinction between a word and
a formant, for example, a case ending—opens up a field of possible envi-
ronments and expectations and feelings of use and meaning. The field of a
deictic word is perceptual, behavioral, or imaginative, since it is a species
of pointing to something ‘accessible’ to speaker and addressee. The field
of a symbol-word, in Bühler’s sense, is conceptual, for it is for the most
part a synsemantical field, the exceptions being when a symbol-sign is
used empractically (that is, in radically curtailed form in a situation) or
symphysically (that is, attached like a label to a ware) (TL, 154). In these
cases the surrounding nonverbal situation supplies the conditions for
understanding the term and functions as complement to the linguistic
utterance itself.
Gardiner did not thematize directly, then, the notion of a synsemanti-
cal Umfeld that would specify word-categories as in ——— man hit the
———. On Bühler’s account we know which types of items from the lex-
icon can fill in the blanks in the sentence, because the words that consti-
tute the core of the utterance have certain field-values or syntactic
valences, opening up certain empty places (Leerstellen) (TL, 173), which
demand to be filled. Their nonfulfillment leaves us with a feeling of
incompletion, a fact that Bühler traced back to our prethematic awareness
of syntactic schemata in the generation of utterances (TL, 253). Since Gar-
diner, however, does not treat this issue explicitly, we must be satisfied
with the hints given above, which are nevertheless illuminating as they
stand.
For both Bühler and Gardiner, and for the modern theory of signs, a
symbol, word, or Begriffszeichen is a specific way of making an abstraction,
of segmenting the experiential and the conceptual fields. It creates a specific

focus on experience by selecting and encapsulating in articulate form certain
important properties and characteristics of the object, namely, those which
‘define’ it adequately for present purposes over against other types of
objects. Just as objects are complex entities, so likewise the semantic struc-
ture of a word—and of an utterance—is itself complex, its semic markers
generating a complicated semantic space, or, in Gardiner’s terminology,
meaning-area, involving as it does a vast range of possible applications (see
Eco 1976, 125–29). While I have noted the parallelism between Bühler’s
notion of a meaning-scope and Gardiner’s notion of a meaning-area and
emphasized their essentially open texture, in a sense rather different from
that of Friedrich Waismann (see Waismann 1965, 226–47), both Bühler and
Gardiner have rather differently focused but complementary accounts of
metaphor. These accounts illustrate in more detailed fashion just how they
conceive of word-meanings and their selective and creative functions. While
Gardiner’s discussion proceeds against the background of his pivotal dis-
tinction between speech and language, Bühler’s discussion is rooted once
again in his perceptual analogy.
4. Notes on Metaphor
Metaphor, for Gardiner, “plays, in the domain of word-meaning, much
the same part as incongruent word-function in the domain of word-form”
(TSL, 165), as in the previously cited the boy king or in the expressions
but me no buts and if me no ifs, where there is a constant shifting from one
syntactic domain to another. Now, as Gardiner puts it in a passage remi-
niscent of Black, Beardsley, Ricoeur, and others, “the chief point wherein
metaphor resembles incongruent word-function is the sense of blending,
of mixture, which arises from it; not a disharmony, however, since the
feeling excited is that of enrichment rather than the contrary. The one
ingredient of the mixture is derived from speech and from the thing-
meant; the other from language and from established semantic usage”
(165). Thus, metaphor as well as incongruent word-function can be
described as “speech obsessed by language” (165), that is, the desire to say
something new and different within a system of pregiven categories (Eco’s
“Swedish stall-bars”; see Eco 1979b, 78) with their own established usage.
This leads to drastic and ‘incongruent’ expressions, a position paralleling
Bühler’s transformation of Hermann Paul’s characterization of metaphor-
ical expression as arising out of an Ausdrucksnot (expressive need) and

issuing into an Ausdrucksdrastik (drastic form of expression). In turn,
each new expression ultimately becomes assimilated to the system
through habituation—it joins the set of socially shared semantic rules for
bringing the manifold of experience into a unity; and then the originally
creative act of speech has become language—“speech is the sole generator
of language” (110)—and the metaphor becomes ‘dead.’
Gardiner noted that the distinction between natural, spontaneous
metaphor and artistic, contrived metaphor is hard to maintain, due to our
lack of knowledge of the historical antecedents of the metaphorical
expression, though Bühler, like Goodman, for example, also noted that
metaphor as such is no Sondererscheinung, no exceptional way in which
meaning appears, but necessarily permeates all concept formation and dis-
course. In Gardiner’s conception the common type of metaphor is made
when “something which is more remote, less concrete, less vivid, is
referred to in terms of something similar which is more familiar, less
abstract, more pictorial” (TSL, 166). Gardiner adds, however, that not all
metaphor is of this type, the reverse relation sometimes (but rarely, he
thinks) obtaining. Gardiner cites a particularly amusing instance of the
latter, from Siegfried Sassoon, on the moon: “But, as her whitening way
aloft she took, I thought she had a pre-dynastic look.” Often, in fact, as
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have shown, deep philological scrutiny
is needed to detect the presence of imagery and linguistic schemata (see
Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987). At any rate,
“metaphor is so natural a phenomenon, that it frequently takes place
unbeknown to its employer” (TSL, 167). Though Gardiner does not the-
matize the psychological processes of grasping similarities, Bühler at least
intimates that they are grounded in our powers of abstractive seeing. Still,
once we become aware of what metaphor does, even if we really do not
know how we do it, it can be, as Gardiner put it in a passage that could be
found in Jakobson, “adopted as a deliberate means of enhancing the inter-
est of a sentence” (167), of, so to speak, making it visible. For Gardiner
metaphor is “a phenomenon of language belonging midway between a
word as used figuratively by an individual speaker and a word of stereo-
typed meaning from which imagery once present has completely van-
ished. The two extremes are separated by any number of intermediate
stages” (168). Although Gardiner was perforce ignorant of later work in
metaphor, he did see that, in the last analysis, metaphor is at least the seeing
of one thing in terms of another, or, in Gardiner’s terminology, viewing the
thing-meant through a figurative presentation that functions as a filter or

lense taken from another domain of experience. Thus, in line with con-
temporary work, Gardiner’s account of metaphor is more akin to the
fusion theory than to any theories of substitution or rhetorical decora-
tion, which have by now been discredited as fundamental features of
metaphor. Its chief peculiarity is to insist upon the pregiven system of
semantic units, constituting language, that are twisted and formed in the
act of speech to enable us to grasp a novel, and perhaps unique, thing-
meant. In this sense, formulation is addition (255).
While the dialectic of speech and language informs Gardiner’s theory
of metaphor, the pivot of Bühler’s analysis of this paradigmatic form of
sense-giving is the use of a model that has later become widespread, prin-
cipally in the work of Max Black, though, to the best of my knowledge, I
am not aware of Black’s acknowledging it. If a word or a language system
is a socially constituted filter on experience, a filter that has its own max-
imally differentiated internal patterns that we project onto and into expe-
rience in order to make it intelligible and to bring it under control, a
metaphor would be a double-filter, involving, as for Gardiner, the fusing
of two meaning-spaces and thus the understanding of an object or state of
affairs in terms of multiple foci. Bühler saw that the widespread notion
that a metaphor involves understanding one thing in terms of another is
true enough, but rather than have an explicit comparison, what we have
is a synthesis of two or more semantic spaces each of which in non-
metaphorical uses has its own spheres of application. When the two
spheres are brought together, we have the semantic analogon to the dif-
ference effect in binocular vision, exemplified, for example, in Bühler’s
marvelous expression ein Salonlöwe (a parlor-room lion). Bühler tried to
explicate this idea by recourse to an extremely illuminating model of a
double-lattice structure, which he graphically illustrated as in Figure 4.
If, then, I call someone a hammer head, I predicate hammerness of his
head, though it is clear that his head cannot literally be a hammer, no mat-
ter how ‘hard’ it is. According to Bühler’s model, I see his head through
the semantic space or meaning-sphere of a hammer, though selectively,
with internal modifications that are due to the particular properties of his
head. The Gardinerian thing-meant, the ‘hard’-headedness of the person
or his stubbornness, governs just what semantic properties can be trans-
ferred from one object-realm to another or how the two spheres are to be
held in relation. A look at our lexicon makes us see just how pervasive this
double-filter effect is. Obviously, to say that metaphor is pervasive and
Fig. 4
necessary in our conceptual schemes is not to say that aesthetic or con-

scious, systematic, stipulative metaphor, in the form, say, of models, is
pervasive (see Ortony 1993; Schon 1963; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Hesse
1966; Harré 1970). The two previously noted conditions of Ausdrucksnot
and Ausdrucksdrastik guarantee that metaphor will remain a live factor in
all speech. Since experience is always changing and new constellations of
objects and states of affairs are constantly arising, we will always need
new modes of classifying and understanding them. Since we grasp the
unknown on the basis of the known, we will perforce always be seeing
something in terms of something else, a process that can become exceed-
ingly complex indeed and is, in fact, a key to mentality’s intrinsically cre-
ative and open nature.
Bühler’s binocular model of metaphorical expression—based upon
psychological considerations skirted by Gardiner, in spite of his empha-
sis on feeling and subjective factors—has obviously close but not clearly
defined affinities with Gestalt theory and the theory of perception.11
Without ascribing the use of the terms directly to Bühler or rooting them
both in von Ehrenfels’s work, we might say that metaphor parallels
Gestalt perception’s Übersummativität (the emergent property of being
more than an additive sum) and the Untersummativität (the property of
leaving out what is irrelevant) that seems to be a consequence of percep-
tion’s fundamental diacrisis. Bühler’s approach has the great advantage of
showing that the semantic effect of a metaphorical expression is an emer-
gent quality, neither preexisting in the language system (language) nor
reducible to its constituents. It is its emergent character and not any
merely negatively oriented ‘selective attention’ that gives us the surplus of
11. Heike Hülzer-Vogt (1989) has produced a fine study that corrects some of my earlier
historical comments on the sources of Bühler’s theory of metaphor. In addition to establishing
just what Bühler could have taken, and actually did take, from von Ehrenfels, she has examined,
with philosophical acumen and in psychological detail, the roots of parts of Bühler’s account in
the work of Wilhelm Stählin in particular. The experiential scope and import of Bühler’s and
Stählin’s work is given a clear and precise treatment.
sense and insight that is resident in the metaphor. At the same time,
because the metaphor—and all words—is a way of making an abstraction,
in this process all nonapplicable and nontransferable qualities—semantic
markers—from the two or more semantic spaces that are being fused in
the metaphor drop away. Only selected semantic markers from the vari-
ous semantic spaces are synthesized in the novel expression. Metaphor,
both living and dead, is a pervasive phenomenon in language—and in lan-
guage-informed perception—and bears witness to the selectivity and con-
stituting power of the subjectivity of the speaker. At the same time, the
public character of the common places (loci communes), the realm of lan-
guage, in Gardiner and Saussure’s sense, predefines certain selective affini-
ties between the semantic units, which are apprehended by the keen
linguistic consciousness. Umberto Eco has tried to show, in his essay
“The Semantics of Metaphor” (Eco 1979b), what is involved in tracing the
embedding of these semantic units in a vast social semantic field. But a
detailed analysis of his argument would take me too far afield from my
discussion of the intersections between Gardiner’s and Bühler’s work. It
is clear, I think, that their two accounts are not only complementary but,
in their own ways, anticipate as well as bear insightfully upon key themes
in later discussions that have revolutionized and revitalized the topic of
metaphor. Dewey encapsulates the issue quite generally in his laconic for-
mulation: “Meanings are self-moving to new cases. In the end, conditions
force a chastening of this spontaneous tendency” ([1925] 1988a, 148).12
5. Sentences and the Predicational Nexus

In addition to concurring in effect with Bühler’s differentiation of the irre-
ducible sense-constituting modi of indication and symbolization, Gardiner
devotes considerable time to elucidating what he calls the predicational
nexus, which for him characterizes the essential declarative act of speech.
The predicational nexus is effected in the declarative use of language, giving
rise to statements that are—both for him and for Bühler—the most pur-
posive of all utterances, since they do not merely mirror or reflect exter-
nal circumstances (TSL, 282), including the interiority of the speaker. In
12. Further reflections on metaphor from a semiotic perspective can take off from Gumpel
1984 and Johansen 1993. They have rich and full bibliographies and are philosophically sensitive
and historically aware.
the specific reality of the sentence—which is the unit of speech and “voli-
tional throughout” (240)—Gardiner sees not only the ultimate ground for
distinguishing between language and speech but also the essentially dia-
critical function of speech, a position derived from Wegener once again.
Reflecting upon the sentence, Gardiner thought, also reveals the key to
the distinction between subject and predicate, which are parts of speech,
not parts of language (which are, rather, in Gardiner’s still traditional for-
mulation, noun, adjective, and so forth [110]), and it reveals the further
distinction between grammatical subject and predicate and logical subject
and predicate, which are, as first shown by Wegener, by no means the
same. While Bühler admitted that “the sentence is obviously more than
and different from an aggregate of words” (TL, 256) and that a sentence
arises out of an act of synthesis rather than out of an act of segmentation
proper, the purpose of sentences being to set unities of meaning into a
field of relations, his approach to sentences is oriented primarily toward
illustrating the objective nature of a language work (Sprachwerk) and its
attendant field. “A field must be opened up wherever and with whatever
means a well-constructed and articulated representation is supposed to
arise as a language work” (182). His theory of the sentence is focused
accordingly on the permanent and structural factors in the sentence.
For Gardiner, however, “sentences are like ad hoc constructions run up
for a particular ceremony, constructions which are pulled down and their
materials dispersed as soon as their particular purpose [i.e., representation,
expression, appeal, etc.] has been served” (TSL, 90). Now, as we have
already seen, it is “function, not form, which makes a set of words into a
sentence” (184). As a speech-action, a notion Gardiner shared with Bühler,
a sentence is always embedded in a preformed situation of communica-
tion. Even private speech-actions are derivates from the social matrix.13 In
such a case the writer (or internal monologist) is both speaker and
addressee together. Thus there is not, in living speech, any necessity to
generate complete linguistic strings. Nor are complete linguistic strings
lying behind the, from the formal point of view, truncated linguistic
expression. Both Gardiner’s overriding mentalism and his insistence upon
the primacy of the social matrix in language theory become clear in his
contention that the sentence is an “irrefutable reality” known from its
13. A thread running through Dewey’s Experience and Nature (1925) is that inner experience
is produced by language, by dialogue. Soliloquy is derivative colloquy. Strangely enough, in this
Dewey coincides with the essential theses of the Russian Voloshinov (1973). See further Innis
1985, 47–65.
“feel” (95), or, in Peircean and Deweyan terms, its distinctive ‘quality.’
“The satisfactoriness perceived in any sentence is due to the recognition of
its perfect relevance and purposiveness” (98). That purpose, constituting
the sentence-quality, of course, is defined by the semantic intention
behind the utterance and is inferred by the addressee from the words and
from the situation. Gardiner’s theory of the sentence is thus a praxeolog-
ical theory. Sentences are forms of actions. Hence they can be replaced,
when the situation is clear and shared between the partners in the
exchange of signs, by gestures. Even the gesture of silence can perform the
necessary diacrisis empractically.
Gardiner’s theory of the sentence is basically a gloss on Wegener, and,
as a matter of fact, Wegener also enters, rather surreptitiously, into Büh-
ler’s sentence theory, as do Wilhelm Wundt and Hermann Paul in their
opposition of analysis and synthesis as the generative key to the structural
principle of the sentence. Not only was Wegener the first to emphasize the
importance of the ‘situation,’ but he also thereby determined, Gardiner
argues, the true reason for the dichotomy of the traditional distinction
between ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’ (TSL, 12). Wegener had already noted in
his Untersuchungen that a sentence could be divided into that part which
was basically subsidiary to the point at issue, literally underlying it, and
that part which introduced something new into the exchange of signs,
something that performed, as I have been emphasizing, the diacrisis. Now,
in predication, it is the proximate thing-meant—expressed in the predi-
cate—that comes to the fore (259). This proximate thing-meant is what is
said about something, and it constitutes the novel diacritical focus of the
sentence, while the subject is the ultimate thing-meant, the ultimate
about-which to which the predicate is applied (268).14 Bühler had noted
that in sentences such as Es regnet am Bodensee (It is raining on Lake
Constance), which seems to be without a subject, it is easy to see, once we
abandon the Aristotelian identification of grammatical subject with logical
14. Dewey has a related, though clearly not identical, distinction between meaning as prox-
imate and meaning as ultimate. For example, to speak in more general semiotic terms, a traffic
signal has as proximate meaning the controlling of movement. It has as ultimate meaning “the
total consequent system of social behavior, in which individuals are subjected, by means of noise,
to social coordination” (Dewey [1925] 1988a, 150). A policeman’s proximate meaning is the
coordination of movements of persons and vehicles. The ultimate meaning is the consequent
security of social movements. Thus, the meaning is a rule, a standardized habit of social interac-
tion. It is, Dewey says, “independent of the psychical landscape, the sensations and imagery, of
the policeman and others concerned. But it is not on that account a timeless spiritual ghost nor
pale logical subsistence divorced from events” (149).
subject, that the proximate thing-meant—in Gardiner’s terms, the logical

predicate—is Es regnet, while the ultimate thing-meant, the so-called log-
ical subject—which fills out the empty space corresponding to the ques-
tion “Where [does it rain]?”—is am Bodensee.
The pivot of Bühler’s theory of the sentence is the thesis that a Vollsatz
(a full sentence) “displays a closed and fully-occupied symbol field. That is
the foundation upon which the purely grammatical theory of the sen-
tence must be built” (TL, 366; Goodwin translation modified). The root
of this contention is, of course, Bühler’s concern, everywhere present in
his language theory as well as in Gardiner’s, to hold to the essential and
insuperable distinction between the sentence field and words. “Sentence
field and words are two different things. Words are situated in the sym-
bolic field; occupying places in it, they also adopt and assimilate field
signs” (299; Goodwin translation modified). The chief, though certainly
not the only, difference between the two sentence-theories is Gardiner’s
implacable opposition to making a closed and fully occupied symbol field
the differentiating criterion of the sentence. While, obviously, for Gardiner
the statement-form—Bühler’s representational form—gives a satisfying
sense of completeness (TSL, 302), the basic criterion of quantity as well as
quality of a sentence is subjective, a matter, in the last analysis, of elocu-
tionary form, which is always congruent. Here form and function coin-
cide necessarily (322–23). In the development of the representational form
of expression there has occurred a stabilization of expressive form con-
ducive to the thematization of intellectual content, a point of general
philosophical interest. Gardiner took from Wegener the insight that the
positions of subject and object in the declarative sentence are subject to two
opposing tendencies: emotional and intellectual. The emotional tendency
leads to the pre-position of the logical predicate, while the intellectual ten-
dency leads to the pre-position of the logical subject. It must be noted,
however, that by reason of the primacy of elocutionary form over both
syntax and word-form it often is only the actual articulation of the sen-
tence that allows us to define what the logical predicate and subject are.
For Gardiner the controversy between Wundt and Paul concerning the
origin of the sentence in an originary analysis or synthesis does not offer
a true alternative (TSL, 241–52). Once again, we can see the theme of the
sentence bordering on the deep issue of the genesis of articulation itself. A
sentence is obviously the result of an act that puts together or synthesizes
in a novel focus preexisting units of sense, which are the results of prior
acts of segmentation, of the cutting of the experiential continuum. The
emergent semantic quality of the sentence points to this irreducible fact,

for the sentential, or propositional, sense is not a mere additive sum of the
component lexical senses. They have been, as Bühler would put it, trans-
formed by being inserted into a field. At the same time, it is clear that a
Sachverhalt or a perceptual content is in the process of articulation dif-
ferentiated by the complex internal relations signaled by the units orga-
nized in the sentence itself. The original putatively unitary or global
apprehension of sense or structure is laid out, zergliedert, by the succes-
sive addition of intelligible determinations. A sentence, so conceived, is
also a power engine of analysis.
Gardiner makes central to his language theory what, for Bühler, is a
peripheral issue, in fact, a sort of oxymoron, namely, the nature and the-
oretical status of the one-word sentence. In explaining the emergence of
the ‘word’ as an entity distinct from the ‘sentence,’ Gardiner thought that
“Wegener’s theory of exposition by successive correctives is evidently of
the highest importance” (TSL, 124), a position discussed quite insightfully
by Susanne Langer in her Philosophy in a New Key, with extensive
reliance, also, upon Bühler and Wegener (Langer 1942, 136–43). The rise
of the sentence, illustrated paradigmatically in the periodic sentence, is
constituted by the increased presence of additions, qualifications, and
other subsidiary components whose function is to help bring into focus
and to ‘situate’ the primary component of the sentence, to wit, the logical
predicate, which is the diacritical focus of novelty in the speech act. In
Wegener’s conception the subject is called the exposition, which, as he
puts it, “serves to make the situation clear so that the logical predicate
becomes intelligible” (Grundfragen, 21). Still, there is no strictly formal
way of identifying the logical subject and predicate, this being left up to
the interpretive powers of the linguistic subject, existing in a shared field
with other subjects. Perhaps from this rather prosaic standpoint we can
see just how difficult psychoanalytic discourse is and how the ‘situation of
analysis’ makes extraordinary articulatory and hermeneutical demands
on its agents.
In the last analysis Gardiner wanted to emphasize the essentially pre-
dicative nature of all speech and, accordingly, distinguished five kinds of
predicate, a theme not really present in Bühler’s work. First, every word,
as a class term—including exclamations—is a predicate. Second, every
sentence is itself a predicate. Third, every word, following upon preced-
ing words in a linguistic string, is a predicate. Fourth, in grammatically
structured sentences with subject and predicate, the grammatical predicate
says something about the grammatical subject. Fifth, and finally, and per-
haps most important from Gardiner’s point of view, “any given word in a
sentence may be used predicatively or in the sense of a logical predicate”
(TSL, 293). A theory of speech needs, then, as Gardiner saw it, three cat-
egories: grammatical subject and predicate and logical predicate. The
essentially qualifying and diacritical and responsive character of speech
here comes most clearly to the fore. As Gardiner puts it, “speech . . . is
always of the nature of a reaction” to a preexisting and generally shared
situation or field (253). The degree of shared knowledge and experience
between the partners in the exchange of signs determines the nature and
extent of the exposition that serves as the support for the essentially dia-
critical function of the logical predicate. While a shared world makes pos-
sible a highly laconic and abbreviated form of speech, it is the function
of a wide and elaborate exposition to create that vast realm of common
references wherein the proper predicate can be located or to sketch the
background against which it can be seen. This explains the brevity of
communicative exchange between intimates and the necessity of exposi-
tion among those not bound together in a common framework. Here is
another aspect of the great difficulties of psychoanalytic interactions and
of the hermeneutical encounters with foreign texts and cultures.
6. Conclusion: Intersections and Continuations

I have tried to show, with side-glances at pragmatist parallels, how Büh-
ler’s and Gardiner’s attempts to thematize language as a form of sense
bear closely upon some of the most central concerns of the philosophy of
language and of general semiotic theory. While Bühler admitted his close
affinities to Cassirer and to Husserl—with constant side-references to
Plato and Aristotle—Gardiner was basically satisfied with asserting that
“linguistic theory constitutes the necessary prolegomena to philosophy,
though admittedly making no direct contribution to it” (TSL, 341), a
position that, in light of his work on the conditions of meaning, must be
taken with a grain of salt. Their clearest point of intersection with philos-
ophy lies in the special nature of their overarching mentalism, their con-
stant recourse to the powers of subjectivity, albeit socially coded and
embodied subjectivity. Language is intrinsically a social form of sense. As
Bühler put it, in a passage to which Gardiner would agree (see TSL, 335),
“‘sense in itself,’ abstracting from a language community for which it is
valid, would be a no less realizable concept than, say, ‘money in itself,’ in

abstraction from an economic context in which it functions in exchange”
([1927] 2000, 126). Indeed, “this sense is no essential characteristic of the
sense-bearing structures, but a moment resulting from an operation of
giving validity which is similar to the giving of value to paper currency”
(131). Bühler’s main thesis, seconded by everything Gardiner wrote, is: “It
is impossible to constitute the concept of sense without appeal to goals
and to subject-relatedness. The things and events in the world carry only
so much sense for the experiencing subject as he is able, either rightly or
wrongly, to extract from them or to pour into them, but in either case we
are dealing with an operation of positing” (132).
This activity of sense-positing, we saw, points directly to the linguistic
subject and his mental operations. Neither Bühler nor Gardiner, how-
ever, felt the need to hypothesize deep structures or to construct models
of processes underlying linguistic activity, though there are more than
just hints in Bühler toward a semiotic (or even socio-semio-biological)
theory of mind in general and of perception in particular (see Sebeok
1979; Thelin, 2001).15 For them, as for the pragmatists, the mind does not
so much lie behind or under linguistic structures and events as within
them, a point made by certain psychoanalytic thinkers. In his “Retro-
spect 1951” Gardiner, polemicizing against Bloomfieldian behaviorism,
spoke of the need for a theory of mind for linguistic theory and opined
that “I still cannot believe that the method of introspection is completely
defunct” (TSL, 344). A linguistically apt theory of mind has a need for
“inner life” terms, by which Gardiner meant ‘sensation,’ ‘perception,’ and
‘purpose,’ which are “indispensable links” in a linguistically sophisticated
theory of mind (344). The elements of such a theory are immanent in
Gardiner’s development of the need for application, for selective atten-
tion, for inferential processes, and so forth, all of which oppose a merely
formal approach to linguistic phenomena. Bühler’s reliance upon the par-
adigmatic importance of phonology, with its attendant emphases on
processes of abstraction and diacritical apprehension, functions as the
pivot separating the science of signs from the sciences of material events,
for, as he put it, signs and substances belong to two different domains of
reality and to two different sciences (TL, 273). At any rate, Bühler’s insis-
tence upon synthesis and his constant references to the fertility of Cassirer’s
15. Thelin (2001) goes a long way in setting out the parameters of just such a project. Of spe-
cial interest is his insight into the intertwining of the biological and the social.
work point to the centrality of Schöpfungsakte (creative acts) that ground

the genesis and interpretation of meaning. Here we have stimuli to think,
with the aid of Bühler and Gardiner, beyond them toward a linguistically
guided model of mind.
The extensive parallels between Bühler’s work and Gardiner’s and that
of others, and how their procedures, categories, and results can be inte-
grated with later developments, I have only been able to hint at in the
course of this chapter.16 Gardiner shared, for example, with Wittgenstein,
perhaps more than Bühler (whose seminar Wittgenstein attended), the
insistence upon forms of life and shared situations as indispensable con-
ditions of sense and meaning. His delineation of meaning-areas, his cri-
tique of the formal theory of meaning, and his recognition of family
resemblances all parallel Wittgenstein’s chief interpretive categories and
procedures. By insisting upon the primacy of public criteria, Gardiner
also saw, along with Wittgenstein, that language is a social action first of
all, that the Platonic “discourse of the soul with itself” has resulted from
an internalizing of an original social exchange of signs, an originary
Miteinandersprechen (see Lohmann 1965).
The Bühlerian connection with Wittgenstein touches upon, among
other things, the critique of deixis as the chief linguistic and semantic act
and, via Bühler’s notion of a synchytic concept (taken from von Kries),
upon the open character of concepts and family resemblances—Bühler
speaks of the “fundamental openness of the linguistic rendering of objects
and states of affairs” (TL, 172)—while Bühler’s account of the empracti-
cal use of language anticipates quite clearly later work in speech-act the-
ory, which really deals not no so much with speech acts as sinnverleihende
Akte (the sense-bestowing acts of Husserlian phenomenology) as with
speech-actions (Handlungen).17 Bühler also entered essentially into Karl
Popper’s epistemological development primarily through his objective—
that is, nonindividualistic—approach (centering on representation and the
16. It would be an interesting exercise to confront the main lines of Bühler’s and Gardiner’s
analyses with some of the classic materials found in such analytically oriented anthologies as
Martinich 2001 and Harnish 1994. While I leave that task to others, I would like to note that D. S.
Clarke Jr. has edited a provocative anthology (Clarke 1990) that does confront semiotics with
analytic philosophy. I have discussed the success of the venture in Innis 1994a.
17. Bühler’s relations with Wittgenstein have been studied by Eschbach (1984, 1988). These
definitive essays give massive bibliographical information and a full discussion of relations
between Bühler and Wittgenstein and of their common intellectual matrices. English-language
readers can still profitably consult W. W. Bartley III (1985), who discusses in some detail the con-
nections between Bühler and Wittgenstein.
organon-model) and his differentiation of the trichotomy of semantic

functions, to which Popper, in his own fashion, as I noted before, added
a fourth function, the argumentative, which he considered the basis of all
critical thought (see Popper 1976, 73–74, 76–78, where he acknowledges
the definitive influence of Bühler, with whom he studied, on his thought).
Popper also used Bühler’s framework, with some help from others, to be
sure, to oppose physicalism both in linguistic theory and in the philoso-
phy of mind (see Popper 1963, chaps. 12 and 13).
Polanyi, I have already noted, was also influenced by Gardiner and
Bühler, and in the magnificent chapter on ‘articulation’ in Personal
Knowledge he continued, within the framework of his theory of the tacit
dimension, the exploration of the processes of mutual adjustment of
word-meanings to things-meant. These processes are exemplified in Büh-
ler’s insistence upon a nonlinguistic Sachwissen (material knowledge;
Peircean collateral knowledge), which is the condition of the possibility of
understanding such compounds as Backstein (brick, that is, a baked
stone), Backofen (baking oven), Backpulver (baking powder), Backhuhn
(roast chicken), the interpretation of which, relying on our ‘baking’
knowledge, falls beyond the powers of a merely formal theory of mean-
ing. Polanyi also saw, just as Bühler did, that specific powers of integra-
tion and apprehension had to underlie our production and recognition of
linguistic forms and that these powers, irreducible to formal operations,
were the ultimate source of sense (see Innis 1994b, chap. 3).
There are other parallels that cannot be pursued here. My purpose has
not been to engage in a constant Gleichseherei but to study in some detail
the philosophical and semiotic import of some critical and essential points
of intersection between the two cognate language theories of Bühler and
Gardiner. It has been impossible, of course, to reconstitute the massive
detail of their work, and I have been able to give only the barest of exam-
ples, with which their books are filled. As Gardiner put it in the conclu-
sion to his book, “[T]he quarry I have been pursuing is theory, not facts.
What I have striven to envisage is speech as an organized functional
whole, and exceptional details have been none of my concern” (TSL, 326).
The importance of such an undertaking has been strikingly put in the last
paragraph of his book. I want to cite it here, along with a parallel passage
from Bühler, as both conclusion and exhortation. These passages express
the inner motivations of their work.
First, the passage from Gardiner:
One unforeseen result has emerged with increasing insistency. . . .

It is the purposiveness of speech. To speak is to convey meaning,
and meaning has tended, in the course of my exposition, to become
displayed ever more conspicuously in its original etymological
sense of human purpose or intention—purpose to influence a lis-
tener in a particular way, and purpose to call attention to specific
things. Out of these two purposes has been born a third, which
properly speaking does not belong to the subject matter of my
book, but which can only enhance the interests of its problems. I
refer to the purpose of comprehension, which the habit of speech
has inculcated and has taught us to regard as desirable in itself. In
his effort to influence the mind of others, man has learnt to instruct
his own. Whilst elaborating a sentence, the speaker does not com-
pletely divest himself of the receptive listening attitude which
alternates so regularly and easily with his creative role as speaker.
He is, in fact, always a fellow-listener, and hence also a fellow-
learner. From this necessity arises the possibility of employing lan-
guage as the instrument of silent thought. When something is
obscure, purposeful effort is employed to reduce it to verbal form,
and when this has been done, we realize our enrichment and
become aware that our intellectual power has increased. Thought
is, no doubt, presupposed by speech, but the habit of speech has
given us lessons in thinking. And so, by reciprocal action, thought
and speech have developed hand in hand. It is no exaggeration to
say that the history of speech is also the history of human under-
standing. (TSL, 326–27)
Bühler, for his part, wrote:
If one has had nothing to do with anything but language one’s

whole life long, one sometimes loses the ability to wonder at what
language is capable of performing; it has become too much a mat-
ter of course. (TL, 390)
The tasks Bühler and Gardiner set themselves in their fertile master-
pieces was exactly to provoke that sense of wonder and to uncover that
veil of familiarity over language, so close to us as our own breath.
Notwithstanding the checkered historical trajectories of the two master-
works and their historically marginal role in philosophical reflections

upon language, taken together they furnish us even after sixty years of
later research, some of it putatively revolutionary, with a profound con-
ceptual matrix within which a language theory that is adequate to its
object can and should be constructed.
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER 2
Articulation as Emendation: Philipp Wegener’s Antiformalist Theory of Language
1. The Neglected Wegener
Scholars often bury the past in a footnote or allusion, and only when we
turn to the contents of the grave itself do we sometimes find a warm,
fresh, and perhaps even living body. Many years ago, when I first read
Susanne Langer’s classic Philosophy in a New Key (1942), I came across
the name of Philipp Wegener, whose thought played a pivotal, though
rather low-keyed, role in Langer’s chapter on ‘language.’ That same chap-
ter was also heavily dependent on the writings of Karl Bühler, with whom
Langer had studied during her period at the University of Vienna and
whose masterwork, Sprachtheorie (1934), contains substantial, even if
sometimes cryptic, references to Wegener. In the course of studying the
points of intersection between Bühler’s language theory and that of a
British colleague, Sir Alan Gardiner, whose Theory of Speech and Lan-
guage (1932) is a wonderful but sadly neglected book (see Innis 1984a,
upon which the foregoing chapter is based), I found that Gardiner not
only dedicated his book to Wegener, whom he had never met and who
was by then long deceased, but built the superstructure of his own model
of language on its basis, considering his own work, in fact, to be an expan-
sion, in light of Saussure and Husserl especially, of Wegener’s ground-
breaking studies.
References were always to Wegener’s book Untersuchungen über die
Grundfragen des Sprachlebens, first published in 1885. In the English-
speaking world this book has remained practically unknown and in fact
does not even appear under its own name, but is included in a book enti-
tled Speech and Reason, which actually consists of two books: Language
Disorder in Mental Disease, an extended psychoanalytically oriented essay
on some Wegenerian implications, by D. Wilfred Abse, and a translation of
Wegener’s volume, by unknown hands, under the title The Life of Speech.
Although Wegener was definitely presemiotic in his orientation and in

no way a forerunner of a general theory of signs, his book is nevertheless
a substantial contribution to that part of semiotics that is concerned with
constructing a proper approach to language, for Wegener’s goal was to
discover “the basic relationships and laws from which the individual phe-
nomena are produced,” a task he assimilated to “scientific grammar”
(Abse and Wegener 1971, 272).
What is distinctive about Wegener’s language theory? What is the
heuristic value of his approach to language and to language theory? What
is still living and what is dead in his model?
2. The Situational Matrix of Speech
The first point I want to emphasize, indicated already in the title, is that
Wegener’s language theory is practically at every turn directed against the
notion of language as an abstract self-enclosed formal calculus, oriented
predominantly toward “mental mapping of the world” and determined
by a (relatively) autonomous play of signifiers, a temptation to which one
strand of semiotics, fundamentally of Saussurian and French provenance,
has been inclined. The sense of any linguistic utterance is not borne
directly by the words themselves and their syntactic forms, but rather is
determined by their relationships to a whole set of ‘extralinguistic fac-
tors,’ including the states of consciousness and knowledge systems of the
linguistic subject. A praxeological instrument first of all, spoken language
is a species of social action, “based on human intercourse, upon egoistical
and sympathetic feelings” (Abse and Wegener 1971, 272), and is aimed at
modifying or directing the consciousnesses of the hearers or listeners,
whose ‘material’ or ‘spiritual’ needs are primary in determining the tra-
jectories and structures of the linguistic action. Now, to succeed as a social
action any linguistic utterance has to be subject to certain conditions—
modern day: rules—and one of Wegener’s main claims on our attention is
his insistence upon the necessity of a shared “situation” between speaker
and listener, a point taken up and given extensive development by Gar-
diner and Bühler.
The extralinguistic factors that, according to Wegener, make up the situ-
ational field are (1) the shared perceptual field, common to speaker and lis-
tener, (2) the retention in memory of not just past linguistic utterances (the
psychological foundation of anaphora) but also past—recent or distant—
events, such retention grounding or conditioning the evolution of tenses,
(3) the structure of consciousness as a historically, socially, occupationally,
or otherwise prestructured field of meanings, interests, and orientations,

and (4) the cultural context. Each of these factors makes up a situation
within which and over against which predication, the essential act of
speech, takes place. Hence, Wegener distinguishes a situation of percep-
tion, a situation of remembrance, a situation of consciousness, and a cul-
tural situation—a fourfold situational matrix (Abse and Wegener 1971,
133–40).
If we are standing in front of a tree and I say, “Linden,” you know that
this is the equivalent of saying, “This tree is a linden.” If we have just
drunk a glass of wine together and I say, “Excellent,” you know that this
is the equivalent of saying, “The wine is excellent.” It is the situation of
perception, including what lies immediately present in the shared field of
consciousness, that fulfills and gives precision to the meaning of “linden”
and of “excellent.” How they are to be taken—what they refer to or that
they refer at all—is determined by the objects themselves perceived in a
common field before our eyes. If during or after some spectacle, such as a
lecture, I say, “Beautiful!” or “Magnificent!” you know that I am refer-
ring to what we have just witnessed and that it is equivalent to saying,
“That was a beautiful/magnificent spectacle/lecture.” Depending on
when we say it in real physical time, we have here either another instance
of the situation of perception or the new situation of remembrance, for it
is presupposed—it is the shared frame—that the lecture as an event stands
at the forefront of consciousness and that it is precisely it that is being
referred to and having something predicated of it.
Again, if we today hear someone say, “He takes the wood in order to
make a fire,” we understand that he is going to ignite the wood with a
flame, not rub pieces of it together. This understanding is derived from the
“situation of consciousness” as a kind of “world knowledge,” just as, to
use another example, “the boards were freshly painted today” means one
thing to an average person and quite another thing to an actor who thinks
of “the boards” as (metaphorically) signifying the world. All termini
techici of this sort appeal to the interest structures of consciousness. Like-
wise, as Wegener pointed out, the word “freedom” uttered in Berlin in
1809 did not have the same meaning as when uttered in Paris in 1848. The
cultural situation, in this case the global semantic field (see Eco 1976,
125–29), determines just what the term can mean.
The purpose of any utterance for Wegener is to differentiate and to
determine through predication any one of the semantically and referen-
tially determining situations. These situations in effect function as grounds
to the predicate’s figure. Wegener’s whole image of language use is what

Bühler called “empractic,” that is, embedded in a matrix of action and pre-
understood meanings and intentions that we do not have to (and perhaps
even cannot) articulate. The parallel with Wittgenstein is almost too obvi-
ous to mention. This matrix constitutes the shared and recognized, even if
unthematized, semiotic and existential bond between the partners in the
exchange of signs. The linguistic utterance is, in one sense, about the situ-
ation, in that its meaning is intrinsically connected with and refers, albeit
creatively and not just reproductively, to some component within it, with-
out which the meaning could not be determined by the listener.
3. Relation to Bühler’s Field Theory
Wegener’s “situation theory of language” is a “field theory,” in Bühler’s

sense. Bühler had distinguished two radically different fields, the index
field and the symbol field, corresponding to the irreducible distinction
between pointing, or deixis, and symbolizing in concepts. The supple-
mentary conditions of sense in the index field were contained in aspects
and features of the immediately accessible perceptual world, which gave
“fulfillment” to the linguistic markers. The supplementary conditions of
sense in the symbol field were contained in the surrounding “empty slots”
(Leerstellen), both syntactic and semantic, that defined the structure of the
linguistic utterance. Wegener’s “supplementation” of the sense of the lin-
guistic utterance through the situation is the same as the Bühlerian con-
tribution of the surrounding field. The principal difference is that
Wegener calls certain psychological conditions of linguistic understand-
ing—things such as remembrance and the whole cultural context, which
is predominantly, though not exclusively, linguistically mediated—“situ-
ations.” In light of modern semantic theory we would call them circum-
stantial and contextual determinants of meaning. The main point, of
course, is the incompleteness of the linguistic expression and its inability
in itself to determine its sense completely. This incompleteness had to be
made up for by other “field factors.” Thus we can see Wegener’s work as
a true antecedent of both Bühler’s and Gardiner’s field theories, although
even Gardiner referred to his own theory as a “situation theory.”
4. The Primacy of Predication
One of Wegener’s key insights is that when the situation is completely

transparent to the partners in the linguistic exchange, only the predicative
part of the utterance is expressed or needs to be expressed, although, in
the gradual evolution of speech, the actual linguistic structure begins to

take on amazingly complicated forms. This is the reason why Wegener
can say that all elements of speech are originally sentences. A sentence, on
Wegener’s account, is defined by its function, not by its form, a position
exploited at length by Gardiner (TSL, 322–23), for whom even the
absence of an utterance in a situation is the equivalent of a sentence. A
sentence, hence, is a predicate of a situation, encapsulating and communi-
cating some selective focus on it. Indeed, it is the effector of a “difference”
between it and the situation, as well as within the situation itself, although
it is clear that the “differential theory of meaning” developed by Wegener
is rather far from the notion of meaning as difference that marks the Saus-
surian tradition and that, now, of Jacques Derrida and his followers.
The engine of language for Wegener is predication, not in the sense of
joining an S with a P, a subject with a predicate, but in the sense of objec-
tifying in linguistic forms novel information and meanings. These are
always set over against the complicated situational background, which is
the ultimate existential and semantic matrix for the emergence and expres-
sion of meaning. The actual evolution of language, however, is from
empractic predication to the gradual raising of the situation itself to lin-
guistic expression. This process of raising the situation to linguistic form
is what Wegener calls “exposition.” The “subject” of a sentence, that is,
what it is about, only needs to be expressed when the presupposed
domain is ambiguous and the empractical use of the speech alone cannot
suffice.
Perhaps, from the psycholinguistic point of view, we also have here an
important clue to the schematic character of much inner speech, which is
essentially fragmentary and “agrammatical,” not at all corresponding to
sentence structure or propositions. We simply have no need to articulate
for ourselves the subject of our inner speech, for it is present immediately
to us, as Vygotsky ([1934] 1986) has shown. Something similar is also the
case with all other uses of language intersubjectively in shared situations.
These demand more or less explication or articulation depending on the
comprehensiveness of the knowledge shared by the interlocutors. When
the situation is not known or is not shared, as in our encounter with past
ages through their texts and monuments, a much greater effort is needed to
reconstruct hermeneutically their meaning. When, on the other hand, as
Williams James pointed out, friends converse together, they often only
have to hint in the briefest of ways in order to make their meaning abun-
dantly clear.
5. Segmentation and Emendation
How, according to Wegener, did language ever attain the capacity to detach
itself from a primary reference to a perceptual situation, where it functions
as a perceptual and actional diacriticon, a point, I would like to note, with
which Bühler begins his “Axiomatik der Sprachwissenschaften” (see Innis
1982) and which specifies the point of origin of signs in social life? For
Wegener all words were originally predicates referring to the perceptual
field and were embedded in immediate perceptual and actional contexts.
But not all perceptually referential expressions were demonstratives, func-
tioning as such in the index field, Bühler’s Zeigfeld, nor is deixis, point-
ing, the predominant function in human language. This is, to be sure, the
way demonstratives get their original meaning, but a word, as a semantic
and relatively autonomous structure, is a bearer or semiotic distillate of
meaning or sense independently of the immediately perceived referential
context of its use.
The gradual segmentation and encapsulation of the world in linguistic
forms, which led and leads to a “separation” from immediate contexts,
derives from language’s essential objectifying and abstracting power and
function. Instead of being predicates of the situation to which they are
inextricably bound, words are able to formulate the intelligible unities
and relations that make up the situation. Articulation proceeds through
increasingly more complex predications, with previous predications
themselves passing into the status of “subjects.” The motive and matrix
for this increased complexification, according to Wegener, are first of all
failures of attempted linguistic understandings, failures traceable, to be
sure, to many sources. A defective and hence incomplete utterance must
always be “emended,” supplemented. When the listener indicates failure
to understand, in whole or in part, the speaker must add to the utterance,
either by making explicit what was implicit or not shared or by breaking
the prior, relatively compact utterance into even more signifying units,
with the routes of reference or systematic connection running either to
novel units in the various “situational fields” or to parts of the linguistic
expression itself, giving rise to demonstrative pronouns and all sorts of
intralinguistic referring devices, rooted in anaphora quite generally. Büh-
ler took themes such as these, which Wegener argued with a wealth of
examples, in his Sprachtheorie, comparing anaphora in the linguistic realm
with attempts, in the other sign systems, to perform the same function and
delineating also the gradual building-up of the world of syntactic forms.
6. Word-Meanings and the Nature of Sentences
What, more specifically, determines for Wegener the meaning of a word,

and what is the relation of word to sentence? What does he mean by “con-
gruent” and “incongruent” functions of words, and what is the connec-
tion with the problem of the uniformity and nonuniformity of word
meaning and with the theme of metaphorical predication?
Meaning for Wegener is both the “sum of all thoughts” (Abse and
Wegener 1971, 156) and the abstract “generic configuration” (196), the
embodiment of a “general configuration of consciousness” (195). The
meaning of a word has grown from its use in immediate perceptual and
actional situations to its stabilization as a bearer of abstract content
detached from immediate situations, though obviously not from situa-
tions as such. The reference to the “sum of all thoughts” brings into focus
the psychologistic and sociological framework of Wegener’s language the-
ory, for a linguistic expression is a selective activation of just those “avail-
able thoughts” that bear upon the situation, functioning as the subject for
the expression’s role as a predicate. Which parts are selected depends, of
course, on the field and communicative matrix in which the expression is
found. This matrix is also defined by the interest structures of speakers
and hearers, by their life situations and existential structures. This selec-
tion activates certain aspects of the global semantic field, while others
remain under the threshold of consciousness (159).
A word is always a predicative placeholder in a sentential structure.
While the global semantic field is the ultimate exposition or subject that is
the ground against which the figure of the predicate stands forth, more
immediately it is the actual situation and sentential structure, and not just
a constituting Husserlian consciousness, that delimits what a word can
mean in any instance of the linguistic exchange of signs. Wegener has no
formal definition of word or sentence. In light of his fundamental princi-
ples he did not feel the need to supply any. Anything can function as a
sentence, which is the primary linguistic unit, and words have emerged
later as autonomous units. These now, however, always evoke their place
for us in stable forms. These forms are actually the products of a large his-
torical process of articulation through emendation. The formal bound-
aries between words and sentences are permeable, therefore, and we make
these distinctions only because we have to. The process of articulation by
emendation is then for Wegener the source of the distinction, by now sta-
bilized and codified in linguistic theory, between words and sentences.
On Wegener’s account, the substantial meaning of words is differenti-

ated with respect to (a) the completeness of associated thoughts, (b) the
arrangement of actually associated thoughts (connotations in Hjelmslev’s
and Eco’s sense), and (c) the type and intensity of the feelings that mem-
ory has accumulated from the associated thoughts. The word ‘lion’ opens
up a different semantic space for the hunter, the naturalist, and the child
attending a zoo. The “abstract generic configuration,” a notion that recalls
Langer’s distinction between a concept and a conception, allows each per-
son to identify the ‘same object,’ but it is clear that the ‘thing-meant,’ as
Gardiner thematized it in his language theory, is not reducible to that, that
is, to a mere physical object. This principle is valid quite generally, but
Wegener treats it as fact, able to be substantiated everywhere, and does
not develop any generic hypotheses concerning its emergence, as befits,
perhaps, a philologist, which he preeminently was.
Underlying the word-meaning, however, has to be some sort of actual
selective apprehension of a subject domain. The use of a word in commu-
nicative context relies upon some ‘identity’ of the meaning, which is the
basis of its sociality, as Husserl and Bühler clearly saw. Now, this distilled
ideal and social sense gives the word its “congruent function,” which must
always be determined by processes of application, outside of which the
word has no meaning, a position also defended by Gadamer (1960) in his
hermeneutical theory. But the articulation of “parts of a group of
thoughts” (Abse and Wegener 1971, 159) that is effected by a word or sen-
tence can only come to fruition in an actual communication when we
realize—another one of Wegener’s key theses—that “our exact speech
comprehension is based upon inferences” (271) and that we must, through
our inferential labor, integrate the clues, upon which we must perforce
rely, into a coherent focus.
What are the clues?
They are the word-meaning as a general configuration of conscious-
ness, the thing-meant, which might not be what is expressed congruently
in the actual linguistic form, and the emotional tone conveyed by the
material and rhetorical characters of the linguistic expression. These fac-
tors become stabilized, typified, and codified in social intercourse.
But they are not rigid. As Polanyi (1958, chap. 5, “Articulation”) and
many others have argued, the employment of no word is exactly congru-
ent with previous uses. Each novel use gives it a new, if not radically dif-
ferent, semantic context. It is the constant adjustment of word-meaning to
the thing-meant that brings into operation the subjectivity of the language
user, both as utterer and as addressee. When we use a word in a novel con-
text or novel circumstance, we perform an act of “reduction.” For
Wegener “the necessary prerequisite for all reduction is that the logical
subject and the logical predicate do not completely agree with each other,
that the predicate does not completely coincide with its function” (Abse
and Wegener 1971, 161). Here arises “incongruent function.” This is the
operative principle of metaphor, which itself in fact becomes the prime
analogon for those processes by which we constantly adjust pregiven
semantic units to an ever changing field of experience, making what is
incongruent congruent. If the application of every word involves “simul-
taneous correction and rectification” (162), the same applies even more to
metaphor, which relies on our understanding of the thing-meant in order
to adjust the various spheres of meaning that are fused to one another (see
TL, 342–56; see also Innis 1982, 43–53). Indeed, for Wegener metaphor is
a purely linguistic phenomenon but once again appeals to our extralin-
guistic knowledge of what is meant. Here is the important intersection
with Wegener’s further attempt to specify the conditions of language
comprehension in the “material knowledge,” or Sachwissen, of the lin-
guistic subject, a theme also central to Bühler’s and Gardiner’s language
theories.
7. Preconditions of Linguistic Understanding
How does Wegener specify, more exactly, the conditions of understand-

ing speech in the Sachwissen of the listener, and what does this contribute
to our understanding of the conditions of sense in the theory-of-commu-
nication part of semiotics as opposed to the theory-of-signification part?
“Understanding,” Wegener writes, “is deduced from points of refer-
ence in general” (Abse and Wegener 1971, 237). This fundamental princi-
ple of Wegener’s language theory is argued in his long discussion of actio,
or Handlung, which, as has been argued, is perhaps the chief category of
Indo-European languages. When we try to understand the “communica-
tion of an action,” we proceed by a process of “continued correction”
consisting in a connecting and mutually adjusting of subject, object, and
activity (232). “The way of connecting and relating the subject to the verb,
and the verb to the object, must also be construed by the reader. The
words themselves do not indicate this” (212). For example, our under-
standing of the differences between ‘having’ a house, ‘having’ a book,
‘having’ an illness, ‘having’ a headache, ‘having’ a sharp mind, and ‘having’
black hair, or between ‘making’ a journey, ‘making’ mistakes, ‘making’ a
table, and ‘making’ leaps is not rooted in strictly linguistic knowledge.

The specific ‘havings’ and ‘makings’ always involve some “background
knowledge” (231). Likewise, in such examples as ‘to put’ the saddle on the
horse, ‘to put’ the book upon the table, and ‘to put’ the rug upon the floor,
all of which use ‘to put,’ we have “to supplement this special type of activ-
ity from the character of the point of reference and further from the pur-
pose: for example, how we have to grasp the saddle, the book, the cover;
how high and with how much force we must lift these things; how to
spread out the cover; how we have to fasten the saddle so that the rider
can use it, so that the cover fulfills its purpose” (237). In such cases as
these, Wegener concludes, “the content of an activity has to be construed
by the listener in that he connects certain points of reference of the activ-
ity. The way of connecting them has to be known by him. They are not
given to him” (234).
How are they known?
Many of them are known because we have “pictures” (Bilder) of the
activity inscribed in our consciousness. Although Wegener’s approach did
not have much psychological detail, but was rather philologically ori-
ented, he did point out, quite astutely, that in the course of experiencing
actions in the social world we build up personal perceptual forms, estab-
lished spatial patterns, mental patterns for movement in space that func-
tion as templates, categories, schemata, and image-sets that structure our
understanding of descriptions and accounts (Abse and Wegener 1971,
257). Wegener argues that we have “action models” (268) that enable us to
fill in the blanks in accounts that are meagerly endowed with specific indi-
cations. In considerations such as these he approaches very clearly the role
of an image-field as a semantic schema, a type of knowledge that is not
specifically linguistically coded (see Hörmann and Innis 1986, 159–63).
Once again we come upon the nonformal and nonlinguistic conditions of
meaning that are rooted in properly experiential factors (see Innis 1982,
1984a, 1984b, 1986a, 1986b).
8. Conclusion: From Perception to Predication
Although Wegener does not chart with systematic intent the movement
from perception to predication, this is the innermost trajectory of his
work. Just as perception always takes place over against a ground, singling
out something as a novel focus, so the act of speech takes place over against
a situation that it qualifies through the diacritical function of predication.
This movement is governed at every step by the informal interpretive acts
of the subject. It is by focusing on the various roles this interpreting sub-

ject takes on in the life of speech that we can come to see the novelty and
substantiality of Wegener’s language theory and its present relevance in the
face of attempts to ignore the very real truths he has to teach us about the
limits of the formal theory of language and meaning. There are many
points of intersection and overlap between Wegener’s work and contem-
porary language theories. I have merely tried here in shorthand fashion to
show the distinctiveness of his approach and why reading him is not a
merely historical act of recollection but a confrontation with some of the
deepest and most controversial problems of language theory itself.
Paleo-Pragmatism’s
Linguistic Turn
Lessons from Giovanni Vailati
Giovanni Vailati’s premature death in 1909, at the age of forty-six, silenced

a distinctive and original voice not just in Italian philosophy but also in the
early development of an ‘international’ moment in the pragmatist project.
In his culturally situated and engaged work, so different in tone and
method from Croce’s idealism and antiscientism, we find reflected and
developed, ultimately within a broadly pragmatistic frame, most of the
great problems and themes that have come to the fore in twentieth-century
philosophy and semiotics. Yet, in spite of his remarkable linguistic skills,
encompassing both modern and classical languages, Vailati’s philosophical
orientation did not derive directly from the Italian humanist tradition or
from the Idealist traditions of German transcendental philosophy. Rather,
Vailati was professionally trained in physics and mathematics and had been
Giuseppe Peano’s assistant at the University of Turin before becoming a

teacher of mathematics in secondary schools. H. S. Thayer, in his classic
Meaning and Context: A Critical History of Pragmatism (1981), said of
Vailati that “his work displays a meeting of intellectual currents that were
to determine the later character of modern philosophy: Peirce’s pragma-
tism and his interest in signs and the analysis of concepts; the interest of the
Vienna Circle, 1923, in formulating the methodology of verification and a
criterion of meaningful (i.e., the cognitive use of) language; the mathemat-
ical, critical, and analytical investigations of language, logic, and science by
Ramsey and Wittgenstein” (332–33).
Into his work—as well as into Peirce’s and Dewey’s, with which it has
an intimate theoretical as well as historical connection—flowed many of
the chief problems and concerns of the whole history of philosophy and
of the sciences, particularly the natural sciences. Out of it emerged a set of
heuristically fertile insights and proposals that anticipated and insight-
fully bore not only upon many later discussions and problems of a
‘reformed’ theory of knowledge but also upon our present attempts to
think about pragmatism’s contribution to philosophy’s linguistic turn.1
Vailati’s philosophical project was nourished, like Peirce’s, most of all
by a long immersion in and preoccupation with the history and methods
of the exact sciences, especially the history of mechanics and the history
of mathematics, as paradigmatic cognitive forms. His work is likewise
deeply marked and motivated by a recognition of the revolutionary
importance of pragmatism, specifically the turn toward the analysis of
meaning and language that was one of its central foci, appearing in differ-
ent ways in the principal classic figures. Vailati’s posthumously collected
Scritti (Vailati 1911), edited by his colleagues and friends Mario Calderoni,
Umberto Ricci, and Giovanni Vacca, which includes almost all his pub-
lished work (the Scritti has 213 entries), displays a range of concern, read-
ing, and reference that bears witness to a philosophical culture of the
highest caliber. His correspondence, a substantial selection of which can
be found in his Epistolario, edited by Giorgio Lanaro (Vailati 1971), dis-
plays an extraordinary range of contacts, including exchanges with Vil-
fredo Pareto, Ernst Mach, Lady Welby, Franz Brentano, Benedetto
Croce, Mario Calderoni, and many others.2
1. See the literature referred to in note 4 of the previous chapter.

2. Vailati has been frequently anthologized. This makes finding an appropriate mode of citing
him complicated. Already in 1916 appeared, with Carabba di Lanciano, the volume Gli strumenti
Paleo-Pragmatism’s Linguistic Turn 101
The highly selective and programmatic discussion in this chapter is lim-

ited to the themes of Vailati’s percipient, pragmatically oriented analysis of
modern science from an epistemological, linguistic, and sense-critical point
of view, and his pragmatic exploration of language from a critical, analyt-
ical, and constructive point of view. Such a choice of topics is confirmed
by Maria De Rose’s assertion that, for Vailati, “the power of the human
mind is revealed in the results to which it attains by means of the use of
logic and its principal instruments: deduction and the analysis of lan-
guage” (1986, 24). Mario Calderoni, one of Vailati’s closest collaborators,
had further specified the two fundamental assumptions of Vailati’s type of
pragmatism: (1) the priority of the problem of meaning of assertions and
(2) the criterion of prevision for the classification of assertions in terms of
truth or falsity (see De Rose 1986, 37 n. 59). As counterpoint to Vailati’s
contribution to these topics I will continue my pattern of indicating en
passant and in abbreviated form some places where other versions of
paleo-pragmatism, which have been examined in an extensive scholarly
literature, intersect with the conceptual resources and their weighting
supplied by Vailati. This weighting is not a mere mirroring of already
existent pragmatism, as Vailati understood it. In an important footnote De
Rose, commenting on the Vailati-Peirce relation, argued that while there
clearly are evident analogies between the two, Vailati’s form of pragma-
tism offers us some “autonomous and original formulations.” One of
these is his distinction between the meaning of an assertion in terms of
della conoscenza, edited by Mario Calderoni, and in 1918, with the same publisher, appeared Il
pragmatismo, edited by Giovanni Papini. These two volumes have now been reissued, with
Calderoni’s preface and edited by Biagio Loré, as Metodo e ricerca (Vailati 1976). The first volume
of La cultura italiana del ’900 attraverso le riviste, edited and introduced by Delia Castelnuovo
Frigessi (1960), is devoted to the journal Leonardo and contains eight essays by Vailati. Ferruccio
Rossi-Landi published a collection, Giovanni Vailati: Il metodo della filosofia (Vailati 1967), con-
taining eight essays, with important introductory materials and notes. This was followed by the
volume Scritti filosofici (Vailati 1980), edited by Giorgio Lanaro. The Rossi-Landi and Lanaro edi-
tions have important bibliographical information concerning the secondary literature, mainly in
Italian, on Vailati. Likewise De Rose (1986) gives a good account of the secondary literature.
Finally, we now have a new edition, in three volumes, of the Scritti, edited by M. Quaranta and
introduced by L. Geymonat: i: Scritti di filosofia, ii: Scritti di scienza, iii: Scritti di scienze umane
(Vailati 1988a, 1988b, 1988c). An important biographical sketch will be found in Scritti (Vailati
1911), i–xxix (by his cousin Orazio Premoli), and a “Ricordo di Giovanni Vailati” by Luigi Einaudi
in Epistolario, xix–xxvi. Unless otherwise noted, all page references in the present essay are to the
Lanaro 1980 volume, which is perhaps still the most accessible and handy. It will be cited in the text
as SF. All translations are my own, even in those rare cases where a translated article from the first
decade of the twentieth century exists. De Rose (1986) offers a compact and helpful overview and
guide to the scope of Vailati’s pragmatism.
envisioned future consequences and the utility or usefulness of meaning-

ful assertions relative to the contexts in which the assertions are made (38
n. 59). I have accordingly tried in my presentation to offer something
more than a menu but clearly less than a full meal. The overarching inter-
pretive matrix is Vailati’s pragmatism, the inner bond that connects him
with that epochal movement in American philosophy and with the rela-
tively short-lived Italian continuation and development of pragmatism in
the work of Papini, Calderoni, and others who collaborated on the Flo-
rentine journal Leonardo during those fateful years in the first decade of
this century, before the overpowering presences of Croce and Gentile
took their toll upon the diversity of Italian philosophical culture.3
What permanent philosophical lessons, then, can Vailati’s version of
paleo-pragmatism still teach us?
1. Between Deduction and Abduction

The core of Vailati’s analysis and evaluation of the significance of modern
science, the topic of his spellbinding essay “The Deductive Method as
Instrument of Research” (SF, 59–92), lies in his thesis that the rise of the
modern mathematical natural sciences effected a pivotal inner change in
the ideal and nature of deduction as a means of knowing. When Aristotle,
Vailati contended, considered the nature and scope of deduction, he had in
mind for the most part deduction in geometrical demonstrations or in
rhetorical argumentations. What geometry and rhetoric had in common
was their focus upon a privileged set of premises or axioms, which were
either epistemically or pragmatically more certain and necessary, and the
use of the premises as foundations for the increase of certitude that would
result from the deduction of sets of conclusions from them. A properly
conceived deductive method transmitted certitude from premises to con-
clusions. Both processes—the strictly formal one of geometry and the
more informal one of rhetoric—were, however, subject to derailment due
3. One of the major differences between the views of Vailati and his colleagues and those
of Croce and his colleagues derives from opposing views on the relation of philosophy to the
special sciences. For Vailati philosophy has not just traditionally proceeded in close contact with
the special sciences but must do so if it is to be true to its task of fundamental conceptual analy-
sis. De Rose (1986, 88 n. 52) points out that Vailati and Dewey share a kind of meliorism, both
epistemologically and politically. Like Dewey, Vailati was aiming at a kind of “reconstruction in
philosophy.” De Rose writes that for Vailati philosophy was to lose the image traditionally
ascribed to it (9).
to the illusions deriving from the imperfections of “ordinary language”

(linguaggio ordinario), or from what Vailati also called “the common lan-
guage” (il linguaggio comune) (62). This theme was taken up and devel-
oped by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (1980) and Paolo Facchi (1975, 1982,
1992). Deduction was to help us avoid these illusions and to facilitate
(facilitare) reasoning processes through long chains.
The distinctiveness of the classical view of deduction as a form of infer-
ence, in addition to its concern with certitude, was exemplified in the
privileged role played by the premises. They were to be taken as given,
while deduction itself would show, through inferential processes, what
conclusions were in agreement with them. In cases of conflict with alter-
native conclusions resulting from other deductive processes, our own
premises, as embedded in ‘the common language,’ or ‘ordinary language,’
were authoritative. This was ultimately the root of the classical reliance
upon the ‘argument from authority,’ potentiated to an incredible degree
by the Scholastics, for whom deduction was first and foremost a “good
conductor” (buona conduttrice) of evidence and certitude, which were
putatively derived elsewhere (SF, 74). It was the overuse of this method as
a support of dogmatism and traditionalism that caused Bacon (and much
later, in a different mode, Dewey) to attack the deductive method—as
practiced in this form, with its maniacal ‘quest for certainty’—as aprioris-
tic and to oppose to it the ideal of a science based on induction and prac-
tical experiment. Peirce, of course, foregrounded the generative and
dynamic processes of abduction, the only form of inference, according to
him, that gave rise to genuine novelties.4
Galilean physics, however, did not wholeheartedly adopt the Baconian
ideal. To be sure, Galileo proceeded deductively, but his goal was not cer-
titude. Deduction for him, Vailati pointed out, was rather the means for
the “explanation and anticipation of experience” (SF, 65). It performs, in
fact, an abductive function. Vailati attempted to encapsulate the radical
difference exemplified in the working-out of Galilean methods in a stu-
pendous and rhetorically involved passage:
The mental processes that make up the most essential part of the
modern methods of explanation and of scientific research, taking,
that is, by means of deduction, theories to their ultimate conse-
quences, for the purpose of confronting them with some fact known
4. See on this whole issue Bonfantini 1987, which still remains one of the most sensitive and
insightful accounts of abduction and its scope and importance.
or eventually knowable to be incompatible with them, the maximum

use of every known law to see up to what point it suffices to give an
account of all the particulars that are encountered in the facts in
which its action is manifested and to establish what unexplained
residuum it still leaves open to our further investigations, the com-
bining of more laws for the purpose of using them in the analysis of
a complicated single phenomenon—all of these operations, no one of
which is possible without the help of deduction, appear to be com-
pletely foreign to the spirit of those first [scientific] investigators. The
dislike of deduction in all the cases in which it is of no use to prove
something of which one was first in doubt, the inability to avail one-
self of it as a means to secure us against too hasty generalization,
increasing in a certain way the points of contact between each theory
and the facts from which it can await a confirmation or a contradic-
tion, the lack of patience, and I would say, as it were, the lack of
abnegation, necessary for drawing out accurately the consequences
of hypotheses or principles less intuitive and less solid than those of
geometry, laying oneself open to the risk of obtaining as a unique
result of one’s own efforts the conviction of having started from
poorly grounded suppositions and of having to redo the same work
by taking a different point of departure, not being satisfied with vague
analogies, but pretending that the agreement, among the phenomena
being compared, is verified down to the most minute particulars
accessible to our senses or to the control of instruments and mea-
surements—these are so many characters or marks that are con-
nected to the same difference indicated above, that is, that between
the old methods and those to which are due the instances of rapid
progress of the physical sciences in the last three centuries. (SF, 71–72)
Such is Vailati’s delineation of what has come to be known as the hypo-

thetical-deductive method. It consists in “the disposition . . . to be amazed
on purpose” (l’attitudine . . . a meravigliarsi a proposito) (SF, 67), in the
movement from the haphazard interrogation of nature to the provocation
of nature, to subjecting it and the inquirer to risks. This is also the well-
known and central theme of Dewey’s Quest for Certainty, with its pro-
vocative reading of the historical dimensions of this quest.
Later in his groundbreaking essay, Vailati offers us another ringing pas-
sage, which delineates further the ‘abductive dimension’ operating in sci-
entific explanation:
It is this reduction of a fact, or of a law, to other more general laws

or facts that constitutes what we call scientific explanation, and it is
important to note how the advantages inhering in this process do
not depend at all on the circumstances that the facts or the laws
upon which a given explanation is grounded are presented to our
mind as more familiar or more evident in themselves than those
that we are explaining by means of them. Deduction, applied in
such a way as a means of explanation, permits us to embrace, with
one glance and with one single act of the mind, a variety and mul-
tiplicity of facts, the consideration of which would demand a quite
large number operations and of distinct intellectual efforts. With
its aid we manage to locate ourselves at a point of view from which
the analogies, the relations, and the connections among the phe-
nomena that we are investigating are explained to our intellect just
as the topographical particularities of a region are offered to the
view of one who contemplates them from a high point. Deduction
multiplies in this way our abilities to perceive order, uniformity,
constant laws in the midst of the tumultuous succession of facts
and events, or, to say the same thing with an expression from Plato
(Republic, bk. 7), it puts us in a position to discern the one in the
midst of the many (to en pollois oron) and to discover with the eyes
of the mind the immutable poles around which turn the chaos and
the perpetual comings and goings of phenomena and of sensations.
(SF, 87)
Vailati thought of science in realist terms, in spite of his not infrequent

admiring references to Mach’s epistemology. What he shared with Mach,
however, was a profound appreciation of the role of “simplifying ideal-
izations”—themselves derived from abduction—in the construction of
scientific theories:
The ease with which such simplifications lend themselves to bring-

ing us to new conclusions, by means of purely mental operations
and independently of any direct examination of the concrete facts
to which they refer, and the absolute uselessness of any appeal to
these to guarantee the correctness of the deductions themselves,
leads us sometimes to lose from view the fact that requisite investi-
gations must precede the application of the results obtained to real
cases in order to establish whether, by means of them, the conditions
are truly present that the theory supposes, whether, by means of

them, that is, the influence of all those causes the theory has not
taken into account is then really and truly able to be ignored. (SF, 91)
The modern scientific process of ‘deduction,’ as Vailati understands the

term, involves a mutual adjustment of theoretical idealization, chains of
deductions, and the demands of experience itself. From an examination of
the significance of the rise of mechanics, which for him was of fundamen-
tal epistemological importance, Vailati contended, much as Dewey did,
that concepts are fundamentally instrumental in nature (SF, 55), that an
intellectual combat of ideas takes place not just between thinkers but
within each thinker (57), that there is an intrinsic aesthetic character to
mechanics that turns theory-construction in this domain into a kind of
“scientific poem” (58), so that coherence, symmetry, and coordination of
ideas are marks of scientific and theoretical quality.5 The drive toward
simplicity and economy that Vailati ascribes to the science of mechanics is
really the drive toward system and is not to be thought of in strictly
Machian terms. Vailati was no positivist either in his account of science or
in his analysis of meaning and language.
Further, Vailati was deeply impressed by Peirce’s pragmatic analysis of
meaning and by its connection with the development of the experimental
sciences on the one hand and of mathematical logic on the other. The
Peircean central contention, on Vailati’s reading, is that the value (valore)
or meaning (significato) of an assertion is to be found in the “practical”
consequences (SF, 237) entailed by it and by its constituent terms. Vailati
gives a faithful and clear account of this pragmatic maxim in his later
essay, written in conjunction with his friend Calderoni, “The Origins and
the Fundamental Idea of Pragmatism,” published in Rivista di psicologia
applicata in 1909 (in SF, 331–46). But the peculiarity of Vailati’s develop-
5. According to De Rose there is a significant difference between Vailati and Dewey with
respect to their conceptions of logic. For Dewey logic is not autonomous, as it is for Vailati. For
Dewey, as De Rose sees it, logic develops as “a functional instrument for reaching the very heart
of the inquiry” (1986, 56). Dewey specifies mathematical reasoning as always open to the possi-
bility of an indefinitely extensive existential reference ([1938] 1986, pt. iv, chap. xx). Mathemat-
ics, that is, develops by means of a change in the context of inquiry. It is the operations of
transformation of subject matters that are the key to Dewey’s conception of logic. The operations
constitute procedural means for dealing with subject matters that are inherent in inquiry itself as
irretrievably concrete. De Rose points out that for Vailati it is the increasing abstraction of math-
ematical logic that is important and that Vailati saw an affinity between mathematics and artistic
creation. In this, of course, he was in good company.
ment of a philosophy of science (and ultimately of a philosophy of lan-

guage) within the confines of a definitely fallibilistic pragmatic epistemol-
ogy is that for him the premises, postulates, and axioms of a theory are
treated as propositions like other propositions, with no divine right. A
theory as a concatenated network of premises, conclusions, and lines of
inference is to be compared to a constitutional or democratic regime
where the postulates are temporarily placed in charge to perform certain
functions in the public interest, that is, in this case, the pursuit of objec-
tive knowledge. The distinction between premises and conclusions, on
this view, is merely functional or pragmatic, since in the last analysis all
the constituents of the theoretical system will be bound together in a
mutually self-implicatory way. These are familiar—and still highly con-
tentious—theses.
Vailati’s antifoundationalism is intrinsically connected with his prag-
matism. For Vailati, scientific knowing, while clearly, by reason of its
proven historical successes, a privileged form of knowing, is not based on
impregnable intuitions or insights. It follows no ‘a priori’ method for the
‘fixation of belief.’ It consists of a vast web of theses and hypotheses that
have been developed from sets of simplifying idealizations and whose
practical (conceptual) consequences have been elaborated in the greatest
detail by complicated chains of inference. As Vailati put it in his review of
Duhem’s Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (SF, 220–22), a theory is
“an ensemble of hypotheses” (un insieme di ipotesi) (222) that, while ide-
ally confronted with experience as a whole, nevertheless must be put to
the test in individual cases and, perhaps, sacrificed in parts in order to save
the theory as a whole. Science is a systematized form of risk taking, moti-
vated by a willingness to fall into error for the sake of truth. In this con-
ception of science, Vailati was agreeing with Peirce’s characterization of
the “experimental mind” at the beginning of his essay “What Pragmatism
Is,” where the provisional character of premises and postulates is meshed
with their heuristic fertility. There Peirce contended that his experience
had led him to believe that
every physicist, and every chemist, and, in short, every master in

any department of experimental science, has had his mind molded
by his life in the laboratory to a degree that is little suspected. . . .
[W]hen you have found, or ideally constructed upon a basis of
observation, the typical experimentalist, you will find that what-
ever assertion you may make to him, he will either understand as
meaning that if a given prescription for an experiment ever can be

and ever is carried out in act, an experience of a given description
will result, or else he will see no sense at all in what you say. (Peirce
[1905] 1998, 331–33)
Vailati had written in 1906 several passages that are almost a gloss on
this Peircean assertion. In his essay “Uno zoologo pragmatista” he spoke
clearly of the active intervention of an observer, using two common
‘observation tools’ as his examples.
The very things that we call instruments of observation, beginning

with the most simple ones such as the scale and the thermometer,
inasmuch as they are means of inducing or constraining bodies to
produce some effects that would not be produced spontaneously
and whose production depends on certain operations that we per-
form on them (moving, touching, immersing, etc.), can be charac-
terized as true and proper instruments of experimentation in the
strictest sense of the word. (1911, 731)
These operations, of course, as they become increasingly technical, move

us further and further away from commonsense properties. Vailati writes:
Precisely one of the most general characteristics of scientific

progress is the tendency to substitute for classifications based on
external resemblances or differences that are more immediately
apparent than the objects or processes studied other classifications
referring, instead, to resemblances or differences that become man-
ifest only when they are subjected to determinate operations and are
forced to act or react in artificially produced circumstances. (731)
A further aspect of this matter, which also looks forward to Vailati’s

valuable analysis of language, is his assertion that the development of
modern mechanics and mathematical logic entails the recognition of the
central role of implicit definition or what he calls definition by abstraction
in our ways of talking about and symbolizing the world. The main point
to be learned is: we cannot assign a meaning to isolated words. The key
words of a theory, such as ‘mass,’ ‘force,’ ‘inertia,’ and so forth, are
defined within the contexts of systems of sentences or assertions. They are
not independent, freestanding contents of abstracted or abstractable intel-
ligibilities but elements within a complex system or field of differences,

connections, and contrasts. Vailati writes: “It is necessary then to admit
that a theory, or a collection of hypotheses, can have a meaning even when
we cannot properly attribute one to the individual parts, or affirmations,
that contribute to its constitution—in the same way that a phrase can have
a determinate sense without that being the case for all the words of which
it is composed, each taken by itself” (SF, 222).
Vailati unequivocally acknowledged the primacy of context, as the fol-
lowing stimulating passage from his article “On Some Aspects of the
Contemporary Philosophical Movement in Italy” from 1907 shows.
A proposition is always more or less a member, a part of a theo-

retical organism, just as a term is part of a phrase or of a proposi-
tion. To determine the sense or to judge the truth of a proposition
without connecting it, in an explicit or an implicit mode, to a sys-
tem of other propositions, constitutes a problem just as insoluble
and absurd as trying to determine the movement or the position of
a body without putting it in relation to other bodies or points of
reference. (SF, 279)
Indeed, Vailati thought that many of philosophy’s own central words also
cannot be ‘defined’ directly, but rather than this being a license to inflate
concepts and theories to no end, pragmatism entails a kind of radical
surgery while admitting all the time an open-ended development of theo-
ries and explanatory concepts sufficiently flexible and creative to deal
with an ever-changing and evolving experience, both individual and
social. These are themes developed in his essays “Language as Obstacle to
the Elimination of Illusory Contrasts” (SF, 325–30) and “Pragmatism and
the Different Ways of Not Saying Anything” (347–57).
The pragmatic maxim was formulated by Vailati, echoing Peirce, in the
following way in his essay “The Origins and Fundamental Idea of Prag-
matism” (SF, 331–46): “[T]he sole means to determine and to clarify the
sense of an assertion consists in indicating what particular experiences
one, with it, intends to affirm will be produced or would be produced,
given certain circumstances” (331).6 These experiences, however, are by
6. This is for Vailati a matter of finding a criterion for sense or meaning (significato). “It is a
matter . . . of establishing a criterion for the validity of our reasoning and our thinking, and of
indicating the forms of expression in which all our reasoning processes must be susceptible to
no means merely subjective or merely intended. The whole point of the

maxim is to make assertions more objective by subjecting them to a set of
constraints and controls. Assertions refer essentially to “anticipations or
previsions [previsioni] of all sorts” (SF, 335), and this, Vailati shows in an
illuminating and ‘semiotically torqued’ analysis of some points from
Berkeley’s Theory of Vision, applies even to the beliefs about present facts
or to facts that have already occurred:
In his Theory of Vision—which is really a true and authentic the-

ory of ‘prevision’—Berkeley, in opposition to the current opinion
according to which the size, position, and distance of objects
would be seen by us in the same way that we see their color,
showed how our visual sensations are, by themselves, simply inca-
pable of furnishing us immediately with such types of information,
and that the distances, the forms, the dimensions of the objects that
we see are not ‘seen’ by us but ‘foreseen,’ or inferred by the symp-
toms or signs of them with which our visual sensations, in the real
sense of the term, furnish us.
That is, the distances, the forms, the dimensions are, in a certain
sense, read and interpreted by us in a process analogous to that with
which we manage to read and to interpret any other species of
‘signs’; we can be said, for example, to see the genius or the stupid-
ity of a person when we read something they have written. (SF, 335)
Berkeley’s esse est percipi really means esse est posse percipi (SF, 336).
Vailati accepts this ‘semiotic’ analysis as equivalent to a ‘pragmatic’ analy-
sis. (De Rose [1986, 28] even says that we are actually seeing a movement
from scire est posse to scire est praescire.) At any rate, on this account, per-
ception and semiosis are reciprocal. The existence or nonexistence of an
intelligible or cognizable thing for us boils down to the possible existence
of conceptually determinate or determinable experiences (SF, 336), which
can come to us independently or which we can provoke by our voluntary
actions.7 These systems of ‘previsions’ are contained in our beliefs and in
translation if they are valid, and in which our beliefs must be susceptible to enunciation if they
are to have any meaning” (SF, 346).
7. One of the benefits of reading Vailati is to follow his citation path and to come upon for-
gotten or at least neglected authors. One of these is Gyula Pikler, a Hungarian psychologist and
philosopher who wrote in English and German as well as Hungarian. Rossi-Landi notes that
Vailati showed the greatest admiration for his ideas and used them in his discussions of prag-
matism. Vailati was especially interested in Pikler’s Psychology of Belief in Objective Existence.
our patterns of conduct and do not have to be actualized or made explicit

except in cases when our beliefs or patterns of action are interrupted or we
fall into doubt. This is, of course, consonant with Peirce’s notion that we
must not fall prey to false doubt or pretend to doubt with our heads what
we do not doubt in our hearts. Vailati is here, as in many other places, a
faithful interpreter and presenter of the Peircean theses, pointing out the
wide range of consequences that flow from accepting the pragmatic axiom
and seeing how we can assimilate it to a semiotic analysis of perception, a
topic Peirce never ceased to deal with in great detail on his own (see Innis
1994b, chap. 2, and Chapter 1 of this book).
2. The Linguistic Dimension in Vailati’s Work

Vailati never ceased to occupy himself in divers ways with language as a
philosophical problem. Language for him, as he put it in a nice piece of
hyperbole in a letter to his cousin Orazio Premoli, “contains in resumé all
that which the other histories hold of interest: the linguist is related to the
historian as the archaeologist is related to the stamp collector” (Vailati
1971, 26). This valuation led to a dual approach to language. On the one
hand, his approach was informed through and through by the rhetoric of
suspicion (and the suspicion of rhetoric).8 This brings him into close prox-
imity to Nietzsche, Peirce, Lady Welby, and Wittgenstein in particular.
Pikler’s analysis completes, in Vailati’s opinion, the work of Berkeley, Hume, and Mill in the
construction of a pragmatic epistemology. While this is an admittedly ironic fusion of various
theoretical positions, the upshot of Vailati’s discussion is that objects are permanent possibili-
ties of sensations or experiences. For Pikler—and Vailati agrees—the “existence” of material
objects and their properties is established by the same means that we use to establish the exis-
tence of our attitudes or cognitions or our memories. It seems that we have here a use of “dis-
positional concepts,” in the sense of analytic philosophy. Hence, the powers ascribed to human
beings are ‘virtual,’ and not necessarily actual. Even the analysis of our own immediate con-
sciousness is in virtual terms for Vailati, or in terms of “previsioni,” whether we are dealing with
how a given thing ‘appears’ to us at a certain time or with the expression of a present sensation,
a momentary state of mind (SF, 344). Self-deception is possible, on Vailati’s terms, because our
dispositions and beliefs can be in opposition to our actual actions. Dispositions are “programs
of action” (345): “The ‘inner’ world no less than the ‘outer’ world is made up not only of what,
at a given moment, is found ‘in act’ but also of what is found ‘in potency’; to the one as well as
to the other applies Pikler’s statement that ‘the “would be” of presentation is the “is” of objec-
tive existence’” (345). Polanyi also had contact with Pikler. See Jha 2002, 8.
8. See especially Vailati’s essays “Sull’arte d’interrogare” (On the art of asking questions)
(SF, 204–9), “Un manuale per bugiardi” (A handbook for liars) (292–99), and “Il linguaggio come
ostacolo alla eliminazione di contrasti illusori” (Language as obstacle to the elimination of illu-
sory contrasts) (325–30), which I will discuss in detail later.
Vailati’s approach, however, is Socratic rather than Nietzschean or

Freudian or Marxist. Philosophy was to put us on our guard against
pseudo-distinctions and pseudo-abstractions and show us ‘how to make
our ideas clear,’ that is, reveal the ultimate conditions of linguistic mean-
ing (and nonmeaning), which are traced by Vailati to pragmatic con-
ditions. On the other hand, philosophical reflection on language had also
a descriptive and a constructive task: to perform a phenomenological
inventory of our language forms and concepts and to delineate the vari-
ous logical grammars of our expressive means. This makes up a kind of
Wittgensteinian/Peircean dimension. I want to focus first on the latter
task, as exemplified in two substantial and fresh essays, “The Tropes of
Logic” (“I tropi della logica”),9 which, with a semantic orientation, deals
with metaphors of mental processes, and “The Grammar of Algebra,”
which, in the syntactic mode, examines the structure of algebra from the
linguistic point of view.
“The Tropes of Logic” (SF, 195–203) is not only a piece of substantive
language-analytical philosophizing in its own right, but it also points
ahead to and compares favorably with the type of analyses undertaken
much later by Wittgenstein and others within the tradition of analytic
philosophy, and by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in recent years in
their provocative ongoing discussions of the ubiquity of metaphor and of
metaphorical constructions of ‘the mind’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999;
Johnson 1987).
Taking deduction (il dedurre), the logical operation par excellence, as his
object of analysis, Vailati asks whether de facto we conceptualize it accord-
ing to diverse images, image-schemata, or root metaphors, and, if so, what
they are. Answering in the affirmative to the first question, Vailati distin-
guishes three root metaphors, each of which represents one aspect, or sys-
tem of aspects, of this paradigmatic ‘mental process’: (1) support or prop
(appoggio/sostegno), (2) containing/including (contenere/includere), and
(3) ascending/descending (salire/scendere).
The first group of metaphors—connected with a foundationalist com-
mitment—focuses on the classical role of deduction as “a means of making
our knowledge certain.” But, on the classical view, certitude is dependent
on the certitude of the premises, to which the conclusion is attached by a
9. This paper appeared in English translation under the title “On Material Representations
of Deductive Processes” (Vailati 1908). I prefer to refer to it under the title that foregrounds the
metaphorical or ‘figured-speech’ dimension, since it clearly bears upon current discussions.
thread (filo) of argument. Certitude is transmitted in a straight line, so to

speak, from premises to conclusions. It literally ‘depends’ on the
premises, hangs from them. Greek science, logic, and geometry shared the
same ideal of deductive systems and gave cognitive priority to the system
of premises, axioms, or postulates from which the process of deduction
started out (the theme of “The Deductive Method as Instrument of
Research”). The validity of the premises and their mutual coherence came
either from their self-evidence or from the fact that in the carrying-out of
inferential processes they did not give rise to contradictory conclusions.
At the same time, however, the image-schemata of ‘support’ or ‘prop’
define a meaning-space of premises as the ‘base’ or ‘foundation’ upon
which the conclusions ‘rest’ or against which they ‘lean.’ Greek thought
was obsessed with the problem of foundations, especially in deductive
systems, where, it was thought, the ideal of the human mind was most
exemplified. While, to be sure, deduction was a process, and hence a
development in time, it was the completed process, as exemplified in a
unified set of properly related propositions, that the Greeks most admired.
Hence, Plato’s praise of geometry, the cultural influence of Euclid’s ele-
ments, and so forth, in spite of Aristotle’s own contributions to rhetoric
and what is now called ‘informal logic.’
Vailati points out that this image does not correspond to the new view
of deduction as it has been revealed in the rise of modern mechanics and
in modern mathematical logic. Premises and conclusion are rather joined
together by “mutual attraction,” mutual dependency. Vailati likens the
process of deduction—note the Wittgensteinian image—to a group joined
together by a rope (SF, 199). Deduction, we saw, is for Vailati much more
like an explication (spiegazione) than a demonstration (dimostrazione) in
modern scientific systems, because the premises and axioms have no per-
manently privileged status, but play their role within a constitutional or
democratic realm. Going beyond his pragmatist claim that induction is “a
reasoning process without foundations” (374 n. 4), Vailati seems once
again to imply that deduction itself, as it functions within the realm of the
idealizing physical sciences and in modern mathematical logic, is more a
means of discovering just what a theory or set of hypotheses means, or
could imply, with respect to their bearing on experience, than a device for
ensuring the certitude of a process of reasoning or finding a rock-solid
base. On this account, the aim of modern science is understanding, not
certainty. Here Vailati parallels exactly, it seems to me, the view of science
proposed by Peirce (see Delaney 1993) and worked out by Dewey in his
Quest for Certainty and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. For Vailati theories
are organisms whose parts are mutually dependent and tied together by
intelligible bonds discerned by inferential processes that could begin at
any place in the organism. So, we have a radical shift in image-schemata
and turn toward a pragmatist picture of the conditions of inference quite
generally.
The second group of operative metaphors or image-schemata of deduc-
tion, found in the pair “to contain/to include,” represents conclusions as
materially implied by premises or of the premises as contained in the con-
clusion, in fact, explicating the conclusion that is deduced from them. By
relying upon this schematization, which Lakoff and Johnson have exten-
sively analyzed, Vailati points out that we are first of all led to think of
deduction as the extraction from premises of what they already contain, of
what is implicit in them. Deduction on this reckoning is a cognitive move-
ment from the implicit to the explicit. But what, we might ask, happens to
the cognitive status of the conclusion if it is already ‘in’ the premises?
How is a conclusion ‘in’ its premises? Aristotle tried to answer this ques-
tion by recourse to an analogy based on the contrast between form and
matter. Deduction, in his view, is likened to a sculptor’s release of a figure
from a block of marble. Vailati, for his part, modifies, in an enlightening
way, the analogy, by pointing out that the deductive process, so under-
stood within this image-schema, should be compared rather to the pro-
duction of a lens (lente) or a dagger (pugnale). This shift in the metaphor
illustrates, he points out, the greater and deeper cultural shift in the cog-
nitive role of deduction: from the explication of what is already there to
an instrument for seeing, by means of the theory, what would otherwise
be inaccessible (the lens metaphor) or for penetrating (the dagger metaphor)
to the inside. It is in this light that we are to understand Vailati’s comment
about “the task of deduction as the organizing activity of our knowledge
in view of the attainment of determinate ends, not excluding, it is under-
stood, that of leading to the quest for acquiring new knowledge” (SF, 200).
Hence, on this account, deduction has a properly heuristic, that is, abduc-
tive, role to play in the development and organization of knowledge.
Vailati has a view of deduction as active and contrasts it with (in his
view) other purely or predominantly passive operations of observation,
contemplation, or registration of the data of experience or of intuition.
Deduction must be likened to a conscription (coscrizione) rather than to a
census (censimento) (SF, 201). This is, in itself, an illustration of the cre-
ative role of metaphors in modeling mental processes.
But there is even more to Vailati’s critical and ultimately destructive

analysis of the implications of the container image. Such an image inclines
us to think of premises as simpler than the conclusions, as, in fact, even the
elements out of which the conclusions are composed. The ‘whole’ would,
paradoxically, be already ‘contained’ in its parts. It is in effect a chemical,
even ‘analytical’ or ‘reductive’ analogy, and is latent even in Euclid’s Ele-
ments and in Plato’s Theatetus (206–8), where the fundamental principles
of the various sciences are likened to the letters of the alphabet. In Vailati’s
view, however, the weakness of the chemical image-schema or root
metaphor is that it exaggerates the role of simple truths over against com-
plex truths and creates the supreme ideal of scientific research as the deter-
mination of truths absolutely primordial, indecomposable, atomic, “fit to
generate all the others by means of their different groupings” (SF, 201).
This is, in fact, the Leibnizian ideal that likens truth to numbers.
To this ideal as a monolithic norm—Vailati nevertheless had a deep
appreciation of Leibniz—Vailati opposes an essentially pragmatic one.
Simplicity and complexity, he points out, are extremely relative, depend-
ing on the goal of the affirmation, where it is uttered, the weight of the
treatment of which it is a part, and so forth (SF, 201–2). Indeed, going fur-
ther, Vailati argues that whether a proposition is demonstrable or a con-
cept definable depends, in the one case, on what premises one accepts or,
in the other case, on what other concepts one supposes as given (202). It is
this shifting nature of the premises and of the concepts that reveals just
how indebted Vailati is to his study of the history of science.10
The third group of metaphors, based on the image-schema of ascend-
ing/descending, encompasses both deduction and definition. The latter is
often represented as consisting in the ascent from particular intuitions to
more general concepts under which the particulars fall (SF, 202). This is
obviously an admittedly muffled echo of the image-schema of the por-
phyrian ‘tree’ and of other image-schemata, perhaps one of which could be
called the ‘canopy’ or ‘umbrella’ image-schema. Vailati points out that
metaphors of groups two and three share the notion that deduction
involves passing from the general to the particular—a descent—and that in
fact the upshot of definition can also at times be considered to be a move-
ment from a more general notion to a particular notion (SF, 203), as when
we add a differentia specifica to a genus. The ‘ladder’ of inference and of
10. See Michael Polanyi’s stimulating discussion of the nature of premises in Polanyi 1964,
85–90, and 1958, 160–71. See also Jha 2002 for nuanced treatment.
definition is clearly bidirectional, though Vailati himself strongly prefers

and thinks in terms of organism or web image-schema or metaphor.
Moreover, comparing the vision-based light-metaphor of “illumina-
tion” (rischiaramento), which Vailati glosses with the German Erklärung,
with that of “going up” (salire), rooted in motoricity, Vailati points out
that the latter has the advantage of foregrounding not only seeing but
commanding and power, “as when one speaks of heights from which one
dominates a given region”—glossed by Vailati, this time in English, as “a
commanding view” (SF, 203). There are, it is clear, many different heights,
with relative advantages and disadvantages. Which ‘rung’ on the ladder or
which ‘slope’ we want to operate from is a pragmatic—perhaps rhetorical
or even political—matter.11
These exemplary analyses of the language of the mind, of those root
metaphors that prestructure not only our pictures of ourselves but also
the procedures we use to structure our world and to set cognitional goals
for ourselves, are heuristically fertile and permanently valid contributions
to the hermeneutics of knowledge and illustrate the power of a pragmat-
ically oriented linguistic phenomenology to contribute to an analysis of
mental processes. Vailati’s is a clear precursor of later work, which by no
means supersedes his percipient and historically informed investigations.12
11. Vailati’s antidogmatism is displayed in his analysis and use of the notion of point of view,
which he calls a ‘metaphor’ in a letter to Giovanni Papini (1971, 354). A chemical datum, he
notes, could be true for agronomists and not for pharmacists. ‘Point of view’ is clearly connected
with his analysis of scope and utility.
12. Vailati’s correspondence shows this quite clearly. I would like especially to note, in light
of Peirce’s correspondence with Lady Welby, Vailati’s comments on her What Is Meaning? which
he conveyed to her (in English) in a letter of 18 March 1903:
I have read it with much interest and with almost general agreement, especially so far as
it concerns what seem to me to be the most vital points of your contention. Among
them I do reckon:
1) Your insisting on the need for a critique of imagery, for a testing of analogies and
metaphors (especially when ‘unconsciously’ or ‘semiunconsciously’ used, as it is always
the case in the current or vulgar ones).
2) Your warning against the tendency of pedantry and school-learning to discour-
age the development of linguistic resources, by the inhibitions of those spontaneous
variations that are the necessary condition of organic growth.
3) Your valuation of the practical and speculative importance of raising language
from the irrational and instinctive to the rational and volitional plane; in which it is con-
sidered as a means or a contrivance for the performance of determined functions (rep-
resentative, inferential, communicational, etc.) and for the attainment of given ends.
4) I would subordinately object to the word ‘Significs’: it could, as it seems to me,
with some advantage, be replaced by Semiotics, which has already been appropriated to
3. The Grammar of Algebra

The principal focus of Vailati’s philosophical work was, as we have seen,
twofold: an essentially pragmatic analysis of the significance of modern
scientific methods and an analysis, also pragmatic, of the importance of
language for philosophical reflection as a whole. The two analyses are inex-
tricably intertwined. The core of his approach to language was fundamen-
tally semantic, for it is through the concepts carried by languages that
human beings gain control over their world and enter into cooperative
arrangements in social life, steering and evaluating both their technical and
their ethical actions with respect to what Dewey called ‘ends in view.’
The semantic orientation, however, is by no means all-encompassing.
While the analysis exemplified in “The Tropes of Logic” is resolutely
semantic in orientation and in method, nevertheless the groundbreaking
essay “The Grammar of Algebra” (“La grammatica dell’algebra”) offers
us one example of a precise and illuminating comparative account of the
syntactic structures of algebra and natural languages (SF, 304–24). In it
Vailati touches upon, and has given a precursory treatment of, issues dear
to general semiotics, whose principal goal is the description, classification,
and comparison of sign systems of every sort.
What, according to Vailati, does or can an analysis of algebra, from the
‘grammatical’ or ‘language’ point of view, tell us?
The foundation of the comparison is that while sign systems, such as
the ideographic, that bypass phonetic representations may not have
‘words’ in the strict sense of the term, their elements perform the same
functions. These second types of writing systems use alterations in the
form, or in the order of signs, to perform the analogous functions of nat-
ural languages realized by inflexions, prepositions, signs of predication
and of interrogation, conjunctions, and so forth. Still, algebra, music, as
well as other ideographic systems, while engaging in a kind of competi-
tion with natural languages, resort to various expedients and have a spe-
cial character all their own, which, in the case of algebra, is not to be
restricted to its remarkable brevity and to the precision of its system of
notation with respect to numbers or to quantities.
Besides its formal advantage as a means of expression, the language of
algebra, Vailati notes, is also advantageous as an instrument of research
the very same meaning by no less an authority than that of Locke (Essay, iv, 21 in fine).
(Vailati 1971, 143)
and of proof (SF, 305). But, unlike the signs of arithmetic and music—
which Vailati groups together as ‘nomenclatures’ rather than languages
and whose tasks are the description and decomposition into their ele-
ments of given groups of sensations or of complex actions—algebra and
its semiotic partner, chemical notation, can enunciate true and authentic
propositions (that is, propositions with objective reference) and deduce
their consequences (306).
The first point of comparison between the grammar of algebra and the
grammar of language focuses on the parts of speech (SF, 307). Vailati
agrees with Max Müller’s thesis that “language begins where the interjec-
tions end” (307). Interjections are “full” of meaning in themselves and
have no specifically syntactic bond with other interjections. They are first
and foremost, though not exclusively, indexes, on Peirce’s understanding,
that is, existentially connected with their meanings. This syntactic bond,
Vailati points out, is crucial for the joining of names, adjectives, verbs, and
so forth to make phrases and propositions. Merely mentioning the name
of an object, without joining it to other words in a syntactic matrix, is
insufficient to determine what we intend to say. Vailati was very clearly
aware of the necessity of a syntactic field, in Bühler’s sense, or of a lin-
guistic situation, in Wegener’s and Gardiner’s sense, wherein the single
linguistic units, to do their work, had to be set in order.
This is extremely clear in the case of prepositions, which ‘mean’ noth-
ing without the addition of other words (SF, 308). Thus, “above,” “beside,”
“after,” and so forth always open up what Karl Bühler, we saw in Chap-
ter 2, called Leerstellen, or empty slots, which have to be filled by other
linguistic units. There are nouns and adjectives that also demand comple-
ments in order to signify: “contemporary,” “fellow countryman,” “greater
than,” “following upon” (309). What Vailati called “relative nouns” (nomi
relativi) have a “transitive” character, analogous to the transitive charac-
ter of verbs, with which they have in common the further factor that they
can be translated into verbal form. Look at Vailati’s examples. “So-and-so
is the enemy of such and such” or “this object is higher than another
object” can be translated into “one person hates another person” or “a
certain object surpasses, or goes beyond, another object” and so forth
(309–10). Vailati, in the course of his analysis, refers explicitly to Peirce’s
theory of relations, although the examples are perhaps not as felicitous as
one would like: bivalent, trivalent, and so forth (bivalent: ‘to teach,’
‘maestro,’ ‘donor’; trivalent: ‘to sell,’ ‘to buy’ [310]). In plurivalent verbs,
which are multiply transitive, the prepositions perform the role of con-
necting organs. To be sure, Vailati points out, the increasing number of
‘valences’ governing the relation of verbs and complements would lead to
ambiguities if there did not appear on the scene prepositions (or inflec-
tions) corresponding to the diverse ‘cases’ of nouns. This is also a Peircean
insight. Telegraphic speech (addresses, financial statements, etc.) dispenses
with them, however. To use Vailati’s Italian example, “Spedite plico seg-
retario” (Send the packet to the secretary) is clear by reason of the seman-
tic content of the words. But, to stick to Vailati’s Italian example once
again, in the equivalent cases of “dico male di Tizio a Caio” or “dico male
a Caio di Tizio” (I am maligning Titius to Caius), the dropping of the
prepositions would make the sentences completely ambiguous (310–11).
Of course, English uses prepositions in this example in a different way,
but the same point is valid. Order alone is not sufficient.
Using the points of reference above as the basis of his analytical
notions, Vailati subjects algebra to a grammatical analysis.
According to Vailati, the first point to note about the special grammat-
ical and syntactical characters of the language of algebra is the absence of
intransitive verbs (SF, 311). The signs of equality or inequality are the
equivalents of transitive verbs, and without them we have only algebraic
expressions, not propositions. Such algebraic expressions as a + b (the
sum of a and b), a × b (the product of a and b), a – b (the difference
between a and b) are of the same structure as the linguistic expressions
“the impact of one body on another” (l’urto di un corpo con un altro), “the
denigration of one person by another” (il disprezzo di una persona per
un’altra), “the distance between one point and another” (la distanza tra
un punto e un altro), and so forth, which function as ‘relative nouns’ or
relational expressions. So, the assertion signs of equality and inequality,
with the help of the signs of operations (addition, subtraction, etc.), exer-
cise not just the functions of bivalent verbs but also those of any number
of valences, and thus are able to express relations between many numbers,
helped by the important device of parentheses (SF, 311–13).
The transitive-verb character of algebraic signs is not, Vailati proposes,
their only defining property. They have the property of “syllogistic tran-
sitivity” (SF, 314ff.). If, for example, A is a “fellow citizen” of B and B is a
“fellow citizen” of C, then A is a “fellow citizen” of C. This, however, is
not the case with “creditor.” The verbal signs of algebra (=, <, >) have this
property. The axiom “two quantities equal to a third are equal to one
another” is the fundamental principle of algebra, which has been extended

to cover and to subject to algebraic treatment nonmathematical or nonnu-
merical relations (SF, 315).
Vailati points out that language often expresses the relation of two
objects to one another by specifying the diverse points of view in which
they are equal or unequal (SF, 316–17). Two persons can be equal “in
stature,” two buildings equal “in height,” two climates equal “in health.”
Where we—in English and Italian, say—use the preposition “in,” Greek
and Latin, for example, use the accusative and the ablative, respectively.
So, such expressions as sine a = sine b, area ABC = area DEF, are the alge-
braic equivalents of such sentences as “the stature of person so-and-so is
equivalent to the stature of some other person” (317).
Algebra also, Vailati points out, avails itself of implicit definitions.
While sine functions are defined explicitly, areas are defined implicitly, by
“definition by abstractions.” Vailati refers to the Greek use of logos—
translated by him as rapporto—in Euclid, as in “two such magnitudes
have the same [proportional] relation [to one another] as two others” or
“the relation of two quantities is equal to (or greater or lesser than) the
relation of two other quantities.” Proportions, then, and proportional
relations, exemplify implicit definitions (SF, 317–18).
Transitivity and commutativity clearly do not always go together,
though in the case of the definition of equality they do, and also in the
definition of perpendicularity or parallelism. If one line is perpendicular
to another, the other is perpendicular to it. Likewise in the class of a line
that is parallel to another line. Divisibility, however, does not share this
property. That one number is divisible by another does not mean that the
other is also divisible by the first (SF, 318–19)—at least using the simple
arithmetic conditions that Vailati obviously has in mind.
In definition by abstraction, terms are defined by their use in expressions
or propositions and are not freestanding units. Examples cited by Vailati: to
judge according to a certain standard (giudicare a una data stregua), to go
into rapture (andare in solluchero), to have something galore (averne a iosa),
to loaf, or to loiter, or to saunter (andare a zonzo), at first sight, at once (di
primo acchito). Another example: the exchange value of something is
defined in relational rather than absolute terms. But it is clear that it is the
great, indeed extensive, use of implicit definition in algebra and mathemat-
ics that distinguishes it so clearly from ordinary language (SF, 320)
This inability (or nonnecessity) to define explicitly what one is talking
about has, for Vailati, implications far outside the realm of algebra and
mathematics. While the decomposition of concepts by means of a specifi-

cation of their elements has a certain usefulness in pedagogical situations,
with which Vailati was much concerned, the term to be defined is perhaps
best grasped or taught through direct observation of the facts or the rela-
tions it is being used to express, through, that is, paradigmatic examples.
This was Wittgenstein’s point exactly. This is also, in Vailati’s view, the
way of cutting short the interminable discussions on such issues as
“time,” “space,” “substance,” and the “infinite” (SF, 321ff.).
Algebra uses the aforementioned means—the transitive verbal forms of
=, <, and >, nouns represented by numbers and variables, operation signs
(+, –, x, /)—to express isolated propositions. But in algebra, just as in nat-
ural language, the point is really to form chains of expressions in order to
express systems of relations of dependence or independence. Natural lan-
guage uses conjunctions, which perform, with respect to propositions,
what prepositions do with respect to nouns. But unlike natural languages,
algebra, with logical chasteness, has need of only one conjunctive sign to
express consequence, represented by the word “therefore.” In addition to
consequence, however, it needs three other signs: for negation (“not”), for
conjunction (“and”), and for disjunction (“or”), which are, of course, coin
of the realm in symbolic logic, too (SF, 322–23).
Vailati clearly saw that one of the tasks of a systematic philosophy of
language was to study the “various systems of ideographic notations used
in modern science, for example, in geometry, in chemistry, in kinematics,
not to speak of the representational procedures used by geography and
the diagrams used by statistics” (SF, 323; see the extremely important
works of Tufte [1990] and Bunn [1981]). In his opinion, the study of ‘arti-
ficial signs’ merits just as much attention as the study of the signs of ‘nat-
ural’ languages that have been adapted to different ends and sharpened by
many voluntary and individual factors. This is, of course, one of the main
tasks of a comprehensive semiotics and fully consonant with Peirce’s
mature position. Philosophy and semiotics have a deep and permanent
bond, both being concerned, in various ways and with various degrees of
detail, with our ‘speculative instruments’ of all sorts, of which language is
only one, albeit universally relevant, system (of systems).
Vailati closes his essay with some further reflections on the pedagogi-
cal implications of what he has tried to do. The emphasis on explicit def-
inition in both the teaching of languages and the teaching of algebra, he
holds, is deleterious. Both should be grounded in exercises of interpreta-
tion and conversation. Here is, Vailati thinks, a real chance for mutually
beneficial exchange between the two putatively separate domains, the lit-
erary and the scientific. Bridging such domains was one of Vailati’s prime
intellectual goals.
Vailati has clearly shown that algebra has a grammar and a syntax,
which systematize a set of elements that correspond to the linguistic ele-
ments of nouns, transitive verbs, conjunctions, and prepositions. Implicit
definition, or definition by abstraction, is the rule in algebra. As a study
of relations it proceeds best by paradigmatic example, by exemplification.
In fact, from the pedagogical side, algebra and the teaching of language
have much in common, for they are most successful when they rely not
on explicit definitions but on the strategy of forcing the “seeing of con-
nections,” in Wittgenstein’s sense. Hence, in this essay, as well as in many
others, Vailati has produced a piece of comparative general semiotics and
a piece of pedagogical advice at the same time.
A further exemplification of this type of analysis is found in his essay
“Pragmatism and Mathematical Logic” (SF, 237–43), whose conclusions
can be summarized in the following five important points of intersection
between the two intellectual concerns. First, they intersect in considering
the value—indeed, the meaning—of every assertion to be “something inti-
mately connected with the task that one can or one desires to make of it
for deducing or constructing determinate consequences or groups of con-
sequences” (237). Second, they share, clearly within reason in light of
Peirce’s approbation of the vague, a “mutual repugnance to what is vague,
imprecise, generic, and their preoccupation with reducing or decompos-
ing every assertion to its most simple terms: those that refer directly to
facts or to the connections between facts” (238), facts being understood
here not in positivistic terms. Third, both acknowledge, in Vailati’s opin-
ion, the centrality of historical researches to the development of scientific
theories. Even theories that have been surpassed still retain heuristic fer-
tility. Vailati considers such theories as “organisms that live, are nour-
ished, fight, procreate,” much as “those figures in a film, developing and
being transformed naturally and logically the one into the other” (240).
Thus, Vailati says, in the great prolusion to his course on the history of
mechanics, “every error shows us a rock to avoid, while discovery shows
us a path to follow” (45). Fourth, pragmatism and mathematical logic
share a concern for “particular interpretations” or concrete examples. Par-
ticular facts (fatti particolari) are needed for abstract theories (De Rosa
1986, 53). Vailati speaks of “that secret correspondence, or mysterious
alliance, between ‘the extremes of theoretical activity’ (between intuition
of the particular and the impulse to abstract and generalize)” (242), the
foregrounding of which is certainly, in Vailati’s opinion, not the least of
pragmatism’s achievements. Finally, to tie in with the analysis of the
grammar of algebra, there is the shared concern with the ideal of maximal
conciseness and maximal rapidity of expression, the elimination of redun-
dancy. Vailati speaks of the “adiposal degeneration of theories” that are
dangerous to the degree that they are useful more to “inflate than to nour-
ish the mind” (243). Theories are instruments for Vailati, means, ‘organ-
isms,’ “whose efficacy and power are strictly connected with their agility,
with the absence of encumbrances, of blocks to their movements” (243).
The epistemological import of the turn to formalisms is clear, while at the
same time Vailati eschewed at the deepest level any attachment to a mere
formalism.
4. Philosophy and the Rhetoric of Suspicion

By foregrounding “the unconscious subjection of thought to language in
the various fields of intellectual activity” (SF, 117), Vailati anticipated, in
spirit and in content, much later work in the most important parts of the
language-analytic tradition. The value of any philosophical thought is to
be measured, on Vailati’s view, by how well it helps us avoid (become con-
scious of) the abuses of language and supplies us with the means to rem-
edy our linguistic blind spots. While the analysis found in “The Tropes of
Logic” is a kind of linguistic phenomenology and that found in “The
Grammar of Algebra” belongs to comparative semiotics, many of Vailati’s
essays and reviews belong to the critique of language and to the problem-
space of the rhetoric of suspicion. Here the development of a logical sym-
bolism has a central role to play. Writing to Giovanni Vacca, Vailati
contended that “one of the greater fruits of the progress in developing
logical symbolism is that of unveiling the defects of ordinary language by
showing in what direction it would be necessary to look in order to bet-
ter it and to heal it [sanarlo]” (1971, 174).13
Vailati’s analysis of this theme, which runs through his work from start
to finish, is illuminated quite clearly by an analogy with which he begins
13. Vailati adds in a parenthetical clause: “precisely in the way socialism reveals the defects
of the present social order.” There was consequently a social imperative, or at least a social
dimension, to Vailati’s critique of language. Here is a “logical socialism” of a type rather differ-
ent from Peirce’s.
his “Language as Obstacle to the Elimination of Illusory Contrasts” (SF,

325–30). Just as we are born into a society we have not created and are
subjected to its rules, obligations, and rights, so our assimilation of a lan-
guage as a system of distinctions and classifications strictly limits, as well
as makes possible, our field or power of expression. We saw Polanyi mak-
ing this point in Chapter 1. Vailati notes that Galileo had to fight, for
example, against the obstacles embedded in traditional language—distinc-
tions between natural and violent movement, between terrestrial and
celestial phenomena, between naturally heavy and naturally light bodies,
between essentially hot and essentially cold bodies, between intrinsically
good and intrinsically bad conductors of heat, and so forth (326). These
distinctions, with all their conceptual baggage, belonged to that tradi-
tional network or “rete” inherited by Galileo, the freeing from which, at
least partially, was necessary for him to create the new science of mechan-
ics. The “common language” and the “ordinary language” (327) contained
also the results of past theoretical decisions, which had to be reformed.
Both science itself and philosophy were to perform this task. In fact, the
critical function of philosophy arises at this point and gives to Vailati’s
work on language, at least in this respect, its distinctively “Socratic” char-
acter.14 This is evident in the following pregnant and visionary—not to say
‘previsionary’—text.
That part especially of philosophy that has as its object the analy-
sis and criticism of the fundamental concepts and criteria of know-
ing and acting demands to be, so to say, rethought in every
succeeding generation; otherwise it runs the risk of losing all its
efficacy and of ending up damaging, rather than helping, those
who passively undergo its influence.
The processes that lead to the elimination of the distinctions
that are gradually coming to be recognized as superfluous or
unjustifiable are no less necessary for the healthy development of
scientific and philosophical thought than is, for the life of the body,
the normal and noninterrupted activity of the organs of secretion.
(SF, 328)
14. The sociocritical and pedagogical thrust of Vailati’s exercises in linguistic self-reflection
and appropriation of self-reflecting instruments was already prelimned, Vailati thought, in the
Greeks. “They were firmly convinced that the art of leading astray through words, just as much
as the art of not being led astray, was able to be learned as one learns arithmetic or geometry or
any science whatsoever” (SF, 118).
This is truly an ‘eliminative’ conception of philosophy, but unlike cer-

tain strands of analytic philosophy, Vailati did not think that philosophy
as such would pass away once it had resolved or dissolved the knots in
our understanding that linguistic problems or scientific problems have
produced. Indeed, philosophy often arrives at, and stays with, what
appears to be paradoxes from the point of view of popular opinion. For
the descriptive role of philosophy, its task of reflecting upon the logical
grammars of our various means of expression, is never repudiated by
Vailati, who, in this respect, remains a critical pragmatist with a semiotic
slant.
In his essay “Pragmatism and the Various Ways of Not Saying Any-
thing” (SF, 347–57), Vailati illustrates the nature and scope of his sense-
critical pragmatism. It is truly a “language-critical essay,” paralleling in
the pragmatist vein many of analytic philosophy’s procedures as well as
its tone. In this essay Vailati classifies four types of propositions as “not
saying anything”: (1) those that have become “true by definition” (as
when originally synthetic propositions have been transformed into ana-
lytic propositions: for example, the transformation of the law of inertia
into a conventional axiom); (2) those that have become “false by defini-
tion”; (3) those that have been constructed within a “process of general-
ization” whose role as a means for given logical or practical ends has been
forgotten; (4) those that take for an explanation propositions that merely
reformulate other propositions (opium facit dormire quia habet virtutem
dormitivam—Comte’s ‘metaphysical explanations’).
Terms such as “to cut in the void” (tagliare nel vuoto) (SF, 213) and
“shifting” (Vailati’s own English word), or spostamento, show the affinity
between Vailati’s inner motivation and the trajectory instantiated in
Wittgenstein’s work. Language for Vailati can also “spin its wheels” and
“go on holiday.” One part of Vailati’s philosophical effort is to determine
just when this is so, so that the various knots and entanglements of our
intellect in language can be cut and unloosed. In this therapeutic function,
philosophy would be oriented to diminishing distinctions, to clearing the
linguistic thicket, to opening a space wherein real sense can be expressed
and controlled. Another part of Vailati’s effort, however, is to “make dis-
tinctions increase” (fare aumentare le distinzioni). This is necessary in
order to do justice to the reality coming to articulation in the language,
which otherwise might be cloaked by a defective articulation. Distinc-
tions, then, are not only resolved in philosophy but also generated. Philo-
sophical practice is both eliminative and edifying.
Vailati had noted in his essay “Some Observations Concerning the

Problems of Words in the History of Science and of Culture” that insol-
uble questions often have their roots in a skewed linguistic formulation.
Vailati would have a semiotic pragmatism, as a philosophical practice,
attend closely to when the questions we consider as insoluble “owe their
character as such to some fundamental vice or weakness in our mode of
formulating them, or to the fact of their being fictitious questions, such,
that is, that to the ensemble of words with which we express them there
does not correspond any assignably determinate sense” (SF, 95). And in
his essay “The Role of Paradoxes in Philosophy,” Vailati held that it is
possible, with sufficient historically informed reflection, “to explain the
fact, which is extremely worthy of note, that the philosophical paradoxes
apparently most incompatible with the postulate of plain common sense
are precisely those that present themselves as negations of the reality of
some distinctions that are considered self-evident: the distinctions, for
example, between reality and illusion, between voluntary and involuntary
actions, or between justice and utility” (192).
In his essay “The Attack on Distinctions” (SF, 210–19), Vailati specifies
three types of procedures for generating and resolving distinctions and
tries to show that the ‘attack’ often does not abolish a distinction but
establishes it in a different context and framework, with a different theo-
retical bite.
The first approach holds that there is no precise line of demarcation
between the groups of facts presumed to be distinct and that one passes
from the one to the other by means of intermediate stages or gradations.
But in this case, Vailati points out, distinctions are actually multiplied. The
discussion of determinism and contingency, for example, exemplifies this
category and avails itself of this procedure. Perhaps one could also adduce
here the so-called mind-body problem, or the definition of ‘mind’ in
terms of the alternative between formal and informal operations, or even
the distinction between God and the world.
The second approach contends that the properties that are supposed to
be distinct are possessed by both classes or by neither of them. This
approach, Vailati notes, only succeeds in putting in better light the distinct
properties, as happened in the case of those who criticized the notion of
cause. Sometimes the line of demarcation is shifted (spostamento delle dis-
tinzioni), or one adds a second line of demarcation to it, or one just seg-
ments the field, as in the distinction between appearance or phenomenon
and the real or essence or noumenon. Such is also the distinction between
egoism and altruism. Discussions about the differences between quantity

and quality also belong here.
The third procedure for attempting to abolish distinctions is exempli-
fied in the erroneous “[interpretation of] a phrase that expresses a relation
among many objects as if it had to have a meaning for each one of them
taken separately” (SF, 215). Another example is the law of inertia in
mechanics, which only makes sense when we specify the spatiotemporal
references within which the uniform rectilinear movement of a body
occurs. Inertia in itself does not exist, any more than the application of the
term “antecedent” or “successor” to numbers is an absolute ascription.
The same number can be both, just as a city can be both “east” and
“west.” Here Vailati is calling attention to the essentially relational nature
of ‘articulation’ and of the language systems that support it and in which
it is embodied.
Vailati criticizes, however, the mania to define (mania definitoria),
which he sees as a kind of “intellectual infantilism.” A word’s capacity to
be defined does not give it a more definite sense than one than cannot be
defined. We do not always need the authority of systems of definitions,
our spade simply being, semiotically, turned. Inability to define a word
does not necessarily mean ignorance on our part, that we do not know a
thing sufficiently. Rather, Vailati says, “we know it too much, that is, so
much as to be unable to assign any other thing that would be more known
and of which we could avail ourselves in order to define it” (SF, 108).
There is in Vailati, it is clear, both a Socratic and an anti-Socratic thrust.
So, for Vailati, as for Peirce and Dewey, especially, philosophy is caught
between the two poles of generating and abolishing distinctions. In this
sense it is a linguistic exercise that straddles the fence between the Scholas-
tic maxim of distingue frequenter, which pursues the path of differences,
and the traditional philosophical task of finding general concepts, univer-
sals, the absolute, or at least the ‘generic traits’ of existence, which was
Dewey’s concern. Philosophy, in one of its dimensions, is “the critical
analysis of the most general and abstract notions, the use of which is the
indispensable condition of every type of intellectual activity” (SF, 189).
Philosophy, as practiced by Vailati, is an activity, bridging the sciences and
the humanities, that forms and cultivates the critical powers of the person
engaged in it, generating new mental habits. Its focus is a reflection upon
cognitive methods, a clarification of concepts, a determination of the con-
ditions of sense, both linguistic and nonlinguistic. Vailati’s work encom-
passes historical epistemology, linguistic phenomenology, comparative
semiotics, and a sense-critical pragmatic analysis. Rejecting the road of

oracular and monological philosophy, Vailati embedded philosophy in
the web of cultural discourse as a whole, with which it intersected, both
theoretically and practically, at just about every point. And it is this com-
prehensiveness, combined with an authentic modesty about philosophy’s
powers, that makes Vailati’s work a model for us as well as a permanent
source of insight.15
15. This modesty is exemplified in a passage in the great ‘prolusion.’ Vailati writes: “The
invention of new modes of formulating and of expressing that which is already known [is] to be
regarded sometimes as no less important to the advancement of the sciences as the acquisition of
new knowledge of fact or the discovery of new laws” (SF, 115). Paolo Facchi concludes his Ele-
menti del significare linguistico (1992) by concurring with Rossi-Landi that one can “go to school
with Vailati with no suspicion whatsoever” (242). Facchi’s 1992 work is permeated by Vailati’s
spirit, as was the work of Rossi-Landi, whose interdisciplinary interests and political concerns
likewise mirror Vailati’s deep commitments.
PA R T T W O
The Senses of Technics

Technics and the

Bias of Perception
The Tacit Logic of Embodied Meanings
1. Organ-Projection as Precarious and Stable

Technology or, following the more nuanced and open-textured usage of
Lewis Mumford ([1934] 1963), ‘technics,’ in all its forms and all its func-
tions, independent of historical period or social matrix, is also a distinctive
form of embodied meaning-making or sense-giving. It is rooted in the
general human production of ‘exosomatic organs’ of all types. These
range from stone chisels through alphabets to violins, telescopes, and par-
ticle accelerators. Such found and shaped forms mediate in complex and
multiple ways between the human body and the nature to which it is
ineluctably bound. The various systems of intertwined and mutually rein-
forcing exosomatic organs make up an ‘artificial body’ that supervenes
upon and penetrates the ‘natural equipment’ with which we are endowed
at birth. Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1983) and others (Zaner 1971; Leder 1990;
Damasio 1994, 1999) have shown how this natural equipment, the lived
body, has its own somatic ‘logic’ and formal structures. These can be
potentiated (think of sound-making) or perhaps destroyed (think of ampli-
fiers at rock concerts) by the accretion of exosomatic structures. Ernst
Kapp, in his Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (1978), was one of
the first to speak of the anthropological peculiarity of ‘organ-projection.’
He saw it as the key to the historical formation of self-consciousness, both
individually and socially. In his Elements of Mathematical Biology, A. J.
Lotka (1956), the theoretical biologist and population theorist, also placed
the notion of exosomatic organs at the heart of his wide-ranging and, for
philosophers, rather neglected bioeconomic reflections.
This general notion of exosomatic organs, of course, is central to the
work of the great dialectical thinkers. Charles Taylor, in a sequence of
stimulating and engaging works (1975, 1985a, 1985b, 1989), has insight-
fully and convincingly foregrounded and extended Herder’s and Hegel’s
insistence upon objectification and expression as ultimately semiotic con-
ditions of ‘humanization,’ understood as a process of self-realization and
self-knowledge—themes most famously transmuted in their own ways by
Feuerbach and Marx. Herman Daly, writing from the point of view of
‘economics as a life science,’ has drawn our attention to a passage from
Marx’s Capital that bears upon this issue: “Darwin has directed attention
to the history of natural technology, i.e. the formation of the organs of
plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sus-
taining their life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in
society, of organs that are the material basis of every particular organiza-
tion of society, deserve equal attention?” (Marx 1976, 493). Daly also saw
support of Marx’s contention—and of his own non-Marxist position—in
a spectacular passage from Lotka. Lotka writes:
The most singular feature of the artificial extensions of our natural

body is that they are shared in common by a number of individu-
als. When the sick man consults the physician, who, we will say,
makes a microscopic examination, for example, the patient is vir-
tually hiring a pair of high power eyes. When you drop a nickel
into a telephone box, you are hiring the use of an ear to listen to
your friend’s voice five or ten miles distant. When the workingman
accepts a wage of forty dollars for his weekly labor, he is in fact
Technics and the Bias of Perception 133
paying his employers an undetermined amount for the privilege of

using his machines as artificial members to manufacture mar-
ketable wares.
The modern development of artificial aids to our organs and
faculties has exerted two opposing influences.
On the one hand, it has in a most real way bound men together
into one body: so very real and material is the bond that society
might aptly be described as one huge multiple Siamese twin.
On the other hand, since the control over certain portions of
this common body is unevenly distributed among the separate
individuals, certain of them may be said in a measure to own parts
of the bodies of others, holding them [in] a species of refined slav-
ery, and though neither of the two parties concerned may be
clearly conscious of the fact, it is often resented in a more or less
vague way by the one less favored. (1956, 369, cited in Daly 1980,
243–44)
Writing from a decidedly non-Marxist position, Arnold Gehlen (1980,

1988) has pointed out that these productive organs, these extensions,
potentiations, and transformations of the human bodily equipment, per-
form a number of functions that make up for the radical instability or plas-
ticity of the human instinctual endowment. Exosomatic organs—including
under this term (following Dewey and Mead) also ‘institutional’ or socially
operative and sanctioned habitual-action structures—substitute for,
extend, and compensate for the natural powers of the human body
(Gehlen 1980; see, e.g., chap. 1).
The positive point, which both Hegel and Marx clearly and unequivo-
cally foregrounded, is startling in its analytical scope. A hammer, for
example, by reason of its weight, flexibility, and varying dimensions,
extends the power of the hands for pounding. Its hardness and durability,
and other properties, compensate for the relative softness of human tissue
and bone. It opens a new motor-space, a new field of projected actions
from stone-breaking to upholstery and on to cranial or orthopedic
surgery.1 A wheeled vehicle, be it chariot or SUV, substitutes for the feet
1. Marx (1976, 460–61) notes:
The productivity of labour depends not only on the proficiency of the worker, but also
on the quality of his tools. Tools of the same kind, such as knives, drills, gimlets, hammers,
as instrument of locomotion. It extends the range of distances a person is

able to traverse and compensates for the limited speed a person can main-
tain on his or her own.2 A stringed instrument—a lute, a violin, a piano—
extends the bodily powers of producing sound, compensates for its
limited range, and substitutes for it where it would not be adequate or
even appropriate on its own. The three functions are clearly seen in the
blind person’s use of a cane or the astronomer’s use of a radio telescope.
All exosomatic organs—microscopes, glasses, telephones, computers, air-
planes, weaving machines, printing presses, the list being truly endless—
can be analyzed under the threefold rubric of compensation, extension,
and substitution. In fact, each sense modality can be analyzed from the
point of view of its exosomatic extensions. The predominance of substi-
tution, compensation, or extension (as well as distortion, which implies an
appeal to a normative ‘anthropological’ model) varies as we pass from
sense to sense. Just as Gaston Bachelard (1971) thought that each sense
had its own ‘imaginary,’ so each sense has its own potential ‘exosomatic
organ-space,’ which exists as both an objective and a subjective ‘fact’ in
the world. This was Marshall McLuhan’s generative insight and organiz-
ing category in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964).
Systems of exosomatic organs, it has been argued, have their own ‘tra-
jectories’—dynamic logics or vectorial paths. They define, the historical
materialist claim runs, the ultimate grounds of the historical variability of
etc., may be employed in different processes; and the same tool may serve various pur-
poses in a single process. But as soon as the different operations of a labour process are
disconnected from each other, and each partial operation acquires in the hands of the
worker a suitable form peculiar to it, alterations become necessary in the tools which pre-
viously served more than one purpose. The direction taken by this change of form is
determined by the particular difficulties put in the worker’s way by the unchanged form
of the old tool. Manufacture is characterized by the differentiation of the instruments of
labour—a differentiation whereby tools of a given sort acquire fixed shapes, adapted to
each particular application—and by the specialization of these instruments, which allows
full play to each special tool only in the hands of a specific kind of worker. In Birming-
ham alone 500 varieties of hammer are produced, and not only is each one adapted to a
particular process, but several varieties often serve exclusively for the different operations
in the same process. The manufacturing period simplifies, improves and multiplies the
implements of labour by adapting them to the exclusive and special functions of each kind
of worker. It thus creates at the same time one of the material conditions for the existence
of machinery, which consists of a combination of simple instruments.
2. A singularly stimulating and insightful account appears in Schivelbusch 1986. It is an

exemplar of how to think about the dimensionalities of “industrialized consciousness” and com-
plements the broad-based cultural studies of Kern 1983 and Harvey 1989.
consciousness and the forms of perception and apprehension, cutting fur-

rows in both us and the world. Analyses of these technological transforma-
tions of perception, no matter what their ideological derivation, often
highlight the fundamental novelty of specifically modern technological
praxis, its sui generis character and distinctive conceptual underpinnings
and framework, which can be positively or negatively evaluated. On the
negative side, Nietzsche, for example, who is often taken as a guide in these
matters, wrote, “Our whole attitude toward nature, our violation of nature
with the help of machines and the heedless ingenuity of technicians and
engineers, is hubris” (cited in Sypher 1968, 138–39). It is, on Nietzsche’s
reckoning, both a praxical and an intellectual hubris. Michel Foucault (1967,
1977) has studied some of its profound psychic and social consequences,
such as the insane asylum and the modern prison. The roots of this hubris
were traced by Heidegger, often in direct conversation with Nietzsche, to
a shift in world-project, identified with the self-assertive and certainty-
seeking Cartesian philosophical framework and the attendant rise of a
deep-rooted will to power immanent in modern science. The result is a rad-
ical reduction in truth’s modes of appearing, connected with the fateful rise
to ascendancy of an ultimately Platonizing ‘mathematization’ and ‘calcula-
bility.’ This leads, in the case of modern technology, to the orientation of
‘enframing’ (das Gestell) and to “ordering as the supposed single way of
revealing.” Modern man, the Heideggerian story goes, is subject to a pecu-
liar sort of ‘objectlessness.’ Technological man, Heidegger writes, “in the
midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve”
(Heidegger 1977b, 307–8). This becomes the criterion of the ‘really real.’
‘Objectlessness’ also involves a reduction of the qualitative richness of
objects and their power to set up or found a world. It entails not just a loss
of world(s), but a loss of the sense of worlding, one of the main messages of
Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art.”
A cognate, but not identical, complaint derives from D. H. Lawrence.
Lawrence writes: “The idea and the engine came between man and all things,
like death. . . . He found that all things were related to certain laws. The
moment man learned to abstract, he began to make engines that would do
the work of his body” (cited in Sypher 1968, 186). For Lawrence, of course,
loss of the sense of the body was one of the prime symptoms of the decay of
vitality in the modern world, part of the desensitization accompanying the
rise of ‘mediating’ and ‘facilitating’ technologies. It was to one aspect of this
process that René Dubos, microbiologist, essayist, and ecologist, was refer-
ring when he bemoaned the “atrophy of sense perceptions brought about by
present-day existence,” a decay traceable to ignoring on a social scale the

“natural biological rhythms,” which are “real biological necessities.” The
spreading lack of perceptiveness to natural shape, form, and contour, the
shrinking of the range of perception to a ‘monodimension,’ in Don Ihde’s
phrase, is traced by him to “the distorted sociotechnological philosophy”
that runs slipshod over the “biological and psychological limits to man’s
adaptability.” It is these limits that “should determine the frontiers of tech-
nological change” (Dubos 1968, 113, 155, 164, 231).
Hence, Antonio de Nicolás, in a book of great analytical acuity, can
argue, along with more contemporarily oriented writers such as Wilhelm
Reich, Gregory Bateson, and Morris Berman, that “our technology has
provided us with the most controversial ‘body’ in the history of human-
ity” and that “there is little doubt that our present embodiment is, for the
most part, a painful one” (de Nicolás 1976, 135). It is so painful, he further
claims, echoing Polanyi’s own analysis of the root defect of the modern
‘critical’ mind, that modern nihilistic movements have been perhaps
‘somatically motivated’ to destroy the very foundations of a society that
has set itself up on the pillars of advanced technological practices. Don
Ihde (1979, 93–100) has even connected the issue of ‘somatic motivation’
and ‘somatic decay’ with the effects of rock music. Rock music without
the high technology in which it is embedded withers. And now, on both
the critical and the constructive side, Richard Shusterman has generalized
this issue, extending Dewey’s analytical framework and actual existential
practice influenced by his involvement in the Alexander technique, by
proposing a ‘somaesthetics’ (Shusterman 2000, 262–83; see Rockefeller
1991, esp. 334–44, and Jackson 1998, esp. 137–39).
Rotating the issues and frames of references even more, in a ground-
breaking and heuristically fertile essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin (1969, 217–52) presented a
set of contentious theses concerning the nature of a “sense perception
that has been changed by technology” (242). The heart of Benjamin’s
argument, rooted in his own idiosyncratic Marxism, is his contention
that “during long periods of humanity, the mode of human sense per-
ception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in
which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is
accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical cir-
cumstances as well” (222). In his justly famous essay, which has many
echoes in the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, and others of the Frankfurt
School, Benjamin, within the framework of his own socioepistemological

project, proceeded to discuss what was particularly novel about the man-
ner, medium, and historical circumstances of modern sense perception:
the loss of ‘aura,’ the disappearance of the technical apparatus through the
rise of (transparent) technologies of the image, the readiness of the tech-
nologically fragmented and split consciousness to accept violence and fas-
cist forms of compensation for a world torn apart through technology, the
new relations between the visual and the haptic, and so forth.
The ambivalent ‘splitting’ effect of technology upon the senses is fur-
ther paralleled by what McLuhan, no Marxist theorist, admittedly within
a very inadequately thematized epistemological theory and in connection
with an inordinate amount of hype, called the “extension of the sensorium
by technological dilation” (McLuhan 1964, 35). This extension and dila-
tion have the effect of “setting up new ratios among all the senses” and
thus of disturbing cultural ecology’s “reasonably stable base in the human
sensorium” itself. Indeed, on McLuhan’s reckoning, “the dominance of
one sense is the formula for hypnosis” (73). Here Dubos’s biological
approach and McLuhan’s cultural-critical approach are in full agreement.
All these factors and issues to which I have been alluding are intended
to frame the set of problems to which I want to address myself in this and
the next two chapters. My guiding question is: what types of categories
and methods are we to use, and to what types of paradigmatic examples
should we appeal, if we want to thematize and evaluate with sufficient rad-
icality the transformations of perceptual structures attendant upon tech-
nics, upon our embodiment in ‘technological’ extensions of ourselves?
I do not intend to pass in systematic review the extensive set of analyt-
ical categories and historical instantiations that have been adduced by a
long line of distinguished thinkers to explain these transformations. My
concern is different. I would like instead in this chapter, by means of some
specific categories derived from Polanyi’s conception of a ‘tacit logic’ of
consciousness and the theory of meaning built on it and by means of some
key and at times rhetorically contentious instances, to draw attention to
essential, yet relatively undervalued aspects of this problem. The next
chapter studies—that is, rotates—the issues from the point of view of
Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics, to be followed by a chapter devoted to a
semiotic rotation and extension of the same themes, relying on the work
of Ernst Cassirer. Although I must necessarily restrict myself to alluding
to parallels and selected points of intersection with other positions and
theses, I hope to be able to show certain things in a new light and to sup-
plement a number of the standard and by now classic discussions to
which I allude en passant.3
2. Structures of the Intentional Arc

Inspired by Polanyi’s model of consciousness and of tacit knowing, let us
take a closer and different look at what, following the phenomenological
tradition, Don Ihde has called the ‘intentional arc.’ This is the fundamen-
tal relational bond between the ‘self,’ ‘subject,’ or ‘inquiring organism’
and the ‘world’ of objects and states of affairs. Phenomenological analy-
ses of the intentional arc focus upon the ‘lived structures’ of the experien-
tial field. This was also, though formulated in quite different terms,
Dewey’s pragmatist procedure especially in Experience and Nature and
Art as Experience (see also Eldridge 1998). Habermasian accounts, con-
tinuing the Frankfurt School’s emphasis on various constitutive rational-
ities, have thematized the putative hierarchy of cognitive interests that
mark different cognitive stances or modes of engagement: instrumental-
technical, practical-communicative, expressive-emancipatory (see Ras-
mussen 1990). My explicit discussion is concerned only marginally with
‘critical theory’ in this format.
A pivotal distinction in phenomenological analyses has been the puta-
tive essential difference between our perception of ‘things’ and ‘objects’ (I
leave other ‘subjects’ out of the discussion here) and our perception and
use of ‘tools’ or ‘instruments.’ Phenomenologically oriented analyses have
followed a line that starts from Husserl’s original ‘cognitionally’ oriented
thematization of consciousness fundamentally, though not exclusively, in
visual terms, passes through Heidegger’s profound, though ambiguous,
critique in Being and Time of Husserl’s putatively latent Cartesian con-
3. I am of the opinion that Lewis Mumford’s work is still a valuable source of both histor-
ical and critical insights. His Technics and Civilization is both richly documented and full of
humane and critical observations. The affinities with some of the main themes of historical mate-
rialism are intended, but with no dogmatic intent. The generative insight of material embodiment
and its consequences has, of course, been graphically charted in central chapters of the first vol-
ume of Das Kapital, but I am unconvinced that Marx’s categorial scheme can do exclusive or
complete justice to both the analysis and the evaluation of the relations attendant upon our pro-
duction and embodiment in exosomatic organs qua tale. At any rate, I am not directly concerned,
here in this chapter, with the economic matrices of such embodiment relations, though, as we will
see, Dewey engages them in his ‘aesthetic’ approach.
frontational model, a critique based on his pivotal but ultimately inade-

quate distinction between the readiness-to-hand of a tool or implement
and the presence-to-hand of a ‘mere’ object, and culminates in Merleau-
Ponty’s classic multifaceted exploration of the phenomena of embodied
consciousness. Paradigm cases of embodied consciousness for Merleau-
Ponty are found not just in the blind man and his cane but also in
Cézanne’s ‘somatic’ hesitation in front of both his canvas and his subject
(Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 9–25) and in the intertwining of ‘eye and mind’
and of ‘vision and being’ in painting quite generally (Merleau-Ponty
1964c, 159–90).
Heidegger’s well-known and fruitful existential analysis of an ‘imple-
ment’ (Zeug) in Being and Time showed it to be an essentially orientational
structure, its ontological reality consisting in its ‘being-ordered-to.’ It is
not a ‘mere’ thing. It is ‘situated’ or ‘placed’ within a field of ‘references’ or
‘assignments’ that both make it possible and are defined by, or even con-
stitute, its ‘operational space.’ A consequence of not considering the tool as
something we experience as an ‘object’ over against us, on the ‘other side’
of the subject-object cut, is the ‘recession’ of the tool from the focus of
consciousness and attention. Our contact with it becomes nonthematic,
nonexplicit, nonobjective. This ‘in-order-to structure’ of the ‘tool’ makes
it possible for us to project ourselves through it in such a fashion that the
tool seemingly becomes transparent, diaphanous. While a carpenter’s or
any skilled craftsman’s relation to tools exemplifies this phenomenon, so
do a musical performer’s relation to musical instruments, a surgeon’s to
complex surgical apparatus, a painter’s to brushes and spatulas.
This is, in fact, the way the particulars or constituent components of a
skill, or the defining features or marks of a nontool perceptual object,
become transparent in skillful doing, perceiving, or knowing. Polanyi’s
great insight, the source of a profound conceptual reform, is that we sub-
sidiarily attend from them while we focally attend to what they ‘mean’ or
to what they are ‘aiming’ at. The ‘function’ of the particulars is to point
away from themselves and toward their integrating focus, with which they
can, nevertheless, be indissolubly bound. The ‘parts’ of wholes, tools as
parts of tool-use situations, movements as parts of skills, ‘belong to’ the
wholes. They are indexical, in the sense of their being existentially con-
nected with their objects. Only when a tool breaks down or malfunctions
or when a practical, perceptual, or cognitive act oriented toward an
‘object’ or an ‘achievement’ cannot be brought to term do we become the-
matically or focally aware of it or of the practical, perceptual, or conceptual
(semiotic) clues upon which we are relying. Nevertheless, we can obvi-

ously disrupt, through reflective, or what Polanyi called ‘destructive,’
analysis, our existential immersion in the tool’s operational field, or in the
actional or perceptual context, or in the conceptual framework and its
array of signs. But normally both the tool and the practical, perceptual, and
conceptual ‘cues’ exist outside the direct line of consciousness on our ‘side’
of the subject-object cut. They become, in short, as we will see, part of the
felt structure of our embodied subjectivities. This point is made with the
greatest clarity within the phenomenological tradition by Merleau-Ponty,
for whom motility is the most basic form of intentionality. The motility of
the self-moving body constitutes the generative matrix of the pluriform
‘intentional threads’ that define the human situation in the world.
Now, Polanyi too puts the body at the center of his epistemology,
which I have already schematized in Chapter 1 when discussing the per-
ceptual roots of linguistic meaning. Recall now in a new context the fol-
lowing pregnant and previously cited passage from his Tacit Dimension:
“All thought contains components of which we are subsidiarily aware in
the focal content of our thinking, and all thought dwells in its subsidiaries,
as if they were parts of our body. Hence thinking is not only necessarily
intentional, as Brentano has taught: it is also necessarily fraught with the
roots that it embodies. It has a from-to structure” (Polanyi 1967, x). These
‘roots’ are also embodied forms of technics and technology. For thinking
is for Polanyi also a form of action, just as for Dewey action was a form—
perhaps the form—of thinking. The extension of ‘thinking’ to technical
action is not only legitimate but necessary.
A second text, taken from his earlier masterwork, Personal Knowledge,
unpacks what is latent in the first. It limns the bearing of Polanyi’s cogni-
tional model on our problem, for he ascribes to knowledge quite generally
the structure of a skill. Recourse to the model of skills throws powerful
light on the structures and implications of technical or technological
embodiment. Polanyi writes:
I regard knowing as an active comprehension of the things known,

an action that requires skill. Skillful knowing and doing is per-
formed by subordinating a set of particulars, as clues or tools, to
the shaping of a skillful achievement, whether practical or theoret-
ical. We may then be said to become ‘subsidiarily aware’ of these
particulars within our ‘focal awareness’ of the coherent entity that
we achieve. Clues and tools are things used as such and not observed
in themselves. They are made to function as extensions of our bod-

ily equipment and this involves a certain change in our own being.
Acts of comprehension are to this extent irreversible, and also
non-critical. For we cannot possess any fixed framework within
which the reshaping of our hitherto fixed framework could be crit-
ically tested. (Polanyi 1958, vii)
The key points I want to emphasize and extend are as follows:
1. Consciousness, the field of awareness, has an ineluctable from-

to structure.
2. This structure is rooted in the different functions of focal and
subsidiary awareness in our grasp of coherent entities or wholes.
3. Coherent entities, practical or cognitive, arise through tacit,
acritical acts of integration and synthesis, involving an existen-
tial commitment of the subject or self.
4. All skillful knowing and doing is or involves an ‘indwelling,’ a
participation by the skillful knower or doer in his or her com-
plex ‘objects.’
5. This participatory structure involves a process of ‘intentional
self-change’ that is not under the full control of the agent.
Phenomenology has insistently brought our attention to the essentially

‘bipolar’ character of experience and has devoted itself to thematizing in
detail the varieties of what Husserl called noetic-noematic correlations.
We should expect, therefore, transformations of both poles of experi-
ence—the noetic and noematic—when experience, or ‘perception’ in the
broad way I am using this term, is transformed by technological ‘exten-
sion.’ Noetically, the very mode of attending to an object or field of expe-
rience, the noetic texture of an act of perception, the antecedent ‘space’
(and time, too) of the perceptual act and the parameters within which the
perceptual object can be ‘given,’ shift. Noematically, the types of objects,
the varieties of objective structures, the forms of appearances—and not
just the forms of appearing—also shift. This is what happens in all cases
of ‘embodiment’ in exosomatic organs. But I think that the distinctions
made in the Polanyi texts bear with especially illuminating precision on
this phenomenon and intersect with more specifically ‘pragmatist’
approaches, with which we will be more extensively and thematically
concerned in the next chapter.
In his Art as Experience Dewey spoke of this noetic-noematic duality

in a way that overlaps with and exemplifies quite clearly, from a pragma-
tist perspective, Polanyi’s model of cognitive or, more generally and more
aptly, ‘intentional’ interaction, since all interactions are by no means ‘cog-
nitive’ in any traditional sense. Polanyi is in full accord with Dewey’s key
thesis that meanings are had before they are cognized. Dewey writes:
The habits of the eye as a medium of perception are being slowly

altered in being accustomed to the shapes that are typical of indus-
trial products and to the objects that belong to urban as distinct
from rural life. The colors and planes to which the organism habit-
ually responds develop new material for interest. The running
brook, the greensward, the forms associated with a rural environ-
ment, are losing their place as the primary material of experience.
Part at least of the change of attitude of the last score of years to
‘modernistic’ figures of painting is the result of this change. Even
the objects of the natural landscape come to be ‘apperceived’ in
terms of the spatial relations characteristic of objects the design of
which is due to mechanical modes of production: buildings, fur-
nishings, wares. Into an experience saturated with these values,
objects having their own internal functional adaptations will fit in
a way that yields aesthetic results. ([1934] 1987, 342)
In Polanyian terms, the transformation of the noetic-noematic relation

sketched by Dewey occurs through a new habituation, which occurs
‘acritically,’ just as the originative perceptual judgment that founds our
access to the perceived world occurs acritically, as Peirce strongly affirmed.
In coming into contact with new shapes, planes, colors, textures, and so
forth that mark the noematic realm of objects, the subject or inquiring
organism comes to dwell in radically new and different sets of subsidiary
particulars, which exist as the attended-from particulars of the objects
being perceived. In line with the ‘instrumental character’ of all sub-
sidiaries and their assimilation to our bodies, they also function as
dynamic vectors, as directed intentional or cognitional lines of force,
‘inclining’ the subject in a felt way in preferential directions, even in spite
of himself and against his will. The fundamental operation of conscious-
ness is the constitution, through tacit acts of integration, of sense-filled
unities, what Polanyi called coherent entities or wholes (see 1958, 57–58).
If we schematize the general types of wholes by the fields of subsidiaries
and the emergent foci built upon them, we can clearly see how we can dis-
tinguish various types of wholes or meanings according to whether the
subsidiaries are motoric, perceptual, affective, conceptual, and so forth. A
whole, in Polanyi’s understanding, is first and foremost “an ordered con-
text,” some of which in addition bear upon something else. In this way
Polanyi was able to distinguish between ‘existential’ and ‘representative’
meanings in a way analogous to, if not identical with, Dewey’s distinc-
tions between ‘instrumental’ and ‘consummatory’ meanings. These
wholes are built into consciousness through a process of ‘typification’ or
‘habituation,’ which Dewey hinted at in the passage above. As a result,
there get built up stable frameworks of moving, perceiving, feeling, con-
ceiving, valuing, in multiple modalities that are founded upon the “inter-
nal functional adaptations” of systems of objects.
The phenomenon to which Dewey is referring is on Polanyian terms
nothing less than the tacit setting-up of a new system of relevance by
which units are selected and discriminated in the experiential field and
new harmonies (and disharmonies) are constituted in the lived forms of
intending. Modern cognitional theory and the profound hermeneutical
work of Heidegger and Gadamer have shown us how ‘relevance’ has a
‘fore-structure.’ This fore-structure, in the case of technologically embod-
ied consciousness, however, is first and foremost an existentially material
and not just conceptual structure. Heidegger characterized it as Vorhabe,
or ‘fore-having.’ We are embodied in material premises that make up our
‘roots,’ an extension of our cognitional embodiment in conceptual
premises that Polanyi (and Gadamer) made a centerpiece of his theory of
knowing and account of science (1958, 160–71).
Don Ihde has distinguished between forms of technically and techno-
logically structured perception in which a tool, instrument, or machine—
technologies of all sorts, whether perceptual or otherwise—enters primarily
into the noetic pole, fusing with and restructuring the acts of conscious-
ness or awareness themselves, or enters into the noematic pole, fusing
with the objects. He calls the first form an instance of an ‘embodiment
relation’ and the second an instance of a ‘hermeneutic relation.’ In con-
trast to Ihde, however, I, rather than see the two relations as relatively dis-
tinct, think that the two relations, in terms of the tacit ‘logic’ of
consciousness as delineated by Polanyi, are like two sides of a coin.
Embodiment and interpretation are inextricably intertwined, even on the
perceptual level. This point is also made by Patrick Heelan in his Space-
Perception and the Philosophy of Science (1983), where meaning-making is
‘pushed down’ to the root structures of perception. In Heelan’s works

natural science as a “hermeneutics of instrumentation” is shown, with
nuance and methodological sophistication, to be rooted in certain corpo-
real conditions of scientific praxis. The ‘semantic’ or ‘hermeneutical’
aspect of instrumental embodiment is confirmed by J. Z. Young. Speaking
of the word ‘atom’ or ‘electron,’ he noted that “it has no meaning except
as used by people who know the experiments by which it is revealed. . . .
It is important to realize that great changes in ways of ordinary human
speaking and acting are bound up with the adoption of new instruments”
(Young 1960, 111).
Indeed, the ‘ontological reality’ of an atom or an electron, as well as the
semantic conditions of our sense of ‘atom’ or ‘electron,’ are ultimately
embedded in the consciousness of the perceiver who has the requisite skill
and know-how to ‘read’ the instruments being used to determine the real-
ity of the object domain. In fact, the identity of the two procedures is one
of the pivots of Polanyi’s philosophy of science: explicit and methodologi-
cally conscious science, which is clearly interpretive, is rooted in an ulti-
mately praxical, tacit, inarticulate, skillful matrix, which is a primitive ‘form
of sense’ and of ‘sense-reading.’ This is also the epistemological point of
Kuhn’s famous work. The well-known transposition of feeling or of felt
qualities that takes place in the use of such things as probes and dentists’
drills (Polanyi, we saw in Chapter 1, affirmed a ‘probal’ nature of language)
is clearly ‘hermeneutical’ or ‘interpretive.’ Merleau-Ponty had pointed it
out, and Polanyi, within the framework of his model of ‘tacit knowing,’ had
observed that a blind person and a dentist and a native speaker begin to feel
their instruments as belonging both to their bodies and to their experiential
fields. They experience these ‘media’ as essential factors of their bipolar
intentional existence. It is through the cane or probe, transformed by the
perceiver’s power to project himself or herself out to the ends thereof, func-
tioning as perceptual channels, that the agent encounters, that is, both
comes into contact with and ‘grasps,’ the world of objects. This point is,
from the pragmatist point of view, once again illustrated in a passage from
Dewey’s Art as Experience, where, although the discussion concerns art
explicitly, the idea is applicable to ‘technics’ quite generally: “Every work of
art [and likewise every tool, machine, or instrument—REI] has a particular
medium by which, among other things, the qualitative pervasive whole is
carried. In every experience we touch the world through some particular
tentacle; we carry on our intercourse with it, it comes home to us, through
a specialized organ” (Dewey [1934] 1987, 195).
To use Polanyi’s terms, the perceiver ‘attends from’ or appropriates

subsidiarily or tacitly the ‘clues’ from the impact of the probe on his
hand—or from the ‘orienting elements’ of the particular, exosomatic ten-
tacle, no matter what the sense—while he ‘attends to’ what they ‘mean.’
This from-to structure, which Polanyi showed marks all meaningful uses
of consciousness from motoric skills to scientific practice, accounts in
epistemologically ultimate terms for both the ‘recession’ of the tool in
favor of its ‘object’ or ‘field of application’ and for the ‘felt,’ nonfocal
structuring of the embodied noetic pole. In its experienced reality, the
world at the ‘end’ of the cane or tool, or exosomatic organ quite generally,
is then conditioned for the agent by, for example, the material reality of
the cane, by its rigidity, its weight, its intrinsic texture.
Dewey calls this experienced distinctiveness ‘quality,’ affirming with
Peirce that ‘firstness’ is “the given permeating total quality of anything
experienced” (Dewey [1935] 1998b, 200). As Dewey puts it, in full recog-
nition of the bipolarity of intentional existence, “considered in itself, qual-
ity is that which totally and intimately pervades a phenomenon or
experience, rendering it just the one experience which it is” (205). But
experience is not to be assimilated tout court to the cognitive. Dewey is
insistent that “quality belongs to the domain of the occurrences of any sin-
gle and total experience wholly irrespective of any cognitive or reflective
reference” (207). As he further says, “existence itself is qualitative, not
merely quantitative, is marked by stress and strain, and by continuities”
(209). These qualities are ‘carried’ by the media in which we are embodied,
each of which has a distinctive ‘feel.’ This universality of mediation does
not necessarily involve a ‘distancing’ of subject and world. It is quality that
connects us feelingly to the world. “The world in which we immediately
live, that in which we strive, succeed, and are defeated, is pre-eminently a
qualitative world. What we act for, suffer, and enjoy are things in their
qualitative determinations” (Dewey 1931a, 93). Indeed, it is clear just how
qualitatively thick the embodiment in exosomatic organs is and must be.
Any exosomatic organ is ‘probe’—in the generalized sense, as developed
by McLuhan—and ‘filter.’ The two aspects are joined indissolubly.
As probe, an exosomatic organ constitutes a peculiar form of ‘contact’
between self and world. As filter, it constitutes a peculiar kind of ‘sorter.’ In
this probing-sorting encounter through instruments, we can see what Ihde
has called a dialectic of ‘amplification’ (McLuhan’s ‘dilation’) and ‘reduc-
tion’ (Dubos’s ‘atrophy’). Specifically instrumental auxiliaries of percep-
tion, which are assimilated to the systems of senses themselves, can either
magnify the unaided sense-organ or bodily power or they can reduce—

through a kind of negative abstraction—the complex polymorphy of sense
perception and of the body’s action-field, which is its ‘natural’ as well as
‘culturally induced’ state, to a single mode of perception. But modes of
perception, understood as ‘ways of worldmaking’ are many. Nelson
Goodman’s specification in Ways of Worldmaking of five operations
attendant upon symbol-schemes and symbol-systems furnishes supple-
mentary elaboration of what is happening. There he delineates, with no
claim to completeness, five operations of (1) composition and decompo-
sition, (2) weighting, (3) ordering, (4) deleting and supplementing, and (5)
deformation. Goodman’s ‘symbolic constructionism’ can be taken over
into the analysis of the material, affective, perceptual sorting procedures
of technics, as Marx Wartofsky and Robert Cohen so perspicuously con-
tended in their editorial preface to the third edition of Goodman’s Struc-
ture of Appearance (1977, vii–viii).
As Lewis Mumford put it in his classic Art and Technics, “a photograph,
accurate and realistic, is an abstraction from the multidimensional object it
interprets” (1952, 94). Indeed, in Mumford’s view, “the abstract office per-
formed by the realist painter’s eye could also be performed by a simple
apparatus that would throw the light rays from the outside world upon a
chemically sensitized surface” (91–92). This ‘abstract office’ in itself is
clearly not, nor does it have to be, the distinctively aesthetic office, which,
from a pragmatist perspective, is irretrievably linked to qualitative presen-
tation. The aesthetic office has as its aim to give the object in its ‘how.’ But
Mumford’s point, which is by no means antiphotography, is that it was the
ultimate facility of the use of this photographic apparatus, combined with a
seeming ‘naturalness,’ that led to the ideology and social practice of what
has been called ‘pictorial vision’ (see Snyder 1974, 219–46): that is, the appli-
cation to natural vision of demands and criteria of a particular ideological
view of vision as incarnated in the technologies of monocular perspective
and its connection with the evolution of the camera obscura and then of our
own modern camera—which has now been further transformed into a dig-
ital instrument (see Crary 1991, 25–66). An idea of vision was combined
with, derived from, a practice of vision. In such a case the range of sub-
sidiary clues bearing upon a focus and the antecedent ‘set’ that induces a
particular preferential form for integrating (weighting and ordering) them
do not correspond to any necessity in the ‘natural’ order of things. Consid-
erations such as these lie behind McLuhan’s comments on ‘hypnosis,’
Dubos’s on ‘atrophy,’ Benjamin’s complaints about the breaking of the
(mythical) seamless web of perceptual traditions, and more specifically of

the isolating role of the camera and the at times pernicious ideology of pic-
torial vision that has, though not necessarily, been conflated with it.
Robert Romanyshyn throws penetrating light on the issue:
In the camera the origins of linear perspective vision have been

instrumentalized. The hegemony of the eye, the character of dis-
tance, the window aesthetic, the paralysis and anaesthetization of
the body, the sterilization of the world of all sensuous qualities
save what is visible and observable, are all incarnated in the camera.
We enact these attitudes and values, we continue these origins in
the use of this simple, popular, and quite harmless instrument. The
photograph reduplicates the world and in time even comes to dis-
place it, taking on the character of what is true and what is real.
Seeing is believing, we say, a maxim that was unimaginable prior to
the invention of linear perspective vision. And with the camera we
have further qualified this vision: not any seeing is believing, but
only that seeing which duplicates the neutrality and impartiality of
the camera eye. If it can be photographed it is real. If it cannot, like
the elusive monster of Loch Ness or aliens from outer space, then
its veracity is in doubt (1989, 63).
So, at least one perceptual bias—let us call it the bias of deformation—is

present in the camera.
Again, a dentist’s probe, certainly not a traditional instrument of
abstraction, can magnify the natural sensitivity of the finger, but it also
reduces the range of sensations that can be transmitted. It cannot effec-
tively transmit data of moisture or heat—unless one is using a probe
combined with a thermometer, something that would give us not the
experience of heat but a set of readings of a temperature, a different thing
altogether. A microscope, dependent upon one of the most fateful of all
inventions, glass, magnifies, by definition, the perceptivity of the eye,
while reducing the ‘space’ of the visual field to a finite, unmoving horizon.
To change the direction of vision, the telescope, for example, actually
made the moon farther away by reconfiguring our sense of distance. The
telescope set up new relations (ordering) within the eye-hand field, the
distortions of which, it has been argued, lie at the root of some of moder-
nity’s major technologically induced problems. (See further Panek 1998
for a more positive take on these matters.)
Romanyshyn has written that we got to the moon in 1969
by travelling the same road that Galileo traveled in 1609. We got

there primarily and essentially as spectators, since we landed on a
moon that was and had already been for a long time a spectacle, an
object of vision. Therefore, as close as we have been to the moon,
we remain in one sense quite far away. In the sense that we have
been there as a spectator we remain quite distant and detached
from the moon. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that Galileo’s
telescope did not in effect bring the moon closer. On the contrary,
it moved it further away. Superficially, of course, the telescope did
move it closer. But beneath this surface closeness the effect was to
distance the moon as an object for the telescopic eye. The tele-
scope, as one of the first technological instruments to transform
the world into a matter of light, did not therefore decrease dis-
tance, but created it. In effect it opened, enlarged, and expanded
the world, making it possible, and perhaps even necessary, to cross
that distance. In short we could and perhaps had to travel to the
moon in 1969 because it had gone so far away. . . . The moon of
technological vision is not the same moon which lighted the skies
before the invention of linear perspective vision. The moon as a
physical object in space is primarily and essentially a cultural
vision, and men and women of earlier ages lived in a different
world, and knew and saw a different moon. (1989, 73–74)
In modern instrumentally mediated science, we are not presented with

things ‘in the flesh’ unless we admit that their flesh cannot be separated
from the means by which we know them and that the instruments are
both continuous with and introduce a ‘break’ in the natural structures of
perception and in our definitions of ‘object’ and ‘real.’ I have discussed
the philosophical matrices of this matter at length in Consciousness and
the Play of Signs, and it has received extensive treatment from such diverse
points of view as represented by the work of Peter Galison (1997) and
Don Ihde (1998).4
4. A fascinating ‘musical’ take on instrumentation is to be found in Levenson 1994. It gives

a readable account of a vast range of examples that supplement the types of instances I have been
able to discuss in this chapter. It breaks down the divide between the arts and the sciences by
showing their deep affinities on both the mathematical and aesthetic levels.
3. Embodied Technics
Can, however, we deepen and take some of these distinctions further?
Consider the cases illustrated in the two following texts, extracted from
authors with similar substantive agendas but very different rhetorical
forms.
In his Art as Experience Dewey has a passage bearing on the ‘bodying
forth’ of art—and, by extension, of the ‘technological arts.’
What we can say is that the products of the technological arts

become fine in the degree in which they carry over into themselves
something of the spontaneity of the automatic arts [that is, arts
such as music, poetry, or the dance, whose media are not separable
from the body and its expressive powers]. Except in the case of
work done by machines, mechanically tended by an operator, the
movements of the individual body enter into all reshaping [includ-
ing technological reshaping] of material. When these movements
carry over in dealings with physically external matters the organic
push from within of an automatic art, they become, in so far forth,
‘fine.’ ([1934] 1987, 228)
Compare the preceding passage with Robert Pirsig’s text, taken from
his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This book parallels in
many of its themes the well-known books by Eugen Herrigel, such as Zen
and the Art of Archery (1971) and The Method of Zen (1974), and David
Sudnow’s exquisite Ways of the Hand (1978).
The craftsman isn’t ever following a single line of instruction. He’s

making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he’ll be
absorbed and attentive to what he’s doing even though he doesn’t
deliberately contrive this. He isn’t following any set of written
instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines
his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature
of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing
together in a progression of changes until his mind’s at rest at the
same time the material’s right. (Pirsig 1974, 167)
In cases such as those I have been adducing, the foci are not ‘perceptual,’
‘receptive,’ ‘mirroring,’ or ‘cognitive’ in a limited sense, but cognitively
and practically ‘productive.’ There is a dialectical relationship between

‘material’ and ‘thoughts,’ between making and moving, that ultimately
comes to rest in a unified form of apprehension. Perception through
‘tools,’ through exosomatic organs, in its technologically (and aestheti-
cally) relevant forms, is as much involved in ‘constructing’ as in construing.
Now, the point to be made here is that, following Polanyi’s profound anal-
ogy of the logical structure of skills under all forms of mental and practi-
cal achievements, both processes have to be thought of as the acritical,
though self-monitoring, integration of subsidiarily apprehended particu-
lars—motoric, perceptual, affective, cognitive—into novel foci or coherent
entities: skills, performances, perceptual objects, whether of use or of con-
templation, even, in fact, concepts and symbolic artifacts of all sorts.
Within the framework of his own inquiry into the relation of knowledge
and values in a technically constituted world, Pirsig has also pointed to cer-
tain perceptual characteristics of the ‘mechanic’s feel.’ This feel embodies a
kind of knowledge that Polanyi, intent upon showing the praxical under-
pinnings of articulate, explicit science, has described under the rubric of the
tacit nature of skills, which are paradigmatic forms of embodied knowledge.
For example, a person using a tool or an instrument—a probe, a cane, a file,
a hacksaw, a clarinet or violin, a chisel—cannot become expert through any
amount of explicit knowledge or theory bearing on the use of these instru-
ments. Expertise comes through apprenticeship, through learning from a
master, within a tradition, through a process of trial and error, akin to grop-
ing or feeling one’s way in the dark. Now, with experienced ‘workers’ we
can de facto see a kind of harmony between them and their tools and
machines, a kind of spontaneous reciprocity that resembles a dance, the
exact step depending on the medium with which one is working.
Modern technology has to a great degree ‘distanced’ the human manip-
ulation of the world by developing productive forms that contravene,
through a process of radical substitution, the natural trajectories of
embodiment relations that, in the forms we are dealing with, always have
the structure of skills. The original skills have become embodied in arti-
facts that often are not so much operated as monitored. Shoshana Zuboff
(1988) has explored this phenomenon in great detail in an insightful case
study, and Arnold Pacey (1999, 73–74), looking at the process from a
broad and humane historical perspective, has confirmed its importance
and scope.
This is a truly ambiguous phenomenon. Indeed, it challenges us to ask,
without expecting a simple answer, just how much of the modern pro-
ductive apparatus in the broadest sense, including symbolic production,

truly involves the ‘amplification’ of perception through embodiments in
probal extensions of ourselves. To what degree in the era of advanced
industrialism at home and abroad is the ‘normal’ contemporary worker,
including symbol-workers, in possession of the kind of knowledge, in
their specific domain, exemplified in the mechanic’s feel discussed by Pir-
sig? Pirsig writes that this is something that
is very obvious to those who know what it is, but hard to describe
to those who don’t; and when you see someone working on a
machine who doesn’t have it, you tend to suffer with the machine.
The mechanic’s feel comes from a deep inner kinesthetic feeling
for the elasticity of materials. Some materials, like ceramics, have
very little, so that when you thread porcelain fitting you’re very
careful not to apply great pressures. Other materials, like steel,
have tremendous elasticity, more than rubber, but in a range in
which, unless you’re working with large mechanical forces, the
elasticity isn’t apparent.
With nuts and bolts you’re in the range of large mechanical
forces and you should understand that within these ranges metals
are elastic. When you take up a nut there’s a point called ‘finger-
tight’ where there’s contact but no takeup of elasticity. Then there’s
‘snug,’ in which the easy surface elasticity is taken up. Then there’s
a range called ‘tight,’ in which all the elasticity is taken up. The
force required to reach these three points is different for each size
of nut and bolt, and different for lubricated bolts and for locknuts.
The forces are different for steel and for cast iron and brass and
aluminum and plastics and ceramics. But a person with a
mechanic’s feel knows when something’s tight and stops. A person
without it goes right on past and strips the threads or breaks the
assembly (1974, 323–24).
This is an extremely insightful phenomenological description, with

bearing on a wide range of issues attendant upon the division of labor. It
is, when taken generally, nevertheless not uniformly or extensively applic-
able to the present relation of human beings to their tools. It should rather
function as a norm and as a challenge. It could be argued that the inner
logic of a large part of the modern production process and its attendant
activities makes impossible such a mutual accommodation between self
and tools. This inner logic is in effect one of the ‘experiential’ sources of
the modern-day ‘proletarianization’ or ‘alienation’ of consciousness, a
term that unfortunately is not without its difficulties, in spite of Lukács’s
cultural-critical efforts. It is perhaps best avoided. Instead, we have here
an ideal that, in assembly-line production or processing of standard units
(even symbolic units), is to a great degree contravened in practice. Mod-
ern civilization, in fact, when we look at the matter critically, is really
based on the attempted and complexly motivated elimination of embodi-
ment relations as exemplified in tool use—hence the point of Nietzsche’s
and Lawrence’s complaint. It thus tends to eliminate the ‘kinesthetic’
component and substitute in its place a ‘nonsomatic’ cybernetic ideal. It
strives to displace somatic satisfaction, embodied in the immanent quality
of an activity, by a social ‘phatic’ component of interpersonal solidarity in
group cooperation or in the development of ‘virtual realities,’ which we
will consider in Chapter 6. Looked at from the point of view of a philos-
ophy of the body, this is scarcely adequate compensation.
There is even perhaps a deeper somatic root of the process of elimina-
tion. It is connected with the ‘splitting’ of the original ‘natural’ fusion of
body and tool, a splitting that renders a technology of the tool as central
factor in the exosomatically mediated intercourse with the world for the
most part a thing of the past. It belongs, in José Ortega y Gassett’s terms
(1941a), to the technology of ‘craft’ but not of the ‘engineer.’ This dis-
tinction, for all its difficulty, does point to an extremely important socio-
cultural fact. While, in one sense, there is an increase in ‘efficiency’ and a
reduction of ‘labor,’ the experienced ‘alienation’ of labor may neverthe-
less have its major cause elsewhere. I am thinking of a hidden aspect of
the movement from an embodied logic of tools, whose structures, func-
tions, and rhythms ‘mime’—or should mime—at the deepest somatic level
organic structures and rhythms, to the ‘logic’ of machines. The material
pivot of this shift may actually lie in the institutionalization of rotary as
opposed to reciprocal motion in the primary interaction field whereby the
human being ‘works up’ the world.
I take this idea from Lynn White Jr., the historian of medieval technol-
ogy, who has argued that it is the crank that is perhaps the fateful key
invention in the development of machines. It marks a veritable ‘somatic
revolution’ in the intentional arc. According to White, “next to the wheel,
the crank is probably the most important single element in machine
design, yet until the fifteenth century the history of the crank is a dismal
record of inadequate vision of its potentialities” (1971, 116). This situation
was remedied when the compound crank was invented by an anonymous

Flemish shipwright, an event, I think, of world-historical importance for
the inner constitution of the life-world.
White remarks that “seated before a quern with a single vertical handle,
a person of the twentieth century would give it a continuous rotary
motion. It is far from clear that one of the very early Middle Ages would
have done so” (1971, 116). As a matter of fact, prior to the time of Louis
the Pious, there was a different “sense of the appropriate motion,” one
built around reciprocal motion. In one of those astounding comments
that are buried alongside rather sober discussions and carry the seeds of a
new focus on ‘hidden things,’ White notes that “continuous rotary
motion is typical of inorganic matter, whereas reciprocating motion is the
sole movement found in living things” (118). This accounts, he thinks, for
the fact that “crank motion does not come easy to us.” White reports that
Ernst Mach noticed that “infants find crank motion hard to learn,” and
adds that “despite the rotary grindstone, even today razors are whetted
rather than ground: we find rotary motion a bar to the greatest sensitiv-
ity” (118). This makes intelligible the utter superiority of the violin, with
its reciprocating bow, to the hurdy-gurdy, and perhaps has contributed
something of crucial somatic importance to the development of the West-
ern form of the orchestra, based on strings. Music, too, has its own bod-
ily logic and trajectories and is, in fact, an extremely fertile source of
insight into the various dimensions of technology, as Pacey insightfully
points out (1999, 17–38).
The philosophical-anthropological and metaphysical upshot of White’s
point needs, of course, to be ‘fleshed out’ by a social phenomenology of
embodiment. The elements of such a phenomenology of embodiment, in
terms of methods and categories, would have to be taken from a wide
variety of sources. White’s deep claim is that “to use a crank, our tendons
and muscles must relate themselves to the motion of the galaxies and elec-
trons. From this inhuman adventure our race long recoiled” (1971, 118).
Now it finds itself inextricably caught up in a rotary world, which defines
the machine-space of our age—including, of course, the rotary powered
press. Harold Innis remarked that “the Western community was atomized
by the pulverizing effects of the application of machine industry to com-
munication” (1951, 79). He cites Jefferson to the effect that “the printers
can never leave us in a state of perfect rest and union of opinion” (24).
Think, further, of the imagery of Chaplin’s Modern Times. The predomi-
nance of circular forms quite generally, as defining the modern age, can
also be clearly seen in many of the works of Fernand Léger, though we

should look for other parallels, with reference to light, materials, space
and so forth in a wide range of sources. We need, in fact, a detailed study
of the relations between preferential ‘somatic trajectories’ and ‘perceptual
schemata’ that are organically a priori and those that due to human plas-
ticity arise through historical actions, both for weal and woe (see zur
Lippe 1984, 1987, 1988).
As to perceptual schemata and their rootedness in exosomatic organs,
I have already indicated that it seems clear that one can trace the strong—
in the sense of both amplified and reduced powers—visualism of modern
cultures, at least in the West, to certain aspects of some key ‘exosomatic
organs’ that have transformed the systems of material ‘filters’ through
which the world is encountered or experienced on both the everyday and
scientific levels. Mumford, for instance, has made much of the power of
glass, which has given us the rectangular, transparent window and hence
offered us a rather different foundation or motivation for the much dis-
cussed grand analogy of assimilating paintings to windows ([1934] 1963,
124–31). James Bunn, in his Dimensionality of Signs, Tools, and Models
(1981) a book of extraordinary importance for the philosophy of tech-
nology (see Innis 1983), has focused upon the theme of ‘exchange with
displacement’ and pointed out within a nuanced framework the implica-
tions for an account of our visual ‘artificial prostheses’ of the fateful
invention of Alberti’s wire grid, to be used by painters in constructing a
true visual analogue to spatial arrangements. This wire grid, as a coordi-
nate system for the ordering of sensations in perceptual space, antedated
by 150 years Descartes’s adoption of a coordinate system for analyzing
objects and events in geometrical or ‘real’ or ‘objective’ space. But there
was an important antecedent to the wire grid marking Alberti’s theoreti-
cal account of perspectival space.
Samuel Edgerton Jr. has indicated how Ptolemy figured out how to
map a reticulated spherical surface onto a flat chart, that is, more gener-
ally, how “to project the coordinates of any geographical location in the
world, and how to compensate for the distortion of the spherical surface
when stretched out on a two-dimensional plane” (1975, 100). Here we
have a kind of slippage as well as reciprocity between a three-dimensional
and a two-dimensional model. Both are perceptual machines that demand
as much construction as construing. Edgerton notes that Ptolemy was
actually describing how to draw a so-called armillary sphere, “the three-
dimensional model of the geocentric universe found on scholars’ desks
down through the Renaissance.” The globe described by Ptolemy “is
apparently transparent, and seems to have been laid out in the manner of
an armillary sphere; that is, with ribs representing the longitudes and lat-
itudes and with the oikumene painted on something stretched over its
proper place in the open, perspectival construction” (110).
The device of longitudinal and latitudinal lines was a semiotic break-
through. It gave rise to a new psychological set by ‘objectifying’ space and
spatial relations. This type of ‘grid’ map differed in its perceptual and
actional consequences from the portolan maps used by sailors. It carried
a very different type of information and obeyed a very different logic.
Edgerton remarks insightfully that comparing a Giotto painting such as
Expulsion of Joachim from the Temple and a Petrus Vesconte portolan
chart shows that both give a good approximation of angle and direction
but not of distance. “So far as the psychology of seeing is concerned, the
portolan chart reflects the tactile perceptions—looking, touching, and
moving about—which characterized art not yet attuned to geometric
abstraction.” Edgerton continues: “As this comparison demonstrates, the
coming of Ptolemy’s cartographic system to Florence in 1400 did to the
psychology of map making exactly what linear perspective—arriving
there about twenty-five years later—did to the psychology of looking at
pictures. Had nautical instruments for determining longitude and latitude
at sea (i.e., chronometers) also been available at this time, Ptolemaic maps
would have displaced portolan maps in seafarers’ use” (1975, 97). Here we
see how perceptual technologies intersect with and condition whole
realms of human action, limiting or potentiating their scope. And in fact
the 1275 Carta Pisana is the first portolan map to show a superimposed
grid for reckoning distances. “Such grids,” Edgerton writes, “represent a
skeletal geometric key to the link between Quattrocento cartography and
the paintings which gave birth to linear perspective” (95).
It is clear that Ptolemy’s great advantage was the devising of the grid
system, “which reduced the traditional heterogeneity of the world’s sur-
face to complete geometrical uniformity. From the moment the atlas
appeared in Florence, the gauntlet was down, awaiting the vision of a rest-
less navigator, a Columbus, to pick it up.” The problem was, of course,
that the new maps, based on the grid system, were not portolan and were
not intended for seafaring use. They were for ‘intellectual use’ and
“thereby gave powerful impetus to the Renaissance rationalization of the
world” (Edgerton 1975, 113). Portolan charts were not meant to furnish
a geometrical framework for comprehending the whole world. Their
use—and the space projected by them—was pragmatic and actional. Their
unity was the unity of an intended action, of seeking a goal in ‘real’ space.
The Ptolemaic grid, however, “posed an immediate mathematical unity,”

allowing precise fixation of places far apart from one another. Indeed, the
Ptolemaic system “supplied to geography the same aesthetic principle of
geometric harmony which Florentines demanded in all their art” (114).
The movement from the portolan to the Ptolemaic map is consequently a
movement from one type of sense-reading and sense-giving to another. It
is a change in the embodied constitution or creation of meaning.
Note, therefore, the use of ‘semiotic’ terminology in the following pas-
sage from Edgerton:
The power to render an abstract image of space in our minds, reg-

ulated by an inflexible coordinate framework of horizontals and
verticals, is what makes any grid system of measurement so
instantly meaningful. No matter how the grid-squared surface is
shrunk, enlarged, twisted, warped, curved or peeled from a sphere
and flattened out, the human observer never loses his sense of how
the parts of the surface articulate. The continuity of the whole pic-
ture remains clear so long as he can relate it to at least one undis-
torted, modular grid square. (1975, 114)
The grid inscribes itself into both the perceptual system and the world.
We learn to see according to it. But there are no grid lines in nature. They
come from us. As Edgerton puts it, referring to the varieties of systems of
space, “pictorial representations of space in any given age are thus sym-
bolic forms of this combined perceiving process” (1975, 159). The spread
of this perceptual technology confirmed what had already been practiced
to a certain degree without the ideology of the perceptual grid. The town
layouts of the Romans, patterned farmland (where the land was relatively
flat), and even bank accounting exemplify the intention to find uniform
(combinable and measurable) units by means of which to probe the world
(see Crosby 1997). But it was the rhetoric of geometrical projection that
captured the imagination. Giovanni Cavalcanti mentions the use of an
imaginary mathematical line to establish a boundary between Florence
and Milan during the wars of the 1420s. Cavalcanti writes, in a passage
from his Istoria Fiorentine (vol. 1, ix, p. 20, cited in Edgerton 1975, 115):
“And thus the eye is the ruler and compass of distant regions and of longi-
tudes and abstract lines. Everything is comprehended under the geometric
doctrine, and with the aid of the arithmetic art, we see that there is a rule
for measuring . . . with the eye.” This measuring is, in one sense, a dis-
tancing. It is an internalized distancing, becoming part of our material

premise systems as well as part of the self-interpretation of what vision
ought to be.
Further, geographical and perceptual space were also shaped by the
extension of the eye by Alberti’s use of a Guckkasten, or a camera ottica,
which has now also been ascribed to Vermeer in his practice of painting
(see Steadman 2001). But structuring of space by the visualization of
mathematical lines on a sphere was itself extended to another practical
device for structuring perception and for making the “scale recapitulation
of images even more assured.” This was a velo, or veil, a reticulated net of
colored strings that was placed in front of objects to be painted “so that
the parts of the things seen could be properly proportioned in a smaller
picture” (Edgerton 1975, 90). So the very notion of reticulation was mate-
rially embodied—and reinforced—by both Ptolemy’s cartographic sys-
tem for mapping the surface of a globe and Alberti’s material device for
mapping the perceived world onto a plane surface. For Alberti, Edgerton
writes, “the grid-formed velo was not merely a device for transferring a
scale drawing. It was a means for organizing the visible world itself into a
geometric composition, structured on evenly spaced grid coordinates.
Alberti exhorted his artist-readers to learn to see in terms of such grid
coordinates in order that they develop an intuitive sense of proportion”
(119). This ‘intuitive sense’ refers to the Polanyian ‘interiorization’ of a
probe, one of the major dimensions of the ‘biasing of perception’ on both
the individual and the social scales. It took a superhuman effort to break
with this material premise in the construal of the visual world. Edgerton
comments:
From the scientific standpoint, it is clear enough that if one takes

for granted that a picture should present itself as an illusionistic
open window, with the viewer standing centrally before it, then
the perspective configuration of the objects in such a picture will
indeed approximate the way the objects would look in ‘reality.’
This is not to say, however, that all pictures should be conceived in
terms of windowlike frameworks—a notion which only the peo-
ple of classical antiquity and those of the European Renaissance
(and after) have ever entertained. (6)
Robert Romanyshyn, writing in his disturbing and brilliant work,

Technology as Symptom and Dream (1989), has further explored what
was involved in ‘turning’ perception away from this embodied form of

vision to another. He writes with regard to impressionism:
Of the many ways in which Impressionism indicates the break-

down of a cultural-psychological dream of infinite distance and the
breakthrough of another dream, I will cite four. The canvases of
these painters betray an end to the eye of distant vision, recon-
struct the geometric landscape of linear perspective vision as a
space of time, of dream, and of imagery, reintroduce a sense of ver-
tical depth or levels into the horizontal space of depth as spatial
distance, and finally register the breakdown of the body as
anatomical object and the breakthrough of another bodily reality.
(216; see further Schapiro 1997)
We saw that it has been argued by many others, though in different

contexts, that the development of the camera, which was first designed as
a plaything and then as an aid for painters, has had ominous, though not
necessarily ruinous, consequences for later experience. Alberti’s wire grid,
a tool for making icons of perception, combined with the doctrine of ‘true’
perspective, which was monocular and unmoving, led to a particular ide-
ology of what ‘real’ space was and had to be. Real space was projected as
ideal, geometrizing, objective, universal, Euclidian. Glass, a wire grid, a
pinhole lens, and the development of a picture ‘frame’ are all both mater-
ial and semiotic factors in the development of the world project of
‘enframing’—das Gestell—delineated, with reference to science in partic-
ular (which is usually blamed for intellectual reasons), by the Heidegger-
ian tradition. These themes have been studied extensively and in
experiential detail in a vast literature almost too well known even to ges-
ture toward. (See, however, Edgerton 1975; Elkins 1994; Damisch 1994;
White 1987. The parry and thrust in their discussions, with the intermix-
ing of historical, aesthetic, and philosophical commitments, reveal the vast
range of issues at stake.) But I think that the modern shift in method and
in the conception of knowing that has been pinpointed by many histori-
ans with reliance upon primarily philosophical and scientific materials,
that is, the Cartesian-Galilean-Newtonian corpus, was already given in
seemingly disconnected inventions, which hang together by ‘hidden
affinities.’ Polanyi gives us a general interpretive handle on them and pin-
points just what is involved on the ‘micro’ level.
To return briefly, but in a different context, to topics treated at length

in Part One. Language, and its extensions in script and print, is by reason
of its flexibility and reflexive structures the most distinctive of all exoso-
matic organs. It is, however, itself rarely discussed specifically as a form of
technics, although both Ernst Kapp and Karl Bühler (in his organon-
model of language) saw it as belonging as much to homo faber as to homo
symbolicus. Analyses of it from this point of view usually limit themselves
to the ‘instrumentalization’ of language in the technical era, its reduction
to ‘mere’ functions, as in Anton Zijderveld’s book On Clichés (1979) or
George Orwell’s earlier and now classic essay, “Politics and the English
Language,” and the massive reflections by Foucault, Bourdieu (1991), and
Habermas on the enabling and constraining matrices of communicative
action. But, as seen in Chapter 1, if we look closely enough, we can see
that the structures of embodiment relations used to explicate probes and
canes, especially as assimilated to Polanyi’s categorial framework, apply
also to language with a vengeance and perhaps even hold, to repeat, one of
the keys to the thorny and incredibly disputed topic of what has come to
be known as ‘linguistic relativity.’
Polanyi pointed out in his pivotal essay, “Sense-Giving and Sense-
Reading” (in Polanyi 1969a, 181–207), and in his chapter on ‘articulation’
in his masterwork Personal Knowledge, that when we learn to speak, the
material reality of the linguistic tools ‘recedes’ in favor of their commu-
nicative and semantic function, becoming in the process transparent. Yet
by reason of what Ihde called their ‘echo focus’ we are always, to use the
more powerful Polanyian categorial scheme, subsidiarily or nonfocally
aware of language’s material—phonic, rhythmic, ‘stressful’—reality in its
own right, which defines what can ‘come to presence’ or be effected in the
meaning-field. Not only is the echo focus—Peirce’s and Dewey’s ‘quali-
tative feel’ of a sign-configuration—obviously auditory in spoken speech
and visual in written speech, but the attendant variations in the two cen-
trally intended ‘primary foci’ have rather serious and different implica-
tions for how we understand language to attach to the world and for the
primary ‘modes’—modi—in which the world is ‘presenced.’ For Polanyi
they are the objects of a subsidiarily embodied focal awareness and are
analogous to figures grasped as emerging out of a ground.
David Abrams (1996) has attempted to make a deep connection
between our experience of nature and the rise of various forms of the
phonetic alphabet. According to him these scripts rendered ‘the breath’
visible and began the fateful separation of the embodied, sound-suffused

meaning-making organism from nature and its voices. He formulates his
central thesis and conclusion in the following passages, which highlight a
specifically ‘ecological’ dimension to our themes. His fundamental idea,
paralleling the one I have been proposing, is “the subtle dependence of
various ‘interior,’ mental phenomena upon certain easily overlooked or
taken-for-granted aspects of the surrounding, sensuous world.” Lan-
guage, on his account, is taken as a “profoundly bodily phenomenon, sus-
tained by the gestures and sounds of the animate landscape” (261). The
“rational intellect so prized in the West,” he contends, can be “shown to
rely upon the external, visible letters of the alphabet” (262). Abrams sees
grave consequences in our embodiment in such an exosomatic organ:
The apparently autonomous, mental dimension originally opened

by the alphabet—the ability to interact with our own signs in utter
abstraction from our earthly surroundings—has today blossomed
into a vast cognitive realm, a horizonless expanse of virtual inter-
actions and encounters. Our reflective intellects inhabit a global
field of information, pondering the latest scenario for the origin of
the universe as we absently fork food into our mouths, composing
presentations for the next board meeting while we sip our coffee or
cappuccino, clicking on the computer and slipping into cyberspace
in order to network with other bodiless minds, exchanging infor-
mation about gene sequences and military coups, ‘conferencing’ to
solve global environmental problems while oblivious to the moon
rising above the rooftops. Our nervous system synapsed to the
terminal, we do not notice that the chorus of frogs by the nearby
stream has dwindled, this year, to a solitary voice, and that the
song sparrows no longer return to the trees. (265–66)
The argument, or at least the claim, goes even deeper.
Human persons . . . are shaped by the places they inhabit, both

individually and collectively. Our bodily rhythms, our moods,
cycles of creativity and stillness, and even our thoughts are readily
engaged and influenced by the shifting patterns in the land. Yet our
organic attunement to the local earth is thwarted by our ever-
increasing intercourse with our own signs. Transfixed by our tech-
nologies, we short-circuit the sensorial reciprocity between our
breathing bodies and the bodily terrain. Human awareness folds in

upon itself, and the senses—once the crucial site of our engage-
ment with the wild and animate earth—become mere adjuncts of
an isolate and abstract mind bent on overcoming an organic real-
ity that now seems disturbingly aloof and arbitrary.
The alphabetized intellect stakes its claim to the earth by stak-
ing it down, extends its dominion by drawing a grid of straight
lines and right angles across the body of a continent—across
North America, across Africa, across Australia—defining states
and provinces, counties and countries with scant regard for the
oral peoples that already live there, according to a calculative logic
utterly oblivious to the life of the land. (Abrams 1996, 267)
The “life of the land” becomes embodied in our perceptual systems and in
our memories, as the classic works of Yi-fu Tuan (1977, 1993), E. V. Walter
(1988), Simon Schama (1995), and Edward Casey (1993, 1997) have so fruit-
fully and engagingly shown.
We do not have to accept the more extreme parts of Abrams’s analysis,
if such they be, to grasp his central point: embodiment in alphabetic writ-
ing is not an indifferent process. It enters into the very structures of per-
ception. Admitting that “the written word carries a pivotal magic,” he
wants to guard us from its consuming us independently of the very things
it should be leading us toward. Caught up in the play of alphabetic signs,
we could so remain with them that they substitute for perception rather
than extend and compensate for its lability and fleetingness. Abrams
writes:
For those of us who care for an earth not encompassed by

machines, a world of textures, tastes, and sounds other than those
that we have engineered, there can be no question of simply aban-
doning literacy, of turning away from all writing. Our task, rather,
is that of taking up the written word, with all of its potency, and
patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land. Our craft is
that of releasing the budded, earthly intelligence of our words, free-
ing them to respond to the speech of the things themselves—to the
green uttering-forth of leaves from the spring branches. (1996, 273)
No semiotic Luddite, Abrams looks forward to “a multiplicity of tech-

nologically sophisticated, vernacular cultures tuned to the structure and
pulse of particular places” (272). The perception of language must be wed-

ded to the language of perception. Here is a challenge to think in a new
way about the ‘ecological’ consequences of semiotic embodiment. Dis-
tancing himself from the logocentrism of central strands of philosophy,
Abrams shows “that all discourse, even written discourse such as this, is
implicitly sensorial and bodily, and hence remains bound, like the sensing
body, to a world that is never exclusively human” (287 n. 36). His funda-
mental reliance on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the signifying
body is fully consonant with my reliance on Polanyi’s equally insightful
elaboration of a tacit logic of consciousness.
As a further illustration, also from the domain of language, of what I
am referring to, consider the following text from Walter Ong’s Orality
and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982). This work stems
from McLuhan’s tradition, though it is rather more sober and balanced. It
also avoids the extremes of Jacques Derrida’s ‘grammatologically’ inspired
critique of Western thought about and relation to language. Ong writes:
Philosophy and all the sciences and ‘arts’ (analytic studies of pro-
cedures, such as Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric) depend for their exis-
tence on writing, which is to say they are produced not by the
unaided human mind but by the mind making use of a technology
that has been deeply interiorized, incorporated into mental
processes themselves. The mind interacts with the material world
around it more profoundly and creatively than has hitherto been
thought. Philosophy, it seems, should be reflectively aware of itself
as a technological product—which is to say a special kind of very
human product. Logic itself emerges from the technology of writ-
ing. (172)
Just as Walter Benjamin could speak of the camera’s teaching us “uncon-

scious optics,” so Ong, basing himself on Harold Innis’s comment that
the ancient, preliterate world was troubled by ‘sounds’ but the modern
world by ‘thoughts,’ could think of script, and by extension print, as
teaching us a peculiar type of logic, a theme dear, I noted, to Jacques Der-
rida and those influenced by him. This long and complicated story, I sub-
mit, should be seen as a central part of a history of our multidimensional
semiotic embodiment. Whatever we want to make of Ong’s notion that
philosophy is itself some sort of technological product, it is clear that
‘spoken’ philosophy and ‘written’ philosophy obey two rather different

‘logics,’ both paradoxically and paradigmatically present in Plato. While
both may ultimately be ‘dialogical,’ they exemplify dialogue and argu-
ment in quite different ways. Perhaps there is also a related difference
between the philosophical form of the essay and that of the treatise. Fur-
ther, maybe it is not just a matter of a logic supervening upon writing, but
also a matter of the attempted embedding of a plurality of rhetorical forms
in writing that must be attended to. But this is an issue for a rhetorical his-
tory of philosophy.
Foregrounding another aspect of the fateful constraints of language as
a probe, William Ivins, a theorist of the history of vision and its embod-
ied forms, has noted, perhaps a bit incautiously but nevertheless making
a point well taken, that in our linguistic apprehension of the world
the very linear order in which words have to be used results in a

syntactical time order analysis of qualities that actually are simulta-
neous and so intermingled and interrelated that no quality can be
removed from one of the bundles of qualities we call objects with-
out changing both it and all the other qualities. . . . In a funny way
words and their necessary linear syntactic order forbid us to
describe objects and compel us to use very poor and inadequate
lists of theoretical ingredients in the manner exemplified more con-
cretely by the ordinary cook book recipes. (Ivins [1953] 1969, 63)
Here we have not just an internalized technology of writing but the key
to thematizing more generally the effects of the internalization of the
material structures of any expressive medium as such. What Peirce called
the ‘material quality’ of a sign and James Bunn its ‘dimensionality’ is
intrinsic to its semiotic power and scope. I would like to note that in the
chapter “Words in Their Place” in his profound book Visual Thinking
(1969, 226–53), Rudolf Arnheim has also pointed out the specifically
‘semantic’ import of the prethematically, tacitly, and nonexplicitly apper-
ceived qualities of language. These qualities are present independently of
the intentional sense given language by the speaker or writer. This is a
point borne out in Valéry’s definition of poetry as “hesitation between
sound and sense.” Such a characterization, appropriately modified,
describes in effect the dual operation and structure of ‘technical’ embod-
iment per se as a form of meaning-making.
4. Conclusion: Toward a Normative Dimension

One of the implications of the preceding analyses is that the roots of mod-
ern ‘technologically’ induced problems are not exclusively and perhaps
not even primarily theoretical, or due to a false ideology, but actually
‘praxical.’ I have tried to show how certain problems and issues are best
clarified by pinpointing choices dealing with a material gearing into the
world with ‘instruments,’ even if they are materially embodied sign sys-
tems. Exosomatic organs, as extensions of our bodies, have their own log-
ics, their own trajectories, and we become so fused with them that we
cannot avoid being subject to their operational conditions.5 The ‘bias of
perception,’ the reason ‘why we attend to the things to which we attend,’
in Harold Innis’s formulation of his own guiding question, which he took
from his teacher James Ten Broeke, is based on the universal structure of
indwelling, in the capacity of the human subject to subordinate and to live
in and through a set of subsidiarily intended particulars in order to
achieve coherent entities or wholes. This process, I have tried to show,
occurs beyond the conscious and explicit control of the perceiver and is,
in effect, as all-pervasive as our embodiment in language itself.
One of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s paradigmatic texts on language could
be appropriately applied to the problem and task at hand by substituting
the word ‘technology’ wherever the word ‘language’ appears: “Man lives
with his objects chiefly—in fact, since his feelings and acting depend upon
his perception, one may say exclusively—as [technology] presents them
to him. By the same process whereby he spins [technology] out of his
own being, he ensnares himself in it; and each [technology] draws a
magic circle round the people to which it belongs, a circle from which
there is no escape save by stepping out of it into another” (1972, 39,
translation modified).
I have only offered a heuristic device and some hints regarding the
types of considerations one has to undertake to handle the vast problem
of the utter inescapability of diverse impacts of technology upon lived
5. Here is the key to reading Mumford’s great 1934 work and its analysis of the material
underpinning of technics. Of special importance is his delineation of the different ‘perceptual
logics’ of materials, processes, and containers. His discussions of wood and glass are exquisite,
and his schematization of the great ‘primary inventions’ and their ‘secondary’ offspring remain
valid. V. Gordon Childe’s discussion of the nineteen pivots of human progress is still challenging
when one thinks of the ‘perceptual spaces,’ in the sense I have been using this notion, opened up
by them (Childe 1951, 180–88).
structures. Each of the examples and problem texts I have adduced points
in a certain direction. They all indicate the perilous nature of the tacit
appropriation of subsidiary particulars. These particulars make up so
many ‘intentional vector fields’—affective, kinesthetic, perceptual,
somatic, aesthetic, praxical—within which we find ourselves. Prior to the
critical task of judging whether the transformations of the intentional arc
are, in specific cases, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for us—a job that always appeals to
some latent model—there is the analytical task of determining just what is
happening to us and how it happens. I have tried to show how certain ele-
ments from one cognitional model can contribute to this project.
Whether we are in fact enriched or diminished is best seen from a
reconfigured ‘aesthetic’ point of view that does not glorify ‘art’ but
extends the scope of the aesthetic over the whole surface of the perceived
world. Pragmatist aesthetics, exemplified par excellence in Dewey’s Art as
Experience, throws a distinctive ‘normative’ light on this surface and on
its depths. It is further confirmed by approaches that also extend ‘aes-
thetic rationality’ to the whole perceived world. To this dimension of the
‘senses of technics’ we now turn.
Pragmatist Aesthetics as
Critique of Technology
1. Elements of a Pragmatist Aesthetics

John Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetic theory, developed most extensively
but by no means exclusively in his seminal and percipient Art as Experi-
ence, contains a rich set of analytical and critical tools for a specifically
‘aesthetic’ critique of technology and of the experiential consequences of
our embodiment in systems of tools, implements, and materials.1 Dewey
1. Exemplifications and concretions of Dewey’s ‘aesthetic’ view of the world of experience

can be found in John McDermott’s two indispensable collections of essays (1976, 1986). My goal
is not to try to duplicate his induplicable contributions, with their breadth of scope and sensitive
and humane tone, but to add some other voices to his discussion as confirmation that Deweyan
concerns and sight lines are shared by many others and hence should be brought to the table.
was not the first to construct an aesthetic theory that, if not principally
motivated by, at least directly intersected with the problems and issues
raised by the rise of industrial technology as perhaps the shaping factor
in the modern world. The nineteenth century, the first century to
undergo the traumatic shifts and upheavals attendant upon the ingression
of large-scale technology into the social order as a whole, in all its dimen-
sions, had produced a long string of thinkers, poets, and artists who
wrestled with technology’s impact upon the lived structures of experi-
ence and upon the primary life-world in which human beings carried
out their day-to-day lives. In England alone, the first country to enucle-
ate and to encounter both the principles and the effects of systematic
technology, the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Shelley,
such social critics as Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris, the landscape painters,
Constable holding primacy of place—I am naming only paradigmatic
figures—registered in their different forms the disruptions of sensibility
and consciousness induced by the great tidal wave of technology.2 White-
head has given us a classic analysis of parts of this story, seen from the
perspective of his emerging philosophy of organism (Whitehead 1925).
David Hall (1973, 104, 171–80, 217–23) has applied Whitehead’s mature
categorial scheme to the project of the ‘civilization of experience’ quite
generally, fully conscious of its technological dimensions.
Dewey’s approach, with its configuration of categories and their rela-
tive weightings, continues, parallels, and in places goes beyond the mas-
terworks of the aesthetically oriented critiques of technology, ranging
from the widely divergent orientations and sensibilities of Marxist theo-
ries to the nuanced and historically urbane investigations of Lewis Mum-
ford. Admittedly, Dewey’s aesthetic ‘take’ on technology cannot supplant
them. He is one voice in a large conversation. Nevertheless, Dewey’s
philosophical aesthetics offers us not only a peculiarly clear and heuristi-
cally fertile model of an aesthetic theory rooted in experience; it also
offers us a model that by reason of its proper focus brings to light impor-
tant philosophical principles for a pragmatist understanding of technol-
ogy’s bearing, as an experientially grounded form of meaning-making,
upon the field of experience as such. A pragmatist aesthetics, appropri-
ately expanded and supported, pushes meaning-making down to the
deepest somatic and perceptual levels (Shusterman 2000, 262–83). As a
2. An extremely useful introduction to the concrete character of this process, a movement

from ‘iron bridge’ to ‘crystal palace,’ can be found in Briggs 1979.
Pragmatist Aesthetics as Critique of Technology 169
result, technological embodiment, which we have explored with Polanyi’s

descriptive categories in the previous chapter, raises also normative con-
cerns at the most fundamental levels of the structures of experiencing.
Dewey can profitably be seen as speaking to the types of issues raised by
such diverse thinkers as Adrian Stokes, David Prall, and Jan Mukařovský,
who come from very different intellectual traditions. In his Stones of
Rimini, for example, after an extensive meditation on the nature of the
‘expressive’ power of stone, Stokes, an English writer and critic of wide
intellectual interests, wrote: “Still, the question remains: how to interpret
the modern environment and condition as the rationalized projection of
ourselves” ([1934] 1978d, 285). For Stokes, as he put it in another book,
“projection . . . , continuous and various projection, is the distinguishing
characteristic of man” ([1947] 1978b, 162), and “the human process is aes-
thetic in so far as it is outlined against the beckoning outwardness of the
external world” (158). The flux of life passes into objective forms that
manifest, in their production, perception, and materials, what Stokes
called an “emblematic tension” ([1932] 1978c, 41). Art itself, as the pro-
ductive process par excellence, is for Stokes a “living emblem” of personal
and corporate emotion. The upshot of Stokes’s analysis quite generally,
which Dewey confirms, is that “an unabashed aesthetic control . . . does
harm to no one. [It] attaches a most noble imaginative logic to sensation”
([1947] 1978b, 172).
The American philosopher David Prall, in his classic, but rather
neglected, Aesthetic Judgment, has a passage bearing directly upon this
issue. “A reasonable order of living and of society would bend its energies
toward making the surface of its own practical active world satisfactory to
the perception that must in any case dwell on it for most of its waking
hours. If the forms of human relations and the interactions of individuals
also partook of such grace and satisfactoriness to the discriminating view,
society would be living in a more rationally controlled environment”
(1929, 44). The rational control of life’s surfaces, however, is an aesthetic,
not merely intellectual or political, issue. As Prall put it in another work,
Aesthetic Analysis, “the whole panorama presented to us through our
senses, the surface of the experienced world, is the field of the aesthetic”
(1936, 5), and “if we wish to mark ourselves off as human and not merely
natural, it is as aesthetic beings that we are best characterized” (31). This
position parallels that of Prague School semiotician Jan Mukařovský, who
wrote in his Aesthetic Function, Norm, and Value as Social Facts, “Thus
the aesthetic realm, i.e., the realm of aesthetic function, norm, and value,
is broadly distributed over the entire area of human affairs, and is an

important and many-sided agent of life practice” (1936, 96).
Stokes, speaking of “the barbaric country of the modern world”
([1947] 1978b, 163)—what Lewis Mumford had called “the iron fare of
industrialism” ([1934] 1963, 205)—was of the opinion that “the spiritual
import of the external world, in so far as it is qualified by the industrial
revolution, still lacks interpretation” (167). While certainly not true as it
stands—for we now have a vast literature—this claim still forces us to see
whether we can cast some new light on this phenomenon. The light, I will
try to show, comes from Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics and from supple-
mentary conceptual tools from some rather ‘offbeat’ thinkers who stand
outside the normal range of sources cited by philosophers when this topic
is discussed. They enable us to frame the issue of the ‘aesthetic rationality’
of our technologically produced occasions of experience in a fresh way.
The cardinal thesis of Dewey’s pragmatist approach to aesthetic expe-
rience specifically as aesthetic experience is that it is continuous with, if
not identical to, “normal processes of living” (AE, 16).3 It is related to
them, he says in a striking image, in much the way a mountain grows out
of a plain (9). Paralleling Hans-Georg Gadamer’s (1975, 5–150; 1986,
1–53) later hermeneutics-based critique of a separate ‘aesthetic dimen-
sion,’ Dewey at the same time thinks of aesthetic production and percep-
tion as an idealization or foregrounding of qualities found in common
experience (AE, 17). This process of idealization itself parallels the for-
malist and structuralist procedures of ‘making strange,’ systematized with
relation to other semiotic functions in Roman Jakobson’s ‘poetic func-
tion’ (see Jakobson, Waugh, and Monville-Burston 1990, 69–79). This
polarity—between everydayness and idealization—runs throughout
Dewey’s whole discussion, giving it its specific dialectical tension. Normal
processes of living are thematized by Dewey under the rubric of ‘transac-
tion’ or ‘interaction’ between an organism and a field or matrix in which
it is found. What he calls the ‘live creature’ in the early chapters of Art as
Experience enters into a mutually defining set of relations with its envi-
ronment, both biological and cultural (see Dewey [1938] 1986, chaps. 2
and 3). This transaction or interaction—which for Dewey are technical
terms with the same content, approximately, as intentionality or being-in-
3. All citations from Dewey, unless otherwise noted, are from the 1987 critical edition of his
Art as Experience and will be abbreviated when necessary as AE in the text. Other citations will
follow the usual format.
the-world for the phenomenological tradition—is the ‘linkage’ of the

organism to its surrounding world. ‘Experience,’ one of the most loaded
words in Dewey’s repertoire, is the event-ful ‘outcome’ of the linkage. It
is not something that is ‘caused’ by it, nor is it contained within or carried
by the organism as its ‘vehicle’ (see Johnson 1987; Lakoff and Johnson
1999, 338, 341, 376, 380–81). Now, for Dewey there are “general condi-
tions without which an experience is not possible” (AE, 217). The condi-
tions of aesthetic experience grow out of these prior general conditions,
which have been discussed clearly and with nuance in Jackson 1998
(chaps. 1–3) and Alexander 1987. When these conditions are brought to
bear upon the production and perception of technological artifacts, as
Dewey himself does in the course of his various analyses, indispensable
components of an aesthetic critique of technology, rooted in Dewey’s dis-
tinctive development of pragmatist insights, are revealed.
Dewey’s model of experience, which permeates not just Art as Experi-
ence but all his work, involves the philosophical exploitation of an
extended set of biological considerations that—while on the surface seem-
ingly commonplace, as he himself noted—have technical significance.
This model is already present in Dewey’s pathbreaking 1896 article “The
Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (in Hickman and Alexander 1998, 2:
3–10) and underlies and is developed in the chapter on the biological
matrix of inquiry in his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. The biologi-
cal organism, Dewey writes in Art as Experience in full anti-Cartesian
voice, is a “force, not a transparency” (251). It is entwined in a dialectic of
need and demand vis-à-vis the environment. This dialectic of need and
demand generates tension, whose resolution in equilibrium is always tem-
porary. The intertwining of organism with the world involves the expendi-
ture of energy—motoric, sensory, intellectual—which propels the organism
through a constant set of transitions. The movement through experience
involves “adaptation through expansion” (20). This is particularly marked
in the case of sense, for there is an “inherent tendency of sense to expand”
(129). As we saw in the previous chapter, this ‘expansiveness’ can bias
perception when a sense undergoes embodiment in a medium or instru-
ment. Equilibrium results from the attainment and recognition of order,
one of the principal demands of a sentient being, which is welcomed as a
“response of harmonious feeling” (20), a theme and form of expression
with clear Whiteheadian overtones. Although the grasp of order tem-
porarily integrates the organism with the environment, the phase charac-
ter of experience, which is Dewey’s pragmatist analogue to the temporality
of consciousness, constantly introduces discord. This is Dewey’s formu-

lation of James’s striking image of the stream of consciousness as moving
like the flights and perchings of a bird. Discord for Dewey is first revealed
affectively or emotionally—the first signs, in the mode of feeling, of an
impending or actual break in the ‘linkage.’ Feeling is bipolar. It ‘qualifies’
both organism and world.4 Discord leads to ‘reflection,’ which leads to
desire for restoration of harmony, provoking and evoking premonitions
of an ultimate underlying harmony, “the sense of which haunts life like
the sense of being founded on a rock” (23). As Arnold Gehlen has charted
in lugubrious detail in his Man in the Age of Technology (1980, esp. chaps.
2, 3, 8), it is this sense that has been shattered and cast to the winds by
twentieth-century events.
Dewey points out that in the first stage of the interaction of the live
creature with its environment, “action, feeling, and meaning are one”
(AE, 22). Later, with the further development of ‘consciousness,’ we
encounter incipient thematization of the natural relations of experience.
Consciousness, understood with James and Peirce as an emergent func-
tion, not a substance, adds regulation, power of selection, and redisposi-
tion, reinstituting, but on a higher level, “the union of sense, need,
impulse and action characteristic of the live creature” (31).5 On the lived
level, experience on Dewey’s Peirce-derived view is permeated with
qualities that operatively, but not thematically, mark off units in the con-
tinuous flow of affect-laden experiencing. This qualitative synthesizing is
not of discrete ideas and impressions, à la Locke and Hume and the
whole sensationalist tradition (see Innis 1994b, esp. chaps. 2 and 4).
Rather, an object—or any experiential unit—is only the semistable ‘focal
culmination’ of the spiraling interactive circuit, rooted in life praxis, set
up between organism and environment. As Dewey put it in a telling text:
4. Paul Ricoeur writes in his Fallible Man (1965), which is situated in the phenomenologi-
cal tradition but supports in a number of ways essential Deweyan pragmatist positions, that
“[f]eeling is . . . without doubt intentional: it is feeling of ‘something’—the lovable, the hateful.
. . . But it is a very strange intentionality which on the one hand designates qualities felt on things,
on persons, on the world, and on the other hand manifests and reveals the way in which the self
is inwardly affected.” So, in feeling, “an intention and an affection coincide in the same experi-
ence” (127).
5. Dewey (AE, 276 n. 1) cites a passage from his Experience and Nature (1925) that shows
how complicated and nuanced his position is. There he distinguishes between ‘mind’ and ‘con-
sciousness’: “Mind denotes a whole system of meanings as they are embodied in the workings of
organic life. . . . Mind is a constant luminosity; consciousness is intermittent, a series of flashes of
different intensities” (230).
We unconsciously carry over [a] belief in the bounded character of

all objects of experience (a belief founded ultimately in the practi-
cal exigencies of our dealings with things) into our conception of
experience itself. We suppose that experience has the same definite
limits as the things with which it is concerned. But any experience,
the most ordinary, has an indefinite total setting. Things, objects,
are only focal points of a here and now in a whole which stretches
out indefinitely. This is the qualitative ‘background’ which is
defined and made definitely conscious in particular objects and
specified properties and qualities. (AE, 197)
This background is a “bounding horizon” that moves as we move (AE,

197); it is a “field” that can never be expanded out to definite margins,
which themselves “shade into that indefinite expanse beyond which imag-
ination calls the universe” (198). Thus, “about every explicit and focal
object there is a recession into the implicit which is not intellectually
grasped” (198) but which functions as a frame qualitatively defined and
revealed.
It is precisely to a central feature of this phenomenon that Robert Pirsig
was referring in the following passage from his Zen and the Art of Motor-
cycle Maintenance, which contrasts a thematic experience of Crater Lake in
Oregon as an ‘object’ and a nonfocal experience of it that both grasps and
is grasped by ‘quality’ on the margins.
At the lake we stop and mingle affably with the small crowd of
tourists holding cameras and children yelling, “Don’t go too
close!” and see cars and campers with all different license plates,
and see the Crater Lake with a feeling of “Well, there it is,” just as
the pictures show. I watch the other tourists, all of whom seem to
have out-of-place looks too. I have no resentment at all this, just a
feeling that it’s all unreal and that the quality of the lake is smoth-
ered by the fact that it’s so pointed to. You point to something as
having Quality and the Quality tends to go away. Quality is what
you see out of the corner of your eyes, and so I look at the lake
below but feel the peculiar quality from the chill, almost frigid
sunlight behind me, and the almost motionless wind. (1974, 341)
For Dewey, an experience is itself first and foremost a bipolar qualita-

tive affect-laden whole that is attached to and revelatory of an object
domain and an environing world. It results from the perceived—that is,

felt—relationship between what is done by the organism and what is
undergone by it. The linkage between the live creature and his world is
characterized by a dialectic of activity and passivity, of actio et passio, of
undergoing and doing. Moreover, Dewey’s account of the primary forms
of experiencing and his critique of ‘epistemologism,’ pivoting around the
notion that meanings are had before they are cognized, are reminiscent of
Heidegger’s antiepistemological project in Being and Time (see Guignon
1983). At any rate, one of the pivots of Dewey’s argument is that “the
conception of conscious experience as a perceived relation between doing
and undergoing enables us to understand the connection that art as pro-
duction and perception and appreciation as enjoyment sustain to each
other” (AE, 53). This point will be important when we see what Dewey
has to say about the production and perception of artifacts of the techno-
logical ‘shaping arts.’
The normal essentially instrumental nature of everyday perception and
experience fulfills, perforce, the conditions of experience, but with varying
degrees of satisfaction and experienced harmony, ideally consonant with
the biological demands of the organism. Now, Dewey writes, “in a world
made after the pattern of ours, moments of fulfillment punctuate experi-
ence with rhythmically enjoyed intervals” (AE, 23). These rhythmically
structured intervals effect in us a “heightened vitality” (25). In the limiting
case, they result in a “complete interpenetration of self and the world of
objects and events” (25). This is one of the many allusions to the type of
phenomenon discussed by Gadamer under the rubric of the I-lessness of
the hermeneutical experience, epitomized in authentic dialogue. This inter-
penetration of self and world arises from letting the logic of the sense
organs be carried to “full realization” through the organism’s participation
in the structures of qualities, which creates a “unity of sense and impulse”
(28). The essential function of art in all its various forms is to set up and
exploit the full conditions for this interpenetration, taking the intrinsic
orientation of experience along the trajectories to “focal culmination”
(29). By means of its essentially projective character, art effects a synthe-
sis of the three temporal ecstases by a creative fusion of elements: “The past
absorbed into the present carries on; it presses forward” (24). In adopting
the past, which has been assimilated to and embodied in the organism in
the form of habits, in all dimensions, the live creature gives to its experi-
ence a funded character out of which the experience of meaning is derived
(Dewey [1922] 1988b, 13–62). Meaning arises when the funded structures
from the past encounter present immediacy and actuality, while opening
up toward future possibilities. Vital experience is fascinating, drawing the
live creature on in its relentless pursuit of felt harmonies, similar to
Polanyi’s notion of intellectual and heuristic passions wherein intellectual
dissatisfaction is exploited and cultivated for its own sake (Polanyi 1958,
chap. 6).
Experience becomes aesthetic for Dewey through the “clarified and
intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete
experience” (AE, 53), even if the experience is buried in convention. Art
will become an “escape from convention to perception” (158). Much like
Peirce and Wittgenstein, Dewey appeals to a sense of ‘fitness’ in the aes-
thetic artifact, to “an immediate sense of things in perception as belonging
together or as jarring; as reinforcing or as interfering” (see Sheriff 1994,
chap. 5; Tilghman 1991). This sense of fitness is “controlling” reference to
“immediately felt relations of order and fulfillment,” wherein anticipa-
tion, reciprocity, cumulativeness, continuity are all “instrumental to each
other” (56–57). This is as much a description as a prescriptive challenge.
For Dewey, ‘experiences’ come to term, to focal culmination, through
embodiment in external media. “The self,” he writes, “is created in the cre-
ation of objects” (286). While “art denotes a process of doing or making”
and “‘esthetic’ refers . . . to experience as appreciative, perceiving, and
enjoying” (53), both production and perception have active and passive
sides. The artist embodies in himself or herself “the attitude of the perceiver
while he works” (55), and the perceiver is no mere passive mirror but is
forced to “create his own experience.” This is an “act of re[-]creation”
comparable to that of the original producer (60). Nevertheless, Dewey
admits that there is no guarantee, and indeed no possibility, of arriving at
the identical meaning of an aesthetic artifact, which only lives in the
reconstructive experience of its perceivers. For the art product as physical
is not the art work that is experiential (see Innis 2001). (Here, once again,
Dewey parallels Gadamer.) Now, since, as Dewey says, “in every experi-
ence there is form because there is dynamic organization,” it is possible to
exploit the various possibilities of “an integrated complete experience”
(AE, 62) through the creation of material objects that, unlike scripts and
abstract sign systems, do not lead to an experience but constitute one (91).
In such an artifact, Dewey remarks, “the meaning is as inherent in imme-
diate experience as is that of a flower garden” (89). We do not pass
through the artifact to something else on which it bears—semiosis in the
mode of indication or representative meaning—but we dwell in it, in
Polanyi’s sense, as we dwell in our own body as an integrated whole. This

indwelling “turns . . . experience upon itself to deepen and intensify its own
qualities” (41). Moreover, the artifact arises through the twin processes of
condensation and selection, for in expressing itself—embodying itself—in
artifacts the organism/self follows the ‘logic of interest’ (100) both of the
external media in which it is embodying itself and of its underlying sen-
sorimotor system. This system, which embeds us in the world and hungers
for expansion in the creative elaboration of sense-qualities, expresses itself
in “abounding joy in intercourse with common things.” Through thema-
tizing the phases of objects and of our experience of objects, art bears wit-
ness to, reveals, and systematically develops our innate “joy of perceiving
the world” (134), even if we are not thematically aware of it.6
Dewey argues that art organizes energies through rhythm, and much of
his aesthetic theory—and its application to an aesthetic critique of tech-
nology—relies on his theory of rhythm. “Rhythm,” as Dewey sees the
matter, “is a universal scheme of existence” (AE, 154). It is a “modulation
of the entire pervasive and unifying qualitative substratum” (159). This is
the ‘vibrational’ foundational matrix of the ‘linkage’ between self and
world. This organic, and qualitatively defined, linkage is itself only a part
6. Tuan (1977) has collected a fine set of examples of this phenomenon in his chapter “Inti-
mate Experiences of Place” (136–48). Tuan cites a delectable passage from a John Updike short
story, where Updike makes a focal voice in the story say:
I, David Kern, am always affected—reassured, nostalgically pleased, even, as a member

of my animal species, made proud—by the sight of bare earth that has been smoothed
and packed firm by the passage of human feet. Such spots abound in small towns: the
furtive break in the playground fence dignified into a thoroughfare, the trough of dust
underneath each swing . . . the blurred path worn across a wedge of grass, the anony-
mous little mound of embankment polished by play and strewn with pebbles like the
confetti aftermath of a wedding. Such unconsciously humanized intervals of day, too
humble and common to even have a name, remind me of my childhood, when one com-
munes with dirt down among the legs, as it were, of presiding fatherly presences. The
earth is our playmate then, and the call to supper has a piercingly sweet eschatological
ring. (John Updike, “Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car,” New
Yorker, 16 December 1961, 59, cited by Tuan [1977], 142)
Another example comes from Helen Santmyer’s novel Ohio Town (Columbus: Ohio State Uni-
versity Press, 1962). Tuan remarks, before citing the Santmyer passage, “And so the touch and
heart make up their magpie hoard, heedless of the calculating eyes and intelligence” (145). Then
the passage: “Valentines in a drugstore window, the smell of roasting coffee, sawdust on the
butcher’s floor—there comes a time in middle age when even the critical mind is almost ready to
admit that these are as good to have known and remembered . . . as fair streets and singing towns
and classic arcades” (Santmyer, Ohio Town, 50, cited in Tuan 1977, 145).
of that vast “ordered variation of changes” which characterizes the uni-

verse as a whole, inanimate and animate, whose illustrations are to be
found wherever there are “orders of different kinds of change”: “the ebb
and flow of the tides, the cycle of lunar changes, the pulses in the flow of
blood,” and so forth. Natural science is a search for these rhythms. “For-
mulae for these rhythms constitute the canons of science” (154). Indeed,
the idea of law is identical with the idea of harmony. In fact, both science
and art have a quite general common interest in rhythms, something that
C. H. Waddington (1969) pointed out with startling clarity in his Behind
Appearance, where painting and natural science are shown to have gener-
ated and discovered in many cases structurally isomorphic patterns.
Rhythm is found everywhere in human life and consciousness. Every
sense, as well as its embodiment in various media, has its own intrinsic—
normative—rhythms, which can or cannot be respected in any techno-
logical extension. Just as experience, in order to be really an experience,
must be subject to intervallic punctuation that makes an experience stand
out, so the phase structure of experience is marked not by recurring units
but by recurring relationships (171) where both order and variation are
operative. Variation constantly freshens existence, but always within a
matrix of dynamic order and ordering, for the use of intervals is crucial in
the work of art.
Dewey’s notion of rhythm is to be taken quite generally. It applies to
both space and time, to the external world that is perceived as well as to
the structure of the perceiving. Inasmuch as perceiving is first and fore-
most qualitatively defined, revelatory of an objective mood or tonality in
the domain with which the self is linked, Dewey can define rhythm on its
most basic level as “rationality among qualities,” for in any case “some
order is desired in the stir of existence” (AE, 174). The shaping arts—and
by extension the technological arts—potentiate this search for order
through processes of production that lead to heightened perception
wherein the artifact gives rise to “that sudden magic” (175) that generates
a sense of inner revelation, which can also be telic, as in the perceived fit-
tingness of a tool to a task. This potentiation brings moments of closure
to human intercourse with the world. Now, as Dewey puts it, “every clo-
sure is an awakening and every awakening settles something. This state of
affairs defines organization of energy” (174). Rhythmic organization of
energy not only is the goal of strictly aesthetic or artistic activity—
whether active or passive—but is one of the conditions for experiencing as
such on all its levels. In the matter at hand, “esthetic rhythm is a matter of
perception and therefore includes whatever is contributed by the self in

the active process of perceiving” (167–68) and, by extension, in the
process of production. For production and perception are correlative.
Since, for Dewey, as for phenomenology as a whole, consciousness,
because of the axiom of intentionality, is always ‘full,’ perception is not to
be defined apart from the objects it apprehends. Its rhythms are defined by
the rhythms of the objects that inscribe themselves upon the field of expe-
rience. As produced objects, not natural objects given independently of
human artifice, art products—and technological products—set up an orga-
nized and rhythmic release of perceptual energy (AE, 182). This process is
characterized by symmetry, rhythm, and measure, as well as intensity,
extensity, and tension. It is embodiment in various media that extends,
incorporates, and shapes the possibilities of the various senses. Here the
descriptive and the normative come together. Prall, in his Aesthetic Judg-
ment, pointed out the scope and depth of rhythmic embodiment in a way
eerily reminiscent of Whitehead’s notion of ‘causal efficacy.’
If . . . a rhythm is to be felt at all, it must, at least in part, and so far

as it is distinctly recognized as rhythmic character, be enacted
however minutely in the body feeling it; and for full appreciation
of its specific nature, the feeling must be of this character presented
to apprehension. There must be not merely the sense content of
sound or color or spatial form, but also the marking off by atten-
tion of the rhythmical pattern itself. . . . All of which emphasizes
the fact that rhythm as such is felt, not heard or seen, and that this
felt rhythm is necessarily that of nervous muscular activity itself,
progressing in the given rhythmical pattern, which can thus con-
ceivably be apprehended by mind. (1929, 162).
It is through embodiment in media that the human senses—and the

human body as a whole—are specialized and individualized (AE, 199).
Each medium, Dewey clearly saw, has different potencies and is adapted
to different ends (230), a point that is of decisive importance for Dewey’s
comments on the intersection between technology and aesthetics. “A
medium,” on Dewey’s reckoning, “as distinct from raw material is always
a mode of language and thus of expression and communication” (291).
Media, within a Deweyan pragmatist position, are “means that are incor-
porated in the outcome” of any act of expression—and, by extension, of
technological production—so much so that “esthetic effects belong
intrinsically to their medium” (201). “The true artist sees and feels in
terms of his medium and the one who has learned to perceive aesthetically
emulates the operation” (204) through subordinating his perception to the
objective form and letting it reinforce his natural perceptual rhythms
(103), indeed his very motor dispositions. These become somatic ana-
logues of the objectified perceptual form with which consciousness is
entwined. While, to be sure, this happens intentionally in deliberately
pursued aesthetic perception, its happens willy-nilly in any act of experi-
ence, as we saw in the last chapter. Different systems of perceptual
rhythms—visual, auditory, somatic/balletic, tactile—are imposed and
induced by different systems of artifacts that have their own logic, their
own ways of materially schematizing space and time. David Harvey
(1989, 201–323; 1996, 207–326), Stephen Kern (1983), and Henri Lefebvre
(1991) have given jaw-dropping accounts of these material and experien-
tial schematizations that are fully consonant with and support, in exten-
sive detail, Dewey’s pragmatist position. The artist is concerned with
space-time, just as the physicist, and just as the technologist. The principal
difference between the artist and material world-builder and the physicist
is that the former are thematically concerned with qualitative space-time,
with felt directions and mutual approaches and retreatings of the differ-
entiated matrix that is the work of art or the configured place or space.
This matrix defines and informs perceptual experience. Every part of a
work of art, or indwelt space or place, is part of a network of identities
leading to indefinite perceptual differentiation to the degree that con-
sciousness is given over to the internal dynamics of the objective form.
This ‘giving over,’ as the previous chapter showed us, is the linkage of self
to world, a fundamentally tacit, nonexplicit process of assimilation, a fact
that makes the setting-up of artifacts in which our senses are, or will be,
embodied all the more serious or, as Dewey would put it, perilous.
Dewey’s theory of embodiment, connected with his theory of expres-
sion, is in fundamental agreement with one of phenomenology’s key con-
cepts. Just as originary impulsion, which initiates the intentional arc
between self and world, leads to expression in movement, gesture, sign,
and symbol, with no aesthetic intent, so the transformation and transfig-
uration of the impulsion through art—and through technology—leads to
the systematic ‘working-up’ of the material world and media in which the
trajectories of the intentional arc can be carried to completion and closure
to constitute what Dewey calls a ‘consummatory experience’—as opposed
to an instrumental experience. It is the creation of consummatory experi-
ences to which material objectification in all its forms is ultimately to lead
and by which it is to be measured. The human quality of life is to be
judged in light of how much it fosters this process. The parallel between
technology and art, which Dewey draws, is grounded in the fact that both
are shaping processes of production that give rise to artifacts. These shap-
ing processes and the shaped products have their own rhythms and their
own logics. Technology is, in fact, though Dewey does not put it in these
terms, the continual and progressive production of exosomatic organs by
which the human body appropriates nature for its own uses and for the
satisfaction of its needs, combining instrumental and consummatory fea-
tures. Once again, following Gehlen, we can see how these organs substi-
tute for, compensate for, and extend the natural powers and sense organs
of human beings as they exist in the ‘state of nature.’ We embody our-
selves in them, pour ourselves into them, make them essential ingredients
in our lives. Dewey and Polanyi are in deep agreement about the ‘embod-
ied logic’ of technological extensions of ourselves.
2. The Aesthetics of Technology

What results do we obtain when we explicitly place the descriptive and
normative grid of Dewey’s aesthetic theory, whose groundlines I have just
sketched, over the phenomena of material production of ‘utilities’ in the
technological process?7 There is no need to extrapolate. Dewey himself has
made the application, but his comments are strewn throughout Art as
Experience and other writings. When they are assembled and put into
order, Dewey is seen to have constructed nothing less than an aesthetic cri-
tique of modern technology whose percipience and heuristic power
matches, anticipates, and even grounds earlier and later work, avoiding in
the process dichotomies, oppositions, and problems often afflicting other
formulations. Dewey did not just see the possibility and necessity of an
aesthetic critique of technology. He also saw that technology itself had
certain aesthetic implications. His analyses oscillate between these two
poles, much as Walter Benjamin’s did. One of Benjamin’s most program-
matic statements, enunciated at the beginning of his “Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” bears directly upon Dewey’s key posi-
7. While I focus here on aesthetics, it must not be assumed that I am inadequately appreci-
ating the other ‘dimensions’ of Dewey’s contribution to the analysis of technology, which are
rooted in his epistemological and political commitments. Hickman (1990, 2001), Campbell
(1995), Ryan (1995), Westbrook (1991), and Eldridge (1998) give differently weighted treatments
of these other dimensions. I have discussed Hickman 1990 in detail in Innis 1990.
tion. Benjamin writes: “During long periods of history the mode of human
sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The
manner in which sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is
accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circum-
stances as well” (Benjamin 1969, 222). Benjamin was most interested, in
light of his problem space, with showing “the social transformations
expressed by these changes in perception,” which he interpreted in his
own idiosyncratic Marxist terms. Most of Benjamin’s politico-aesthetic
themes and most of his conclusions have their own parallels and deepen-
ings in Dewey. But, even more remarkably, many later issues raised by stu-
dents of the technological biasing of perception such as Harold Innis,
Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and other differently oriented theorists of
the ‘media’—in a sense both cognate with and different from Dewey’s—
are already present in Dewey. Although it is not possible to claim that we
can reconstitute all of their work out of Dewey, it is certainly possible to
begin to situate it, as well as the work of others.
To begin with, as Dewey puts it, “[a]ll of the ‘shaping’ arts bend natural
materials and forms of energy to serve some human desire” (AE, 234).
Technology in the strict sense deals with the production of ‘utilities’ to
satisfy the prevailing system of needs, which are themselves a fusion of
‘natural’ and ‘social’ components. Dewey’s characterization of art as pro-
duction, which also lies at the heart of the neo-Crocean model of Luigi
Pareyson’s stimulating Estetica: Teoria della formatività (1960, 41–55,
57–93), connects it immediately with technological production. Dewey
was well aware that the distinction between objects of use and objects of
beauty—as well as the frameworks for their respective production and
evaluation—is social in origin, not built into the nature of things. He
would agree with the central themes and problems of Pierre Bourdieu
(see Bourdieu 1984). Prior to the industrial mode of production, with its
predominant interest in mass consumerism and private profit understood
in monetary terms, objects of use of all sorts—rugs, pots, tools, distinctive
uniforms—were central factors in the decorative informing of everyday
life, where the useful, the decorative, and the expressive coexisted in inti-
mate union. This, of course, was one of the dreams and the experienced
nightmares of the great Victorian social and cultural critics. While, to be
sure, this union or disunion was in many cases the object of a Ruskinian
“argument of the eye” (Hewison 1976), the argument was not conducted
just on the receptive, perceptual side. The very material process of pro-
duction itself was expressive. In its drive toward form and shape it was
oriented toward effecting an expansion and integration of the producer’s

powers and skills. Modern industrial conditions have, according to
Dewey, forced apart in varying degrees these two dimensions of the pro-
ductive and perceptual processes.
However, in Dewey’s view, it is clear that the “objects of industrial arts
have form—that adapted to their special uses. These objects take on
esthetic form, whether they are rugs, urns, or baskets, when the material
is so arranged and adapted that it serves immediately the enrichment of
the immediate experience of the one whose attentive perception is
directed to it.” Indeed, “when . . . form is liberated from limitation to a
specialized end and serves also the purposes of an immediate and vital
experience, the form is esthetic and not merely useful” (AE, 121). At the
same time, there is nothing intrinsic to the industrial mode of production
as such that blocks the expressive dimension both on the side of produc-
tion and on that of perception, provided the general conditions for having
an experience are respected, which, to be sure, they so often are not in
modern contexts. To the degree that such expressive rationality is failing,
a mode of production—and the products emerging from the process—
falls below the organic standard defined by harmony and rhythm. “If our
environment, as far as it is constituted by objects of use, consisted of
things that are themselves contributory to a heightened consciousness of
sight and touch, I do not think any one would suppose that the act of use
is such as to be anesthetic” (266–67). However, adaptation to an end—
such as a comfortable and hygienically effective chair—does not neces-
sarily issue into aesthetic effect, as Siegfried Giedion has charted in detail
in his Mechanization Takes Command (see esp. 258–510). Adaptation to
an end is often intellectually grasped, while aesthetic effect must be found
directly in sense perception (AE, 120). There is no preestablished har-
mony between the needs of the various senses. The “needs of the eye”
(120), the “master organ of the whole being” (223), which mediates to us
more than any other sense “the sensuous surface of the world” (130), are
not definable in predominantly intellectual terms. Because of our bodily
insertion into the world, it is ultimately the qualitative harmony between
all the senses that is determinative.8
8. See Ackerman 1990 and Tuan 1993, 35–118, for extremely pertinent inventories of these
forms of harmony. While not ‘philosophical’ in any ‘technical’ sense, they are among the most
pertinent confirmations of the correctness of Dewey’s pragmatist approach to lived experience.
By their range of examples they are ideal initiations into what Erwin Strauss called the “primary
world of the senses.”
It is not just the visual apparatus but the whole organism that
interacts with the environment in all but routine action. The eye,
ear, or whatever, is only the channel through which the total
response takes place. A color as seen is always qualified by implicit
reactions of many organs, those of the sympathetic system as well
as of touch. It is a funnel for the total energy put forth, not its well-
spring. Colors are sumptuous and rich, just because a total organic
resonance is deeply implicated in them. (127)
Or, otherwise put, “in normal experience, a sensory quality is related to

other qualities in such ways as to define an object” (AE, 129). The object is
the organizing center brought to a focus through the integration of the var-
ious qualitative vectors, each having a varying and unequal perceptual
weight. But inasmuch as “an object is perceived by a cumulative series of
interactions” (223), the “continuity of the total act of perceiving must be
maintained” (224). Now, as we have learned from Kern and Harvey and
many others, the continuity of the total act of perceiving is one of the ele-
ments most missing in modern life, which is marked most of all by frag-
mentation, splitting, radical syncopation of perceptual acts. No vivid
consciousness can be sustained when our habits are “formed in working on
a moving belt in a speeded-up industry” (266; see Harvey 1989, esp. 121–97,
on ‘Fordism’ and its consequences), habits that have now penetrated to all
strata of social life and to all the various dimensions of consciousness, a phe-
nomenon also noted by Walter Benjamin. Dewey had foreseen, by com-
mon observation and philosophical vision, the psychic dissolution and
endemic anomie that lay latent in the then predominant, and even now
expanded, system of production in which human emotion “repelled by the
dreariness and indifference of things which a badly adjusted environment
forces upon us . . . withdraws and feeds upon things of fantasy” (264),
which are now served forth in magnificent quantities by the mass-media
and mass-entertainment industries (see Ewen 1988; Boorstin 1992; Hodge
and Kress 1988). The privatization of life attendant upon the industrial pur-
veying of images and the ensuing vacuity of perception—its latching onto
the most minimally qualitatively formed objects and products—are both
responses to a felt lack of harmony between the deepest organic, motoric,
and perceptual needs of the self and the objects with which the self interacts,
and a symptom of deep disorder.
Some of Dewey’s most biting comments are directed at the aesthetic
vulgarity of many of our modern edifices, whether in domestic, civic, or
industrial contexts (see AE index under ‘architecture’; McDermott 1976,

179–231; 1986, 196–209).9 Architecture for him—as for Hegel, too, whose
thought is echoed everywhere in Dewey’s work—plays a paradigmatic
role in the building of human life and is a prime source of information for
our deciphering of a group’s imaginative vision of its common destiny (see
Scruton 1979; Harries 1997). Now, the “bustle and ado of modern life ren-
der nicety of placing the feature most difficult for artists to achieve” (AE,
216). This is especially so for those ‘practical artists,’ such as architects,
whose relationship to place is mediated and defined by space as ‘property
value.’ This is one of the most deleterious aspects of modern life for
Dewey, whose critical strictures on unimaginative boxlike structures and
the disgraceful nature of civic architecture, which is so unworthy of the
‘fine civilization’ that we aspire to be, are impassioned and bitter. Dewey
remarked, in words that parallel those of Lewis Mumford, Ian McHarg,
and many others, that “extension sprawls and finally benumbs if it does
not interact with place so as to assume intelligible distribution” (217).10
This sounds like nothing less than a critique of incipient American
‘urban sprawl’ and the emerging decay of the American inner city, a phe-
nomenon practically unknown in Europe, whose urban sprawl is found in
the devastating erection of abstractly computed and shoddily constructed
‘belt cities.’ This lack of intelligible distribution ignores quality, both in
Dewey’s sense and in the sense developed by Robert Pirsig in his provoca-
tive Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I have already
cited. Although Le Corbusier might think that a building is a machine for
9. I am referring to the following chapters here: “Nature, Nostalgia, and the City: An
American Dilemma,” “Space, Time, and Touch: Philosophical Dimensions of Urban Conscious-
ness,” “Glass Without Feet: Dimensions of Urban Aesthetics.”
10. Dewey’s comments on architecture, which space does not allow us to reproduce here, can
be supplemented by the work of Yi-Fu Tuan. Compare a representative passage from his Space
and Place (1977), which could have been written by Dewey:
Building is a complex activity. It makes people aware and take heed at different levels:
at the level of having to make pragmatic decisions; of envisioning architectural spaces in
the mind and on paper; and of committing one’s whole being, mind and body, to the
creation of a material form that captures an ideal. Once achieved, architectural form is
an environment for man. How does it then influence human feeling and consciousness?
The analogy of language throws light on the question. Words contain and intensify feel-
ing. Without words feeling reaches a momentary peak and quickly disappears. Perhaps
one reason why animal emotions do not reach the intensity and duration of human ones
is that animals have no language to hold emotions so that they can either grow or fes-
ter. The built environment, like language, has the power to define and refine sensibility.
It can sharpen and enlarge consciousness. Without architecture feelings about space
must remain diffuse and fleeting (106–7).
living, it cannot be built without thematic awareness of the “total organic

resonance” (AE, 127) that characterizes the live creature. Form and shape
and adaptation to an end do not have to fall apart; they can combine into
a structure that has “visible grace” (119), so long as private profit, or a
false reckoning of ‘costs,’ does not force a separation of form and utility,
with each putatively going its own way. What Dewey says about the
scope of a work of art can be directly applied, I think, to the scope of any
artifact when we consider it from the point of view of its impact on the
immediate quality of living. “The scope of a work of art is measured by
the number and variety of elements coming from past experiences that are
organically absorbed into the perception here and now. They give it its
body and its suggestiveness. They often come from sources too obscure to
be identified in any conscious memorial way, and thus they create the
aura and penumbra in which the work of art swims” (128).
Walter Benjamin was certain that the loss of aura characterized the work
of art in the age of mechanical reproducibility, wherein the work of art lost
its uniqueness, that which was due to its being “embedded in the fabric of
tradition” (1969, 223). For Dewey the loss of aura is due to the leveling-out
and gradual disappearance of the funded elements from past experience. It
is the scattering of the number and variety of elements coming from past
experience that modern industrial conditions have effected. This scattering
has both positive and negative aspects. The negative aspects are found in
the various dissociations of sensibility that let either a flattened or an over-
inflated sensibility run amok, which Benjamin pointed out in claiming that
the rise of Fascism and the Futurists has shown that war is expected to
“supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been
changed by technology.” Indeed, “the destructiveness of war furnishes
proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology
as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope
with the elemental forces of society” (Benjamin 1969, 242). Cassirer traces
these elemental forces down to their mythic roots. It is also these elemen-
tal forces that are supposedly to be both satisfied and harmonized in and
by a work of art or any artifact, to the degree that it is subject to the
Deweyan conditions of ‘having an experience.’
3. Positive Technics
It is in the characterization of the positive aspects of a “sense perception
changed by technology,” however, that one of the greatest strengths of
Dewey’s analysis paradoxically lies. This connects his affirmative theory

of media and embodiment with, for example, Don lhde’s attempt, dis-
cussed in the previous chapter, to lay a phenomenological grid over tech-
nological phenomena. And it offers, besides, criteria for evaluating their
import. The point of connection is in Dewey’s theory of the medium.
Dewey writes: “Every work of art [likewise every tool, machine, or
instrument—REI] has a particular medium by which, among other things,
the qualitative pervasive whole is carried. In every experience we touch the
world through some particular tentacle; we carry on our intercourse with
it, it comes home to us, through a specialized organ” (AE, 199).
This idea is expanded in a pregnant passage that I want to cite in full in
order to hang onto it some glosses and comparisons. For when we append
some examples and conceptual supplementations to Dewey’s theoretical
frame, we will see just how wide and deep his argument cuts.
Each medium has its own efficacy and value. What we can say is
that the products of the technological arts become fine in the
degree in which they carry over into themselves something of the
spontaneity of the automatic arts [that is, arts like music, poetry, or
the dance, whose media are not separable from the body and its
expressive powers]. Except in the case of work done by machines,
mechanically tended by an operator, the movements of the indi-
vidual body enter into all reshaping of material. When these move-
ments carry over in dealings with physically external matters the
organic push from within of an automatic art, they become, in so
far forth, ‘fine.’ Something of the rhythm of vital natural expres-
sion, something as it were of dancing and pantomime, must go
into carving, painting, and making statues, planning buildings, and
writing stories, which is one more reason for the subordination of
technique to form. (AE, 231–32)
Read once again, now in a Deweyan, not Polanyian, context, the two
remarkable passages from Pirsig’s novel that explicate this point, from a rather
different point of view, and help to define the ideal of technology as praxis.
They are worth attending to in this new context, where the focus is not on the
‘tacit dimension’ but on the ‘aesthetic dimension,’ as understood by Dewey.
The craftsman isn’t ever following a single line of instruction. He’s

making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he’ll be absorbed
and attentive to what he’s doing even though he doesn’t deliber-

ately contrive this. His motions and his machine are in a kind of
harmony. He isn’t following any set of written instructions because
the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and
motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at
hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a pro-
gression of changes until his mind’s at rest at the same time the
material’s right. (Pirsig 1974, 167)
A Deweyan reader would foreground the notion of harmony, the mind’s

being at rest, the material’s being ‘right.’
The same thought is expressed with reference to the ‘mechanic’s feel.’
This is something that
is very obvious to those who know what it is, but hard to describe
to those who don’t; and when you see someone working on a
machine who doesn’t have it, you tend to suffer with the machine.
The mechanic’s feel comes from a deep inner kinesthetic feeling
for the elasticity of materials. Some materials, like ceramics, have
very little, so that when you thread porcelain fitting you’re very
careful not to apply great pressures. Other materials, like steel, have
tremendous elasticity, more than rubber, but in a range in which,
unless you’re working with large mechanical forces, the elasticity
isn’t apparent.
With nuts and bolts you’re in the range of large mechanical forces
and you should understand that within these ranges metals are elas-
tic. When you take up a nut there’s a point called ‘fingertight’ where
there’s contact but no takeup of elasticity. Then there’s ‘snug,’ in
which the easy surface elasticity is taken up. Then there’s a range
called ‘tight,’ in which all the elasticity is taken up. The force required
to reach these three points is different for each size of nut and bolt,
and different for lubricated bolts and for locknuts. The forces are dif-
ferent for steel and for cast iron and brass and aluminum and plastics
and ceramics. But a person with a mechanic’s feel knows when some-
thing’s tight and stops. A person without it goes right on past and
strips the threads or breaks the assembly. (Pirsig 1974, 323–24)
This is an extremely insightful as well as irenic interpretation of the

relation of human beings and their tools. I have already noted, however,
that it could be argued that a large part of the modern industrial produc-
tion process renders no longer possible such a mutual accommodation
between self and tool. Nevertheless, Pirsig, consonant with Dewey’s own
argument, has delineated the ideal toward which a rightly ordered tech-
nology should be heading and according to which it should be judged. It
contains in capsule form a remarkable phenomenology of the fusion of a
worker with his tools—and of the artist with his medium—and of the
nonlogical, tacit, praxical, and qualitatively defined nature of technologi-
cal embodiment.
Adrian Stokes’s distinction between ‘modeling’ and ‘carving,’ originally
a distinction between two approaches to visual art, throws further light on
the problem of balance and the constitutive nature of the medium. Stokes
originally made the distinction to illuminate what he considered a pivotal
shift in the fundamental modi of self-objectivation quite generally. Between
carving and modeling, Stokes wrote, “terms on which we . . . bestow the
widest application,” there has always existed “a ratio, full of cultural
import” ([1934] 1978d, 188). It is his contention that this has now, in the
aftermath of the industrial revolution, been upset. Stokes claimed that
‘carving’ as a practical, intentional set toward matter was determined by
an attempt to reveal “mass as final objectivity” ([1932] 1978c, 57), to gen-
erate a “compact firmness” that would show the “ineradicable rooted-
ness” of our lives in the “welling-up gradually” of stone (78), which was
made to ‘blossom’ through the builders’ activities. In carving, the form of
any object is elicited from its ground by emerging from it, like a rose
emerging from a bud, continuous in its discontinuity. ‘Modeling,’ as
Stokes is using the term, is, for its part, ‘indifferent’ toward the ‘quality’
of materials. Now, the point I would like to make about this distinction,
in light of Dewey’s analysis, does not concern stone as such but materials,
specifically the gradual appearance—through scientific research, through
digitalization—of materials, techniques, and artifacts that make ‘carving
values,’ independent of their realization in any specific material substrate,
difficult or impossible to realize in practice or to apprehend in perception.
Stokes’s key thesis is that the whole balance between carving and mod-
eling, as praxical intentional stances toward the world, has been upset
through the displacement of ‘stone’ and its substitution by essentially
‘plastic’ materials. What is the problem here? “These materials,” Stokes
argues, “have little emblem of their own” ([1934] 1978d, 258). They lack
what Goethe called ‘significant roughness.’ “Synthetic materials take the
place of age-old products in which fantasy is deposited. . . . Modern scien-
tific power of synthesis fashions a fundamentally new and plastic environ-

ment,” for “stone architecture is prolonged but a moment by synthetic
stone” (258). (We can also say that synthetic materials as such are very
poorly adapted to certain organic contexts, as is plastic or rubber-coated
cloth used for children’s bibs, which associates the consumption of food
with the perception of hard, greasy surfaces.)
This is not just, in Stokes’s seemingly conservative argument, a trans-
formation in materials but a pivotal shift in the perceptual and pragmatic
intentionality structures of the technologically embodied sensorium. The
aesthetic basis of Western civilization, which, in the visual domain at least,
was exemplified in ‘enhancing’ or ‘carving’ values, has been superseded,
or at least outweighed, by manufacture, a process of fashioning, molding,
or modeling. What is novel, according to Stokes, is not the actual exis-
tence or emergence of modeling values, which certainly have their per-
manent place in world-building, but the modern attitude of ultimate
perceptual indifference toward the material and the consequent loss of the
“ideal of emotional externalization” ([1932] 1978c, 119) wherein things
come to a stand (135). In its place, Stokes contends, has been put a concern
with mere plasticity and mere line, both the results of what Stokes calls a
process of ‘abstraction.’ Paralleling Dewey’s account of expression as the
result of impulsion through experience wherein the self creates itself in the
creation of objects, that is, through a process of embodying itself in mate-
rial media, Stokes asks, “For what else is civilization but a converting of
formless power to organized show, to outwardness” (76)? In the present
age, however, there is “no concretion, but inhumanly to abstract is . . . the
deadly showing” (77).
This abstraction, when taken to term in the rise of modern mathemat-
ical science and its extension into the intentional orientation of industrial
and science-based design, not only distorts the anthropologically based
‘ratio between man and his environment,’ which Dewey is concerned to
maintain and to cultivate, but confirms Whitehead’s complaint that “the
assumption of the bare valuelessness of mere matter led to a lack of rever-
ence in the treatment of natural or artistic beauty” (1925, 196), consisting
in a “development of particular abstractions, and a contraction of concrete
appreciation” (197).
Maintaining that there is “no groove of abstractions which is adequate
for the comprehension of human life” (1925, 203), Whitehead argued—in
full agreement with Dewey’s position—that the emergent value repre-
sented in an aesthetic experience is “the measure of the individualisation
of the activity” of perceiving (200). For him “what is wanted is an appre-

ciation of the infinite variety of vivid values achieved by the organism in
its proper environment” (199), an achievement that, in Whitehead’s
framework, is a process of concretion, and not of ‘abstraction.’ The goal
of this process, as Whitehead put it in his Modes of Thought, is the “ratio-
nalization of consciousness. The prize at the goal is the enhancement of
experience by consciousness and rationality” (1938, 124). This is exem-
plified first and foremost in the “drive toward aesthetic worth for its own
sake” (119).
In the modern world, however, as Whitehead’s analysis shows, this is
difficult to achieve. Whitehead’s aesthetic critique, which is really an ‘ais-
thetic’ critique, in the Greek sense, hence runs parallel to Stokes’s and
Dewey’s and aims at opposing the two principal evils that block the real-
ization of this goal: “the ignoration of the true relation of each organism
to its environment; and . . . the habit of ignoring the intrinsic worth of the
environment which must be allowed its weight in any consideration of
final ends” (1925, 196). This is Dewey’s point exactly and is connected
with the general problem of embodiment.
We saw in the preceding chapter how to think about the ‘tacit logic’ of
embodiment. There I pointed out, following mainly Polanyi’s lead, a
more powerful and nuanced way of thinking about the nature and scope
of Heidegger’s putatively radical and fundamental distinction between
presence-to-hand and readiness-to-hand as ways of relating to our envi-
ronment. Heidegger’s generative insight was that the Zeug, or ‘imple-
ment,’ upon which Dasein was relying, was not apprehended as an
‘object’ but as an essentially orientational structure, its ontological reality
consisting in its ‘being-ordered-to . . .’ This um . . . zu, or ‘in-order-to,’
structure, one recalls, showed the tool or implement as existing ‘existen-
tially’ on our side of the so-called subject-object cut or relation, while its
term, that upon which it bore and which was the focus of the tool user’s
consciousness or awareness, was ‘out there,’ projected away from him.
The experiential consequence of this um . . . zu structure of the tool was
that the tool ‘receded’ in its objective reality as a thing, our contact with
it becoming prethematic, nonexplicit, preobjective. We project ourselves
through the tool to its term in such a fashion that the tool becomes trans-
parent, diaphanous, paralleling Dewey’s ‘automatic arts’ as paradigms of
the medium-form relation. Only when the tool breaks down or malfunc-
tions—or the material becomes recalcitrant—do we become aware of its
own separate material reality wherein it emerges as a ‘mere’ object into the
focus of consciousness. But as long as it is functioning properly, it defines

a particular concrete mode of being-in-the-world and of intentionality,
with its various possibilities of activities and, ultimately, of sense-giving.
While a hammer, for example, defines a particular mode of motoricity, a
rat-tailed file defines a rather different one, reorganizing the bodily thrust
and orientation to the projected task. A hacksaw, to be used on metal,
defines a different set of possible actions—a different action-space—than
a two-man woodman’s saw. Not only can all these do different things, but
they have a different feel, although all of them become in their own ways
transparent through skillful praxis. But, it is clear, they are transparent in
the way our bodies are transparent, that is, not completely so but with a
relative degree of opaqueness. John McDermott (1976, 162) has recog-
nized this complex situation, relying, in fact, upon and echoing a key text
from Polanyi, which is worth citing in this context. Polanyi writes: “Our
body is the ultimate instrument of all our external knowledge, whether
intellectual or practical. In all our waking moments we are relying on our
awareness of contacts of our body with things outside for attending to
these things. Our own body is the only thing in the world which we nor-
mally never experience as an object, but experience always in terms of the
world to which we are attending from our body” ([1967] 1969d, 17).
McDermott, commenting on Bergson, had written that “the body, then,
becomes a probe, an informing and selecting extension of our very being”
(1976, 162).
Don Ihde, we saw, has taken the Heideggerian analysis of a Zeug and
attempted to generalize it, both by the addition of certain reformed
Husserlian categories and with some hints from Merleau-Ponty. The nat-
ural, that is, putative nontechnologically embodied, straightforward
noetic-noematic correlation that defines in Husserlian phenomenology
the ‘intentional arc’ between subject and world—Dewey’s ‘interaction’
or ‘linkage’—is radically modified, he contends, by the technological
embodiment of perception. Noetically, the very texture of the act of per-
ceiving an object, or an object-domain, is changed through our reliance on
instruments. If, to use Ihde’s example, which is itself taken from Merleau-
Ponty and is exploited to the hilt by Polanyi, the world is mediated to us
through a cane or a probe, the noetic texture of the act of perception, its
antecedent ‘space,’ is conditioned by the specific materiality of the cane or
probe, by its physical reality as a filter, by its rigidity, weight, material, and
so forth. Experiencing through an instrument—through a medium—feels
differently, noetically, than experiencing the object directly, which was
the predominant model in Husserl’s theory of perception. In fact, the

object and the mediating instrument are fused together in the act of per-
ception, our perception of exactly these characteristics in this modality of
the object being dependent upon the tool or medium quite generally. The
example of a probe can become, therefore, the model for a series of stud-
ies involving the telephone, the optical microscope and telescope, the elec-
tron microscope, the bubble chamber and nuclear accelerator, and so
forth. This was, of course, McLuhan’s generative insight.
I also pointed out in the previous chapter that in the course of his
analysis Ihde sees two rather different technologically mediated relations
between perceiver and perceived. With varying degrees of emphasis in
different works (see now esp. Ihde 1990, 72–123; 1998, 39–49, 139–98), he
distinguishes between embodiment relations and hermeneutic relations.
In embodiment relations an instrumental auxiliary of perception can
either magnify the powers of an unaided sense-organ or sense-power or
can reduce the complex polymorphy of sense apprehension to a single
mode. Face-to-face conversation makes a person present in a way radi-
cally different from talking on the phone, for the richness of perceptual
elements in the first case is reduced to a part of the person’s voice. The
phone only offers up clues, which we have to integrate—both perceptu-
ally and imaginally through memory—into the focus that is the person in
absentia. Instruments of this sort isolate and differentiate the senses from
one another. If left to run its course unchecked by being brought into
proximity with other senses and their technological embodiments, a sense
can suffer an unnatural growth, disrupting the ecological balance of the
sensorium. A microscope or a telescope magnifies our senses, redefines
our experience of space, distance, size, and thus increases the perceptive-
ness and range of the eye. At the same time, certain instruments not only
magnify but transform, revealing phenomena that are ontologically depen-
dent upon the instrument for their cognitional apprehension, as happens in
research in microphysics and in molecular biology. In these latter cases,
however, the instrument does not lie on our side of the subject-object cut
but on the object side. While embodiment relations involve the assimila-
tion of the instrument to the subject, as in the transposition of feeling in
the use of the probe, drill, saw, and so forth, hermeneutic relations involve
the assimilation of the instrument to the object, so that the instrument
must be read, interpreted, as in microphysics or in the use of the electron
microscope, where the very ‘cognitive’ existence of the data being inves-
tigated is dependent upon the instruments that constitute them as data.
Now, as Ihde puts it (1979, 7), all instruments have an ‘echo focus’ and
a ‘primary focus’ when they are incorporated into the intentional arc. The
echo focus is apprehended, in Deweyan terms, as a specific qualitative
texture of the noetic act, which is subsidiarily experienced, in Polanyi’s
sense, while the primary focus lies at the center of attention. To take an
example—which is not Ihde’s—from a rather different domain, the shift
from oils to acrylics can make possible two qualitatively differently felt
and apprehended paintings even if there is an attempt to paint exactly the
‘same thing.’ This is identical with Dewey’s contention that the aesthetic
effect belongs essentially to the medium. Moreover, the reduction that
occurs in instrumentally mediated perception is always to a monodimen-
sion, which belongs to the telos or intentional trajectory of the instru-
ment, setting up a true ‘technological bias of perception’ that in its own
way is or can be creative. Technologies of perception present on multiple
levels new features, real novelties, new structures. Ihde mentions, as does
Dewey, the creation of a special kind of cinematic or spectatorial con-
sciousness that has followed upon the large-scale reliance upon, and
exploitation of, optical instruments in the modern world. Ihde has noted
(see 1998, pt. 4 passim) that modern science—perhaps perforce—has a
marked optical or visual bias and, in fact, as Whitehead saw and repeat-
edly warned against, is in danger of reifying visual phenomena both noet-
ically and in the social world, too. I also pointed out in the previous
chapter, however, that this visual bias derives from a very complex set of
factors and not just from the use of scientific optical instruments. The
invention of the technique of monocular perspective and the Albertian
construction of a wire grid to aid in the making of pictures, the extensive
work done on the camera obscura as a further aid to painting and to the
development of the ideology of picturing vision, the development of charts
and graphs for the study of motion and acceleration, the production of
cheap paper, which made bookkeeping and thus visual representation of
abstract quantities possible, the astronomical breakthroughs that made
celestial mechanics the paradigm scientific discipline: such factors as
these—all involving new perceptual organs or perceptual underpinnings—
must be invoked to account for the historical rise of ocularity as a world-
intentional project (see once again Crosby 1997; Panek 1998; Crary 1991).
Dewey’s thematization is completely compatible with and theoreti-
cally just as powerful as Ihde’s attempt to understand the impact of tech-
nology upon the structures of experiencing. Dewey spoke of the reed,
string, and drum as modifying the matter of song, of the piano’s role in
fixing our scale, of the advent of print as modifying the ‘substance’ of lit-
erature and the relation of ‘literary’ to ‘spoken’ language. Indeed, in
words that point forward to McLuhan and other theorists, such as Harold
Innis, of the cultural impact of print, Dewey notes that “print has made
for an enormous extension not merely in bulk but in qualitative variety
and subtlety, aside from compelling an organization that did not previ-
ously exist” (228).
When we further combine the elements of Dewey’s work that I have
passed in review and some other selected materials that I will now intro-
duce, we have in hand essential and even novel components for a radical
critique of technological praxis, a critique that, as I have noted, is by no
means exclusively negative. Dewey clearly saw in technology new possi-
bilities of creating harmonies in the interaction of the live creature with
his environment. A human, and humanizing, technology had to corre-
spond to the general conditions of experience, since these were rooted in
basic organic structures. These antecedent structures are not rigid, nor do
they constitute some sort of biological ‘essence.’ As Helmut Plessner and
Arnold Gehlen have pointed out, man’s essence is his plasticity, his abil-
ity to become practically everything. Nothing Dewey says contravenes
this thesis. But the foundation of his bitter and accusatory opinion of
modern technology was that it led to anesthesia or to hypertrophy of the
senses. The ‘widespread disruption’ of modern civilization is the signifi-
cant fact that explains what for Dewey is the central problem of modern
life: the “absence of obvious organic connection of the arts with other
forms of culture.” The putative incoherence of our civilization has been
produced by “new forces,” and these forces are “so new that the attitudes
belonging to them and the consequences issuing from them have not been
incorporated into integral elements of experience” (AE, 339–40), and, in
fact, in a number of central cases, perhaps cannot be.
The goal in technological production must be the organization of pro-
duction and perception in such a way that vivid consciousness (AE, 266)
can be sustained to the highest possible degree. The compartmentalized
psychology that separates work from completeness of perceptual experi-
ence must be overcome, for it is a “reflection of dominant social institu-
tions that have deeply affected both production and consumption or use”
(266) that is, the division of labor. As Dewey put it in a passage that reads
like something from Marx’s 1844 manuscripts:
Where the worker produces in different industrial conditions from

those which prevail today, his own impulsions tend in the direction
of creation of articles of use that satisfy his urge for experience as he

works. It seems to me absurd to suppose that preference for
mechanically effective execution by means of completely smoothly
running mental automatisms, and at the expense of quickened con-
sciousness of what he is about, is ingrained in psychological struc-
ture. And if our environment, as far as it is constituted by objects of
use, consisted of things that are themselves contributory to a
heightened consciousness of sight and touch, I do not think any
one would suppose that the act of use is such as to be anesthetic.
(266–67)
Not only does this passage echo Marx—without the baggage of alien-
ation—but it echoes Ruskin’s great statement on the relationship between
labor and art in his famous essay on the nature of Gothic in The Stones of
Venice. At the same time, although industrial design is not in itself aes-
thetic, “mass production by mechanical means has given the old separa-
tion between the useful and fine a decidedly new turn. The split is
reinforced by the greater importance that now attaches to industry and to
trade in the whole organization of society.” Dewey continues, in a passage
looking forward to the argument developed in Lewis Mumford’s Art and
Technics:
The mechanical stands at the pole opposite to that of the esthetic,

and production of goods is now mechanical. The liberty of choice
allowed to the craftsman who worked by hand has almost van-
ished with the general use of the machine. Production of objects
enjoyed in direct experience by those who possess, to some extent,
the capacity to produce useful commodities expressing individual
values, has become a specialized matter apart from the general run
of production. This fact is probably the most important factor in
the status of art in present civilization. (AE, 344)
André Leroi-Gourhan (1993), writing out of a very different tradition,

offers support for this contention. Based on an anthropology of the
senses, he has pointed out in Gesture and Speech (269–399) that in the
production of every artifact, whether aesthetic or not, there are four fac-
tors or planes operating, each of which must be adverted to and kept in
balance: function, form, matter, and rhythm. For example, in the case of a
tool—and I would also say of a production process quite generally—we
can distinguish (1) the ideal mechanical function, (2) the material solutions
that approximate to and derive from the current state of technics, and (3)
the ‘style’ that derives from the ethnic ‘figuration.’ Rhythm, the fourth
factor, concerns in his conception the ultimate matrix, rooted in move-
ment, of all active behavior (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 309 ff.). For him mus-
cular sensibility is the ultimate instrument of insertion into existence
(309). It is continued, to be sure, in all the other forms of rhythms proper
to the individual senses. The modern period for him is characterized by a
radical dissociation of—or attempt to dissociate—‘technique’ and ‘figura-
tion,’ breaking the cyclic unity of a threefold ‘esthetique’: a functional, a
physiological, and a figurative. In a total perceptual process or object,
whether cognitionally, practically, aesthetically, or instrumentally ori-
ented or constituted, these factors must always be kept in some equilib-
rium, and in fact the ‘aesthetic’ logic of the senses has always striven to
maintain this equilibrium. It is indeed an ‘organic’ demand.
Leroi-Gourhan has shown through his extensive anthropological
investigations that rhythms permeate all the sense modalities. This, we
have seen, is also Dewey’s (as well as Whitehead’s and Prall’s) deepest
conviction and insight. But in the modern world it is, I think, in the ratio
between the visual, auditory, and somatic domains that the major prob-
lems lie. It could be argued that the radical syncopation, abstractness, and
lability of perceptual acts that mark the “extraordinarily labile” con-
sciousness of modern man (Gehlen 1988, 313, translation emended) have
their source in our inability, or lack of opportunity, for the most part, to
keep these domains in some sort of dynamic equilibrium. They are rooted
as well, Dewey claims, in “the hold of the lowest order of rhythm upon
the uncultivated” (AE, 174), a thesis that parallels one aspect of the prim-
itivization of consciousness described by Gehlen in Man in the Age of
Technology. They are perhaps also rooted in a certain migration of the
locus of rhythm from one part of the body to another, as in Don Ihde’s
distinction, in his essay “From Bach to Rock,” between body-music and
head-music (Ihde 1979, 93–100).
Where, however, would one ever hope to get one’s scale of ‘higher’ and
‘lower’ rhythms? From an analysis, I think, of the dynamics of perception
itself and the ‘mechanisms’ that underlie it and drive it on. This would
come from a full-fledged phenomenology of the actual rhythmic intervals
of everyday life as centered on their somatic base (see Young 1988). We
need to focus operatively, in the greatest detail, on the ‘ground elements’
out of which the modern figures of consciousness emerge, for they not
only carry the rhythmic elements, but, as what Prall quite generally called
“units of sensuous content,” which make up the sensuous surface of the

world, they determine the “affective tones” that arise within the prehen-
sion of concrete objects. In Whitehead’s words, from his Adventures of
Ideas, “the true doctrine of sense perception is that the qualitative char-
acters of affective tones inherent in the bodily functionings are trans-
muted into the character of regions” (1933, 215), that is, are projected
outside as qualities in the world. Now, citing Whitehead once again, “not
only can the objects be prescribed, but also the corresponding affective
tones of their prehensions. This is the aesthetic experience so far as it is
based on sense-perceptions” (216).
Coherent affective tones demand some sort of dynamic unity and inte-
gration of the inner trajectories of the senses. But might this be just what
has been obstructed in many cases under modern perceptual conditions?
For example, in Inside Out Adrian Stokes has argued that a peculiar rela-
tionship between noise and vision has arisen in the modern world. As he
saw the matter, a peculiar shift toward the auditory has occurred, with
startling consequences for visual design, especially in architecture. It is, in
fact, the “plastic interplay of noise and movement [that] gives some mean-
ing to contemporary environment” ([1947] 1978b, 167). Stokes points out
that it is the fusion of movement and sound that characterizes modern
machinery, which when at rest often makes little impression, as opposed,
for example, to a sailing ship, the lines of which mirror in the visual
domain its functions. Could we not say the same thing about the rise of
megalopolises such as New York and the cult of the skyscraper? What
would New York (Stokes’s example is London) do to the sensorium if we
removed from it the incessant movement and noise of a city that really
does not respect the rhythmic structures of night and day or even, but not
consistently, time of year? What types of experiential possibilities and of
experiential integrations and equilibria does such a complex offer? The
visual impact is, to be sure, overwhelming, but this is due to the incredi-
ble scale on which things are built. René Dubos, in his book So Human an
Animal, has many comments on the distortions of experience attendant
upon city life that contravene “natural biological rhythms” (1968, 155).
And what about the cult of gigantism in building in premodern societies:
Pantheon, Roman baths, Hagia Sophia, and so forth? Do they differ
essentially—that is, perceptually or symbolically—from modern forms
of gigantism? Is it possible that the spread of technical gigantism as ideo-
logical project is something new and not yet adequately studied from the
experiential point of view? With respect to this Prall has argued that “the
point is simply that we cannot afford to neglect, in our account of the

intrinsic nature of spatial forms and relations, the matter of the human
point of view, a point of view determined by the size and structure of
human bodies and the specific nature of their modes of sensation. . . . The
size of objects as compared to the size of the human body is fundamen-
tally important to their specific aesthetic character” (1929, 162).
Well, where do we draw the line? Have we really taken the matter of
scale seriously into consideration? It is well-nigh impossible to answer
such a question in the abstract. But I think it is in important ways inti-
mately connected with the loss of concrete perceptual place, which is
apprehended prethematically, operatively, in the analog mode (as pre-
sented in, for example, Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space), and its trans-
formation into abstract designed space, which is apprehended digitally,
and then—especially in America—the further transformation of this space
into property value. When a building becomes a ‘machine for living’
rather than a dwelling or a habitation, arising from the diverse demands
and constraints of practical reason in its efforts to make its world rational,
the figurative and functional fall apart, first of all, and the material under-
pinnings of the perceptual world undergo a profound change. Roger Scruton
has made much of this point in his interesting and contentious Aesthetics
of Architecture, and Karsten Harries (1997) has explored the topic of the
‘ethical’ function of architecture in deep detail, as have Yi-fu Tuan (1977,
1993) and E. V. Walter (1988).
4. Toward Aesthetic Rationality as Social Norm

Is there any way out of the various dilemmas Dewey has presented us
and any secure way toward the stabilization of the positive dimensions of
our forms of embodiment in a technologically formed culture? The ele-
ments of Dewey’s answer also run parallel to Mumford’s, and in four
densely packed pages near the end of Art as Experience, in the chapter
“Art and Civilization,” he sketches the basic outlines of an answer, or at
least the criteria that a viable and effective answer must satisfy. Applica-
tion, both personal and social, to concrete cases is a further intrinsically
contentious task.
First of all, “every well-constructed object and machine has form, but
there is esthetic form only when the object having this external form fits
into a larger experience” (AE, 344). Now, technology has become deter-
minative in constructing the matrix of this larger experience and in part to

redefining its criteria and internal structures. “There is something clean in
the esthetic sense about a piece of machinery that has a logical structure
that fits it for its work, and the polish of steel and copper that is essential
to good performance is intrinsically pleasing in perception” (344), a theme
developed with acute aesthetic sensitiveness by the renowned metallurgist
C. S. Smith (1981). The trajectories of such objects and processes have,
unfortunately, not always been followed. The destruction of the natural
beauties of the landscape and the rise of slums, as well as the perceptually
shabby products of machine civilization, go against that union of form
and function which are demanded by an aesthetically sensitive mechani-
cal and industrial efficiency. More important, in Dewey’s mind,
the habits of the eye as a medium of perception are being slowly

altered in being accustomed to the shapes that are typical of indus-
trial products and to the objects that belong to urban as distinct
from rural life. The colors and planes to which the organism habit-
ually responds develop new material for interest. The running
brook, the greensward, the forms associated with a rural environ-
ment, are losing their place as the primary material of experience.
Part at least of the change of attitude of the last score of years to
‘modernistic’ figures in painting is the result of this change. Even
the objects of the natural landscape come to be ‘apperceived’ in
terms of the spatial relations characteristic of objects the design of
which is due to mechanical modes of production; buildings, fur-
nishings, wares. Into an experience saturated with these values,
objects having their own internal functional adaptations will fit in
a way that yields esthetic results. (345)
Here is another point of intersection between the analyses of Siegfried

Giedion, in his Mechanization Takes Command, and Dewey’s work,
expressed in this case in the form of a statement of fact and of a hope—
maybe even, in the last analysis, a demand. That society’s ‘objects of
desire’ have not always embodied principles of design that should inform
whole perceptual systems is not surprising, but the relation between
‘design and society’ is extremely complicated and the results often unfore-
seeable (see Forty 1986; Mumford 1952). The work of Marinetti and the
Futurists, as well as many of the paintings by Léger, for instance, indicate
the clear penetration of ‘machine’ forms and values into visual art, though,
as Walter Benjamin saw very clearly and argued convincingly, the psychic
consequences of the internalization of technological schemata in con-
sciousness have not been necessarily benign or conducive to forming
those harmonies of ‘linkage’ between the self and its world that Dewey
desired. The film and the camera, for example, have had effects not
glimpsed by Dewey. Benjamin’s pervasion of reality by ‘the apparatus’ is
exemplified most of all by the rise of optical technologies and the condi-
tioning of our larger experience by freestanding images. The distinctive
seductiveness of the image is that it hides its equipmental nature, obliter-
ates itself as artifice. In the words of Benjamin, “the equipment-free aspect
of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate
reality has become an orchid in the land of technology” (1969, 233). Or,
in the words of Max Frisch (1959, 178), “technology [is] the knack of so
arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” The mass pro-
duction of images, their subjection to the material conditions of industri-
alization, was an aspect of that larger field of experience which Dewey did
not see and for the explication of which we have to go to other theorists,
such as Benjamin, Susan Sontag (1977), John Berger (1972, 1980), and
Roland Barthes (1981).
But Dewey’s insistence on the determining character of the medium
presents no obstacles to such an integration. Still, Dewey himself, as we
have seen, was in no way naive concerning the benign effects of technol-
ogy. “Since the organism hungers naturally for satisfaction in the material
of experience, and since the surroundings which man has made, under the
influence of modern industry, afford less fulfillment and more repulsion
than at any previous time, there is only too evidently a problem that is still
unsolved. The hunger of the organism for satisfaction through the eye is
hardly less than its urgent impulsion for food.” That such a hunger is not
satisfied under present conditions is due to “forces at work that affect the
mechanical means of production that are extraneous to the operation of
machinery itself,” which Dewey, without mentioning Marx or socialism
by name, traces to the “economic system of production for private gain.”
He calls for a “radical social alteration” that would change “the degree
and kind of participation the worker has in the production and social dis-
position of the wares he produces,” which alone will “seriously modify
the content of experience into which creation of objects for use enters”
(AE, 345). Dewey pointedly adds: “And this modification of the nature of
experience is the finally determining element in the esthetic quality of the
experience of the things produced” (345–46) and will overcome the “old
dualistic division between labor and leisure” (346) an echo, unbeknownst

to Dewey, no doubt, of Marx’s differently conceived—and rather confus-
ing as Marx developed it—diatribe against the separation of manual from
mental labor (see Sohn-Rethel 1978 and Pieper 1998).
The road to such an overcoming is through abolishing “oligarchical
control from the outside of the processes and the products of work.” Such
control is the “chief force in preventing the worker from having that inti-
mate interest in what he does and makes that is an essential prerequisite of
esthetic satisfaction.” There is, in fact, “nothing in the nature of machine
production per se that is an insuperable obstacle in the way of workers’
consciousness of the meaning of what they do and enjoyment of the sat-
isfaction of companionship and of useful work well done” (AE, 346). The
goal and the criterion of a system of production must be the “esthetic
quality in the experience that accompanies processes of production,” not
oligarchical control for private gain. In this way art will no longer be “the
beauty parlor of civilization.” The way is through a revolution that affects
“the imagination and emotions of man,” and “the values that lead to pro-
duction and intelligent enjoyment of art have to be incorporated into the
system of social relationships.” This, we saw, was Prall’s contention
exactly. Indeed, “art itself is not secure under modern conditions until the
mass of men and women who do the useful work of the world have the
opportunity to be free in conducting the processes of production and are
richly endowed in capacity for enjoying the fruits of collective work”
(346–47), a high order indeed, which is long from being filled. As Dewey
put it in an elegant passage, “esthetic experience is a manifestation, a
record and celebration of the life of a civilization, a means of promoting
its development, and is also the ultimate judgment upon the quality of a
civilization. For while it is produced and is enjoyed by individuals, those
individuals are what they are in the content of their experiences because of
the cultures in which they participate” (329). This participation must be
taken in the literal sense of the term: as embodiment in media by which
the live creature interacts with and hence comes into contact with his
environment, generating in the process new objects of experience and new
forms of experiencing. But the whole process, both of production and
perception, must always be under the control of an overarching and uni-
versal ideal, rooted in the anthropological conditions of experience poten-
tiated by and exemplified in art.
A truly comprehensive aesthetic critique of technology cannot be car-
ried out by relying on Dewey alone. His work can and must be integrated,
as I have only schematically indicated, with that vast constellation of other

thinkers who have seen in the demands and developments of aesthetic con-
sciousness a base from which to measure the interaction of man with the
world through tools, instruments, and media of all sorts. I have tried to
indicate in the course of my discussion some points of intersection
between Dewey and others as well as his bearing on some actual problems.
A detailed confrontation of Dewey’s descriptive and normative model
with present-day reality, with our practice of technology, our organization
of the workplace, and the design of our objects, would make us see, I think,
that we are still in many cases on a very wrong course, confirming in many
ways the worst of Ruskin’s fears. We have, as a society, failed to keep con-
stantly before our eyes Dewey’s question: “For what ideal can man hon-
estly entertain save the idea of an environment in which all things conspire
to the perfecting and sustaining of values occasionally and partially expe-
rienced?” (AE, 190).
By following the lead of art through selection and organization of
those “features that make any experience worth having as an experience”
and that lead to “commensurate perception,” we might be able to create a
technology that would contribute to effecting “in spite of all indifference
and hostility of nature to human interests some congruity of nature with
man,” without which life could not exist (AE, 190). The ideal of art gives
us a sense of the possible, even while present actuality forces us to admit
that the prospects are not altogether favorable. “Our lives,” Whitehead
wrote, “are passed in the experience of disclosure. As we lose this sense of
disclosure we are shedding that mode of functioning which is the soul”
(1938, 62). It is the maintenance of this sense of disclosure quite generally
that Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics both asks of us and gives us the tools
to accomplish.
Form and Technics
Nature, Semiotics, and the

‘Information Revolution’
1. Semiosis and Technics

Ernst Cassirer’s great trilogy, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, which
appeared over a six-year period from 1923 to 1929, as well as all his mature
semiotic work, delineates and is based upon what he called the three
‘form-worlds’ or ‘sense-functions’ of ‘expression’ (Ausdruck), ‘represen-
tation’ (Darstellung), and ‘signification’ (Bedeutung).1 These form-worlds
1. I am following the usage here of Ralph Manheim’s translation of Cassirer’s great trilogy,
since this is the version that most English-language readers of this book will be consulting. ‘Sig-
nification’ is accordingly to be taken in a restricted technical sense as ‘pure’ signification. Of
course, all sign-functions ‘signify,’ but I think what Cassirer has in mind is sufficiently clear from
the context and hence relieves us of trying to come up with an even more confusing alternative.
function as the ultimate frames or matrices of sense-giving and sense-

reading, which are by no means restricted to the explicit or thematic use
of signs. ‘Expression,’ in Cassirer’s use of the term, is the sense-function
where sign, meaning, and object are so indissolubly joined that the sign is
taken to participate existentially in, or have an ontological affinity with,
its intended reality. For Cassirer, word-magic and mythic consciousness
are prime exemplifications of this stratum or form of consciousness.2
They are continued, even though residually, in ‘higher’ forms of religion
and their distinctively ‘affective’ configurations. Expression is the realm
primarily of physiognomic and qualitatively defined meanings. ‘Repre-
sentation,’ as Cassirer is using the term, is the sense-function where the
relations between signs, meanings, and objects have moved to a higher
level of ‘abstraction.’ Whereas mythical consciousness works within the
dimension of ‘identity,’ representation introduces ‘difference.’ “The aim
of repetition lies in identity—the aim of linguistic designation lies in dif-
ference” (1953, 189). The word is not the thing; the image is not the
imaged. Words and images, doing the ‘work’ of representation, ‘articulate’
the world without being a part of it. Language and art for Cassirer exem-
plify in clearest fashion this sense-function, albeit in rather different ways.
They ‘grasp’ (begreifen) the world, upon an intuitive (anschaulich) base,
to be sure, but they do not take hold (greifen) of it in any material or mag-
ical fashion.3 ‘Signification’ is the stratum of sense-functions farthest
Since this chapter attempts to make accessible and apply an unknown work of Cassirer and does
not discuss his thought as a whole, references to the scholarly literature are kept to a minimum.
Krois 1983 and 1987, however, should be consulted, as should the collection of studies in Braun,
Holzhey, and Orth 1988. Bayer 2001 gives a commentary on Cassirer’s opus posthumum fourth
volume on the metaphysics of symbolic forms. Orth 1996 and Lofts 2000 engage Cassirer’s
thought as a whole. Further accounts, at different levels of difficulty, are to be found in Paetzold
1993, 1994, and 1995 and Graeser 1994.
2. In his Language and Myth Cassirer gave a condensed version of the thrust of the first two
volumes of his trilogy. It charts the formation of what Susanne Langer called the “magic circle”
of “figurative ideas” and the emergence of a “discursive logic” limned in language. The expres-
sive matrix or dimension of thought is never repudiated by Cassirer, though it is clear that it must
be properly situated in its scope and bearing and modes of appearing.
3. Note the scope and nuance of the following formulation, parallels to which can be found
throughout the whole corpus of Cassirer’s works.
Both [perception and intuition] become ‘objective’ [gegenständlich] inasmuch as the

energy of language succeeds in clarifying, differentiating, and organizing the mute and
undifferentiated chaos of simple subjective states of mind. . . . A life in ‘meanings’ sup-
plants the life of mere impulses, of being absorbed by the immediate impression and
into the various needs. These meanings are repeatable and recurring; something that
Form and Technics 205
removed from normal sensory, intuitive supports. The concrete physical

reality of the sign and its objects recedes. This meaning-space accesses,
indeed constitutes, a world of law-governed events that are defined by
their relations to one another and not to our intuitional capacities. It is
exemplified in modern mathematical physics and the notation systems
that make it possible (as well as the various systems of pure mathematics
and symbolic logic). These sense-functions correspond to an increasing
‘distance’ between the sign and the realities accessed through it, indeed, an
increasing ‘transparency’ of the sign, a disappearing of its ‘material’ char-
acter and ‘physical’ reality and underpinnings, which, however, can never
be left behind.
This semiotic triad generates the world-defining and socially effective
‘vortices of consciousness’ and frames the three fundamental ways a sign,
through its meaning focus or, in Peirce’s terms, its interpretant, can relate
us to ‘objects and states of affairs.’ In a rather neglected essay, “Form und
Technik,” originally published in 1930, Cassirer uses his mature semiotic
framework to thematize the fundamental ways in which ‘technics’ (Tech-
nik) builds worlds. Technics, on Cassirer’s account, develops on multiple
levels that correspond to the semiotic logic of these form-worlds. By
using his semiotic scheme, which also has deep roots in the German
humanist philosophical tradition, with its distinctive aesthetic twist
(Cassirer 1916, 62–139, 269–302), Cassirer thought he could uncover the
philosophical and cultural logic of the evolution of organ-projections
(Ernst Kapp’s term, we saw in Chapter 4, as developed in his 1877 work,
Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik). The movement marking the
spiral of semiosis charted in Cassirer’s essay and in his other writings
dealing with the cultural sciences is precisely a movement from the con-
crete to the abstract, from the realm of ‘sensible signs’ to the putative ‘dis-
embodiment’ that occurs in the production of ‘mindful artifacts’ and
further in the production of ‘abstract’ technologies.
The semiotic ‘ascension’ of consciousness away from and through the
concrete and intuitive toward the abstract ‘signification’ (Bedeutung)
dimension is matched, so Cassirer thinks, by an inner movement in technics
does not cling to the bare here-and-now, but which comes to be meant and understood
as something identical with itself in countless life-moments and in the appropriation
and use by countless different subjects. By virtue of this identity of intention, which
rises above the multifariousness and diversity of momentary impressions, there
emerges, gradually, and by stages, a determined ‘state,’ a ‘common cosmos.’ (Cassirer
2000, 14–15)
from a mimetic, participatory phase, rooted in mythic consciousness’s

subjection of itself to a fundamental wish-world of magic and ritualistic
acts, through an analogical, extending phase, wherein every tool is to be
seen as an externalization (Nachaussentreten) of the hand or other bodily
organ (an insight due to Hegel and Kapp), to a purely abstract or ‘sym-
bolic’ phase of technologies that transcend or supersede, either in scale,
speed, or inner form, the organic limits of human being-in-the-world.
The progressive ‘dematerialization’ of the sign charted in Cassirer’s semi-
otic phenomenology, its abandonment of intuitive supports, is matched,
on Cassirer’s view, by a progressive dematerialization of the body and its
extensions in technics. Technics is for Cassirer a distinctive ‘way of world-
making’ and a multileveled ‘symbolic form’ in its own right. It actively
projects, indeed, inscribes, a pattern of intelligibility upon the world. The
result is ‘stamped forms’ of every sort, from chipped stone to the ‘auto-
matic’ processes of modern computing systems.
The theme of tools (Werkzeuge) and implements had already been
insightfully engaged by Cassirer within the context of an analysis of
‘mythic consciousness.’ While ‘primitive man’ may have ascribed “an inde-
pendent form of efficacy peculiar to them” to the simplest tools and even
developed a veneration and kind of cult of “favored tools and implements”
that is not without parallel in the ‘developed world’ of high technics, as we
will see with the cultivated obsessiveness of certain information technolo-
gies, nevertheless “the use of the implement as such constitutes a decisive
turning point in the progress of spiritual self-consciousness.” The world
of desire and the world of reality begin to be differentiated. “The one no
longer intervenes directly in the other; the two worlds have ceased to
merge; through the intuition of the mediating object that is given in the
implement [Werkzeug] there gradually develops a consciousness of medi-
ated action” (1955, 213). But this consciousness, according to Cassirer,
comes at a price. An inner crisis is provoked by the advent of implements.
“The omnipotence of mere desire is ended: action is now subject to cer-
tain objective conditions from which it cannot deviate. It is in the differ-
entiation of these conditions that the outward world first takes on
determinate existence and articulation.” This differentiation entails, or is
constituted by, the interpolation, in any project, of “more and more inter-
mediary steps” (214). This gives rise to “consciousness of the means indis-
pensable for the attainment of a certain purpose” that effects knowledge
of “inner” and “outer” as “links in a chain of causality.” In a pragmatist
mode, but unnamed as such, Cassirer asserts that “it is only from the
intermediation of action that there results the articulation of being, by
virtue of which it is divided into separate, mutually related and dependent

elements” (215).
When Cassirer goes on to distinguish between the mechanical function
and the spiritual function of implements, it is necessary to avoid all isola-
tion of functions. Remarkably, as he sees it, to the mechanical function of
the implement or tool there corresponds, he writes,
a purely spiritual function which not only develops from the for-
mer, but conditions it from the very first and is indissolubly cor-
related with it. Never does the implement serve simply for the
mastery of an outside world which can be regarded as finished,
simply given ‘matter’; rather, it is through the use of the implement
that the image, the spiritual, ideal form of this outside world, is
created for man. The formation of this image and the articulation
of its elements does not depend on mere passive sense impression
or mere ‘receptivity’ of intuition; it issues rather from the mode
and trend of the effect which man exerts on objects. (1955, 215)
It is in the context of such contentions that Cassirer has explicit recourse

to the work of Kapp and to his pivotal concept of ‘organ-projection,’
which I have referred to in the two previous chapters. Kapp, Cassirer
rightly reports, contended that primitive tools “are primarily an extension
of the action which man exerts on things with his own organs and limbs”
(1955, 215). The paradigmatic role of the hand, which Aristotle thought of
as the “organ of organs,” was the model for “most artificial implements.”
Cassirer summarizes Kapp’s argument in the following manner:
Primitive hand tools—hammer, hatchet, ax, knife, chisel, drill, saw,

and tongs—are in form and function mere continuations of the
hand, whose strength they increase, and hence another manifesta-
tion of what the organ as such accomplishes and signifies. From
these primitive implements the concept rises to the implements of
the specialized trades, to the machines of industry, to weapons, to
the instruments and apparatus of art and science, in short to all the
artifacts which serve any need belonging to the realm of mechani-
cal technics. (215)
But there is a fine dialectical logic to this process. While we can follow
the historical development of implements and their connection with “the
natural articulation of the human body,” the mechanisms that were “built
quite unconsciously after the organic model . . . can in turn serve, by a

reversal of the process, as a means of explaining and understanding the
human organism. Through the implements and artifacts which he builds
man learns to understand the nature and structure of his own body” (Cas-
sirer 1955, 216). This is precisely the somatic side of the argument of
Bolter’s fascinating book Turing’s Man (1984), which charts the anthro-
pological significance of “defining technologies” in Western culture, that
is, of our attempts to understand ourselves on the model of what we have
made. Our artifacts and their logics become constitutive metaphors of
our natures.
Cassirer, however, does not think that Kapp’s lessons, which he
attempts to extend, end with this fundamental phenomenon. There is more
to the “central and most profound significance of organ projection, a fact
which becomes evident only when we consider that here again a spiritual
process runs parallel to man’s increasing knowledge of his own physical
organization, that man arrives at himself, at his self-consciousness, only
through this knowledge” (1955, 216). The formation of the outside world
and the formation of self-consciousness are both mediated by the inven-
tion of implements. Here Cassirer quotes a marvelous passage from Kapp
that encapsulates the general point:
[O]n the one hand every tool in the wider sense of the word is a
means of increasing man’s sensory activity and as such his only
possibility of passing beyond the immediate superficial perception
of things, while on the other hand, as a product of the activity of
brain and hand, it is so essentially and intimately related to man
himself that in the creation of his hand he perceives something of
his own being, his world of ideas embodied in matter, a reflection
and copy of his inwardness, in short, a part of himself. . . . Such a
survey of this outward field, which encompasses the totality of
man’s instruments of culture, is a self-confession of human nature,
and through the act of retrieving the copy from outside us and
restoring it to our inwardness, it becomes self-knowledge. (Kapp
1877, 25 f., cited in Cassirer 1955, 216)
Cassirer’s key insight into the nature of ‘tools,’ then, is that they exem-
plify the universal spiritual power and need for mediation quite generally.
Semiotic mediation, through signs and sign systems, and material media-
tion, through tools, machines, and processes, go together. In this sense,
both types of mediation are equally ‘unnatural’ in the sense that they
involve a differentiated movement away from ‘immediacy’ and ‘the nat-
ural.’ They are “expressions of the spontaneity of the spirit” (Cassirer
1955, 217). Because Cassirer, like Peirce, affirms ‘semiotic closure,’ there
is no ‘outside’ to the play of signs. But Cassirer goes even further and
affirms a kind of ‘technological’ (technical) closure, for the mere ‘taking’
of something as a tool, parallel to the taking of something as a sign,
involves the twin actions of Absicht and Voraussicht. The ‘technical circle’
for humans is just as ‘closed,’ and just as ‘open,’ as the ‘semiotic circle.’
Cassirer writes:
For in order to invent a tool as such, man must look beyond the
sphere of immediate need. In creating it he does not act from the
impulse and necessity of the moment. Instead of being moved
immediately by an actual stimulus, he looks to ‘possible’ needs, for
which he prepares the means of satisfaction in advance. The intent
(Absicht) that the tool serves contains within itself a certain fore-
sight (Voraus-Sicht). The impulse does not originate only from the
spur of the present but belongs also to the future, which must in
some way be ‘anticipated’ in order to become effective in this man-
ner. This ‘idea’ of the future characterizes all human action. We
must place something not yet existing before ourselves in ‘images’
in order, then, to proceed from this ‘possibility’ to the ‘reality,’
from potency to act. This basic feature emerges still more clearly
when we turn from the practical to the theoretical sphere. There
exists no fundamental difference between the two, insofar as all
our theoretical concepts bear within themselves an ‘instrumental’
character. In the final analysis they are nothing other than tools
that we have fashioned for the solution of specific tasks and that
must be continually refashioned. (2000, 26)
Looking ‘away’ from (Absicht) the material reality of something (Bühler’s

principle of abstractive relevance) is the precondition for looking ‘for-
ward’ to (Voraussicht) something, that is, pro-jection toward the future,
whether through tools or through signs. Consequently, as Cassirer puts it,
in a passage that has motivated the course of these studies, “All spiritual
mastery of reality is bound to this double act of ‘grasping’ [Fassen], the
conceptual grasp [Begreifen] of reality in linguistic-theoretical thought
[Denken] and its material grasp [Erfassen] through the medium of effective
action [Wirken]; to, that is, the conceptual as well as the technical process
of giving-form to something [Formgebung]” ([1930] 1985a, 52). ‘Form’ and
‘technics,’ Cassirer strongly affirms, not only are essentially linked but bind
us in their charmed circles, which are not always stable or secure but from
which we cannot escape. “For the intellectual tools that man has himself
created are even more doubtful than his technical tools” (2000, 27).
For Cassirer’s Hegelianized (i.e., historicized) and semioticized Kant-
ian project, our very sense of self is correlative to our sense of an external,
constraining ‘reality.’ The ‘I-pole’ and the ‘object-pole,’ making up a com-
plex relational field, develop together. This correlation, he thinks, is espe-
cially exemplified in the realm of technics and its sphere of ‘effective
action.’ “Knowledge of the ‘I’ seems to be bound up in a very special way
with the form of technical ‘doing’” (Cassirer [1930] 1985a, 71). This spe-
cial way is manifested in the sense of limits or constraints, the sphere of
Peircean secondness, attendant upon the turn to the ‘will,’ away from the
‘wish.’ “For human beings there does not exist from the beginning a firm
representation of subject and object according to which they, so to say,
orient their behavior, but in the whole of this behavior, in the whole of
their bodily and animate-spiritual activities there first arises knowledge of
both domains, and the horizon of the ‘I’ differentiates itself from that of
reality” (55). Such an insight is deeply pragmatist in the spectrum of con-
ceptual frameworks from Peirce to Mead.
Cassirer, too, like the pragmatists, breaks in his work with all logocen-
trism in spite of the centrality of language and dialogue in his philosoph-
ical project. This centrality must be kept in mind in the following
discussion, since language is the paradigm ‘information technology’ and
indeed the ultimate matrix for all the other information technologies. Not
only does the theory of language constitute “a necessary and integral fac-
tor in the construction of a theory of knowledge” (Cassirer 2000, 14), it is
integral to the critical and productive theory of culture that Cassirer is
concerned to develop.
Instead, he sees the essence of humanity in activity and the production
of form quite generally, even if many of the types of forms could only
have been produced by a speaking and symbol-using animal (see his Frei-
heit und Form). For him humanity develops by ‘embodying’ itself—in the
senses I have been developing in this book—in the twin systems of (a)
thought-forms, carried by language and the other semiotic systems, nota-
tional and otherwise, it makes possible, and of (b) material forms, effected
by the ‘working’-up of matter and its transformation into tools, artifacts,
containers, and controlled processes of all sorts. But just as the complex
system of language is caught in the dialectic of ‘proximity and distance,’
so do the systems of tools both bring the world closer and set it at a dis-
tance. To ‘take’ something, indeed to look upon the whole world poten-
tially, ‘as’ a tool—or ‘as’ a sign—involves, to repeat, the twin actions of
Absicht and Voraussicht. Looking ‘away’ from the material reality of
something, ceasing to be immersed in it, is the precondition for looking
‘forward’ to something. This ‘turning’-of-sight-‘from’ makes possible
‘fore-’sight, pro-jection into the future, a point Dewey emphasized in
many places (see chap. 4 of his Experience and Nature).
The significance of the transition to the tool (Werkzeug) as mediating
device resides in the fact that “the extension of effective action changes its
qualitative sense [Sinn] and that it thereby creates the possibility of a new
way of looking at the world” (Cassirer [1930] 1985a, 53). This new way is
in terms of an overarching instrumentality, a point Hegel also made and
that Marx exploited to the hilt. Dewey explored this field of instrumen-
talities in chapter 3 of Experience and Nature. This new thought-form
(Denkart) reveals the human formative power not only of ‘working up’
nature to satisfy immediate practical needs but of projecting systems of
novel relations over it that are, incipiently, more ‘abstract’ or even uni-
versal. It introduces an ‘as’ structure, a hermeneutic structure, into the
sensorium as a whole. In a passage that reminds one of Heidegger, with
whom Cassirer had a prickly relationship (see Innis 1994b, 157–61), Cas-
sirer notes that a tool-defined object is determined as something only
insofar as it is determined to something ([1930] 1985a, 64). Any tool is
grasped not as a whole composed of thing-properties (Dingbeschaffen-
heiten) but as a whole composed of vector-magnitudes (Vektorgrössen). It
is precisely the elaboration of complex, interlocked systems of vector-
magnitudes—of relational complexes—that makes up the inner spaces and
historical trajectories of the symbolic form of technics quite generally.4
4. I will not go into the issue of how many symbolic forms there are. There has been a lot
of discussion of just what is and what is not a ‘symbolic form,’ but I think the whole topic is best
approached by looking at symbolic formations, putting the emphasis on the productive aspects
of semiosis as delineated by Cassirer and not breaking one’s head looking for some architecton-
ically schematized ‘essence’ that is exemplified in different modalities. The key fact for Cassirer
is the “trait of mediation,” which “characterizes all human knowledge, as well as being distinc-
tive and typical of human action.” Cassirer gives, in different places, various listings of what are
to be considered symbolic forms. They include myth, language, art, and science, as well as law
and technics. The actual enumeration is, in my opinion, not essential. What is essential is the
notion that symbolic formations are embodied in “the specific media that man has created in
In all instances, however, we have seen that the material features and
dimensionalities of signs and tools are apprehended (not ‘focally’ but ‘sub-
sidiarily,’ to use Polanyi’s terminology) and enter constitutively into the
sign-object and tool-world relation. (I am thinking here of Bunn 1981.)
Accordingly, on Cassirer’s position, each stratum of embodied—that is,
mediated—sense-functions will ‘bias’ our access to the world. These biases
are ineluctable, since for Cassirer, as for Peirce, there is simply no unmedi-
ated access to ‘being’ or the ‘world.’ The dynamic closure effected by
mediation in all its forms—semiotic and material-technical—is in fact a
widening gyre of meaning-fields and function-fields that spiral ‘upward,’
with seemingly no greatest upper bound. Even what, from the point of
view of philosophical semiotics, is putatively ‘outside’ the play of signs is
accessed through signs, and the play is not a ‘free’ play but a ‘bound’ play,
as I argued in Innis 1994b. Bound to the world through specifically con-
figured signs and sign systems, we are subject to their functional and semi-
otic logics. Bound to the world through material-technical or technological
systems, we are likewise subject to their functional and operative logics.
This constitutes the material ground of what Cassirer calls our ‘commu-
nity of fate’ (Schicksalsgemeinschaft), which demands to be turned into a
‘community of will’ (Willensgemeinschaft). Such a community is (ideally)
discursively constituted and oriented toward freedom, though not neces-
sarily ‘happiness.’ This is for Cassirer a ‘lower’ and impossible goal in light
of his modified acceptance of the ‘tragedy of culture,’ whose objective
weight and force more and more press upon the individual. Meaning or
significance does not entail happiness (see Cassirer 2000, 103–27). The
inner trajectory of the technical process (and semiotic process, too) should
be toward an ‘education’ (Bildung) of the will-to-work and the develop-
ment of humanity’s deepest form-building power (Cassirer [1930] 1985a,
90). This is manifested in freedom from the mere Triebwerk, or ‘compul-
sive circuit,’ of labor and consumption (even of meanings and images in
our ‘information age’) that marks the present-day social matrix in which
technological systems operate. From happiness exemplified in subjective
gratification there is needed a movement to the open space of ethically
considered possibilities, a consequence of our having a ‘symbolic future.’5
order to separate himself from the world through them, and in this very separation bind himself
all the closer to it” (Cassirer 2000, 25). The citations could be multiplied.
5. “Not blissful happiness but the ‘worthiness of happiness’ is what culture promises to
man and what it alone can give him. Its goal is not the realization of happiness in this life but the
realization of freedom, of that genuine autonomy that consists not in the technical mastery of
man over nature but in man’s moral mastery over himself” (Cassirer 2000, 104).
The ethical issues, in the broad sense, are so important because technics
in all forms shapes the very matrices of space and time in which we live
and hence in which we both experience ourselves and select and carry out
our projects. The reformed transcendental aesthetic outlined in the chap-
ter “The Human World of Space and Time” in Cassirer’s Essay on Man
(1944) involves differentiating—following, though rather at a distance,
the tripartite schema of expression, representation, and signification—
three spaces and times in which human culture, encompassing both semi-
otic and material-technical systems, develops. As to space, Cassirer
distinguishes (1) an organic space, that is, a pragmatic space of action, (2)
a perceptual space, “of a very complex nature, containing elements of all
the different kinds of sense experience—optical, tactual, acoustic, and
kinesthetic” (1944, 43)—and (3) an abstract space, a homogeneous space
of geometrical and mathematical relations. Time is likewise divided into
three forms. (1) There is an organic time, which is “not a thing but a
process” (49) and is absorbed in the present. (2) There is the time of
human memory, which “implies a process of recognition and identifica-
tion, an ideational process of a very complex sort” (50). It involves the
construction of a general scheme of serial order, making possible ‘sym-
bolic memory,’ which allows human beings to reconstruct, through imag-
inative recollection, prior experience, to ‘survey’ it and hence construct a
‘sense’ of the past. (3) And there is a transcending of the intrinsic, instinc-
tual drive of organic life toward the future by the transforming of the
immanent ‘pressingness’ of the future into an ‘ideal.’ This is the theoreti-
cal idea of the future, a “prerequisite of all man’s higher cultural activities”
(54). Here arises a symbolic future, indeed a ‘prophetic’ future, since such
a sense, transcending finite, empirical life, is exemplified in the lives and
teachings of the great religious prophets. The future become promise and
imperative.
Cassirer offers us both a semiotically derived analytical framework and
elements of a normative standard by which we can attempt to ‘take the
measure’ of technics. His semiotic theory, culminating in a theory of cul-
ture, encompasses all media, or mediating structures, whatsoever. This is
the domain of a Hegelian ‘objective spirit,’ which plays a central role in
Cassirer’s thought as a whole—and also in Peirce’s, Royce’s, and Dewey’s.
The ‘materialization’ of mind in signs and other exosomatic organs—both
‘hard’ and ‘soft’—is a veritable ‘realization’ or ‘embodiment’ of mind, the
‘inside’ seeing itself ‘outside’ and the ‘outside’ defining and constituting
what is ‘inside’ (Goethe). Cassirer’s generative insight is that signs, tools,
and ‘media,’ which are normally identified with information technologies
in particular, can and should be seen together as exemplifications of the

universal spiritual power of, and need for, mediation quite generally.
It is clear that all forms of semiotic and technical mediation participate
to some degree or another in the three ‘sense-functions.’ Information
technologies—writing, the alphabet, numerals, oils and pigments, papyrus
and paper, the book, the telescope, cartographical grid lines, the camera
and photography, radio, television, and now computer-based technologies
of both the graphical and linguistic sort—have an ‘expressive’ (or ‘phys-
iognomic’) dimension, a qualitative ‘feel’ that defines a particular way of
accessing the world. This results from the ‘echo effect’ of all forms of
embodiment. They also have, as bearers of content, a ‘representational’
dimension. Their function is, in either new or potentiated ways, to make
something known besides themselves. This ‘making present’ involves a
complex dialectical relationship between ‘proximity’ and ‘distance’ and
between ‘resemblance’ and ‘convention.’ Pictographic writing and alpha-
betic writing differ mainly in the weighting of the second factors (resem-
blance and convention). The telescope and the microscope shift the
relationships between the first factors (proximity and distance). Writing
involves, as Plato pointed out at philosophy’s very beginnings, a kind of
substitution of external for internal memory. But the telescope and the
microscope do not first and foremost substitute for, but rather extend and
strengthen, the sensorium or perceptual field. The representational power
of the camera—light writing itself, figuring itself, on a sensitive ground—
is due, within a Peircean frame, to the existential connection proper to
indexicality and to its consequent ‘iconic’ fidelity, which is now chal-
lenged by the new digital technologies of the image and their ability to
create ‘virtual realities.’ The third Cassirerian sense-function, ‘significa-
tion,’ is defined by the superseding of ‘expressive’ and ‘intuitive’ sup-
ports. The paradigm cases are mathematics and mathematical physics,
with all their attendant problems of visualizability. Their goal is pure
‘transparency.’ At the limit their function is “reference rather than pres-
ence” (Borgmann 1999, 17), both of themselves and of what they bear
upon. Paradoxically, these ultimately ‘digital’ systems underlie the
‘abstract’ semiotic systems and all the information technologies built on
them that generate the powers of ‘virtual realities’ and the range and scope
of ‘simulation.’ It is the peculiar and paradoxical power of these signify-
ing systems to effect a ‘turn’ toward the concrete and a ‘disconnect’
between a semiotic system and what it makes present. While for Cassirer
‘signification’ moves us away from the concrete intuitive-perceptual
world, the new information technologies, based on signification, return us

to such a world—but the world is now the effect of the technologies and
not something preexisting that is brought into view by reason of the sys-
tem’s semiotic power.
2. Thinking About the Soft Edge of Information

What, then, becomes of our sense of ‘reality’ and of ‘nature’ when we
embody ourselves in ‘information technologies’?
I would like to indicate, briefly and schematically, how this would
work out in concreto by focusing first, with Cassirer-informed categories,
on three arch and provocative works by information theorist Paul Levin-
son, Mind at Large (1988), The Soft Edge (1997), and Digital McLuhan
(1999), which exemplify a strong and distinctive approach to these issues.6
Looking intently in the rearview mirror supplied by Marshall McLuhan,
Harold Innis, and others, Levinson has attempted to chart the historical,
systematic, and social trajectories specifically of ‘information’ technolo-
gies, which are thought of as so many “adventures in materialization”
(Levinson 1988, 223). In these books Levinson explores, with a wealth of
examples and in clear adherence to a Popperian fallibilistic ‘naturalized
epistemology,’ the putative inner logics of those types of specifically
‘mindful artifacts’ that have propelled the sequences of ‘information rev-
olutions’ that, for him, mark, indeed define, the history of consciousness.
The story and its logic follow, with updated references, that told pri-
marily by McLuhan and Harold Innis. The rise of speech is assimilated to
a “primitive technology” (Levinson 1988, 126) in which we are embodied.
The achievement of a first stage of abstraction by speech is called “the ini-
tial technological act” (129), an original and problematic ‘distancing’ from
reality. Spoken language constitutes the “essence of our species” (Levin-
son 1997, 2), generating, by reason of its creativity and flexibility, a multi-
dimensional environment (Levinson 1988, 127). It continues, Levinson
6. Digital McLuhan is of more restricted interest for us in this chapter. It recapitulates in a

different format many of the themes in the two other principal works of Levinson. The focus
principally on McLuhan’s heuristic value is certainly welcome, but my goal is not to engage in a
reconstruction of McLuhan as such, but to reflect, in light of Cassirer’s profound semiotic
schema, upon the ultimate descriptive and normative categories for thinking about the ‘informa-
tion revolution’ as an instance of embodiment in media. Levinson has rightly seen that McLuhan
has a fruitful notion of embodiment. He has also supplied some supplementary normative
notions I will advert to in due course.
rightly claims, in all its media offspring (126). The invention first of pri-
marily alphabetic writing—a level of ‘abstraction’ above speech—is com-
pared to a “volcano” or a “tsunami” (131). Levinson implicates it in the
rise of monotheism. Seeing it as the “informational technology” par excel-
lence, he asserts that it makes possible the very notion of “abstract or
nonsensory knowledge” (208). Alphabetic writing’s revolutionary poten-
tiation by movable type and its permeation of the social world effect an
even more radical shift in the sensorium, differentiating it and biasing it
even more toward abstract visual space, a process in fact begun with
Euclid’s systematization of geometry. Electro-chemical information tech-
nologies such as the telephone, radio, photography, television, and now
the computer and its attendant electronic networks reconfigure in their
own ways the temporal and spatial matrices in which the self is formed.
Recording devices for sound and vision function as “cognitive refrigera-
tors” (138). Indeed, photography even effects a “migration of subjectiv-
ity” (Levinson 1997, 46) in that painting, challenged by photographic
capturing of the objective world, has developed further “into an art form
its very subjectivity in the conception of the image” (47). Radio, televi-
sion, and the telephone make the spatially absent immediately present, in
real time, and the network now known as the Internet generates a new
type of community and new ways in which information is stored,
accessed, and appropriated, fundamentally in nonlinear fashion.
The evolution of information technologies, Levinson admits, is not
uniformly benign. Radio can evoke “the primitive passions of the tribe”
(1997, 90). Technologies, by reason of their reliance in different ways on
various forms of abstraction, can cause a “withering of reality” (38), a
movement away from the richness of aural/tactile space. The “upward
spiral of vicariousness” that marks human cultural life continues on “two
profound, more or less simultaneous tracks”: (1) abstract thought and (2)
technologies—away, that is, from immediacy. Recognizing, however, that
“a medium cannot exist, let along thrive, without content” (98), Levinson
admits with Jacques Ellul that “every device of communication, print as
well as electronic, triumphs in one kind of propaganda or other” (156).
But the constant rise of “remedial technologies” (such as window shades!)
to counteract the deleterious effects of other technologies (glass windows)
is not exemplified primarily on the level of content but on that of mediat-
ing power. Technologies, furthermore, can pervert the “rational factor”
itself (Levinson 1988, 223). There are pathologies of information tech-
nologies (228)—Cassirer also spoke of the pathologies of symbolic con-
sciousness (1957, 205–77). Acknowledging, in a Dewey-type formulation,

“the qualitative way that mental expression differs from technology to
technology” (Levinson 1988, 81), the central question becomes, “in what
ways does technologically extended perception distort or render unnat-
ural the realms it brings into human focus” (99)? While there are organi-
cally based “human sensory ratios” and technologies that more or less
“snugly fit the human perceptual array”—for example, radio, phono-
graph, and even telephone fit into the “human ecological niche of hearing-
without-seeing” (Levinson 1997, 99)—by reason of the tacit logic of
embodiment no technology leaves us untouched, and indeed there is no
guarantee that radically debilitating psychic and social consequences can
be in all cases avoided.
How can we bring Cassirer’s analytical apparatus to bear here?
Perhaps the focal issue in Levinson’s and similar accounts is the ‘split-
ting’ of the spatial and temporal dimensions of the sensorium accom-
panying the rise of alphabetic man. The major contrast is between the
plenitude and richness of the aural/tactile dimensions, with their proper-
ties of omnidirectionality, proximity, concreteness, and sensory thickness,
and the abstract, distancing, objectifying and potentiating nature of vision
and its embodiments and extensions in information technologies. Vision
is, at least in one of the predominant historical forms, the ‘abstract’ and
‘abstracting’ sensory modality par excellence. Its history, and its cultural
import, is wedded both to the ‘alphabet’ and to the consequent rise of
Euclidian geometry. It has introduced and reinforced novel ratios between
the senses, engendering, it has been argued (Francastel 1977; Heelan 1983),
a ‘carpentered environment,’ in more senses than one, that is by no means
in all cases the ‘normal’ or ecologically best for human intercourse with
the world.7
Now, while it is true that alphabetic and geometric ‘man’ has developed
complex systems of abstraction and objectification, to thematize these
systems fundamentally in terms of a contrast or dichotomy between
aural/tactile and ‘visual’ seems, on Cassirerian grounds, less than satisfac-
tory or ultimate. Cassirer’s schematization of the three ‘levels’ of sense-
functions and the correlative semiotically defined spaces and times in
which animal symbolicum lives offers a more powerful analytical frame-
work. Information technologies can and do develop on the three semiotic
7. Levinson is aware of Heelan’s valuable work, although he notes (1999, 45) that Heelan,
in his discussions, does not mention either McLuhan or his colleague Edmund Carpenter.
levels simultaneously, the expressive, the representational, and the signi-

fying. They do different kinds of work, depending on which dimensions
are foregrounded or ‘torqued’ and which dimensions are ‘suppressed,’ to
use James Bunn’s (1981) terminology. Information technologies quite
generally are complex combinations and weightings of these factors. They
inform, differentiate, and perhaps to varying degrees distort the spatial
and temporal matrices of action and the physiognomic face of the world
as a qualitatively configured expression field, the perceptual spaces and
times of the natural-world picture in which the world is ‘represented,’ and
the symbolic spaces and times of the theoretical worldview, accessed at a
high level of abstraction by what Levinson calls ‘process-extending’ infor-
mation technologies.
The contrast between aural/tactile space and visual space is neither
phenomenologically nor analytically ultimate. It is tied up with a prob-
lematic notion of ‘abstraction’ as applied to specific sensory channels or
combinations thereof. For some reason Levinson speaks of the move-
ment from the experiential level through speech and on to writing as
putting experience through the “double wringer of abstraction” (1988,
123). The metaphoric schema here implies a process of ‘squeezing out.’
But one of Cassirer’s most important lessons is that only through the
labor of abstraction do we have access to a stable world of objects gov-
erned by structures and laws. Even physiognomic perception, both of the
information technologies themselves and of the world experienced
through these technologies, is a feat of abstraction. ‘Abstraction’ is not by
definition diminishing; it is, rather, enriching. This is one of the main
lessons of semiotics. Information technologies are defined by their abili-
ties to perform different types of abstraction. Rather than look upon them
as fundamentally distortive and disruptive, which seems to me to be
infected with a kind of longing for immediacy, we should resolutely hold
fast to the ineluctable universality of mediation, fateful as it is.
Levinson’s project, deeply dependent upon McLuhan’s, is in many
ways an attempt to ‘make a case’ for the novel electronic information
technologies. Without denying their semiotic power and heuristic fertility,
I am not sure such an approach is fully coherent. On-line education and
courses, for example, of which Levinson is a radical proponent, do not in
every case live up to or avail themselves of the highly desirable “physical
substrates of in-person knowledge groups” (Levinson 1988, 207). Uni-
versal universities may be made possible electronically (210), but what
about the “loss of the myriad unnoticed, minor ways that shared physical
presence acts as a stimulant to good thinking” (207), something that

marked the Socratic origins of Western philosophy, for example, or that is
a permanent feature of the rhetorical matrices of sign use and interpreta-
tion? And why is this presence ‘minor’? Indeed, the permanent presence
of print and of the logic of the alphabet in all informational media, which
Levinson affirms, seems to make the ‘on-line’ mode, with its claims to
immediacy, just as ‘abstract’ as other print-defined access to knowledge, if
not to wisdom. To be sure, inasmuch as all technologies, and technologi-
cal artifacts, are perceived, they have an expressive or physiognomic
dimension or qualitative ‘feel.’ To stick with information technologies, the
evolution of scripts as well as systems of numerals evokes forms of
immediate participation and identification. In addition to being repre-
sentational devices, they have a life of their own, fusing expressivity with
utility. The development of various hand-writing systems, including sys-
tems of Chinese calligraphy, and the design and promulgation of type-
faces are not under the strict control of efficient mediation of information
but also point toward a concern with what Cassirer calls Formschönheit,
the beauty of form. This entwinement of art and technics does not mean
that they are isomorphic, a point Lewis Mumford also made in his still
pertinent Art and Technics (1952). Beauty in the aesthetic sense, however,
is not the thematic goal of technics. This is, rather, efficient action. But in
the case of information technologies the perceptual matrices in all their
complexity and range of relevance are crucial, and thus there is a kind of
‘technical beauty.’ The felicitous or infelicitous ‘design’ of Web sites or
computer programs exemplifies the point quite clearly. Cassirer has a pas-
sage in “Form und Technik” that clarifies what is at stake.
If one can characterize the two extremes between which all the
development of culture moves as the world of expression and the
world of pure signification (Bedeutung), we can say that there is
attained in art, in a certain sense, the ideal point of equilibrium
between these two extremes. Technics, however, has in common
with theoretical knowledge, with which it is so closely related, the
fundamental feature that it repudiates more and more every
expressive element in order to raise itself up into a strictly ‘objec-
tive’ sphere of pure signification. (1930, 86).
This clearly puts embodiment structures and their perceptual matrices

into perilous play.
John Krois (1983 and 1987, esp. 198–208), reflecting on Cassirer, has
pointed out that modern technologies of all sorts, by reason of their
speed-up and rapid turnover and multidimensional causalities, have frag-
mented the ability to synthesize and integrate time. The three temporal
ecstases fall apart and no longer make up a dynamic structural unity.
Indeed, we have what Krois calls ‘tychastic’ time, a time of events that do
not hang together, a time that is constituted by a seemingly random, but
full, upsurge of events, with stretchings and retractions of time’s experi-
enced dimensionalities. Submergence in the organic time of the present
creates a sense of immediacy and fullness, but when it is mediated by
information technologies, especially electronic technologies, ‘proximal’
participation takes priority over the ‘distal,’ and the ability to construct a
general scheme of serial order, necessary for ‘symbolic’ memory, dimin-
ishes. One has access to the past, as data, but it so transcends our integra-
tive powers that it begins not to be surveyable or to hang together. The
rapidity of turnover of images and information, by transcending organic
limits, makes certain types of self-appropriation difficult, if not impossi-
ble. However, ‘organic limits’ are not easily specifiable, and one must be
wary of premature determination.
The thing Cassirer most feared in the world of sophisticated informa-
tion technologies—Levinson’s soft edge—was the paradoxical outbreak
and spread of mythic consciousness, which is revealed as a permanent
possibility of consciousness and meaning-making. In his Myth of the State
(1946b) Cassirer charts “the skilful use” of a new “technical tool” (277) to
which he ascribes a “catalytical effect.” In times of individual and collec-
tive peril, he notes, human beings turn to myth and magic, reinforced by
rituals (279). The “volcanic soil” of political life is always prepared to
explode with “demonic mythical powers” (280), exemplified in, but not
restricted to, the personification in a leader of the desire for order and
security. This leader (and his message), made available through all the
technical resources of the media, wields a kind of “social magic” (281).
But the spontaneous, and elaborate, turn to magic and myth, which
marked the early stages of humanity, is replaced in the modern world—in
the twentieth century—with a new technique of myth, which has become
“artificial things fabricated by very skilful and cunning artisans.” Think-
ing of the paradigm case of the rise of German fascism, Cassirer sees mil-
itary rearmament as “only the necessary consequence of the mental
rearmament brought about by the political myths” (282).
Language itself, he notes, manifests a constant tension between the

“semantic” and the “magical” use of the word. The word-magic of early
humanity recurs in a kind of generalized media-magic of high technolog-
ical societies. Along with a transvaluation of ethical values goes a “trans-
formation of human speech” (Cassirer 1946b, 283), indeed, in Cassirer’s
evaluation, a degradation, a hyperventilating creation of and reliance upon
the emotional effects of speech and, moreover, their supplementation by
new rites and rituals. Although the “steering function” of language is a
permanent feature of social life, it is the pervasiveness and technological
sophistication—the insistent unavoidableness—of the exercise of this
function in a “high tide of new rituals” that technically sophisticated mass
democracies unwittingly ensure by means of media saturation. The effect
of this saturation is a lulling of the critical faculty, a diremption of the feel-
ing of being a unified personality, a loss of individual responsibility. The
social myth—whatever its content, including the message of augmented
consumption—gains sovereign control over the “masses.”
Modern political myths, Cassirer thinks, perhaps with some justifiable
rhetorical exaggeration, do not just demand or prohibit actions of a certain
kind. Their goal is to “change the men, in order to be able to regulate and
control their deeds.” “The political myths acted in the same way as a serpent
that tries to paralyze its victims before attacking them. Men fell victims to
them without any serious resistance. They were vanquished and subdued
before they had realized what actually happened” (Cassirer 1946b, 286).
While Cassirer was most concerned with the racial myths, whose cata-
strophic effects, both past and present, are undeniable, other myths, with dif-
ferent contents and horrible effects, have functioned according to the same
logic: the myth of the proletariat, of manifest destiny, of the moral superior-
ity of capitalism and the universalization of market relations to every sphere
of life. In these circumstances, Cassirer remarks, freedom, the sphere of free
actions, disappears. Freedom for him entails autonomy, the giving of a law to
itself by the moral subject. But moral subjects need the open space of imag-
ination, and it is this that the modern homo divinans politicus takes upon
himself to control and supply—and even enforce, though not necessarily
anymore through terror and physical force. “The politician becomes a sort
of public fortuneteller. Prophecy is an essential element in the new technique
of rulership. The most improbable or even impossible promises are made;
the millennium is predicted over and over again” (289). Parallels with certain
claims made for the ‘media revolution’ come readily to mind.
Although we do not have to subscribe to a Spenglerian “astrology of

history,” many political myths—including the economic myth of the
superiority of American-style capitalism—evoke the idea of a destiny that
is inevitable, inexorable, and irrevocable (Cassirer 1946b, 290). Messianic
Marxism and messianic Americanism both became pliable instruments
wielded by crafty political leaders. The idola fori charted by Bacon are, for
Cassirer, “the most dangerous and enduring” (294). Philosophy must
enter into combat with them, uncovering what should be the logic of the
social world—founded on increasing freedom and autonomy—just as it
uncovered, by finally eschewing magic, the logic of the natural world.
Philosophy alone—and semiotics alone—cannot destroy the ruling myths
or their mediating structures. The omnipresence of these structures makes
their centralization and control a danger to free political life. But, as
Levinson points out and as we see from daily reports in the newspaper,
certain types of new technologies effect a countervailing centrifugal force,
multiplying foci and sources, thus leading to a radical polycentrism. While
this may be practically desirable, its social-psychological consequences
may not be so benign. Levinson is certainly right to emphasize the scope
and bite of McLuhan’s four laws or effects of media: amplification, obso-
lescence, retrieval, and reversal. These make up McLuhan’s “tetrad.” This
tetrad, in Levinson’s words, “asks four questions about the impact and
development of any medium: What aspect of society or human life does it
enhance or amplify? What aspect, in favor or high prominence before the
arrival of the medium in question, does it eclipse or obsolesce? What does
the medium retrieve or pull back into center stage from the shadows of
obsolescence? And what does the medium reverse or flip into when it has
run its course or been developed to its fullest potential?” (1999, 189).
At the same time, Cassirer, while he would certainly be willing to admit
the legitimacy of such questions, is clearly pushing us forward with cog-
nate but different analytical instruments, issuing us a warning and a chal-
lenge to think through, from a comprehensive semiotic perspective with
cultural-critical intent, the consequences of technological embodiment
quite generally. This embodiment is isomorphic with and embedded in
semiotic embodiment. Information technologies open different meaning-
spaces, upon which they bear, and they are defined within the triadic
structure of sense-functions that defines not just the type of ‘work’ vari-
ous technologies perform but also the kind of semiotic work upon which
they depend. Modern ‘digital’ technologies, which may be used primarily
for ‘aesthetic’ purposes, are themselves made possible by notation systems
that belong to the stratum of signification. In this sense, ‘signification’

makes possible distinctive yoked forms of ‘expression’ and ‘representa-
tion.’ The generative matrices of these technologies are highly ‘abstract,’
even though their uses and their perceptual impacts may be eminently
‘concrete.’ But the invention of the alphabet and other systems of writing,
with their material substrata, involved a generative insight that was not
dependent upon previously existing and highly sophisticated information
technologies. So, the ‘soft edge’ propounded by Levinson really encom-
passes all systems of exosomatic organs wherein or whereby meaning and
information are carried. Its analysis and classification must be subject to a
clearly formulated semiotic conceptual scheme or schemes.
Cassirer’s schematization could be enriched and extended, if one so
desired, by the rather differently focused Peircean classification of sign-
types and the Peircean account of interpretants. These can be interestingly
and fruitfully brought to bear, as a heuristic frame, in determining the
inner trajectories of information technologies.
It is axiomatic on a Peircean position that information technologies,
inasmuch as they are sign-complexes, can function, in weighted fashion
and highly differentiated contexts, iconically, indexically, and symboli-
cally. The development of image systems, diagrammatic systems, and sys-
tems of technologically grounded metaphorical schemata constitute the
iconic realm, rooted in firstness and quality. The world of scientific and
technical instrumentation, while certainly having a deep iconic compo-
nent, is fundamentally indexical, rooted in secondness, since it involves a
trail of existential connections between the system of instruments and the
‘objects and states of affairs’ upon which they bear and with which they
put us in contact. The ‘testing’ of technical plans—and all the apparatus
necessary for this—exemplifies indexicality in acute fashion. The sym-
bolic component, rooted in thirdness, assimilates, as Bunn clearly saw,
signs, tools, and models to one another. A conventional symbolism,
embodied in socially shared habits of interpretation, is based on the same
type of ‘as-structure’ as the system of tools. The abstract notational sys-
tems, including computer software, upon which modern, science-based
technics essentially depends are true ‘cognitive tools’ in which we dwell.
But, as befits the realm of thirdness, even though true, they have no intrin-
sic connection with the object-domains and fields of application upon
which they bear. They are free creations of mind. Peirce was of the opin-
ion that all signs are mixtures of all three components. So, analyzed from
a Peircean semiotic position, the challenge becomes, as from Cassirer’s
position, to determine the exact mix and relative weightings of semiotic

factors in any technical complex. The Peircean semiotic schema, originally
devised to describe and sort the ‘perfusion of signs’ in the universe, also
enables us to make cuts at the ‘significant joints’ in the continuum of tech-
nics in general and of information technologies in particular.
On the side of the ‘technical subject,’ seen from a Peircean perspective,
the information user is to be seen as a multileveled percipient, a topos or
place, defined by complex systems of affective, energetic, and intellectual
or logical interpretants, understood as the ‘proper significate effects’ of
signs and sign systems. Peirce’s account of interpretants is quite complex,
and this is not the place to go into niceties of interpretation. Restricting
ourselves to the descriptive scheme just mentioned, we can clearly see
that information technologies (indeed, all technologies) give rise to affec-
tive, actional, and conceptual fields in which the self-interpreting human
organism tries to make sense of the world in which it is found and which
it is constructing. These spaces are intertwined with one another and
evolve in accordance with their respective logics. A comprehensive phe-
nomenology of information technologies in the Peircean mode would,
therefore, have to attend to all the types of interpretants and their inner
contents that are generated in the active processes of world-construction.
In this sense we are the affective, actional, and conceptual ‘out-comes’ of
the mediating instruments in which we are embodied. The goal of the
process, as well as its norm, for Peirce is “concrete reasonableness,”
embodied in rational habits and exemplified in self-control and method-
ical self-reflection. If we find ourselves caught up in a play of technics
that reduces our capacities for self-control and self-reflection, then we
would have the Peircean analogue to Cassirer’s loss of freedom and
autonomy, which is one of the fateful consequences and possibilities of
technics. Perhaps, if we take the material embodiments of semiosis and
information technologies really seriously, the ‘soft edge’ is pretty hard
after all.
3. The ‘Nature’ of Information

The ‘nature’ of information is the central question that Albert Borgmann
deals with in his Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the
Turn of the Millennium (1999) and that vexes, albeit within a more general
frame, David Rothenberg in his disturbing Hand’s End: Technology and
the Limits of Nature (1993). They supplement and extend, but by no

means contravene, Cassirer’s heuristic frame by developing some critical
categories and distinctions of semiotic import. Cassirer would agree, we
have seen, that each technological form, whether thematically informa-
tional or not, orients us toward ‘the real’ with a distinctive ‘feel.’ In this he
is in full agreement with Peirce and Dewey. But Cassirer, in line with his
critical philosophical position, rejects all unified notions of ‘the real’ and,
by extension, of ‘nature.’ Sign-functions and sense-functions do not ‘dis-
tance’ us from the real or from nature, for the very reason that they are
our only means of accessing it. Cassirer arrived at this position not just
from an extension of his deepest Kantian commitments. From the theo-
retical biologist von Uexküll he took the notion of a functional circle that
defined the access structures of various organisms to their ‘worlds.’ While
every organism has a receptor system and an effector system, whose
cooperation and equilibrium ensure the continued existence of the organ-
ism, humans have a symbolic system (Cassirer 1944, 24). This “third link”
to the world “transforms the whole of human life. As compared with the
other animals man lives not merely in a broader reality; he lives, so to
speak, in a new dimension of reality” (24), wherein animal reactions give
rise to human responses. The move to the symbolic system is irreversible.
It is a reversal of the natural order, and once undergone, there is no escape
(25). The human being, now transformed into animal symbolicum,
cannot but adopt the conditions of his own life. No longer in a

merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Lan-
guage, myth, art, and religion are parts of this universe. They are
the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web
of human experience. All human progress in thought and experi-
ence refines and strengthens this net. No longer can man confront
reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Phys-
ical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activ-
ity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is
in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped
himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols
or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by
the interposition of this artificial medium. His situation is the same
in the theoretical as in the practical sphere. Even here man does not
live in a world of hard facts, or according to his immediate needs
and desires. He lives rather in the midst of imaginary emotions, in
hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in his fantasies and

dreams.8 (25)
Different access structures, then, give different ‘senses’ to the real and
to nature as a whole. Because, on a Cassirerian position, all form is
stamped form, there is no unmediated access to reality or to nature, not
even through our bodies, considered as a field of lived and vital projects.
Mediation in itself is potentiation, not diminution. So, from a Cassirerian
point of view, we must repudiate all longing for some paradise of imme-
diacy that will ‘take the measure’ of technics for the sake of some original
‘basically human’ condition. Indeed, we saw that the norm for Cassirer is
‘freedom.’ Technics in all its forms both ‘opens’ and ‘binds.’ But the inner
telos of technics is to ‘liberate’ us from necessity and to increase the scope,
nature, and range of meanings within which we orient ourselves. Cassirer
does not use the Heidegger-inspired rhetoric of ‘enframing’ (Gestell) or
the Frankfurt School–inspired rhetoric of ‘domination’ and ‘alienation’
that marks much contemporary discussion of technology and its impact
on the life-world in general.9 But it is clear that his evaluative criteria, in
the case of information technologies, would appeal to the balance between
the inner logics of the expressive, representational, and significational
powers of the various ‘sense-bearing’ frames. Such criteria are not merely
formal. Forms of consciousness evolve by developing novel forms of con-
tent and novel frames for the contents, ‘media’ in common parlance,
which themselves interact and potentiate one another in a process called
8. Reflecting on the reversal of determinism that began with life itself, Levinson (1999,
201–2) writes:
When that evolution gave rise to human intelligence, determinism suffered another
reversal, as profound as that which attended the emergence of open-programmed life.
To imagine is to disperse to infinity the prospect of a single, unavoidable result. To
embody those imaginings into tangible technology is to greatly constrict that field of
possibilities—for physical things are less easily wrought than ideas—but even a hand-
ful of new technologies, even just two, breaks the spell of a single, inevitable outcome.
It also breaks the spell of the ideology of ‘media determinism.’ No more than language itself
is a ‘prison house’ are the varieties of embodied media necessarily ‘iron cages’ of instrumental
rationality. But that they make up constraining as well as enabling conditions of world-building
is a massive and undeniable fact.
9. Feenberg (1999) gives one of the most up-to-date exemplifications of how an analysis of
technology from a position derived from Frankfurt School commitments would and should pro-
ceed. I have discussed a recent and stimulating reconstruction and critique of the concept of
nature in critical theory in Innis 1998b.
by Bolter and Grusin (1999) ‘remediation.’ Remediation refers to the

interaction and dialectical relationships between various media. But reme-
diation is not a norm but a fact, fundamentally a descriptive category,
which I take most strictly semiotic categories to be, even if they have nor-
mative and critical implications, as becomes clear when we turn to
Borgmann and Rothenberg especially.
Borgmann distinguishes three types of information: (1) natural infor-
mation, giving us information about reality, (2) cultural information, giv-
ing us information for reality, and (3) technological information, giving
us information as reality. Let us briefly and schematically explicate these
distinctions. Borgmann’s main thesis is that the rise of ‘information’—in
the technical sense of the term—is coincident with a decline of ‘meaning.’
The movement toward ‘abstract,’ ‘digital’ technologies has weakened our
‘hold’ on the world by introducing kinds of fragility, ambiguity, and
noise—not to mention nontransparency—that distort the fundamental
features of balanced living and meaning-making. About the first two
types of information, Borgmann writes, “Natural information pivots on
natural signs—clouds, smoke, tracks. Cultural information centers on
conventional signs—letters and texts, lines and graphs, notes and scores”
(1999, 57). As to technological information—based on the ‘bit’—
Borgmann thinks that the great lesson to learn, in spite of counterclaims,
is that there is no “natural harmony between information and reality”
that would “require us to confine and partition reality antecedently and
artificially” (136). Borgmann notes that the use of the term ‘technologi-
cal’ to describe a certain kind of information is meant to be taken in a
special and restricted sense, referring to “modern and in fact to the most
recent technology of information,” since cairns, tallies, clay tokens, and
letters can also be considered ‘technologies.’ Independently of carrier—
whether electrons, photons, proteins, or quantum effects—the marks of
technological information are “digital rigor, the massive logic and data
structures, and the rapid processing of technological information.” As
such, then, technological information, as fundamentally digital, is a
“marvel of permanence, perspicuity, and pliability,” while analog struc-
tures are “as viscous as molasses and as difficult to manipulate.” They are
constantly in danger of “falling back into reality” (167), since in being
copied they suffer irreversible damage. The model here is, of course, the
progressive degeneration of images (including texts) when they are
reproduced ‘by hand,’ the information they contain being undetachable
from their material substrates. In general, for Borgmann, ‘reality’ does
not ‘copy’ signs; signs ‘copy’ reality—or at least answer to it, a distinc-
tively Peircean position.
Borgmann, however, is no enemy of mediation or of the digital. But he
is supremely aware that different types of information—and their atten-
dant technologies—have different logics, perceptual, motoric, affective,
social, political, semiotic. These logics must be kept in balance for a full
human life. This is the much needed and fine-tuned message of
Borgmann’s earlier nuanced and historically sensitive Crossing the Post-
modern Divide (1992). The massive and uncritical move to ‘digital’ tech-
nologies of the ‘new media’ type is for someone like Borgmann
ambiguous at best, utterly pernicious at worst. The root of its pernicious-
ness is, in effect, a reduction of the polymorphousness of consciousness
and its intentional bonds to the world. Although the types of technolog-
ical information Borgmann is focusing upon are carried by sign structures
and hence are subject to the general conditions of semiosis, his major
complaint is that there is a ‘loss of reference’ when technological infor-
mation is taken as reality and becomes its substitute. This is all the more
serious when we find ourselves embroiled with technologies that function
with what Bolter and Grusin call “the claim to immediacy of experience
through the intense, almost hypnotic involvement of the user” (Bolter
and Grusin 1999, 90). But it is precisely the hypnotic effect that is impov-
erishing from the semiotic point of view. This becomes painfully clear
with just a cursory look at the analyses in Bolter and Grusin. Their exam-
ples, in the visual realm at least, suffer from a serious ‘thinning’ of the
signs’ palpability and consequently of their ‘poetic’ function (in Jakob-
son’s sense). On Cassirerian terms, it is precisely the attempt to build vast
systems of expressions and representations normally rooted in the body-
based intuitional and perceptual structures by means of fundamentally
significational instruments that results in an essential ‘loss of information’
in the domains that are putatively being ‘replicated.’ For a semiotic
philosopher such as Cassirer the types of sign systems upon which ‘signi-
fication,’ as a distinctive sense-function, rests are oriented toward the
‘abstract,’ the ‘law-governed,’ ‘the universal.’ The ‘information revolu-
tion,’ to be sure, makes possible a ‘re-presentation’ of prior intuitive and
perception-based sign systems and their contents. But, in spite of the mar-
velous technical effects of the new information technologies and their real
and insuperably important uses in such areas as computer-aided design,
modeling, simulation, and so forth, I wonder whether there should not be
a semiotic and aesthetic ‘Turing Test’ for the new media. If there were
such a test, which was combined with a concern for content and for the
conditions for full perceptual and imaginative activation, apart from

instrumental and ‘magical’ ends, perhaps we would be much less enam-
ored of ‘merely technical effects’ and with the cult of immediacy.
Bolter and Grusin give an example of what I am talking about here.
Photo-realistic paintings reproduce, in their words, “an illusion of an illu-
sion” (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 122). Painting from photographs, the
photo-realistic artist takes the photograph as real and attempts to copy it
as closely as possible.
He is not willing to take us all the way, however, for he exhibits his
paintings, not the photographs on which they are based. He must
retain us in the realm of painting in order to represent the desire
for immediacy. Here as elsewhere, the logic of hypermediacy is to
represent the desire for transparent immediacy by sublimating it,
by turning it into a fascination with the medium. So . . . hyperme-
diacy becomes the representation of the desire for immediacy and
unavoidably of the artist as the seeker after immediacy. (122)
Bolter and Grusin build their whole analysis on the fact that “new digital
media oscillate between immediacy and hypermediacy, between trans-
parency and opacity” (19).
This oscillation is the key to understanding how a medium refashions
its predecessors and other contemporary media. Although each medium
promises to reform its predecessors by offering a more immediate or
authentic experience, the promise of reform inevitably leads us to become
aware of the new medium as a medium. Thus, immediacy leads to hyper-
mediacy. The process of remediation makes us aware that all media are at
one level a ‘play of signs,’ which is a lesson that we take from poststruc-
turalist theory. At the same time, this process insists on the real, effective
bodily presence of media in our culture. Media have the same claim to
reality as more tangible cultural artifacts; photographs, films, and com-
puter applications are as ‘real’ as airplanes and buildings (Bolter and
Grusin 1999, 19). The networks that arise from these media technologies
encompass the physical, the social, the aesthetic, and the economic
spheres. Borgmann is certainly well aware of this—as was Cassirer, whose
blistering attack on the new media of mythmaking and political propa-
ganda makes up, we saw, the lasting value of his Myth of the State.
The semiotic point here, though, is that of the ‘quality’ of meaning, not
of its ‘technical’ sophistication. The mark of any medium—any information
technology in general and the ‘technological information’ in particular that
Borgmann is concerned with—is the quality of the Peircean ‘proper signi-

ficate effects,’ the interpretants, that the various semiotic systems bring
forth in the society or community of interpreters. The new ‘technologies of
information’ have changed the bases for the production of our access struc-
tures, just as, for example, the development of oil-based pigments changed
the ‘iconic’ structures of access to the visual world in terms of their ‘quali-
tative feel’ and depth of perceptual meaning. The fact is that each informa-
tion technology has, as I already have frequently noted, its own ‘feel,’ which
is connected with the different degrees of pliability and recalcitrance of the
medium. Modern digital technologies, because they reside on a formal,
articulate, and abstract base, which is semiotically opaque to most users,
nevertheless give rise to a peculiar ‘transparency effect.’ By this I mean that
we can radically shift the outcomes of the instruments without concomitant
somatic or intellectual input, although it is clear that the code can prevent
the realization of one’s merely arbitrary desires and that those who can
write the code are ‘in the long run’ those who control the effects. This,
however, from a semiotic point of view is problematic, since ‘making pos-
sible’ a semiotic effect, no matter how technically sophisticated, does not
validate or valorize that effect in any sense of that term.
But, one might ask, is this any different from the antecedent system of
constraints that mark any semiotic medium? In all cases we attend from
the medium to what it bears upon or brings to presence or constitutes.
This by now familiar Polanyian notion makes all media ‘subsidiaries’ to
the ‘focal wholes’ they make up or support (Polanyi 1958, 1966). In the
semiotic context they are so many ‘semiotic vectors’ pointing toward
their ‘object,’ whether (to use Peircean terms) in the mode of indication,
iconization, or symbolization, which, in any case, are normally mixed
modes themselves, since these modes are dimensions of all sign use qua
tale. We can certainly continue to follow Polanyi here in seeing the from-
to relation, which he derives from a reflection on the philosophical import
of Gestalt theory, as allowing a nuanced notion of embodiment or of
‘indwelling.’ In Polanyi’s words, read once again, but now in a Cassirerian
context, “This structure shows that all thought contains components of
which we are subsidiarily aware in the focal content of our thinking, and
that all thought dwells in its subsidiaries, as if they were parts of our body.
Hence thinking is not only necessarily intentional, as Brentano has
taught, it is also necessarily fraught with the roots that it embodies. It has
a from-to structure” (Polanyi 1966, x). The from-pole comprises every-
thing we can attend from as we attend to the world, including every tool,
model, analogy, or semiotic system whatsoever. Because of the universal-

ity of embodiment, no technology, whether informational or not, is ‘indif-
ferent’ or without effect on the percipient or ‘technological subject,’ who
at the same time is a ‘semiotic subject.’ Indwelling and embodiment are
extensions of the subject out toward and into the world, where it inscribes
its projects upon ‘nature’ as figures upon grounds.
This process of inscription is the construction of a new body for our-
selves. Cassirer writes:
[I]n its speech, its art, and all its cultural forms, mankind has cre-
ated, so to speak, a new body for itself which belongs jointly to all.
The individual human being cannot, as such, transmit his own
individual skills that he has acquired in the course of life. They
adhere to the physical ‘soma’ that is not transmittable. Neverthe-
less, that which he places outside of himself in his work, that which
is expressed linguistically, that which is represented graphically, or
in plastic form, is ‘embodied’ in language and art and endures
through it. It is this process that distinguishes the mere transfor-
mation (Umbildung), which takes place in the sphere of organic
becoming, from the formation (Bildung) of humanity. The former
is passive, the latter is active. Accordingly, the former leads only to
changes, whereas the latter leads to enduring formations (Gestalt-
ungen). The work is essentially nothing other than a human act
that has solidified in order to become but it does not deny its origin
in this consolidation. The creative will, and the creative power
from which it has emerged, continues to live and be effective
within it and to lead to ever new creations. (2000, 127)
Among these new creations are all those attendant upon the informa-
tion revolution. Where do we find the norm that will ‘measure’ and ‘limit’
them? Can ‘nature’ function as a ‘limit,’ in every sense of that term, for
our evaluation of the ‘information’ revolution?
Here, Rothenberg gives us some valuable analytical, and normative,
tools, which also confirm and extend the types of semiotically based con-
siderations presented in this chapter. Although Rothenberg’s concern, as
was Cassirer’s, is technology quite generally, much of what he says
applies quite straightforwardly and insightfully to information tech-
nologies as such. One of his central theses is that “there are no grounds
to expect that technology will learn to respect those problems which
elude quantification” (Rothenberg 1993, 99). What types of things, as he

sees it, elude quantification? Fundamentally, those things and experi-
ences rooted in the analog world and its intrinsic connection with the
body and the field of lived experience and of “felt meaning,” to use
Eugene Gendlin’s term (Gendlin 1962). The realms of ‘virtual reality,’ for
example, including those conveyed through the use of sensor gloves and
so forth, which are paradigm cases of “digital extension,” are “most
poignant,” as he puts it, when we can turn them off. Echoing the work of
virtual-reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, who claims that “the most vivid expe-
rience of virtual reality is the experience of leaving it” (cited in Rothen-
berg 1993, 156), Rothenberg comments, “This may be the most telling
comment on the future of computed worlds. We will only accept the
course of disembodiment if we are able to turn our back on it at will,
returning to a more grounded and direct alternative” (156). But this
“course of disembodiment,” which paradoxically drives the new media, is
haunted by the proviso that “the medium should never be the only mes-
sage” (97), which I take to mean also that the ‘effect’ of a medium should
never supplant its ‘content.’ The striving for effect, independent of con-
tent, is precisely what Cassirer decried in the outbreak of technically
mediated propaganda that marked twentieth-century mass consciousness.
It is paradoxical that the digital media that involve maximal, indeed obses-
sive, participation of the embodied subject are precisely those that intend
to supplant the body as ultimate node of connections in the virtual world
(157). In a comment that confirms Gendlin’s (and Dewey’s) pathbreaking
analyses, Rothenberg asserts that “the limit to what can be accomplished
in virtuality is the same as the limit to what the mind can accomplish
without the life of the body” (159). In all cases, technology is “humanity
extended, the hand’s end” (15), but because technology is a process, and
not a stable thing, there is no unified sense of ‘nature’ “apart from our
continuously transforming attempts to learn it and build a world to our
own liking” (157).
Rothenberg encapsulates his position in the following passage: “Tech-
nology changes the meaning of nature as it continues to seek nature. The
virtualization of technique which begins with the wheel and ends with the
computer successively brings the notion of tool away from direct contact
with earth and towards complete imitation of the universe with the set
laws of logic” (1993, 193). But any technology only makes “specific parts
of the world accessible” (198), that is, is ‘biased,’ and hence performs a
specific kind of abstraction. Even “mimetic technologies” (39) still involve
abstraction, Rothenberg notes, in complete agreement with fundamental

semiotic principles. The computer, while an abstract technology par excel-
lence, is nevertheless not able to take on tasks proper to other ‘logics.’
“The computer,” writes Rothenberg, is “that part of us into which we
have extended our symbolized and constructed logic, and no more” (142).
This is Cassirer’s level of signification. Significational technologies—not
‘signifying’ technologies—have, to be sure, their own ‘semiotic’ power,
but they are not intended to ‘simulate’ what is better done by other sys-
tems. Pure mathematics, or pure formal logic, allow us both to make bet-
ter machines (hence, modern science-based technologies) and to build
other types of machines that extend our “ability to think and work
abstractly” (38)—including perceptual and aesthetic thinking and work-
ing. And just as there is nothing more ‘natural’ in the use of tempera tech-
niques or oil-based techniques than in the use of acrylic-based techniques,
so there is nothing intrinsically ‘unnatural’ in these novel techniques,
which have a scientific base rooted in chemistry and the physics of light,
and in their use as significational technologies for ‘perceptual,’ ‘somatic,’
and ‘aesthetic’ ends. The issue is one of semiotic power and content.
Rothenberg issues a challenge: “I am not certain,” he writes, “that more
can be conveyed in a digital fluid realm than through set expressions in
word, image, or sound created by more traditional means” (156). Indeed,
“as technologies shift and multiply around them, words still hold onto a
firm piece of ground” (98), being a ‘cooler’ medium than perhaps McLuhan
had thought, eliciting deep commitment and participation. Language—the
representational system par excellence for Cassirer—still remains effective
even within the “most stringent of media” (98), and so do all those iconic
forms that exemplify the aesthetic domain, with its intuitive and percep-
tual thickness and involvement of the moving and self-sensing body.10
10. Levinson (1999, 53) asks, “Why, in view of the centrality of abstraction in our lives, has
so much of media evolution been iconic?” He responds to his own question in this way:
The answer, I would argue, is that the alphabet conveys abstraction so effectively that
we lack the impetus to improve upon it in other media. Print, of course, is but the
alphabet writ large; as is the telegraph, in another sense. The alphabet is more abstract
than even speech, its progenitor, which conveys non-abstract emotional tone in the
quality of the voice speaking the words. . . . And the alphabet is more abstract at its
actual point of usage than current digital media—which although highly abstract on the
programming level (the binary codes that can represent sounds, images, letters), often
operates iconically on the usage level (as when we see pictures and hear sounds on the
Internet).
Cassirer’s valorization of the aesthetic dimension is extremely pertinent

here and introduces, in addition to the notion of freedom, a further nor-
mative element, bringing him closer to the central focus of Dewey’s work.
Repudiating all attempts to totalize either the expressive or the represen-
tational dimensions of art, Cassirer ultimately, relying for the most part
on Goethe, sees the key to art—and to the aesthetic understood as the liv-
ingness of art in human experience—in “the power of form” (Cassirer
1979, 158). For Cassirer, “the artistic eye is not a passive eye that receives
and registers the impression of things. It is a constructive eye, and it is
only by constructive acts that we can discover the beauty of natural
things.” More generally, and going beyond any restriction to natural
things, “the sense of beauty is the susceptibility to the dynamic life of
forms” (Cassirer 1944, 151), wherever they may be found. But, as Cassirer
insists, “in art we do not conceptualize the world, we perceptualize it”
(1979, 186). The world of art is not a conceptualized world, but a world
of intuition and contemplation, not mere sense-experience obsessed with
the empirical properties of things. “The artist ignores these qualities. He
is absorbed in the pure form of things; he intuits their immediate appear-
ance” (159) through a sympathetic and constructive vision. Art in this
sense is a discovery of reality. It involves the intensification and deepen-
ing of experience, a liberation of experience from merely instrumental
ends. Art as formative is the farthest from the obsessive as one could
imagine. While art is certainly ‘absorbing,’ the self-loss that occurs in art
is in fact an increase in selfhood, a potentiation of autonomy and the abil-
ity to relate oneself freely to the world. It is not a reversion to egocentrism
or to a fanatical sense of power or control. Art is, for Cassirer, a way of
objectifying the world in terms of meanings, not of projecting one’s ego
onto it for merely technical effects. As Cassirer puts it:
The sphere of art is a sphere of pure forms. It is not a world of

mere colors, sounds, tactile qualities—but of shapes and designs,
of melodies and rhythms. In a certain sense all art may be said to
be language, but it is language in a very specific sense. It is not a
Given this uniquely high degree of abstraction of the alphabet, together with the
centrality of abstraction to human thought and life, a reasonable prediction based on a
Darwinian evolution of media toward increasing consonance with human communica-
tion would be that the alphabet’s place as the conductor of acoustic cyberspace is quite
secure.
language of verbal symbols, but of intuitive symbols. He who does

not understand these intuitive symbols, who can not feel the life of
colors, of shapes, of spatial forms and patterns, harmony and
melody, is secluded from the work of art—and by this he is not
only deprived of aesthetic pleasure, but he loses the approach to
one of the deepest aspects of reality. (186)
Without claiming to be the last word—which it does not—such a passage

at least emphasizes the deep personal participation of the perceiver in the
life of forms in art and indicates that the formative power of art is oriented
toward discovery of experiential possibilities in all their forms. But the
norm is full qualitative richness attendant upon the complex processes of
artistic objectification. The new information technologies must accord-
ingly be brought constantly before this bar.11
The ‘nature’ upon which the information revolution bears and within
which it is found is, in the last analysis, that accessed through the dialec-
tically and differentially related ‘transparent’ and ‘transformative’ tools
emerging from human intentional projects. The norm in all cases is the
polymorphous development of the various sense-functions and sign-
types that make up the fundamental world access structures for humans.
There is no ultimate need to choose between the analog and the digital,
the continuous and the discrete, the concrete and the abstract. Rothenberg
is right in his demand that we need a “person-centered aesthetic” as the
11. Levinson (1999, 145–72) discusses various aspects of the aesthetic implications of the new
media. He holds that the Internet “blurs the distinction between work and play” (156). Indeed,
on his reading, McLuhan was after something different, something that
encompassed not only the spontaneity of play and the seriousness of work—but the
perfection of art. If the Industrial Revolution had severed childhood from adulthood,
it also had squeezed out the personal perfection of the handicraft from the mass pro-
duction of the machine.
That idea—that the machine steps on the aesthetic, and thereby the artist—has of
course itself been around since at least the age of Romanticism, and its first protest of
the Industrial Revolution, now nearly two centuries ago. McLuhan’s notion that elec-
tronic media reverse that process by reintegrating aspects of art into everyday life was
something new. It arose, as did most of McLuhan’s ideas about electronic media, from
his view that the very process by which we perceive television—all-at-once, all-around,
involved, in contrast to the page-by-page specificity and distinctions and inherent
aloofness of print—was an integrating, artistic mode of experience. (156–57)
It is problematic notions such as these that must be brought before the bar of a self-conscious
aesthetics, working at, dare one say it, a higher level of abstraction.
norm for “the authentic human way-in-the-world” (1993, 201). Informa-

tion technologies should help us get there and not divert us by, in Colling-
wood’s terms, confining themselves to the level of craft (albeit high
abstract craft) and amusement while leaving the great imaginative powers,
rooted in the body and its perceptual structures, undeveloped, unchal-
lenged, or diminished. Perhaps we can follow Cassirer here and see the
real future of digital information technologies in the transformation and
extension of the significational realm itself—in science, technology, and
mathematics—with only a subsidiary and tentatively exploratory role in
the expressive and representational domains. The technologies founded
on ‘measurement’ and those founded on lived order imposed on skill are
not in radical opposition. “Measurement,” writes Rothenberg, “need not
be opposed to the qualities it opens up for us. Quantity needs to leave
room for quality, else it will frame only itself” (203).
In a striking passage in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences Cassirer
encapsulates the scope and existential import of our commitments to
‘tools’ of every sort in a way that supports and resonates with Rothen-
berg’s deepest concerns:
Through the use of tools man has set himself up as ruler over
things. However, this power has turned into no blessing for him
but rather into a curse. The technology that man invented in order
to subjugate the physical world has turned against him. It has led
not only to a heightened self-alienation but ultimately to a kind of
self-loss of human existence. The tool, which appeared to provide
the fulfillment of human needs, has instead created countless arti-
ficial needs. Each perfecting of the technological culture is, and
remains, in this respect a truly treacherous gift. Hence the yearn-
ing for primitive, unbroken, immediate existence must repeatedly
break forth; and the more numerous the areas of life taken over by
technology, the louder the call, ‘Back to nature!’ (2000, 27)
In conclusion, then, it is, to repeat, the ‘quality,’ in every sense of that

term, of the meanings, and not some external ‘nature’ functioning as a
norm, that defines and constrains the normative and heuristic powers of
the various information technologies. We can learn from Cassirer (and
from Peirce, Dewey, and Polanyi) that these technologies have distinctive
expressive powers and feels and must be used with close attention to their
operative logics. These logics are not the same. They open up different
spaces wherein the embodied subject orients itself to and within the
world.12 The fusion of this subject—ourselves, that is—with these exoso-
matic organs is a fateful process, leaving no part of our sensorium
untouched. They not only change the feeling tones by means of which we
are present to ourselves—Lyotard’s ‘tautegorical feelings’—they also fate-
fully change the ways we inscribe meanings onto the world and onto our-
selves. Each change is a shift in our mental existence that, even in its
technological forms, is coincident with the fundamental structures of
semiosis.
12. Walter (1988) has explored, often with the aid of Cassirer, the expressive nature of ‘places’
under the rubric of ‘topistics.’ His goal, which intersects with Dewey’s acerbic comments on
material misplacement, is to uncover the “philosophical ground for understanding why the ratio-
nalization of place in the modern world contributes to the disintegration of topistic unity” (131).
Walter develops a doctrine of “selective support” for world-building, namely, that the self is not
a disembodied self, but bound to its body, its exosomatic body. We not only have “tychastic
time” but in a sense “tychastic space,” which effectively prohibits “a group of effective presences
dwelling together” (23). Reflecting on his experiences in Manchester, England, he remarks that
“Manchester taught me that the energies of place flow through its meanings” (12). In his under-
standing, “place is a location of mutual immanence, a unity of effective presences abiding
together” (121). If we expand his analysis to the ‘spaces’ opened up by information technologies,
which have material supports as much as our cities and neighborhoods have, we can see just how
fateful our commitment to the seemingly immaterial spaces are. They are not immaterial at all.
Walter writes:
The totality of what people do, think, and feel in a specific location gives identity to a
place, and through its physique and morale shapes a reality which is unique to places—
different from the reality of an object or a person. Human experience makes a place, but
a place lives in its own way. Its form of experience occupies persons—the place locates
experience in people. A place is a matrix of energies, generating representations and
causing changes in awareness. (131)
On Walter’s reckoning, “the structure of consciousness is a fabric of associations and disso-

ciations” (170) that have distinctive valences. The fundamental agreement with Cassirer becomes
clear, and opens a road to further investigation, in Walter’s central contention: “Our perceptions
are inherently expressive, and the core of every phenomenon holds a kernel of expressive energy.
Perception remains alive and vibrant—not a dead record of things—because phenomena live and
vibrate. The energy of phenomena moves people to feel, think, act, and imagine. The world of
experience trembles with excitement” (170).
Innis References 9/24/02 10:02 PM Page 239
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Innis Index 9/24/02 10:03 PM Page 253
Index
abduction alienation, inadequacy as analytical category,

perceptual, 23–37 195
Vailati on relation to deduction, 102–11 alphabet
Abrams, D. consequences of embodiment in,
nature and the alphabet, 159–62 159–63
no semiotic Luddite, 161 Levinson on, 216
Abse, D. W., 88 not an indifferent process, 161
abstraction as work of abstraction, 233
Bühler on principle of abstractive relevance, analog, 235
62 apprehension of place, 198
Cassirer on, 217–18 analysis
as instrument in technology, 189–90 precedes normative task, 165
Levinson on language and, 215–17 as segmentation, 25
Peirce on, 23–37 animal symbolicum, characterized by Cassirer,
property of the alphabet, 233 225
as selective attention, 70 apprenticeship, and expertise, 150
Ackerman, D., 182 n. 8 architecture
aesthetic Dewey on, 183–84
characterized by Cassirer, 234–35 Tuan on built environment, 184 n. 10
Dewey on, 167–202 Aristotle, 83, 102
effects belong to medium, 178 on deduction, 114
field of, 169 armillary sphere, Ptolemy’s drawing of,
person-centered as norm, 235 154–55
physiological, 196 Arnheim, R., and semantic qualities of words,
rationality as social norm, 198–202 163
realm of, 169–70 art(s)
scope of, 169 automatic, 186; Dewey on, 149
surface, 169 not beauty parlor of civilization, 201
universal factors of, 195–96 Cassirer on, 234–35
aesthetics, pragmatist connection with technological production,
elements of, 167–80 181
positive evaluation of technology, 180 connection with work and play, 235 n. 11
pushes meaning down, 168 entwined with technics, 219
affective tones, discussed by Whitehead, 197 fine, 149
Alberti, L., 154–57 as language, 234–35
algebra phase structure of, 176
contrasted with language, 121 photorealistic, 229
Vailati’s grammatical analysis of, 117–23 technological, 149, 186
254 Index
art product(s) somatic logic of, 132

not the art work, 175 universal relevance of, 2
release perceptual energy, 178 body-music, 196
art work, work of perception, 175 Bolter, J. D.
articulation, 43 defining technologies, 208
in Polanyi, 43–48 remediation, 228–29
self-articulation, 13 Bonfantini, M., on abduction, 103 n. 4
in Wegener, 88–98 Borgmann, A., 224, 227–28, 229
artifacts, as model of the body, 208 Bourdieu, P., 181
artist, concerned with qualitative space-time, Briggs, A., from iron bridge to crystal palace,
179 168 n. 2
atomism, psychological Buchler, J., 4, 38
Dewey opposed to, 172 Bühler, K., 51–88
aura, loss of, 185 abstraction, 65
autonomy, loss of in mass society, 221 fields, 53–66, 72
awareness. See also consciousness language and perception, 69
focal and subsidiary, 2, 140 linguistic sign, 60–66
subsidiary and language, 43–48 metaphor, model of, 74–78
universal from-to structure, 2 organon-model of language, 53–60; dia-
gram of, 58–59
Bachelard, G., on the imaginary, 134 and philosophical tradition, 83–88
Benjamin, W. sentences, 78–83
artifice and reality, 137 words and meanings, 66–74
aura, loss of, 185 Bunn, J., 212
camera teaches unconscious optics, exchange with displacement, 154
162
on changes in sense perception, 136–37, Calderoni, M., 101, 102
180–81 camera, 214. See also photography
consequences of technology, 137 embodies a bias, 147
Berman, M., 136 camera ottica, used by Alberti, 157
Bergson, H., 191 camera obscura, 193
Berkeley, G., 110 Carta Pisana, first portolan map with grid
bias, 131-65 lines, 155
of deformation, 147 carving, as intentional orientation, 188–89
embodied in camera, 147 Cassirer, E., 3, 68, 69, 203–37
fateful nature of, 212 aesthetic dimension, 234–35
general notion of, 141, 131–38 Bühler’s use of, 84
bipolarity ‘grasping’ reality, 3
foregrounded by phenomenology, 141 nature and information, 224–37
of embodiment in media, 144 probal nature of language, 49–50
body roots of political myths, 220–22
cultural forms as humanity’s, 231 semiosis and technics, 203–15
dematerialization of, 178, 206 semiotic schema, 203–5
enters into all shaping, 186 sign not external to thought, 20
matrix of rhythms, 196–97 soft edge of information, 215–24
matrix of skills, 140–41, 149 Cavalcanti, G., on boundaries between Flo-
not an object, 191 rence and Milan, 156
relationship to scale, 197–98 Cézanne, C., somatic hesitation, 139
role in Dewey’s thought, 176–78, 186 Chaplin, C., imagery of Modern Times, 153
role in Polanyi’s thought, 140 Childe, V. G., pivots of human progress, 164
Index 255
closure deixis, 55–58

Cassirer and Peirce on, 20, 209 as defining situation, 56
semiotic and technical, 209, 212 De Rose, M., 101, 102 n. 3, 106 n. 5
clues, used not observed, 140–41 Derrida, J., 20, 62, 92, 162
Colapietro, V., ix, 24, 33 Descartes, R., 154
collateral experience, 44 destructive analysis, 140
recognized by Bühler, 86 determinism, and rise of intelligence, 226 n. 8
Collingwood, R. G., art, craft, and amusement, Dewey, J.
236 aesthetic critique of technology, 167–202
compensation, function of exosomatic aesthetic model, 167–80
organs, 134 aesthetic rationality, 198–202
computer, as pure signifying technology, 233 anti-essentialism, 67, 67 n. 7
congruent function, of words, 95–96 architecture, 183–85
consciousness change in perceptual habits, 142
bottomless lake, 33 experience, biological aspects of, 171-72
distinguished from mind (Dewey), 172 n. 5 inner experience and language, 79 n. 13
emergent function, not substance, 172 language as form of action, 54
from-to structure ineluctable, 141 language and tools, 2–3
intermittent series of flashes (Dewey), 172 language transforms biological, 54
n. 5 and Marx, 194–95
musical analogy of, 34–35 meaning as proximate and ultimate, 80 n. 14
myth and tools, 206 meanings as self-moving, 78
mythic (Cassirer), 204, 206, 220–22 media, 144; as language, 178
Peirce on perceptual, 23–37 open structure of experiencing, 172–73
perceptual, 19–50 organism force, not transparency, 171
Polanyi on perceptual, 37–48 on quality, 145
semiotic structure of, 203–15 technics, positive evaluation of, 185
spectatorial, 193 understanding as anticipating together, 52
subsidiary and focal, 38, 40–43, 140–41 Vailati on philosophy, 102
container metaphor, 114–15 Whitehead overtones in, 171
context, 56 workers, 194–95
corollarial reasoning, 31 diagrammatic reasoning, 29, 31
craftsman, Pirsig on, 144, 186–87 digital, 235
crank, epochal significance of, 152–53 apprehension of space, 198
Crater Lake, qualitative apprehension of, 173 technologies, paradoxes of, 230
Croce, B., 99, 102 n. 3 dilation, technological, 137
Calderoni, M., 101, 102 as amplification, 145
dimensionality, intrinsic to semiosis, 163
deduction disclosure, as functioning of the soul (White-
relation to abduction, 102–11 head), 202
conscription, not census, 114 discord, leads to reflection, 172
container metaphor of, 114 discourse, written bound to nature, 162
dagger metaphor of, 114 disembodiment, fostered by new media, 232
lens metaphor of, 114 distance, effected by technologies, 147
metaphors of, 112–14 distinctions, philosophy as attack on (Vailati),
definition 127
by abstraction, 108 distortion, of human sensory ratios, 217
in algebra, 120–21 Duhem, P., reviewed by Vailati, 107
implicit, 108 Dubos, R., on atrophy of sense perceptions,
Vailati on limitations of, 127 135–36
256 Index
echo focus, 193 qualitative background of, 173

Eco, U., 74, 78, 95 unbounded nature of (Dewey), 173
Edgerton, S., Jr., on Ptolemy’s achievement, expertise, and apprenticeship, 150
154–57 explicit, contrasted with the tacit, 37–48
Einstein, A., 30 expression, as sense function, 204
Ellul, J., communication and propaganda,
216 Facchi, P., 103
embodiment on Vailati, 128 n. 15
central to Cassirer, 213–14 family resemblances, 67, 85
ecological consequences of, 162 feeling
in language, 48–50 bipolar, 172
linked to interpretation, 143 coinciding of intention and affection, 172
material and semiotic, 3, 210–11 feeling-core of a percept, 36
normative concerns, 169–70 qualities in language, 72
painful, 136 shift of attendant upon embodiment, 1
perilous nature of, 131–38, 164–65 fields, 51–98
recognized by Bühler and Gardiner, 83 deictic vs. symbolic, 55
relations, contravening of, 150; Ihde on, figurative aesthetic, 196, 198
192 foresight, 211
technical, as form of meaning-making, 163 fore-structures, as material, not conceptual,
technical, implications of, 164 143
types of, 3, 147 form(s)
universal phenomenon, 1, 230–31 Dewey on, 198
emendation, as language engine, 43 and world of art, 234–35
emergence, 42, 172 forms of sense, defined, 1–4
in metaphor, 77 four-factor theory of speech act, 53–60
energy, of places, vibrant with meaning, 237 freedom
enframing, as material process, 158 entails autonomy, 221
Eschbach, A., on Bühler and Wittgenstein, 85 as goal of technics, 212
n. 17 Frege, G., 68
Euclid, 115, 120 Frisch, M., on technology, 200
examples, role of in book, 14 from-to relations
exosomatic organ(s) types of, 41–43
filter and probe, 145 functional aspect, 41
Gehlen on functions of, 133 ontological aspect, 41
logics and vectorial paths, 134 phenomenal aspect, 41
organ-projection, 131–38 semantic aspect, 41–42
experience technological implications, 131–65
becomes aesthetic, 170, 175 functional aesthetic, 196
bipolar (Dewey), 173 function of words, congruent and incongruent,
consummatory vs. instrumental, 179 95
dialectic of activity and passivity, 173 fundedness, of experience of meaning, 174
doing and undergoing, 174 fusion, with probes and instruments, 1–2
embedded in language and technics, 2–3
general conditions of (Dewey), 171–73 Gadamer, H. G., 66, 95
horizonal structure of, 173 fore-structure, 143
as meaning-making, 15 I-lessness of dialogue, 174
mediated by signs and tools, 6 language ahead of us, 47
as ‘outcome’ (Dewey), 171 parallel with Dewey, 175
phase structure of, 171–72 Galileo, discussed by Vailati, 124
Index 257
Gardiner, A., 51–88 Hall, D., applies Whitehead’s categorial

concrete speech as text, 56 scheme, 168
constitution of linguistic sign, 60–66 happiness, as lower goal of life, 212
four-factor theory of speech, 53–60 harmony, of worker and tools, 150
indispensability of mental terms, 83–87 Hausman, C., on Peirce’s linguistic turn, 53
language and mental progress, 87 n. 4
linguistic situation, 57 head-music, 196
metaphor, 74–78 Heelan, P., on hermeneutics of instrumenta-
purpose of speech, 54–55 tion, 143
sentences and predicational nexus, 78–83 Heidegger, M., 2
situation, 55–56 critique of Husserl’s Cartesianism, 139
situation of common knowledge, 57 fore-structures, 56
situation of imagination, 58 Gestell, 135, 226
situation of presence, 56–57 in-order-to structure of tools, 39
speech and language, 61 on perception of things, 24–25
words and meanings, 66–74 Vorhabe, 143
Gehlen, A., 172 hermeneutic relations, Ihde on, 192
functions of exosomatic organs, 13, 133 Herrigel, E., 149
plasticity of human being, 194 Hewison, R., 181
primitivization and lability of consciousness, Hjelmslev, L., 95
196 Holenstein, E., 20
Gendlin, E., felt meaning, 232 Hookway, C., 23, 36
generalization, in language, 44 Hörmann, H., 97
Gestalt human body, as norm, 197–98
connection with model of metaphor, 37–43 Hülzer-Vogt, H., 77
moments in language, 63–64 Humboldt, W. von, magic circle of language,
primacy of wholes, 37 164
role in Polanyi’s thought, 37–43 Husserl, E., 68, 95
Gestell, 158, 226 approach modified by embodiment, 191
Giedion, S., 182 and Bühler, 85
relation to Dewey, 199 cognitional orientation, 138
gigantism, 197 and Gardiner, 88
Goethe, J. von
on inner and outer, 213 icons
on significant roughness, 188 core of conceptual meaning, 29–30
Giotto, 155 used in all thinking, 29
Goodman, N., technology and ways of ideal, as aesthetic, 202
worldmaking, 75, 146 idealization, aesthetic
grasping parallels ‘making strange,’ 170
material and conceptual, 3, 209 Ihde, D.
material and intuitive, 204 analysis of intentional arc, 138
grid, Edgerton on power of, 156 on echo effect, 49, 193
Grusin, R., on remediation, 228–29 embodiment relations and hermeneutic
relations, 143, 192
Habermas, J., 138 head-music and body-music, 196
habit(s) modified by Deweyan analysis, 191–93
dispositional, 33 image. See also Johnson, M.; Lakoff, G.
funded nature of, 174 vagueness of, 47
as self-analyzing interpretants, 28 -schemata, 32
transformation of the eye’s, 142, 199 mass-media and mass-entertainment, 183
258 Index
immediacy interpretants, 224

fostered by digital technologies, 229 media matrices of, 224
to be repudiated, 226 role in perception, 33
implement. See also tools types of, 33
functions of, mechanical and spiritual, 207 interpretation, perception as, 35
in-order-to structure, 190 introspection, 84
use of decisive, in consciousness, 206 irreversibility, of acts of comprehension, 141
impressionism, as new vision, 158 Ivins, W., language versus vision, 163
index, role in perception, 36
indication, 51–98, 175 Jakobson, R., 58, 75
industrialism, aesthetic effects of, 182–83 parallel with Dewey, 170
indwelling James, W., 25, 29, 92
acritical felt process, 142 consciousness as emergent function, 172
central Polanyian notion, 2 consciousness as flights and perchings, 172
defines all knowing and doing, 2, 141, 230 free water of consciousness, 35
relevance to Peirce, 49 Jefferson, T., on printers, 153
in a text, 45 Jha, S., 111, 115 n. 10
universal phenomenon, 2, 230–31 Johnson, M., 32, 32 n. 6, 75, 112
inference container metaphor, 114
abductive, 23–37 joy of perceiving, and art, 176
abductive and deductive compared
(Vailati), 102–11 Kapp, E.
acritical, 28 on organ-projection, 132
as ampliative, 29 tool as instrument of self-knowledge, 208
in language, 62 summarized by Cassirer, 207
information knowing, as skillful, 140–41
natural, cultural, technological, 227 Köhler, W., 37, 38
information technologies, 215–37 Krois, J., on tychastic time, 220
adventures in materialization, 215
dependent upon pure signification, 222–23 labor
electro-chemical, 216 and leisure, 201
pathologies of, 216 mental and manual, 201
Peircean perspective on, 223–24 laboratory mind, Peirce on, 107–8
perform different types of abstraction, 218 Lakoff, G., 32 n. 6, 75, 112
recording devices, 216 container metaphor, 114
inner experience, produced by language, 79 n. Langer, S.
13 distinction between concept and conception,
Innis, H. 95
biasing of perception, 164 influenced by Bühler, 88
on mechanization of communication, 153 influenced by Wegener, 82, 88
sounds and thoughts, 162 magic circle of figurative ideas, 204 n. 2
in-order-to structure, Heidegger on, 139 language
inscription, mutual of world and subject, 237 as abstraction device, 66–74
instrument(s) acritical appropriation of, 46
as access structures, 1 Cassirer on, 204 n. 3
reading of as skillful, 144 depends on integrative power, 43
relying on changes of perception, 191–92 as embodied technics, 159–63
integrations, 38–43 embodiment in, 48–50
intentional arc, structures of, 138–48 functions of, 58–59
Internet, 216 holds its ground, 233
Index 259
linear order of versus vision, 163 and hubris (Nietzsche), 135

magic circle of, 164 Pirsig on, 149, 151
as means of social cooperation, 52 map(s)
musical element in, 64 Ptolemy’s achievement, 154–57
and nature, 159–62 portolan, 155
not a veneer, 49–50 Marx, K.
and perception, 19–50, 69 on hammers, 134 n. 1
probal nature of, 49–50, 163 on history of productive organs, 132
proper model of, 52 relevance of categorial scheme, 138 n. 3
not a pure play of signifiers, 52, 60 on tools, 133 n. 1
role in multimedia, 233 mass production, 195
semantic and magical uses of, 221 materials
as system of differences, 64 and craftsman’s thoughts (Pirsig), 149–51
tacit logic of, 22, 43–48 synthetic, 188
tool, 68 n. 8 mathematical logic, and pragmatism,
transparency of, 49, 159 122–23
Lanier, J., on leaving virtual reality, 232 McDermott, J.
Lawrence, D. H., on laws and engines, 135 on body as probe, 191
Le Corbusier, 184 and Deweyan aesthetic critique, 167 n. 1
Léger, F. on urban aesthetic, 184 n. 9
circular forms in work, 154 McLuhan, M.
machine forms in work, 199 four laws of media (tetrad), 222
Leibniz, G., likens truth to numbers, 115 Levinson’s use of, 215, 215 n. 6
leisure, and labor, 201 on work, play, and art, 235 n. 11
Leroi-Gourhan, L., on universal aesthetic Mead, G. H., 7, 54
factors, 195–96 ‘I’ as result, 210
Leroy, M., 52 meaning(s)
Levenson, T., musical history of science, 148 consummatory and instrumental, 143
Levinson, P. defined by subsidiaries, 43
on abstraction and the alphabet, 233 n. 10 existential vs. representative, 42, 143
discussed, 215–24 had before cognized, 174
relation to McLuhan, 215–16, 218, 222 immediate, 175
on work, play, and art, 235 n. 11 linguistic and perceptual, 43–48
linear perspective vision, Romanyshyn on, as ordered contexts, 43
147 physiognostic, 42
linguistic relativity, 46–47 problem of criterion of, 109
linguistic sign, constitution of, 60–66 proximate and ultimate, 80
live creature, central Dewey concept, 172 self-moving, 45
logic, 106 tacit knowing as general theory of, 22
Vailati and Dewey on, 106 n. 5 teleognostic, 42
logocentrism, Cassirer breaks with, 210 meaning-making
Lohmann, J., 85 situated in fields, 12
Lotka, A., on artificial extensions of body, unlimited, 12
132–33 meaning-spheres, 66–67
synchytic concepts, 67
Mach, E., 153 mechanical vs. aesthetic, 195
and Vailati, 105 mechanic’s feel, 187
machinery, aesthetic sense of, 199 as norm and challenge, 151–52
machines mechanization, of communication, Innis on,
Dewey on, 149, 186, 195, 199 153
260 Index
media on material underpinnings of technics, 164

as information technologies, 215–37 on perceptual logic of technics, 164 n. 5
magic, 221 on photography, 146
real physical presences of, 229 technics as technical term, 131
mediation music
tools and signs run together, 208 instrumentation and science, 148
universal, 214 parallels with technology, 153
medium mythic consciousness, permanent possibility
carries qualitative pervasive whole, 144 of, 220
defines aesthetic effect, 193 myth(s), dangers of political, 220–22
defines rhythm, 186
Dewey on, 178–79, 186 nature
as means of expression, 178 congruity with humankind, 202
as mode of language,178 as matrix of technics, 224–37
mental processes, metaphors of, 111–16 as norm, 231–36
Merleau-Ponty, M., 62 as source of information, 227
blind man’s cane, 39 no unified sense of, 232
embodied consciousness, 139 needs, artificial, created through tools, 236
meaning in nascent state, 22 Nicolás, A., painful embodiment, 136
motility basic form of intentionality, 140 Nietzsche, F., 28, 111
phonological analogy, 62, 64 on machines and hubris, 135
metaphor(s) noetic-noematic correlations
of ascending and descending, 115–16 recognized by Dewey, 142
Bühler and Gardiner on, 74–78 shift in embodiment structures, 141
container, 114–15 noise, and vision, 197
fusion theory of, 76–77 normative, follows analytical dimension, 165
light metaphor in Vailati, 116
of mind, Vailati on, 111–16 Ong, W.
method, of this book logic and technology of writing, 162
retrieval and continuation, 12 philosophy as technological product, 162
rotation, vii, 4 Onians, R. B., 13
microscope on-line education, 218
changes proximity and distance ratios, 214 organization of energies, connection with
as form of embodiment, 147 rhythm, 177
Miller, A. I., 30 n. 5 organ-projection, 131–38, 203–15
mind organon-model of language, 53–60
distinguished from consciousness, 172 schema of, 58–59
as system of meanings, 172 Ortega y Gassett, J., on types of technology,
modeling, as intentional orientation 152
Stokes on, 188–89
moon Pacey, A., 150
as cultural vision, 148 on music and technology, 153
going to, 148 paintings, as windows, 154
motion, rotary vs. reciprocating, 152–53 Papini, G., 102, 116 n. 11
Mukarovsky, J., aesthetic realm defined, paradoxes, Vailati on, 126
169–70 Pareyson, L., 181
Müller, M., 118 Parker, K.
Mumford, L., 138, 219 on consciousness and infinitesimals, 24 n. 4
on glass, 154 on Peirce’s semiotic realism, 20 n. 2
iron fare of industrialism, 170 passions, intellectual and heuristic, 175
Index 261
Paul, H., 74, 80, 81 phonology, 62–65, 69–70

Peano, G., 100 photography
Peirce, C. S., 19–37, 56, 59, 61 effects migration of subjectivity, 216
abduction, 23 in relation to painting, 146
and analysis of technics, 223–24 instrumentalizes linear perspective vision,
consciousness as emergent function, 172 147
division of signs, 36, 223–24 physiognomic dimension, of technology,
‘I’ as result, 210 219
on laboratory mind, 107 physiognomic perception, 39
on mind as sign, 20 pictures, as windows
on perceptual matrix, 23–37 historically determined, 157
and philosophy of language, 48 n. 10 Pirsig, R.
semiotic realism, 20 n. 2 on craftsman, 149, 186–87
sense of fitness, 175 on mechanic’s feel, 150–51, 187
and Vailati, 100, 101 quality grasped on the margins, 173
perception Pikler, G., and Polanyi and Vailati, 110 n. 7
abductive, 23–24 place
and abstraction, 35–36 matrix of expressive energies, 237 n. 12
acritical, 27, 28 Santmyer on, 176 n. 6
difference from conception, 32 Updike on, 176 n. 6
embodied matrix of meaning, 48–50 versus space, 198
function of whole organism, 183 Plato, 54, 67, 83, 105
inherently expressive, 237 n. 12 Theatetus, 115
interpretive nature of, 27, 28, 35 play
lack of continuity of, 183 connection with work and art, 235 n. 11
model of consciousness, 19–50 of signs, vii, 20, 148, 212
physiognomic, 39 Plessner, H., on plasticity, 194
primacy of, 22 Polanyi, M., 19–50, 68, 95, 131–65. See also
qualitative types in, 36 indwelling, embodiment
role of signs in, 36 embodiment in language, 48–50
and semiosis, 19–23; as sign process, 35 from Gestalt to meaning, 37–48
skillful, 38 perceptual meaning as model and exemplar,
instance of thirdness, 27 21
perspective reformulation of intentional arc, 138–49
philosophical implications of, 158 relation to Bühler and Gardiner, 86
as picturing the world, 14, 154–59 skillful nature of knowing, 140–41
philosophy on tacit logic of language, 43–48
as activity in Vailati, 127 and technical embodiment, 149–63
attack on distinctions, 126–27 politician, as public fortune teller, 221
as eliminative and edifying, 125 Polya, G., 45
and method of retrieval and continuation, 12 Popper, K., 59
and method of rotation, 4 relation to Bühler, 85–86
needs rhetorical history, 163 Potter, V., 48
as practice of rhetoric of suspicion, 123–28 pragmatism, as philosophical framework of
pragmatist and semiotic tools, 15 book, 1–15
and semiotics, 121 Prall, D.
Socratic nature of in Vailati, 124 on aesthetic surface of experience, 169
as technological product, 162 on rhythm and the body, 178
two logics: spoken and written, 163 on scale and the body, 197–98
Vailati on task of, 124–25 precision, 32
262 Index
predicate remediation, 227, 228–29

grammatical, 78–83 representation
kinds of, 82–83 bridges perception and language, 43–48
logical, 78–83 Bühler and Gardiner on, 60–83
predication in Cassirer, 203–5
Gardiner’s account of, 82–83 in metaphor, 74–78
Wegener’s account of, 91–92 perceptual and linguistic, 23–37
predicational nexus, 57, 78–83 and predication, 78–83
premises in Vailati, 111–17, 123–28
of perceptual inference, 27, 34 in Wegener, 88–98
Polanyi’s conception of, 115 n. 10, 143 work of contrived order, 42
primary focus, 193 rhythm(s)
print, revolutionary aspect of, 194 aesthetic, 177
privitization of life, connection with mass and the body, 178
images, 183 Dewey on, 174, 176–78
probes, 39 higher and lower, 196–97
as attended from, 145 natural, Dubos on, 197
and embodiment, 39, 192 patterns in the land, 160
and indwelling, 39 permeate all sense modalities, 196
Janus-faced, 1 rationality among qualities, 177
probal nature of language, 49–50 somatic migration of, 196–97
projection, geometrical, rhetoric of, 156 of tools, 152
propaganda, and striving for effect, 232 universal scheme of existence, 176
proprioception, 38 ritual(s), and media saturation, 221
proximity and distance Ricoeur, P., dual nature of feeling, 172 n. 4
bringing the moon closer, 148 Romanyshyn, R.
connection with telescope, 148, 214 on camera and hegemony of vision, 147
dialectic of, 211 on impressionism, 158
on the moon, 148
quality Rossi-Landi, F.
aesthetic, 167–80 on Pikler and Vailati, 110 n. 7
connection with Cassirer, 236–37 on Vailati, 128 n. 15
Dewey’s theory of, 41 n. 8, 167–202 Rosenthal, S., 25, 27, 28, 53 n. 4
intensification of, in art, 176 Rothenberg, D., 224
of a medium, 144–45 on computer, 233
Peirce’s theory of, 41 n. 8 on hand’s end, 232
permeates experience, 172 on nature as norm, 231–36
Pirsig on, 173 on separation from nature, 232
of a place, 237 n. 12 Ruskin, J.
relation to quantity, 236 and argument of the eye, 181
ultimate norm of meanings, 236–37 and Dewey, 195
radio, 216 Sachwissen, 86, 96. See also collateral experience

rationality, aesthetic, as social norm, 198–202 Santmyer, H., on Ohio town, 176
realism, 20, 21 n. 2, 43, 45 Saussure, F., 52, 60, 61, 63
and language, 67 Scharfstein, B., 40 n. 7, 48 n. 9
reality, practical character of, 67 n. 7 schema, 29–32. See also Johnson, M.; Lakoff, G.
reduction, atrophy of senses, 145 corrolarial, 31–32
relativity, technological, parallels linguistic, 164 role in metaphor, 75
remedial technologies, 216 theorematic, 30–31
Index 263
science function as schemata, 30–33

embodied, 143–44, 148 icons in perception, 29–30
Galilean method, 103–4 makes the absent present, 3
ideal of Greek, 113–14 material quality and semiotic power, 163
modern instrumentally mediated, 148 social nature of, 65
as poem, 106 signification, pure
and pure signification, 204–5 in Cassirer, 204
as search for rhythms, 177 paradox of, 214
and technology, 143–44 Simon, J., 20
Vailati on nature of, 102–14 situation
self, created through embodiment, 175 Bühler and Gardiner on, 53–60
self-alienation, through tools, 236 types of, 56–58
self-change, not under agent’s control, 141 in Wegener, 89–98
self, sense of, bound up with technical doing, Skagestad, P., 28
210 skills
semiosis motoric, 38
encompasses all of mental life, 19–20 Polanyi on tacit nature of, 37–39, 140–41
and perception, 19–23 structural analogy between knowledge and,
and technics, 203–15 38
unlimited, 13, 19 universal relevance of, 140–41
semiotics. See also Cassirer, E.; Peirce, C. S.; Sleeper, R., on Dewey’s philosophy of
sign language, 53 n. 4
comparative in Vailati, 117–23 Snell, B., on discovery of the mind, 13
sober, vii socialism, logical, Vailati and, 123 n. 13
as viewpoint of book, 1–15 soft edge, of information, 215–24
sense, inherent tendency of to expand, 171 really hard, 224
sense-functions somaesthetics, 136
basis of distinction between, 203–5 somatic decay, connected with rock music,
structure all embodied mediations, 203–5 136
sense-giving, social matrix of, 83–84 space
sense of fitness, scope of, 175 abstract visual, 216
sensorium aural/tactile, 216–18
McLuhan on, 137 Cassirer on types of, 213
splitting of by alphabet, 217–18 tychastic, 198
sentences, nature of versus place, 198
Bühler and Gardiner on, 78–83 speech. See also language
connection with synthesis, 81 adjectival nature of, 71
emergent semantic quality of, 82 inner, 87
power engine of analysis, 82 and nature, 159–62
recognized by feel, 80 as opposed to language, Gardiner on,
Wegener on, 94 51–88
Shusterman, R. as primitive technology, 215–16
pushing meaning-making down, 168 purposiveness of, 83–87
somaesthetics, 136 social matrix of, 84
sign(s) speech-act, Bühler and Gardiner on how to
abstract nature of, 61–63, 65 model, 53–60
as abstraction devices, 73 Stokes, A.
Cassirer on, 203–15 on aesthetic control, 169
constitution of linguistic, 60–66 external world needs interpretation, 170
function in perception, 23–37 on externalization, 169, 189
264 Index
Stokes, A. (continued) economic system and aesthetics, 200

modeling and carving, 188–89 magic circle of, 164
noise and movement, 197 mimetic, analogical, symbolic, 205–6
on projection, 169 process-extending, 218
stone-blossom, 188 as technics, 131
stone-blossom, 188 telescope
Strauss, 182 n. 8 proximity and distance, 214
Stuhr, J., ix and the moon, 148
subject, grammatical and logical, 78–83 Ten Broeke, J., leading question, 164
subsidiaries, 230 tetrad, McLuhan’s four laws of media, 222
instrumental character of, 142 Thayer, H. S., on Vailati’s importance, 100
perilous nature of embodiment in, 165 Thelin, N., 84
Sudnow, D., 149 theory
symbolic constructionism, relation to as organism, 114
technics, 146 Vailati on nature of, 107–11
symbolic forms, 69 thinking
how many, 211 n. 4 as kind of conduct, 34
symbol(s), 50 melodic character of, 34–35
distinction between intuitive and verbal, thirdness, in perception, 36
235 Thom, R., 30
indispensable for thinking, 50 time
symbolism, logical, and defects of ordinary organic, memorial, symbolic, 213
language, 123 temporal ecstases, 174
synchytic concept, 85 tychastic, 220
synthesis, 25 tool(s)
as integrative act, 23–37 bipolar, 1
as tacit process, 37–48 breakdown of, 139–40
complex of vector-magnitudes, 211
tacit connection with machines, 13
acts give rise to coherent entities, 141 effects new thought-form, 211
knowledge of skills, 40, 140–41 in-order-to structure, 39
logic of consciousness, 22 intellectual and technical, 210
matrix of language, 22, 43–50 language as, 47–50
matrix of technological embodiment, primary form of sense, 2, 3, 4, 14
131–65 recession of, 190–91
nature of inference, 37–43 and rhythms, 152
technics. See also technology scope of concept of, 13–14
and aesthetics, 167–202, 219 transparency of, 191
embodied meaning-making, 131 used not observed, 140
as organ-projection, 131–38 transaction, between organism and field,
and semiosis, 203–15 170–71
as source of bias, 131–65 transparency
subsidiary roots of, 140 effect if digital technologies, 230
as symbolic form, 211 of a sign, 205
and theoretical knowledge, 219 of tools, 191
and ways of worldmaking 75, 146 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 182 n. 8
technology on building as complex activity, 184
abstract, significational, 232–33 n. 10
aesthetics of, 180–85 on touch and heart, 176 n. 6
changes meaning of nature, 232 type/token distinction, 63
Index 265
Uexküll, J. von, Cassirer’s use of, 225 relation to Bühler, 91

understanding, linguistic, Wegener on situation theory, 82, 89–91
preconditions of, 96–97 theory of language, 88–98
Updike, J., on packed earth, 176 n. 6 understanding, preconditions of, 96
use objects Welby, Lady, and Vailati, 111, 116 n. 12
not necessarily aesthetic, 182 White, L., Jr., on crank and rotary motion,
prior to industrialism, 181 152–53
Whitehead, A. N.
vague abstraction and concretion, 189–90
Peirce and Polanyi on, 47–48 on affective tones, 197
theological language as, 48 applied by Hall, 168
Vailati, G., 8–9, 99–128 body and causal efficacy, 178
on abduction and deduction, 102–11 on degradation of environment, 189–90
on Galileo, 124 on rationalization of consciousness, 190
on grammar of algebra, 117–23 on soul as sense of disclosure, 202
linguistic dimension of philosophy, 111–16 wholes, 3, 37, 42
metaphors of mind, 117–23 defined by fields of subsidiaries, 142–43
and Peirce’s theory of relations, 119 as ordered contexts, 143
on philosophy and rhetoric of suspicion, Wittgenstein, L., 54 n. 4, 58, 60, 66, 100
123–28 and Bühler, 85, 85 n. 17
point of view as metaphor, 116 n. 11 fitness of aesthetic artifact, 175
and Wittgenstein, 122 rope metaphor, 113
Valéry, P., poetry as hesitation between sound use of paradigmatic examples, 121
and sense, 163 and Vailati, 111, 112
values, new perceptual, 142 word
vectors as class name, 71
subsidiaries as, 142 form determined by feeling, 73
vector-magnitudes in Cassirer, 211 images of in Gardiner, 72 n. 10
vector fields, types of intentional, 165 relation to sentences, 94–96
velo, used by Alberti, 157 words and meanings, 66–74
Vermeer, J., use of camera ottica, 157 work, connection with play and art, 235 n. 11
Vienna Circle, 100 work of art, scope of, 185
virtual reality, 232 worker(s)
vision distortions of oligarchical control, 201
contrasted with language, 163 need for aesthetic satisfaction, 200
and noise, 197 worldmaking, ways of, exemplified in tech-
pictorial, 146 nics, 146
Voloshinov, V. N., 62, 70 worth, aesthetic, goal of individualization
Vorhabe, 143 process, 190
Vygotsky, L., 92 writing, 214
alphabetic, 159–63
Waddington, C. H., on painting and natural Levinson on, 216
science, 177 Wundt, W., 80, 81
Waismann, F., 74
Walter, E. V., on space and place, 237 n. 12 Young, J. Z., on adoption of new instru-
web metaphor, 56 ments, 144
Wegener, P., 52, 55, 56, 57, 79, 88–98
Gardiner’s use of, 82 Zeug. See tool; implement
metaphor, 96 Zijderveld, A., 159
on primacy of predication, 91–93 Zuboff, S., 150
Innis
P h il o s o p h y
cont i n ue d f ro m f ron t fla p
to present debates about the “biasing” of “ This is a work of rst-rate scholarship and deep-cutting philosophy,
Making sense of the world around us is a
perception by language and technics, Innis also replete with important insights and fruitful suggestions. The author brings
into sharp focus, above all else, language and what he calls (following process involving both semiotic and material
seeks to provide a methodological model of Ernst Cassirer) technics by drawing upon diverse traditions—principally Robert E. Innis

mediation—the use of signs and sign systems
how complementary analytical resources from the pragmatism of Peirce and Dewey, the phenomenology of Husserl,
Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, the work of Cassirer and Langer in the (preeminently language) and various kinds of
American pragmatist and various European
philosophy of symbolism, and that of Bühler and others in linguistics. He tools (technics). As we use them, we experience
traditions can be deployed fruitfully in the shows how these and related phenomena (for example, perception, action,
them subjectively as extensions of our bodily

pursuit of new insights into the phenomenon agency, and consciousness) are at once fully embodied and irreducibly
symbolic. His explorations of linguistic and other forms of sense ought to selves and objectively as instruments for
Pragmatism
of meaning-making. be of interest to a wide audience.”
accessing the world with which we interact.
—Vincent Colapietro, Penn State University
Emphasizing this bipolar nature of language
Robert E. Innis is Professor of Philosophy at and technics, understood as intertwined

American and European Philosophy Series
the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. Other books in the series
and the “forms of sense,” Robert Innis studies the
multiple ways in which they are rooted in and
Forms of Sense
The Primal Roots of American Philosophy: transform human perceptual structures in both
Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Native American Thought their individual and social dimensions.
by Bruce Wilshire
The book foregrounds and is organized around

The Purest of Bastards
Works of Mourning, Art, and Affirmation in the Thought of Jacques the notion of “semiotic embodiment.” Language
Derrida Language, Perception, Technics and technics are viewed as “probes” upon which
by David Farrell Krell
we rely, in which we are embodied, and that
themselves embody and structure our primary

You Must Change Your Life
Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense modes of encountering the world. While
by John T. Lysaker making an important substantive contribution
The Pennsylvania State University Press Penn

ISBN 0-271-02223-X
S tat e co ntinu ed o n b a ck fl a p
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Innis

Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense

Language, Perception, Technics

Robert E. Innis is Professor of Philosophy at and technics, understood as intertwined

multiple ways in which they are rooted in and

The book foregrounds and is organized around

themselves embody and structure our primary

by John T. Lysaker making an important substantive contribution

The Pennsylvania State University Press Penn

General Editors: CHARLES E. SCOTT and JOHN J. STUHR

Editorial Advisory Board

MITCHELL ABOULAFIA, University of Colorado • BETTINA BERGO, Worcester

The Pennsylvania State University Press

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

B840 .I56 2002

Copyright © 2002 The Pennsylvania State University

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free

Part One: Framing Language

1 On the Perceptual Roots of Linguistic Meaning 19

Part Two: The Senses of Technics

4 Technics and the Bias of Perception: The Tacit Logic of

embroiling it in such a labyrinth of qualifications, supplementations, and

Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense

Anyone who has ever used a ‘probe’ or ‘instrument’ of any sort—knitting

2 Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense

probe, who feel it as an integral part of our existence—and it points away

4 Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense

matist attempt to understand our ‘life in language’ as ‘action in a situation’

6 Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense

While I am in full agreement with this position, what if nevertheless the

8 Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense

word-meanings and things-meant, how to model metaphor, and the pred-

‘semiotic embodiment’ central to this book and shows the open-ended

10 Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense

perception by technics but also illustrates the centrality of the concept of

12 Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense

describing, the ‘transformations’ of the sensorium attendant upon our

14 Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense

On the Perceptual Roots of

1. Between Perception and Semiosis

20 Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense

Peirce’s central idea, formulated at the very beginning of his intellectual

Peirce’s theory of perceptual judgment requires the hypothesis of an independent exter-

On the Perceptual Roots of Linguistic Meaning 21

In spite of a quite different starting point and conceptual apparatus,

22 Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense

both an instance and an exemplar of semiosis or meaning-making. In one

On the Perceptual Roots of Linguistic Meaning 23

2. Peirce on the Perceptual Matrix

Abductive inference shades into perceptual judgment without any

24 Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense

being absolutely beyond criticism. The abductive suggestion

What induces for Peirce the abductive inference or perceptual judg-

We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g., tones and

4. Kelly Parker (1998, 125), speaking of Peirce’ account of consciousness as a sequence of

On the Perceptual Roots of Linguistic Meaning 25

whistling in the chimney, we hear the three-motored plane, we hear

In her helpful and provocative Charles Peirce’s Pragmatic Pluralism San-

26 Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense

synthesis because the perceptual field is characterized by the appearing of

On the Perceptual Roots of Linguistic Meaning 27

pretant sign of the object, and hence an instance of thirdness, and is

28 Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense