FOREWORD

By Thomas A. Sebeok

In an early approximation to the typology of visual vs. auditory signs--the sole dichotomy considered in his 1963 semiotic analysis--Roman Jakobson advanced the thesis that vision is man’s paramount spatial sense and audition his foremost temporal one. While, in the former, the principal structuring device is simultaneity, in the latter it is successivity. He spelled out why, in opposition to the synchronous semiotic type, vision, the sequential type, audition, requires a compulsory hierarchial buildup from discrete elementary components organized to serve a given communicative purpose. Jakobson’s concern was with man alone, but--as I had occasion to point out in a typologically oriented supplementary sketch on chemical signs written especially for his 70th birthday-- the contrasts he developed seemed so neat chiefly because they excluded from consideration all of the other multifarious media of communication at the disposal of the vast gamut of organisms, including man. It now turns out, however, that a popular model of the bicameral mind, with two underlying cerebral hemispheres ostensibly specialized to perform quite different but complementary tasks, lends added credence to Jakobson^’s view, as is palpable especially from the line of research pursued by Gordon H. Bower.

A few years before Jakobson’s analysis, in 1960, Frank A. Geldard, the premier human sensory physiologist, following upon the summary work of R.H. Henneman and E.R. Long in the mid-1950’s, reviewed the conditions under which visual coding seems to be indicated for man, contrasting this mode for casting messages with auditory coding. He identified six such requirements. In reviving “all this debate about eyes and ears,” Geldard’s motivating purpose was to raise his voice about still other possibilities, in particular, the tactile channel, and to focus on the human integument housing several modalities, “rivaling the ear as a temporal discriminator… and sharing with the retina the property of somewhat orderly spatial extension… .”

By 1964, it appeared pressing to me that we learn to predict the pivotal characteristics of every kind of sign propagated in no matter what form of physical energy. Thus I attempted to compare, in summary fashion, the advantages and disadvantages of chemical, optical, tactile, and acoustic systems--merely four among a multiplicity of other channels--gently probing why signs have the characteristics they do, but making it clear that “at this stage” the problem of typology could be adumbrated only in very modest, preliminary ways, for the sources of our ignorance were manifold. The existence and functioning of the aforementioned systems, and a few others--such as the increasingly appreciated electric channel, the semiotic properties of which have ingeniously been construed by Carl D. Hopkins--are certain, but, as the great animal psychologist, Heini Hediger, has repeatedly underlined, we consistently tend to underestimate the speechless creatures with respect to their sensorial efficiency. He points, for example, to the literature on the African rhinoceros, still replete with references to its extraordinary short-sightedness. Investigations carried out in the Zurich Zoological Garden during his directorship have, in fact, proved that the black rhinoceros has a better eyesight than the elephant and many species of antelope. The notorious Clever Hans episode, the far-reaching semiotic dimensions and profound lessons of which have, as yet, been scarcely understood, crucially hinged upon Oskar Pfungst’s demonstration that the horse--a paradigmatic ancestor of the Clever Dolphins of yesteryear and the Clever Apes, from the chimpanzee Washoe to the gorilla Koko, of our decade--is capable of perceiving the raising of eyebrows, the dilation of nostrils, or even unintentional movements in the human face of less than one-fifth of a millimeter. We now know that “muscle readers”--like the amazing Eugen de Rubini--“clairvoyants,” “rod diviners, and “psychics” or “seers” of the same ilk, can exceptionally do almost as well as “talking” horses, dogs, pigs, goats, geese, or, most recently, a Greater Spotted Woodpecker, whose linguistic performance has already been declared analogous to Washoe’s and Sarah’s, in decoding wittingly or unwittingly emitted, extremely subtle visual cues, some wide ranging implications of which for both science and daily conduct have been explored with insight and imagination by Robert Rosenthal. In a 1612 manual dealing with The Art of Juggling or Legerdemain, the first English-language volume devoted to conjuring, Samuel Rid commented, with shrewd percipience, on Morocco, the white steed known to Shakespeare as “the dancing horse,” and which was capable of stamping out with its hoof the total number of spots on a pair of rolled dice, the number of shillings in a person’s pocket, or the age of anyone who whispered it to his exhibitor: “mark the eye of the horse is always upon his master [the Scotsman John Banks, who, along with his learned horse, was, in the end, allegedly burned for witchcraft in Rome], and as his master moves, so goes he or stands still, as he is brought to it at the first… . And note also that nothing can be done but his master must first know, and that his master knowing, the horse is ruled by signs. This if you mark at any time you shall plainly perceive.”

As von Uexküll has so vividly impressed upon us, the umwelt, or phenomenal world, of each animal is shaped (and sometimes colored) by the very particular configuration of its sensorial apparatus. And as he had further observed, many of these worlds are necessarily invisible to humans. Thus we are incapable of perceiving ultraviolet, bordering on the x-ray region to about 400 nm, which is readily distinguishable by the honey bee, as Karl von Frisch has demonstrated, abridging the visible spectrum in the red but extending it to shorter wavelengths. Men likewise cannot see in the dark without special enhancing instrumentation, but infrared sensitive nocturnal mammals may come equipped, so to speak, with their own accouterment, the iridescent pigment choroid coat known as the tapetum lucidum, enabling them to exploit the faintest sources of ambient light.

Not only are the respective ranges of the sensorium of animals more or less at variance with ours and, of course, with those of one with another, yielding, at best, overlapping Umwelten, but also their relative acuity is sure to differ considerably. For instance, the sharp eye of an African vulture is capable of discriminating from a height of 4,000 m whether an object lying on the ground is a sleeping gazelle or the corpse of one. Hediger justly points out that “this is all the more extraordinary when we consider that, even with field binoculars, we are unable to identify the bird at such a height.”

I was fascinated recently to learn that the reciprocal exchange of visual signs between an animal sender and a receiver of another species may not only be imperceptible to a human observer--one would expect reaction times to be often much faster than ours, as elegantly demonstrated, since the early 1960^’s, by W.H. Thorpe in his acoustic work with several species of Laniarius antiphonal duet patterns (“the timing of the singing is normally so perfect that in no case would one suppose that two birds were involved…”)--but that some such signs might be actually reduced to zero. A zero sign is an important semiotic category, not at all the same as the mere absence of communication. The evidence for this comes from the Dutch psychologist F.J.J. Buytendijk’s slow-motion analysis of a film depicting a combat between a mongoose and a cobra, where the reaction time between the movements of both predator and snake were (in certain parts) zero. This means that such messages are not actualized but merely anticipated, much as they may be in a well-rehearsed pas de deux in a ballet, or, as Hediger surmises, in circus acts, “when the trainer causes the panther sitting on the pedestal to strike out with a fore-paw and draws back in precise accord with the movement, or when the springboard acrobat adjusts his reaction to the blow of the elephant’s foot at the other end of the plank.” D.N. Lee’s observation that body movements, e.g., sway, with respect to the layout of environmental surfaces can be driven phasically by minimal oscillations in optical expansion and contraction, or flow patterns at the eye, thus implies not only a mathematical correlation between coordinative structures and perceptual variables but that this relationship can be specified in highly precise fashion.

For the correct evaluation of the myriad events that take place between animal and animal or man and animal, and the nature of human dyads in their enormous diversity, it is imperative to understand the characteristics of the channels, or, more generally, of the media of transmission, that connect, singly, in alternation, or in concert, the source of any message with its destination. One must, additionally, take full cognizance of the structure of every intraspecific and interspecific message repertoire and the methods of coding peculiar to each, as well as the crucial role of the bionomic context of every communicative act. Senders and receivers, codes and messages, channels, and the pertinent ecology within which all of these function are known in only the most fragmentary fashion, here a piece of mosaic from the macroregion of the ethologist’s field or Hediger’s circus, there a piece from the microsphere surrounding the laboratory bench. The numerous and varied bits are, however, hardly ever assembled into a coherently framed ethogram. Our new state-of-the-art handbook, How Animals Communicate (Indiana University Press, 1977), like its more primitive forerunner, Animal Communication (1968), endeavored to present expert sketches of known channels of communication, as well as to exhibit, in selected groupings of animals, how these worked in vivo. I count it as my good fortune, and a blessing for us all, that Jack Hailman got carried away with his assignment to contribute the chapter on visual communication to the 1977 collection and failed to follow the publisher’s strictures with respect to length. His excess led to the inspired idea of this additional, separate monograph, which turns out not only to be the first book of its kind, but one that is bound to become an incitement as well as a model for comparable works on every other known major channel employed in the animal world, doubtless paving the way for an eventual synthesis incorporating the long awaited typology of terrestrial communication at large.

One chapter was excluded by mutual agreement: the one on optical signs in man. This discussion is of paramount interest, coming from this gifted and unusually broad-gauged investigator of animal behavior, and will appear as a long article in Semiotica. The mechanisms involved in human optical communication have very deep phyletic roots, considering the evidence, for instance, that animals share with man certain classic optical illusions, such as the Edgar Rubin type of figure-ground reversal effect. Hailman’s work is situated in the great tradition extending from Hermann von Helmholtz to R.L. Gregory, but he brings it to an added--and, to my mind, indispensable--dimension of sound evolutionary perspective. It is amply clear that optical processes in animals and man constitute a kind of semiosis which has as its source the regulation, or, to use Cannon’s term, with its curiously old-fashioned ring, homeostasis, of living organisms in nature and the stability of societal units both in nature and in culture. Organized systems (bodies, societies) tend to restore their equilibrium by the intermediary of certain devices following feedback stimulation from an unstable environment. One of Hailman’s principal tasks is thus to spell out how this particular kind of physiological adaptation frees all of us who can see from the perennial fluctuations of (as Claude Bernard might have put it) our milieu extérieur. His achievement lies in having delineated the universal aspects of optical communication without, however, having glossed over the quite disparate biological phenomena, those subtle but fundamental disparities that separate species from species, and man from the rest of the animal world.