II. BACKGROUND TO A SEMIOTIC APPROACH

Sixteen thirty-two is a year of great importance to semioticians. It marks the birth of John Locke, the man, as is well known, to whose work Peirce principally owed the inspiration for his conception of semiotic as "the doctrine of the essential nature and fundamental varieties" of signifying (Collected Papers 5.488). It is also the year, as is not (yet) so well known, of the publication in Iberia of a work virtually lost heretofore, which has so far proved to be the earliest full-scale realization of exactly the doctrine Peirce envisaged (cf. Herculano de Carvalho, 1969: 131-32). I refer to the Tractatus de Signis of John Poinsot,³ a treatise introduced by its author as being aimed at "explaining the nature and divisions of signs"—"ad explicandam naturam et divisiones signorum" (a formula amounting to a translation into seventeenth-century European school Latin of Peirce's definition of semiotic) ; or, as he puts it in slightly expanded form a few lines later, aimed at expounding "the two principal points concerning signs that must be considered, first, the nature and general definition of a sign, and, second, the classification of signs and the contents of each class in particular" ("circa ipsam rationem signorum duo principalia occurrunt disputanda: Primum de natura et definitione signi in communi, secundum de divisione eius et de quolibet in particulari").⁴

Now this distinction between the definition and the division or classification of signs, adverted to by both Peirce in his definition of semiotic and Poinsot in explaining the internal structure or scope of his Tractatus, is altogether fundamental and, I am inclined to believe, more important than has until now been generally perceived. I would go so far as to suggest restricting the term semiotic to the investigation of what a sign is as such, employing the term semiotics for the critical working out and comparative evaluation of divisions or 'classifications' of signs made now on this basis and now on that, in hopes of obstructing the common tendency (well noted by Greenlee, 1973:14) to bypass thorough consideration of what a sign is in favor of detailed analyses of this and that kind of sign—secondary concerns, of a certainty, inasmuch as such analyses always presuppose a range of implications, more or less consistent, in the notions of sign they deploy, which range demands explicitation all the more to the extent it is left unexamined (at least from the point of view of principle, theoretical elegance, and transparency).

But, without relying overmuch on this suggested piece of linguistic legislation (because of the huge improbability of its becoming generally adopted), we can see that while there is no one way of rightly dividing and classifying signs, but many ways, each legitimate from a critically aware point of view and superior or inferior in different respects,⁵ there is one way (not, of course, verbally and empirically but indeed conceptually and, as it were, "ontologically") of rightly defining and setting forth what a sign is, in the sense that no definition of signs that excludes any one or part of the many possible classifications of signs can be considered fully valid.

Yet these tasks, though distinct, are by no means entirely separable. For how could one approach the task of defining what a sign is, unless one were already familiar with examples of signifying? And who can be familiar with examples of signifying without being aware of fundamentally different examples and varieties of signifying? Thus a critical classification of signs, though in principle never the only possible one, is nevertheless necessary as a preliminary to any attempt to define signs, which definition in turn (as we saw above) will serve to ground any classifications and measure their justice. Classification and explanation in this field (semiotics and semiotic, if you like) are related as provisional and (in possibility and principle, at least) definitive phases in the statement of a doctrine of signs.

Poinsot's Tractatus shows the original genius of its author in both these phases of investigation, it seems, though more crucially, of course, in the latter, foundational aspect. When I was invited to develop an essay on the origin of semiotic, I first thought of Poinsot's unique historical position and the innovative elements of his work retrospectively and prospectively viewed. I saw in the invitation an opportunity to deepen and extend the attempt to situate historically the thrust of Poinsot's Treatise (Deely, 1974b :876-905). However, when the invitation was followed by newsletters limning the scope of the program proposal out of which this volume developed and its theme of signaling behavior in man and animals, the philosophical side of me quickly bested the inclinations to pursue academic historical considerations in my presentation. My long-standing interest in evolutionary matters prompted me to re-interpret the phrase origin of in my title along, as it were, Darwinian lines; and I began to think of the origin of semiotics not in the sense of textual and authorship priorities (see note 9, below) but rather in the sense of the semiotic behavior that gave rise to the possibility of semiotic treatises in the first place. That is, I began to think in terms of the essential structure of the semiosis of mankind as it differs from that of the anthropoids and other animals generally, so far as this difference might be clarified by a consideration of the theoretical framework of Poinsot's work—the "doctrina" of signs.

Why is the sign, empirically considered, an ambiguous reality, susceptible of myriad classifications and transformations in the course of public life? More particularly, how do the terms of Poinsot's theory of signs, his semiotic and semiotics, assimilate this irrecusable fact of experience?

III. HISTORICAL EXCURSUS: SEMIOTIC AND SEMIOTICS IN JOHN POINSOT

Let me begin by summarizing briefly the terms of Poinsot's semiotic and his classification of signs, in order to show where they intersect with the problem of ambiguity posed above for present consideration. Then, with the intersections marked, we can explore the problem in detail in the light of Poinsot's theory.

Poinsot's work belongs to the period of Latin scholasticism, a milieu that had its origin in the sixth-century translations by Boethius of Aristotle's categories and its demise in the seventeenth-century stirrings of the national language traditions that roughly marked the end of medieval and the beginnings of modern times. Poinsot comes at the very end, then, of a linguistically unified and internally rich tradition that covers approximately eleven hundred years of our intellectual biography.

Throughout the medieval period, the dominant focus of semiotic concern was neither linguistic nor philosophical—though the currents were there—but theological (the sacraments of the Church as signs). The definition of signs that gave precision to this focus was the one essayed by Augustine in the fifth century and incorporated by Peter Lombard in Book IV of his Sentences, the universal medieval textbook after its completion c. 1150-1152. Augustine defined a sign as "something that, besides the impressions it conveys to sense, makes something else come into cognition."⁶ Translating more freely, we can say that Augustine defines the sign as anything that, on being perceived, brings something besides itself into awareness. Thus Sebeok's observation (1974:240) that, historically, signs tend to be conceived of as sensible phenomena first of all, is certainly warranted in the period from which Poinsot's work comes.

In this context, the originality of Poinsot's semiotic first manifests itself in his taking exception to this all but universal way of characterizing signs as, not invalid tout court, but restrictive of our understanding of signs in an a priori way, i.e., in a way not warranted by sufficiently thorough attention to what is most central to our experience of the action of signs (semiosis).⁷ For what is experimentally central and primary in our use of signs is not their being sensible but their being relative. Wherever there is in awareness "a representation of one thing not only for itself, but for another thing distinct from itself," there is the use of a sign.⁸ What is essential to the sign, truly by all accounts this side of sophistry, is that it be relative ad alterum; but from this it does not follow that the sign, as such, must itself be something in the order of sensible phenomena—and, moreover, sufficient attention to our experiences reveals that the sensible signs of our perception, as something present in our awareness, already depend for that presence on something besides themselves, namely, on an intraorganismic factor (Deely, 1972a, 1975a: 90-94, 1975b:277-92), the perceptions and conceptions of things formed by the work of a cognizing organism. This work thus already produces something relative to its objects in just the way that some among perceived objects are relative to other objects as their signs—that is, as serving in awareness to make present something that they themselves are not. The idea that has horses for its object, for example: horses are not ideas, but ideas of horses cannot exist without making horses present in our awareness. The idea of a horse, in short, is entirely relative to its object; and so it is for all the products of mentation as such—imaginations, estimations, memories, concepts, percepts : they are not the objects that we cognize directly, but that on the basis of which the objects or whatever else that we cognize are present in our awareness. They are a source of the objective being of occurrences, without themselves being perceived preliminarily as "objective" phenomena in their own right.

These remarks, pregnant with not a few subtleties, contain the whole semiotic of Poinsot. Moreover, they open doors in epistemology—the philosophy of mind and knowledge—closed since the time of Descartes's identification of objective with ideal being, a move in which, unfortunately, even Locke as much as followed Descartes's lead. That, however, is another story; but it hardly seems too much to say that we have, in the confrontation at last between the account of ideas as pure signs of objects and the account of ideas as the first of all our objects of experience, an entirely new chapter in philosophical thought and the way out of the proclivity toward solipsism that has characterized modern thought since its origins in the seventeenth century.⁹

Sticking to our immediate concern, we may outline Poinsot's definition and division of signs on the basis of the above remarks, as follows. If we shrive the traditional, Augustinian definition of signs of its element restrictive a priori, and define signs strictly in terms of what is central to our experience of signifying, we shall not say that a sign as such makes an impression on the senses, but simply that it makes present in cognition something other than itself. Since a sign is something relative to another for a cognizing organism, Poinsot continues, signs may well be divided either from the point of view of their relativity to what they signify, or from the point of view of their relativity to the one for whom they signify. From the first point of view, they divide according to the foundation or causes of their relativity (understanding "cause" in the fundamental sense of dependency in being—in this case, as that on which the significant relativity proximately depends for its exercise) into signs based upon stipulation, nature, or custom: signa ad placitum, naturalia, and ex consuetudine. From the second point of view, they divide according as the foundation of their relativity is not or is itself an object of sense perception into what Poinsot calls formal signs (because they form and structure objects directly apprehended, constituting them as known, while remaining distinct from those objects) and instrumental signs: signa formalia and instrumentalia.

First a few more words on what is innovative about Poinsot's classifications of signs, before discussing his account of the relativity constitutive and definitive of all signs as such—his semiotic proper, the account of what it is for anything to be a sign.

The division of signs into formal and instrumental—the explicit thematization and appellation of this contrast—may well have been original with Poinsot. Certainly the aspects of experience brought together in this designation had already begun to be discussed in what appears to us as a generally semiotic context at least as early as William of Ockham (d. 1350), and probably much earlier. Whether Poinsot's actual terminology here is to be found in some other and earlier authors is an historical question that cannot be answered decisively at this time. Preliminary researches of my own have turned up no traces of such usage, and certainly, once one sees how directly the classification of formal signs follows from Poinsot's criticism of the a priori element in Augustine's definition, which was accepted as standard throughout the milieu of the Latin scholastics, it would not be surprising to find that we have here a neologism, so to speak, of Poinsot's own coining.¹⁰

For present concerns, however, it is his other division of signs into natural, customary, and stipulated that holds the greatest interest, because it is this division that takes us straight into the empirical ambiguity of semiotic networks. In our experience, the contrast between what Poinsot calls stipulated and natural signs arises out of and passes back into the reality of customary signs. As we shall see, it is just this expertmentum that Poinsot's semiotic enables us to explain. Customary signs are the particular sort of signs that provide, in function of the sort of relative being proper to all signs as such, the interface between nature and history, the structure and cement of cultural traditions as something added to the social life of anthropoids.

The distinction between signa ad placita and signa naturalia, nominally considered, is not by any means original with Poinsot. It comes to him from a long tradition of medieval semiotics and was already present in the semiotics of Roman stoicism, the Cratylus of Plato, and throughout Aristotle. In our own American-English heritage it has come down to us most commonly as the distinction between "conventional" signs, on the one hand, and "natural" signs (clouds-rain; smoke-fire) on the other. This usage, in turn, goes back principally to the social contract theories of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers in England and France, taking deep root in our own political and social heritage from those philosophers.

Yet the long history and widespread usage of this distinction is, when it comes to Poinsot, almost sure to be misleading. Here, as at all points in his treatment of signs, superficially traditional and common terminology has had its sense transformed by employment in the wake of his account of the relativity constituting the being proper to signs in cognition. Few terms (perhaps only one—the traditional term ensrationis) better illustrate this than the present example. Poinsot would find the conventional-natural dichotomy of modern languages simply insufficient to support a minimum critical understanding of either the common ground or the dividing boundary between human and animal semiosis. For this, a trichotomy at least of sensible signs is required; for, while several animals emphatically do use signs that are conventional (Maritain, 1957:90-91; Sebeok, 1975b:90-91; von Frisch, 1954, 1967; and many others), they do not use signs that are, in Poinsot's sense, ad placitum.

Thus, in Poinsot's semiotic, any simple dichotomy between the signum ad placitum and the signum naturale is misleading, bound to obfuscate and probably miss what is distinctive in the semiotic contrast between men and animals; for it is in the twilight zone of the signa ex consuetudine, whence natural, "conventional,^” and stipulated signs alike arise and return, that anthropo- and zoosemiotics merge and define a common ground.¹¹ The signaling behavior of the higher animals has its origin here.

Leaving the extended consideration of Poinsot's signum ex consuetudine to the following theoretical and main section, therefore, let me conclude this historical excursus with a brief statement of Poinsot's explanation of the being common to signs as something relative, for it is this in the end that governs all the other elements of his theory, including, as I have said, his twofold classification of signs.

The discussion of relative being in the Latin West goes back to the seventh chapter of Aristotle's book of Categories, translated and commented upon by Boethius in the sixth century A.D. (Krempel, 1952). The gist of that discussion, as it culminates in Poinsot, may be summarized as follows.

A being can be relative in two distinct and exhaustive senses. When something is said to be "relative," the thing referred to may be either (1) an individual that requires for its full intelligibility the bringing into account of other things besides itself—e.g., a dent in a previously undented garbage can "refers" to something besides the garbage can, even though the dent is in and is not at all distinct from the can itself ("non est forma adveniens subiecto seu rei absolutae, sed illi imbibita, connotans tamen aliquid extrinsecum, a quo pendet vel circa quod versatur," Poinsot would say); or (2) a relation considered precisely as a supra- and intersubjective reality existing between though quite dependently upon at least one of two or more individual existents. Anything that is relative must be such in at least one of these ways;¹² and so the problem of signs' relativity as signs comes down to the question of which of these two conceptions circumscribes the relative being constitutive of the sign as such.¹³ Taking over the terminology current in the Latin tradition from Boethius' day, Poinsot designates the former relativity as relativum secundum dici, or (synonymously) transcendeutal relation;¹⁴ the latter relativity he designates as relativum secundum esse, which I translate as "ontological relation."

Ontologicai relation, as Poinsot understands it and makes of it the ground of signifying, is closely related to the notion of "external relation" as it has come to be familiar in recent times, particularly through the work of Bertrand Russell. That is, by identifying the relative being proper to signs as ontological rather than transcendental, Poinsot makes of signifying an intersubjective reality that overcomes and unites the otherwise isolated individuals making use of signs ("in whom those signs are founded"). But for Poinsot what is decisive about ontological relation is its indifference to being caused by or caused independently of the activities of perception and conception—what I have elsewhere characterized as "the functional equivalence of real and unreal relations in perception" (1975a :96-97) and "indifference to subjective ground" (1974b :870, 1975c:486). It is this fact, true only of pure relations, that explains the empirical ambiguity of signs, as well as (or what is perhaps the same as) their relative indifference to the physical reality of what they signify (Deely, 1971b, 1972a, b, 1975b:276-92): a given relation, formed once by nature, another time by mind, is equivalent for signifying precisely because the relation is in either case an intersubjective mode of being, having its proper reality in the union of two (or more) otherwise distinct objects.

When one realizes that, for two hundred years before Poinsot (Ockham to Suarez) and for another two hundred years after him (e.g., unanimously in the works of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant), the reality—i.e., the possible mind-independent character—of external relations was flatly denied in the mainstreams of modern thought (Weinberg, 1965: esp. 112-16), one begins to suspect something of the revolutionary potential of his account of signs. But that again is another story.¹⁵

To see in detail how Poinsot's identification of ontological relation as the being proper to signs accounts both for their empirical ambiguity and for their differential (as well as for their common) function in human and animal semiosis, it suffices to concentrate on his account of customary or "behavioral" signs (signa ex consuetudine) as they merge and contrast with natural and stipulated signifyings.

IV. THE AMBIGUITY OF SEMIOSIS AND THE SIGNA EX CONSUETUDINE

Signaling behavior in men and animals, the theme of these reflections, takes one straight to the center of semiotic concern. Taking signaling in what I believe to be the most ordinary, or at least paradigmatic, sense—the sort of information passed by semaphore, between merchant marine vessels during World War II—at once brings us into the realm of what Poinsot terms signa ex consuetudine, habitual signs, the signs by which one anthropoid population develops a sign-system which, while not impenetrable to outside interpretation and understanding, is easily recognizable as an "in-group" or even "ethno-centric" sign-system. It is a "private language" in the only real sense of "private" —something that, while not immediately available in interpreted terms from A to B, could of course become so if sufficient critical control were exercised by В (or A, for that matter) over its objectification—the sort of thing demonstrated, e.g., in the work of Altmann (1968), Carpenter (1969), and countless other careful students of animal behavior.¹⁶

The operation of these signs defines or roughly circumscribes the animal populations—such as dolphins, some dogs, certainly men and apes—that are most interesting in the contrasts they provide to the innate, or genetically endowed and determined, perception-pattern-response mechanisms found in numerous (far more numerous) other species of animals, ranging from ducklings to the astounding array of the insect (or "exo-skeletoned") animals.

Yet, as the naturalist thinks more and more about the semaphore example, it illustrates certainly a form of behavior that is by no means confined to the historically more versatile species and forms of biological life. Many are the gene-dominated systems of display that function in exactly semaphoric ways, from the sexual display of the peacock to the million other "trigger mechanisms" that define populations all the way up, down, and across the scale of sexually compatible, cross-fertile biological populations.

This brings out the first decisive ambiguity in the category of customary signs : the need for distinguishing them from signa naturalia, the signs that seem connected to what they signify in ways that, while no doubt historically conditioned (since the world, as distinguished from what could have been the world, is history), yet fall fully outside the social control of the group perhaps even genetically determined to use them in reflex or "semaphoric" ways.

For higher animals, for the anthropoid and many mammalian populations, let us say, clouds and rain, smoke and fire, the favorite examples of semioticians throughout the New and Old World periods of philosophical semiosis, serve perfectly well to illustrate the sort of natural relation constitutive of the signa naturalia involved even in trigger or releasor mechanisms of sexual and predatory animal behavior.

How is this so? While the display of peacocks, let us say, may serve immediately as a trigger from organism A to B, it is not at all in this way that, from Jones to Hati, clouds are signs of rain. Here experience intervenes, there it does not: how can the two be put on a par?¹⁷

Because, Poinsot demonstrates, if one is sufficiently patient in the analysis of the way experience intervenes in the constitution of behavioral, or customary, signs (signa ex consuetudine, the signs based on experienced associations of X and Y as constant relative to Q), one will be able to see how they differ from all objectively natural signs, regardless of whether or not experience intervenes in the apprehension of what is natural about the signification. For what is "natural" about the designation of a sign as "natural" in the experience of its difference from a merely consuetudinal sign is this: among the signs that have a relation to what they signify dependently more upon experience than upon the genetic constitutions of the organisms for which they signify, some turn out, upon sufficiently controlled observation, to be connected with what they signify entirely due to the social action whereby they became signs (became assimilated as relative within cognition) in the first place; while others, in addition to being conjoined to something signified through experience, also turn out—or so give every reason to believe—to be conjoined antecedently to and partly independently of our experience of their conjunction. Thus they are natural signs— signa naturalia—in precisely the sense that releasors, as we observe their function, signify something as related in but on a ground antecedent to (independently of in this sense) our or any other organism's awareness of the connection.

This clears the way for recognizing, within the class of consuetudinal signs common to the populations of higher anthropoids, i.e., defined by the acquisition of significance largely as the product of the experience of social interaction, the inevitability of a natural overlap or mutual penetration of the semiotic fields defined by "natural" (gene-dominated) and "social" (experience-structured) semiotic behavior: for, as elements of experience become assimilated through cognition to other elements of experience, it will not necessarily be apparent whether the source of associations and sequences is at bottom society alone, organic disposition (‘heredity') alone, or society and nature "in collusion" (as Poinsot describes the naturally determined interactions that lead to objectification in cognitive life¹⁸).

Even when it is due to society alone, the process of assimilation of X through experienced behaviors to the status of sign of Y may take place so unobtrusively and on the fringes of thematic consciousness that it transpires entirely 'naturally', i.e., as if independently of conscious awareness: for so it is indeed relative to the consciousness of any particular one, and to that of the many ("das Man”) who have "better ways" (or at least more commonly absorbing ones) to occupy their attentions than reflexion upon socialization processes as such (hence the "cultural unconscious" [White, 1973:163-78]).

Thus we see that the ambiguity in the type of signs circumscriptive of higher primate behavior is not something that can be entirely remedied or defined away: to signify consuetudinally is to signify naturally, not of itself, but in respect of those for whom the connection is established; nor is it unusual for two modes of signifying to attach to the same thing under different aspects of its objectification.¹⁹

Here we arrive at the semiotic boundary between what Poinsot calls, in the quaint term of the old scholastics, "brute" and human animals. It is here that Poinsot's semiotic defines an interface between the activities and attainments of perception as such, and the peculiar work of human understanding in the spinning of semiotic webs.²⁰

Consider the sort of creative activity whereby laws are enacted, or that whereby conquering neologisms are introduced. A neologism—such as was Aristotle's sense of "substance" added to the consuetudinal force already attached (by earlier Greek society)to οὺσία, or such as seems to have been Poinsot's signum formale category in the usage of European society both before and after 1632 (the year of the publication of his Treatise), or Teilhard de Chardin's "biosphere" (or indeed Locke's "semiotic")—is precisely a new classification, a new shaping, of things, and it is obviously bound up with the free initiatives, the "stipulations," of its originator, just as laws re-define and order things according to authoritative stipulations. To illustrate: Before Aristotle, there may have been what Aristotle stipulated "substance" to refer to (yet it was not there as an object of thematic awareness before Aristotle). But "substance" in Aristotle's sense, or the term substantia that came from οὺσία in the cultural traditions of the Latin West uniquely as a result—so far as critical control of sources is able to maintain—of Aristotle's work: this is considerably more than a signum ad placitum ²¹ It carries a freight of history and functions in the traditions of Latin Aristotelianism as a signum ex consuetudine as well as ad placitum (with the further ambiguities that implies).

The same remarks extend, mutatis mutandis, to each of the above examples, or to whatever others.

We have here the second of the two ambiguities in the class of signs we experience ex consuetudine : the need for distinguishing among them as now ad placitum and now relatively naturale, or functioning in this segment of the population predominantly one way and in that segment of the population the other, now at this time, now at that time.²²

What is the basic contrast between a signum as ad placitum and a signum—rooted perhaps in one and the same objectified physical thing —as ex consuetudine, on the way to becoming or already established, within a given population, on a par with clouds as signs of rain and even with releasors and trigger mechanisms?

A signum ex consuetudine acquires or retains (as the case may be) the dimension or status of ad placitum, we may say as a first approximation, to the extent that an individual or a group exercises conscious critical control over its objectivity and mind-dependent status as such; while that same signum, to the extent in its ex consuetudine functioning that it falls outside the critical control of our society or group precisely as including ourselves —be we pumas, arboreal apes, lemurs, dinosaurs, or "men"—that same sign ex consuetudine is a signum naturale²³

Critical control of objectivity, then—a notion our remaining paragraphs will put in sharper relief—is the key to the human world of names for things. (I choose the case of names specifically only in view of the texts from Poinsot that will be cited and developed just below. The specific case of descriptions would do equally well [Deely, 1972a:41, 42-43, 1975b:278]; for, generically, what is at stake here is any use of signa ad placitum or ex consuetudine, of which namings happen to be but the simplest instance, depending more principally on what is stipulated than on what is conventional about their significance.) For a thing's name, as an element of human language ad placitum, is what Poinsot calls an impositio, while that same thing's name, as an element of human language ex consuetudine, need be no more than what he calls a comparatio (an employment of a term or terms that can be made, for practical purposes, "sine discernendo relationem fictam a reali"²⁴).

Here is Poinsot's description of the difficulty. As a matter of daily experience,

The functioning and use of customary signs among animals is guaranteed by the fact that some non-human animals are capable of learning by experience, and do not initially perceive some things that

To this a behaviorist would be inclined to say: So what? Frequently a human animal fails to understand a word on first hearing, and then afterwards is conditioned to understand it. There is no ground here for distinguishing between animals that grasp relations between signs and signata also as based on stipulation (human animals) and animals that grasp those same relations only on the basis of some other form of reinforced association (brute animals). For children, too, do not learn their names from a first hearing, but must be accustomed (conditioned) to them.

But, for Poinsot, the elevation of a customary sign to a stipulated status is not a question of when the relation of sign A to significate В is grasped—from the first or only after repeated efforts—but of how it is grasped: "discernendo inter ens verum et fictum," vel non.²⁷ (One could also approach this conclusion by an analysis from the side rather of the sort of cognitive ability at play in the circumstance, in terms of how objects, including sign-objects, are graspahle by an organism of a given type [Deely, 1971a:55-83, 1973:134-36,].) When a customary sign in the strictest sense, a sign wholly dependent for its being on social interaction, is seen precisely by a given organism as a mind-dependent being in some pure respect, set off against nature as what is as against what is not dependent upon our perceptual and conceptual activities—the work of our minds—then, and only by that act of insight, does the signum naturale ex consuetudine acquire the added and distinct dimension of a sign ad placitum, i.e., a signum expressive of the way things are more dependently upon than independently of self-conscious awareness.

Thus, the clarification of Poinsot's notion of signa ex consuetudine as something common to the semiotic behavior of higher anthropoid populations uncovers two fundamental differences underlying the variety of signs present in the experience of those populations. On the one hand, there are signs related to what they signify in our experience, only some of which seem entirely dependent thereon: and this is the difference between signa ex consuetudine simply speaking and signa naturalia. On the other hand, among the signs that result from experience alone, some are recognized as so resulting, while others are not discriminated at all in their contrast with natural signs: and this is the difference between signa ad placita and signa ex consuetudine.

Here, then, we have the difference introduced earlier between a given sign known now owing to an imposition, now owing to a comparison. When a sign is known according to an imposition, that sign is a mind-dependent being recognized as such. But when a sign, though perhaps a mind-dependent being, is known solely because of a comparative perception of environmental features (acoustical, visual, etc.), its mind-dependent status need not be recognized as such in order for it to elicit quite determinate and 'satisfactory' practical responses. Thus, says Poinsot, we do not deny to non-human animals the grasp of stipulated signs on the grounds that they are unable to relate names to objects named, since this they unquestionably do, but "for want of their grasp of universality, because they do not cognize the more universal reasons by discriminating between true and fictive beings,"²⁸ though they do indeed grasp less universal reasons by discriminating between what is to be sought and what avoided (what the scholastics called 'accidental universais'— universale quod pertinet ad accidentia alicuius rei existentis, or universale quod est accidens [Deely, 1971a:55-83, esp. 72-76]), and materially employ in this light fictive beings as means to ends of vital preservation and well-being, not only in the pretenses and deceits of animal 'lying' (Sebeok, 1974:243, text and fn.82), but in the many forms of adaptive camouflage (Huxley, 1942: chapter 8) and problem-solving (e.g., Harlow, 1959: esp. 44—45), and even in the use of wholly arbitrary or "conventional" symbols (Maritain, 1957:90-91; Sebeok, 1975b:90-91) : "quod est cognoscere non formaliter id, quod in ratione entis fingitur, sed materialiter id, ad cuius instar fingitur, quod in se non est."²⁹

Yet the human animals, through their senses and by their habits, remain animals; and the order of stipulated signs as a semiotic region or zone restricted (so far as presently known biological forms go) to homo sapiens, is also, by custom, extended beyond man to whatever brute animals are brought into sufficient contact with us that they take comparative note of our conduct and adapt accordingly. In this way, the creative intrusions of individual genius, such as neologisms witness, just as the decisions of legal authorities, become established as part of the historical consciousness of a group rooted in its own customs and lifeways. Individual discovery is assimilated and socialized in the patterns of this or that society and civilization; what has its origin in the mind becomes through custom relatively independent of the mind and "naturalized."

Thus we speak of English and German as "natural languages" (ex consuetudine?), in contrast to the "artificial languages" (ad placitum?) of the symbolic logicians. Yet what is artificial to the non-logician is a system of constructs the logician feels at ease in; and English in the hands of Shakespeare abounds in artifice. Yet Hund to the German is as natural a sign for chien, as dog is to the Englishman; while clouds are signs of rain for all anthropoids :

V. CONCLUSION

These insights drawn from the semiotic of John Poinsot cast, I believe, an unusually clarifying light upon such standard remarks of contemporary anthropology as these by Harlow (1959:44):

The terms of Poinsot's theory enable us to grasp the origin of the human world in a semiotic act—the act of insight into the mind-dependent status of certain signs as such (Deely, 1975a:94-96, 98-99; Maritain, 1943:191-95, esp. 194 fn. 2, 1957:88-91; Poinsot, 1632)—that is in itself not empirically observable but is rather that on the basis of which the empirically observable is apprehended, here as it derives from the workings of nature, there from the workings of mind.

The effects of such insight—response to and the further development of truly linguistic signs—of course, are not unobservable empirically, and are so closely connected with the unobservable act of insight with its formal signs (being the expression and fullness thereof) that we are, at one level, almost inevitably inclined to mistake the two (e.g., Brown, 1958:82-83, 102-103)—a procedure that becomes a veritable matter of principle in the "pure" versions of behaviorist semiotic (e.g., Osgood, 1953:410, 681).

This original potential for semiotic ambiguity—the origins of semiosis in formal signs inaccessible to external sense—is further compounded by the process of assimilating ad placitum usage to the world of customs, which begins just as soon as insight expressed in sensible signs begins to enjoy the least measure of social success. Through this assimilation the achievements of one or a few become the heritage of many, available in subtly transmogrified forms not only to men, but to animals that perceive with interest the behavior of men.

It is in terms such as these, I believe, that semiotics insofar as it is influenced by Poinsot's account will advance in decisive ways our understanding of the human mind, its relations to nature, and its dependence upon history and cultural traditions.

NOTES

1. Leslie White (1959:74), in his "Summary Review" at the end of the volume containing Hockett's essay, takes exception to such assertions.

2. It is not a question here of whether such claims are or have ever been valid from a sufficiently sophisticated critical standpoint. (The answer to that question is no: see, inter alia, Deely, 1975a: esp. 94-95, 98-99; Sebeok, 1975b: esp. 88-89.) What is of interest rather is the depth of the ambiguity attested by the fact that such claims are dissoluble only by the most refined critical techniques, and are no sooner rebutted in one formulation than they are reasserted in another.

The general character of this complex and troublesome source of ambiguity has been well limned recently by Sebeok (1975b:90): "A fair sample of the most commonly acknowledged and utilized signs—including signal, symptom and syndrome, icon, index, symbol, and name—were subjected to detailed scrutiny, particularly in the light of recently accumulated data on non-verbal communication, with the unexpected result that every type of sign thus analyzed has been found to occur in the animal kingdom as well as in human affairs."

3. The description of Poinsot's Tractatus as a "virtually lost work" is not excessive, despite the fact that certain secondary elements from his account of signs, as I will describe in note 10 below, have come in very recent times to attract some interest. For, in the very limited circle of those aware of the existence of Poinsot's account, none that I have been able to find have drawn upon it in such a way as to exhibit its systematic origins in and the dependence of its various elements upon the prior account of relative being (from which also hangs the notion of ens rationis). This is a somewhat surprising fact in view of Poinsot's quite explicit insistence upon this point both in his Foreword to the Treatise at 642a24-37, esp. 642a30-37, and in his opening paragraphs and most formal statement of the thrust of the Treatise in Book I, Question 1, 646b16-45, esp. 646Ы6-25 and b22-25. Yet, this fact is well calculated to illustrate the contrast I shall shortly suggest and insist upon (not terminologically, to be sure, but conceptually) between semiotic as the general doctrine of what a sign is and semiotics as the classification of signs into specific types. (The manner of referring to the text of the Treatise in terms of page, column, and line is set forth in the note immediately following.) Indeed, only in Maritain (1943:192) is there so much as a passing reference to this doctrinal origin, and that in but a single sentence.

If we look to the wider context of the semiotics movement proper, moreover, despite the Poinsot-based essay of Maritain (1943) and the systematic exposé with texts of Herculano de Carvalho (1969) covering about two-thirds of the Treatise, not even the most limited awareness or trace of Poinsot's pioneering doctrine is to be found as late as Jakobson's celebrated "Coup d'Oeil sur le Développement de la Semiotique," delivered at the opening of the First Congress of the International Semiotic Association in June of 1974, and published the following year.

This general ignorance of Poinsot's work, coupled with specific unawareness of its proper foundations as mentioned above, will explain the somewhat awkward circumstances of my having to rely on references to my own published articles as the principal research background for the ideas developed in the present essay so far as they derive from the doctrina rather than merely from the divisio of signs Poinsot proposes.

4. Both these formulae are from the Foreword to John Poinsot's Treatise on Signs, trans, by John Deely (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forth-coming), 642a20-21 and 642a38-b43, respectively. Page, column, and line references are to the 1930 Reiser edition of Poinsot's Ars Logica (Turin: Marietti), in which the Latin text of the 1632 Treatise is incorporated, as I have explained more fully elsewhere (Deely, 1974b:858ff.). These "Reiser numbers" will appear in the margin of the published English translation (as, for example, the Bekker numbers appear in good translations of Aristotle), with the English text set alongside the original Latin of Poinsot on the subject of signum in the Cursus Philosophicus completed finally in 1635.

The reader may note that what in my earlier articles (1974b and 1975c) are referred to as Appendix A and Appendix B of Poinsot's Treatise, are here referred to as the Second and First Preamble, respectively, to that same Treatise. The material referred to as Appendix C in earlier writings has also been relocated under the literary-form heading of Summulae texts (as will be explained when the work appears), leaving what was formerly called Appen-dix D as the sole Appendix to the work as it will finally appear in published form. This reorganization has been made to reflect better and more directly Poinsot's historically conditioned reasons for treating signs at the point where he does in the larger context of his Cursus Philosophicus (of which the Ars Logica comprises only the first two of the original five parts), and should little, if at all, hamper those going to Poinsot from the article literature, inasmuch as all references to the Treatise, in earlier publications-Maritain (1943), Herculano de Carvalho (1969), Deely (1971-1975), and Oesterle (1944) - as in this publication, conclude with an identification of Reiser page, column, and line, irrespective of the names assigned the various internal parts of the work. Thus the Latin original remains, so far as presently possible, the fixed base equally for the initially proposed and the finally adopted organization of the forthcoming first independent edition of the Treatise. Further editings may result as the grounds of the original divisions progressively clarify, both historically and in themselves.

5. Poinsot was expressly aware of this circumstance: see the Summulae (or beginners') texts preliminary to the Treatise on Signs, 7a6-20, and the "Transition to Book III" in the Treatise proper, 722a45-bl4.

6. "Signum est, quod praeter species, quas ingerit sensui, aliquid facit in cognitionem venire." Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, Book II, chap.l, n.l, as cited by Poinsot in the Treatise on Signs, Book I, Question 1, 646a24-28. Both the Migne Patrologia Latina XXXIV. 35 and the édition Bénédictine of 1949 (Paris: Desclée, Oeuvres de Saint Augustin, vol.11, p.238), however, agree in wording Augustine's definition as follows: "Signum est enim res, quod praeter speciem quam ingerit sensibus, aliud ex se faciens in cogitationem venire." These differences in wording are not important theoretically, as can be seen from careful study of the texts identified in note 7, following.

7. Summulae text preliminary to the Treatise on Signs, 10a6-12, and note thereon; also Book I of the Treatise proper, Question 1, 646a 14-28.

8. ". . . plane est uti signo, scilicet repraesentatione unius non solum prose, sed pro altero distincto a se." Treatise on Signs, Book I, Question 6, 685b41-44.

9. I say "the confrontation at last . . ." because, even though the doctrine of ideas as the known objects representing mind-independent things and the doctrine of ideas as signs were both spoken of in the writings of the seven-teenth-century founders of modern philosophy (e.g., in Locke's Essay, Book II, chap.8, pars.12-16, chap.30, par.l; Book IV, chap.4, par.4; et alibi), these two formulations or 'doctrines' were treated as basically equivalent. Poinsot alone-who died without influence on the post-seventeenth-century developments of English and Continental thought-grasped and gave systematic expression to the essential difference between representation and signification (see the Treatise on Signs, Book I, Question 1, 646a39-bl5, 649all-b28, and the "Sequel" to Book I, 693a9-31), whereby he was able to show why ideas, though necessary for our awareness of things and representative of them, as signs, are not themselves the objects of which we are aware. Repre-sentation, when it occurs in signification, serves to found the "relation to another" constitutive of the signifying, but it is not itself that relation. In Poinsot's terms, an idea as representation is a sign fundamentally but not formally (e.g., see the Treatise on Signs, Book I, Question 3, 669a34-bl2, Question 5, 684bl0-14). Formally, i.e., as a sign, the "idea" is the relation to another-to the object signified-that is directly cognized or known. (See note 10 following.) It is this other-which may or may not, and sometimes does and sometimes does not, involve elements of mind-independent being (see Deely, 1974b: esp. 277-92)-which is the direct object of our experience and awareness of things, not our ideas, which serve (as iconic or "representations") only to found relations to what they themselves are not, namely, the objects of which we are directly aware. Cf. Oesterle, 1944:241-46.

This situation brims with irony. Given the distinction between representing and signifying as Poinsot construes it, we can see that the conclusion of Locke's famous Essay, where he marks out the domain of semiotic and identifies ideas as signs (Book IV, chap.XXI, esp. par.4), is in principle at variance with the doctrine of ideas as objects with which he introduces the Essay (Introduction, par.8) and on which he grounded the body of its expositions (e.g., Book II, chap.1, pars.1-6, chap.8, par.8). Thus, when Locke conjectured in the same breath with which he proposed semiotic as a distinct domain, that perhaps if "ideas and words [formal and instrumental signs, in the language of Poinsot] as the great instruments of knowledge . . . were distinctly weighed, and duly considered [precisely as signs], they would afford us another sort of logic and critic, than what we have been hitherto acquainted with," he spoke truly indeed, and as a prophet; but a prophet whose vision had in substance been realized by an earlier contemporary of another land, in a work that would wait some three hundred years to be heard outside the Latin world, when the project of semiotics, thanks to Peirce, Saussure, and a hundred others, would at last in our own time be ventured in earnest in the national languages.

For, if semiotic is before all else the doctrine of signs, and centrally the account of what it is for anything to be a sign; and if the first systematic investigator of this matter is to be titled, as it would seem he must be titled, the "real founder" (as Sebeok [1968:6] puts it) of semiotic, then this historical encomium must in one sense go to Poinsot even over Peirce, who nevertheless "founded"—or re-founded—semiotic in modern times insofar as it was destined to become an intellectual movement of international scope. In this other sense of "founding," Poinsot's work, coming as it did 58 years before Locke's Essay and provisional designation of semiotic as a distinct province of knowledge, truly fell "deadborn from the press," and passed without prospective trace into history. Thus Poinsot, as Sebeok remarks (1975a :3), "appears, in retrospect, to have forged the most solid, lasting link between the Scholastic semioticians—an intellectual milieu [extending in this area, as we have remarked above, over eleven hundred years of Western civilization] in which this keen thinker was still profoundly at home—and the emergent doctrine of signs envisaged, labelled, and foreshadowed by John Locke half a century later, in 1690."

10. The discovery that a fully consistent account of ideas as signs is inconsistent with an account of ideas as the objects of which we are directly aware, is what comes to expression in Poinsot's distinction of formal signs from instrumental signs, i.e., in his division of signs into those whose whole being consists in the giving of objective presence to—the founding of cognitive relations to—what they themselves are not (formal signs, "concepts" or "ideas") and those that depend in their fundamental signifying on being themselves objectively apprehended (instrumental signs). In secondary literature, the relation between these two kinds of signs, especially the relatively dependent status of the latter on the former (a point perhaps so evident for Poinsot—but perhaps not: read the "Transition to Bk. III," 722a45-bl4—that he makes it expressly only en passant in Book II of the Treatise, in Question 1 at 701al7-23, and in Question 5 at 716a27-45), is well treated by Oesterle (1944: esp. 259-260). If this relationship is well understood, for example, a question can be raised as to whether the extensive debate in recent philosophy over the so-called identity hypothesis or thesis is rendered nugatory (Deely, 1975a: 92-93, 1975b:291-92). In general, according to the first systematic semiotic account of ideas and consciousness—Poinsot's theory of formal signs, essayed in the first four of the six Questions making up Book II of his Treatise —the theoretical impasse in philosophy since Descartes's enclosure of awareness within its own workings (the "casket" or "closet" of individual consciousness —a "monad without windows," in Leibniz's immortal expression) is overcome with a stroke, and the contemporary conviction that communication is real and objects are public is theoretically justified in the simple terms of two (or more) things being related to the same third thing, by the realization that ideas as formal signs, are not and cannot be that which we directly apprehend, experience, or know, but that rather on the basis of which ("id in quo") we are related to whatever we know, be it sensible or abstract.

Given the novelty of the perspectives opened up by Poinsot's notion of formal signs, it is not surprising that this is the one element of his semiotics that was fastened upon in the polemical climate of the last quarter century or so, by philosophers interested primarily in a "realist" epistemology and logic —e.g., Maritain (1924, 1943, 1957, 1963), Adler (1967), Simon (1961), Veatch (1952), Parker and Veatch (1959), Wild (1947). The strictly limited success met with by these attempts to appropriate Poinsot's conception, I venture, traces directly to the fact that each of these authors to a greater or lesser degree (least by far in the case of Maritain) attempts to employ the distinction of formal signs as if it were independent of Poinsot's prior account of relative being—on which prior account in truth the formal/instrumental distinction depends for its proper force (Deely, 1974b: fn.26 pp.875-76). Indeed, in the case of Wild and Adler, so "independent" is the use made of Poinsot's notion in terms of its semiotic origin, that it is deployed against the background of a view of the reality of relation that is the contrary opposite of the one Poinsot regards as indispensably propaedeutic to the possibility of any finally coherent theory of signs (Wild, 1956:558; Adler, 1968:582)! In either case, if the notion of formal signs is detached from Poinsot's account of the relative being constitutive of all signs and treated, not as a particular instance (the intraorganismically founded instance) of this being, but as something posited independently, as it were, and cut out of whole cloth, it is bound to appear as an extremely interesting but essentially arbitrary and ad hoc construct, devoid of proper philosophical justification and hence finally unconvincing in its own right—a point Poinsot gave a great deal of thought to, as Herculano de Carvalho (1969:139) points out well.

With the semiotic foundation of this division of signs at last brought to light, this veneer of arbitrariness can be fully stripped away, and we may expect the distinction of formal signs to play the central role it is capable of playing in the entire re-assessment of the history of post-seventeenth-century thought that is long overdue, especially in all that concerns the theories of mind, knowledge, and truth.

11. J. Rey-Debove (1973:8) acutely notes that, in the semiotic movement, "deux courants de pensée se dessinent nettement: Iʼun pour lequel la signifiance est un phénomène humain dont la connaissance positive seule ne peut rendre compte, dans l'étude duquel le chercheur est lui-même impliqué, et qui fait de la sémiotique le fondement même de l'épistémologie des sciences dites 'humaines'; l'autre pour lequel les problèmes de communication et d'information sont fondamentaux, dépassent le fait proprement humain, et constituent un objet d'étude dont les données relèvent du mesurable."

There is no doubt of the direction in which Poinsot's semiotic resolves this "question actuellement controversée." The contemporary perspective most congenial to the theoretical requirements of Poinsot's doctrine of signs is the one Sebeok describes (1975b :95) as "a semiotics that eschews anthropocentrism, coupled with an ethology that shuns parochialism." As he explains more fully elsewhere (Sebeok, 1974:213): " Anthroposemiotics, that is, the totality of man's species-specific signaling systems, was the first domain concretely envisaged and delineated, under the designation semiotic. For most investigators, from 1960 to this day, both notions still remain synonymous. The second domain, zoosemiotics, which encompasses the study of animal communications in the broadest sense, was named and comprehensively outlined only in 1963. It would now seem more accurate to consider anthroposemiotics and zoosemiotics, separately and conjointly, as two principal divisions of semiotics, having in common certain essential features but differing especially as to the fundamental and pervasive role that language plays in the former in contradistinction to the latter."

12. The analysis establishing the distinction and exhaustiveness of these two modes of relative being—which is not to deny the possibility of many subdivisions under each of the headings—is just below the surface and between the lines of the first two of the three Articles making up the Second Preamble to the Treatise on Signs, 573b8-583a50. Much of the material from the Translator's Introduction to the Treatise covering the context and ground of this distinction as it provides the adequate foundation, pure and simple, of Poinsot's semiotics has been published in article form (Deely, 1974b :858-75). I have also essayed an independent philosophical explication of the essential notions at play here, by fleshing out the cursory rationale or modus procedendi indicated by Poinsot in his Foreword to the Treatise, 642a24-41 (Deely, 1975c: esp. 476-87). A satisfactory statement in English of that attempt has just become available (Deely, 1977).

13. Here accordingly is exactly where Poinsot's semiotic formally begins. See the Treatise on Signs, Book I, Question 1, "Whether a Sign Is in the Order of Relation," esp. 646bl6-21: "Quaerimus ergo, an formalis ista ratio signi consistât in relatione secundum esse primo et per se, an in relatione secundum dici seu in aliquo absoluto, quod fundet talem relationem."

14. Treatise on Signs, "Second Preamble," Article 2, 578bl9-25: . . relatio transcendentalis, quae non est alia a relatione secundum dici, non importat ex principali significato relationem, sed aliquid absolutum, ad quod sequitur vel sequi potest aliqua relatio."

15. It is in terms of the universal denial of the reality (the "mind-independence") of relations in the currents that formed distinctively modern philosophy—both in its early Latin phase (Ockham to Suarez) and in its transition to the national languages (Descartes to Kant)—that the uniqueness and revolutionary power of Poinsot's semiotic becomes most readily visible, as I have tried to indicate (Deely, 1974b:876-905).

16. "Ethologists refer to the behavioral dossier of a species as its ethogram," comments Sebeok (1975b :88). "In semiotic terms, this concept encompasses an animal's species-specific communicative code, in confrontation with which the human observers role necessarily becomes that of a cryptanalyst, of someone who receives messages not destined for him and is initially ignorant of the applicable transformation rules."

17. Here we skirt a crucial point that is reduced by Poinsot to its ground in sensation as such only in Book III of his Treatise, long after the discussion of perceptual ambiguities in the notion of ex consuetudine : the distinction between cognitive life in its intuitive (restricted to the here and now) and abstract (structured by experience-borne, sometimes reflected modifications) phases, or, as we should more recently say, between the semiotic behavior of the higher anthropoid populations and that of the more common genetically dominated animal forms.

18. Poinsot, Naturalis Philosophiae IV. Pars: De Ente Mobili Animatо, Quaestio 6, Article 2 : .. potentia quantumcumque habeat virtutem efficiendi vitaliter actum cognitionis, dependet ab obiecto, ut simul cum ipso cognitionem eliciat. Et hoc ideo est, quia potentia per cognitionem debet esse assimilativa vitaliter, non solum ea communi ratione, quo omne agens intendit assimilare sibi effectum eo modo, quo potest, sed speciali ratione, quatenus tendit ad uniendum et coniungendum sibi obiectum et trahendum ad se. In qua cognitione seu operatione non fit assimilatio per hoc, quod potentia operans faciat aliam potentiam sibi similem, sed solum facit simile seu assimilationen! ex parte obiecti. Circa hoc enim operatur et negotiatur potentia, пес intendit in hac assimilatione propagationem et multiplicationem sui, sed solum manifestationem aut expressionem aut unionem actualiter exercitam erga obiectum. Non potest autem potentia emittere ex se vitaliter hane assimilationem et unionem seu tendentiam erga obiectum nisi cum concursu ipsius obiecti. Et non sufficit terminari ad obiectum, quia ut terminetur ad obiectum, debet egredi a potentia ut determinate tendens ad illud obiectum, ad quod terminatur, siquidem notitia est partus quidam potentiae determinatus circa hoc obiectum eique potentiam assimilans. Ergo necesse est, quod non a sola potentia procedat, quae indifferens est ad multa obiecta, sed etiam ab obiecto, ut illi assimilatio fiat. Imo etiamsi virtus potentiae sit determinata erga tale obiectum in ratione viventis, non tamen est determinata in ratione foecunditatis, nisi ab obiecto perficiatur et determinetur, sicut virtus feminae licet sit determinata ad generandum dependenter tamen a foecunditate viri. Non potest autem exire cognitio ab obiecto ut extra, sed ut est intra ipsam eamque actuat et afficit media specie sui, eo quod ille actus seu cognitio vitaliter exit a potentia. Et quando exit ab ipsa, exit ut determinatus et specificatus circa tale obiectum, et non potest exire seorsum ab obiecto et seorsum a potentia, quia ab obiecto ut est extra non potest exire vitaliter, пес ut entitas unica et indivisibilis, cum multum distet aliquando obiectum a sensu. Opportet ergo, quod aliquid loco sui et repraesentativum sui ponat in potentia, ut exeat cognitio ab ipsa cum sua determinatione et specificatione et dependentia, quam habet ab obiecto per unicum et indivisibilem partum et vitalem processionem potentiae." (Original edition: Alcalá, Spain, 1635; citation is from the 3rd volume [1947] of the Reiser edition of Poinsot's complete Cursus Philosophicus, 182a29-b47.)

19. Significare "ex consuetudine ... est significare naturaliter non ex sesed solum respectu illorum apud quos est nota consuetudo. Nec est inconveniens, quod eidem rei conveniant duo modi significandi secundum distinctas formalitates": Poinsot, Treatise on Signs, Book II, Question 6, 722al3-19.

20. Cf. the "First Preamble" to the Treatise on Signs, Article 3, "By What Powers and Through Which Acts Do Mind-Dependent Beings Come About?" 301al-306b45, esp. 301b33-304b7; and, in the Treatise proper, Book I, Question 6, 685a36֊691a20, esp. 688al8-28, and Book II, Question 6, 719al8-722a37.

21. This, I should think, is why Poinsot indicates in the very first definition of the signum ad placitum (Summulae text 10al6֊19) that the aspect of "ad placitum" that connotes an arbitrary or whimsical element in a stipulation is (as Herculano de Carvalho [1969:141-52] develops well) what is least important and least interesting for an understanding of this class of signs. On the contrary, a stipulation will become interesting and "conventional" only to the extent that it expresses a socially structured human intention: "Signum ad placitum est, quod repraesentat aliquid ex impositione voluntatis per publicam auctoritatem" (emphasis supplied; see also Book II, Question 6).

Compare the discussion in Oesterle, 1944:247-49.

22. "Voces per se solum significant ad placitum, per accidens autem ex consuetudine, quod est significare naturaliter non ex se, sed solum respectu illorum, apud quos est nota consuetudo. Nec est inconveniens, quod eidem rei conveniant duo modi significandi secundum distinctas formalitates. Unde una sublata altera manet, et sic numquam est idem signum naturale et ad placitum formaliter, licet materialiter sint idem, id est conveniant eidem subiecto.

"Quod autem dicitur illud esse signum naturale, quod significat idem apud omnes, intelligitur de eo, quod est signum naturale simpliciter, quia natura est eadem apud omnes. Consuetudo autem est quasi altera natura, sed non natura ipsa, et ita significat omnibus, apud quos est consuetudo, non omnibus simpliciter, et sic est aliquid imperfectius in genere signi naturalis, sicut ipsa consuetudo est aliquid imperfectum in genere naturae" (Treatise on Signs, Book II, Question 6, 722al0-37).

23. This is the main thrust of Question 6, Book II, of the Treatise, which has been so frequently referred to in developing this section: "Sit ergo unica conclusio: Si consuetudo respiciat aliquod signum, destinando illud et proponendo pro signo, tale signum fundatum in consuetudine erit ad placitum. Si vero consuetudo non proponat aliquid vel instituat pro signo, sed dicat simplicem usum alicuius rei et ratione illius assumatur aliquid in signum, tale signum reducitur ad naturale" (719a35.(44־־

24. "Sensus internus ita comparai unum alteri formando propositionen! et discursum, quod ipsa ordinationem praedicati et subiecti, et antecedents ad consequens formaliter non cognoscit discernendo relationem fictam a reali. Et similiter montem aureum cognoscit quantum ad id, quod sensibile est in illis partibus repraesentatis auri et montis, non quantum ad rationem fictionis, ut distinguitur a realitate. Quod est cognoscere non formaliter id, quod in ratione entis fingitur, sed materialiter id, ad cuius instar fingitur, quod in se non est" (from the "First Preamble" to the Treatise on Signs, Article 3, 305al4-29).

25. In quotidiana experientia "videmus bruta moveri signis, tum naturalibus, ut gemitu, balatu, cantu, etc., tum ex consuetudine, ut canis vocatus nomine consueto movetur, qui tamen impositionem non intelligit, sed consuetudine ducitur" (Treatise on Signs, Book I, Question 6, 685b26-32). (Explication in the text above of this and the following citations from Poinsot in light of his doctrine concerning the relative being of signs is well calculated to illustrate further how, as was said above, this doctrine—his semiotic strictly speaking—transfuses superficially commonplace, quite "traditional," examples and usages of words with an entirely new depth of life.)

26. "Cum aliqua bruta sint disciplinae capacia, non statim a principio aliqua percipiunt, quae postea consuetudine procedente cognoscunt, ut canis non statim a principio movetur, cum vocatur tali vel tali nomine, et postea movetur habita consuetudine. Ergo utuntur aliqua bruta signis ex consuetudine; nam ex impositione ipsa nominis non movetur, quia non ínnotescit illis impositio ipsa, quae ex voluntate imponentis dependet" (Treatise on Signs, Book I, Question 6, 686al-12).

27. Jacques Maritain (1957:90), who himself learned this point from Poinsot, expresses the matter thus: "what defines language is not precisely the use of words, or even of conventional signs; it is the use of any sign whatever as involving the knowledge or awareness of the relation of signification, and therefore a potential infinity; it is the use of signs in so far as it manifests that the mind has grasped and brought out the relation of signification [italics Maritain's].

"... the invention of those particular conventional signs which are words, the creation of a system of signs made up of 'phonemes' and 'morphemes' was in itself ... a further discovery of human intelligence, no less characteristic of man, but less essential than, and by nature not prior to, the discovery of the relation of signification.

". . . the word 'language,' when referring to animals, is equivocal."

Cf. Sebeok (1975:88-89), who concludes: "It is therefore scientifically inaccurate, as well as, even metaphorically, highly misleading, to speak of a 'language' of animals."

28. "Sensui autem interiori non negamus formation em entis rationis ex defectu comparationis, sed ex defectu universalitatis cognoscendi, quia non cognoscit universaliores rationes discernendo inter ens verum et fictum, quod tamen facit simplex apprehensio; discernit enim praedicamenta ab iis, quae in praedicamento non sunt" (from the "First Preamble" to the Treatise on Signs, 305bl9-28).

29. "First Preamble," 305a25-29. I wish to stress here and make as clear as possible that Poinsot's distinction between ens verum and ens fictum, as the difference between what depends upon and what is independent of cognition, is not isomorphic with the difference between what will and will not work in the accomplishment of vital purposes. It is this latter difference as encompassing mind-dependent and mind-independent beings indifferently, that is at stake in the pretenses, camouflages, and deceits deployed in animal 'lying'. The analysis of signa ex consuetudine as absorptive of signa ad placita and overlapping the conduct of human and animal affairs, thus, easily encompasses, in Poinsot's semiotic, this ingenious variety of animal communications.

30. Treatise on Signs, Book II, Question 6, 722all-23 (lines included in the Latin citation for note 22 above).

31. Ibid., 722a25-37 (also included in note 22 above).

REFERENCES WITH SOME ANNOTATIONS

Adler, Mortimer J. 1967. The Difference of Man. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, esp. p. 320n8, p.327nl0, p.331nll. In this work, Adler uses "the ideas without the terminology" of Poinsot, or so he would have it.

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