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.A Paean to Peirce

(upon looking up "semiotics" on the Web).


By Ernie McKracken, May 2001

I owe a lot of serenity to C.S. Peirce. In a time of metaphysical chaos, his thoughts brought order into my intellectual life. It was 1968, and I was in the midst of a philosophical tempest, much like the rest of the world at that time. I was seeking a reliable basis for knowledge, for understanding reality, for evaluating different ideas, hypotheses, theories.

Years earlier, I had rejected the main portion of what I'd been taught by societal authorities in this regard. Religion, I had decided, was total speculation, hardly better than the errant notions to run or stall that seem to lodge in the skull of a horse or donkey randomly and without warning. Other benchmarks from which to view reality (such as historical, artistic, thespian, rock and roll lyrics, etc.) were better, but not by much. Science seemed the most valid choice, but even it had its drawbacks. It seemed too one-dimensional somehow. Even more importantly, I had problems with the basic assumptions of all of the above.

I was taking Philosophy 101 at MSU at the time. Plato demonstrated how the fallacies of human belief could be brought to light by questioning and inductive logic. DesCartes showed me that almost anything could be successfully subjected to doubt. DesCartes had decided that he would consider nothing as true if it could be at all doubted. He would only believe that which he "clearly and distinctly perceived" as true. I changed DesCartes' wording a little, from "clearly and distinctly perceived" to "directly perceived", which fit more comfortably with my own reasoning that the five senses were not unimpeachable, a fact that DesCartes had noted also.

I had reasoned all this out years before, when I rejected my tutelary teachings, but the disciplined examination of them in the classroom lent authority and substance to my doubts while at the same time providing clarity with which to pinpoint the weaknesses inherent in many of the beliefs society seemed to see as inalienable.

I now had effective and authoritative ammo to add to the arsenal of cognitive weapons in my personal war against the philosophical underpinnings of a society which separated human beings according to skin hue, outlawed the ingestion of certain substances, and planned to send me across the sea to exchange hostilities with perfect strangers. I joyfully waved bye-bye to the Sinking Slough of Despond and the Rising Gorge of Commercialistic Spirituality.

Alas, in blowing out the cognitive framework that supported the traditional structure of perceived reality, I had left myself with nothing to stand on. Like Wile E. Coyote, I had sawed off the limb that was supporting me. I had a direct and unimpeachable sense of vertigo engendered by the realization that I was in danger of falling to the floor of the cognitive canyon miles below and going SPLAT! Anything could happen, and all roads led into the abyss of schizophrenia. Gorgeous as that Abess was, what with her aura of sophistic authenticity lined with psychedelic trim, I knew I really didn't want to go there. The arroyo was full of weeds and there might be snakes. (Speaking of snakes, I'm beginning to realize I may be beating a dead one over the head with this metaphor.) "Why don't you make a pun out of that?" quoth the Raven, "Something about joining a serpent and beating yourself over the head with it, or refusing to join a snake that would have you as a member? You know the routine." I whip out my hunting slingshot and shatter the bust of Pallas on which he perches above my torture chamber door. He flutters away, cursing or coughing-- I never can tell which. Stupid damn Raven!

Foraging on: I was adrift in a conceptual sea, full sail but rudderless, while hurricane-force winds of doubt whipped up mountainous waves: Rationalism, Scholasticism, Empiricism, Hinduism, Existentialism, and a plethora of other isms smacked me one after the other, threatening to capsize the little cognitive coracle that held me from sinking into the Deep. I desperately needed to choose an ism, but they all seemed equal in terms of validity.

Then along came C.S. Peirce with his Pragmaticism. Look at the results, he taught me. Take any two concepts and ask yourself what observable difference it made whether one was true as opposed to the other. The question of free will vs determinism was the first to fall. I saw that the world would be no different under either concept. Other eternal questions dropped off one-by-one in a domino effect when subjected to the criteria of Peirce's results-oriented criteria. Philosophical worries that had plagued humanity for millennia were revealed as no more than mere linguistic chimeras. Philosophers and theologians of past centuries had been suckered in by their own words, by the convolutions of their own verbiage. And the verbal significator was seen as only randomly associated with the actual significatee. "Red" was not the color red, but only a sign chosen by chance to indicate the outer reality of a band of reflected light.

Gleefully, I applied this paring knife to not only the traditional "eternal questions" but also to contemporary concepts. It proved most effective in cutting away bullshit, knocking out the whistles and bells with which politics, religion, public relations, and marketing embellished fifty-cent notions with an eye to foisting them on the rest of us.

By 1971 I had changed my major several times and "finally" settled on Anthropology. In Culture and Personality, a cross-cultural psych course taught by Dr. Avery Church, we were shown that normalcy and abnormalcy could vary totally from culture to culture. Applying Anglo-Saxon criteria to assess the behavior of people in other societies could, and most of the time would, miss the mark entirely. Sigmund Freud worked with patients who were mainly neurotic German women. His universals simply didn't apply so well to Americans, much less Samoans, without extensive revision.

Dr. Church told us of a society (in New Guinea? Africa? I don't recall which) where an injured or infected leg or arm was treated by putting a huge copper ring on it. The natives explained the success of this cure by saying that the copper ring drew out the demons. The occidental researcher theorized that what "really" happened was that the heavy ring exercised the limb and helped it heal that way. Dr. Church commented that what really mattered was that it worked, not how it worked.

So the Pragmatics view proved to be a valid benchmark with which to evalute behavior: Did the given behavior work in terms of the cultural standards of the specific society in which it took place? If so, then the behavioral patterns could be considered sane. I had learned a new standard, that of cultural relativity.

But there were problems. Were we to see every practice by every society in this light? What about Nazi Germany? Stalinist Russia? Aztec Mexico? The Assyrian empire? If a society practiced wholesale atrocities, torturing and killing thousands or millions of its people, should we then say, "Well, it's okay. That's their cultural perogative." Further, what if one society's practices threatened to interfere with the practices of other societies? The Aztecs depopulated the surrounding tribes, sacrificing thousands of them at a time to Aztec divinities. The Assyrians, much like the Catholic Church, burned whole populations alive. And we all know the Nazis somehow misplaced some ten million Jews, Poles, intellectuals, and Gypsies, not to mention starting a war that destroyed Europe. Not that we Anglo-Saxons can point fingers, what with the genocide on the Red Man, the lynchings of black people, Jews, and Catholics. Had the victims no cultural perogatives of their own? Surely the Vietnamese had a right to pursue their own form of rule without the Americans burning their skins off with napalm, no matter what the American cultural imperatives might be.

Besides that, Dr. Church had introduced me to another facet of the language thing. We had been assigned to read selections from Benjamin Whorf. Whorf had tried to translate the Christian Bible into Pueblo Indian tongues. He'd found that some 30% of the book could not be accurately translated due to the vast differences between linguistic structures. One Pueblo dialect had no tense changes. Everything was present tense, and past events were marked by memorable events that took place. "Running Deer is born in the year that Leaping Frog kills a bear." Another Pueblo dialect had no differentiation between noun and verb. "Running-Deering born in the yearing Leaping-Frogging killed a bearing." You can easily see how hairy translation can be getting.

Noting these differences, Whorf went on to point out how differences in language structure were correlated with almost irreconcilable differences in world view. He theorized that language, which we learned by osmosis during infancy, pre-determined the structures of cognitive processes.

Language was no accident. The first word for "snake" was "sssss", and that root remains with us like the reptilian oblongata at the base of the brain. Bovine Alif's skull may be upside-down today yet still be horned.

I realized it was time for a change of venue. Results-oriented criteria gave me the excuse I needed to allow ventures into the occult. If it works, do it! Moreover, the occultist viewpoint allowed a reconciliation between Empiricism and the Cartesian distrust of the senses. There was no need to balk at mirages, hallucinations, dreams, optical illusions: They were all perceived by the senses and therefore all real! I could entertain ghosts and pixies in my parlor without violating a single empirical more!

Armed with my Pragmaticist paring knife and a background in logic and occidental science, I waded into the jungle of occultism. My paring knife developed into a machete. When I had cleared away the undergrowth planted by the Catholic Church, Hollywood, professional charlatans, amateur skeptics, and my fellow occultists, I found myself in the open spaces of Buddhist thought. Buddhist writers, especially those with a Tibetan bent, recommended empirical observation and what amounted to pragmaticist analysis of the data perceived. The main divergence from occidental empiricism was that the Buddhists put emphasis on observation of the world within. There were six senses, not five. They did not totally discount the outer reality, only asserted that it was less "real" than the inner reality. The Tibetans had brought me full-circle back to Plato's Cave.

Adder oil, what was the outer reality, the physical world, but images in the mind, initiated by physical stimuli which the nervous system translated into messages sent to the brain to be reconstructed from patterns of neural firing into, say, a picture of a horse running, the sounds of a brook babbling? There was no direct contact between the mind and the physical world. The mind was like a little homunculus living in the top of the head, not even peering through the windows of the eyes but merely receiving third-hand reports of said observances as relayed by the nerves. And even the eyeballs were not in literal contact with, say, a fire engine, but only with light reflected by the fire engine. The fire engine was not really red, either, however much the eyeballs might assert so. Rather, it was every color except red. The red band of light was what the fire engine had rejected. The mind was forced to take the word of those senses as gospel, having no other means to perceive the outer reality.

The inner world was a whole different enchilada, though. The mind could perceive its own thoughts directly, without any intermediaries except those it itself had constructed. Belief and expectation were the filters. Alter those filters and you alter reality. The Tibetan wise men nodded sagely as the Yaqui brujo wafted holy humito my way. Pasa la hierba, Padre!

So there I was at the nexus of a really real reality. What to do? The obvious plan was to go to Korea and teach English. I learned the arts of making out behind the temple, soaking up sweet potato vodka, and doing a song-and-dance four times a day for bevies of beauties at Pusan Women's University. I married one and took her home to the bayou.

I was in a fix, now though. The bayou labored under three-digit temperatures and was generously populated with bugs the size of breadboxes. My Korean wife was raised in a climate both cooler and drier, where the only bugs tolerated were flies and mosquitoes, neither of which was any serious problem. (Korean flies wisely remain in the outhouse. They get so fat there that they don't even bother to fly, just fall to the ground and lazily crawl back up the outhouse wall. Korean mosquitoes are knocked out by "mohgi killa" or mosquito coils.)

Many Koreans were fond of soup or vodka with snakes as a main ingredient, so Korea is sparsely populated with serpents. Jungye, who got itchy ankles just from contemplating the fauna effulgent in a Tennessee golf green, was horrified that our woods were inhabited by copperheads and cottonmouths. She thought I'd made a wrong turn at Maui and brought her to the Amazon rainforest. Seeking a more amiable habitat, we emigrated to sunny California. Alas, the milieu in which we found ourselves in Southern California was as bereft of intellectual conversation as it was of mimosa trees. Didn't have much in the way of employment, either, what with would-be stars taking all the shit jobs and politicians' broods snappng up the rest. Four years later, we re- relocated back to Memphis.

So we're back in the bugs and humidity, but at least we're in a smaller pond. MSU was "suffering" from the results of over-enrollment, so they hired me on to teach Freshman English. By the second semester, I had squeezed the intellects of the profs around me dry, in terms of intellectual stimulation. It didn't take that much squeezing: Most of them were either unsuccessful writers or else people using the English Department as a stepping stone to positions more fulfilling by some standard that eluded me.

Then I found Metaphysics Anonymous, which fulfilled all my fondest desires for intellectual communication. And MORE! To Peirce and the Buddhists was added the effects of Korzybski, Wiener, McKenna, Rainbow Gatherings, the Neo-Cafeine movement, coldpools, et al, et al. Free will, it turned out, was active only if you chose it. Like the particle that becomes a wave when you're not looking, free will slides into determinism when not in use. Many signficators, verbal and otherwise, far from being random, evolved naturally from archetypal structures in the mind that in turn reflected physical forms.

That was 1984. Add 17 years of metarecursions, synchronicities, strange attractors, even stranger repellants, convergences harmonic, divergences discordant, diversions concordant, pools cold and hot... and here we are, pragmatic empirical schizopsychedelian linguistic shamans. Whew!

So thanx and a tip of the Hatlo hat to C.S. Peirce and all his little friends out in Metaland!


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