Science: The Question of Its Limits/Portis-Winner 12/15/2011 1
Science: The Question of Its Limits
Irene Portis-Winner
December 15, 2011
Science: The Question of Its Limits/Portis-Winner 12/15/2011 2
Science: The Question of Its Limits
This paper is a discussion of Susan Petrilli’s path-breaking book, Signifying and
Understanding. Reading the works of Victoria Welby and the Signific Movement. The collection
of the works of Victoria Welby including correspondence and comments by fellow scholars, and
edited with a conclusion by Susan Petrilli, is a major undertaking, and the vast areas that Welby
considers are overwhelming, and in many of the debates with her colleagues and friends, she is
well ahead of her time.
I have been particularly interested in concentrating on the topic of science and its limits.
Are there any? which has been an area of confusion, to say the least in American anthropological
work. That is, in the post Boas period most anthropologists reverted to positivism, which was
limited to primarily descriptive linear studies or incorrect evolutionary studies. These are
exceptions, the most important one was Kroeber who was essentially an historian but even he
decided that science was not a part of the research anthropologist do. Boas, the founder of
American anthropology, was a scientist and artist and linguist who proved the biological
assumption of European thinkers, and the evolutionary stages of culture were but myths not
founded on factual data.
In spite of its heritage, the American Anthropological society made a decision in
November 2010 to remove the word “science” from the description of the association’s mission.
Where the old language defined the association’s purpose as advancing “the science of
anthropology,” the new document states that the association will advance the public
understanding of humankind and omit the word “science”. The date for this circular, which was
sent to all members of the Anthropological Association was sometime in June 2011. There were
various criticisms of this change in the purpose of anthropology, and it is, I think, still under
discussion, but it does mean, or at least imply, a move towards the postmodern approach, which is
Science: The Question of Its Limits/Portis-Winner 12/15/2011 3
very specifically non-scientific and also is basically descriptive and timeless. One more comment
on this issue was issued in a recent issue of the American Anthropological Association. There is a
strong call on the cover page for the work of public intellectuals like Margaret Mead, which
seems to extend this new anti-science view. This is a misunderstanding, for Margaret Mead never
advanced the dichotomies, science and history, and science and the humanities. On the contrary,
she saw culture as an interconnected whole, while the AHA’s call seems to mean that public
intellectuals should share and embrace the framework of the new definition of anti-science
anthropology. But such leaders as Levi-Strauss, and apparently Clifford Gertz, had rejected this
dichotomy as well as did long ago Ruth Benedict in her address to the American Anthropological
Association, where she said that “Anthropology is half in the science, half in the humanities.” The
problem of the role of science in the semiotics of culture, which is the term coined by the Russian
scholar, Yuri Lotman, and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce and Welby, advanced the
interaction of all fields of knowledge as fundamental. We need not return to Boas’s The Mind of
the Primitive Man (1911) or Levi-Strauss’s La Pensée Sauvage (1962) to outline the fundamental
structure of anthropology, where science has been understood as paramount and essential for the
survival of humans, as is language. Whether it is Levi-Strauss’s Bricolage, the science of the
concrete, or science as described by Boas (The Mind of the Primitive Man), science has a
universal appearance, with its own validity, even in primitive societies. Yuri Lotman saw his
semiotics of culture, which he gradually changed to global semiotics, as pertaining to all living
things notably including the human life encompassed by the growing field of biosemiotics.
Indeed, a semiotic perspective has been extended to the origins of the universe.
Now I look at Welby’s own words, and those edited by Petrilli, to search for Welby’s
foresighted conception of the interrelation of all fields of human behavior, the creativity of
humans, and the communication of pre-sapiens. As a philosopher, she advanced her investigation
in the broadest sense, a search for the interrelations of all living things. Similarly, she interpreted
the conceptions of the various scholars, 450 with whom she was communicating. Her closest
Science: The Question of Its Limits/Portis-Winner 12/15/2011 4
relation was Peirce. Only a few American scholars, even fewer of whom were anthropologists,
welcomed the importance of Peirce. In spite of Roman Jakobson’s commendable efforts to
introduce Peirce in all his writings and lectures, every year until his death. He used to say that
Peirce was too brilliant for any American universities. Thus it was an American scholar who did
this pioneering for Peirce, for Jakobson was a Russian linguist and who at the time of World War
II was forced to flee to the United States, and originally taught at the New School for Social
Research in New York. There he met Boas and also Levi-Strauss whom he strongly influenced.
Meanwhile, Yuri Lotman’s work in semiotics was cut off from the world since he was banished
to Tartu, Estonia. In recent years, much has been translated. Nevertheless, Lotman founded a
vibrant field of semiotics, as part of the University of Tartu.
Victoria Welby continued to advance her field “Significs.” She has variously defined it
but let’s try “the philosophy of interpretation, philosophy of translation, and philosophy of
significance. It studies the conditions that make meaning possible, its principles and foundations,
keeping account about the biological basis of the signifying process and is concerned with the
relation of value theory and sign theory” (p. 20). As Welby explains, she transcends purely
descriptive writing, rather, her analysis takes a critical approach to signs, values, and behaviors,
including verbal and nonverbal behavior. Because she is so original, and her work in this
collection so widespread, listed here are some of the important terms in her oeuvre which she
believes prevails all knowledge.
1. Mother’s sense
2. Responsibility
3. Ambiguity
4. The I and the self
5. The critical evolution of identity
6. Otherness and dialogue
Science: The Question of Its Limits/Portis-Winner 12/15/2011 5
Furthermore, she sees her singnifics as affected by the context of global capitalism and the
market. This critique of the structure of society is prevalent in her thinking.
For example, Welby discusses gift-giving characteristic in primitive societies as
reciprocal responsible care for others. She rejects artificial barriers in all forms of
intercommunication among living types. She does not consider life and mind as independent of
matter, and she holds that we need to translate the facts of physical nature into those of mind and
mental and spiritual nature. Welby writes that her broad interest is called philosophizing, and her
subject is expression, in whatever form and significance. There is no separation between feeling,
thinking, and acting. In this process, there is no ultimate foundation that we can reach nor is there
an end to Peirce’s infinite regression.
Welby’s position is anti-universalism, because universalism overlooks the discordant
duality within our identity. She points out the fallacies in many dichotomies. For example, love is
boundless, and living truth must be dangerous. Expediency is safe for the moment. We build our
house on shifting sands. While with opposites, we try to find the link between them, nevertheless,
ambiguity is fundamentally a principle of all communication. (p 97.) What we want, she says, is
more introspection, more expression rather than more knowledge, and we also want enhanced
power to signify more and to interpret better (p 133). She points out, interpenetrating,
understanding, and translation are all subtle, metaphorically a spider’s web with lines going in
many directions. The human goal is the advance and power of mental communication in all its
complexity.
What is introspection? What is the progress of science, that constant remodeling of
scientific conception in terms and formations? Welby stresses the importance of metaphor. All
elements of language are metaphorical. Almost all words are metaphors. There are impossible
goals in nature, of which we cannot know the full solution. There are only distinctions and
differences everywhere. The gaps are simply in our present knowledge. This foreshadows
Saussure’s theory of language, one of the many examples of how Welby is ahead of her times. In
Science: The Question of Its Limits/Portis-Winner 12/15/2011 6
attempting to describe what meaning is, specific to human beings, she says it invades the power
of true analogy and what can really be compared and combined, which teaches us of the
unknown, and differences, measurable and scientific, between humans and prehumans. It’s the
connection between language, thought, and action that demonstrates the openness of meaning.
Welby criticizes everyday figures of speech and common sense as reductive. She studied this
problem with focus and the rays of light that must be gathered together into one lens, which
reminds me of Margaret Meade’s early statement that “We see through a cultural lens. We cannot
avoid it, therefore we must account for it.”
Discussing translation, she says that it is the ability to look at signs with the eyes of the
other. Interpretation implies translation. She criticizes egocentric identity, which is the sacrifice
of the other to the self, or denial of the other. Petrilli quotes Peirce’s famous comment, “every
thought is an external sign, proof that man is an external sign…my language is the sum of myself,
for the man is the thought” (P5.C1). Peirce again, “Man’s experience is nothing if it stands alone”
(P5.1402 p. 150).
For Welby art is focal in her philosophy of meaning, and she writes that “as to the place
of art in making life deep and great, take the old triad – the true, the beautiful, and the good – in
our day, science practically stands for truth, which you can never simulate and thus mislead.
“While beauty and good may be related to truth, all true beauty is good. All true good is beautiful,
but we cannot say in the same sense all good is truth. Truth is the essential factor which makes
the beauty of good and the good of beauty” (p. 177). Welby says that she doesn’t think that she
has put this very clearly. She adds that we need a true marriage of the poet with science. Welby
describes herself as an ideal realist, which she says almost digests materialism and turns it into
life tissues. Still discussing aspects of meaning, Welby assumes that the whole universe is
pervaded with meaning. She wishes to describe forces in the universe beyond the geotropic and
explore the heliotropic and the cosmic tropic towards infinity. She holds, there is, in some sense,
what we call truth.
Science: The Question of Its Limits/Portis-Winner 12/15/2011 7
Truth is not a problem for one individual. It requires, in a sense, all humanity to try to
understand this problem, if possible. The complications include the fact that the study of
primitives shows that they have both science and art, though it’s very different from ours. My
own comment: Levi-Strauss finds two kinds of thinking, the logic of the concrete and the logic of
modern science. What somebody calls false may not be false to the actors in a primitive society.
For example, Frasier writes about dream theory. What is referred to as superstition is simply
beliefs of primitives where there is no scientific evidence to falsify it. In general, Welby foresees
early studies of primitive mind by Boas and Levi-Strauss. Welby supports Tyler in discussing
“mana,” the primitive ideas of energy and animism, the spirit that inhabits natural objects. She
goes on to describe various primitive beliefs, or even ones not so primitive as Hinduism and
pantheism, seeing everything in the universe as divine. Such beliefs all have historic interests and
they have some role in primitive beliefs. For example, Welby interprets the idea among primitives
that the soul has a separate seat in the body of another. Welby shows that in more contemporary
beliefs, the body perceives itself and reacts upon itself and this is also similar to Peirce’s ego and
non-ego, which is in one body and Freud’s super ego and ego. She rejects the Cartesian will as
purely rational. She discusses in some detail many ways to make our meaning and language clear,
and holds that her meaning is somewhat different from Peirce’s dynamic interpretation. Peirce
believed that Welby has a prodigious sensitivity of perception, which he could not rival.
Welby is critical of the concepts of autonomy and total independence, which imply
isolation. The individual is a starting point, or an element, of the universe of energy…but the goal
is consummation and it is naturally fails to understand itself…only too often hindering the views
of other (150). Welby’s critical position continues, “Truth requires continuous revisions.” It must
be surveyed from as many different viewpoints as possible, and she critiques monolithic truth and
monolithic knowledge. The triad of knowledge is meaning, sense, significance. Welby warns
against specialization, which I believe she means is reductive, omitting too many other variables.
Peirce holds that the principle of logic is self-surrender. As Welby writes: “I am only in love
Science: The Question of Its Limits/Portis-Winner 12/15/2011 8
with wisdom, knowledge, and truth.” She writes somewhat metaphorically that the beginning and
the end of a text are two halves of one idea.
In another extension of continuity, considering the question of meaning, it seems to me
that Welby accepts Dealy’s quotation that there is a basic semiotics which cuts across all living
beings – plants, animals, and humans alike. (1981: 203 and Dealy 1986 p 183.)1
In discussing the self, which the quotation of Peirce alludes to, Welby writes that a
person represents the original actor’s mask. It is a truth that all the world is a stage, and
personality is the makeup which enables us to play our part, that which we impersonate. Identity
is invulnerable, and persists through all change. Man is an ident, the distinction between self and
I. The I is at once the generative center of multiple selves and multiplicity inhabiting each one of
ourselves (see p 607).
The origin of the ident is at the source of all mental power (p. 738) – Welby discusses
Peirce’s interpretant, immediate dynamic and final. The method is similar to Welby’s sense,
dynamic, corresponding to Welby’s meaning, and final corresponding to Welby’s significance.
Welby calls for linguistic conscience, the education called for experience interpretive and
ethical and critical animal instinct and human intellect. Toward the close of this volume, Welby
speaks about the fact that at the heart of science is a secret, and this same thing is true of the
humane sciences. Today, she says, the brain is starved of imagination due to the mechanistic
views in society. A new direction and semioethics is very necessary for us today. Welby always
asks the unanswerable questions. Her critical questioning mind leads her through these amazing
writings she quotes, encouraging all kinds of new ideas. But the secret is still haunting us. She
writes in an extremely imaginative and questioning way and assumes that she will always pursue
the secret, which makes the so-called secret seem somewhat less immense and somewhat
containable.
1
Frontiers of Semiotics Dealy, Williams, Crompen Indiana 1986
Science: The Question of Its Limits/Portis-Winner 12/15/2011 9
It is not surprising that Welby should be attracted to Bakhtin, as Bakhtin rejects plain
meaning fallacy, and rejects rigid definitions. He stresses the vital role of metaphor. Language is
a modeling system. Added to her pursuit, Welby questions our conceptions of time and space as
related to first, and secondness, and thirdness by Peirce. Thus she rejects the division of time into
past, present, and future. This is simply limited by our own vision. Past is the world already
experienced, the future is not revealed to our own gaze. In the discussion of space and time, she
holds that time is derivative, and space is the primary factor for change. Time is the product of
your experience of motion, and its condition is space. Time is really one-dimensional, she says.
Time is the translation of the idea of space (p.460.) Elaborating on this idea, present is the sweep
of your outlook, the future is that which is below the horizon. The past is what already has been
explored by man (p. 460). Here again Welby predicts future concepts of time and space. In this
context, she discusses the brain and its parts and their functions and evolution.
Considering music, intentional discord may be the conidtion of true music where the
essay is significant and compared with intentional ambiguity (369.) She believes that music is
related to the language model, but this is disputed or modified by some semioticians today. For
example, Levi-Strauss employs musical terms for metaphoric names for some of his works, and
he wrote that when writing he extends this process to the music of Wagner. While Welby does
not concentrate on the role of music, because she says she is deaf, she notes some similarities
between language and harmony, which was Jakobson’s point. While she does not discuss this, it
is thought that primitive music is universal as dance and the issue of whether it precedes language
or not has been open to question. In her various references to primitive man, the recognition of a
common human nation and primitive learning of the child began with acting and imitation. Again
she was ahead of her times in her discussion of primitive peoples.
Translation is described as the most fundamental aspect of significance. Significance
increases as interpretive and translation develops through the open network of signs. The more
Science: The Question of Its Limits/Portis-Winner 12/15/2011 10
the interpretative process proceeds, the more the significance and with this one understanding of
life.
In considering the meaning of a word as the intent which it is desired to convey – the
intention of the user, the significance is always manifold and intensifies in sense as well as
meaning. It expresses its importance, its appeal to us, the moment for us, its emotional force, its
ideal value, the moral aspects, the universe or at least the social image (p. 36). Expressing her
ideal, Welby writes, “Significs, then, brings us the philosophy of Significance, i.e., raising of our
own whole conception of meaning to highest and more efficient level. It brings the cosmos out of
the present chaos of our ideas as the sense meaning and significance, and showing us that we
need to use these terms in a certain order of value and range” (p. 255). Welby stresses the
flexibility of language, which is important in the interpretive process, and also her three triads.
Welby’s theory of translation, according to Petrilli, breaks new ground because she really
has a theory of infinite semiosis, like Peirce. But she says that the translation can be of
expressions, and of any way of communicating. She comments on Jakobson’s famous article on
translation, where he points to three forms, one intralingual, then interlingual, and then
intersemiotic, giving a feeling of the breadth of what translation can do. She discusses at great
length the universal aspects of translation, particularly with Jakobson’s intersemiotic, the idea
being that somehow we can communicate anything if one works on the problem of translation,
and if we could be universally communicative with the human world. Translation was really the
high point for Welby because, as she says, it increases knowledge, increases ethical sense,
increases intercommunication throughout the world, and it is fundamental for any kind of
Significs, because it allows us to have universal applications.
Here is where we must defer to Welby’s “mother sense.” As Petrilli says, Welby has
devoted much to figurative dimensions of meaning, the operation of metaphors and similes.
Welby lists in considerable detail her many types of metaphors. In the search for exact meaning,
Science: The Question of Its Limits/Portis-Winner 12/15/2011 11
she says that humans are endowed with mother sense, or primal sense, necessary for critical
consciousness, for creativity, and for responsibility.
Turning to the importance of mother sense, she seems to believe that the female brain
(mother sense) is prior but the male brain reaches a higher degree of complexity, but the man
owes much to the womanhood acting through him. This problem is contentious and today is
subject to research and investigation. Is it genetic, is it biological (women being the child-bearers)
but Welby’s effort cannot be completely overlooked. It is synonymous for her with primal sense,
and other kinds of senses, including original sense, racial sense, and native sense. It is described
as the originating source of sense and meaning necessary for the capacity for interpretation and
invention, for problem-solving and discernable among the multiple meanings for signs, behavior,
and experience. Other synonyms are primal sense, primary sense, original sense. Additionally, a
development of mother sense is the faculty for critique and rational construction conditions of
possibility from which the intellect must employ. It is noted by Welby as the primordial method
of mind, one which is necessarily the precursor and condition of all forms of mental activity,
including even that of logic itself. It appears to me that mother sense envelops Peirce’s ground or
firstness. Welby’s primal sense is oriented by the logic of otherness. It includes the human
capacity for critique, and instinctive abilities. It is inborn and closely related to the concept of self
as the following examples imply: “We are in thought and not that thought are in us” (CP 5285 –
p. 608) And we might compare this to Levi-Strauss, who writes that myth thinks through him.
Welby writes that the relation of the self is non-correspondency, deferral, differences, and a
reciprocal otherness. The “I” with its multiple selves, belongs to the order of motion, and
function. Therefore, it cannot be self-regarding. Identity is becoming, acting, and doing for both
Peirce and Welby (p. 605) Relation between the I and the self, and the sign and the interpretant, is
relation of deferral, reciprocal otherness and dialogism (p. 608).
The self that aims to replace the I is selfish. It is necessary to master the relation of
otherness between I and self. To know himself, not as an end but as a means, is the highest order
Science: The Question of Its Limits/Portis-Winner 12/15/2011 12
of identity (615). My own comment is that this can be again compared to Peirce’s ego, non-ego
and also to Freud’s ego and superego. Welby writes that “the supreme function of the ident is to
put itself at the service of the ident and to collaborate in generating, knowing, serving, mastering,
and transfiguring our actual and possible worlds, the mission of ourselves being to master the
world for identity and difference. Note: the ident means multiplex we, us, but more complex
refers to I-me. Peirce writes that self love is no love. One cannot be at once the observer and the
observant. Like Peirce, Welby holds that the human being is a community of parts that are
distinct but not separate. Far from excluding each other, these parts, or selves, are interconnected
by relations of reciprocal dependence. They are founded on the logic of otherness and of
similarities among differences, thereby excluding the possibility of undifferentiated confusion.
Welby’s neologism, Ident, describes subjectivity in all its aspects. Referring to ident she
writes “We need some word like ‘self’ to stand for what we are made to conquer and transform,
and another totally different one to express the essence, the root and the constructive nature of our
time and conscious being” (p. 148).
It is logical to complete this report on this massive work with the subjectivity of the
interpretative process and the fundamental mentality of the ident, the root of all semiosis. Here
again Welby is foreseeing and defining major research on the subject of the identity of the self
and meaning in all its dimensions.
Science: The Question of Its Limits/Portis-Winner 12/15/2011 13
References cited
Boas, Franz. The Mind of Primitive Man. Boston: Macmillan, 1978.
Deely, John. Frontiers in Semiotics. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. La Pensée Sauvage. Paris: Plom, 1926. (The Savage Mind, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1976).