4.2.2. The Stoic Influence: Augustine
In his De doctrina christiana (II, 1–4), Augustine proposes his famous definition of the sign. A sign is something which, over and above its sensible aspect, brings to mind something different from itself, like the spoor left by an animal, the smoke from which one infers the presence of fire, the moan that indicates pain, the bugle that communicates orders to a troop of soldiers. Signs are therefore either natural or given. Signa naturalia are those that make something manifest independently of any intention, like the smoke that indicates fire or the tracks left by the animal or even the anger that shows in a face without the angry person wishing to show it. The signa data on the other hand are those emitted in order to communicate the movements of the mind or the contents of one’s thought. We only signify in order to produce in the mind of someone else what we already have in our own. But, on the one hand, what is in the mind of the person emitting the sign is not necessarily a concept; it can also be a psychological state or a sensation; on the other hand, the sign produces something in the mind of the addressee, not necessarily a concept. This is why Augustine places among the signa data both the words of Scripture (in addition of course to human words) and the signs produced by animals, and, in a humane touch, he evokes for us not only the utilitarian relationship between the rooster and the hen in search of food but also the cooing of the turtle dove calling for her mate.22
He leaves us no choice, then, but to attribute to him the classification shown in Figure 4.1.
Figure 4.1
Except that at this point Augustine realizes that he has gone too far, and in his final paragraph he corrects himself, leaving in suspense the question as to whether the call of the dove or the groans of the sick are truly to be considered phenomena of signification. If it were not for this correction, the “language” of the dove would have been firmly situated alongside the words of Holy Scripture. And since it is the latter that he is concerned with, he chooses to shelve the other issue for the time being.
4.2.3. The Stoic Influence: Abelard
One solution to the riddle of the dove will make its appearance (albeit somewhat problematically) with Abelard. In his Dialectica (I, iii, 1), the classification he espouses (which in any case does not depart from the Augustinian distinction) can be reduced to the Aristotelian-Boethian model (to be discussed later): meaningful voces may be divided into those than are meaningful naturaliter and those whose meaning proceeds ex impositione or ad placitum (“by convention”); and among the natural utterances he cites the barking of the dog (as an expression of anger).23
But in his Ingredientibus, another opposition is associated with that between naturaliter and ex impositione, namely, that between significativa and significantia.24
In order for a word to be significativa it must be an institutio. This institutio is not a convention (like the impositio); instead it is a decision that lies behind both the impositio and the natural significativeness, and could come very close to intentionality. Words signify in fact by means of the institution of human will, which orders them ad intellectum constituere, that is, to produce concepts. Seeing that by his day the barking of the dog must have become a canonical citation, Abelard declares that it is significant of anger and pain, just like a human expression designed to communicate something, because it is instituted by nature, in other words by God, to express this meaning. Thus, the bark can be distinguished from those phenomena that are merely significantia, that is, symptomatic, such as, for example, that same bark that, heard from a distance, allows us merely to conclude that there is a dog somewhere over yonder.
If a man, then, hears a bark and infers that there is a dog present, this is a symptom being used, by inference, to draw a signification, but the fact that it becomes significant does not imply that it has been instituted as significative. On the other hand, when the dog barks, it does so to express a specific concept (anger or pain or rejoicing), in other words, in order to constituere intellectum (produce concepts) in our minds. Abelard does not say that the dog does so of its own free wilclass="underline" the dog is acted upon by another will, belonging to the natural order (a sort, we might say, of agent will).25 But it is still an intentional agent. Abelard is quite clear: a thing is significative because of the act of will that produces it as such, not because of the fact that it produces meanings.
Accordingly, Abelard’s taxonomy should be translated as in Figure 4.2.
Figure 4.2
Apropos of which, it could be said that where there is institutio, there is some form of code, a correspondence (natural or conventional) between signans and signatum, which cannot be simply a matter of conjecture. But the voces significantes remain a matter for conjecture and therefore inference, and in this sense Abelard sticks to the Stoic distinction that distinguishes between speech act and index or cue.
4.2.4. Boethius’s Reading of
De interpretatione
16a
This distinction, however, is not so evident in the semiotics clearly derived from Aristotle. Now, if we are to appreciate most of the discussions that follow, we must take as our point of departure, as the Middle Ages did, De interpretatione 16a, where, with the purpose of defining nouns and verbs, Aristotle makes a number of statements about signs in general. Let me attempt a translatio media, which, while taking into account our current versions, endeavors above all to give an account of those aspects that particularly struck the translators and interpreters of the Middle Ages:
The sounds of the voice (ta en te phone) are symbols (symbola) of the affections (pathematon) of the soul, just as the letters of the alphabet (grammata) are symbols of the things that are in the voice (en te phone). And as the letters of the alphabet are not the same for all men, in the same way neither are the sounds. Nevertheless, sounds and letters are basically signs (semeia) of the affections of the soul, which are the same for everyone, and likewise things (pragmata), of which the affections of the soul are similar images (omoiomata), are the same for everyone. (16a, 1–10)
A name is a sound endowed with meaning (phone semantike) by convention (kata syntheken). (16a, 20–21)
Lo Piparo (2003) has proposed a radically different interpretation of this passage,26 but in the present instance we are concerned, not with the philological exegesis of Aristotle, but with seeing how the Middle Ages read this text; and the current interpretation was that what we have on the one hand are things, which impress their images upon the soul (which constitutes their species), while on the other we have the linguistic symbols (sonorous and graphemic) that refer to the affections of the soul, or mental images, ad placitum. But, if this is how the text is to be understood, we ought to draw another conclusion from it: that sounds and letters (independently of their meaning) are also indices (semeia) of the affections of the soul. An idea that may appear banal in itself (like saying that if someone speaks it is because they have something in their heads that they want to say), but which becomes less banal when we see the advantage that Thomas derives from it indirectly, when he lets it be understood that we do not recognize that man is a rational animal through direct knowledge of his essence, but because he manifests his rationality though language.