As a public health practitioner, I share many of the concerns faced by Walker Percy, the physician. He was fascinated by the universe and the people who inhabited their worlds within that universe. Science* should be a valuable tool for exploring the whole of this mystery. Yet, Percy contended that modern science is incoherent when it tries to understand humanity specifically as human rather than biological or neurological.
He further contended that the view of world that we have derived from modern science is also incoherent. This arises from a bifurcation introduced by Descartes some three hundred years ago. He contended that there was mind and body. How they interact is left unexplained.
Fundamentally, we think that the latter (material) is real and the former (mind) problematic. Where can the reality of mind be located in space? Are we really left with a ghost in the machine?
So, Percy argued that science is incoherent, because no matter how much they might try, a “brain” scientist qua “brain” scientist (e.g., Skinner) and a “mind” scientist qua “mind” scientist (e.g., Jung) cannot bridge the gap (Percy 1989:79).
Perhaps the oddest thing about these incoherences is the fact that we do not find them odd…We do not find it odd to jump from the natural science of the biology of creatures to a formal science of the utterances of this particular creature without knowing how we got there (p.80).
It was Charles Saunders Peirce who suggested that the place to bridge the divide was at the very point where mind and matter meet: language. Language is a combination of words and meanings. You can see or hear words. You cannot hear or see meanings. Yet, both are real, both are natural events.
Words, as spoken or written, are an example of a dyadic event. Air passes by the vocal cords and causes a vibration that is shaped by the tongue, teeth and lips to produce a particular sound. A hand articulates through a series of movements using a stylus and an symbol appears on a wax tablet. We can hear, see, or touch these.
However, we cannot see, hear or touch the meaning of the sound or the symbol. A third appears in our intellect, our insight, but not to our sight. We grasp a connection between what is pronounced or impressed and some other. A triadic relation is created, elaborated or elucidated. This relation is immaterial. Yet, it is the foundation of so much that is human.
What is important, what distinguishes us from other animals, is not the fact that we use these relationships to navigate through our worlds. Animals do this as well. What makes us different is the fact that we can study, know and understand the significance of these relationships.
We can name reality. We, thereby, know that reality more fully. We can also modify the modelling that makes for our life-world. The modelling is of first importance. Communication, important as it is, is secondary.
For Peirce, semiotics is the study of the immaterial activity of signs that allows us to navigate the material and more. Both the dyadic (causal events) and the triadic (relational events) are natural and can be investigated in an integral fashion. We are only just beginning to develop the capacity to do this after a rather tragic false turn. We need no longer be divided creatures.
*”When I say science, I mean science in the root sense of the word, as the discovery and knowledge of something which can be demonstrated and verified within a community” (Percy 1989:77).
Walker Percy (1989) The Divided Creature. The Wilson Quarterly 13(3):77-87.
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