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Volume 1 Issue 1
Volume 2 Issue 1

Thomas A. Sebeok (1920-2001) Remembered

by
Marcel Danesi

       On December 20, 2001, Professor Thomas A. Sebeok passed away peacefully at his home in Bloomington, Indiana. To write this rémembrance is one of the most difficult things that I have ever had to do. As a graduate student at the University of Toronto in the late 1960s and early 1970s I came under the spell of his writings, which instantly influenced my own thinking and the direction my own career has taken so many years later. One cannot help but to be in awe of one's intellectual mentors and, therefore, to feel inadequate writing about them. But my problem is compounded by the fact that my mentor had become a good friend from whom I learned so much. I truly will miss him. His ideas, his advice, his writings constitute the sum and substance of the Program in Semiotics and Communication Theory of Victoria College - for they have been instrumental in shaping it beyond the scenes. Professor Sebeok loved everything about us - the great students in the Program, the instructors, the "type of semiotics" espoused here, and the larger community of people at Victoria College. We have lost a great friend; but his spirit lives on - in the content of the courses, in the ideas that are put forward and debated, and in many other ways.
       As the seventeenth century French writer and moralist Jean de La Bruyère (1645-1696) wrote in his 1688 treatise Of Books: "A heap of epithets is poor praise; the praise lies in the facts, and in the way of telling them." And the facts, in the case of Thomas A. Sebeok, speak for themselves. As an instructor of university courses in semiotic theory and method, I have been able to show the relevance of semiotics to students from all kinds of disciplinary domains primarily because of the fact that I have based the content of my courses on Sebeok's "way of telling the facts," to put it in La Bruyère's terms. This has allowed me to demystify semiotics and thus make it a more widely known and accepted method of scientific inquiry among newcomers to the field.
       It is not commonly known that the science of signs grew out of attempts by the first physicians of the Western world to understand how the body and the mind interact within specific cultural domains. Indeed, in its oldest usage, the term semiotics was applied to the study of the observable pattern of physiological symptoms induced by particular diseases. Hippocrates (460?-377? BC) - the founder of Western medical science - viewed the ways in which an individual in a specific culture would manifest and relate the symptomatology associated with a disease as the basis upon which to carry out an appropriate diagnosis and then to formulate a suitable prognosis. The physician Galen of Pergamum (130?-200? AD) similarly referred to diagnosis as a process of semiosis. It was soon after Hippocrates' utilization of the term semeiosis to refer to the cultural representation of symptomatic signs that it came to mean, by the time of Aristotle (384-322 BC), the "reference system" of a sign itself.
       So, from the dawn of civilization to the present age, it has always been recognized in Western culture - at least implicitly - that there is an intrinsic connection between the body, the mind, and culture, and that the process that interlinks these three dimensions of human existence is semiosis, the production and interpretation of signs. The raison d'être of semiotics is to investigate the interconnection between life and semiosis. And that is what Thomas Sebeok did brilliantly. His major books, and I mention only a handful here - Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs (1976), The Sign and Its Masters (1979), The Play of Musement (1981), I Think I Am a Verb (1986), Signs (1994), Global Semiotics (2001) - have shown how semiosis interacts with biological, psychological, and cultural processes and systems. Incidentally, I had the distinction and pleasure of co-authoring with him The Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotics (2000), a project that he and I had agreed to carry out in order to show the world that the Toronto-Bloomington axis was based not only on friendship, but on a true spirit of scientific inquiry.
       It is difficult indeed to formulate a single theme as characteristic of his overall contribution. Like the great biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944) - whose "discovery" by North American scientists is due in large part to Sebeok's efforts - Sebeok found a point of contact between a mainstream scientific approach to the study of organisms - biology - and that of the strictly semiotic tradition. Von Uexküll argued that every organism had different inward and outward "lives." The key to understanding this duality is in the anatomical structure of the organism itself. Animals with widely divergent anatomies do not live in the same kind of world. There exists, therefore, no common world of referents shared by humans and animals equally. The work of von Uexküll and Sebeok has shown that an organism does not perceive an object in itself, but according to its own particular kind of preexistent mental modeling system that allows it to interpret the world of beings, objects, and events in a particular way. For Sebeok, this system was grounded in the organism's body, which routinely converts the external world of experience into an internal one of representation in terms of the particular features of the neural modeling system with which a specific species is endowed.
       Sebeok thus transformed semiotics back into a "life science," having taken it back, in effect, to its roots in medical biology. In other words, he uprooted semiotics from the philosophical, linguistic, and hermeneutic terrain in which it has been cultivated for centuries and replanted it into the larger biological domain from where it sprang originally. Sebeok's biological approach inhered in a perspective that aimed to investigate how all animals are endowed genetically with the capacity to use basic signals and signs for survival, and how human semiosis is both similar to, and different from, this capacity. He distilled rudimentary elements of semiosis from animate reality, so as to establish a taxonomy of notions, principles, and procedures for understanding the uniqueness of human semiosis. The result has been a program for studying human cognition as a biological capacity that transforms sensory-based and affectively-motivated responses into a world of mental models. Signs are forged within the mind as extensions of the body's response system. No matter how bizarre or unearthly the shape of creatures which might inhabit alien planets, we are likely to recognize them as animals nonetheless. The chief basis for this recognition is that they are bound to give off "signs of life."
       There is no doubt in my mind that Professor Sebeok's ideas will continue to shape the development of semiotics in the future, for the simple reason that they now have become unconscious patterns of thought in those who have themselves been influenced by his work - and there have been myriads of them. Indeed, in having transformed the mainstream study of semiosis into a life science, Sebeok has expanded the nature of semiotic inquiry and attracted, in the process, more and more interest in it from the behavioral, cognitive and social sciences.
       The term model, which is central to the Sebeokian paradigm, requires some discussion and elaboration. Model-making typifies all aspects of human intellectual and social life. Before building a house, a constructor will make a miniature model of it and/or sketch out its structural features with the technique of blueprinting. An explorer will draft a map of the territory he or she anticipates traversing. A scientist will draw a diagram of atoms and subatomic particles in order to get a "mental look" at their physical behavior. Miniature models, blueprints, maps, diagrams, and the like are so common that one hardly ever takes notice of their importance to human life; and even more rarely does one ever consider their raison d'être in the human species. Model-making constitutes a truly astonishing evolutionary attainment, without which it would be virtually impossible for modern humans to carry out their daily life routines. All this suggests the presence of a modeling instinct that is to human mental and social life what the physical instincts are to human biological life. Now, what is even more remarkable is that modeling instincts are observable in other species, as the relevant literature in biology and ethology has amply documented. The purpose of semiotics, Sebeok argued, is to study the manifestation of modeling behaviors in and across all life forms.
       In a fundamental sense, the study of all modeling phenomena is a study of the symptomatology between body, mind, and culture - just like the ancient physicians maintained. Sebeok's framework for studying this nexus is called Systems Analysis (SA). The main tasks of SA are: (1) to determine what constitutes a model in animal behavior, (2) to what modeling system it pertains, (3) what kind of modeling activity it manifests, and (4) what its function is. These tasks are guided by several key notions. First, there is the notion which posits three distinct but interconnected types of models: (1) a primary model, which is a simulacrum of a referent; (2) a secondary model, which is either an extension of a simulacrum or an indexical form; and (3) a tertiary model, which is a symbolically-devised form of some kind. Second, there is the notion of stability vs. pliability which claims that a model (natural or artificial) can be stable (e.g. a written text) or pliable (e.g. oral conversation): stable models are fixed and relatively permanent or invariable; pliable ones are temporary and adaptive to the dynamics of a situation. Third, there is the notion which posits that the form a model assumes can be singularized, composite, cohesive, or connective, providing clues as to the nature of the referent or referential domain that it encodes. Fourth, there is the notion of interconnectedness, whereby the modeling system deployed will vary according to the nature of the referent, the function of the model, and the situation in which the modeling act occurs. Fifth, SA makes a distinction among semiosis, modeling, and representation: semiosis is the neurobiological capacity to produce forms (signs, texts, etc.), modeling is the channeling of the semiosic capacity towards a representation of some referent (the actual act of creating a form). Sixth, there is the notion that all models possess the same structural features. Finally, there is the notion that modeling reveals how the brain carries out its work of transforming sensory forms of knowing into internal forms of thinking and external forms of representation: a specific external model is thus considered to be a "cognitive trace" to the form a concept assumes in the mind, and since concepts depend on how they are modeled Sebeok argued that the form that knowledge takes depends on the type of modeling used.
       In SA, the species-specific forms of knowing are seen as manifest in the modeling behaviors of the species. Access to how a species knows something, therefore, is through the modeling system it possesses. Primary modeling, for instance, is "knowing through simulation." Secondary modeling, on the other hand, is "knowing through extension and indication." This implies that secondary modeling does its handiwork, by and large, after the primary system has completed its own. Further extensions of forms leads eventually to highly abstract, symbolic (tertiary) systems of representation. The primary (iconic) system is the "default" system, while the other systems are extensional systems. Thus, SA attempts to take systematically into account the various facets of semiosis in an integrative fashion.
       Once the nature of the modeling process has been ascertained, then its forms and functions can be inferred from observation of the semiosic behavior they permit. Thus, the cross-species nature of SA has clear implications for ethology and animal psychology, as well as for traditional semiotic theories. Its central proposal is that the tendency in human representation is to produce, first and foremost, a sensory model of some referent or referential domain and then, by extensional processes, to make it encompass increasingly larger domains of meaning. This "flow" from iconicity to cultural symbolicity, i.e. from concrete, sensory modes of representation to complex, abstract modes, characterizes human modeling.
      As Peirce cogently argued, "Every thought is a sign." But, as he also wrote, "Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there." This statement encapsulates why Sebeok's type of semiotics is so important today. It is based on the premise that the Umwelt and Innenwelt of all animals, as well as the feedback links between the two, are created and sustained by the particular biology that characterizes a species. A model is a semiosic production with species-specific biological features for its utilization. Sebeokian semiotics shows, in other words, how thought originates "in the organic world." The models that animals produce are natural forms which must fit "reality" sufficiently to secure the survival and "sanity" of the members of a species in its ecological niche. In human beings, the modeling instinct is so pervasive and powerful that it often becomes very sophisticated indeed in the adult life of some individuals, as borne out by Einstein's testimonial, or by what we know about Mozart's or Picasso's ability to model intricate auditory or visual referents in their heads in anticipation of transcribing them onto paper or canvas. Language and symbols as far as we know, are unique to anthroposemiosis. These make it possible for humans not only to represent immediate reality, but also to frame an indefinite number of possible worlds. The modeling capacity in humans has led to true culture, requiring the representational capacities of language and other symbol-based systems in contrast to "nonhuman culture." It is on this level, defined as tertiary, that nonverbal and verbal sign assemblages blend together in the most creative modeling system that Nature has thus far produced.
       To conclude this tribute to Thomas A. Sebeok, I would like briefly to draw attention to Sebeok, the individual. As great an intellectual as he was, with a truly international reputation, he nevertheless had profound respect for his colleagues in the field and a considerable attachment to students. It really could not be otherwise. Great thinkers are invariably appreciative and respectful of the others in their field. As John Deely puts it in his preface to a reprint of The Sign and Its Masters, Sebeok "may fairly be called the primus inter pares of that elite handful of contemporary intellectuals responsible for the establishment of semiotics as an interdisciplinary perspective affecting our perception and understanding of the world of ideas in the full panoply of its traditional entrenchments ("the disciplines") and historical development." And, now the Professor Sebeok has left us, it has become even more obvious to me how important he truly was to the field of semiotics. He was perhaps its "greatest mind." I conclude this rémembrance, with the apt words of the nineteenth century German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) who wrote in 1851: "Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them."