Pierre Maranda

Anthropologie, retraité de l’enseignement, Université Laval

“The Bridge Metaphor:
Polarity or Triangulation ?
Humanities + Semiotics versus Sciences,
or Humanities + Semiotics + Science ?”

Un article publié dans Semiotics as a Bridge between the Humanities and the Sciences, pp. 129-161. Edited by Paul Perron, Leonard G. Sbrocchi, Paul Colilli et Marcel Danesi. New York: Legas, 2000, 662 pp.


In this contribution to our round-table I shall convey you to move in metaphoric — and occasionally meta‑metaphoric — spaces. As you have all noticed the title of this conference includes a metaphor. It does not say "Semiotics IS A bridge" ; cautious, it says "Semiotics AS A bridge". Thus it orients us toward comparison, not toward definition. In fact, can we move from the AS A paradigm to the IS A one ? In the title readings I propose, I shall explore the conditions under which one may transit from a metaphor — AS A — to its implementation — IS A, the conditions under which a metaphor may generate a metamorphosis, i.e., become "metamorphosizing": a sign that effectuates its signified.

First, as a way of extracting the most from the title of the conference I shall propose a limited‑scope exercise in semantics. As everybody knows, semantics is culture‑specific, and it weighs on cultural interpretations, with epistemological implications. Thus, I shall conform to the expectations of the conference organisers who, in their "Call for papers", have invited us to adopt an "epistemological/ cultural/ interpretative" approach. Second, I shall briefly consider the call for papers (in connection with the conference title) to contextualize the kinds of responses it elicited, as found in the tentative program. Third, a cursory epistemological contextualization of semiotics with respect to anthropology, cognitive science and transdisciplinarity. Fourth, I shall loop back to the conference title in order to envision two possible scripts for bridge building or, actually, to do away with the bridge metaphor. According to one script semiotics would drive the Humanities into the bassin d'attraction of the Sciences as Leroi-Gourhan and others suggest it may happen ; semiotics would then move towards cyborgics. The other script would also merge the two heretofore different banks to [130] bridge into one ground — one ground: a continuum on which move art, poetry, and other forms of so-called unscientific corpora as well as so-called scientific ones through Imagination Structuring Processes (ISPs).

1. The Conference English Title:
Semiotics as a Bridge between the Humanities and the Sciences

Obviously, this title implies a polarity, a contrast: even perhaps two opposites as marked by "between". Irreducibility ? At least a gap: a ditch, a brook, a river, a chasm, a canyon ? over which a bridge can or might be built. The title identifies the two banks to bridge: the Humanities and the Sciences. But to Umberto Eco the issue would be meaningless: taking optics as representative of the hard sciences, he stated bluntly (1986, p. 217) in his study of mirrors, that "optics seems to know a lot about mirrors, whilst it is questionable whether semiotics knows anything about signs." And he continued, purporting to question the "scientific" nature of optics, "On the whole, optics is an 'exact' science, and so‑called exact sciences are supposedly more accurate than so-called non‑exact sciences. When questioning ourselves on our experience with mirrors (from now on we are entitled to speak 'scientifically' of catoptric experience), we might, at the most, wonder to what extent catoptrics is actually exact.." Thus, sciences and semiotics would share the same status of two "inexact" sciences and the bridge problem would disappear — or should I say the "lips of the wound" would have come closer, ready to heal — provided hard scientists accept to soften their claim to exactness ? And many do, like Benjamin Kuipers (distinguished Professor of Computing science at the University of Texas at Austin) in his recent book Qualitative Reasoning (1994), marvelling that we function quite well in a world extremely complex of which our knowledge remains always incomplete so that we never fully understand the world we live in. And John Law (1984) suggests in his actor‑network model that all thought processes conform to sets of black boxes, be they human beings, particles, petrol firms, etc., and to him such networks are all "scientific facts".

But before investigating the — shall I say, "fuzzy"—  borders or shores or banks, before investigating what the bridge may span, and in order to run our investigation from a higher vantage point, I should like to point out another contrast in the conceptual architecture of this conference: that between the English and the French titles. Actually, a manifold contrast. Let us begin with it so that our vantage point transcend both languages. Then we may be able to go deeper into what we [131] might call the metalinguistic title of the conference, the semiosis of which I shall invite you to reflect upon. "

1.1 The English and French Titles of the Conference.
Epistemological Implications of the "Bridge"
and "Hyphen" Metaphors

The French title launches us in a different metaphoric space than the English title: one that belongs to literacy, "trait d'union". The English version may evoke civil engineering and it implies that the space between the Humanities and the Sciences is wide and deep enough to require a bridge. Congruently with the metaphor in the French title let us recast the English one in terms of literacy and move from the hyphen to alphabetic representations. Thus we have a capital T figure: it suggests a horizontal passageway over a relatively wide drop. Then superimpose the capital T on a capital U or V and consider the vertical bar of the T as a pillar if you like. [1] The title might have used an up-and-down link‑metaphor such as a rope or a ladder but it would have meant a hierarchy between the two fields. The title does not preclude, however, level disparity between the two banks so that the bridge might slope down one way or the other... But concerning the U — or V — shape geometric representation I just suggested, only the upper parts of the figure stand apart. Would it be that if we dig deeply enough, we would find that, after all Eco is right and the differences are only superficial, the surface opposition being neutralized when one "gets to the bottom line" so that we do not have two capital l's but a single letter ? If so would an upside-down U or V offer a better representation of the relationship between sciences and the humanities ? Semiotics might then perch with Umberto Eco on top of that arch forming a sort of Peircian triangle.

Of course, many do disagree with Eco's underrating of the "exact" sciences. Even some semioticians do. Among the most conscientious and thoughtful of them, Jean-Claude Gardin has restated the polarity that sets clearly apart the sciences and the humanities, objecting to Lepenies' "third way" that would create a "confusion of genres". For Lepenies, a "Third Way" — a "bridge" as it were — would exist between the sciences and the humanities. Thus, « les sciences de l’homme » — that include semiotics — would eventually establish their position "between the Humanities [Belles-Lettres] from which they stem and the Sciences toward which they have chosen to go" (Gardin 1991, p. 29 ; see also [132] p. 244-249). Gardin maintains the border between the two worlds, resolutely adopts the duality paradigm and the "double langage" it implies, showing agreement with Jerome Bruner's dichotomy between two ways of thinking, the "logical‑scientific" mode and the "narrative" mode (Bruner 1986 ; Gardin 1991, p. 33, and chapter 12). For Gardin, the "double language" will have to persist until we find "new forms of communication" (1991, p. 35). On those lines, he proposes a "practical epistemology" ("Épistémologie pratique") which, through "logicist analysis", would enable scholars in the Humanities to improve the scientific quality of their procedures. And he rejects as inadequate the "harder" approach that some of us use occasionally and that he reduces to statistical analyses that would "imprison [us — meaning myself and others] in numerical ways" (p. 36). [2]

The "boundary question" — the title of Shapiro's presidential address to the Semiotic Society of America (1993) — belongs of course with taxonomies and consequently with epistemology. When Gardin, Bruner and others contrast two languages or modes of thought, they reinforce the boundaries between the sciences and the humanities. About that kind of opposition it may be pertinent to recall Claparède's "law of awareness" according to which the awareness of differences precedes that of likeliness. Lévi-Strauss made the same point in Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949) when accounting for the definition of acceptable marriage partners that stems from partitioning humans into mutually exclusive groups: exclusion comes first, thanks to which inclusion becomes possible. And Shapiro, in the presidential address already mentioned, quoted Spinoza to the same effect: omnis determinatio est negatio. In his own words: "whether negative statements are cast negatively of affirmatively, it is the negative that is fundamental both to the ontology of norms and to their practical consequences" (1993, p. 14).

Starting with that principle, we do set up borders and dig entrenching distances between fields and disciplines that, when we have succeeded in setting them apart, we endeavour to bridge. We thus can create a new type of job, that of cognition engineers. These would follow Vygotsky, who may have gone deeper than Claparède into the epistemological implications of the bridge metaphor and its implication of a gap between "sciences exactes" and "sciences humaines" as the French version of the title has it. For Vygotsky, "awareness of similarity requires a more advanced structure of generalization and conceptualization [133] than awareness of dissimilarity" (1962, p. 88). Would it be to say that the task of "bridge"-building draws on higher, more powerful mental resources than the simple acceptance of the convenient nature-culture dichotomy, and of the disciplinary borders it maintains and facilitates ? The conference English title thus puts us resolutely on the bridge and conveys us to look right and left, to reflect on the two banks, on the two worlds it might connect.

In contrast with the English version of the title, the metaphor in the French one refers primarily to a bi-dimensional space, that of writing ; a hyphen connects the parts of a segmented word or joins two or more lexemes into a single one — "belle-mère", "mother-in-law". The hyphen metaphor may appear to be at the same time more abstract and stronger than the bridge one since it joins two lexemes — here, two fields of human knowledge. But then, a hyphen is so much tinier than a bridge that is three-dimensional with an added fourth dimension when one moves on it. The hyphen exists only on paper and between words, vs. the robustness of that material thing, a bridge, that must be sturdy enough to support the weight of those that use it to cross some form of gap. But one must note that the bridge metaphor implies a clear demarcation between two banks set sufficiently far apart that one cannot easily leap from one to the other while the hyphen is only one typing-space wide and may force together in a sort of contrived union relatively incongruous lexemes (a "mother-in-law" is not always a "beautiful mother"...). Nonetheless a hyphen may correspond to what is called an "appetence" in digraph theory and in neurophysiology.

So, on the one hand, we have a "concrete" (no pun intended) multidimensional metaphor, that comes from the current stock of "metaphors we live by" according to Lakoff and Johnson (1980, p. 46) who would doubtless classify it their category "Theories (and arguments) are buildings". But that kind of "building" deserves further analysis. Indeed, a bridge is a road but a road providing its own ground because there is none underneath ; it is a self-grounding passageway spanning a drop of some sort. On the other hand, in French, we have a metaphor that escapes Lakoff and Johnson's typologies: a literacy one that refers to the link that unites separate lexemes that do not have to share common attributes. The French version would suggest that one might hyphenate sciences and the humanities to form a compound word and perhaps also a united world of knowledge ?

We thus deal with a double semiosis, perhaps implying that the English title is better "grounded", more "motivated" than the French one while the latter is more abstract, therefor more scientific ? Non‑literate peoples do build bridges, be they simple logs over a brook or rope gangways over a chasm, but they know nothing about hyphens... On the [134] face of it and with respect to epistemology the bridge metaphor would pose fewer and less difficult problems than the hyphenation one. But one may have second thoughts about that. In fact, since a bridge is a self‑supporting structure resting on whatever pillars that are necessary if the banks to span are too far apart for a single arch, how can semiotics build the ground it consists of, walking on and through its own "ontology" as it were ?

My reading suggests that indeed semiotics IS A bridge. The bridge then becomes a hyphen because the material of which it is made is semiotics itself. In this respect, we may evoke again bridges among nonliterate peoples: for them, a bridge is often a ritual object. It not only serves as a means of transit from one state to another, it means the transiting act itself. The contiguity it establishes generates consubstantiality. Therefore a bridge has synergetic and symbiotic powers, it is not only a substantial but also a substantive connection. Thus among non‑literate peoples as in semiotics, a bridge may become a "live wire", an "ontological hyphen". Consequently, we could see the two versions of the title merging into a single meta‑metaphor. The "bridge AS hyphen" offers a second‑degree metaphor or meta‑metaphor that must be endowed with metamorphosizing power so as to implement what it means. And it generates a metaphoric space of higher order and dimensionality precisely because it requires metamorphosizing power.

In my interpretation — that can be checked by asking the conference organisers —, the semiosis of the different renderings of the title means a deliberate move to inseminate our minds with a concern broader than a simple contrast of the Humanities on the one hand, the Sciences on the other, with semiotics in-between as an inert gangway on which to listen to sighs — the Ponte dei Sospiri...

1.2 Title Versions: Lexicon and Syntagms

I still have to take up two more contrasts between the titles, one of a lexical type, the other a syntagmatic variation. In the lexicon case we do not face metaphoric diversity but idiom differences. The English title says: between the Humanities and the Sciences" — two "spaces" —, while in French it reads "entre sciences exactes et sciences humaines" — a simple space with two domains: here the word "sciences" (in the plural) recurs and the contrast obtains not between two broad fields (the humanities and the sciences) but through a dichotomization of sciences into "exactes" and "humaines". The English version might connect with Gardin's apology for "two languages", the French one, with Eco's contention of fuzziness in both.

Note also another contrast obtaining this one within the French title: some sciences are exactes but non-human, others are human but not [135] exactes, both remaining "sciences". The English version thus evokes a wider gap with two single and distinct nouns and the French one might imply a narrower one with the repetition of the same noun on both sides of "entre", the contrast expressed only through the different epithets so that the repetition of the noun would reinforce the hyphen metaphor. In this respect, the English version would consolidate the dichotomy (in conformity with Claparède's law) while the French one would reduce it (a higher mental process according to Vygotsky ...).

Finally on this topic of title comparison, let me comment briefly on the chiasm structuring the syntagms, forming the last part of the two titles — a sort of X-bridge between the two titles as it were. Indeed, a chiasm inverts the domains to be bridged or hyphenated. The English version poses as the first shore or starting point "the Humanities" while the French version switches things around: "sciences exactes" comes first followed by "sciences humaines". Should we look for epistemological implications in that chiasm. ? The answer rests with the conference organisers. Actually, moving into the substance of the conference as effectuated by its contributors we shall see that some papers conform to the English syntagm, that fewer adopt the French, and most others, none.

2. Call for Papers:
Understanding and Quest for Definitions

2.1. The Call

Next and next to last in this first section, I should like to comment briefly on the paragraphs giving leads to authors under the title "Call for Papers", « Appels de Communications ». Here again, we may note idiomatic differences: papers, more concrete than communications. For the sake of economy, suffice it to set the versions of the call for papers in two columns, the perusal of which will again show the expected English preference for concreteness even in the treatment of abstract problems, and the French preference for a more abstract approach.

LABELS

Note capital S and singular in "Science", lower case and plural in "sciences"

Note the quotation marks enclosing « exactes ». Note also, the synonym « humanités » between parentheses.

Note as well that in both versions "Sciences" comes first,\ "Humanities" second, which neutralizes the title chiasm.

And note that "spac", « espace » occurs in both versions.

APPROACH

"We invite": active voice, more incisive than the passive

« sont bienvenus ». "way" vs. « problématique » ;

"specific aspects of semiotics" vs. « perspective interdisciplinaire »

semiotics become restricted, in French, to « perspective interdisciplinaire »

To conclude on the two renderings of title and call for papers, I should say that in both languages we are asked to explore the ways of the epistemological /cultural/interpretative space between Science and the Humanities, between exact and "inexact" sciences or, to carry the contrasts further and to push it to the absurd, between natural and unnatural sciences, inhuman and human sciences... A space to "bridge" in English, to hyphenate in French. But the "ways" remain the same: epistemological /cultural /interpretative. This complex syntagm would deserve analysis but I shall only point out that the French version uses a comma and the conjunction "and" to form the syntagm while, in English, we have slashes ; the organizers having preferred the sign of equivalence or of option to hyphens.

2.2. The Response

Most titles of the papers/ communications are transparent enough to allow for sketching broad patterns and to sort them into four categories. Thus (1) one category comprises four papers out of 92 (i.e., 4%) walking the "bridge" itself, i.e., focusing on epistemology ; (2) 13 out of 92 (i.e., 14 %) conform to the English title syntagm, taking the humanities as [137] their starting point to then move toward the sciences ; (3) 14 (15%) conform to the French syntagm, and (4) 61 (66%) show apparently no concern. for the "science" side, avoiding the bridge/hyphen issue to remain entirely in the domain of the humanities. My fourth. Remember Gardins's statement quoted above to the effect that semiotics would stem from the humanities, not from the sciences.

In this respect, I would venture to say that the distribution of the papers constituting this conference deviates from standard semiotic practice: take a representative sample of semiotics journals, scrutinize articles and book reviews as well, and you will find that the overwhelming production in the field grounds itself firmly on the humanities shore, ignoring the "science" bank without even a glance in that direction. The semiosis of the program shows that the organizers of this conference have mustered up enough determination to urge semioticians to take a hard look at their epistemological/ cultural/ interpretative confinement. They thus convey us to loop back to a fundamental problem already addressed by John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), in which he uses the concept semiotikê. Locke aimed at doing for our knowledge of the understanding what Newton did for the natural sciences. His point was to improve conceptual and linguistic clarity by freeing it from the "rubbish" — cf. Francis Bacon's four "idols of the human mind' [3] —, i.e., freeing it from imprecisions and from what we could call the "semiotic torpor" akin to the mental laziness echoed to some extent in Zipf's "law of the least effort", in critical slumpiness, and self‑satisfying world‑views. Three hundred years later, Gardin's "logicism" still urges social scientists along similar though more sophisticated lines, a position also advocated in artificial intelligence for the hard sciences so as to integrate the best of both "the sloppiness required by conceptual modeling ... and the feedback that an operational language provides" (Linster 1993, p. 143).

Before going further in that direction, I feel the need of a concise epistemological contextualization of semiotics.

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3. Contextualizing semiotics:
An Epistemological Summary

3.1. Semiotics and Anthropology

I shall not offer here an overview of the semiosis of semiotics. And I restrict the approach to epistemology because to me as an anthropologist a given epistemology provides an interpretative grid of the universe, and because worldviews or "philosophies" stem necessarily from a culture. Hence my interpretation of the slashes in the triad formulated by the organisers of this conference which I read as "epistemology is a cultural product as are other interpretative operations" ; and of course interpretation relates to relative understanding, it relates to ways of representing and processing the world in which one lives as a part, the world from which one often tries artificially to dissociate oneself.

As pointed out by Aristotle and repeated by countless philosophers and cognitivists, the easiest way to believe that we understand is by assimilation of new data into existing schemes. One's worldview is thus comforted, one is reassured about one's mental competence, and one need not work hard at revamping one's processing system. One thus achieves scientific solidarity through consent and reinforcement of epistemological satisfaction. What appeared as a new problem finds old solutions and everybody can rest content with such stereotypes as "history repeats itself" or "quantum theory can swallow that". Nobel prizes and other such awards act as some sort of self-congratulatory and reassuring mechanisms our culture needs to comfort itself by confirming its intellectual competence at running the world. All in all, Hebb's law still prevails according to which the weights of the connections of memory's cell assemblies may vary to a certain extent without structural alterations of on-going sign organization nets (SONs). And such SONs remain within the parameters of what I call a culture-specific Markovian space Waranda et Nze-Nguema 1994).

As a non technical exemplification of a Markovian space, [4] and also to illustrate the cultural dependency of epistemologies I take the example of Buddhism, drawing from Fabio Rambelli's paper in the January 1995 issue of the SRB.

In Buddhism, "ignorance" is a "confusion of ontology with epistemology" (p. 11) ; actually, "everything is not different from Emptiness, at the same time semiosic potentiality and mirror-like quiescence" (p. 12). And "The Buddhist universe in its absolute modality is made of reflections reflecting reflections [i.e., a Markovian space] in a cosmic interplay [139] of pure light" (p. 12). [5] Rambelli carries on by showing how Buddhism impacts more and more European thought, and we could even make him tell that Buddhist semiotics may hyphenate Science and the Humanities:

Since the late 1970s Buddhist concepts and metaphors are more and more frequently found in semiotic discourses. It is less a systematic phenomenon than a transversal attitude fragmented in scattered texts and in the usage of many authors. Nonetheless, these different instances of penetration of Buddhism share their recurrence in the general ambit of the new cognitive sciences — constructivism, cognitivism, science of complexity, artificial intelligence — in which traditional boundaries between hard and human sciences, between physics, biology, psychology, and semiotics disciplines are blurred (p. 12).

Then is semiotics culture-bound ? Satisfaction rates with one's own cognitive bearings depend on their explanatory power. But then what of perfectly translatable metaphors that remain opaque cross-culturally — like "Time is money" in cultures where time is absolutely not a commodity: there it remains out of the local semantic space. Likewise, some metaphors receive quite different interpretations like "S.O.B." in our own semantic space and in that of peoples who worship the dog as a god (Nggela, Solomon Islands). For semiotics to cope with such problems, it must transcend cultural inertia and draw on anthropology. If knowledge and understanding and epistemology stem from a culture, that is where one must trace back their roots. "Understanding" an epistemology should therefore call on anthropology since anthropology's raison d’être is the comparative study of cultures. In this respect, anthropology and semiotics converge (cf. Rastier 1992).

Like semiotics, anthropology is a bridge : a live one, between different cultures. In our fieldwork we establish contact with more or less "exotic" people with whom we try daily to hyphenate worldviews, behaviour, i.e., with whom we aim at achieving communication as adequately as possible. And we deem we have succeeded in our endeavours when we can define mutual "conditions of intelligibility" as Leibnitz would put it, and predict correctly the responses we can observe in this or that situation. But the bridges we build are between beings of the same species or with other primates, our close cousins. Zoosemiotics goes further.

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To take an illustrious confirmation of the consonance between anthropology and semiotics, I should say that it is no mere accident that Thom Sebeok started out as an anthropologist and remains it while becoming a semiotician that dared leap into zoology and biology, one of his forthcoming subjects being "Semiosis in Bacteria, Plants, and Animals". I could find in him a living consolidation of the thesis I advanced in a paper some 15 years ago (Maranda 1981) in which I purported to show that semiotics was in fact a broadening, by application to literate cultures, of the holistic approach developed in anthropology since at least 1871, the publication year of E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture. In the same issue of Zeitschrift für Semiotik, rejoinders by Karl Eimermacher, Jerzy Pelc and Walter Schmitz debated my views that they found somewhat reductionist... But I should emphasize that the convergence between anthropology and semiotics precludes the unacceptable reduction of the former to one its components, viz., to symbolic anthropology (as Mertz [19851 would have it) ; no symbolic anthropology exists independently of socio-cultural anthropology.

But semiotics reaches further than anthropology when it tackles non‑human facts. And, as a discipline, it antedates anthropology if we do not take Herodotus into account. Semiotics can claim as totemic ancestors such scholars as John Locke at the end of the 17^th century, Condillac in the 1740s-80s, Peirce, de Saussure, etc. Nonetheless, anthropology was the first human science to develop field semiotics, i.e., a method to collect and analyze holistically and comparatively such data as kinship terminologies, cuisine, religion, fashion, and the vast array of other expressions of mankind through systems of signs. And, more recently, Latour's team (Latour and Woolgart 1981 ; Latour 1991) brought anthropology to bear on scientific laboratories as ethnographic field stations. Still in anthropology, François Dumont (1995) sets up an "anthropology of sciences and technologies" based on fieldwork to investigate the "epistemological doubt" put forth in the sociology of knowledge.

3.2. Semiotics, Cognitive Science,
and Transdisciplinarity

Another convergence, that of semiotics and cognitive science ‑remembering that cognitive anthropology preceded the latter (cf. Charles Frake, "The Ethnographic Study of Cognitive Systems" in 1962 ; Stephen Tyler's book of readings Cognitive Anthropology, 1969). Some — e.g. Paul Bouissac (1990, p. 298) — are worried that the cognitive paradigm may push semiotics aside "into the realm of anachronistic speculations and literary divagations". For others — e.g. Sebeok (1991, p. 2) — cognitive science is "at best a stylistic and methodological variant for semiotics. And Sebeok had written already in 1977, p. 180) [141] that there exists a basic connection between semiotics and mathematics. Cognitive science enjoys a vast prestige and constituency in com-

Figure 10.1: Interplay of Memory and Imagination in the Cognitive Process imagination Structuring Processes in Slikkerveer, L.J. et al. 77te Expert Sign: Semiotics of Culture. Leiden: DSWO Press, 1993.

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puting science, especially in artificial intelligence. And it is pertinent to note in view of what I shall propose in Section Four in the light that the most recent developments in AI still rest on Hebb's law about cell assemblies.

The relationship between semiosis, culture, and cognitive science has actually become a special topic of investigation in such international meetings as the one organized in Groningen on "Semiotics, Culture, and Artificial Intelligence" (Slikkerveer et al. 1993). The title of the published proceedings turns out to be as significant as that of the symposium itself, namely, The Expert Sign: Semiotics of Culture. Towards an Interface of ethno- and cosmosystems. Congruently with cognitive approaches but choosing to remain closer to disciplinary praxis, transdisciplinarity has taken a "bottom up" strategy. In that framework, practitioners aim at reworking and revamping from within the issue of boundaries between disciplines. Instead of focusing on cognitive processes as such in the "top down" approach, they purport to reach beyond multi- and pluri-disciplinarity by starting from the "guts" of specialized fields in order to "allow for the emergence of unity within diversity and of diversity through unity". In the words of what could be called the "transdisciplinarian manifesto",

« La transdisciplinarité n'est pas concernée par le simple transfert d'un modèle d'une branche de la connaissance à une autre, mais par l'étude des isomorphismes entre les diférents domaines de la connaissance. Autrement dit, la transdisciplinarité prend en compte les conséquences d'un flux d'information circulant d'une branche de la connaissance à une autre, permettant l'émergence de l'unité dans la diversité et de la diversité par l'unité. Son objectif est de mettre à nu la nature et les caractéristiques de ce flux d'information et sa tâche prioritaire consiste en l'élaboration d'un nouveau langage, d'une nouvelle logique, de nouveaux concepts [6] pour permettre l'émergence d'un véritable dialogue entre des spécialistes des différentes branches de la connaissance. » (CIRET 1978: 2, emphasis supplied ; see also Nicolescu (1994), « Transdisciplinarit6: naissance d'un mot ».)

Founded in 1970, the Laboratoire Béna d’épistémologie Naturelle represented the first transdisciplinary approach to what they call the "scientific foundation of meaning". Afterwards, in 1987, was created the International Centre for Transdisciplinary Research and Studies (CIRET [19871) that publishes since 1994 the "interactive" bulletin Rencontres transdisciplinaires. The basic principle of that association and of its annual meetings, « fondé sur l’esprit de rigueur scientifique », is to [143] promote "the advent of dynamic exchanges between the sciences and the humanities, art, and tradition" (1987," p. 3). Thus, for transdisciplinarity, the "bridge/hyphen" will result from "a new language, a new logic, and new concepts".

The association has initiated a series of books, Transdisciplinarité, tditions du Rocher (Paris) ; it complements the journal Transversales Science Culture, of GRIT (Groupe de Réflexion Inter et Trans-disciplinaire) that publishes since 1990 a newsletter that transcends disciplinary borders. The CIRET also envisions as a long‑term possibility "the creation of a 'transdisciplinary university'" (ibid.).

As the eminent mathematician and semiotician Solomon Marcus, one of the prominent members of CIRET, puts it (1994, personal communication) transdiciplinarity had to be invented because scholars in the natural sciences know nothing about semiotics. Indeed, transdisciplinarity appears strongly connected both with cognitive science and semiotics. In Noth's words (1994, p. 5), "As far as its transdisciplinary appeal and its potential for a unifying scientific perspective are concerned, cognitive science has affinities with another transdiscipline which was also once envisioned as providing a unifying point of view to the sciences (Morris, 1939), namely semiotics".

Epistemologically, semiotics belongs with a set of concerns shared by several disciplines. But its main vector remains the understanding of understanding, the analysis of the conditions of production of meaning, the process of semiosis. But since understanding remains culture-specific, do we have the mental tools to transcend our culture, to break through the walls of our own Markovian space, or can we only grope in a twilight zone of sorts towards an unattainable goal, programmed to indefinitely replicate the same modes of analysis of the constructivist processes in which take shape the different forms of a single type of operation, human cognition as our culture has posited it ?

Anthropology answers, first, that we, of European mentalities, do dichotomize the world into two sets of things: human beings on the one hand and on the other the world of which we are nonetheless thinking parts and parcels — the "nature-culture" dichotomy. And anthropology adds, second, that if we want to reach beyond our own cultural parameters, we must look at our worldview from the outside, without eschewing the difficulty of the endeavour that several epistemological anthropological publications have emphasized lately (e.g., Geertz, 1983 ; Marcus & Fischer 1986 ; cf. Simonis 1988). Consequently we have to revamp our memory, our traditional Sign Organization Packages (SOPs) and SONs (Sign Organization Nets), and to restructure our MONs (Memory Organization Nets). The task calls on pragmatics — i.e., fieldwork in an "exotic" culture — and on imagination, on ISPs.

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4. Two Scripts Developing
the "Bridge AS Hyphen" Metaphor

Since imagination opens up considerations of other worlds and of futuristic scripts, I shall explore two of them in terms of the meta‑metaphor of semiotics as "bridge AS hyphen". First I shall report the converging views of a distinguished paleontologist, of a leading feminist and of a Cambridge anthropologist that do hyphenate nature and culture, matter and mind. Second, I shall propose another script in which once better understood the association of memory and imagination might provide a vantage point for semiotics to reconsider the relations between the Sciences and the Humanities.

As I said earlier in the outline of this paper, one script consists of discarding the bridge because the gap will eventually disappear between the Humanities and the Sciences. Another script, i.e., the development of another metaphor, would privilege semiotics as the "spark" that transforms hydrogen and oxygen — he former standing metaphorically for the Sciences [associate freely with the hydrogen bomb if you wish], oxygen, for the Humanities into what flows under many bridges. That "water" would actually link the shores it seems to divide, would irrigate them and endow them with shared fecundity, or it would undermine them to the point that they would collapse into a single ground. The "spark" image would thus supersede the meta‑metaphor "bridge AS hyphen". Let us examine succinctly those two scripts.

4.1. Script No 1: Leroi-Gourhan's prediction

Drawing on his vast knowledge of paleontology and prehistory, Leroi-Gourhan imagined the broad outline of a script in which the Humanities would take an entirely new form. Writing in the 1960's, Leroi-Gourhan stated that the study of man belongs with both biology and ethnology. Concerning the Humanities, he predicted the forthcoming obsolescence of writing as we still know it, after the few millennia during which it imposed its flattening constraints on the relatively few human minds that knew ‑and the not so many more that still knowhow to use it. To him, keyboards would serve only marginal functions as voice recognition machines take over ten‑finder typing ‑already an improvement in the use of the hand, of both of them in fact, over its earlier reduction to the two fingers of the one hand that hold a pen or pencil.

Leroi-Gourhan saw the advent of world representation by electronic media and of [internet] communication superseding the "phonetic infeodation of the hand" (p. 262) that, according to his theory (see also Goody 1977), linearizes the mind because the tool molds the gesture [145] that in turn molds thought. In this respect, I must emphasize an important point: do our tools really come first, shaping our thinking processes and scientific practices, and freeing us from old servitudes by imposing new ones as Gardin says (1994 p. 28), taking seemingly and implicitly a view opposite to Leroi-Gourhan's when he argues against putting the computer first « et subséquemment les problèmes de méthode ou de fondement que posent certains de ses employs » insisting that we switch things around and « place ces problèmes à l'avant-scène et l'ordinateur à l'arrière-plan » ?

Leroi-Gourhan would have welcomed the hand's « nouvelle liberté », he claimed had he seen it ride a mouse on which to click instead of having its fingers laboriously cramped on a pen. And toggle switches would have delighted him that enable us to move at will in milliseconds on-screen within different semantic universes - as fast as our minds do it. He would have found his predictions validated in another way as well: the replacement of the two-dimensional silent sheet of paper by brightly coloured three-dimensional signs we manage at will on a screen with an added fourth dimension, the audio one: The multidimensionality of parallel representational processes he longed for -and the very multidimensionality semiosis defines as its object hat multidimensionality does occur when chunks of ideas click and counterclick to form a mosaic whose components reverberate in a cognitive accelerator of a sort. There the mind spins, experiencing the « nouvelle libération », its "new forms of thought... being to older ones like steel to silex" (p. 262).

But whatever the impact of the tool on the hand and on the mind, we tend to think that the performance of sophisticated machines remains function of the competence of their users. Or would we go further along with Leroi-Gourhan and believe that multimedia power tools will shape a new type of mankind, with a new type of Humanities: the fused pair that the French title of the conference suggests, viz., v sciences > at the same time both « exactes » et « humaines »? Or would we rather tend to think that the new technologies will make the mind run out of control, metamorphosizing their users into postmodernist drifters that will loose their bearings in the turmoils of W3 ? Significantly, and in line with Gardin's reservations quoted above, some of my colleagues as well as myself lead a rearguard fight when we refuse to teach WINDOWS in our initiation courses to computers in the social sciences: we teach DOS so that students know what they are doing instead of becoming mentally inept through MacIntoshing.

Where do we, and semiotics, stand in this world that Leroi-Gourhan anticipated ? He wrote that as a species we have come of age. And he warned us: "species do not age: they transform themselves or [146] they vanish" (1965, p. 266). Such may become the fate of the humans carriers of what they have themselves called the Humanities: metamorphosis or disappearance. If the latter, in Leroi-Gourhan's words, their dying charm may persist for a time, the nostalgic obsolescence of 'philosophy, literature [those] forms of thought strangely archaic that human beings will have used during the period of alphabetic graphism" (p. 262). The Humanities then may still mirror what mankind used to be at the beginning of the 21st century just before becoming museologized. Or if that field persists, will it take a new shape and form as Leroi-Gourhan and, more recently, Gardin (1994) would have it ? Most likely it may evolve in the direction of analyse logiciste, and the shape and form Gardin promotes for the social sciences, with writing becoming much more economical and graphic. On such lines, see Laurette's recent book (1993) exploring "literary informatics" and its epistemological, methodological and technical statuses.

Some time ago, Gardin (e.g., 1991 when discussing the "third way" between the humanities and the sciences), far from proclaiming the Humanities obsolete, emphasized their full right to exist as such, his mise en garde concerning social scientists that write as humanists. Four years later, he became more radical and came closer to Leroi-Gourhan's position when he wrote (1994, p. 29), « À tort ou à raison, j'imagine que cet air-du-temps [self-reflexivity, interest in "machines"] flottera longtemps autour ou au-dessus de nous et que si les sciences de l'homme entendent rester le refuge de ceux qui le trouvent irrespirable, elles pourraient un jour se trouver à court de réfugiés ». And (p. 30) « loin de nous épargner toute recherche sur la représentation des connaissances dans nos domaine particuliers, elles [les nouvelles technologies] l'imposent au contraire avec force et nous obligent à donner des réponses précises, pratiques, opératoires, à des questions que nous avions pris l'habitude d'aborder plutôt sous l'angle moins vif de la philosophie ».

According to the scenario inspired by Leroi-Gourhan that I just sketched, semiotics would no longer have any gap to bridge for the banks would have merged as physical ones do under geological shifts such as landslides. Semiotics might then become what I have called in the Sebeoks' 1988 Semiotic Web "semiotronics", i.e., a cyborg discipline, "cyborgics". As for semiotronics, "the major aspects of that Protean discipline touch on 1) semiotics ; and computing science, 2) semiotics, artificial intelligence and expert systems, 3) semiotics and mathesis, 4) semiography and infography [to which add neurophysiology] and 5) their possible "synergies" (Laurette 1993, p. 54). As for cyborgs they [147] are hybrids, partly human and partly mechanical. [7] The term abbreviates two words to merge them into one: cybernetics and organism. In fact, the cyborg concept — born in science fiction (Clark's Rendez-vous with Rama if I am right) — represents something venerable and more ancient than linear writing. It would be an attribute of pristine mankind, of mankind still intact, the mankind still alive that writing has not yet reduced to bidimensionality and that feels deeply its continuity with, participation in, and belonging to the world as a whole. Thus, Marylin Strathern (1991) applies the cyborg concept to better account for the association of masks and other artifacts and their users in Papua‑New Guinea.

Some cultures consider masks to be alive: people feed them, talk to them, wash and repaint them as they do their own bodies. In Papua-New Guinea, masks in initiation rituals and other ceremonies coalesce with the humans whose identities they coin as part and parcel of cosmic forces, and such operations produce ecstasy. Socio‑cultural identities thus result from an intimate association of human being and tool, an interpenetration as it were, the mask or costume being engrossed by, pregnant with the bearer that sustains its life (Maranda 1993a). Anthropologically — and semiotically — speaking, cyborgics can be understood as a rewrite of Leroi-Gourhan's general thesis of the impact of tools on minds. In this case, life- and person-creating apparatus: an identity giving tool, a perfect embodiment of applied semiosis.

According to crude stereotypes feminism could be considered the last refuge of the arts and the humanities, of the "soft arts of life". Consequently it may surprise some to see that cyborgs serve as conceptual tools in some paramount feminist writings. In Donna Haraway's words (1985, p. 99, quoted in Strathern 1991, p. 37), "The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment". Haraway offers a semiosis of feminism that does away with organicism, a philosophy that feminism must oppose. She continues "My hope is that cyborgs relate difference by partial connection rather than antagonistic opposition, functional regulation, or mystic function." That is possible because a cyborg "does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end" (1985, p. 99). Indeed, "The cyborg is a creature in a postgender world" (1985, p. 67). Should we say in a "post‑Humanities" world ? And Strathern (1991, p. 36 ; see also 112 ff. and especially 118), has this, which bears directly on the bridge issue and restates [148] Leroi-Gourhan's thesis, "It no longer becomes possible to sustain a division between the natural and the artificial, between matter and consciousness, or between who makes and who is made in the relations between human and machine." Thus the cyborg is a metamorphosizing metaphor: it reestablishes continuity where it had been artificially disrupted, disrupted through faulty semiosis.

Of course many would and will protest against such iconoclasm. What ? Our most cherished treasures, in literature, music, the plastic arts, would become obsolete, forlorn ? They would be superseded (Baudrillard hints at it because of the failure of our civilisation) by the deeds of non-literate people that, by definition, bear witness to the pre-technological age, a human condition we have progressed much beyond (except when we dream about paradise islands and good naked savages). Technologically advanced, exploiting what we call nature to the extent of destruction, our civilisation made possible the creation of the masterpieces that ground the pride that enables us to believe we are worth surviving as we are. Are we really worth surviving as we are, worth perpetuating the world we have twisted and divided up to suit our conveniences ? Facing the problem, semiotics then takes another turn -an ethical as well as epistemological one. The bridge issue becomes one of osmosis, of "resonance" as traditional Chinese wisdom has it (Le Blanc, 1994 ; Maranda 1994a)- a topic that another forum would have to take up. But this approach may lead us to raise the question as to whether a work of art in our cultures, like cultural implements in Papua-New Guinea, is anything else than a way of going deeper into "nature", i.e., a cyborgic act...

Along the lines of this first script, should semiotics promote cyborgism ? And would semiotronics really hyphenate the Humanities and the Sciences ?

4.2. Script No 2:
the interplay of memory and imagination

I shall now examine briefly the relationship between memory and imagination in our quest for understanding. In this respect, I would posit that semiotics might complement cognitive sciences by better acknowledging the function of imagination in understanding.

Knowledge vs. ? understanding

The English and French versions of the call for papers seem to postulate the equivalence of "understanding" and "seeking to define", i.e., a quest for "knowledge". However, the contrast between knowledge and understanding impinges on our epistemologies. Would semiotics aim at understanding through a quest for definitions: as though understanding [149] should lead to knowledge ? or is it the other way around, knowledge leading to understanding ? This should lead us to consider summarily the possibility that semiotics may link diverse fields through its very nature, through its "ontology" so that the bridge is not an artifact to cross a gap but a live "symbiotic" link.

Knowledge is acquired, it consists of definitions, we store it in our collective memory, we find it in books, on CD-ROMs, etc., but one does not find understanding on one's hard disk or in data bases. [8] Understanding implies the dynamic integration and processing of knowledge, drawing on memory (Memory Organization Packages, MOPs in Shank and Hunter's terminology) and imagination structuring processes (ISPs ; Maranda 1994b) — imagination, which is "the openness function of perception" [9] and that, in Jean‑Jacques Rousseau's terms, "stretches the scope of possibles", [10] i.e., the scope of hypotheses and other kinds of scripts when exploring possible worlds and universes of belief (cf. Martin, 1983: ch. 2-3).

In fact, and to loop back to Vygotsky's point on generalization as a more powerful mental act than discrimination, I might add that generalizations processes depend on imagination as much as memory. Starting from repeated perceptions of, say, chairs or cats, recognition of other tokens of those types will depend on (1) reduction to one's own prototypes of them and (2) on the power to imagine other forms (tokens) they may take so that we recognize them as possible variations of what we have built as an "exemplar" (Martin 1983 ; Kleiber 1990). The operation of smoothing (« lissage » in statistics may be just a form of ISPs.

Whereas memory has received considerable attention and has been the object of an extremely large number of empirical studies in neurophysiology, experimental psychology, computer simulation, [11] etc., imagination has remains beyond the horizon of "real" scientists and its treatment left to such soft scholars as philosophers, psychoanalysts and students of the arts and literature (cf. Sartre, Bachelard, Durand, Freud, Jung, Frye, Ricoeur, following Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Cassirer, [150] etc.). On the experimental front, even Piaget's treatment remains sketchy (Piaget 1946). Actually, with respect to imagination, Aristotle (De Anima 433b29) was at the same time responsible for dichotomizing its powers into "aesthetic" and "logistic" (logistikè), hence reinforcing the Science-Humanities opposition but -and that has been forgotten by most- he did recognize the "logical" workings of imagination in heuristic and other "scientific" endeavours.

Our epistemologies having somewhat forgotten the logistikè function of imagination, we have developed an approach that aims at being truly "scientific" in the care of memory and another that rests with the humanities for imagination. Memory seems to be a "hard" fact, imagination, not. Actually, as everybody knows, computers have memories, and very large ones, but no hardware maker has yet come up with an "imagination" chip. So, use your computer as a data processing system, use it as a knowledge storage and retrieval tool, use it as a most efficient — but dumb — research assistant, ask it to implement connectionist procedures (that's where it comes closer to imagination structuring processes): it will perform adequately if rightly programmed. But activated through imagination that enables us to scrutinize the unknown, understanding remains our own thing — cyborgs though we may be. As a consequence, I suggest we look at memory and imagination, at memory intersecting with imagination, [12] in order to explore (1) the relationship between knowledge and understanding so that (2) we may come closer to investigating the semiosis of the bridge/hyphen metaphor.

Imagination Structuring Processes

Neurophysiologists do not seem to know much about imagination ; it would be located in the orbitofrontal cortex, next to the paleocortex and it would depend on prefrontal dimensional complexity (Schupp et al. 1994). They seem to know a bit more about memory: different mnesic systems would depend on the adequate functioning of relatively specific brain components, e.g., the limbic system (middle temporal lobe, etc.) for what they call 'explicit memory" ; the base ganglions for the memory of what they call "habits", etc. (Meunier, Bachevalier et Mishkin 1994). As it would be expected, psychophysiologists do link memory and imagination: in dreams. - Dreams would activate the hippocampal-neocortical memory system that would draw out sensory images from what the Japanese Okuma (1992) calls the "memory reservoir" [151] of the brain, materials that would be combined and recombined according to association patterns to make up dream stories. And those findings would correlate with neurophysiological data. To conclude on meuro- and psychophysiology, I might add that Niethammer (1983) of the Swiss Clinique Psychiatrique de Bel-Air has speculated, on the basis of experiments with laughing gas, that imagination would share the same neurophysiological seat as the "laughter centre" ; hence, imaginative people would tend to laugh more than unimaginative people.

More generally, memory consists of "cell assemblies" in Hebb's terms, of Memory Organisation Packages (MOPs) in the terms of Shank and Hunter — to which I have added Memory Organisation Nets (MONs) (Maranda 1994b) that we may wish to complement by Sign Organization Packages (SOPs) and Sign Organization Nets (SONs) — in terms of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Such cell assemblies and SONs are partial networks some of which undergo reinforcements while some others become obsolete and vanish for a time, while others seem to be lost forever in spite of strenuous efforts at remembrance, etc. (our brain would be a less effective operating system than a computer to recover lost data because our UNERASE command cannot be activated as easily as it can be done on an electronic machine). Hebb's law on the workings of memory and its refinements by such scholars as Kamp and Hasler (1990) with their concepts of appétence, attracteurs and their rayons and bassins d'attraction, have contributed and still contribute to a better "understanding" of memory. [13] The neural networks approach is moving along the same lines, drawing from sophisticated statistical methods as evidenced by the contents of the tutorials on neural networks offered in the Fifth International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks in October 1995 in Paris (ICANN '95).

Thus we know that knowledge consists of sets of SONs structured in dynamic Memory Organisation Nets (MONs), and that the human mind actually works as a statistical machine — not a great surprise since statistics is nothing else than a product of the mind, i.e., the analysis and explicitation of spontaneous mental processes having to do with reduction, representation, probabilities, differentiation, generalizations, and multivariate semiosis. But then, and in order to be able to account for probability functions, from the crudest forms of superstitions and divination to the most refined operation of quantum physics, we need to take imagination into account: imagination, the creativity operator, the operator of the most preposterous hypotheses As well as of [152] the most enlightening speculations on cosmogony — be they those of the ancient Sumerians Or Polynesians Or those of modem astrophysicians.

Another recognition of the role of imagination come from its implementation in human languages. All human languages acknowledge imagination as well as memory. Take moods (or modes) and tenses. In a way like Oswald Ducrot's présupposés (cf. Martin 1983, p. 45 ff.), past tenses in the indicative mode imply recognition of some storage in memory.

— 'The man you saw yesterday...'

— "It happened the day you went to that art gallery."

— "You told me over the phone the things you did to Jim when you were angry with your sister."

Natural languages also give valuable clues to the nature of Imagination Structuring Processes (ISPs), a kind of anticipative présupposés as far as Prospective Imagination Processes (PIPs) go. We all utter such programmatic statements as:

— "I avoid him whenever I can because I know he will be bragging about his children."

— "I never answer the phone before 08:00 hours."

The simple future tense may be based on MOPs scanning to envision possible scripts WIN:

— "Next time he comes I will tell him to show more consideration to my mother or to stay in the kitchen.'

It relates to "programming", conative verbs:

— "Try and keep your cool next time John comes over."

With respect to Regressive Imagination Processes (RIPs), languages give us ways to imagine revisions be they of our own personal past, or of history or of scientific experiments. Thus, Renais' films Smoking and Not Smoking, and the counterfactual:

— "Had I gone to that conference instead of going on vacation..."

— "Had she walked on the other side of the street, she would not have met that person.""

— "Had Jacques Cartier landed in Florida instead of the Gaspé Peninsula..."

— "Had oxygen not combined with silicon under high pressure and at that temperature..."

As a last case, take the conditional-speculative process of MOP scanning to take decisions in the light of PIPs:

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— "If I bought that kind of shoes (or hat or car or magazine), I wonder what my friends would think."

— "If I tried to increase particle speed by a factor of one hundred in my accelerator, would my lab blow up ?"

And when Nasa or Ariane postpone a launching, the project scientists have imagined — speculated upon, computed — the consequences of this or that defection of a system part. As well, when Einstein objected to the introduction of the probability concept into the basic laws of atomic physics his conditional‑speculative scanning power failed him. [14]

Actually, human languages seem to conform to and implement, or rather be at the root of, Emmanuel Kant's typology of the functions of the human imagination: the facultas firmandi, or power to form images in the present, the facultas imaginandi, or power to form images of past states (through MOP associations triggered by a percept), and facultas praevidendi, the power to anticipate future states, related to his als ob, the "as if" mental process in the formation of hypothesis (Wunenburger 1991 ; see also de Raymond 1980, p. 145 ff. for an application of the same syntax to improvisation). In this respect, Kant's "als ob" syntactic operator restates the speculative‑conditional mode in languages. Indeed, the elementary ("BASIC') IF ... THEN OR ELSE structure may reach the domain of causation. If it does not express a mere question of temporality, we have here a reflexion process on causality and understanding.

Languages thus express ways to explore plausible or probable eventualities as well as speculate on events that could have materialized but never did. They set out what I call 'Prospective Imagination Processes" (PIPs) as well as "Regressive Imagination Processes" (RIPs). The interplay of such regressive and prospective processes enables scientists of the hard kind to revise experiments, to devise better tests, etc., as much as they enable them to revise decisions and modify their own private behaviour and existential steerings. Concerning RIPs: critical appraisals of theories or experiments in the sciences actually follow the same mental paths as bridge players commenting on their partners' moves during a game, or those of any person using the counterfactual in educating children, or reworking a love relationship. "Had this or that experiment been conducted under lower temperature or higher [154] pressure..." "Had the authors of that report taken into account Fourier transforms..." ; "Had he not forgotten my birthday..."

De Raymond (1980, p. 144) states excellently the relationships between MONs and ISPs, i.e., between MONs and RIPs on the one hand and between MONs and PIPs on the other, their interplay operating within the constraints of cultural inertia, the inertia of "collective memory":

... la quête du temps perdu illustre l'illusion nostalgique de ceux qui cherchent en arrière ce qu'ils ne trouveront qu'en avant: la décadence reduisant la force prospective du désir en force rétrospective tandis que le présent et l'avenir donnent la clé du passé. De même l'illusion prospective d'accélérer l'avenir où se dissoudrait le passé: la mémoire individuelle et collective nous constitue et nous permet de projeter cet avenir qui nous accomplira en la réalisant.

As for PIPs: hypotheses, forecasts of all sorts, divination, all grope outwards. Always based on knowledge, i.e., on MOPs, such PIPs extrapolate new configurations of variables (MONs) to project into the future, aiming at anticipations, at getting a better hold on outcomes. Some hypotheses will turn out to be verified, others not and others undecidable at least until new data or reparametering become available. One might take correct anticipations as cases of understanding but valid predictions, useful as guidelines, do not mean penetration into the nature of things. Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas ? Here we move to syntax and conjunctions of causality. A simple case of syntax: H₂+O always give water, p=1,00. But It takes two H for one O to make water, PLUS a SPARK. Among mammals, it takes a spermatozoon and an ovule to generate offsprings, but the advent of sexual dimorphism remains a MON still subject to better understanding (Deputte 1995) through more inventive imaginary processes that could generate effective laboratory experiments — or chance events that could all of a sudden produce unexpected results. [15] Both the SPARK to produce water and the SPASM to produce a living mammal in vivo could be used as metaphors to express semiosis. The spark metaphor actually belongs in Lakoff and Johnson's category "Ideas are light‑sources" (1980, p. 48), the spasm one escapes their categorizations. And to modify the referents of the "water" metaphor I used earlier in this Section, should we say that "H₂" would stand for "Humanities Stage 2" in Leroi-Gourhan's frame of reference, "O" for "organon" in the Aristotelian sense, the spark being semiotics [155] that would fuse those two components into the epistemological "water" that would quench our cognitive thirst of a unified approach to knowledge ? In Francis Bacon's terms, it takes vis imaginativa, "judicial and ministerial imagination" to invent new experiments, new empirical approaches, that will bring mankind closer to unveiling the secrets of nature. We may develop such views by saying that a theory is first a fiction generated by the "inference engine", i.e., imagination, fed by MONs.

New theories require for their validation that they go further than previous ones and that they include them. Consequently, like prospecting, retrospecting draws on both memory and imagination. The psychoanalytic concept of abreaction aims at revamping some MOPs but cannot do it without rewiring them into new nets (MONs), and such rewirings require a heavy contribution of RIPs and PIPs. Scientific experiments do not work differently except for what they bear on. When a new paradigm (in Kuhn's terms) supersedes an older one, drastic readjustments must be carried through. Scientists must reread evidence under new lights, must retrospect it. Regressive imagination processes rewire past readings, speculate on the OR ELSE completing IF ... THEN propositions. And they have to restate in a conjectural or anticipatory mode what they had previously stated in the counterfactual mode.

According to this view, 'understanding' could very well belong in the realm of creativity. Based on relative erudition, i.e., competence in handling SOPs to feed and eventually revamp MOPs, understanding can recreate the web of relationships that account for specific clusterings of SONs into MONs, i.e., a dynamic knowledge acquisition. The mind then "lights up" as the principle or reason underlying a MON, renders its structure "plausible" and can generate testable cognition. A new, "live" knowledge has thus been acquired and integrated into the MON — specific and dynamic cell assemblies — of its creator where it will dwell until, for lack of further input, of use, or for other reasons, it will transit to his set of MOPs where, eventually, it may disappear beyond the grasp of mental retrieval. In such cases, "Proustian" events or accidents or psychotherapists, may be able to recover, to "UNERASE" lost MOPs. But our mind's "operating system" must continuously sift through and sort the enormous input we receive through constant perception and dreams, most of which it readily discards or stores only in some form of short‑term MOPs. The frustrations of vain attempts at remembrance may bear witness to the fact that paper memories have perhaps reduced the power of our cell assemblies. And even [156] our paper and electronic memories may fail us, as even "science" forgets. [16]

Both memory and imagination may and do fail us. Memory less than imagination when we, plugged into our computers, become cyborgs with gigantic electronic storage and retrieval powers. Here I should say that I have not kept up with the recent developments of a highly interesting and far-reaching concept implemented in Aarhus University, in Denmark: the creation of the Department for the Integrated Study of Computing Science and the Humanities. At he outset the orientation of that department implied a fourfold semiotic view of the computer as a tool, as a communication channel for humans, and as a partner of humans which transforms them into a machine, and of the resulting human as a mechanized being (Andersen 1986). Aarhus University had thus meant to offer some sort of training in cyborgics. Going deeper in the nature of things than cyberspace, cyborgics reaches into our own ontology. But both cyberspace and cyborgics call on reworking imagination processes in connection with pragmatics. Answering the call through a better operationalization of the relationships between memory, imagination, and pragmatics would give semiotics a major and urgent assignment.

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Human beings, ourselves molded by our technical objects and being ourselves scientific data, we must look at ourselves and at the world we are part of from a higher vantage point than the dichotomy that opposes us to our environment. In that view, semiotics would stand as the mythological figure with two faces but those two faces would gradually undergo metamorphosis through a sort of "morphing" and turn into a single one. Instead of two corpora — better: of two bodies — each with its own face looking past the other, and instead of two faces atop a single body, we would have one head whose eyes can see the continuity of the continuum with‑out which we simply lose our ontology. The bridge AS hyphen metaphor would then become endowed with metamorphosizing power ; semiotics would be the light from within, the light of a better understanding of understanding. Here we sort of loop back to Sebeok's interest in and concern for biology, which I find echoed in George Lakoff's Invariance Hypothesis according to which:

certain mechanisms for the perception of spatial relations that appear to be present in lower animals are used by human beings in abstract reasoning - that aspect of human beings that has traditionally been taken as separating man from the lower animals ... Indeed the idea that abstract reason makes use of spatial perceptual mechanisms present in lower animals makes much more sense than the idea that reasoning came in all at once with man as a totally separate new cognitive faculty (1990, p. 73).

If metamorphosis obtains, cyborgian semiotics or semiotronics might no longer have to span a gap, to be a bridge: semiotics will be the spark generator that will illuminate what has heretofore artificially, i.e., culturally, forced apart as two dimensions a single vector of understanding. Matter vs. spirit, body vs. soul, the partitioning attempts to rupture a deep unity so that, having succeeded in creating a gap, European thought can then desperately try to bridge it in order to justify the basic though fallacious fault on which our cultures build themselves (cf. Latour 1991) ?

I should conclude this meta‑metaphoric exploration and venture to say that when both cognitive science and semiotics do undertake a better and deeper approach to the relationships between memory and imagination operating in synergy, as a single faculty of "understanding", we will have come closer — I "imagine" — to hyphenating the Humanities and the Sciences to form a comprehensive new Natural Science. And I shall end by using still another metaphor: along with neurophysiology, neural nets and the investigation of other associative structures, semiotics should help uncover the inner web that holds together the hemispheres of a single brain to form a mind.

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