Differences

The world presents resistance to your will: in other words, you and the world exist.
The separation of self and other created the space in which you can act. Thus it also created good and evil.
The meaning (to you) of what is not you generates your guidance system, recreating you and the world together as inside and out.
Semiosis is self-organization.

On this January morning, the walls of this house make a difference of about 50 degrees (Celsius) between inner and outer space. I am burning birch (harvested last summer) to maintain this difference – the aspen i usually feed the woodstove with is not quite equal to the task. The goldfinches, nuthatches and chickadees are feeding their inner fires with nyjer and sunflower seeds. How they do it is beyond me.

Signs and pictures, Peirce and Dogen

There is no meaning without signs, but no sign can say more than its reader can mean with it. The act of meaning is never fully determined by the sign.

C.S. Peirce makes a

distinction between the two kinds of indeterminacy, viz.: indefiniteness and generality, of which the former consists in the sign's not sufficiently expressing itself to allow of an indubitable determinate interpretation, while the latter turns over to the interpreter the right to complete the determination as he please. It seems a strange thing, when one comes to ponder over it, that a sign should leave its interpreter to supply a part of its meaning; but the explanation of the phenomenon lies in the fact that the entire universe — not merely the universe of existents, but all that wider universe, embracing the universe of existents as a part, the universe which we are all accustomed to refer to as “the truth” — that all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.

— EP2:394 (1906)

What Peirce says there about signs can be compared to what Eihei Dogen says here about pictures:

Because the entire universe and all things are, as such, pictures, both humans and things actualize themselves through pictures. The Buddha-ancestors perfect themselves through pictures.

— Dogen, ‘Gabyo’ (Kim 2007, 116)

Is ‘pictures’ a sign of signs? Is ‘signs’ a picture of pictures? Consider this comment by Hee-jin Kim (2007, 118):

Dogen once wrote: ‘The monastics of future generations will be able to understand one-taste Zen based on words and letters, if they devote efforts to spiritual practice by seeing the universe through words and letters, and words and letters through the universe.’ Replace ‘words and letters’ in the above passage with ‘pictures,’ and its gist is the same — the reason is that for Dogen, picture is language and language is picture. Both in turn belong to thinking. Thus the visual and linguistic, the spatial and temporal, imagination and conceptualization, the material and the mental, the sensuous and rational coalesce in Dogen's religious method and hermeneutics.

Kim also comments that Dogen's method ‘amounted, in essence, to critical, reflective thinking as an integral part of meditation’ (Kim 2007, 122). Peirce's ‘critical common-sensism’ was likewise an integral part of his philosophical practice.

As for me, i'm taking a break from digging out after the first big snowstorm of this winter. It seems all the time i've been shovelling signs.

Who's here?

Who am i really? An imaginary being, like the square root of -1.
O, and u2? No wonder we get along so well together!

We tend to push our way along, with the illusion that while liberally whispering, smoothly saying, and shouting messages back and forth at will, we are effectively communicating, though we are by and large oblivious to our frequent backfires, misfires, and blanks.

— Floyd Merrell (1997, 244)

Symbolic and other inheritance systems

Can we guide our own evolution?

Yes, because changing our own habits changes the context in which natural selection operates.

No, because we don't control the effects of what we do. Some of those effects are always unanticipated, and you don't control what you can't anticipate.

Eva Jablonka has identified four different ‘inheritance systems’ which have roles in evolution: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic. For the full story see Jablonka and Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions (2005). Since the discovery of DNA and its structure, the genetic inheritance system has dominated evolutionary theory, but the other three are finally being recognized as sources of variation on which natural selection can operate.

Of course language — the primary symbolic system — has long been recognized as a source of variation on which conscious selection can operate. Biosemiotics, based on the pioneering work of Peirce, is beginning to bridge the gap between natural and conscious selection as factors in evolution — just as Jablonka has done, except that semiotics begins with the symbolic (linguistic) level and works downwards while Jablonka and colleagues are working upwards from the genetic.

My blog post yesterday commented on some similarities between the genetic and symbolic inheritance systems (GIS and SIS) which are not shared by the other two: both are modular and combinatorial. This allows them both to encode information, a vitally important function in the evolutionary process, as Jablonka points out:

Because of the ability to encode information, both the GIS and SIS transmit a lot of unexpressed information. Nonfunctional genes are transmitted, as also are nonimplemented ideas. This provides a huge reservoir of variation, which may become useful in new conditions. I believe that this ever-present potential gives these systems a particularly important role in long-term evolution. However, no inheritance system acts in isolation: inheritance systems interact both directly and indirectly. For example, the social animal, with its behavioral information systems, determines the selective regime in which genes are ultimately selected.

— Jablonka (Oyama, Griffiths and Gray 2001, 112)

This implies that in a time of crisis like the one we are now living through, we can affect the course of our own evolution by consciously changing our actual habits to realize ideas which have already been ‘transmitted’ but not yet implemented. That may sound obvious, but i wonder whether the possibility has really ‘sunk in’ to our awareness. Maybe it can help to place it on a scientific basis, as Jablonka does, and as Peirce did a century ago.

Natural symbols

From the beginning of his semiotic work — before he called it that — C.S. Peirce recognized three kinds of sign: icon, index and symbol. Symbolic signs are essential to human language, and that makes all the difference between language and other kinds of communication found in nature. Peirce wrote in 1909 that symbols ‘represent their objects, independently alike of any resemblance or any real connection, because dispositions or factitious habits of their interpreters insure their being so understood’ (EP 2:461). A language is a complex set of habits common to all who speak the language. ‘Factitious habits’ are artificial conventions; ‘dispositions’ however need not be artificial. Obviously the primary reference here is to the use of language, which is partly conventional, but not entirely so in the case of ‘natural languages’: the ‘dispositions’ which guide the interpretive process can be as deeply grounded in human nature as the habits of laughing, crying or smiling.

And what about the larger natural context of human nature? Could the dispositions of language-interpreters be grounded in pre-linguistic habits? Is there a kind of interpretation older than language, a kind of symbol older than humanity? What about the genome: it is obviously a sign of the organism, but can we call it a symbol?

The analogy between genetic and linguistic structures has been made many times, because both are modular and combinatorial. That is, the molecular structures within the genome consist of parts which hang together as units and can be rearranged to generate a somewhat different organism, just as a new arrangement of word-symbols can mean something new. (Of course there are constraints on this rearranging — not every structure is viable in either domain, genetic or linguistic.) Both genetic and linguistic ‘statements’ are holarchic, i.e. they are multilevel structures, each level consisting of units which are both parts of larger wholes and wholes made up of their own parts. The main difference seems to be that statements in language are intentionally (consciously, deliberately) meant to be interpreted, while genetic ‘utterances’ are not. But is this an absolute difference, or are there levels of intentionality mediating between those two extremes? If so, then it's more than metaphor or analogy to say that genes are symbols.

There is of course a big difference between the interpretation of a linguistic sign and that of the genome, but not so big a difference that the latter can't be called interpretation.

Language is a social phenomenon, which means that the interpreter of a sign is a different person from its producer. We do talk to ourselves — usually not out loud — but you first learn to talk by interacting with others, and later internalize a virtual other as yourself, i.e. a self you can talk to while you're alone (we call this thinking, or internal dialogue).

The interpreter of your genome, on the other hand, is your biological self (rather than a social or virtual self). Each replica of the genome is read by the cell in which it is embedded, and the reading process is guided from without by indexical signs of the cell's environment. The collective interpretant of all these cellular-semiotic processes is the growth, differentiation, self-organization and behavior of your body — including your verbal behavior!

As with any linguistic utterance, the meaning of the genome is context-dependent. Why not, then, call it a symbol?

On reading translations

The Internet connection is not always working here in the backwoods — hence the hiatus in posting here, if anyone noticed —

Still not healthy enough to do much walking in the woods, i'm reduced to walking through words. Often this means relying on translators to help me engage with a writer i can count on to shake me out of a mental rut, such as Dogen. So it's cause for celebration to discover, as i did last week, a complete English translation of Dogen's masterwork, the Shobogenzo, at the Shasta Abbey website.

The translation is by Rev. Hubert Nearman, who dedicated 14 years to the task and seems well qualified for it. Of course i can't compare his translation with the original, since i don't read medieval Japanese, so there's no point in my passing judgment on the quality of his translation. But this observation opens a deeper question about the wholehearted reading of ‘scriptures’ in translation.

The question can perhaps be put best in semiotic terms, since translation is paradigmatic of semiosis itself: a sign-process produces an interpretant, and translation is prototypical of interpretation. For example, take one fascicle or ‘chapter’ of Dogen's Shobogenzo: the title, ‘Kokyo’, is translated ‘On the Ancient Mirror’ by Nearman; the Nishijima/Cross translation (the only other one i've seen) calls it ‘The Eternal Mirror’. The whole essay is about this ‘mirror’ — in other words, the whole Japanese text is a sign and this Mirror is its object. Like any sign, Dogen's essay ‘determines its interpretant to stand in the same triadic relation to the same object for some interpretant’ (Peirce, CP 1.541). The original text ‘determines’ the text of the translation by constraining it to say the same thing as the original in another language; if it didn't, we wouldn't call the new text a ‘translation’.

This implies at least that both texts are about something which can be spoken of in either language (and perhaps in any language). The object of these signs is therefore independent of, and external to, any language used to direct attention to it. And each sign of that dynamic object, as Peirce called it, generates an interpretant which works in turn as another sign, generating a further interpretant, and so on — each sign in the sequence having the same object.

The catch is that whatever this object called a Mirror is, you must already have some acquaintance with it before you can interpret any signs as describing, defining or informing you about it. The sign itself can't supply this acquaintance; it can only give you some hints about how to renew that acquaintance and carry it forward. In terms of Dogen's essay, this is equally true of the original Japanese text and of any translation of it. Indeed the original text was itself a translation, namely of the eternal buddha-dharma, as reflected in Dogen's own reflections on his experience of the Ancient Mirror. And your reading of any translation is another translation of these signs directing your attention to the ancient mirror itself.

The word mirror is a symbol of the object of this infinite succession of signs. Most of Dogen's essay is about how to read this symbol, as used by various ancient masters in their koans and conversations. And this blog post is about how we read translations of that essay.

In that last sentence, i put ‘translations’ in the plural for a reason. It is obvious, but perhaps worth noticing for that very reason, that a single text can be translated in more than one way. In practice, this implies that if we compare two translations, we begin with the assumption that they are equivalent, even when they are different. This has to be our assumption because we are reading them as interpretant signs which have the same dynamic object as Dogen's original essay. So our working assumption is that where they differ, they have chosen different ways of directing our attention to that object, namely the Ancient or Eternal Mirror. For example, compare these two translations of a single Dogen sentence:

Nearman:

We should by all means have as our investigation through training and practice an exploration that broadly spans the sayings of all the Buddhas and Ancestors.

Nishijima/Cross:

There must be learning in practice that widely covers the teachings of all the buddhas and all the patriarchs.

We notice right away that latter parts of the two translations, from the word ‘that’ to the end of the sentence, are quite similar. But the part of the sentence before that consists of 15 words in the first translation, but only 6 words in the second. Yet we must assume that both say what Dogen was saying in the source text. We might decide eventually that one says it better than the other, but we certainly can't begin with such an assumption. Besides, the differences may be entirely a matter of style, and quirks of style should be considered innocent of misrepresentation until proven guilty of it. Since ancient Japanese and Chinese tend to be more economical in their use of words than contemporary English, i would guess that the Nishijima/Cross translation is closer to being word-for-word than the Nearman. But that in itself doesn't make it a better or more accurate translation. Nearman's Dogen appears a bit more verbose than the Dogen of other translators (for instance, the famous Genjokoan has a four-word title in many English translations; Nearman entitles it ‘On the Spiritual Question as It Manifests Before Your Very Eyes’). But perhaps Nearman captures more of the nuances of the text this way.

One implication of all this is that a translation can work as well as the original text, or maybe better, for ‘scriptural’ purposes — just as one artist can sometimes perform a song better than the artist who wrote it in the first place. A translation need not be a ‘second-hand’ substitute for the original. It can be the real Word itself, if it successfully ‘determines’ your reading to recognize the universal Truth, or some face of it, which dwells in the deepest layers of experience, which is your own because it is everyone's. Just don't be too sure that your reading is the right one! The trick is to recognize the Truth when it comes to you in another new (dis)guise. Are you ready for that?

Signs of life-and-death

Thoreau's journals are especially pointed and profound when they take on the prophetic tone of an oracle. The same is true of the fragments of Heraclitus, such as this one:
Ἓν τὸ σοφὸν μοῦνον λέγεσθαι οὐκ ἐθέλει καὶ ἐθέλει Ζηνὸς ὄνομα.
(‘The wise is one alone, unwilling and willing to be spoken of by the name of Zeus.’)
The genetive form Ζηνὸς for ‘of Zeus’ is one of those meaningful puns often deployed by Heraclitus, as it could also mean ‘of life’. This connects the polyversity of names with the per-versity (the pervasive or ‘thorough turning’) of life-and-death, or birth-and-death as Buddhists call it.

Charles Kahn's comment on this fragment sums up the whole practice and purpose of the oracular style:

If Heraclitus must, like the oracle, ‘neither declare (legei) nor conceal but give a sign’, that is because his listeners cannot follow a plain tale. If they had what it takes to comprehend his message, the truth would already be apparent to them. But since words alone cannot make them understand ‘when their souls do not speak the language’, he must resort to enigmas, image, paradox, and even contradiction, to tease or shock the audience into giving thought to the obvious, and thus enable them so see what is staring them in the face. If they succeed, they will understand not this sentence alone but the unified world view that Heraclitus means to communicate. And central to such understanding will be a recognition that the principle of cosmic order is indeed a principle of life, but that it is not willing to be called by this name alone. For it is also a principle of death. Human wisdom culminates in this insight that life and death are two sides of the same coin. And cosmic wisdom is truly spoken of only when identified with both sides of the coin.

— Kahn (1979, 270-1)

Ungraspable mind

The Diamond Sutra says that ‘Past mind cannot be grasped, present mind cannot be grasped, and future mind cannot be grasped.’ (For an extended elucidation of this, see Dogen's ‘Shin fukatoku’ (Heine 1994, 153-6; Nishijima and Cross 1994, 189-205)). Perhaps Peirce is pointing in the same direction when he says that a sign must generate an interpretant in order to function as a sign (i.e. to enter into a real relation with its object), and beyond that, the interpretant in turn must function as another sign in the same relation to that object, and so on ad infinitum. This is the triadic nature of all genuine signs. Knowing and thinking, cognition and representation, being continuous relational processes, necessarily take time, and thus cannot be pegged to any specific location in time or space.

At no one instant in my state of mind is there cognition or representation, but in the relation of my states of mind at different instants there is. [note by CSP: Accordingly, just as we say that a body is in motion, and not that motion is in a body we ought to say that we are in thought and not that thoughts are in us.]

— (EP1:42)

Just because thinking is unstoppable, and mind ungraspable, does not imply that the object of cognition, or thought, is itself unreal. The laws of nature really do govern what actually happens and are not merely ‘results of thinking’, as ‘conceptualists’ believe. Peirce considered this doctrine a form of nominalism, and thus rejected it, as the scholastic realists had several centures earlier:

The great realists had brought out all the truth there is in that much more distinctly long before modern conceptualism appeared in the world. They showed that the general is not capable of full actualization in the world of action and reaction but is of the nature of what is thought, but that our thinking only apprehends and does not create thought, and that that thought may and does as much govern outward things as it does our thinking. But those realists did not fall into any confusion between the real fact of having a dream and the illusory object dreamed. The conceptualist doctrine is an undisputed truism about thinking, while the question between nominalists and realists relates to thoughts, that is, to the objects which thinking enables us to know.

— CP 1.27 (1909)

The apprehension of thought by thinking could be called ‘grasping’, but it cannot be completed—just as mind cannot be grasped—because it takes time. Since we are in time just as we are in thought, there is no way to get one ‘handle’ on either without letting go of another.

Biosemiotics and symbols

It's been quiet in this space for awhile but this rather long and complex post should make up for that! Here goes:

Biosemiotically speaking, sense perception is a fundamental form of semiosis. But if a sense experience is a sign of some external object, what kind of sign is it—icon, index or symbol? It seems obvious, at first, that a visual image is an icon of its object. But if we take a closer look, especially at a perceptual process which is not visual, it becomes clear that the relation between sign (as sense image) and object (as external reality) is not that simple.

It makes intuitive sense that the perception of high-frequency sound requires receptors that convert sound waves into neural energy. These are the hair cells of the auditory apparatus, which respond to high-frequency sound with a correspondingly high rate of firing. Similarly, hair cells respond with a low rate of firing when presented with low-frequency sound.

— Llinás (2001, 219)

The hair cells code sound waves iconically. But as the coded message is transmitted through various stages to the auditory cortex, with one burst of neural activity triggering the next at every stage, it loses in translation its iconic relation to the initial ‘stimulus’.

This tells us something very important: it is not the code or message coming from the outside world that is being transmitted, but rather it is the neuronal element that responds to the message from the outside that is itself the message!

— Llinás (same page)

In other words, the neural activity as interpretant of external events impinging on the senses is now a sign which in turn determines further interpretation. As the semiotic sequence becomes less iconic with respect to the external events, it becomes more relevant to the system's habits, and thus more symbolic. By the time it contributes to a conscious experience, the signal has become a symbol filling a niche in meaning space.

Habits linking neural signals with responses are symbolic, incorporating both iconic and indexical signs into self-organizing systems guided by the mapping of internal models onto pragmatic situations into which behavioral patterns are interwoven. Since this mapping is an outgrowth of intentionality, it is habitual and symbolic: for symbols ‘represent their objects, independently alike of any resemblance or any real connection, because dispositions or factitious habits of their interpreters insure their being so understood’ (Peirce, EP2:460-461, 1909). Though the indexical component of perception is necessary to the system's structural coupling with the external world, the symbolic component is essential to the system's autonomy—that is, to its being a system in the first place.

The main difference between human minds and those of other animals is the extent to which humans make deliberate use of symbols—which we can do because our symbol use can be decoupled from immediate situations. However, this does not mean that symbol use is restricted to humans; the semiotic continuity between human and other lives is unbroken. Indeed the genetic code itself is symbolic. For Baldwin's Dictionary, Peirce wrote that a symbol ‘is constituted a sign merely or mainly by the fact that it is used and understood as such, whether the habit is natural or conventional, and without regard to the motives which originally governed its selection.’ The genome is a sign of the genotype because it is interpreted as such by the system incorporating it.

It seems to follow from this that habits of symbol use can be established by natural selection, given a regular system of sign production, interpretation and replication. Such a system is incorporated in every organism, and in every cell of multicellular organisms. The facts that the genome can be modified by natural selection, and that its expression changes with circumstances in ways that usually turn out to be appropriate, show that it is symbolic, ‘constituted a sign mainly by the fact that it is used as such’ in the course of development. Learning is a similar process within the nervous system, parallel to the evolutionary process (as Bateson pointed out) but at a much faster time scale.

This interpretation of ‘symbolic’ seems at first incompatible with views which take symbol use to be the exclusive province of humans—for instance, Deacon (1997) and Jablonka and Lamb (2005). But this may be due to the habit of taking all symbols to be conventional, whereas for Peirce this was not the case. In a 1904 letter to Welby, he wrote:

I define a Symbol as a sign which is determined by its dynamic object only in the sense that it will be so interpreted. It thus depends either upon a convention, a habit, or a natural disposition of its interpretant, or of the field of its interpretant (that of which the interpretant is a determination).

— PW, 33 (1904)

The ‘field’ here could be taken as a domain or ‘space’ such as a lexicon, and ‘determination’ as selecting or locating an item in that domain. In perception, any given object is perceived to the extent that it determines selection of some pattern from the experiential repertoire of the perceiver (i.e. her Umwelt). Neurodynamically, the pattern can be represented as an attractor in the space of brain activity. These patterns no doubt overlap, accompany or associate with each other in much the same way as the common words in a lexicon. The analogy between the genetic code and language is even more obvious; researchers in genetics are constantly speaking of ‘transcription’, ‘translation’, ‘reading’ and so on, without thinking of their usage as metaphorical. From this it seems clear enough that symbols pervade not only human life but all forms of life which employ the genetic code.

Selective Information Overload

The title above links to an article on the David Suzuki Foundation website which deals with the problem of information overload and its effect on decision-making. A couple of paragraphs from the article:

When I began my television career in 1962, I thought that all the public needed was more information about science and technology so it could make better decisions based on facts. Well, people are getting far more information today than they ever did 45 years ago. Although there are more facts, there are also more opinions. And we still make ill-informed decisions.

I now believe we are experiencing a major problem in the early-21st century: selective information overload. And by this I mean that we can sift through mountains of information to find anything to confirm whatever misconceptions, prejudices or superstitions we already believe. In other words, we don’t have to change our minds. All we have to do is find something to confirm our opinions, no matter how misguided or wrong they may be.

Read the rest at the Suzuki Foundation website.

Meaning and the logic of vagueness

My work in progress, Turning Words, documents an inquiry guided by the question How do you mean?. The question is not What do you mean?—although that is sometimes a good question for clarification purposes. The root question is how meaning happens, or how semiosis works.

Writers, thinkers and scholars have been asking this kind of question for a long time, but their work tends to be ignored because most of us are either too busy committing our acts of meaning to reflect on how we do it, or don't see the point of thus reflecting. A century ago, C. S. Peirce and Victoria Welby were both looking into the nature of meaning, but they didn't learn of each other's work until near the end of their lives. The correspondence between them began in 1903, and parts of it are among the clearest explanations of Peirce's mature semiotics. Most of it was published in 1977 under the title Semiotic and Significs (which i cite as PW), but copies of this are hard to find, and i only got hold of one recently.

In one of his earliest letters to Welby, Peirce explained why the study of what we mean, important as it is, should not be taken too far:

I fully and heartily agree that the study of what we mean ought to be the … general purpose of a liberal education, as distinguished from special education,—of that education which should be required of everybody with whose society and conversation we are expected to be content. But, then, perfect accuracy of thought is unattainable,—theoretically unattainable. And undue striving for it is worse than time wasted. It positively renders thought unclear.

— Peirce to Welby (PW 11, 1903)

When a theorist like Peirce says that something is theoretically unattainable, he is not implying that it might be attained in practice (because theory is unreliable); he is saying just the opposite, that ‘perfect accuracy’ is unattainable because of the way meaning works. The very logic of meaning guarantees that all language is necessarily vague to some degree. Here's a fuller explanation of the point, written a year or two later (CP 5.506):

No communication of one person to another can be entirely definite, i.e., non-vague. We may reasonably hope that physiologists will some day find some means of comparing the qualities of one person's feelings with those of another, so that it would not be fair to insist upon their present incomparability as an inevitable source of misunderstanding. Besides, it does not affect the intellectual purport of communications. But wherever degree or any other possibility of continuous variation subsists, absolute precision is impossible. Much else must be vague, because no man's interpretation of words is based on exactly the same experience as any other man's. Even in our most intellectual conceptions, the more we strive to be precise, the more unattainable precision seems. It should never be forgotten that our own thinking is carried on as a dialogue, and though mostly in a lesser degree, is subject to almost every imperfection of language. I have worked out the logic of vagueness with something like completeness, but need not inflict more of it upon you, at present.

That last sentence has inspired scholars to look for a text among Peirce's papers that ‘works out the logic of vagueness with something like completeness’, but as far as i know, nobody has claimed to find it. And considering how well that final sentence works as a pragmatic ‘punchline’ to Peirce's argument, it would be at least a little ironic if anyone did find such a text.

When Peirce says that ‘no man's interpretation of words is based on exactly the same experience as any other man's’, he is talking about what i call polyversity (see TW Chapter 2). In the earlier stages of writing this book, i collected quite a few examples of what i took to be statements of the same idea expressed in diverse ways. But there's a limit to the usefulness of that, just as there's a limit to how exactly you can say what you mean. Indeed, as Peirce said, ‘the multiplication of equivalent modes of expression is itself a burden’ (PW 20). I hope that my final draft will not burden the reader too much in this way.

The ‘trust’ in dialog includes a willingness to let most of the meaning process work implicitly—trusting that it can become explicit, can bear the spotlight beam of attention, if that becomes necessary. Genuine dialogue requires an exquisite sense of what needs to be explicated and what needs to work implicitly.

What scriptures are about

Let's assume, for the sake of simplicity, that the wisdom expressed in a scripture can be stated in the form of a sentence, or proposition.

A proposition is a sign. The subject of a proposition (what it is about) is the object of that sign. What the sentence says about its subject is called the predicate of the proposition.

The object of any sign you can read must be something that you can direct your attention to. No sentence can tell you what its own object is. It can include a name for it, but that won't help unless you already know what that name refers to. The most it can do, without relying on some other (indexical) sign to designate the object, is to direct your attention by relying on your linguistic habits—that is, on some generic connection between words and your experience.

In the case of a scriptural sentence, the experience (the object) must also be generic in some sense. Scriptures don't tell you anything about isolated facts or minor details, but about some pervasive quality of life.

The more generic is the subject of a text, the deeper its meaning, the more it approaches the status of scripture. For a human reader, a story about Jesus is scriptural to the extent that ‘Jesus’ names a generic feature of human experience. A story specifying factual details about an individual named ‘Jesus’ who lived in a specific time and place meets the criteria for history, but not for scripture. What makes a reference to ‘Jesus’ scriptural, for you, is that you can read ‘Jesus’ as the name of a real presence in your life—a definite presence either remembered or anticipated, or (ideally) both. The same goes for ‘Buddha’, which is why the sutras say that his body pervades the universe. And the same for any mythic archetype. All genuine myths and sacred stories are grounded in universally human experience, which must therefore be your experience.

The interpretant of a scriptural sign, and thus its enlightening or life-changing effect, emerges from the reader's effort to clarify the real connection between its object and the rest of reality. In a proposition, that connection is the content of the predicate. But the effort is all for nought if misdirected to the wrong subject (object, referent).

When the sentence doesn't make sense, the reader has to consider that she may be directing her attention to the wrong object. You can't rely on your mental habits to tell you what the scripture is about, unless your habits are cyclic and self-correcting. In other words, the ideal reader's methods must be rooted in the self-organizing process of life itself.

But it would take a whole book to explain that …