Berthoff, A. (1996). Problem-dissolving by triadic means. College English, 58 ( 1), 9-2 1.
Wow. By this time, Berthoff has her spiel down to the bone:
“In a triadic semiotic, the meaning relationship is conceived as having three terms: the symbol (or representamen, as C.S. Peirce called it), its referent (or object), and the interpretant, Peirce’s term for the idea which mediates the representation and what it represents” (my emphasis).
The concept behind triadic semiotics is that this ‘idea’ is a dimension of meaning-making [the terms/ideas/concepts we think with]. It is socially constructed and an innate aspect of every individual person. It is both inward and outward—think of it as a field, or a wave, or a wave-field—binding, running through, individuals, connecting them, constituting them (both separately and as a group).
“Triadicity sees the distinction between the signs and what it signifies … as a relationship mediated by interpretation, which is thus the logical condition of any and all signification.” ***Writing is hermeneutical. Languaging is hermeneutical. Indeed, by this logic, all meaning-making (all modes) is hermeneutical—a matter of translation, translation a matter of meaning-making (read/writing/same thing).
“By seeing interpretation as a constituent of the sign, we commit ourselves to the principle that we must interpret our interpretations or, as Peirce put it, each sign requires another for its interpretation.” ***Meanings are matters of links, relationships. No ‘meaning’ exists distinct from the ideas/meanings with which they are comprised. This is poststructuralist thinking, only better, because it doesn’t descend into meaninglessness. Signification forms meaning from meaning.
Wait… Back The What Up!!!….
9: “Like everything else, the meaning of meaning has a historical and therefore political meaning. How we think we make sense of the world—the way we think about our thinking—will be constrained by who we are and where we are, by history and circumstance.” *** Here. How can Berlin and others consider her work ahistorical? apolitical? The logical conclusion of a triadic semiotics is historical and sociopolitical.
“That is because we live, as Sapir noted, in ‘a world of meanings,’ including those meanings which mediate any account we might give of the making of meaning.” **This is triadicity: meanings that mediate our meaning-making; terms/ideas we think with, that help us understand sun = [shielding eyes, looks up at the sun]…. and in context (sociopolitical, historical)… all the potential meanings.
10: “The idea that anything goes and the idea that all reading is misreading are mirror images of each other, both expressions of a dyadic semiotic in which words and meanings function as a code. The recognition that there is no direct knowledge of anything—beetles, bottles, or books—has led to the aberrant idea that all knowledge is mistaken and the related notion that all reading is misreading. Peirce held that all knowledge is partial, but that is not the same as claiming that all knowledge is error.” **Room for imagination, for discovery
10: “To hold that all knowledge is interpretation means, first of all, that interpretations must be interpreted, in a logically infinite regress.” **This doesn’t satisfy the want for “structure” (Vitanza), for sure…. “It also means that we must bring this interpretation of interpretation to a temporary halt by asking what difference it would make to our practice [writing, composing of any kind, teaching] if we put it this way.” ***So satisfying. You know, I haven’t come across one single full consideration of this theoretical approach to teaching writing. Dismissals, yes. But no dialogue.
10-11: Berthoff describes Peirce as he was originally and historically considered, in terms of the interpretation of English literature. Is Berlin’s complaint against Berthoff stemming from his refusal to consider the potential of triadic/pragmatic semiotics beyond its original context. It has no use now that we’re challenging the eminence of ‘high culture’ and the English canon?
11: “…Peirce’s pragmaticism is entailed in his semeiotic.” And it reminds us that ‘practical criticism’ was from the first triadic and pragmatic in its presuppositions.” **Pragmaticism is what saves theory in general for me.
Holy shit. Here she is full on addressing Berlin (though not by name): “Many literary theorists contend nowadays that judging contexts in this way, conducting the audit of meaning, is only to cling to ‘a passe critical sensibility of the 1950’s,’ in the words of a recent reviewer. [Not Berlin, I think, but…] For those now redrawing the boundaries of literary study, close reading is seen as the necessary tool of a totalizing, hegemonic oppression, or of an arrogant, self-serving canonicity.” ***YES and Berlin’s book would have just come out, right?
11: So anti-Husserl! Triadic semiotics brings its own phenomenology.
“When the subject of inquiry is a literary text—or any symbolic representation—the means of access to its meanings will be provided by the meanings we bring to it. If phenomenology is to guide us, it cannot be by bracketing meaning [Husserl].” **Now I’m thinking of the silly “myth of the invisible ships.” Just because we don’t have language for a thing, no word for the thing in the world, doesn’t mean we don’t have other meanings with which to interpret that thing, and come to some understanding (or suspicion) about it. In fact, as Freire and others show us, generating other words for things opens possibilities to other meaning concepts, other interpretants, other interpretations and meanings.
12: “Words in an utterance of any kind are not lexical items whose semantic and syntactical roles can be studied in isolation from one another.” (**Or in isolation from sociopolitical context.)
13: “In the act of critical reading, we continue what we do in all our apprehensions: we make explicit our implicit recognitions.” ***So that we can re-cognize them, again. This is conscientizacao. “The common reader—any critical reader—discovers structure in one or another instance by seeing it in terms of other structures.”
“That is one of the chief meanings of reading in context; to have had the experience of reading one sonnet sequence is preparation for reading another.” ***THIS IS A LEVEL OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY WE RARELY ENGAGE IN, particularly in dms? When we “read” one webpage, this prepares us for “reading” the next. It shapes our expectations and our understanding, what we accept, what we reject or ignore. Our imagination is shaped by the structures it has encountered in the past. What does it take to break, then, a legacy of hegemonic structures shaping our imagination?
“The structures we thus recognize are conventional, generic, grammatical, syntactical, and so on; they are both linguistic and conceptual.” **And the other modes, too. “Competence is thus a measure both of how adequately implicit recognitions serve the process of interpretation and of how our representations articulate those recognitions.”
“When wide experience of literature and letters is reflected on imaginatively, it makes for valuable criticism—the kind we go to Kenneth Burke for.” ***Wonderful definition of “expertise” and of what we might assess in student composing!!!
14: “A triadically conceived theory of the reader’s response—Louise Rosenblatt’s theory I take as an excellent exemplar—will acknowledge the dialectical process in which meanings emerge.”
“The contradictions of current theories of literary criticism are to be understood, I believe, in the context of what has happened once the ill-conceived idea of ‘the structure of determination implicit in a text’ was supplanted by pseudo-concepts such as intertextuality, code, and indeterminacy.” **Addressing to poststructuralist, social-epistemic here?
“The poststructuralists claim to deal only with the codes and conventions, but by a process which Paul de Man, in ‘Semiology and Rhetoric,’ calls the rhetorization of grammar and the grammatization of rhetoric, they will also manage to analyze meaning. (The contrast with Kenneth Burke is instructive: A Rhetoric of Motives suggests the conception of rhetoric needed if dialectical purposes are to be served.)”
15: “…analogy is a triadic conception which cannot be caught in a dyadic grid.”
16: “Thus pseudodoxia academica keep themselves alive by an endless adjustment of terms, by an energetic and aggressive casuistry.” **I think of Lunsford’s “everything’s a text” or “everything’s an argument”
16: Does Berthoff’s rejection of Jakobsonian structuralism (detailed rejection) have any effect on her being treated as “conservative”?
On pages 17-18 Berthoff does something interesting. She analyzes and critiques Jonathan Culler’s explication of the Saussurian sign. She writes, “Culler has dispensed with readers and speakers, putting language in their place. This personification makes possible the casuistry by which he muddles arbitrary…” It seems to me that she’s pointing out Culler’s ‘personification’ of language aspects is a de-humanization of the process of signification. This is a lovely instance, I think, of a critique of theory OVER practice, of a pie-in-the-sky concept-rearing bereft of pragmaticism. Pragmatic is method.
18: “It is no great step from this idea of the autonomous language arbitrarily dividing up a spectrum of conceptual possibilities to the idea that if your language doesn’t provide the right band of the spectrum, you won’t be able to entertain the ideas which constitute it.” ***The myth of the invisible ships. “The dyadic insistence that the map is not the territory becomes the claim that without the map there is no territory.”
“But it is not the availability of particular words which determines the ideas to which we have access: the relationship of language and thought is mediated by meaning and, as I have been arguing, meaning is not a concept to be defined in narrowly linguistic terms.”
***Perhaps more clearly and with more power than any moment I’ve read so far (even and especially in Palmeri’s chapter), this claim has great implications for what and how we teach. What is literacy in light of triadicity?
19: Distinction b/w Berthoff & Berlin: “For Peirce, indeterminacy was, in its metaphysical aspect, a characteristic of what he called Firstness, that essential ground of Thirdness. He differentiated indeterminacy (his word for vagueness) and ambiguity: ‘a sign is ambiguous if it is doubtful what it is applicable to and what it is inapplicable to, but the indeterminacy here spoken of merely consists in its begin applicable to more than one possible object. (Writings 3:84)”
“For Richards and his famous student William Empson, ambiguity provided an invaluable speculative instrument for the study of the structure of complex words and texts. What has been learned about ambiguity in fifty years of practical criticism does need to be freshly formulated, but that task cannot be carried out in the terms provided by dyadic conception of the sign.” ***Does Berthoff’s operationalizing of triadicity achieve this ‘fresh formulation’? Does the multimodal turn provide interesting instruments for this fresh formulation? The digital?
“It is not indeterminacy which should supplant the doctrine of a structure of determination but the idea of a process of determination.”
***This is such an incredible take on ‘process’! With huge implications on how we teach writing, as seen in FTW, for one.
19: “IT is very difficult for positivists to resist reducing equivalence to identity. The tendency is to conclude that because consciousness entails representation, they are the same; that because thought requires language for its realization, they are the same; that because a sign requires another for its interpretation, what it represents is only another sign.”
**It’s not ’empty’; it’s full of meaning (socially constructed, personally formed).
“But triadically speaking, we can see that it is not representation which engages us but the representation of representation.” (**MEANING)
“We must not forget the Third.”
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