The semiotics of religion

Reflections from a semanticist

Bibliographic Data

ID4754912
AuthorsMark Q Gardiner (0000-0002-2294-733X, Mount Royal University, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume44
Issue1
Pages114-129
Publication date2014-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueReligion (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0048-721X • E-ISSN: 1096-1151
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0048721x.2014.866185
OpenAlexW1990335977
LanguageEN
References cited23

Robert Yelle's The Semiotics of Religion makes important contributions on two fronts. First, it offers powerful and compelling analyses of a considerable range of religious phenomena. Second, it advances significant theoretical and meta-theoretical frameworks that underpin those analyses. The theoretical framework is semiotic in its broad outlines, but the meta-theoretical one is more pragmatically oriented: i.e., don't be dogmatically committed to any particular theoretical doctrine, but rather use whatever resources help to shed more light on the subject matter. Despite that meta-theoretical positioning, several of Yelle's analyses remain stubbornly committed to a set of core doctrines that limit the extent of his investigations and lead to questions about the persuasiveness of certain details of his analyses. In other words, Yelle does not always follow his own meta-theoretical recommendations. The author diagnoses the source of those limiting assumptions and suggests some perspectives from within the philosophy of language more generally that might potentially serve to bring his method closer to his meta-theoretical ideals.Key Words: Yellereligionsemioticsphilosophy of languagereferencemeaning Notes1All unaccompanied page numbers in the text refer to this work.2Thanks to Steven Engler for helpful comments on earlier drafts.3Yelle acknowledges that ‘traditional’ semiotics has ‘promised more than it has delivered in the way of a science of culture;’ it has simply failed to provide ‘a totalizing meta-discourse with universal application’ (7). But, this speaks more against such aspirations than against the cogency and fruitfulness of semiotics as one way of among many in understanding religious phenomena.4Yelle notes the complexity of the interplay between the ‘universal’ (needed if the theory is to be scientific) and the ‘particular’ (needed if the data is to be culturally and historically situated). An investigative approach is to be measured, in part, against how well it is able to navigate this ‘problematic that is endemic to any science of culture’ – namely to separate what is unique about a particular phenomena (that which is ‘culturally specific’) from that which allows its comparison to similar phenomena (that which is ‘universally human’) (3).5A case in point – a central theme in the book is that linguistic behavior is explained, in part, by reference to the ‘semiotic recognition’ of its participants. That ‘semiotic recognition’ involves a number of meta-, and hence theoretical-, commitments. ‘Semiotic recognition’ is itself, of course, a linguistic act.6Yelle's entry ‘Semiotics’ in The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion (Citation2011) makes this point explicit. Some religious phenomena are linguistic (e.g., scriptures) while others are structured in language-like fashion (e.g., rituals). He acknowledges the pioneering work done by his methodological predecessors like Claude Levi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Michael Silverstein, Stanley Tambiah, Thomas Sebeok, and others.7For example, Yelle critiques Frits Staal's (Citation1979) contention that a good deal of religious ritual, principally the recitation of ancient Vedas, is akin to ‘the incessant warbling of birds and babies’ (24) in that such a form of communication would be counterintuitive; i.e., such recitations seem much more like linguistically constituted communication than the autonomically driven ones of birds and babies. Nonetheless, such religious communication is importantly different from ordinary everyday ones.8The label ‘philosophy of language’ is so broad that no one tradition can claim it as its own, nor is there any one thing that can be identified as ‘the’ philosophy of language. My own personal view of philosophy is that it is a discipline without any inherent presuppositions or fixed content. It is rather only pragmatically characterized by the types of questions which it raises, and perhaps some family-resemblance set of methods for trying to answer them. What is and what is not philosophical is almost impossible to delineate, especially as philosophy has an interest in all subject matters without exception (hence the plethora of ‘philosophy of x's.’) Nonetheless, in this article I will use ‘the philosophy of language’ as a pointer towards a tradition with a more or less unbroken historical continuity from Gottlob Frege through such key figures as Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul Grice, J.L. Austin, W.V.O. Quine, Donald Davidson, Michael Dummett, Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke, and beyond. It focuses on philosophical questions about how language is constituted and constrained, and how these impact our ability to ask and answer other philosophical questions. Key works of philosophy of language's intersection with the study of religion include Frankenberry and Penner's (Citation1999) anthology and Frankenberry's (Citation2002) edited collection of original essays.9The so-called ‘analytic–continental divide’ is largely a creation of certain mid-20th-century academic attitudes and mutual misunderstandings – sometimes more than bordering on willful disdain from both sides. The semioticians most frequently mentioned by Yelle are the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce, neither of whom can really be informatively characterized as ‘continental’ thinkers, though of course they enabled the possibility of the ‘continental’ post-structuralism of such people as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.10At the risk of introducing the potential for confusion, in the following I will adopt the terms ‘sign’ and ‘thing signaled’ as the principal relata in the basic semiotic relation rather than the more usual ‘signifier/signified.’ This is because I tend to use them more along Peircean lines and so wish to avoid importing connotations from the Saussurean terminology. In general, signs are linguistic entities most commonly associated with the syntactic structures of familiar phonemes and morphemes. These syntactic structures are themselves just the products of intentional human behavior, and so signs can be detected in things other than just language use narrowly construed – such as in ritual action. At further risk of censure, I say that they are grammatically constituted entities, though of course much turns on what one takes grammar to be.11As we shall see, not all semantic theories are truth-conditional ones (i.e., not all of them identify the meaning of a sentence with the conditions under which it would be true), nor are all truth-conditional theories of meaning referential ones.12From The Online Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=1&context=lsj.13The philosophy of language has spawned a large number of particular theories of in what that semantic content may consist, perhaps most influential is the Fregean-Wittgensteinian notion that the semantic content of a sentence is the thought (Gedanke) its occurrence expresses (Frege Citation1956; Wittgenstein Citation1922: § 3). The association of semantic content with a mental state has been a particularly important one. For example, much work in the philosophy of mind, especially that which partners in the cognitive-science programme, is centered on providing an account of mental content and the role it might play in mental causation (i.e., the relation of cognitive inputs to behavioral outputs). Along somewhat different lines, British philosopher Michael Dummett identifies semantic content with mental states by arguing that a theory of semantic meaning must take the form of a theory of what one understands when one understands a language (e.g., Dummett Citation1976). American philosophers W.V.O. Quine and Donald Davidson further argue that what one understands can only be gauged in light of one's explicit behavior, thus further bringing together theories of meaning with the goal of understanding human behavior (e.g., Davidson Citation1984a; Quine Citation1960). In many ways, Yelle's idea that culturally and historically conditioned ‘semiotic recognitions’ play a constitutive role in the beliefs and practices of individuals complements these maneuvers very well.14Nor is there any single view of reference which dominates the market. Given the widespread agreement that there can be no ‘magical’ connection between word and referent (e.g., Putnam Citation1981), different theories offer different accounts of how reference is fixed. These range from ostensive views in which reference is fixed by some sort of pointing, to descriptivism (e.g., Donnellan Citation1966) in which reference is fixed by whatever satisfies a description implicitly associated with a word, to causal theories (e.g., Kripke Citation1980; Putnam Citation1975) in which reference is fixed by whatever stands in the right causal relationship to the introduction of the term into the language, to various hybrids and other alternatives.15Variously translated as ‘On Sense and Reference,’ ‘On Sense and Meaning,’ and ‘On Sense and Nominatum.’16Notice that the translator, Max Black, renders the German ‘Bedeutung’ as the English ‘meaning,’ reinforcing the assumption of a referential semantics.17Perhaps anticipating Saussure, Frege endorses the ‘arbitrariness of the sign:’ ‘Nobody can be forbidden to use any arbitrarily producible event or object as a sign for something’ (Frege Citation1952, 57). Indeed, it is precisely this arbitrariness that produces the ‘crises’ he sees the sense–reference distinction as needed in overcoming – it is because there is no intrinsic relation between either ‘The Morning Star’ or ‘The Evening Star’ and Venus that their meanings cannot be guaranteed to be the same. Frege tried to solve this problem by arguing that sense determines reference – i.e., the reference of an expression is fixed by its meaning, rather than vice versa.18‘Use’ conceptions of meaning have become quite sophisticated and cluster around a constellation of views which collectively have been associated with semantic contextualism (to be discussed elsewhere in this article).19Davidson's views have recently been taken up by a number of scholars of religion. For a representative sample, see Davis Citation2007; Engler and Gardiner Citation2010; Frankenberry Citation2002; Gardiner and Engler Citation2010, Citation2012; Godlove Citation1989; Penner Citation1994; Schilbrack Citation2002.20It is by starting with the sign that Charles Morris (Citation1938) first introduced the familiar semiotic trichotomy of syntactics (involving relations that signs stand in to other signs), semantics (involving relations that signs stand in to objects), and pragmatics (involving relations that signs stand in to sign-users). See (Szabó Citation2006, 364–367) for a critique of Morris' distinction.21From the perspective of formalism, it is somewhat difficult to see semiotics’ move from content to form as a move away from semantics. For the formalists, grammar (form) plays a large role in determining meaning (content). There is a reading, I think, of Saussure's emphasis on form over content which is not at odds with this: meaning does depend on form, as long as ‘form’ is not limited to the sub-sentential grammatical structure but extends to an interrelation of all linguistic expressions. This would make structuralism strongly analogous to another broad constellation of semantic theories – semantic holism – which takes the meaning of any linguistic expression to be, at least in part, a function of its relation to the meaning of others. See Fodor and LePore (Citation1992) for a critical overview of some of its main forms.22Some contextualists further blur the semantic/pragmatic distinction by continuing to adopt a truth-conditional semantics where truth-conditions are regarded as contextually sensitive things not determinable a priori. A collapse of the semantic/pragmatic distinction is not limited to contextualists. For example Paul Grice (e.g., Citation1957) argued that semantic content is a function of a speaker's intentions that her words be interpreted by others in a particular way.23Cappelen and LePore (Citation2006) argue for the necessity of some measure of contextually insensitive meaning to account for the fact that, at least very often, someone can understand a sentence without knowing the context in which it was originally given. Donald Davidson's interpretational semantics regards meaning-theories as formally constructed proposals which are tested against as broad a range of contexts as possible (Citation1984b, Citation1990)24He further notes that this ‘shift from a focus on semantics to one on pragmatics’ is counterintuitive in that it ‘threatens a certain concept of human autonomy, or the idea that humans choose, in every particular, the meanings that they attribute to the world’ (162). (Why to the ‘world’ rather than to their ‘words’? I suspect that it is semiotics’ fundamental assumption that words are thought of as signs, and hence as signs of something, that suggests there is little difference between assigning meanings to words and assigning them to things in the world.) There is an implicit illicit dichotomy here: either meaning is pragmatically constructed or it is subjective. Many perspectives in the philosophy of language offer alternatives to both.25Yelle's combination of the Peircean categories of iconic signs (i.e., those that refer in virtue of structural similarity to their referents, as for example in statuary and rebus languages) and indexical signs (i.e., those that refer in virtue of being causally related to their referents, as, for example, that smoke is a sign of fire), which he borrows from Michael Silverstein and Roman Jakobson, powerfully analyzes a good deal of magical and religious ritual (Chapter 2). Yelle argues that by iconically indexing its goal, ritualistic language can be viewed by its users as causally efficacious.26For example, see Davidson (Citation1984c, Citation1986, Citation1993) for an idea of his views on what Yelle would call the rhetorical uses of language.27Yelle does discuss the cognitive approaches to religion, often very favorably, as providing part of the story he is interested in telling. Insofar as CSR can be seen as resting on a ‘semiotic ideology,’ a Yellean analysis of the discourses in the academic debates would prove interesting.28E.g., it is a matter of indifference whether the mathematician counts ‘one, two, three, ... ’ rather than ‘un, deux, trois, ... ’. Nonetheless, the Arabic numerals, ‘1, 2, 3, ... ’ will be preferable to the Roman ‘i, ii, iii, ... ’ as the structure of its symbolism more closely matches that of the numbers themselves.Additional informationMark Q. Gardiner is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada. He works predominantly in the area of philosophical semantics. He is the author of Semantic Challenges to Realism: Dummett and Putnam (2000), and has recently authored and co-authored publications in such journals as Religion, Religious Studies, Journal of Ritualistic Studies, and Method & Theory in the Study of Religion

Epistemology · Semiotics · Sociology · Cross-Cultural and Social Analysis · Philosophy · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education · Study and Philosophy of Religion

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