First published 2015 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2015 by Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2014008630 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Petrilli, Susan. Victoria Welby and the science of signs : significs, semiotics, phi- losophy of language / Susan Petrilli. p. cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-4128-5492-4 1. Semiotics. 2. Semantics (Philosophy) 3. Linguistics--Philosophy 4. Iconicity (Linguistics) 5. Welby, Victoria, Lady, 1837-1912. I. Title. P99.3.P48 2014 302.2--dc23 2014008630 ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-5492-4 (hbk) For Genevieve Vaughan Blessed are those whose hearts testify that they have loved much. (Søren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses, 1843) Contents Foreword, by Frank Nuessel xi Introduction: Prefigurations and Developments in the Study of Signs xix Part I On Signs in the Direction of Significs 1 1 Significs: A New Approach to Signs and Language 3 1.1 The Scope of Significs, or “Semioethics” 3 1.2 Problems of Language and Terminology 5 1.3 Significs and Theory of Meaning 7 1.4 Iconicity and Translative Processes in Language and Knowledge 10 1.5 Geosemiosis, Heliosemiosis, Cosmosemiosis 14 1.6 Mother-Sense, Love, and Subjectivity 16 1.7 Interpretative Itineraries in the Relation between Religion, Philosophy, and Science 28 2 Understanding and Misunderstanding 39 2.1 Significs as het Critique of Bad Linguistic Usage 39 2.2 Ambiguity of the Live Word and Sclerosis of Definition 41 2.3 For a Significal Education 47 2.4 Common Sense and Common Speech in Welby and Peirce 52 2.5 Semantic Vagueness and Logical Abstraction 56 3 Life Sciences and Human Sciences in Dialogue 63 3.1 The Transdisciplinary Vocation of Significs 63 3.2 The Problem of Sense, an volutionaryE Perspective 64 3.3 A New Copernican Revolution 74 3.4 The Development of Signifying Processes 79 3.5 Similarity and the Figurative Nature of Meaning 91 4 The Question of Translation 95 4.1 Translation as Method 95 4.2 Significance in Interpretative-Translative Processes 105 4.3 Translation Theories: Welby, Peirce, Bakhtin, Wittgenstein 111 4.4 Translatability and Common Meaning 116 4.5 Centrality of Translation in Sign Processes and Evolutionary Development 129 Part II Among Masters of the Sign 143 5 Victoria Welby and Charles S. Peirce: Significs, Semiotics, Semioethics 145 5.1 The Welby Network 145 5.2 From “Code Semiotics” to “Interpretation Semiotics” 150 5.3 Sense, Meaning, and Significance 152 5.4 Interpretation, Translation, and Value 155 5.5 Significs, Semantics, Semiotics 163 6 Victoria Welby and Giovanni Vailati: The Critique of Language 167 6.1 An Intellectual Alliance 167 6.2 Linguistic Ambiguity and Definition 169 6.3 Figurative Speech, Analogy, and Communication 171 7 Victoria Welby and Charles K. Ogden: What Does Meaning Mean? 177 7.1 Welby, Ogden, and Others: A Communication Network 177 7.2 The Correspondence between Victoria Welby and Charles K. Ogden 181 7.3 Significs and “The Meaning of Meaning” 191 7.4 Meaning, Referent, and Linguistic Production 193 7.5 A Biobibliographical Study on Ogden 200 8 Victoria Welby, Mary Everest Boole, and Susanne K. Langer: Humanizing Signs 207 8.1 Victoria Welby and the Logic of Mother-Sense 207 8.2 Mary Everest Boole in Correspondence with Welby 217 8.3 Susanne K. Langer on Signs, Symbols, and Significance 229 9 Victoria Welby and Mikhail Bakhtin: The Vitality of Meaning 245 9.1 Intellectual Biographies: Difference and Encounter 245 9.2 Language and Culture 249 9.3 Identity and Otherness 252 9.4 Ideology, Language, Consciousness 254 9.5 Sign Theory in elby,W Peirce, Bakhtin 258 10 Victoria Welby and Genevieve Vaughan: Gift-Giving and Communication 261 10.1 Gift-Giving, Significs, Semioethics 261 10.2 For the Quality of Life in the World of Global Communication 266 10.3 Sensitivity to Otherness with Global Semiotics and Semioethics 272 10.4 The Gift from a Semioethical Perspective 275 10.5 To “Pull the Mother Back into Philosophy” 280 10.6 Significs: ollowingF 283 References 287 Name and Subject Index 321 Foreword Frank Nuessel Remarkable is the appropriate descriptor to depict Victoria Welby (27 April 1837 to 29 March 1912), the subject of Susan Petrilli's perspicacious academic and biographical study of this truly extraor- dinary intellectual of Victorian England. Welby was known for her copious scholarship and her voluminous correspondence with the major academic titans of her era, including Michel Bréal (1831–1915), André Lalande (1867–1963), Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), Charles K. Ogden (1889–1957), Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), Ferdinand C. S. Schiller (1864–1937), Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936), Giovanni Vailati (1863–1909), Frederik van Eeden (1860–1932), Mary Everest Boole (1832–1916), and Julia Wedgewood (1833–1913), to name but a few of her more than 450 distinguished correspondents from Great Britain, the United States, France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands during the five-decade period of 1861 to 1912. Some scholars have argued that Welby would have received more attention during her lifetime were it not for the fact that she was a woman in an epoch when men dominated the academies. To be sure, however, Welby's work was greatly admired by all of her renowned letter writers. Susan Petrilli (University of Bari, Italy), a world-renowned semioti- cian in her own right, and the leading authority on the work of Victoria Welby, has now authored the definitive academic biography of this great English intellectual. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of Victoria Welby's scholarly achievements, her major contributions to the evolution of semiotics, and her considerable influence on her contemporaries and her successors. The bulk of Welby's unpublished scientific writing (composed from 1861 to 1912) is housed in the Welby Collection at the York Univer- sity Archives and Special Collections at the York University Library xi Victoria Welby and the Science of Signs (Downsview, Ontario, Canada). This wealth of invaluable material includes notes, extracts, and observations on such themes as biology, education, ethics, imagery, language, significance, logic, matter and motion, number theory, philosophy and significance, significs, and time, as well as diagrams by Welby, unpublished essays, and a collection of poems, photographs, and translations. Although the York Univer- sity collection constitutes virtually all Welby's unpublished essays and correspondence, another useful archival resource is the Welby Library in the University of London Library, which houses one thousand vol- umes from Welby's personal library, pamphlets, reprints, newspaper clippings, religious tracts and sermons, and published lectures. In this sense, the London collection contains secondary sources while the York archives house primary resources. Welby's essays on theoretical as- pects of semiotics, metaphor, semantics, meaning, translation, and in- terpretation are wide-ranging and insightful. Most important, however, is that she inspired the development of the significs movement, and this makes her one of the most influential figures of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Significs was defined in theOxford English Diction- ary in 1911 as a “proposed science and educational method based upon the importance of realizing the exact significance of terms and con- ceptions, and their influence on thought and life” (Petrilli 2009: 253). Many of her ideas influenced semiotics and semioticians both during her lifetime and after her death in 1912. Equally remarkable are Susan Petrilli's painstaking efforts to pre- serve Victoria Welby's documents in an easily available format so that the academic world has access to Welby's central contributions to the history of semiotics. Petrilli's monumental volume (xx + 1048 pages), entitled Signifying and Understanding: Reading the Works of Victoria Welby and the Signific Movement (Petrilli 2009; Nuessel 2011, 2013), is a virtual treasure trove of essential primary documents gleaned from the York University Archives. This book includes reproductions of Welby's original correspondence with the great minds of her epoch as well as her treatises on various aspects of her research, which is discussed in detail in Petrilli's monumental volume. Moreover, it contains Petrilli's insightful commentary on the significance of Welby's scholarly ruminations within a historical framework, showing Welby's intellectual development and her conceptualization of significs and the movement that it spawned (a comprehensive listing of Welby's writings appears in Petrilli 2009: 952–958). Thus, interest in Welby's research has continued to the pres- ent day through various selected publications, including those edited by xii Foreword Nina Cust (1929, 1931), Welby's daughter (1867–1955), and many others written during the twentieth century (a comprehensive listing of these publications appears in Petrilli 2009: 958–998). While many consider this to be Petrilli's magnum opus on Welby, Petrilli has, of course, written at length elsewhere on this important figure in the history of ideas. Her first monograph on Victoria Welby was her doctoral dissertation (Petrilli 1993), subsequently published as Su Victoria Welby. Significs e filosofia del linguaggio (Petrilli 1998). Petrilli, it should be noted, was named the Thomas A. Sebeok Fellow in 2008, the most prestigious award granted by the Semiotic Society of America (Nuessel 2008b).