What kind of sign a word is

The order of the last page says what a word reaches. It does not yet say what a word is. For that we need one more distinction, and it happens to be the one that answers the oldest objection to this whole course: that words are labels stuck on things, and the things are what matter.

Two cuts across signs

Houser makes the division with two cuts. The first is familiar. A sign may be natural, like smoke for fire or a rash for a fever, or conventional, holding its meaning because we assigned it: a red octagon, a handshake, the word dog.

The second cut does the work. A sign may be instrumental or formal.

An instrumental sign is something in its own right first and a sign second. Smoke is a real grey plume whether or not anyone reads it. A stop sign is a painted piece of metal, and you have to see the metal before you can take the order. You notice the sign, and then, through it, the thing.

A formal sign has no such standing. Its whole nature is to point. Houser: “their fundamental reality is that they are signs of something else.” And our awareness runs the other way. We notice the object first, and only later, by reflection, the sign at all. His example is a bear seeing a salmon. Some process in the bear’s eyes and nerves is what the salmon is seen by, and without it the bear sees nothing. But the bear notices the salmon, never its own seeing. There are no philosopher-bears.

Cross the two cuts and there are four possibilities, of which three exist. Natural and instrumental: smoke. Conventional and instrumental: the stop sign. Natural and formal: our own acts of knowing. There are no conventional formal signs, because a thing cannot be assigned a meaning unless it is first something there to be assigned one.

Now place the two items from the last page.

Houser states it in a line: a written or spoken term is a conventional and instrumental sign; a mental term is a natural and formal sign. Maritain classes the word the same way in passing, when he distinguishes a concept of a thing from a concept of a word: the written or spoken word is “the instrumental sign … which, being known the first, leads to the knowledge of the thing itself.” Known the first: that is what makes it instrumental.

Why the sticker picture fails

Now the objection. A label in the thin sense is a sticker: peel it off and the thing is unchanged. The objection says a name is like that, and that serious people should attend to the thing instead.

Half of that is right, and it is the half the tradition asserts first. A word really is a conventional instrumental sign. It is something in its own right, we assigned it, and it can be replaced. You can peel off glacier and use another sound; Latin does.

The objection fails at the next step. It assumes that because the word is a sticker, the whole business of naming is a sticker, so that between you and the glacier there is nothing but a removable noise. But between you and the glacier there is also a concept, and a concept is not that kind of sign. It cannot be peeled off, because it was never stuck on. It is not a thing in its own right to which we then assigned a meaning. It is the glacier having been understood by you. “Never mind the words, look at the thing” asks you to look with no seeing.

So the honest form of the objection turns into a demand this course agrees with. Attend to the thing. But the way to attend to a thing is to get the concept right, and the only instrument we have for working on a concept — holding it still, testing it, handing it to someone else — is the word. Walshe puts the matter in one image:

A parrot can make vocal sounds identical to words used in human language, yet they are not words since they do not signify things through thoughts.

The parrot has the sticker and nothing behind it. That is also what a fluent page with no speaker has.

This is why the logician’s subject is stated the way it is. Walshe: the proximate matter of logic is words insofar as they signify things through thoughts, and the remote matter is the thoughts themselves. Andres says it more briefly, and it is worth memorising in his form: logic is about words insofar as they signify things through our thoughts. The logician cannot get at a concept except through a word. Neither can you.

Where truth enters

One more thing follows, and it is the reason there is a second art at all. Aristotle continues a few lines later:

As there are in the mind thoughts which do not involve truth or falsity, and also those which must be either true or false, so it is in speech. For truth and falsity imply combination and separation. Nouns and verbs, provided nothing is added, are like thoughts without combination or separation; “man” and “white,” as isolated terms, are not yet either true or false.

Say white aloud. You have signified something and said nothing true and nothing false. Say the shirt is white and now you have. Truth and falsity arrive with joining and separating, not with naming.

Aristotle draws a consequence a few lines further on that bears directly on the first page of this course. Not every sentence is a statement:

Yet not every sentence is a statement; only such are statements as have in them either truth or falsity. Thus a prayer is a sentence, but is neither true nor false.

The foundation opened with prayer as an act of speech, and it is. It is speech that is not a statement, and Aristotle sets it aside here not because it is unimportant but because it is not what the logic of truth is about. He sends it, in the same sentence, to rhetoric and poetry. The third art will take it up.

That single observation divides the first two arts. Grammar composes names into a saying, and can succeed or fail at composing; a well-composed saying is not thereby a true one. Truth is not in the term. It is in what the mind does when it joins a predicate to a subject and affirms or denies. That is the second act, and it is what logic takes up.

Continue to One name, many things.