Diagrams and mental figuration: A semio-cognitive analysis

  Appendix

To our knowledge, the only attempt at treating naturally occurring diagrams as real and theoretically relevant phenomena is Stjernfelt’s 2007 treatise. However, Stjernfelt again drowns them in standard semiotic waters: iconicity and Peircean logic. We offer in this appendix an extract of Ulf Cronquist’s (2009) review:

Sometimes you encounter a work of scholarship so impressive that you find yourself rather in awe. Frederik Stjernfelt’s Diagrammatology is such a work, grounded in readings of Peirce’s semiotics and Husserl’s phenomenology – with fine-grained analyses of unnoticed parallels between the two thinkers. Generally the claim is that diagrams – a special sort of icon, in the Peircean sense – are, if in some respect similar to their objects, fundamental for the study of thought processes involved in acquiring knowledge. Diagrams, or diagrammatical schemata, “represent the internal structure of … objects in terms of interrelated parts, facilitating reasoning possibilities” (ix). Of special interest for theorists and practitioners of cognitive linguistics and cognitive poetics are Stjernfelt’s references to the conceptual metaphor theory of Lakoff and Johnson (1999), the blending theory of Fauconnier and Turner (2002), and Talmy’s force dynamics (2000). It should be noted that although this publication is in parts hypertheoretical, it also has a number of more applied chapters, on biosemiotics, picture semiotics and literary theory. Also, Stjernfelt underlines the position from which he is writing: if the notion of diagrammatology is opposed to anything, it is “grammatology as a headline for all sorts of deconstructivist, vitalist, social-constructivist skepticisms against the possible reliability of iconically [diagrammatically] represented information” (xxi).

The first three chapters prepare the ground for the centerpiece, Chapter 4 (“Moving Pictures of Thought”), where the cognitive theorization of schemas, frames and Gestalts is considered the main breakthrough in semiotic scholarship in the last few decades. Stjernfelt stresses the central role of diagrams in Peirce’s mature work, with special reference to Peirce’s 1906 ‘PAP’ paper [MS 293], not often considered in previous Peirce research. Being an icon, the diagram is characterized by similarity to its object; it represents through “a skeleton-like sketch of relations” (90). The diagram does not have the simple qualities of an image, or a metaphorical similarity to something else: it is an operational elaboration of the concept of similarity where “the decisive test for its iconicity rests in whether it is possible to manipulate the sign so that new information as to its object appears” (90). On this level of analysis Stjernfelt refers to Peirce’s AB-DE-IN (abduction-deduction-induction) trichotomy. AB is hypothetical, a qualified guess as to the object of study, mainly iconical/diagrammatical; DE fleshes out the necessities of what is implicit in AB; IN tests probable implications of AB (cf. pp. 328–343). This claim for iconic similarity certainly problematizes iconoclast deconstructivism and postmodern nominalist “discourse analysis” as a faulty ivory tower of irrationalism. If there is no iconicity, there is no meaning – but there always is some kind of meaning related to similarity. We always try to make sense, quite simply to survive; we might subjectivize, perspectivize, in some Nietzschean-Derridaesque attempt at “not making sense” and being hyper-personal-subjective on ontological matters. The fact, though, is that such equilibrist thinking and writing is banal. For all the misunderstanding there is in human communication, pragmatically, in the big picture, we are amazingly well tuned-in through our intersubjective language competence; it is mostly unlikely that we will fail to understand each other, being subjects sharing the same meanings in (sometimes specialized) areas of socio-linguistic experience.

After the central statements in chapter 4, Stjernfelt develops several themes and variations in another fourteen chapters based on the centrality of diagrams for human thought processes. Chapter 5 focuses on aspects of transformations, with a pertinent critique of the static ontology of Saussure, Chomsky and others compared with conceptual metaphor theory and blending theory, seen as decisively important for generating meaning and possibilities for further transformational meaning production. In chapter 6 Stjernfelt discusses categories, diagrams and schemata, through the perspective that Peirce (the “pan-semiotician”) and Husserl (the “transcendental solipsist”) did know of each other’s works – but probably not well enough. The interesting conclusion, comparing their theories, is that the necessarily immediate grasping of a diagram (Peirce) corresponds to spontaneous Gestalt grasping (Husserl), for further knowledge elaborations in terms of more detailed diagrams or Gestalts. Chapters 7 and 8 proceed to discuss mereology, how part-whole relations play a fundamental role in both Husserl’s phenomenological categorical intuitions and Peirce’s semiotic diagrams, with a comparison between Husserl’s synthetic a priori and Peirce’s diagrammatical reasoning.

Chapters 13–15 deal with the pictorial arts, claiming that all pictures are also diagrams, primarily maps (278). An important point here is that pictorial art is “diagrammatically underdetermined in a way analogous to the metaphorical underdeterminacy of poetry” (279). Stjernfelt’s brief analysis of Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White Square on White specifies such an underdetermination; what was understood by Malevich himself (and many art historians) as direct access to being itself does not take place without diagrammatical means (286). When we view the painting, in relation to its title, a first observation concerns its universality and/or particularity: a white square on white may of course be presented in numerous ways. As Stjernfelt remarks, the picture opens for diagrammatical manipulation: “we may imaginatively let the inner square reduce and grow, move around on the surface” (286). We typically construct a space in which we imagine our body wandering around in the landscape of the painting – an embodied diagram manipulation that is essential for “getting to know” the composition, similar to engaging with a literary text. Thus, a phenomenological experiential act cannot generally be reduced to some direct (mystical) insight into the object of study. In a cognitive-semiotic scientific context everything can be mapped: there is no hocus-pocus in the study of signs. (Cronquist 2009: 96–100)

Stjernfelt’s 2014 opus does not bring us further. Here, we learn that diagrammatical reasoning is propositional and also iconic.

The distinction between signs conveying information and signs from which information may be derived points to the possibility of deriving information from icons – crucial to diagrammatic reasoning. When such information is actually derived, however, it will be structured as a Dicisign. The most simple example of this is perceptual judgment … I see a certain configuration of crafted wood and derive the information “This is a chair,” linguistically expressed or not. (Stjernfelt 2014: 55). So, for Stjernfelt, categorial perception is propositional, which makes the perceived “configuration of crafted wood” into a diagram, unless he wants to say that a proposition is a diagram or inversely. The confusion seems considerable. And categorial perception is hardly propositional in any phenomenological sense.