As a researcher studying the evolution and ontogenesis of text-norm systems as they are being constituted by communities of authors collaborating in virtual environments I will necessarily come to take part in and contribute to the constitution of these selfsame norm systems. It is also reasonable to expect that changes in my own text norm-systems will develop as a result of this. This means that there is a pressing need to adopt a research methodology and a language of description which is in some way capable of grasping and making understandable the evolution and ontogenesis of complex semiotic systems seen from the viewpoint of one who is involved in these processes himself. Now this problem is of course not new to science. At a very basic level it is closely tied in with the old issue of whether scientific objectivity is possible or not. And as Umberto Eco has pointed out[1]:
`La costituzione di un codice completo deve rimanere dunque solo una IPOTESI REGOLATIVA: nel momento in cui un codice del genere fosse interamente descritto esso sarebbe giàcambiato e non solo per influenza di vari fattori storici ma per la stessa erosione critica che l'analisi che se ne èdata avrebbe compiuto nei suoi confronti. Ogni volta che vengono descritte delle struttuure della significazione si verifica qualcosa, nell'universo della comunicazione, che non le rende piùcomplertamente attendibili. Questa condizione di squilibrio non èperòuna contraddizione dellla semiotica: èuna condizione metodologica che la accomuna ad altre discipline come la fisica, rette da criteri di metodo come il principio di indeterminatezza o il principio di complementarietà. Solo se acquisisteràquesta coscienza dei propri limiti senza aspirare a essere un sapere assoluto la semiotica potràaspirare a essere una disciplina scientifica.' (Eco 1975, p. 182)
I do not wish to begin discussing all the wider ramifications of this rather difficult issue here. But what is important is, as I will attempt to argue in this paper, the consequences it may have for decisions to be made regarding which particular ontological framework a researcher wishing to focus on the highly interrelated processes forming the basis of dynamic open systems such as language and culture ought to adopt as a basis for his or her investigations.
I have proposed elsewhere (Coppock in press) that the multiplicity of distributed virtual environments we now see developing in what is often referred to as `Cyberspace' or the `Information Superhighway' are best to be understood as dynamic open systems of culture where individual and collective life-worlds and their associated experiential horizons are constantly being constituted, construed and enacted by members of a steadily expanding interpretative community. So which ontological framework do we need to adopt in order to study processes of change in social and cultural practices which involve multifarious levels of interaction between a very large number of quite different semiotic systems? Obviously, the answer would seem to be a semiotic approach, but I want to argue that this semiotic approach must also be grounded in som kind of phenomenological methodology which also allows us to take full account of the complex dynamics of the (inter)subjective and experiential constitution of meanings in virtual environments.
The program of phenomenology as put forward by Edmund Husserl originally expressed a revolt against an approach to philosophy that takes its point of departure from crystallised beliefs and theories handed down by a tradition which all too often perpetuates preconceptions and prejudgements. (Speigelberg 1982, p.680) The first objective of a phenomenological approach is the enlarging and deepening of the range of our immediate experience. (Speigelberg 1982 p. 679) The leitmotif of phenomenological research has since Husserl been "Zu den Sachen" - 'To the things themselves'.
Herbert Kuhn (Kuhn 1968) describes phenomenology as an attempt to base philosophical analysis on an impartial and adequate account of what really happens in experience. And, as he says, `For the attainment of this end, the concept of "horizon" is one of the foremost instruments.' Horizon, says Kuhn, is to be understood as the ultimate circumference within which all things, real and imaginable, are bound to appear. To explore the horizon means moving away from ordinary foci of attention with a view to integrating the things at hand in a broader and broader context. The idea of horizon stands for a progressive drive inherent in experience. While limiting the totality of given things, the horizon also frames it.
This framing helps to constitute its wholeness, while at the same time determining that which is framed. Horizon as a guiding metaphor enables us to discover shades of meaning cast on the object by the environment encompassing it. In Husserl's phenomenology, horizon stands for the impetus of self-transcendence with which experience is animated. Husserl refers to the concepts of noema and noesis, in order to distinguish between the object of all objectivating acts and the act of perception visualized as a dynamic structure. All such acts are directed toward something which is their meaning or intending something. They all point to an object as their end.
While perceiving, thinking, feeling, remembering and hating, we perceive, think of, feel, remember and hate someone or something. It is this pervasive characteristic of the mental operations in which phenomenological analysis centers. While we are performing the act itself, absorbed or "living" in the act, we are unable to become aware of it. The act reveals itself only to a supervening reflection; to another teleological act within which the former appears as an object. The act as a whole does not become visible to us unless we free ourselves from the absorption in the object as simply given or discovered, forcing into the view the object as perceived, believed, remembered as an element of a presentative act.
Understood in this way than, a phenomenological method of analysis implies that the principle inherent in Occam's razor stating that entities ought not to be multiplied beyond necessity must be modified to ensure that the phenomena we are investigating do not become diminished below what is intuitively given.
Now, what we mean by "intuition" and "givenness" are of course discussible at great length. Again, I do not wish to take up this discussion here, but the main point I wish to draw attention to in this connection is the idea of developing an approach that allows, end even encourages a moving away from more established, simplifying abstractions of science which lead to some minimum vocabulary of scientific concepts. A phenomenological approach ideally allows us to open our eyes to unconditionally take account of what is there, or rather to what is intuitively given to us by what is there (the real), without any prior operationalisations of this reality by means of preconceived models and theories. This kind of approach is something that is implicit not only in Charles Sanders Peirce's concepts of interpretative musement and abduction (see for instance Corrington 1993 for a discussion of these ideas), but also reflected in his pragmatic maxim, where meaning is tied to the practical consequences or habitual behaviours which the object as we conceive of it will come to produce over time in the real world of experience. Here Peirce says (my translation from the original French[2]):
`Consider which are the practical consequences we think may be the products of the object of our conception. The conception of all of these effects is the entire meaning of the object.
To develop the sense of an idea, one simply has to determine which habits it produces, since the sense of something consists simply of those habits which are implicit in it. The nature of a habit depends on the way it might cause us to act, not only in that particular circumstance, but in all possible circumstances, as improbable as that might seem. What a habit is depends on two points: when and how it makes us act. Regarding the first point: when? everything that stimulates to an action is derived from a perception; as regards the second point: how? the goal of every action is to lead to some sensible result. We obtain, then, the tangible and the practical as the basis of all differences of thought, so subtle as that might be.'
[C.P. 5.18]
It is then, our experiences of the practical and the tangible impingements of the external real on our sensory systems, constituting as they do so over time beliefs or habits of thought in our minds which are sufficiently strongly established so as to cause us to act upon them that form the basis of all differences of thought.