Any empirical study involving living systems needs to cope with the issue of how best to collect, categorise and analyse sufficient relevant data to illuminate the phenomena being studied. Interestingly, the main problem (if one is prepared to think deeply enough about it) turns out not to be the most obvious one of categorisation and measurement of certain selected, `discrete' elements of the particular system under review (which is of course a highly exacting, and difficult enough project in itself), but to a large extent epistemological, and even ontological choices that must be made before an investigation of this kind is begun. Such choices will tend to `filter down', permeating the whole system of investigation and description and have methodological - in terms of ways of `doing research', or `looking at' specific phenomena - and terminological - at the linguistic, lexicogrammatical level of description - consequences, which will (re)define, and (re)structure the ways in which the scientist or `interpreter' (re)constructs and (re)presents for him/herself and others the systems and processes being studied.
One fundamental question I obviously am invoking here can be formulated in fairly simplistic fashion: Just how do we go about `capturing', describing and explaining in all their complexity systems of semiotic and cultural interchange that are continually undergoing change and evolution, without the act of capturing, describing and explaining destroying or subverting the dynamic nature of the system, which is what we are interested in investigating in the first place? How do we avoid the paradox of `freeze-drying', and thus `killing' naturally evolving processes and systems that are dependent on `living' in order to continue constructing and constituting meaning? Which, if any, ontology, epistemic framework, paradigm, research methodology and metalanguage, may be deemed both `sufficient and necessary' for studying social and cultural processes which involve - as indeed `science' itself does - the use of various forms of language in their self-constitution as dynamic open systems?
Now, this is of course, no new problem for science at all, in fact it is probably one of the most often, and hotly discussed issues within the international scientific community in the course of history. In opening up for discussion of these issues here, I have gathered and used a number of arguments from some distinguished authors in support of my own developing views. Amongst these are philosopher and semiotician C.S. Peirce, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and linguist and semiotician Michael Halliday. I have also drawn heavily on philosophical theologist Robert Corrington's recent exegesis of what he calls Peirce's mature ecstatic naturalism (Corrington 1993). Other sources of inspiration and ideas are acknowledged as they crop up in the course of this paper.
In the last of a proposed series of lectures written in 1898 (but not delivered), and entitled: The Logic of Continuity, Peirce writes in §2: The Logic of the Universe that:
`... continuity is shown by the logic of relations to be nothing but a higher type of that which we know as generality. It is relational generality.' [CP 6.190].
The problem of continuity has been approached and discussed by philosophers and scientists within at least three different types of epistemological framework, looking at:
1. the continuous relationship between mind, body and nature - for instance in the case of the biologically or biochemically oriented perspectives developed within the natural sciences2. the continuous relationship between consciousness, perception and representation - as in the sociocognitive and psychologically oriented perspectives of psychology, sociology and linguistics
3. the continuous relationship between time, space and existence - as in the philosophically and metaphysically oriented perspectives of classical philosophy and semiotics
What I will argue for here is the need for a grounding in a pansemiotic ontology such as we find in the `mature' peircean pragmaticism that not only is able to encompass issues like the diachrony of textual norms, but also issues related to the diachronicity of such norms - i.e. to the concurrent processes of evolution and ontogenesis of culturally and socially constituted text-norm systems. I shall discuss this issue with oblique reference to some specific problems I am considering in relation to my own developing research project design, which is at present defined as an investigation into how textual and interactional norm systems change over time when scientific authors from a number of different disciplines collaborate in distributed virtual environments, constituting new norm-systems as they do so. I shall return briefly to this project once more at the end of this paper, and attempt to tie in the rest of my discussion to the evolutionary and ontogenetic character of the phenomenon I want to investigate.
By deliberately using the lexeme `diachronicity' in my title above I have then hopefully invoked in you as reader a general idea of the tendency that any naturally developing systems have towards autonomy, self-regulation, constant change and growth and increasing internal complexity. Paradoxically too, such dynamic open systems that constitute themselves as autonomous systems also tend to reduce complexity in the larger life-world that they separate out from. This being in virtue of the fact that they, in separating out, represent a break in the continuity of the ground, or horizon of that life-world, to use Husserl's terminology. This implies that we must take account of, and take very seriously the problem of continuity.
What we are talking about here, then, is change that is not only is occurring simultaneously at many different levels of organisation in a text- or discourse-norm system (or text- and discourse community), but also in many different kinds of ways. My focus here is on the general tendency to change that dynamic open systems where human beings collaborate and work together, and, in doing so contributing to the development of cultures, seem to display. I shall examine the question of diachronicity within a context of continuity between means and processes of internal and external representation, more general conceptualisations of `reality' and the interactive nature of the relationship human beings have with the other kinds of natural systems and processes that constitute their, and also one another's, immediate environment.
I will refer briefly here to two interesting articles by Michael Halliday: one that is taken from a collection of articles on writing published in 1987, entitled Language and the Order of Nature, (Halliday 1987), and another from Halliday's own book The Semiotics of Language and Culture, entitled: Language as a code and language as behaviour: a systemic functional interpretation of the nature and ontogenesis of dialogue (Halliday 1984). In the first article of the two, Halliday discusses the relationship between what he calls the
`"distinctively human semiotic" the special form of dialogue powered by a system we call language" and the "two macrocosmic orders of which we ourselves are a part : the social order, and the natural order."`
He argues that we have always used language in culture to construe, i.e. to understand or make sense of, these two macrocosmic orders, without necessarily being aware that we are doing so. He goes on to say that
`All this dialogic construction is, by definition, interactive. At the micro level, we get to know our fellow creatures by talking to them and listening to them; and they respond to us in the same natural language. At the macro level, the "dialogue with nature" (Prigogine & Stengers 1984), is also interactive; but in another guise. When we want to exchange meanings with physical or biological nature we have to process information that is coded in very different ways, and that may need to go through two or three stages of translation before we can apprehend it.'
Halliday considers languages as dynamic open systems in very much the same kind of way as linguist Sydney Lamb also does in his stratificational model of grammar (Lamb 1966). Where Halliday seems to differ most from Lamb is in his treatment of the closely woven networks of interpersonal relationships that develop and grow over time between users of language. Halliday seems more concerned with the relationship between the development of grammar and language per se and the intersubjective nature of human relationships, and also with the intimate interactions that human beings of necessity have with the natural environment they inhabit and are an integral part of. For Halliday, there seems to be no clear Cartesian mind-body distinction, and no clear human-nature distinction either. Halliday's approach is thus `naturalistic' in one sense, in that it approaches an ecological, systemic understanding of language as just one kind of naturally occuring evolutionary process. In this way, it would seem that Halliday and Peirce are quite similar in their ways of thinking; i.e. their basic ontology is strongly phenomenologically oriented. Lamb, on the other hand does not really seem to be concerned with these kinds of issues at all, at least not as far as one can discern on reading his Outline of Stratificational Grammar (Lamb 1966), and his basic approach to language is also much less empirically grounded and functionally oriented than Halliday's is.
Halliday stresses continually that language and/or grammar is as much a product of evolution as we ourselves are; the grammar of language is a naturally evolving, and thus, at present, an evolved system, rather than a designed system. We must always examine language and grammar as they are; as naturally occurring phenomena - as an essential part of our situatedness as human beings within the larger natural order. With regard to the relationship between language and science he points out that we - through our `investigative dialogues with nature' that we have over time have come to characterise as science - have learned to measure, experiment and try and understand the phenomena we observe around us. As a result of this evolutionary process we have developed metalanguages - languages of philosophy, mathematics and science. These metalanguages are, however, all extensions of natural languages, not totally new creations; and they remain intimately tied not only to one another, but also to the very phenomena that they are investigating and attempting to illuminate.
From early infancy language impinges in a number of ways in the construction of the social order, mediating the dialogue and interactions that build upon the intimate intersubjective relationships that develop from a very early age between the child and its caregivers. The efficacy of this `language for loving and caring rather than for knowing and thinking' is not judged referentially - except when the intimate sphere of communication breaks down, as in clearly pathological cases.
`Language creates society; but it does so without ever referring to the processes and the structures which it is creating'.
I would add here that it always does so in close conjunction with other forms of semiosis, such as non-verbal communication, physical activity of various kinds, olfaction, and tactile forms of communication etc..
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