“That's What You Say”: Response to Fredric Busch

I am grateful to Fredric Busch for taking the time to respond to my paper on mental representation. I will try to clarify my arguments and the ways in which they counter his response.

Peirce's three registers for representation, iconic, indexical, and symbolic are each “meaningful” in their own right; they are not hierarchically organized such that the first two registers necessarily defend against the third.

Busch makes an incorrect assumption regarding Peirce's three registers for representation. He assumes that subjective states in the iconic or indexical registers (e.g., somatic states and enactments) are not fully meaningful in their own right, that they require verbalization (“symbolization” in Peirce's terms) to acquire meaning. He mistakenly attributes to me this same belief, that the role of iconic and indexical representation is to operate defensively against the symbolic or verbal register. Thus, Busch writes,

some somatic states can be identified as emotions and fantasies. According to Erreich, if such bodily states are not represented in a meaningful way [in words], it is because of a defensive function that represses the conscious [verbal] experience of the associated fantasies and feelings [italics added]. (p. XXX)

Peirce's three representational registers can be transliterated from one to another, (e.g., the concept of “tiger” can be represented by the picture of a tiger, the footprint of a tiger, and the word tiger), but I do not propose that these instances represent some objective hierarchy with the verbal “symbolic” register at the top. Busch, like many analysts, does hold this belief: