Morse Peckham in this book, despite criticizing the fundaments of experimental psychology, perhaps is taken in a bit by the humans-as-lab-dogs metaphor. The notion of "response" is primary for him here. The meanings of words or any other perceptual configurations are simply the responses that those words or other configurations elicit. Since Peckham also posits - controversially - that the evolutionary step from monkey to humanity consisted in large part of an explosive increase in randomness of response, language and indeed all human dealings with even the nonverbal realm are radically unstable. Peckham points out again and again that meaning is not "immanent." The world consists merely of signs and responses to those signs, and since meaning is not immanent the only tenuous stability that a given pattern of responses can exhibit must be the result of highly redundant efforts by various "institutions," including the dyadic institution of the individual, to maintain that tenuous stability.
The "meaning is not immanent" mantra is not entirely savory in Peckham's rendition. Elsewhere he has decried the postmodernist movement, but in this book (and in other places too) Peckham clearly lists confusedly towards the subjectivist fog. He allows a given response to a given verbal or nonverbal configuration to be appropriate or inappropriate but only insofar as that judgment of appropriateness or inappropriateness is itself just another response. Nothing about the world determines correctness in such a judgment. Meaning is not immanent. In this spirit Peckham even deconstructs logic. Logic as he describes it is merely one more institution attempting normatively and redundantly to stabilize patterns of response. The irony that he uses logical analysis throughout this book, that the entire project of this book is in effect an exacting extraction of the immanent meaning of "meaning is not immanent," seems not to be lost on Peckham, however.
The puritanical prism that Peckham has chosen to wield in this enterprise casts drab hues. Central to his argument is his conception of explanation. He sees an explanation as merely a series of categorizing responses. The thing to be explained is placed into a subsuming category. That subsuming category is placed into a wider category, and so forth, for some finite number of categories. Explanations are constructed to limit randomness of response, and they are maintained through redundancy. Thus the intricate, fascinating, intellectually compelling models of science and mathematics (and of other endeavors, including some of Peckham's earlier books) are drained of life.
But there is a discreet Bergmanesque charm to this bleakness. The world is radically unstable. Individuals are threatened continually on the one hand by the terrible sanctions - economic privation, imprisonment, torture, death - that are the ultimate institutional riposte to behavioral dissolution and on the other hand by behavioral dissolution itself, even by the dissolution of their own psyches, which as it turns out are fictive and normative redundancies, explanatory regressions required for human functionality. In this dramatic landscape, supercharged eros, paradisiacal respite in which psyches willingly dissolve into an orgasmic sea of uncategorized carnality, is possible. Also, a person can become a Romantic revolutionary, can weather alienation, collect a cadre of like-minded friends, and join the tiny elite currently instituting the most significant behavioral innovation since the Neolithic or possibly even the Paleolithic, though only to the ultimate end, alas, of entraining an epistemological piety.
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