Semiotic Analysis and the Formalisation of Experience

A process of formalisation is required in order to generate a model of experience that can be validated. In this research, I treat the participants’ external behaviour of expression through verbalisation and the resultant interview transcripts as, in Varela’s terms (2003, p.9-10), a trace or manifestation of the participants’ internal mental life. This requires the assumption that an accurate transcription process is semiotically neutral, in other words the transcript is equivalent to the interview for the purpose of the post-facto analysis. That process is a multi-step semiotic analysis that uses coding, graph-theoretic clustering and interpretative input by the researcher at

Methodology

each step to elucidate meanings and aspects of the CFS experience that are not readily apparent in the raw data.

Several steps of the analysis process towards a formal model of the experience involve transformations from one form of description to another. Firstly, transcription of the subjects’ spoken accounts into text, secondly, coding of the interview transcripts into nodes, thirdly, the clustering of nodes and the graphical presentation of those clusters, fourthly, semiotic analyses of the node contents from clusters or groups of nodes, and finally, theoretical explication providing a model for the experience. Each of the transformations in the analysis process is intended to be meaning preserving. The descriptive forms, such as nodes, node labels, and graphs, used at each step of the analytic process are chosen to facilitiate the researcher’s reflection on the material.

6.6 Nodes and Coding

Given a graph of textual invariant nodes derived from a saturated interview process, it is possible to enlist further techniques from graph theory to assist semiotic analyses of experience. This requires the preparatory step of coding interview transcripts into nodes. Nodes and coding are defined in this section.

Coding involves the semiotic process of identifying and collating into nodes, passages of interview text that describe textual invariants. The labels given to the nodes refer to the textual invariants described by the interview passages collated at that node. Nodes are simply containers for interview material that symbolises textual invariants. These symbolisations coded to a node constitute a specified meaning. According to the IOFI principle this meaning can also be considered a methodological category. The label attached to the node directly refers to the specified meaning and the methodological category that this specified meaning symbolises. Therefore the node labels also directly refer to the experience underlying the textual invariant that generated the node.

6.7 Process Knowledge and Intricacy

Adequate tools for the examination of experience need to reflect the fact that experience is an infinitely varied continuous process. Intricacy and a dynamical systems view of process provide these tools.

Gendlin’s (2004) concept of process-knowledge suggests that considering any experience in terms of atomistic, rigidly defined discrete components is a potentially flawed approach. In effect, any experience is a complex dynamic system. Gendlin comments: “there are precise distinctions between different kinds of processes, precise ways to identify whether a given kind of process is occurring or not, the precise conditions under which it can be brought about, and its

Process Knowledge and Intricacy precise results” (Gendlin and Johnson 2004 p.3). Despite not being constituted from discrete components, such complex dynamic systems do have multiple processes and subprocesses that can be characterised and, in combination, describe the overall process. Nodes used to refer to any experience, likewise, do not refer to discrete components. The nodes are better understood as referring to the eigenstates, or characteristic states, of the ongoing processes involved in the experience. The textual invariants that refer to the content of these nodes are the symbolisations of the eigenstates underlying them.

The coding process requires that the researcher observe the symbolised experience offered by the subjects and recorded in the interview transcripts. This process creates felt meanings, and the researcher is then required to symbolise those felt meanings into coding decisions, and further symbolise those coding decisions into node labels. As I coded the interview text it was as if the nodes arose from the initially undifferentiated discourse in the same manner as Gendlin describes the specification of felt meaning into language. This meta-analysis of the articulated experience seems, therefore, to follow the same specification process as underlies the subjects’ explicitation of their experience. Both are symbolisation specification processes. The process of symbolisation is the process of identifying and calling out symbols that combine to a similarly weighted collection of eigenstates. This involves a very precise transformation since, as a matter of mutual constraint, the symbolisation process is specified on one side by felt meaning and on the other by the structure of language, that is to say, by enculturation and, as will be discussed below, by semiotics, particularly the semiotic concepts of generation, generative grammar and the generative tracjectory.

Since a set of relations between a set of meanings is itself a meaning, the same is true of nodes, and the specified meanings that they represent. Observation of the relationships between nodes can give rise to new codes that create new composite nodes. Nodes representing the more subtle or complex aspects of the experience arose in this way.

Symbolisation always involves the underlying implicit intricacy of experience. The symbolisation process appears to produce discrete entities from this intricacy. Prior to symbolisation, however, these discrete separations did not exist in all instances, they functioned within a pre-separated multiplicity.

When concepts retain implicit intricacy, they form a cluster. Each says more about the others. This “more” is not a fuzzy excess of form. Each lets us think—in exact ways—how more functions than what was already formed. (Gendlin 2002 p.92)

One purpose for deriving the experiential clusters from the relationships between the nodes was to preserve some of this pre-separated multiplicity in the examination of the structure of the CFS experience.

Methodology

What Gendlin describes in pre-reflective experience as intricacy, Maurel (Maurel 2009) describes in evocation as specificity. Gendlin provides numerous approaches to the investigation of this intriciate exactitude of experience (Gendlin 1962, 1978, 1986, 1992, 1996, 2002). He is particularly concerned with how this intricate exactitude enters into symbolisation from the body. For Gendlin (2002) the ‘…’ is the space in which the letting come of epoche occurs. The ‘…’ is the moment in which new meanings are created as what is implied in our embodied experience is called forth into symbolisation. This precise implicit intricacy is what is exhausted in the process of saturation described in section 6.4.

In his in-depth discussion of the theoretical and methodological issues surrounding introspection Vermersch comments:

A second complementary hypothesis is that all these retentions are linked, interwoven and connected by resonances over distances, and associations of all kinds. And that each moment recalled in the evocation mode takes into view everything that is linked to it and can be seized provided that the view is shifted inside what is given. For this intuitive donation elicited by evocation will open up possibilities provided by the continuous interweaving of all the components of the lived experience. This means that each recollected lived element can give rise to and/or be the object of the placing into relationships with everything which is linked to it, by [simple] contiguity or by remote reference. … The practical question is then no longer recollecting, but discerning in what has already been recollected everything which is attached to it, and whose description may be relevant. (Vermersch 2009, p.41)

Since there are semiotic relationships between the contents of all the nodes, these nodes and their semiotic relationships form a graph, which is therefore another form of symbolisation of the authentic experience. In Vermersch’s terms, this graph records and links what is attached to the experience recollected in each node.