3 - Computing in the Humanities and Social Sciences

However, scholars have also proposed a different approach from Staal’s.
According to it, everything that is part of a culture is significant, and can be
interpretable and explicable. In a semiotic perspective, in fact, there are no entities that
can be characterized a priori as signs or as significant. On the contrary, any object can
become a sign of something else to someone under “some respect or capacity,” as the
well-known definition by Peirce puts it. In the same way, mantras can be regarded as
signs, and therefore as interpretable cultural entities. More specifically, mantras must
have been created with special purposes and significative goals. A possible objection to
this standpoint is that the listeners (including many officiants) of mantric expressions
almost never understand their meaning. Now, as Wittgenstein argued, the meaning of
linguistic expressions is their use, therefore it is not necessary to understand the
meaning of an expression in order to use it correctly. However, we can also argue that
users of mantras believe that mantras have a meaning, even though they do not know it.
In other words, the epistemes of cultures employing mantras assume that mantras have
meaning. In fact, many esoteric texts presuppose a model-reader who is able to
understand the meanings of mantras. As Stanley Tambiah has written in a different
context, the structure of the expression of “magic” formulas and their meaning
must of course be separated from the problem of whether the exorcist
actually understands all the words contained in the spell. From his, as
well as the audience’s, point of view, the spells have power by virtue of
their secrecy and their capacity to communicate with demons and
thereby influence their actions. However, mantra do not fall outside the
requirements of language as a system of communication, and their
intelligibility to humans is not the critical factor in understanding their
logic (Tambiah 1985: 21; see also Tambiah 1970: 195-222).
In other words, correct usage and shared assumptions about their validity as
communication tools should be enough to consider mantras as endowed with linguistic
nature; as such, they should also be endowed with signification (the signification of the
mantric expressions will be the subject of the next lecture).
The Japanese case is more complex than the Indian one, for the reason that mantras
are elements from a foreign culture, with a different phonological system, specific ritual
uses, and meanings that require initiation (for example, even those mantras that in
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