Ben, List, You say: "I agree with Gary about the role of purpose in interpretation. Vinicius does, however, seem to allow of it in connection with the final interpretant, and to wish merely that Kees had somehow put it into those terms. On the other hand, I think Vinicius underplays the role of purpose. It's hard to see why interpretation would take place at any level except for an end, bringing standards and norms of value into play. The world in its thermodynamic decay scrambles information, and life prospers in sorting some information out as more important, valuable, to the purpose, for life; some call it 'decoding', which makes sense provided that one remembers that there is in life a purpose or function of extracting information from mixed and scrambled signs and sign systems, both as to particular questions and in general ways that 'add value' (e.g., not just deducing whatever is deducible, but, since no deduction concludes in anything really new or complicative, deducing that which nonetheless brings a new or nontrivial perspective to the premisses). If one conceives of inference or interpretation as taking place in some more or less 'quasi' way at purely material and dynamic levels, then one still needs to suppose an end, even if that end merely be thermodynamic decay or the conservation of certain physical quantities - i.e., probable and (in the classical limit) extremal outcomes. These things do not involve retroactive efficient (agential) causation by ends. In inference, aim or purpose 'solicits' (to borrow a Scholastic term) and guides determination by the premisses; the reasoner hopes and supposes that there are ways to do that without stacking the deck, i.e., without interfering with the determination to truth."
Your explanation is quite clear and to the point. Having said that, I'd like to raise the following question. To what extent should we bracket metaphysical questions about the reality of the purposes that seem to govern biological, chemical, physical processes? T.L. Short seemed to think it worth the while to get those questions on the table at the very start of his discussion of Peirce's semiotics. I will admit that it makes sense to canvass all of the possibilities as we start to classify different kinds of representamens and relations and then build explanations of the growth of semiotic systems. After all, we wouldn't want to leave important classes out of our explanations. Having said that, shouldn't we bracket the metaphysical questions out of a concern that in our eagerness to give answers to these questions we might bias the normative inquiry? --Jeff Jeff Downard Associate Professor Department of Philosophy NAU (o) 523-8354 ________________________________________ From: Benjamin Udell [bud...@nyc.rr.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2014 8:58 AM To: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] de Waal Seminar: Chapter 5, Semeiotics, or the doctrine of signs Vinicius, Gary R., Kees, list, I see that I omitted a few key words, inserted in dark red below. I reordered a bit too, and repaired the links (I don't know why they didn't work). Vinicius, I've read your reply now in which you said that by "purpose" you meant conscious, deliberate purpose, so some of this discussion turns out to arise from mere differences of word usage, but at this point I don't know how to revise my post accordingly without writing a rather different post! Vinicius, Gary R., Kees, list, I agree with Gary about the role of purpose in interpretation. Vinicius does, however, seem to allow of it in connection with the final interpretant, and to wish merely that Kees had somehow put it into those terms. On the other hand, I think Vinicius underplays the role of purpose. It's hard to see why interpretation would take place at any level except for an end, bringing standards and norms of value into play. The world in its thermodynamic decay scrambles information, and life prospers in sorting some information out as more important, valuable, to the purpose, for life; some call it 'decoding', which makes sense provided that one remembers that there is in life a purpose or function of extracting information from mixed and scrambled signs and sign systems, both as to particular questions and in general ways that 'add value' (e.g., not just deducing whatever is deducible, but, since no deduction concludes in anything really new or complicative, deducing that which nonetheless brings a new or nontrivial perspective to the premisses). If one conceives of inference or interpretation as taking place in some more or less 'quasi' way at purely material and dynamic levels, then one still needs to suppose an end, even if that end merely be thermodynamic decay or the conservation of certain physical quantities - i.e., probable and (in the classical limit) extremal outcomes. These things do not involve retroactive efficient (agential) causation by ends. In inference, aim or purpose 'solicits' (to borrow a Scholastic term) and guides determination by the premisses; the reasoner hopes and supposes that there are ways to do that without stacking the deck, i.e., without interfering with the determination to truth. In the case of the _question_ asked about the weather, Peirce identifies the purpose with the question's final interpretant and has it depending in some sense on the asker of the question, but, yes, one can consider the purpose merely as 'given' with the final interpretant of a given posed question. Letter to William James, CP 8.314, 1909, http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/terms/finalinterpretant.html: [....] But the Significance of it, the _Ultimate_, or _Final_, Interpretant_ is her _purpose_ in asking it, what effect its answer will have as to her plans for the ensuing day. [....] In turn, the final interpretant of the _reply_ given at the time to the posed question is the sum of the reply's lessons (scientific, moral, etc.). I don't know whether Peirce means to associate purpose with the final interpretants of posed _questions _ in particular, and ultimate lessons with the final interpretants of given _replies_. In the 1909 letter to William James in EP 2:493-4, Peirce says http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/terms/interpretant.html : But that which the writer aimed to point out to you, presuming you to have all the requisite collateral information, that is to say just the quality of the sympathetic element of the situation, generally a very familiar one - a something you probably never did so clearly realize before - _that _ is the Interpretant of the Sign, - its 'significance.' If the painting's viewer lacks the requisite experience collateral to the signs in respect of the object, then the viewer's adequate consideration or investigation of the painting includes acquiring such experience. Since generally one does not know everything, and the increase of knowledge is a basic part of what signs are for, the need to increase one's collateral acquaintance with the represented object in order to reach a final opinion on a nontrivial question seems the rule, not the exception. Neither ends nor collateral acquaintance seem 'ex machina' intrusions on semiosis. Peirce does not leave the roles of purpose and collateral experience in a riot of idiosyncrasies, but generalizes from the role of mind to the roles of quasi-mind, commind, etc. Best, Ben On 3/25/2014 7:11 PM, Gary Richmond wrote: Vinicius, Kees, list, Thank you, Vinicius, for these first two valuable and most stimulating posts. I'm certain that Kees appreciates both that you recognize the extreme space limitations placed upon him, and that his choices of what to include were anything but arbitrary, rather, based on several considerations, perhap especially that of introducing Peirce to those who may not be very familiar with his work, including his sometimes complicated terminology. In rereading his book I was reminded of how much Kees was able to pack into a mere 164 pages, how clearly he presents some of Peirce's most important, even difficult concepts, and yet how readable the whole is. However, your pointing to what he wan't able to include is also valuable. But, again, I find it remarkable that in the 19 pages which comprise the chapter on semeiotics that, at least as I see it, he was able to say more of value concerning that field than, for example, Tom Short was able to say in the 347 pages of Peirce's Theory of Signs , a work which I know Joe Ransdell considered--and I agree--to be an idiosyncratic distortion of Peirce's semeiotic, what Joe once suggested might better be titled Tom Short's Theory of Signs (which is not to suggest that it doesn't include many original, valuable insights--but, I'd say, only for those well-schooled in Peirce). Be that as it may, and as your first mentioned of two issues objections to Kees' presentation of hypostatic abstraction has already, albeit briefly, been discussed, I'd like to comment on your second objection. You quote Kees: CdW: "Thus we can say that, though any object, say a footprint on the beach, can give rise to a great variety of signs (human presence, the firmness of the sand, etc.), and though any sign can give rise to a variety of interpretations (a spouse's infidelity, the movement of the tide), each object limits, or determines, what may be a sign of it, and each sign similarly limits what may be an interpretant of it. Peirce's account suggests that what is picked out as a sign and how it is interpreted relates to the purpose of the interpreter" (emphasis added). And remark: VR: I think this might not the best way to describe a genuine triadic relation. The object appears here as some "thing" quite independent of the other correlates and that "can give rise" to a variety of signs. Actually the object of the sign is always in a logical relation to the sign. If the relation does not subsist, then it is not the object of the sign. Besides that, a sign might have several objects (or a complex object), but I don't see how an object cannot "give rise" to several signs. As I read the snippet from Kees' chapter, he is not saying, as you wrote immediately above, that "an object cannot 'give rise' to several signs; indeed, he seems to be saying just the opposite in explicitly stating that a object "can give rise to a great variety of signs." Rather, he says that what i 'picked out as a sign' depends on the interpreter's (we're discussing human semiosis here) purpose . This seems to be what you are objecting to as you c ontinue: VR: On the same vein, it is true that the sign can produce a variety of interpretations, but each interpretation effectively produced is the result of the potential that the sign itself has to be interpreted independently of any psychological consideration such as "the purpose of the interpreter". The purpose, which might be understood as related to the final interpretant of the sign, must also be considered part of the logical relation and should not be introduced "ex machina". It appears to me that you are here suggesting, in writing " of the potential that the sign itself has to be interpreted independently of any psychological consideration such as "the purpose of the interpreter," that the sign somehow functions independently of its being a sign of something for someone. You continue by stating that "the footprint [is] the sign." VR: I would rather consider the footprint as the sign. Taken as an individual, it is a sinsign. Considered as a true symptom, it is an index that represents existentially its object, which is the very foot (and the person related too such foot) that determined the form of that singular footprint. As an indexical sinsign, it only represents that "something with this shape was here", which is its interpretant dicisign. I am assuming that the interpreter has already familiarity with the shape of a shoe, that shoes leave their marks on the sand etc. We could put this into the analysis too, but would lead us to nearly an infinite regress. As Peirce states, we must start our inquiry with our own prejudices, or the "state of information" about the universe we live in. But it is not simply familiarity with "the shape of a shoe" that is critical here. It appear that Kees sees it somewhat differently in writing that a"footprint on the beach, can give rise to a great variety of signs (human presence, the firmness of the sand, etc.)" Spring-boarding off the end of that snippet ("the firmness of the sand"), but offering yet another example, consider the case of an archaeologist who, while quarrying, comes upon a footprint of a perhaps small to mid-sized reptile from the age of the dinosaurs. one which he immediately identifies from his collateral knowledge of previous footprints, as well as a very few other fossil remains which he, and those in his field, are familiar with. So the question here is not what extinct reptile this footprint is a sign of (already known) but, say, because the texture of the material is well known, and the footprint, clearly that of an adult of the species, the print here being not shallow, but deep, the anthropologist, combining those bits of information, is able to surmise the approximate weight of the animal--new information, perhaps wholly unexpected (e.g., he might earlier have thought it was quite small, but it appear to be considerably larger based on his new knowledge). So here the sign is not the footprint alone, but for the archeologist's purposes it is the footprint, its depth, the constitution of the material it's contained within, etc. You continued by remarking that it is not the purpose, but merely the familiarity from collateral knowledge which is significant here. But it seems to me that purpose, in consideration of gaining new knowledge, is important (otherwise one would be blind to the possibility of even discovering new knowledge). In the present example, the purpose of the archaeologist is not to identify the maker of the print (already known) but to arrive at the approximate weight (and so possibly also size and height) of this not well known extinct reptile, Yet, perhaps you are saying something like this in writing: VR: If memory of these past experiences is vivid enough in the mind when the sign footprint comes to the phaneron, associations will follow naturally, even unconsciously, putting it in relation with information already in the memory. This synthetical inference, which is an abduction, will create a new and more developed sign (emphasis added) Possibly I've misrepresented either or both you and Kees in this matter of 'purpose'. Little doubt that I'll find out. Best, Gary Gary Richmond Philosophy and Critical Thinking Communication Studies LaGuardia College of the City University of New York On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 9:35 AM, Vinicius Romanini wrote: Dear list members, In this second message I will comment on Kees' excursion on Peirce's definition of signs and its elements: the representamen (or the sign prescinded from the other correlates), the object the sign professes to represent and the interpretant as the effect of the action of the sign. Kees gives us a rather succinct overview and avoids going too much into questions still open to scholar debate, sometimes with very strong disagreements (that's what I would do too, by the way, if I were to write a panoramic text). Actually, I have never found two Peirce scholars who would totally agree when it comes to Peirce's theory of signs - and I would not expect this will happen during this seminar either. I myself have some disagreements with Kees in minor details but also on some at least one important example of applying the above mentioned analysis of the correlates. As we know, Peirce wrote dozens of different definitions for "sign" in his more than 40 years of work around the subject and it seems that he ended his life never totally satisfied with any, for his last MS's, from 1908-11, are full of tentative definitions to accommodate his commitment to pragmatism, the reality of the three categories but also his further division of the three correlates into ten a aspects. These variations use verbs like "represent", "determine" , "affect", "influence", "cause", "specialize" etc. Although written in different wordings, all of them have the same fundamental goal which is to define what a genuine triadic relation is. Since there are three correlates, one can choose how to punctuate this triadic relation. Kees explains all this and also warns us that Peirce would sometime write a definition that he thought would be more intelligible. He would use for example the term "interpreter" instead of the more logical "interpretant" - a word that Peirce himself created to eliminate traces of psychologism in his logic. Having the above in mind, I two disagreements with Kees' account: - The first is that Kees suggests that all signs might be hypostatic abstractions (either entia realis or rationis) but I do not see why. Although hypostatic abstractions are certainly signs (such as the relations among the objects of a proposition), there might be signs which are not abstractions. Since any cognizable can be a sign, this would include real possibilities and existents not yet cognized. For example, I recall Peirce saying that a fossil fish is thought (and hence a sign) even if not yet found by anyone. Maybe Kees could clarify what he meant. - The second objection is the example he offers on page 80: "Thus we can say that, though any object, say a footprint on the beach, can give rise to a great variety of signs (human presence, the firmness of the sand, etc.), and though any sign can give rise to a variety of interpretations (a spouse's infidelity, the movement of the tide), each object limits, or determines, what may be a sign of it, and each sign similarly limits what may be an interpretant of it. Peirce's account suggests that what is picked out as a sign and how it is interpreted relates to the purpose of the interpreter (...)". I think this might not the best way to describe a genuine triadic relation. The object appears here as some "thing" quite independent of the other correlates and that "can give rise" to a variety of signs. Actually the object of the sign is always in a logical relation to the sign. If the relation does not subsist, then it is not the object of the sign. Besides that, a sign might have several objects (or a complex object), but I don't see how an object cannot "give rise" to several signs. On the same vein, it is true that the sign can produce a variety of interpretations, but each interpretation effectively produced is the result of the potential that the sign itself has to be interpreted independently of any psychological consideration such as "the purpose of the interpreter". The purpose, which might be understood as related to the final interpretant of the sign, must also be considered part of the logical relation and should not be introduced "ex machina". Data maxima venia , I thought it would be interesting to offer to the members of the list a more detailed description of semiosis involving this example. This would certainly not be the case in a book directed to a more general audience, which would only lead to perplexity. But since I assume that most of us here are already passed the state of perplexity when dealing with Peirce's terminology, I will risk bothering you with my own interpretation from the same example. I would rather consider the footprint as the sign. Taken as an individual, it is a sinsign. Considered as a true symptom, it is an index that represents existentially its object, which is the very foot (and the person related too such foot) that determined the form of that singular footprint. As an indexical sinsign, it only represents that "something with this shape was here", which is its interpretant dicisign. I am assuming that the interpreter has already familiarity with the shape of a shoe, that shoes leave their marks on the sand etc. We could put this into the analysis too, but would lead us to nearly an infinite regress. As Peirce states, we must start our inquiry with our own prejudices, or the "state of information" about the universe we live in. Anything beyond this will depend on the familiarity of the interpreter with the object being represented by the sign, gathered by what Peirce calls collateral experience. Not the "purpose", but the familiarity. In the case of the tide, the mental habits about how ocean waves usually erase footprints, how tides come and go. In the case of the spouse infidelity, the knowledge that people are sometimes unfaithful, etc. The important here is that his knowledge must have been gathered by previous experiences with related situations, be it directly or indirectly perceived from from other sources (books, movies, newspapers, conversations etc). If memory of these past experiences is vivid enough in the mind when the sign footprint comes to the phaneron, associations will follow naturally, even unconsciously, putting it in relation with information already in the memory. This synthetical inference, which is an abduction, will create a new and more developed sign. But how is new sign and its information is created? The indexical sign "footprint" is attached to this "idea" already present in the mind (the immediate object of this new sign), which is a sort of composite image of all similar situations that are present in the mind. Attaching an index to an idea embodied on a particular moment produces the cognition - which is the sign that brings information to the mind. In the case that the inference is about the spouse's infidelity, the complex object of this new sign (the hypothesis) will be the owner of the foot that produced the footprint (her lover), the spouse, and the act of infidelity. The predicate would be the logical principle that holds all these objects together (that is, the form of the argument that prescribes that "if something would be true, than the observed relations among the objects would follow logically". That is: "if the spouse is unfaithful, then the foot of the footprint could be from her lover". In the case of the tide, a similar set of objects and a relational predicate would be necessary to produce meaning, which is always interpretations. Furthermore, it might be the case that a mind seeing the footprint will produce both inferences (about the tide AND about the spouse infidelity). These two former inferences would appear then as premises of a new and more developed sign, which now gets the shape of an argument. This is what Peirce's rhetoric (or methodeutic) is about: a continuous production of hypostatic abstractions and putting them in communication to create ever more embracing arguments about the reality. Starting with facts and cognitions initially not associated, a systematic and more coherent view becomes diagrammatized in the mind. Deduction then would extract the necessary consequences and induction would eventually put them to the text of experience. Certainly this outline could be refined to bring into scene the plethora of Peirce's types and classes of signs. I write all this to show, in advance, how difficult it is to put a "tag" such "this is an index, that is an abduction" without considering the whole "movement of the thought" involved. As in my next message we will have to deal with Peirce's classes of signs, I think it is good to keep this in mind. All the best, Vinicius -- Vinicius Romanini, Ph.D. Professor of Communication Studies School of Communications and Arts University of Sao Paulo, Brazil www.minutesemeiotic.org www.semeiosis.com.br<http://www.semeiosis.com.br/> Skype:vinicius_romanini
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