I'll reply to a few comments; thanks for your input.
----- Original Message -----
From: Clark Goble
To: Peirce-L
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2014 6:48 PM
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6231] Re: biosemiotics is the basis for
1) CLARK: Lots of comments so I’ll just pick a few posts and include my
comments in a single post. My sense is that there’s a lot of miscommunication
going on because it’s not clear when people are following Peirce and when they
aren’t.
EDWINA: I fully agree, but my concern is when people, such as Sung, say that
they are following Peirce - when he is misrepresenting him.
2) JOHN COLLIER:I suppose that their could be signs that are not manifested,
but I would call these possible signs. The possibilities are real, and are most
likely thirds. I don't think that a possible x is an x. So I find it a bit odd
to talk about signs that "manifest[s] as tokens their Secondness must enter the
world of physics”.
CLARK: Put an other way the question is, are possible signs signs with a
substance of pure possibility rather than material tokens? That’s not the only
non-material sign of course. Consider the implication of a law. The laws are
generals and not material and what is signified is also a general. The approach
of Soren and Sungchul seems to be that this general -> general as a sign
process still needs a material substrate which is far from clear to me if we
adopt a more thoroughgoing ontology than simple materialist ones.
EDWINA: I agree that the laws are generals and not material; they couldn't be
general AND material, for materiality is existentially local and particular.
However, following Aristotle, I consider that the general law (Form) is
embedded within the particular instantiation, even though, in itself, it is not
a material form.
So I think Søren is right in saying that sign tokens are subject to
thermodynamics, and in particular it takes work for them to appear. They also
tend to dissipate, and to overcome that requires work as we.. And so does
recognizing them for what they are.
I’ve not read your link yet so I’ll hold off commenting on this beyond
thinking there’s quite a bit assumed here - at a bare minimum a materialist
ontology of some sort. Kelly Parker’s work on the early ontology of Peirce is
rather interesting here.
Again one need not buy into Peircean ontology here. As I recall you had some
troubles with aspects of Peirce’s indices and icons so it might be that’s at
play here?
3) On Jul 31, 2014, at 1:40 PM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:
I'm saying that you, who has not read Peirce and yet who constantly
chooses to use Peircean terms in your outline of semiosis, and to inform us of
'what these terms mean', then, you HAVE to have read Peirce and you have to use
them as he used them.
CLARK: I do think it would be helpful for clarity for everyone to be clear
when one is using (or mining) Peirce and when one is breaking from Peirceanism.
There’s nothing wrong with breaking from Peircean orthodoxy (or debating about
what Peirce did or did not mean). I just think for clarity of communication
it’s helpful to be clear what we are doing.
EDWINA: Exactly. But the problem is, is that Sung considers that HIS view of
Peirce - even though he hasn't read him - is the correct view.
4) On Jul 31, 2014, at 2:14 PM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:
I think this is the basic distinction between the Representamen, the habits
of formation, which are 'real' but not existentially particular - and the
existentially particular unit or token (the Object and Interpretant) - and the
relation between the two modes: the habit and the existential. This
relationship, the relationship of mediation, is active, and thus, does involve
work and exchanges of energy/information. So, I disagree that Peirce did not
work on this aspect of semiosis; it's the basis of his semiosis - that constant
networking of the Representamen with other Representamens (the action of
generalization); the constant networking of the Sign, in its triadic sense,
with other Signs.
i don't agree with Sung's outline, which is a postmodernist nominalism,
because it ignores both that objective reality exists outside of the perception
of humans and it ignores a fundamental nature of Peircean semiosis; that the
sign exists - in its own interactions; that is, objective reality exists on
its own. For example, the word on the page is, as a material unit, a sign. It
exists as ink-on-paper. It does not have to be read by a human in order to
exist.
CLARK: Honestly I can’t even figure out what postmodernism means anymore so
I’ll avoid that term. I think it’d lost its sense well into the 80’s when so
many disparate movements were put under the same rubric (often with gross
misreadings by both proponents and opponents).
EDWINA: Yes - I'm aware of the fuzziness of the term postmodernism; a more
modern term is 'constructivism', I think; but the point remains - that it views
the world through the individual human agent's eyes.
5) CLARK: It does appear that there’s nominalism at work here though. The
consideration of a general signifying a general as I mentioned to John above
seems a good example. If I have John and Sungchul correct they would argue that
this could at best be the representation of a general signifying the
representation of a general with all of this possible only on a material
substrate undergoing physical change. That is the representation always has a
materialistic token. That’s clearly nominalism as I understand it.
EDWINA: I would consider Sung a nominalist - but not John. A general
signifying a general is only one class of sign: the pure Argument, where all
three - the Object-Representamen-Interpretant are in a mode of Thirdness. Such
a sign is, in my view, both aspatial and atemporal, and thus, purely
conceptual. It might be carried by words - but, in itself, it is 'purely
mental'.
6) CLARK:Again, while merely appealing to Peirce proves nothing, I think
Kelly Parker’s work on Peirce’s neoPlatonic aspects is rather helpful here. The
question then becomes whether these ideas persisted into his mature era when
his thought arguably took a more Hegelian turn.
EDWINA: Really? I'd consider that his more mature era rejected the Hegelian
analytic frame, which, after all, essentially ignored Secondness - and was,
again my view, most certainly not Platonic.
On Jul 31, 2014, at 2:30 PM, John Collier <colli...@ukzn.ac.za> wrote:
Clark, I don’t think something can be a sign unless it is habitual. How
could it make any sense otherwise?
There’s a surprising amount to unpack here. Gary addresses this later and I
agree with his answer about the legisign and other types of signs. I think we
have to be careful to distinguish the sign undergoing semiosis from knowledge
of the sign. That’s why yesterday I emphasized that epistemological aspect with
unknowables from physics. Interestingly this is again a point in Kelly Parker’s
article. To use the language of Eco we have to distinguish between the sign and
the code for that sign. (The code being a legisign to allow us to interpret the
sign and guess at its object to return to Peircean terminology) Conflating
codes and signs ends up leading to problems in my view.
Most of Parker’s article is available on Google Books since he took down the
online copy he used to have up.
http://bit.ly/1s7V8pV
A key passage which should settle the question of material (actuality) in
signs is the following.
I do not mean that potentiality immediately results in actuality. Mediately
perhaps it does; but what immediately results in actuality. Mediately perhaps
it does; but what immediately resulted was that unbounded potentiality became
potentiality of this or that sort - that is of some quality.
Thus the zero of bare possibility, by evolutionary logic, leapt into the
unit of some quality. (CP 6.220)
Also
The evolutionary process is, therefore, not a mere evolution of the
existing universe, but rather a process by which hte very Platonic forms
themselves have become or are becoming developed. (CP 6.194)
Again to keep constantly repeating there’s no reason to adopt Peirce’s views
here. But we should be clear what we are appealing to.
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