Thanks for getting this thread started, Frederik. I hope the discussion of "anti-psychologism" (due to start next week, led by Jeff Kasser) will help to resolve some of the past debates we've had on the biosemiotics list about the relationship between logic and psychology.
One comment I'd like to add to your introduction here: several members of this list have incorporated the terms icon, index and symbol, used in a more or less Peircean way, into their biophysical evolutionary and origin-of-life theories. But they have had little or no use for Peirce's other two sign trichotomies, and often use that first trichotomy in an exclusive sense, as if a given sign had to fit into one (and only one) of those types. I think your book will change all that, showing as it does a dicisign - that is, a sign complete enough to be true - must involve both iconic and indexical components, but does not have to be symbolic. But a really basic introduction to the other basic sign types might be useful at this stage, for those who aren't familiar with them. Icon/index/symbol is the trichotomy of signs according to their relations to their objects, and probably needs no introduction here. The trichotomy according to the mode of being of the sign itself is qualisign/sinsign/legisign (Peirce experimented with other names for them, but these are the most widely used). A qualisign is a quality that is a sign; a sinsign is an existing thing or actual event that functions as a sign; a legisign is a law (such as a law of nature, a rule or a habit) that functions as a sign, mostly by governing actual occurrences. The other trichotomy is according to the sign's relation to its interpretant, and was recognized in traditional logic as term/proposition/argument - an argument being a sequence of propositions, and a proposition a combination of terms. But traditional logic was hampered by its close connection to language and the grammar of languages. It was to escape this limitation that Peirce generalized those concepts (as you aptly put it) to create the trichotomy rheme/dicisign/argument. Thus the new term dicisign was crucial for Peirce's explanation of cognitive semiosis as more basic than either human thinking or language (and therefore basic to both). I won't go into this further until we get to Chapter 3, but I thought it would be best to set the stage now. gary f. From: Frederik Stjernfelt [mailto:stj...@hum.ku.dk] Sent: 1-Sep-14 5:26 PM To: biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee Subject: [biosemiotics:6592] Natural Propositions Why "Natural Propositions"? The book "Natural Propositions" grew out of my investigation of Peirce's general notion of diagrams and diagrammatical reasoning in "Diagrammatology" (2007). If it is indeed the case that all deduction takes place by means of transformation of diagrams, implicitly or explicitly, it follows that a single diagram, before transformation, must depict a proposition, namely that stating the premiss of the argument. (Likewise, the post-transformation diagram will depict another proposition, that of the conclusion). This observation made me take som interest in Peirce's notion of "proposition" -- or, as he renames it in the generalization of triads which he undertook in shaping his final semiotics from 1902-3 onwards -- "Dicisign". During a stay as visiting scholar in Berlin 2010 I began working on this and realized that Peirce's notion of proposition deviates considerably from the simultaneous conceptions of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and others. Peirce's semiotic and purely functional definition of proposition does not presuppose any specific formalism (like human language or special, formalized languages), neither does it presuppose accompaniment of conscious, intentional acts. Peirce simply said that a Dicisign is a sign which is involved twice with one and the same object: 1) it refers to the object (P's generalization of the Subject part of a proposition; 2) it describes that object (P's generalization of the Predicate). This made me realize the revolutionary potential of such a definition: it is not confined to human beings and it is not confined to language. So this gives us the possibility of a semiotics which in a fluid way encompasses biological communication as well as non-linguistic human semiotics involving pictures, gestures, diagrams, etc. on a par with language. One aspect of this definition -- the absence of conscious states of mind etc. in the definition -- seems to me deeply related to Peirce's antipsychologism, which made it natural to open the book with a chapter on that. Also, I think psychologism has emerged as a new threat after certain developments in cognitive science and the related turn to philosophy of mind in analytical philosophy. In the chapters (4-7) following the large Dicisign chapter, I try to develop some possible consequences of the two extensions of propositions made possible by the Dicisign concept. The latter part of the book is connected to the Dicisign argument in a more remote way, addressing further issues connected to diagrammatical reasoning: the issue of operational vs. optimal iconicity, the early Ms. 725 diagram experiments pertaining to natural kinds, the distinction between corollarial and theorematic reasoning. The final chapter expresses an ongoing interest I have in the history of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which is a booming field these years (Margaret Jacob, Jonathan Israel, Martin Mulsow et al.) -- I think there is reason to place Peirce in this ancestral tree rather than e.g. the poststructuralist one to which he has sometimes been connected. I am happy that the Peirce and Biosemiotics lists have agreed to discuss my book and I look forward to all sorts of questions, comments, developments etc.
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