Thanks - I won't have your book until two more days (assuming on-time delivery)
and I look forward to reading it. I am interested, if I am understanding it
correctly from the brief discussions so far, is your focus on defining the
symbolic relation (the object-representamen relation) as an indexical attribute
of a law (the symbolic mode) and its subsequent form in the Interpretant as a
physical (dicent) expression of law. Again- I'm just 'muttering' at the
moment, but it seems to give powerful 'cognitive' attributes to biological and
physical processes.
Edwina
----- Original Message -----
From: Frederik Stjernfelt
To: <biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee>
Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2014 1:26 PM
Subject: [biosemiotics:6600] Re: Natural Propositions
Dear Edwina -
Indeed. Peirce's notion of proposition, often called "Dicisign", refers to
the third of his basic triads, Rheme-Dicisign-Argument. I return in more detail
to this in Chapter 3.
Best
F
Den 02/09/2014 kl. 16.32 skrev Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca>
:
Gary F - thanks for this introduction.
I think it's important to clarify that, first, the interactions between the
sign and the object; and the sign and the interpretant, are relations - my use
of this term has prompted serious criticism on the Peirce list! I continue to
use the Peircean term of 'representamen' for this mediate sign...rather than
sign. I confine the term 'sign' to the full triad of
object-representamen-interpretant.
And I think it's important to acknowledge that there are nine such
relations available to semiosis - not just the three of icon, index and symbol
- which refer anyway, only to the relation of the representamen to the object
and ignore the other two vital semiosic processes of the
representamen-in-itself and the relation to the interpretant.
Edwina
----- Original Message -----
From: Gary Fuhrman
To: biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee
Cc: Peirce List
Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2014 10:09 AM
Subject: [PEIRCE-L] RE: [biosemiotics:6592] Natural Propositions
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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