Dear Gary, list The basic difference is whether there are non-trivial semiotic processes going on in non-biological world or not. John and others think there are, whether to be categorized as "pan-semiotics" or "physio-semiotics". I and others think there are not, preferring to say that semiotics proper begins with biology. For the support of the latter position I cite the observation that signs are rarely quoted in physics as being part of the object of that science, while all levels of biology refer to sign processes studied - most often by spontaneous terminology like "genetic code" etc.
I think the "lines of resistance" which Eco speaks about belong to another discussion, namely that between European structuralism and Peircean semiotics. The former maintained the world is an amorphous mass before the imposition on it of semiotic structure; the latter, as you know, is realist and refuses such semiotic idealism. Eco's "lines of resistance" is his way of introducing Peircean realism in idealist structuralism. But the "brute action" of secondness could not exhaust those "lines of resistance", because physical laws, due to their generality, are thirdnesses - forming part of those lines of resistance as well. In Peirce such laws are not products of sciences but part of reality. Best F Den 05/09/2014 kl. 10.08 skrev Gary Moore <gottlos752...@yahoo.com<mailto:gottlos752...@yahoo.com>>: Dear sirs, This short note about the divergent opinions of two imminent authors on the Peirce list leaves me frustrated. I tried to go through the communications to find the conversation referred to and could not. I think it is important, here, for this area to be clearly spelled out even for ignorant non-peirceans such as I. While I do not disagree with the forms of non-cognizant 'communication' discussed, none the less "non-cognizant communication" carries a tone of total contradiction in normal discourse about it. And the frequent & unusual uses of "pan" necessarily are tagged in the long run, despite fascinating discussions in detail that are logically valid, as 'mystical' and seem in the long haul in outsider discourse to actually disregard Peirce's ULTIMATE secondness, if that is correct, of "brute action", "force", the ultimate criteria of any kind of validity as in "Does it work?" I am getting Stjernfelt's book to see how his argument ties in - pro or con - with Umberto Eco's "lines of resistance" (FROM THE TREE, p. 584, "the World always presents us with something that is ALREADY GIVEN and not POSITED by us. What is ALREADY GIVEN are precisely the lines of resistance." [emphasis Eco's]) and Kant's schematism (Eco's "figuring", Stjernfelt's "diagrammatology"). I 'think' undeniable and unavoidable limits of basic, plain ontology are being equivocated here - in my ignorance - between John N. Deely and Frederik Stjernfelt where I am unable to accurately attribute in plain, normal language who straightly says Peirce's "brute action" or "force" that (Eco) "Habermas, in seeking to identify the kernel of Peirce's criticism of Kant's thing-in-itself, stresses the fact that Peirce's problem is NOT [my emphasis] saying that something (hidden behind the appearances that aspire to mirror it) has, like a mirror, a reverse side that eludes reflection, a side that we are almost certain to discover one day [GCM ?], so long as we can circumvent the figure that we SEE [my emphasis]: the fact is that reality imposes restrictions on our knowledge only in the sense that IT DOES NOT PERMIT FALSE INTERPRETATIONS [my emphasis] (Jurgen Habermas, "Peirce and Communication" in Kenneth Ketner, PEIRCE AND CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT, Fordham, 1995, p. 251)", FROM THE TREE, pp. 583-4. This unknown thing-in-itself has the same utter negativity as Plato's and Aristotle's "matter" that would seem to be necessary in the vertical scheme of logic in both ancient philosophers that, if I remember right, Frederik Stjernfelt wants to archeologize. Truly, Gary C. Moore
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