> On Oct 6, 2014, at 6:31 PM, Benjamin Udell <bud...@nyc.rr.com> wrote: > > Comprehension is implication. Somewhere Peirce also says that a proposition > comprehends the further propositions that it implies, and denotes the > propositions that imply it. I wonder whether that applies only in deductive > implication (i.e., 'entailment' as it is nowadays called) or in all inference > modes of implication (I'm not sure how to say that, but I hope readers > understand me). I also have wondered whether an icon may properly be said to > have a comprehension. This depends on whether an icon 'comprehends' the > character that it presents. I once searched CP, W, & CN for discussion of > comprehension in relation to icons and found nothing.
That’s quite interesting. I think it gets at the way Peirce analyzes signs - starting with the object rather than the interpretant. Denotation is going “leftward” from the sign to the object. Comprehension is going “rightward” towards the interpretant. Again, a lot of this depends upon how one is conducting ones analysis. I find Peirce’s approach very fruitful, but there are reasons for focusing on the interpreter and interpretant rather than the object. Especially if one is focusing on the types of guessing (abduction) used to work backwards to the object. An interesting question (and this gets back to the Derrida issue relative to dicisigns) is whether in working backwards we can ever escape symbols. > Peirce speaks of index, icon, and symbol alike as 'denoting.' The icon > denotes by virtue of a character of its own. While, as Gary F. recently said, > an icon denotes a possible range of objects, some of that range may also be > actual. An icon may have actual denotation. > > The copula as index is index in a 'meta' sense. In a 1908 effort at the ten > sign-trichotomies, Peirce classified 'copulants', or 'distributive signs', as > Thirds in the trichotomy of (1) descriptive (2) designative/denominative, and > (3) copulant / distributive. Peirce did not complete the ten-trichotomy > system to his own satisfaction but his effort indicates that he regarded the > copula basically as a Third, not as a Second, although it works as a Second > at the syntactical level. > I think this aspect of the copula in its role as a third (even though it has a more complex structure) is one reason why symbols can’t be escaped. In its role as a third, is it functioning as a symbol? I think Peirce perhaps touches on this when he distinguishes “the matter of thought” and the “logical form.” (For instance in “Pragmatism as the Logic of Abduction”) It’s a distinction we should keep in mind since logical structure isn’t all that’s going on.
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