Thanks for this summary, Doug! (I’m including your whole post below, so the biosemiotics list can see it as well as the Peirce list.)
About the case of the Danish TV journalist — as Frederik points out, it wasn’t really “fraudulent reporting”, in a sense that what the reporter said was actually true: the troops really were leaving Iraq at the time, although the accompanying footage showed them entering a Danish military camp rather than leaving it. But the example shows how it is possible for a combination of film and voice-over narrative to lie, and we can probably all think of examples where this has been done on TV news. Another example occurred to me which shows that a film sequence can lie even without the voice-over narrative. Some years ago, in one of the BBC documentaries narrated by David Attenborough, there was a sequence where we see a polar bear entering her den, and then a polar bear giving birth. There was a voice-over narrative referring to the bear as “she”, but even without that, a viewer would make the unconscious inference that it was the same mother bear both inside and outside the den (especially when we later see bear and cub emerging from the den in spring; Frederik’s footnote on p. 187 explains this unconscious inference process that film sequences are designed to prompt in the viewer.) But actually the birthing sequence was shot in a zoo, and of course it was not the same bear we see in the wild. Again, I see nothing “fraudulent” here, because the accuracy of the film’s depiction of the life of a generic polar bear was not undermined by the implicit assumption that the two juxtaposed sequences showed a single individual bear. But it does show that film viewing involves an inference process which can be used to lie; and this is important because only a sign capable of lying is capable of telling the truth, as dicisigns can do. gary f. From: Douglas Hare [mailto:ddh...@mail.harvard.edu] Sent: 7-Dec-14 5:42 PM To: PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edu Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Stjernfelt Seminar: Chapter 7, Dicisigns Beyond Language ~ 7.1 List, Chapter 7 of Natural Propositions (NP) generalizes the doctrine of Dicisigns over a broad range of human expressions, many of which are not usually recognized as propositions by the Frege/Russell tradition(s) in philosophy of language/logic. Stjernfelt argues one implication of Peirce's Dicisign doctrine is that pictures and diagrams can serve as predicates in truth claims. Diagrams themselves may also play a role in reasoning itself because spatial structures are capable of general representation and so furnish the possibility of further reasoning by means of experimental manipulation (c.f. Diagrammatology 2007). Recall that for Peirce, the notion of diagrams includes not only stylized figures on paper, but that algebras, images, maps, graphs, aspects of linguistic grammar, logic representations, etc. also constitute subsets of diagrams proper (NP, 4). Given the functional definition that Dicisigns are signs which make truth claims due to their denotative and descriptive involvement, (or indexical and iconic elements, or their simultaneous acts of reference and description) with the same object, we can look for cases in which non-linguistic elements form parts of or whole propositions in themselves. This extension covers not only a wide range of biological signs (c.f. Chapter 6) but it also deflates the notion of human propositions by expanding it to include diagrams (extremely) broadly construed. In the resulting naturalized framework, we find that sentences (linguistic propositions) form only a special subset of signs which can be used to lie. Given the criterion that Dicisigns refer to signs which can be considered true or false, Stjernfelt first offers an example of a diagram performing the (misleading) role of a visual predicate in a Dicisign. The image of the rat's brain tissue indexically connects to the experiments described and predicatively connects the graphic content as describing the results of those particular experiments. The second example of 7.1 offers of a case of journalism in which the footage displayed of Danish troops not entering but leaving Iraq counted as a case of fraudulent reporting given that the video (images) did not match up to the text being read to the viewers. So both examples are similar in that a mixed-media Dicisign acquires a truth-bearing role from the co-localization of subject-predicate coupling. The first two examples offer specific cases of how text-image Dicisigns can be used to deceive when a diagram (image/video) serves the predicative role of the Dicisign coupled with linguistic assertions. The third example of 7.1 discusses a film of and 4-D diagrammatic representation of the Kennedy assassination. This wholly non-linguistic example demonstrates how a diagram may play the role of the full propositional sign (without any linguistic element whatsoever) and also how diagrammatical reasoning in a more technical sense can be used to form valid inferences and an indefinite amount of new Dicisigns, using both theorematic and corollarial reasoning. The spatio-temporal origin of the film connects it indexically to the controversial event, forming a “vast, essentially continuous predicate” (NP, 187) from which new Dicisigns may be inferred by means of diagrammatic reasoning. I will postpone my discussion of the notion of a continuous predicate until my next posting on 7.2. I assume there will be specific questions and comments about the preceding three examples: the Penkowa case, the journalism of Nybroe, and the Myers 4-D model. I will await these responses before discussing 7.2 and a second implication of the Dicisign doctrine: that differences which are usually believed to be rely upon sharp bifurcations between perception/reason or image/language should be analyzed as differences within a more nuanced field of propositions requiring a typology detailing various differences in the types of possible predicates and a new taxonomy of subtypes of predicates. Regards, Doug
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