John C., Gary F.,
I'd say that a poem can be like general word, 'horse.' The word 'horse'
represents the general horse, a general object, and not any individual
horse, yet by a personal name, a demonstrative, a gesture, or contextual
understanding, one attaches an index to the general word, so as if to
say, 'that instance of horse'. Different individual objects, as
instances of the same general object, will determine indices
incorporating for example the same word 'horse' or the same poem into
different compound representamina to different readers. That's a lot of
what words and poems are for. The idea of semiotic determination
involves the idea of tracing the influence of the object in semiosis,
insofar as semiosis aims at truth about the object because, if the
object has no say in the matter, how is one supposed to find the truth
about the object? Now, if one purposely combines the word 'horse' with
various indices in succession in order to 'change' the individual
object, or rather, to exchange one individual object for another, in
order to see what kind of sense (literal, metaphorical, etc.) and how
much sense the resultant compound representamina make, then one is
becoming "meta" and arranging for oneself to be determined to truths
about semioses as objects. Is it even possible to do this without
'stacking the deck'? Certainly, it isn't always easy.
Different readers are influenced by different objects, their collateral
experience is variously rich and variously limited; the _/roman à clef/
_ depends on that. Gilbert Sorrentino wrote such a novel _Imaginative
Qualities of Actual Things_, in which he said that that's the beauty of
art, it moves outward into the world of the audience's experience, yet
also inward into the world of the artist's stringencies, and he said
that he meant that, if you know the original of a certain character,
you'll see him clear, otherwise you'll see what the author lets you see.
It's true that objects aren't to be grasped independently of semiosis,
at the very least, unconscious semiosis, but the point is to help
semiosis depend better on the object in those ways in which it should in
order to lead to truth, influence us toward truth, and, as Peirce liked
to say, ultimately force and _/compel/_ us to truth. The reality of the
object independent of particular semioses is shown in that we are not
free to represent and interpret as capriciously as we like without harm.
The consequences of enough misrepresentation tend to be existential;
i.e., if we get the object wrong, the math wrong, the mapped territory
wrong, whatever, the object may clash with us and damage or destroy us
(or we damage or destroy ourselves with it), irrespectively of how we
interpret that damage or destruction (rather than independently of
representational and interpretational relation in general). I don't
recall Peirce ever touching on the idea of the 'vital lie', I wonder
what he would have thought of it. Now, obviously people gain in some
sense from quite a few lies, along with other distorters of semiosis -
incitement, interference, coercion, etc. Still, the reality of objects
in the form of existential consequences of belief in falsehoods looms.
It's like they say, a currency may be somewhat debased but, if nobody
did any honest work whatsoever, the currency would be worthless and
nobody could do anything about it. I just noticed Gary F.'s little
closing quote of Willliam Hazlitt - "Lying is the strongest
acknowledgement of the force of truth" - that's a good one!
In a message that I think that John meant to send to the list and not
just to me, he said that he doesn't think that he'll start using the
word 'determine' in Peirce's semiotic sense because it's not exact
enough. I'd agree that the word does cause problems for the
'uninitiated', with its ambiguities and philosophical history. But
another word doesn't come to mind.
Also I want to thank John for his discussion of ordering and
transitivity in another message. He's right, there isn't always an
intuitive sense of 'more' or 'less' involved in a non-arbitrary
ordering, except that of rank in the ordering itself, but that exception
seems just a consolation prize.
Best, Ben
On 1/30/2015 8:27 AM, Gary Fuhrman wrote:
John, my responses inserted (and this is going to the Peirce list as
well as the biosemiotics because the thread has been common to both):
*From: * John Collier [mailto:colli...@ukzn.ac.za]
*Sent:* 30-Jan-15 5:44 AM
Here is a message I sent Gary when I could not post to the list due to
the fallout of rolling power outages. They are supposed to continue
for at least two years (sigh). The damage to South Africa will be
immense, but at least I can transfer my posting accounts to my
Canadian email. Fortunately my home ISP, unlike the University one, is
very robust.
As I said in my post, I took determine to be being a sufficient
condition for.
gf] Yes, that’s the problem.
That gives the right direction, whereas as I pointed out, the
narrowing of conditions (necessary condition) does not. I don't mean
fully determinate by any means. That would be necessary and sufficient.
gf] I don’t see how considerations of necessary and sufficient
conditions are relevant to determination in the semiotic sense, but
it’s evident that trying to apply them to it causes confusion.
Suppose two people read a poem. There is a single representamen, but
their interpretations could be very different, and there would be
different objects.
gf] You can say that there is a single representamen, in the sense
that it’s the same poem that is printed in every copy of it and read
in every reading of it. I guess what you mean is that different
readers would have different ideas of what the poem is about, and this
is true because each actual reading of a symbol is another instance of
semiosis. This implies that the representamens as well as the objects
and interpretants are different, so your first premiss does not hold.
What the poem is about, at any given reading or performance of it, is
partially determined by the circumstances of the reading: any
indexical component of the symbol can only come from those
circumstances, and thus determine the breadth of the poem (considered
as a proposition), while its depth is determined by the reader’s
experience and habits.
Alternatively, if we say there is a single representamen in all
readings, it’s a type of which each reading is a token, and it has a
single object as well — but a necessarily vague one, because the
connections between the poem and its object are entirely verbal. Or we
could go even further and say that the object of a poem is created by
the poet, just as a mathematical object is created by the
mathematician. Either way, the dynamic object of that sign does not
vary with the interpretants of the various readings. It might take
several hermeneutic cycles to settle into an interpretation of a
symbol such as a poem, but each reading or re-reading proceeds on the
assumption that the object of the sign does /not/ change. Otherwise
the reader is assuming that the symbol can mean whatever he thinks it
means; in which case its communicative or informative value is zero.
You might say that the /immediate/ object does change as the
circumstances of reading vary, but I don’t think that clarifies the
meaning of “determine”.
Of course there would also be different signs in Peirce's sense, but
we are talking about one part of a sign determining another (in some
way I have yet to determine).
gf] I take it that by “part of a sign” you mean one of the three
correlates of the triadic relation.
If, if the sign is given then all the parts are fully determined, then
each part determines the others in virtue of being a member of the
(same) sign relation.
gf] Not so, when a sign relation is /defined/ as one in which the
object determines the representamen to determine an interpretant sign
of the same object. Semiosis is precisely that process of
determination; so the sign is /not/ “given with all the parts fully
determined”.
This is trivial, so we need to consider degenerate cases to avoid
triviality and also multidirection determination.
gf] Sorry, you’ve lost me there! I don’t know what you mean by
“degenerate cases”. Are you implying that a sign “given with all the
parts fully determined” is a /genuine/ case of semiosis? If so I disagree.
Your selecting a specific instance of a sign just makes my case for
me. So I assumed that was not what Peirce could have meant (assuming
of course that he meant anything; a wise man once told me that if you
puzzle carefully over something someone said and you still can't make
it out, then it is acceptable to consider the possibility that it does
not make sense -- George Boolos).
gf] Acceptable to consider the possibility, of course. But it’s more
than acceptable to consider the possibility that it really does make
sense to others who say that it does.
Surely, as in the poem example, it is the interpretant is that
determines the object;
gf] Surely not!
objects aren't around to be grasped independently of how we interpret
whatever signs we come across.
gf] If an object is real, then it is what it is no matter what anybody
thinks about it. Again, this is /definitive/ of reality, at least for
Peirce and for me, and I think for any pragmatist. So you’re saying
there are no real objects. In that case I don’t think there are any
real signs either.
But if there is only one sign in question, then it determines the sign
as a whole, and the other components as a result. But this is trivial,
as I said.
gf] Trivial maybe, but certainly not true! Not of the sign as defined
by Peirce.
And also multidirectional determining, which was my original worry.
gf] Going out on a limb here, I’m going to assume that what you call
“multidirectional determining” is what others call polysemy, or
ambiguity, which is characteristic of symbols. In my book (/Turning
Signs/ ) I started calling this “degeneracy”, with the biological
usage in mind. But later I started using that term in the Peircean
(mathematical) sense, and it would have been confusing to use it both
ways, so I invented a new word for it, “polyversity” — the quality of
symbols such as words which enables the same words to have different
meanings and the same meanings to be expressed in different words.
What I learned from Peirce while writing is that the only cure for
polyversity (if it’s something you worry about) is genuine indexicality.
Of course, if the “multidirectional determining” you’re worried about
is something different, then my remarks about polyversity are of no
use to you!
gary f.
} Lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth. [Hazlitt] {
www.gnusystems.ca/gnoxic.htm <http://www.gnusystems.ca/gnoxic.htm> }{
gnoxics
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