John,
I can appreciate your problem. It took me a few years of reading Peirce intensively to get a firm enough grasp of what he means by “determine” to use the term myself with some confidence. But, as Ben says, once you reach that point, there just isn’t any other term available to express that exact meaning. And as I said before, Peirce’s usage does not differ from that of other logicians. It’s true that he uses the term more often than other philosophers, but that’s because other philosophers don’t treat logic as semiotic. What I do regard as unusual is your insistence that “Once you have a sign, with its three parts, that determines all the parts” — i.e. your insistence on regarding the “sign” as a static three-part entity, discarding the Peircean insight that semiosis takes time. But you’ve sketched out the path at which you arrived at this understanding, so I can see why you’ve parted ways with Peirce — or rather declined to take the Peircean path to semiotics. For me, though, the cost of taking your path would be too high. To illustrate: you write that There are some cases in which the object determines the representamen in the same way as it determines the interpretant. A weather vane points a particular way. That is caused by the direction of the wind, so it is so determined. The pointing of the weather vane is interpreted as the direction of the wind, the object of the sign in this case. No problem. Where I have trouble is when we are dealing with not instances of objects, but generals, as I have mentioned several times now. Suppose I say that gravitation (which is a general, obviously) determines that if I pick up a rock and let go of it, it will move downwards, toward the center of the earth. Do you have trouble with that proposition? If so, then I think it’s your brand of realism that is “only available to sophisticated initiates”. If you don’t have trouble with that proposition, then you must have trouble with making the connection between that usage of “determine” and the semiotic usage whereby object determines sign to determine an interpretant. But that connection is simply the common-sense principle which Peirce often called “il lume natural” From: John Collier [mailto:colli...@ukzn.ac.za] Sent: 30-Jan-15 3:20 PM To: biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee Subject: [biosemiotics:8047] Re: Triadic Relations I am not getting the Peirce list version, but my mail is so messed up that anything might be happening. The email server I can use to post to the lists is especially wonky since the power outages. Gary, I am just going to focus on one thing, since this discussion seems to me to be expanding without focus. See below in red. John From: Gary Fuhrman [mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca] Sent: January 30, 2015 3:27 PM To: biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee Cc: Peirce List Subject: [biosemiotics:8041] Re: Triadic Relations 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”. Once you have a sign, with its three parts, that determines all the parts. Otherwise it is a different sign. So a particular sign determines all of its parts. And being parts of the same sign means the determination of one part of another is symmetric. As far as the process goes, since we have no way to grasp an object except through signs, it seems very strange to me to say that the object determines the sign or its parts through a process of any sort. This is especially true when the object is a general, which is an abstraction (however real). That would be rather like saying that the number twelve determines the number of eggs I bought today. As far as Peirce’s definition of a sign in terms of determination goes, it certainly doesn’t preclude determination also going in other ways. So we could accept the definition, and interpret determination as ‘being relevant to’ or something like that, and still have determination in all directions. It seems to me that this is necessary unless there are multiple mappings (degeneracies) of interpretation and object to representamen (not sign in my current usage), since there is only one thing whenever we are talking about a particular sign, which determines its particular parts. Being a part of the sign is then determined. By part, of course, I mean the relata of the sign. I was assuming that we could have the same interpretant and representamen and object across different signs. If not then determination of one part by another is trivial by identity and the part-whole relationship. Which is what I have been worried about all along. There are some cases in which the object determines the representamen in the same way as it determines the interpretant. A weather vane points a particular way. That is caused by the direction of the wind, so it is so determined. The pointing of the weather vane is interpreted as the direction of the wind, the object of the sign in this case. No problem. Where I have trouble is when we are dealing with not instances of objects, but generals, as I have mentioned several times now. The nature of the “determination” in this case seems very obscure to me, and I would not call it determination, since that leads far too easily to what Putnam called “the magical theory of reference” popular among metaphysical realists. I have been concerned about this issue since I wrote my thesis on incommensurability, through my work against Putnam’s rejection of metaphysical realism, up to today, right now. I don’t think things are nearly as clear as you and Ben seem to think they are. You have made some huge leaps in interpreting what I said, Gary, e.g., objects aren’t real. Most pragmatists actually reject this, by the way, in following James’ nominalism about generals. In any case I can’t possibly deal with all of them now. I think that Peirce’s discussion using ‘determines’ has been a disaster, since even those closest to him in his own time got it wrong (like James). If it is only available to sophisticated initiates, I think there is a real problem that Peirceans have to come to terms with. 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 }{ gnoxics
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