> On Jun 21, 2016, at 1:55 PM, Gary Richmond <gary.richm...@gmail.com> wrote: > > One interesting think in Parker’s book is the cosmological element in the > development of the categories.
Whoops. One interesting thing… LOL. Sorry for all the typos. I wrote that quickly. Hopefully I don’t make an embarrassing mistake in it. One addition is this explanation of the sign that Ben put together some years ago. 1. Sign: always immediate to itself. 2. Object: i. Immediate object: the object as represented in the sign, a kind of statistical, "average" version of the given object. ii. Dynamic object: the object as it really is. Also called the dynamoid object, the dynamical object. 3. Interpretant: i. Immediate interpretant: total unanalyzed effect of the interpretant on a mind or quasimind, a kind of starting point of the dynamic and final interpretants, a feeling or idea which the sign carries with it even before there is an interpreter or quasi-interpreter. ii. Dynamic interpretant: the actual effect (apart from the feeling) of the sign on a mind or quasi-mind, for instance the agitation of the feeling. iii. Final interpretant: the effect which the sign _would_ have on any mind or quasi-mind if circumstances allowed that effect to be fully achieved. The final interpretant of a response about the weather about which one has inquired may consist in the effect which the true response would have one's plans for the day which were the inquiry's purpose. The final interpretant of a line of investigation is truth and _would_ be reached sooner or later but still inevitably by investigation adequately prolonged, though the truth remains independent of that which "you or I" or any finite community of investigators believe. The immediate object is, from the viewpoint of a theorist, really a kind of sign of the dynamic object; but phenomenologically it is the object until there is reason to go beyond it, and somebody analyzing (critically but not theoretically) a given semiosis will consider it to be the object until there is reason to do otherwise. To say, therefore, that thought cannot happen in an instant, but requires a time, is but another way of saying that every thought must be interpreted in another, or that all thought is in signs. (C.S. Peirce, CP 5.254). Peirce referred to his general study of signs, based on the concept of a triadic sign relation, as semiotic or semeiotic, either of which terms are currently used in either singular of plural form. Peirce began writing on semeiotic in the 1860s, around the time that he devised his system of three categories. He eventually defined semiosis as an "action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of _three_ subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs". (Peirce 1907, in Houser 1998, 411). 1.. A _sign_ (also called a _representamen_) represents, in the broadest possible sense of "represents". It is something interpretable as saying something about something. It is not necessarily symbolic, linguistic, or artificial. 2.. An _object_ (also called a _semiotic object_) is a subject matter of a sign and an interpretant. It can be anything discussable or thinkable, a thing, event, relationship, quality, law, argument, etc., and can even be fictional, for instance Hamlet. All of those are special or partial objects. The object most accurately is the universe of discourse to which the partial or special object belongs. For instance, a perturbation of Pluto's orbit is a sign about Pluto but ultimately not only about Pluto. 3.. An _interpretant_ (also called an _interpretant sign_) is the sign's more or less clarified meaning or ramification, a kind of form or idea of the difference which the sign's being true would make. (Peirce's sign theory concerns meaning in the broadest sense, including logical implication, not just the meanings of words as properly clarified by a dictionary.) The interpretant is a sign (a) of the object and (b) of the interpretant's "predecessor" (the interpreted sign) as being a sign of the same object. The interpretant is an _interpretation_ in the sense of a _product_ of an interpretive process or a _content_ in which an interpretive relation culminates, though this product or content may itself be an act or conduct of some kind. Another way to say these things is that the sign stands for the object to the interpretant. Some of the understanding needed by the mind depends on familiarity with the object. In order to know for what a given sign stands, the mind needs some experience of that sign's object collaterally to that sign or sign system, and in this context Peirce speaks of collateral experience, collateral observation, etc.
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