> On Mar 31, 2017, at 3:49 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt <jonalanschm...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > It turns out that Short "counts" different Signs based on different Immediate > Interpretants, but not based on different Dynamic Interpretants. This makes > sense, given that the Immediate Interpretant is internal to the Sign, while > the Dynamic Interpretant is external to it; especially since each occurrence > of the latter is distinct, even for the same Sign. So I wonder--does this > "counting" principle also apply to Immediate (internal) vs. Dynamic > (external) Objects? Maybe so; in Short's example, the puffs of smoke would > seem to constitute the same Dynamic Object, but have different Immediate > Objects as a Sign of fire vs. a Sign of Apaches on the warpath. > > This leads to my suggestion that every Sign has an Immediate Object and > Immediate Interpretant that are real possibilities internal to it, thus > forming a triad; but a Sign may or may not have a Dynamic Object and a > Dynamic Interpretant that are actualities external to it, as three correlates > of a triadic relation. Again, what do you think?
I’m reading (slowly) through the messages. I wanted to comment on this though. My personal view (which may be wrong) is that what counts to equate signs are the immediate interpretant, sign vehicle, immediate object trichotomy. That is what is internal to the sign. While that’s close to what you have Short saying, I think I see the immediate object is quite important. Where I think I’m differing is that Short is counting what I’m calling the sign-vehicle as part of the immediate object. So I’d see smoke as a sign for apaches and smoke as a sign for fire as different simply because one is more general. That is smoke in general is a sign for fire. Smoke here and now thus signifies fire. But there’s also the general sign smoke in this part of Arizona is a sign for possible apaches. So to me the immediate objects really aren’t the same even though the dynamic object is the same (the particular smoke). However that’s different from the immediate object due to the smoke. (A subtle point, but keep with me) (Sorry if others already responded to this) This gets back to our discussion of averageness we had here last June. I’d been relating Heidegger’s phenomenological principle to Peirce at that point you might recall. Unfortunately the terms weren’t quite ideal (averageness a pretty vague term). The idea is that the dynamic object virtually contains the immediate object (due to it containing virtually all the possible significations). Peirce’s term “dynamic” actually comes out of Platonism. So in The Sophist Plato talks of the lively possibility (dunamis) of being. The same notion gets taken up by Aristotle in his distinction between potential and actual. So the dynamic contains within itself the possibility of being represented. The immediate object is thus the set of possibilities in which an object is determined for us by its sign. That set of possibilities within the immediate object is what I mean by averageness or everydayness. That is the ways in which our encountering the sign could be interpreted. Getting back to Short, while we can distinguish two different signs due to two different generalities when we talk of the object in question (smoke in the Arizona desert) then the immediate object of that particular smoke includes those other types of general signs. That is virtually the immediate object includes the possibilities of apaches, fire, and a whole lot more. It doesn’t include all possibilities though, only the possibilities available for me due to my culture and so forth. So if I’m completely ignorant of apaches, while smoke in Arizona implies apaches, it doesn’t for me. Whether one puts this distinction due to knowledge in the immediate interpretant or the immediate object seems to depend upon the type of analysis we are conducting. (I can go further on that point but I’ll avoid it for now) The immediate interpretant is what the sign could actually do to my mind. It’s thus inherently very similar to the immediate object which is how the sign represents the object. The dynamic interpretant is the actual effect of the sign (other than feeling which is in the immediate interpretant). Then the final interpretant is that “would have” effect given sufficient development. Typically final inoerpretants are interesting only in that they allow us to make sense of truth. So the immediate object is itself a kind of sign of the dynamic object. It’s also what phenomenologically is the object. The problem is that how the immediate object functions really depends upon the type of analysis we are doing. That’s because if we think of semiosis as a process rather than a static slice of analysis any particular sign can itself be broken up into constituent signs. That’s especially true of the immediate object which can be broken up into all the signs of the object open to analysis. So Short is right in a way, but only because he’s ignoring this composite nature of the sign in what he says. I suppose this is a very long way of saying that I think signs are only the same sign when both the immediate interpretant and immediate object are the same. But again, it really depends upon the type of analysis one is doing. This is one of those places where subtleties make a big difference.
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
