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John, list -
I agree with all that John has written. Certainly one could do a
Peircean semiotic analysis of a nativity scene but, as John noted, it
would take 20 pages and frankly, in my view, what would be the point -
other than to show that one could do it?
A basic socio-historical comparative analysis would, in my view,
reveal both the intent and the hoped-for result of the
refugee-nativity. That's far more enlightening than a deep semiosic
analysis.
Where Peirce could be used, and unfortunately, is little appreciated
on a list such as this which is more devoted to points 1 and 2 of
John's list, is within the biological and societal formative systems.
I think that the use of Peirce would be astonishingly productive in
this areas.
Edwina
On Sat 30/12/17 11:45 AM , John F Sowa s...@bestweb.net sent:
Ben, Helmut, Peter, and Edwina,
Ben
> I have long been wondering why there is so little discussion
> of relating Peirce's concepts and methodologies to concrete
> examples, or other 20th and even 21st century thinkers.
I strongly with that criticism.
To understand Peirce's writings and their implications, five kinds
of studies are important:
1. Analyze the development of his thought by relating his many
publications and his many more unpublished manuscripts.
2. Relate his writings to his sources in various fields from the
ancient Greeks to the latest developments of his day.
3. Analyze the effects of his work on his contemporaries and
successors.
4. Analyze developments in the 20th and 21st centuries that could
have been improved if the developers had studied Peirce.
5. Compare Peirce's methods for analyzing the world and how we
talk
and act in and about it to the methods used by other
philosophers,
past and present.
Ben
> All [Peter] asked was the relevance of Peirce's semiotics to
> a presently existing symbolic representation.
Helmut
> whether the picture/diorama is insufficient of being analyzed with
> Peirce, or Peirce´s theory is insufficient, because it does not
> cover this example.
Peter
> I tend to agree with those who have opined that there is just not
> much to be said, from a Peircean point of view, about this
analogy.
I agree with Peter that a pre-theoretical literary analysis is
sufficient to determine the intentions of the people who designed
the scene and the implications they wanted to express. Peirce's
semiotic could carry the analysis to a deeper level. But that
would require a 20-pages of details, not a short email note.
Edwina
> I ... tend to run from many of the philosophical discussions that
> dominate this list. My focus is on biosemiotics and the societal
> system as a complex adaptive system - which does function within
> the Peircean triad.
I agree that examples from biosemiotics, societal systems,
and complex adaptive systems would be far more useful than
the nativity scene for understanding all five issues above.
Re philosophical discussions: My major interest in Peirce was
originally stimulated by and continues to be focused on points
3 to 5 above, but I also found that 1 and 2 are important for
understanding 3 to 5.
For some of those issues, see my article "Peirce's contributions
to the 21st century": http://jfsowa.com/pubs/csp21st.pdf [1]
Re logic: Before I discovered Peirce, I had learned 20th c
logic from the so-called "mainstream" of a Frege-Russell-Carnap-
Quine-Kripke-Montague perspective.
What led me to Peirce were the criticisms of that mainstream
by Whitehead, Wittgenstein, and linguists who recognized that
there is more to language than Montagovian "formal semantics".
I discuss that in http://jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.pdf [2]
John
Links:
------
[1]
http://webmail.primus.ca/parse.php?redirect=http%3A%2F%2Fjfsowa.com%2Fpubs%2Fcsp21st.pdf
[2]
http://webmail.primus.ca/parse.php?redirect=http%3A%2F%2Fjfsowa.com%2Fpubs%2Fsignproc.pdf
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