List
With reference to 'form', as I said, Peirce has multiple references
to it. When I look up, in the CP index, the term 'form', besides page
numbers, I also find 'see also Generals'...and generals are Thirdness.
"originality is not an attribute of the matter of life, present in
the whole only so far as it is present in the smallest parts, but is
an affair of form, of the way in which parts none of which possess it
are joined together" 4.611
Peirce refers to form as 'type': "this noun is not an existent
thing; it is a type or form, to which objects, both those that are
externally existent and those which are imagined may conform, but
which none of them can exactly be' 5.429.
In 5.430, he refers to generals and forms...In 5.194 - he refers to
the difference between matter and logical form
In 5.550- he refers to the mathematical form..'as represents only
the sameness and diversities involved in that state of things". This
sounds, to me, like 3rdness not 1stness.
Then, in 6.353 and on, there is his long outline of the history of
the distinction between matter and form. And in 6.360- a long list of
the 'varieties of form' - something imposible within the mode of
Firstness.
I am aware of that one quote referring to Form as quality,
suchness' - but I take that to mean only the holistic nature of Form,
which is meant to be understood in its whole general nature rather
than by its mechanical parts.
So- I'll still maintain that Peirce's use of Form refers to its
generality of Type and not to a state of 'freshness, spontaneity'-
which is Firstness.
Note- see also 1.409, with Pierce's rejection that habits will
eventually be dominant in the world.."at any assignable date in the
future there will be some slight aberrancy from law'.
Edwina
On Tue 13/02/18 8:34 AM , Edwina Taborsky tabor...@primus.ca sent:
BODY { font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12px;
}Gary R, Jon, list:
1. I don't think that there is an 'end to semiosis', because
Firstness, which is akin to entropy, is as basic to semiosis as
Thirdness/habits. Even a rock will dissipate. Also, I don't think
that Mind is ever separate from Matter and vice versa.
2. I consider, as I outlined previously, that the situation with the
mother, child, hot stove, burn etc is not one Sign but a plethora of
Signs. I don't think that a regression analysis is correct here.
Each Sign is triggered from another Sign but I don't think you can
regress to the One Sign. So, I continue to maintain that for the
Mother, the Sign that she reacts to is the cry of the child [a
Rhematic Indexical Sinsign]. The hot stove is almost irrelevant to
her.
3. I remain concerned about the role of 'quasi-mind'.
4. Peirce has multiple and contradictory uses of the term 'Form' and
I certainly don't see it as akin to the formlessness of Firstness.
Firstness is a State and has no structure.
Edwina
On Mon 12/02/18 10:01 PM , Jon Alan Schmidt jonalanschm...@gmail.com
sent:
Gary R., List:
1. I am inclined to agree with you on this. As I understand it,
the end of semiosis--both its final cause and its termination--is the
production of a habit; a substance is a bundle of habits; and a
material substance is a bundle of habits that are so inveterate, it
has effectively lost the capacity for Habit-change. As a result, it
seems to me that the behavior of such "things" can in most or all
cases be adequately analyzed in terms of dyadic action/reaction,
rather than the irreducibly triadic action of semiosis. In fact, I
am leaning toward seeing the latter as requiring a Quasi-mind (see #3
below), at least to serve as the Quasi-interpreter, even though
"things" can certainly serve as Quasi-utterers (i.e., Dynamic
Objects) of degenerate Signs.
2. Something is a Sign by virtue of having a DO, an IO, and an
II--not necessarily a DI, so I do not see the relevance of the
mother's inability (at first) to interpret the Sign (correctly, in my
view) as standing for the hot burner. She would presumably find this
out very quickly, of course, after rushing into the kitchen. The
Dynamic Object determines the Sign--perhaps a neural signal of
pain--of which the girl's scream is a Dynamic Interpretant; and
every Sign determines its Interpretant to stand in the same relation
to the Sign's Dynamic Object as the Sign itself does. Hence both the
internal neural signal and the external scream are Indices of the hot
burner; at least, that is how I see it at the moment.
3. Did you mean to say "Quasi-mind," rather than "Quasi-sign"? My
current tentative definition of "Quasi-mind" is a bundle of Collateral
Experience and Habits of Interpretation (i.e., a reacting substance)
that retains the capacity for Habit-change (i.e., learning by
experience), and thus can be the Quasi-utterer of a genuine Sign
(since this requires a purpose) and the Quasi-interpreter of any
Sign.
4. I addressed this already in the "Aristotle and Peirce" thread.
Regards,
Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USAProfessional Engineer, Amateur
Philosopher, Lutheran Laymanwww.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt [1] -
twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt [2]
On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 7:05 PM, Gary Richmond wrote:
Jon S, Edwina, list,
For now, just some preliminary thoughts on Jon's several bullet
points. In response to Edwina, Jon wrote:
1. It seems like we both struggle, although in different ways, with
talking about Signs as individual "things"--like "a stone on a sandy
beach," or "an organism" trying to survive--vs. talking about Signs
within a continuous process. That is why I find your tendency to use
the term "Sign" for the entire interaction of DO-[IO-R-II]
problematic, and why I hoped that when we jointly recognized the
internal triad of [IO-R-II] some months ago, we would thereafter
conscientiously call this (and only this) the Sign, while always
acknowledging that there is no Sign without a DO.
My view is that while such an individual thing as a crystal has been
created by some semiosic process, that the semiosis is (internally)
more or less complete once the crystal is formed, and this is so even
as we can analyze aspects of the three categories present in/as the
crystal (these no longer being semiotic, but rather, phenomenological
categories).
John Deely, who introduced the idea of physiosemiosis, did not argue
for a, shall we say, vital 'process' of physiosemiosis once rocks and
the like have been formed: "Deely . . . notably in Basics of
Semiotics, laid down the argument that the action of signs extends
even further than life, and that semiosis as an influence of the
future played a role in the shaping of the physical universe prior to
the advent of life, a role for which Deely coined the term
physiosemiosis."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Deely [4]
As suggested above, I think that it was Peirce's view that what
Delly termed "physiosemiosis" not only " played a role in the shaping
of the physical universe prior to the advent of life" but has played
one since and does so today, and not only in the formation of
crystals. But, again, in my view, once the crystal is formed the
(internal) semiosis ends (yes, it continues to have a relation to its
environment, and there will be atomic and sub-atomic activity
necessarily occurring, but I personally have yet to be convinced that
such activity constitutes a form of semiosis, while some physicists
have argued that it does).
Living organisms present a more difficult problem. The work of
Stjernfelt (esp. in Natural Propositions: The Actuality of Peirce's
Doctrine of Dicisigns), not to mention the whole thrust of the
science of Biosemiotics holds not only that any living organism, but
the organism in relation to its environment (its Umwelt) is fully
involved in complex semiosic activity. I would tend to strongly
agree.
2. As I noted in my own reply to Gary, I instead view the DI of the
child (the utterer) as an external Sign for the mother (the
interpreter), and its DO is still the hot burner.
While I also view the DI of the child as an external Sign for her
mother, I do not see the DO as the hot burner. The mother, say, who
was out of the room for the moment of the accident, hearing her
child's scream may not connect the scream (the Sign) with the stove
at all. So then what is the DO? I think that rather than the hot
burner (as Jon holds) that it's the child herself.
3. Your mind is indeed an individual manifestation of Mind; but
again, I suspect that Peirce used "Quasi-mind" to accommodate cases
that most people would not normally associate with "mind."
As I've posted now a couple of times, in my opinion the concept
"Quasi-sign" needs much further discussion, perhaps a thread of its
own. I would for now merely suggest that while it no doubt does
"accommodate cases that most people would not normally associate with
"mind," that the concept includes more ordinary cases as well.
4. If to you "Form has [parameters] and laws and continuity," then
you are not referring to the same thing that Peirce called "Form"
when he contrasted it with Matter in NEM 4:292-300 and EP 2:303-304.
At times in this discussion as to the meaning of 'Form', while
there seems to me that for Peirce 'Form' is 1ns, Edwina's analysis of
Form seems to me more related to structure--the forms of the
organization of related elements in a material system, rather than
the forms of the elements themselves. In that physical system the
organization would in many if not all cases have "parameters, laws,
and continuity."
Best,
Gary R
Gary RichmondPhilosophy and Critical ThinkingCommunication Studies
LaGuardia College of the City University of New York718 482-5690 [5]
Links:
------
[1] http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt
[2] http://twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt
[3]
http://webmail.primus.ca/javascript:top.opencompose(\'gary.richm...@gmail.com\',\'\',\'\',\'\')
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Deely
[5] http://webmail.primus.ca/tel:(718)%20482-5690
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