Jon (welcome back!), Responses inserted …
Gary f. From: Jon Alan Schmidt <jonalanschm...@gmail.com> Sent: 20-Jun-18 14:23 Gary F., List: Apologies for the long-delayed response, but I was traveling abroad on vacation during the last two weeks and am still catching up on certain things. Coincidentally (or providentially), I have now finally managed to read through most of Francesco Bellucci's excellent book, Peirce's Speculative Grammar, although I am still processing many of its valuable insights. GF: It’s important to note that Stjernfelt’s definition of the immediate object is a functional one--the immediate object plays an indexical role within the functioning of a Dicisign ... According to Peirce, this is only true of some Immediate Objects--the Existent ones for Signs that he classified as Designatives in the late 1908 taxonomy. Immediate Objects can also be Possibles for Signs that are Descriptives, or Necessitants for Signs that are Copulatives. GF now: I don’t follow you here. Are you saying that neither a Possible nor a Necessitant can function indexically? They appear to be doing exactly that in Peirce’s 1908 account: [[ If the Immediate Object is a Possible, that is, if the Dynamoid Object is indicated (always more or less vaguely) by means of its Qualities, etc., I call the Sign a Descriptive; if the Immediate [Object] is an Occurrence, I call the Sign a Designative; and if the Immediate Object is a Necessitant, I call the sign a Copulant; for in that case the Object has to be so identified by the Interpreter that the Sign may represent a necessitation. ]EP2:480] FS: That is, IO refers to the identity and the reference to the object - not to any description of the object, because the task of description is fulfilled by the no less than three concepts of interpretant (immediate, dynamic, final, respectively). With all due respect to Stjernfelt, I strongly disagree; some Signs refer to their Dynamic Objects primarily (if not exclusively) by describing them, and such description constitutes the Immediate Object in those cases--i.e., "the Object as represented in the sign" (EP 2:498; 1909). Moreover, assigning "the task of description" to the Interpretant strikes me as making the same mistake that Peirce called "a confusion of thought between the reference of a sign to its meaning, the character which it attributes to its object, and its appeal to an interpretant" (EP 2:305; 1904). GF now: In that essay (“New Elements”), Peirce does not say that this “confusion of thought” is a mistake; he says it is “the conception of the relation of antecedent and consequent.” A sign cannot refer to its DO exclusively by describing it, because the DO, being Second to the sign, belongs to the actual world, and “the actual world cannot be distinguished from a world of imagination by any description” (EP1:227, W5:164, CP 3.363). However, as Stjernfelt explains with his example, a description can be (and often is) ‘called to the aid’ of the IO to narrow down the identity of the object it indicates. FS: To take an example: a guy points while exlaiming: “Look at that car over there!” “Which of them?” “The red, not the blue one!” The initial pointing gesture combined with the reference "over there" constitutes the Immediate Object - but is subsequently supplied with descriptive material in order to make precise the object of the pointing ... In my view, this analysis conflates two different (although related) Sign-Replicas. The first statement is indeed Designative--its Immediate Object is the combination of pointing and saying "over there," which provides context-specific instructions for locating its Dynamic Object. However, the second statement is Descriptive--its Immediate Object is the redness of the specific car to which it purports to refer. Overall, the entire exchange is Copulative, as must always be the case for Signs that are Symbols--its Immediate Object is the set of logical relations that it expresses. GF now: Well, I’m not sure I understand that view — it’s far more complex than the indexical function Stjernfelt is referring to in his examole — but I don’t see how an immediate object can be a “set of logical relations” when the dynamic object is that car the guy is pointing at. By the way, if you’re generally in agreement with Bellucci’s account, I don’t see how you can strongly object to Stjernfelt’s view of the immediate object, because it’s virtually identical with Bellucci’s. Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt <http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt> - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt <http://twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt> On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 12:28 PM, <g...@gnusystems.ca <mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca> > wrote: List, While working on my transcription of Lowell Lecture 6 from the manuscript on the SPIN site (https://www.fromthepage.com/jeffdown1/c-s-peirce-manuscripts/ms-472-1903-lowell-lecture-vi), I came across what strikes me as a key passage in it, and what struck me as a key term in it: “direct experience”. To get a more exact sense of what Peirce meant by that term, I collected several passages where Peirce had used it in other contexts and arranged them in chronological order (they date from 1893 to 1903). I found the resulting collection so interesting that I’ve now included it in the Peirce resources on my website: http://www.gnusystems.ca/Peirce.htm#dirxp. It throws a direct light, so to speak, on Peirce’s phenomenology. Coincidentally (or providentially), I’ve also been reading Frederik Stjernfelt’s article responding to some critical reviews of his Natural Propositions, http://frederikstjernfelt.dk/Peirce/Answer%20to%20Critics%20of%20Natural%20Propositions%202016.pdf. This includes some remarks about the nature of the immediate object, which was the subject of a discussion on the list awhile back, which got bogged down partly for lack of specific examples of IOs, especially examples that do not involve human mentality. Stjernfelt includes two very specific examples, which I will quote below (though I’d recommend reading the whole section where he discusses the matter, which starts about halfway through the article.) It’s important to note that Stjernfelt’s definition of the immediate object is a functional one — the immediate object plays an indexical role within the functioning of a Dicisign — so I’ll begin with that. The words in double brackets below are Stjernfelt’s: [[ I claim that the immediate object (IO) is a concept addressing the way the sign is connected to the object (or is claimed by the sign to be so connected), while the opposed category, the dynamic object (DO) is the object of the sign as existing independently of the particular sign relation. That is, IO refers to the identity and the reference to the object - not to any description of the object, because the task of description is fulfilled by the no less than three concepts of interpretant (immediate, dynamic, final, respectively). ]] [[ To take an example: a guy points while exlaiming: “Look at that car over there!” “Which of them?” “The red, not the blue one!” The initial pointing gesture combined with the reference "over there" constitutes the Immediate Object - but is subsequently supplied with descriptive material in order to make precise the object of the pointing (hereafter, some predicative description may follow: "That car is a German car".) Thus, descriptive features may indeed enter the Immediate Object to the extent that it serves the identification of the object - but the defining function of it remains object identification, not description. ]] [[ … in bacteria sign use … The object of the bacterium is the sugar detected by its sensors - and the Immediate Object, again, is the index which purports to put the sign in contact with that object - that is, the weak interaction of the sensors of the bacterium and the active spot on the periphery of the carbohydrate molecule. This leads, in turn, the organism to swim in the direction of higher concentration of the Dynamic Object so detected. ]] I think the role of the immediate object can be clearly visualized using the conventions of Existential Graphs. A line of identity on the sheet of assertion asserts that “something exists.” When one end of a line of identity is attached to a “spot” (marked on the sheet by a verbal label of some kind), the spot furnishes a description (predicate, attribute) of it, and thus tells us what kind of thing it is. The spot together with the line of identity represents a proposition (or more generally, a Dicisign). Now, suppose the other end of that line of identity is a “loose end”, not attached to anything. We can read that end as the Secondness or unqualified existence of the dynamic Object of the proposition. Then we can read the other end of the line of identity, the point attached to the “hook” or “blank” of the “spot” or “rhema”, as the immediate Object of the proposition. That attachment is the Subject of the proposition, the part of the sign which represents the sign as referring to the dynamic Object. In other words it represents the object within the sign as identical to an Object existing independently of the sign relation. The defining characteristic of the Dicisign is that it represents itself to represent its Object in this way. But whether this visualization helps to clarify the concept of “immediate object” or not, I think the two examples given by Stjernfelt should be helpful. Especially in connection with the concept of direct experience. Gary f.
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