Jon, OK, I think I’ve been misunderstanding the purpose of your “hypothesis.” I’ve been treating it as an inductively testable hypothesis about Peirce’s use of terms. But evidently you are not testing it in that way, but rather “trying it out” as a proposed improvement over Peirce’s actual usage, in the sense that it offers greater clarity and thus facilitates the systematic explication of what is going on whenever an event of concrete semiosis occurs.
Personally I don’t find it clearer than Peirce’s late (post-1904) usage in that respect, but that’s a judgment call which every user of your “improved” terminology will have to make. So the only way of “testing” it would be to tally up the number of opinions on each side of the clarity question. I put “testing” in quote marks because I don’t think such a tallying up would count as inductive reasoning as Peirce defines it in the Lowell lectures; and I put “hypothesis” in quotes for the same reason. Regarding your belief that Peirce’s reference to Tokens as Signs “was a form of shorthand,” I think that too is a judgment call. In terms of Peirce oft-used onion metaphor, you are saying that referring to Tokens as Signs is the “skin” or outer layer of the onion, and if we take that skin off we get closer to the core reality of the Sign. But as Peirce says, it’s layers all the way down; and it seems to me that every “event of concrete semiosis” involves a measure of actuality that Types in themselves do not have. If the Final Interpretant is “that toward which the actual tends,” as Peirce says, there is no way to approach it, or learn what that tendency is, except by way of actual Dynamic Interpretants determined by Actisigns, i.e. Tokens acting as signs in an ongoing dialogue. Gary f. From: Jon Alan Schmidt <jonalanschm...@gmail.com> Sent: 13-Aug-18 22:49 To: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] A Sign Is Not a Real Thing Gary F., List: Peirce indeed referred repeatedly to Tokens as Signs, but I believe that this was a form of shorthand. Just like he acknowledged using "word" in two different senses, he also used "Sign" in two different senses. Just like embodying a Graph (Type) in a Graph-Instance (Token) is scribing the Graph (not the Instance), embodying a Sign (Type) in a Replica (Token) is uttering the Sign (not the Replica). My suggestion is that for the sake of greater clarity, we should more carefully draw an explicit distinction between Signs as Types and their Replicas as Tokens, as well as the significant characters of the latter as Tones. My post earlier today spelled out how I see this facilitating a systematic explication of what is going on whenever an event of concrete semiosis occurs. In any Instance of a Sign, the Tone is the character (or set of characters) by which the interpreting Quasi-mind recognizes the Sign-Replica to be an individual Token of the Type. Acquaintance with the system of Signs (Essential Information) is necessary and sufficient for this. It is analogous to the role of the Immediate Object as that by which the interpreting Quasi-mind identifies the Dynamic Object of the Sign, for which Collateral Experience (Experiential Information) is necessary and sufficient (cf. CP 8.179, EP 2:494; 1909). As a Possible, the Tone can only have an Immediate Interpretant--"its peculiar Interpretability before it gets any Interpreter." As an Existent, the Token is what produces the Dynamic Interpretant--"that which is experienced in each act of Interpretation." As a Necessitant, only the Type has a Final Interpretant--"the one Interpretative result to which every Interpreter is destined to come if the Sign is sufficiently considered," which corresponds to the ideal Habit of Interpretation (Substantial Information). In other words, "The Immediate Interpretant is an abstraction, consisting in a Possibility. The Dynamical Interpretant is a single actual event. The Final Interpretant is that toward which the actual tends" (SS 111; 1909). As for EP 2:326, "token" clearly did not yet carry the very specific technical meaning that Peirce attributed to it in "Prolegomena." Moreover, he went on to state that "signs by themselves can exert no brute force," which is another way of saying that "a sign is not a real thing"; that which can exert brute force--i.e., any actual Thing--is not a Sign. These are, after all, constituents of two different Universes of Experience (CP 6.455, EP 2:435; 1908). Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA
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