Robert, I strongly agree with the issues you raised and your interpretation of them.RM> it may not be a good methodology to give such a preference for interpretation in semiosis without focusing the analysis on the whole process... how individual semiosis articulates with global semiosis?Yes. While observing the solar eclipse of 1870 (in Sicily), Peirce was impressed by the importance of the international scientific community in making observations, interpreting results, proposing hypotheses, communicating them, and testing them. RM> signs being obligated interfaces (a medium for the communication of a form for example) between the outside world and the inner world it is necessary to grasp by "a same movement of thought", the before-sign and the after-sign with the physiological perception of the sign as a connection between these two worlds.Yes. The signs we use for interpreting "experiences in the phaneron" include a huge number that we inherited from our culture. Some words are recent creations and others have an ancestry of thousands of years. Our words for wheel and axle, for example, are derived from Proto-Indo-European roots for circle (PIE 'kwel') and shoulder (PIE 'aks'). Some estimates place the invention of the wheel about 3400 BC -- based on archaeology and linguistics. CSP> But while I say this, it must not be inferred that I regard consciousness as a mere "epiphenomenon"; though I heartily grant that the hypothesis that it is so has done good service to science. To my apprehension, consciousness may be defined as that congeries of non-relative predicates, varying greatly in quality and in intensity, which are symptomatic of the interaction of the outer world -- the world of those causes that are exceedingly compulsive upon the modes of consciousness, with general disturbance sometimes amounting to shock, and are acted upon only slightly, and only by a special kind of effort, muscular effort -- and of the inner world, apparently derived from the outer, and amenable to direct effort of various kinds with feeble reactions; the interaction of these two worlds chiefly consisting of a direct action of the outer world upon the inner and an indirect action of the inner world upon the outer through the operation of habits. If this be a correct account of consciousness, i.e., of the congeries of feelings, it seems to me that it exercises a real function in self-control, since without it, or at least without that of which it is symptomatic, the resolves and exercises of the inner world could not affect the real determinations and habits of the outer world. I say that these belong to the outer world because they are not mere fantasies but are real agencies." CP (5.493 ,Pragmatism, 1906) RM> But this fundamental text alone does not solve the question posed by Edwina because it obviously lacks the commens, this concept that dominates both the emission of signs and their receptions. A concept that is added to this text allows us to situate Peirce's semiotics in the social field, his study in sociology and his practice among social practices. But the commens as Peirce presents it is a general framework in which individual signs are supposed to cooperate to arrive at a kind of social semiosis whose dynamics feed on individual variations... Unfortunately, Peirce's discussions of semeiosis do not include enough examples to illustrate and clarify his methods for deriving his terminology and applying it in practice. That is why I suggested his _Photometric Researches_ as an extended series of examples that show how he analyzed observations, used the terminology and results of other scientists, and communicated his results to the scientific community. He did the research from 1872 to 1875, shortly after his experiences with the scientific community during the solar eclipse. He published that book in the same year as the article "How to make our ideas clear" in the _Popular Science Monthly_. And the editor of that magazine was one of the people he met in Sicily during the solar eclipse. The book and the article don't use the abstract terminology he developed 20 or 30 years later, but they more clearly show his individual and social thinking processes that inspired that terminology. For my selection of 16 pages from his 273-page book, see http://jfsowa.com/peirce/PRexcerpts.pdf . The complete book has many more examples of the way Peirce related his own observations to the work by the entire community of scientists. John
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