Gary, Gary, Joe, list,
Regarding the absence of "interpretant" from the Century Dictionary: For
Peirce's technical terms, fortunately there's another resource, The Commens
Dictionary of Peirce's Terms, Peirce's Terminology in His Own
Words, Edited by Mats Bergman & Sami Paavola http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/dictionary.html
There's plenty about the interpretant, the representamen, etc., there.
During the discussions and arguments with Tom
Short here at peirce-l last year, the subject of the term "interpretant"
came up -- why would Peirce have wanted it? And why was it a good idea? I can't
remember whether we distinguished those two questions clearly. Tom didn't think
much of coining the term in order to distinguish interpretation as product (the
interpretant) from interpretation as the activity leading to the interpretation
as product. He said that context, syntactical differences, etc. were enough. I
disagreed and argued that Peirce probably wanted an unambiguous word which would
retain its univocality in translations and not overdepend on the literary
abilities of the translators. Many languages do not have "the" or "a" etc. and
other English tricks for differentiating senses -- Latin, for instance. I
could not prevail. I argued also that calling it an "interpretant" tended to
minimize the idea that it had to be a _human_ interpretation. Tom did
like that idea. I don't remember whether anybody else had a strong opinion
on such specific aspects of why Peirce would have wanted a different
word than "interpretation." There were other and bigger arguments going on
at the time!
Since then I ran into an old word "interpretament" from Medieval Latin
interpretamentum which meant intepretation, apparently in the sense
only of product, and this arising from a chiefly technical use -- the
interpretament was an explanatory gloss. (At this Webpage look for
yellow-highlighted "interpretamentum" -- it's bad OCR of the
Encyclopedia Britannica 11th edition, some of it is garbled) http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:4DjOTI7LpFMJ:encyclopedia.jrank.org/GEO_GNU/GLOSS_GLOSSARY.html+interpretamentum&hl=en
The Century Dictionary has interpretament
(obs.) (in-te·
r'pre-ta··-ment), n.
[< L. interpretamentum, explanation, >
interpretari, explain: see interpret.]
Interpretation. [Rare.] This bold
interpretament, how commonly soever sided with, cannot stand a minute
with any competent reverence to God or his law, or his people. Milton,
Tetrachordon.
My suspect that Peirce indeed knew this word but thought, why not a
briefer word, and one without an established meaning of an explanation
in a glossary.
Best, Ben Udell
===========================
Gary F. wrote:
Thanks, Joe, for a highly informative answer to my question! I hope someone
does come up with an e-version of that list.
By the way, i just noticed that the Century has no definition for "interpretant". I guess if there was one, there would be no question who wrote it ...
gary F.
----- Original Message -----
Gary and list:
I was just now reminded by Nathan Houser that there is indeed such a list of entries to be found in Ken Ketner's primary bibliography of Peirce's writings (see P 00373), of which I have a copy though not in electronic form. There is a digitized version of the bibliography in the package INTELEX puts out in addition to the Collected Paper package: this second package also has the Nation articles in it (as well as a long-outdated secondary bibliography mostly compiled by me many years ago). I do have a an electronic copy of that but it is in Mac format and my Mac machine is not presently in working order. Maybe somebody that has a digitized copy of it can forward it to me to post, though..
In this version of the list -- the one in Ketner's primary bibliography -- there is one shortcoming, though it probably is not in practice a very serious one, namely, that it does not show what is NOT due to Peirce in the cases where someone else provided a part of the definition. (It seems to be common practice for lexicographers to supplement one another's work in this way, but I doubt that many of the entries due to Peirce will involve much of that, and we will usually have no difficulty in recognizing what is due to Peirce. If it looks philosophically interesting then it is likely due to Peirce.) Whether there is a version of it which does somehow convey that further information I do not know.
Joe Ransdell
---By the way, i just noticed that the Century has no definition for "interpretant". I guess if there was one, there would be no question who wrote it ...
gary F.
----- Original Message -----
Gary and list:
I was just now reminded by Nathan Houser that there is indeed such a list of entries to be found in Ken Ketner's primary bibliography of Peirce's writings (see P 00373), of which I have a copy though not in electronic form. There is a digitized version of the bibliography in the package INTELEX puts out in addition to the Collected Paper package: this second package also has the Nation articles in it (as well as a long-outdated secondary bibliography mostly compiled by me many years ago). I do have a an electronic copy of that but it is in Mac format and my Mac machine is not presently in working order. Maybe somebody that has a digitized copy of it can forward it to me to post, though..
In this version of the list -- the one in Ketner's primary bibliography -- there is one shortcoming, though it probably is not in practice a very serious one, namely, that it does not show what is NOT due to Peirce in the cases where someone else provided a part of the definition. (It seems to be common practice for lexicographers to supplement one another's work in this way, but I doubt that many of the entries due to Peirce will involve much of that, and we will usually have no difficulty in recognizing what is due to Peirce. If it looks philosophically interesting then it is likely due to Peirce.) Whether there is a version of it which does somehow convey that further information I do not know.
Joe Ransdell
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