Jim, list,
Jim Piat wrote:
>>[Joe Ransdell] Good point, Gary. Still another way of thinking about it
>>might be to suppose that the emphasis is supposed to fall on "thing" rather
>>than "sign": "no sign is a real THING" rather than "no sign is a REAL
>>thing"; but that doesn't sound very plausible to me. I like your solution
>>better.
>> Joe Ransdell
>[Jim] While we're raising questions about the distinctions among such notions
>as the real, the existent and the true (their relationships to the categories
>etc)
Are you disagreeing with Peirce here? It's okay to disagree with him, I do too,
but I'm wondering whether that's what you're doing. Here's Peirce's view:
1. The possible
|> 3. The (conditionally) necessary ("would have to" approx. = "should"), the
real
2. The actual, the reactive, the existent
"Truth" in Peirce's use of the word is the property of a true proposition, its
property of corresponding to fact, though it could also correspond to a law
regarded as a fact.
I'll give this a try. Keeping in mind that these are correlations, not
equations:
1. Term (seme, etc.) - (univocality?) -- (case in the sense of question,
issue, matter, _res_?) --- possibility.
|> 3. Argument -- validity -- law --- (conditional) necessity.
2. Proposition - truth -- fact --- actuality.
>[Jim] -- I'd like to throw in a related question: Does existence as a mode of
>being ever occur outside of representation or thirdness (as a mode of being).
>Or is existence (and objects conceived of as merely existing -- ie something
>less than signs) something that always swims in the contiuum of
>representation.
My take has been that existent objects are always also embodied signs, but that
embodied interpretants aren't so common. I'd have to dig. I seem to remember
Peirce talking about genuine phenomenal thirdness as not being everywhere --
but I also remember thinking that he was talking in terms of the interpretant,
and not of "just any" signs -- i.e., it was the thing about embodied
interpretants again. Peirce doesn't use the phrase "embodied interpretant," as
I recall. Gary used it & I picked it up from him.
Now, Peirce says that an index doesn't necessarily resemble its object at all,
and that it indicates its object whether we notice or not -- the relationship
with its object is one of actual resistance or reaction (when the index a
sinsign; otherwise, the relationship of its replica with the object). If I
think of such reactions, I think vaguely of forces, variational principles,
etc. And I think of effects which quantitatively and qualitatively differ a lot
from their causes.
In the case of icons, Peirce is more likely to think in terms of mathematical
diagrams. He thinks that mathematical structures and patterns are real, and are
real thirdness (I think).
However, I don't know what Peirce thinks about iconicity in statistical
patterns and processes in material nature -- I don't mean in the sense of
statistical patterns making pictures of physical objects, if that ever happens.
I mean in the sense that there are statistical processes whereby random
fluctuations and differences cancel out to a common middle or average, and a
stage of a process can be predictably similar to a current stage depending on
how recent or soon-to-arrive it is at the time of the given curren stage. There
are other kinds of widespread similarities -- typical percentages of various
substances in widely dispersed material, & so on. Now insofar as we're talking
about embodied iconicity, it's not just about resemblances, but about
resemblances arising among things reactively or resistantially related -- in
other words, a lot of things with family kinships, things made of the same
kinds of stuff often from common sources and maybe ultimately all from a common
source way way back, anyway, such that these things informatively resemble one
another.
Peirce does not seem to have regarded biological phenomena as involving genuine
thirdness. He includes biology in the physical wing of cenoscopy. He says that
if a sunflower's turning sunward could reproduce another sunflower's turning
sunward without the second sunflower's having directly reacted with the
sunlight, then the first sunflower's turning sunward would be a genuine a
representamen (to the second sunflower) -- in the sense that a sign entails a
mind, while a representamen does not, a distinction which he later dropped. And
of course the second sunflower's turning sunward would be an interpretant
representamen. If we look inside vegetable organisms, rather than among them,
we might have better chances of finding genuine semiosis. However, although
there is a lot of what we now call decoding, there doesn't appear to be the
kind of learning & retention that allows chains of interpretants onward
indefinitely, which is an essential part of what Peirce means by "interpretant"
and semiosis.
My view has been that retention in some useful form happens only with learning
and testing of signs, interpretants and systems & "codes" of interpretation,
and this involves recognitions which are neither mere claims (=signs) nor mere
construals (=interpretants). I suspect that, instead, the info-theoretic setup
is what there is at the vegetable level --
there are sources but not semiotic objects for the vegetable,
there are encodings but not signs/representamens for the vegetable,
there are decodings but not interpretants by the vegetable, and
there are recipients but not recognitions by the vegetable -- also, the
recipient of the signal seems to be the evolutionary process itself, whose
"disconfirming" of the vegetable's decodings tends to involve removal of said
vegetable from the gene pool. The individual vegetable does not learn, or even
biologically evolve. Biological evolution is by trial and error, and, while
biological evolution itself might be described as a capacity which has
"evolved" in some ways (at least in regard to genetic change & stability), I
don't know in what sense one would call it a learning process.
However, we were discussing indices & icons, and then instead of moving on to
symbols, I switched to interpretants. What about symbols? Now, certainly one
can take planets as symbols -- Jupiter for power, Mars for war, Venus for love
-- yet, for a scientific intelligence, is there anything in nature, at least at
the biological level, which could be taken as symbols? Since we did not find
resemblance embodied except in "compromise" form with indexicality, in material
kinships, perhaps we have to look for some such "compromise" form in the case
of symbols too. I don't know how to think of it except in terms of one's
witnessing an organism decoding a stimulus and reacting in terms of that
stimulus's "meaning" or "importance" for the organism by the standard of its
species, gender, developmental phase, etc. The stimulus is an encoded signal
for the organism but is a genuine symbol for us because we actually interpret
it in a way that continues generating interpretants in us. But it's like a
symbol in another language, the conventions are not ours but those of the
vegetable species, etc. But it's not just a cause of a mere reaction because
we're understanding it in terms of its "meaning" for the organism, in terms of
the organism's interests; the organism's response is guided by functionality,
ends. Well, this seems to complicated, I feel like there should be something
simpler, and what happened to the "compromise" with indexicality that I was
talking about? There should be a salient reactional or material connection
between symbol & object, if we're to be consistent with the above icon case.
Well, I guess there is that, with vegetable organisms. Anyway, that's enough
for the time being!
>[Jim] My personal understanding is that Peirce views objects as something
>which we abstract from triadic or representational experience. IOWs in the act
>of perceiving an object we are engaged in representation. However, I do not
>take this interpretation of Peirce to mean that Peirce is arguing that objects
>do not exist outside of our representation of them because clearly he is not
>saying this. The fact that objects exist (and are thus real in his
>definitional sense of the real as that which exist apart from what we imagine)
>does not mean that we have access or experience of objects apart from the
>triadic or representational mode of being of which they are inextricably
>embedded. Nor I might add does it mean that objects as we experience them
>representationally are necessarily other than what they are -- in contrast to
>the view that we experience objects through some distorting lens. What we
>experience is always a part of the truth -- our error is not that what we
>perceive is distorted but that we mistake the small part of the truth that we
>perceive (from our limited POV) as being the whole truth!
Sometimes our error is that what we perceive is distorted, but just not always
(one hopes!). Take Gary's notion that Queens is a part, a "borough" (quaint
term!) of New York City -- next thing you know he'll be claiming that there are
enormous bridges spanning the East River! Or, more seriously, let's say that
somebody actually believed that Queens is NOT part of New York City. Or how
about this, an actual case, a guy I knew believed that there are stable
water-valleys in the ocean, places where the water doesn't find its level. But,
yes, sometimes our error is just overestimation of the completeness of what we
know. don't know about Peirce's thinking that we abstract objects from
representational experience in some sense that we don't likewise abstract
signs. Besides that, a lot of what you say sounds to me like that which Peirce
is saying.
>[Jim] This view raises the question (I guess I'm trying to suggest an answer
>to my own questions -- so my larger question is how does this solution seem
>to yall) what then is the distinction between objects such as trees and
>objects such as the word tree which are replicas of signs (or representamen of
>representations -- is that the correct usage of these terms btw). My answer
>is that both are abstractions. All are signs. So called objects are merely
>signs that we have not interpreted as signs. So called objects are signs in
>the universal mind of god or the universe -- but it is only when we use these
>objects as signs for other objects that we think of them as signs. IOWs what
>we have here is a confusion of level and meta level -- a sort of category
>mistake. All is a sign -- all things are signs and all of reality is merely
>a matter of signs interpreting signs. Indeed the modes of being called
>qualtiy reaction and interpretation can each be conceptually abstracted from
>the all inclusive reality of a universe of signs which is itself a sign --
>but all experience (in the fullest sense of the word) is a matter of
>representation. At least I take this to be the overall thrust of Peirce's
>comments though I must admit that in some context and on some occassions his
>comments do seem to suggest that we can experience or know objects or
>reactions without representation.
Why "so-called" objects that are "really" signs? There couldn't be semiotic
objects or signs without each other. I don't see Peirce as seeing objects as
less real than signs, or, to put it another way, object-roles as less real than
sign-roles. The only case where in some sense signs may drop out of the picture
is in idealized isolated mechanical systems in which complete knowledge of any
stage tells you EVERYTHING about all stages before and after, such that
familiarity with any stage would count as familiarity with all stages. You know
the object whole in its any single moment. Only thing is, you'd have to
interrupt this isolated "perfect" system in order to measure it. So you never
get to know it. And I can't think even of an idealized case of signs where
objects drop out of the picture -- it sounds like a mirror maze waiting for
something opaque to be reflected in and throughout it.
That's it. My brain has stopped working. That may already have been evident.
Good evening!
Best regards,
Ben
[Jim] > But as to the specific quote above -- I'm inclined to go with the
reading you suggest above, Joe. Gary's reading (while a good way of
illustrating the question or problem) changes the logic of Peirces statement.
Yours, for me, clarifies Peirces remark in what strikes me as a most plausible
way. Signs are not mere things -- however real. In fact, as I've argued
above, what we call things are actually abstracted from signs. Things are mere
replicas of signs as Gary has pointed out.
-- on a related note: Wittgenstein points out (according to PMS Hacker) that
when we say such things as "I have a pain" supposing we are describing an
internal object such as the sensation of pain we are instead actually
expressing the pain itself. The expression is less an indicative symbol of
pain as an exclamatory index of pain. I mention this because I think it may
have some bearing on the issue of the so called internal vs external nature of
experience. IOWs some seemingly symbolic sentences are actually merely indexes
-- dressed up in the traditional form of symbolic sentences. This
misunterpretation of how we are using language when speaking of such things as
feeling and thoughts (as I understand Wittgenstein) accounts for much of the
confusion we have about private language intuition and the like. I think Peirce
may be saying saying something similar.
And finally, (trying to squeeze a lot into this quick weekend note) -- I found
a passage of Leo Strauss on interpretation vs explanation (and how to read
texts in general) that I think is interesting both in terms of our reading of
this text as well as giving some insight into Strauss. He comes off to me as
not so sinister as I'd feared -- and in fact rather straight forward. This
"secret/privledged reading stuff is merely a common sense admonition to be
mindful of the context in which a writer is or was expressing his views.
Minorities are of necessity generally more aware of this than those whose
consciousness is limited by being of the majority opinion. As Peirce has said
all development is a matter of eliminating options. On that which everyone
agrees -- interpretation, development and consciousness stops. Which is the
danger of mistakenly supposing agreement determines truth rather than truth
being one factor that tends to promote agreement over the long haul. Perhaps
truth is the only factor that promotes lasting agreement, but the trouble here
is that lasting is a very long time so mere agreement by itself (without
consideration of the time element) turns out to be a very poor measure of
truth. Actually I think our individual perceptions (even including illusions
and delusions) are excellent and indeed the only measure of personal truth --
but we must be ever vigilent not to mistake our narrow individual truths
(limited across time and space) as the whole truth. But anyway I will try to
post a short Strauss passage later. Just musing as usual. I'm greatly
enjoying this New Elements and related discussion.
Best wishes,
Jim Piat
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