[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?

[Gary Richmond]

Joe, Ben, List, Joe wrote: I don't see anything reductive in assuming that the analysis of cognition, including recognition, can be done in terms of a signs, objects, and interpretants as elements of or in cognitive processes, andif this involves shifting phenomenological gears and semiotic frames of reference then so be it.. I would agree that "the analysis of cognition, including recognition [and, I would add, even whatever of 'memory' is logically analyzable GR], can be done in terms of signs, objects, and interpretants" and, indeed, see no other way to analyze it. Joe continues: Your suggestion that recognition should be acknowledged to be a distinctive fourth factor seems to accomplish nothing other than to make it impossible to analyze recognition at all since the conception of it is already given, as a sort of logical primitive, prior to its use as an analytic element. I would fully concur with this analysis. Joe continues by stating: But the truth is, Ben, that I just don't understand your argument. I just can/t follow it, and I can't really answer you effectively for that reason. I guess I will have to leave that to Gary for the time being and hope that I will in time come to understand what you are getting at. I'm afraid that I apparently either haven't understood Ben's argument or, if I have, that Ben has quite rejected my analysis as you can see from his blog comments referring to earlier discussions on this list (which I've copied just below). Joe concludes: I always take what you say seriously, at the very least. I take Ben's thinking seriously as well, but sense that he will try to fit triadic semeiotic to the Procrustean bed of his fours as he was fully committed to them well before coming upon Peirce's semeiotic (and, of course, for the reasons he has given which I too cannot follow). So I hope that others will argue these points with Ben as I have pretty much 'shot my wad' in the matter. Here's some of Ben's reflection on Bernard Morand and my earlier arguments as they appear on Ben's blog. Ben writes: One might argue, as Gary Richmond and Bernard Morand have argued at Joseph Ransdell’s peirce-l electronic forum, that the recognition, observation, etc., are the “integrity” of the triad or of the evolvent semiosis over time, and are their totality and locus. Yet the recognitional and observational relationships are distinguishable from the triadic relationships of objectification, representation, interpretation, since the relevant observation/recognition is collateral to sign and interpretant in respect to the object, and is not merely their totality and locus while not really being anything more than them. Furthermore, by the same method one could argue that the interpretant sign is really just the “integrity” or maybe instead the “clarity” of an object-sign dyad and that no further distinct relationships need be invoked in order to conceive of the interpretant. And so forth. — Gary has also argued that since he is the sign, he already is the observation, they aren’t different things etc. (In a similar argument, he argues that the universe is an interpretant and already has all its observations, etc.) Yet this involves ignoring the shifts of semiotic reference frame whereby we say that a thing is a semiotic object in one sense or set of relations, and is a sign in another sense or set of relations, etc., and it leads to a hypostatization of object, sign, etc., even while Gary claims that it avoids the hypostatization to which he claims that the conception of the recognizant amounts. Furthermore, by the same method one could argue that one is already the pre-interpretant sign, one doesn’t need a “separate” interpretant, it would just be a hypostatization, one is both and it’s all one, etc. Meanwhile, the recognizant is not a hypostatization; something is no more a recognizant in every set of relations than it is an interpretant in every set of relations, or a sign in every set of relations, or a semiotic object in every set of relations. Gary’s arguments are, in a sense, too powerful; they “reduce” the semiotic triad itself away. Well, I don't necessarily agree with Ben's conclusions, but I have been unsuccessful on list and off (and including discussions relating to the Peircean 'reduction thesis' 'valency analysis' 'existential graph analysis' etc. which support the argument that three semeiotic elements are necessary and sufficient. But perhaps anticipating your argument reproduced above, Joe, Ben has also written: — There remains the argument that collateral experiences, recognitions, etc., are not “semiotic” and don’t belong with object, sign, and interpretant. Yet, that’s just to say that verification, disconfirmation, etc., are concerns at best adjacent to, but still outside of, logic and semiotics; the scientific process, then, for example, falls outside of semiotic concerns to the extent that the scientific process is verificational, disconfirmatory, etc. Yet Peirce and others have treated the scientific process in its full dimensions as a semiotic concern. Therefore, in terms of ramifications for subject matter, the recognizant, the collaterally based recognition, seems semiotic enough. — Furthermore, the recognizant is defined by its relations to object, sign, and interpretant and is defined such that it is semiotically determined by them. Thus the recognizant seems semiotic enough in terms of definitions and the Peircean conception of semiotic determination. . . . . . . My fourth in addition to Peirce’s index, icon, and symbol, is the “proxy.” See Ben's full discussion at this place in his Blog: http://tetrast.blogspot.com/2005/03/semiotics-collaterally-based.html Of course I look forward to reading Ben's response to my most recent remarks (should he reply to them), but  I don't feel that I have anything to offer to this discussion which I haven't already stated in my earlier analyses of especially  collateral observation (Ben has suggested that he's taken the "ramifications" of the collateral notion further than did Peirce to exactly posit the "proxy.") Gary Joseph Ransdell wrote: Ben, you say: I don't pose a tetradic reduction thesis applicable to all relations. I just say that there's a fourth semiotic term that isn't any of the classic three. A sign stands for an object to an interpretant on the basis of a recognition. I think that an increasingly good reason to suppose that recognition can't be reduced to interpretant, sign, and object, is that nobody has done so in any kind of straightforward way. REPLY: Has anybody tried? BEN: Basically, signs & interpretants lack experience conveyable to the mind. How will you reduce experience of them respecting the object, reduce such experience into things that lack experience conveyable to the mind? Where did the experience vanish to? You can analyze, but not reduce, experience into such by shifting phenomenological gears, semiotic frame of reference, etc. REPLY: I don't see anything reductive in assuming that the analysis of cognition, including recognition, can be done in terms of a signs, objects, and interpretants as elements of or in cognitive processes, andif this involves shifting phenomenological gears and semiotic frames of reference then so be it.. Your suggestion that recognition should be acknowledged to be a distinctive fourth factor seems to accomplish nothing other than to make it impossible to analyze recognition at all since the conception of it is already given, as a sort of logical primitive, prior to its use as an analytic element. But the truth is, Ben, that I just don't understand your argument. I just can/t follow it, and I can't really answer you effectively for that reason. I guess I will have to leave that to Gary for the time being and hope that I will in time come to understand what you are getting at. I always take what you say seriously, at the very least. Joe Ransdell --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com