Thanks Ben,
I guess we are speaking past each other a bit. In a simple sense, re-cognition has for its object something previously cognized. I took this to be where experience comes in. Maybe I should just drop cognition. ( I had in mind the NLC) 3a says basically "determined-by" entails "determined-as." 3b adds a big *but* and a *not.* I am trying to understand the incompatibility. I agree they are incompatible. You say,
3b **But a mind's experiential recognition, -- logically determined by object, sign, & interpretant, -- of said object, sign, & interpretant as truly and validly one another's triadic correlates, -- is _not_ that mind's sign or interpretant of them as being truly and validly one another's triadic correlates, since it is and conveys _experience_ of them as being truly and validly one another's triadic correlates.** (end quote)
So, experiential recognition is other than 3a recognition? It sounds as though there is recognition determined -by and determined-as, and secondly, "a mind's experiential recognition" which is not 3a recognition. The reason you give is that "it (mind's recognition) .....conveys experience of them (soi) as being truly and validly one another's triadic correlates." But then, doesn't this suggest that recognition is validated in experience? If so, I agree. But you say,
"3a & 3b are not addressing very separate questions of the logical description of a semiosis and its validation. The validation or confimation of a semiosis's logical structure is a question in, of, for that semiosis. A logical description which excludes questions of confirmation would be incomplete." (end quote)
I took it that 3b has something to do with the role experience plays in confirming the structure. ("truly" and "validly") The logical description of the structure would *include* both 3a recognition and 3b experience. So I think I agree again.
Your graph runs all three correlates into *recognizant.* Can this represent both 3a and 3b recognition? I don't think so, at least in an unambiguous way, since they are incompatible. Yet it seems the graph should show the difference between 3a and 3b.
Jim W
-----Original Message-----
From: Benjamin Udell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Peirce Discussion Forum <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>
Sent: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 14:23:54 -0500
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: Peircean elements
Jim, list,
Jim wrote:
Ben,
I have a question. What is the relation between cognition and recognition? It seems that 3a and 3b respond to two different questions, namely, what is a correct logical description of the structure of cognition and how is that structure *validated* for any given peice of information. No wonder that 3a and 3b appear incompatible. To represent an answer graphically would appear to require extended sides, more vertices, new objects and interpretants since what determines a sign to an interpretant does not explain how or why it does so. I do not know if I am even getting warm here but I guess that the interpretant might become a sign which has new objects and interpretants that do the explaining. How the extended apparatus can show its reference to the original structure of cognition without ad hoc marks eludes me.
Jim W
I have a question. What is the relation between cognition and recognition? It seems that 3a and 3b respond to two different questions, namely, what is a correct logical description of the structure of cognition and how is that structure *validated* for any given peice of information. No wonder that 3a and 3b appear incompatible. To represent an answer graphically would appear to require extended sides, more vertices, new objects and interpretants since what determines a sign to an interpretant does not explain how or why it does so. I do not know if I am even getting warm here but I guess that the interpretant might become a sign which has new objects and interpretants that do the explaining. How the extended apparatus can show its reference to the original structure of cognition without ad hoc marks eludes me.
Jim W
Your question is not very clear to me and seems a bit connect-the-dots, but I'll give it a try. However, I'm seldom so long-winded as when I'm trying to respond to questions which I've grasped somewhat vaguely. Fortunately, quite a bit of this post is phrased not very formally.
3a & 3b are not addressing very separate questions of the logical description of a semiosis and its validation. The validation or confimation of a semiosis's logical structure is a question in, of, for that semiosis. A logical description which excludes questions of confirmation would be incomplete.
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3:
a. **If the recognition is logically determined by the object, sign, and interpretant, then Peircean semiotics says that such recognition is determined AS their object or AS their sign or AS their interpretant,** narrowed down to a choice between sign or interpretant except in such regard as may arise in virtue of the dynamoid object's depending on the final interpretant (which I tend to take as a case of mutual determination and some sort of logical equivalence).
b. **But a mind's experiential recognition, -- logically determined by object, sign, & interpretant, -- of said object, sign, & interpretant as truly and validly one another's triadic correlates, -- is _not_ that mind's sign or interpretant of them as being truly and validly one another's triadic correlates, since it is and conveys _experience_ of them as being truly and validly one another's triadic correlates.**
**a. & b. are in strict logical incompatibility.** They can't both be true. Something cannot both be and not be a sign or interpretant in the same respect & extent. A choice must be made. I won't belabor the point, but it is crucial that this be clearly seen, else what follows will be pointless.
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Now maybe your question arises because I phrased b. as if the mind were talking to itself in a semiotician's vocabulary and were trying to do the kind of abstract theoretical validation which a semiotician might do. But, I don't mean that the mind is doing semiotics except in the mind's doing it in an amateur, practical way as it usually does. That phraseology of "triadic correlates" which I use just seemed briefer and less tangled. But I'll rephrase it here:
A mind's experiential recognition -- logically determined by object, sign, & interpretant, -- of said object, sign, & interpretant as truly & validly one another's object, sign, interpretant, -- is _not_ that mind's sign or interpretant of them as being truly one another's object, sign, interpretant, since it is and conveys _experience_ of them as being truly and validly one another's object, sign, interpretant.
Nevertheless, you raise a more serious issue, one that goes to the heart of the difference between information & logic, and between vegetables & intelligent beasts.
The question of how a cognition is validated or confirmed, is a question for cognition, in cognition, by cognition. Science did not emerge, like Venus on the half-shell, out of seeming parentlessness & foam. It is not only semioticians, but also everyday people, who find themselves wondering about their interpretations of signs, and seek confirmation where they do not already have it. In everyday experience, probably most interpretation occurs nearly simultaneously as the recalling of experience which confirms the interpretation. And, in everyday experience, there is a continual bringing to bear of interpretations as expectations about the experience, and the experience is formed as an ongoing testing, though the testing isn't usually THE purpose or end of all that activity, rather it's like checking that ends have in fact been achieved & continue to be achieved. The experience itself is semiotically enriched -- how? How else? -- than by being formed as collateral to signs & interpretants in respect of objects. Now, people's standards of confirmation, evidence, rigor, etc., may vary and are certainly not typically the result of professional scientific training, and some will take the word of some book or newspaper as absolute proof, but that's life, few scientists are any better when they get five inches off familiar intellectual turf and, sometimes, they're worse, feeling much the same semiconscious mantle of confidence when far from their usual stomping gounds as they feel at their usual stomping grounds, and this is just one kind of one of the most common stories of all humans such that every one of us sooner or later plays the fool and usually many times more than once. As any professional magician will tell you, it's easier to fool a smart person than a dull one. The smart person is actively thinking and making assumptions, trying to construct a mental picture, trying to outrace & outsmart what the smart person is being shown. Often it's a smart thing to do, too! Just not always. The dull person rests comfortable in the knowledge that the pro magician is doing it "somehow" and the dull person simply doesn't care how. Now, we do like to think that sciences & maths exert some kind of ameliorative influence on society in terms of respect & standards of reasoning, evidence, etc. This is the sort of thing which Rorty somehow fails to see or consider important when he says that philosophy has nothing to learn from the sciences about ways of getting at truth.
People seldom talk either like semioticians or like scientists in lab coats or like mathematicians walking atop of their cubicle partitions, but they are often concerned, without using the technical vocabulary, with issues of the logical determination of their representations, interpretations, & confirmations. Any innocent defendant in a trial will certainly hope so, and the idea that the validation of logical structure with respect to specific information is somehow not a question influencing semiosis is the idea that closes off the possibility of intelligent semiotic evolution, the idea that semiosis has no higher-order or higher-level processes, only semioticians & scientists do. If the system itself is not being tested, how will it evolve intelligently? There isn't some abstract part of semiosis which is utterly insulated from testing, or, if there is, then to that extent and in that respect we do not intelligently evolve, instead we evolve in that respect, if at all, then by harsher steps; and it would be strange to think that, if there is such a non-evolving aspect, then semiotics, as a philosophical field, would be about just that non-evolving aspect of minds or quasiminds. The binding unity of consciousness is binding unity of instability & fallibility of the whole system which is put to the test -- at least slightly -- at every moment. My guess -- and this is just a guess -- is that information theory by itself will never be able to deal with meaning in the full human sense, because the questions of legitimacy, validity, soundness, which tortured Hamlet for instance, give meaning itself a cornucopia of extra dimensions, pleasant & unpleasant. Such questions & dimensions of legitimacy are a subject for philosophy. We are sufficiently unbound from our "codes" & systems of intepretation, sufficiently unbound or sufficiently non-rigidly bound, that we can test, adjust, correct, improve them, instead of leaving that task to biological evolution which tends to punish bad interpretants by removing the interpreter from the gene pool.
In fact, nothing could be more essential to cognition than the recognitional stage. Without that, cognition would not get beyond calculation, curve-fitting, & the like, and would not be, strictly speaking, a logical process, but more like an algebraic or information-processing process, something that vegetables do. And there's already lots of information theory & cybernetic theory for that sort of thing.
Now, basically I'm not sure how my view raises the question of diagrammatic complexity in some way which Peircean semiosis doesn't already raise it. Tagging a vertex in Peircean semiotics a matter of asking whether the item in question is a source of practical differences (practical-difference-making effects), i.e., is an object, or is a conveyer of information in implicit form about that, i.e., is a sign, or is a clarification of the implicit info, i.e., is an interpretant.
A sign is almost the object, and thus carries information about the object, but this information is only implicit, somwhat muddled or scrambled, and it is rich, over-rich. For various minds, it would need to be selectively clarified in various ways. More precisely, the thing serving as sign may do so in variant ways for various minds. So I don't see quite the same sign which you see, and my sign determines my interpretant, your sign determines your interpretant, etc. And so sometimes people end up talking about the interpretation "determining" the sign, but that's in a higher-level sense. If the interpretant & sign are true & valid, then the object determines the sign, and the object and sign determine the interpretant, and minds go to considerable lengths sometimes to arrange to be properly determined by the truth. The interpretant is a clarification of the sign about the object in terms of the conceivable practical bearing of the conceivable effects of the object-as-represented,-- to put it another way, in terms of what conceivable practical difference would be made by the object's being as represented by the sign. Different kinds of practical differences would be made for different kinds of minds. Life interprets, or at least decodes, according to standards of value & importance. Now, by clarifying in terms of the conceivable practical difference which would be made by the object's being as represented by the sign, the interpretant is addressed as an appeal to a conceivable kind of experience formed as collateral to the interpretant & sign in respect of the object. Any actual recognition is singular & concrete, though it is recognition not necessarily in respect only to concrete singulars. In that same sense, an interpretant is general or qualitative, at any rate not singular (my scope system differs from Peirce's but that's a whole other discussion). To the extent that the mind forms an appeal to a singular recognitive experience which would, will, does, or did singularly take place, the mind is forming a potential, probable, actual, or established recognition. It is as when a mind infers a prediction from a hypothesis -- it narrows the question down from a _kind_ of experience to a singular experience in which the interpretant would, will, does, or did actually get tested by that particular mind. (Note: I speak of this as a 'recognizant' rather than as a 'test' confirmatory or disconfirmatory, in conformity & analogy as one speaks of an 'interpretant' of a sign, rather than of something which might either interpret or "disinterpret" the sign as representing the object, and in conformity & analogy as one speaks of a 'sign' which represents the object, rather than of something which might either represent or "dis-represent" the object, some sort of "contrasign," such that a contrasign that an object is blue would be a sign that the object isn't blue. We speak of a 'sign' rather than of 'something which could be sign or contrasign.' Etc.)
Now, the part of your post which is unclear to me is that involving the addition of further relations, vertices, etc. Usually in regard to semiosis, one says that each interpretant is itself a sign inviting & inciting further interpretation, and that each sign is already an intepretant of a previous sign in regard to the object. It's a matter of what is salient & in question to the semiotician. Insofar as a sign conveys information requiring interpretation, it is a "pre-interpretant sign." Insofar as a sign is a clarification of a sign's implicit information, it is an interpretant. It's a sign in both cases, and it's question of whether unclarified/clarified. It's like talking about rest mass & energy. It's all sign, just as rest mass & energy are equivalent in a sense, though that's not a standard analogy among Peirceans so far as I know. The sign unclarified has information that is, so to speak, incubating. The interpretant is the clarification, the illumination. Generally, we will regard as "the" sign the earliest sign in question for the semiotician. That "preintepretant" sign is itself an interpretant, but is so of earlier stages that don't happen to be _in question_, so, instead of drawing a bunch of little segments with little "I"s attached, leading back to the object, one just draws a line from "sign" to "object," without breaking it into pieces, because that stretch of semiosis doesn't happen to be in question. It's a relative question, but, for a given mind, it's not completely arbitrary where one marks the sign as being, since there is usually a point before which the sign is not interpretive with any clarity to the mind. E.g., if I see a blotch on a peach, that blotch is a sign about the peach, about its condition (probably internally mushy), but I would have to shift to some other viewpoint to see it as a clarification of a previous sign conveying such information about the peach. Where semiotic relations are not in question, they are "collapsable." I don't mean that in any non-Peircean sense, rather this is what I've taken to be the standard view, and I'm talking about the kind of difference between "in-question" & "not-in-question" which Joe Ransdell addressed so well in his paper on the immediate object and the distinction between the "Theorist" & the "Critical Analyst." I'm not a professional academic, but as far as I'm concerned, that paper deserves publication a lot more than many things which do get published.
The conception of the recognizant certainly adds to the potential complexity of semiotic diagrams, but its a potential complexity which is already there.
Best, Ben Udell
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