Patrick,
My responses are interspersed below.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Patrick Coppock" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>
Cc: "Bill Bailey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, July 03, 2006 9:26 AM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: Sinsign, Legisign, Qualisign - help!
Thanks Bill for your comments.
You wrote:
Patrick,
I'm don't know what in my post you're replying to. I don't keep my posts,
so I can't be sure, but I don't recall mentioning an "expression
continuum," "segments" or "meaning continuum." I may have; I sometimes
think I only think I know what I say or mean. My post (I think) had to do
with the confusion/conflation of independent processes. If that's what
you're doing in your last paragraph, quit it! (I don't have any of those
smiley gadget to put here.)
Cheers,
Bill
Ok, on the last point, you can borrow this smiley here if you like :)
I'd be the first to argue that the more abstract--"featureless"--sign works
best (I'm not a perceptual cognitivist ( :) ), but I'll have to pass.
Apropos: "expression continuum" and "meaning continuum" are actually
supposed to be considered part and parcel of one and the same general
continuum of meaning-expression potential that is capable of being "cut"
in various ways, according to Eco's "creative" blending of Peirce and
Hjelmslev's sign functions.
I've never been much of an Eco fan; in my view, his creative blending tends
to bend Peirce to mend Saussure's linguistics based-semiology. But maybe
I'm too provincial.
My last paragraph was of course pure speculation, and I apologise if it
seemed to you too arcane, since there are some "flavours" in there
(transitivity) that I pulled in from systemic functional linguistics.
I think you can see why I might twit you on that paragraph from the above
response. I'm not much for linguistic approaches to semiotics; however, my
comments on your post were absolutely sincere. I very much liked the
pragmatic "attitude" of your post. But I'm not sure you can carry it to
fruition in your theoretical enterprise. Gregory Bateson once commented
that there are two mutually discrete universes--the Newtonian universe of
objects and the communication universe of information. If you start in one,
you can never reach the other. Similarly, I think, we might distinguish
between the two universes of signs and language, and arrive at the same
conclusion.
But since I am at present trying (I think) to build/ defend a position
that says that all independent processes, though "discrete", must always
be seen as to some degree presuppositionally linked to one another in the
immediate context of any given current event, I fear some conflation/
confusion/ overlapping of perspectives is probably inevitable.
Whether it is actually worth trying to defend such a position is of course
another matter (cf Steven's recent comments on useful and non-useful
hypotheses/ predictions), but that is what (I think) I'm trying to do.
But actually, I did keep your message, so let's have a look at it in some
more detail.
You wrote:
Patrick: In addition to representing what I have always hoped is Peirce's
developmental teleology, your description of sign function seems to me to
get to the heart of pragmatic discourse analysis in which conventional
sign structures and meanings ("syntactics" and "semantics") serve
principally as orientation to what the situated discourse is being used to
do.
I would only add that it is sometimes useful to recognize that a number of
differentiable processes occur simultaneously within the great "alpha"
process. There is the "action" processes associated with "life-forms."
There is the "motion/matter" processes associated with "non-life-forms."
(I'm using these terms only as gestures, fingers that point in a given
direction, and not as depictions.) The highly ephemeral acts of sign usage
are "real" events in several related but distinct processes--e.g, those
physical, physiological, psychological and sociological processes
necessary to communication acts.
My point here would be that it may be of interest to try to investigate/
describe in some more detail the possible relationships that may obtain or
"exist" between salient aspects of the "several related but distinct
processes" you mention above.
In this connection it has occurred to me that the notion of narrative
possible worlds as used by Eco, coupled with a dynamic notion of
transworld identity, where there can be some degree of transmission or
intersection of some salient aspects of actual events as these are "seen",
or made pertinent, by the "inhabitants" of each of the involved possible
worlds.
I sometimes feel that we have developed so specialised languages and norms
of communication in our different disciplinary fields that it is often
more and more difficult to find some common ground about which we can
communicate.
Mathematical and computational models provide one interesting, and perhaps
relevant means of doing this kind of thing.
Mathematics with its high level of abstraction has the advantage of being
open to systematically/ formally describing (or modelling) any kind of
physical or other phenomenon in processual terms.
A problem with this is that any model we make in this way will be
reductive in some sense or other, and we will only be able to suggest/
grasp a fairly vague idea of what may be going on in some domain or other
of our supposed "whole".
But mathematical models can certainly be used to "predict" and "confirm"
working hypotheses, at least to a certain extent
When computer science is brought in, coupled with narrative,
argumentational or explanatory forms of discourse and dynamic
visualisation technologies, this allows intersemiotic translations of
descriptive models into visual narrative forms that may be easier to
"intuitively" understand for non mathematicians.
It seems to me these different processes often get confused or conflated.
Existential "objects" are also events, but typically in a much slower
process that makes them available to our exteroception for comparatively
vast periods of time, which we think makes them "empirically" real,
extant.
Re-reading this makes me want to ask you what you meant here by
"exteroception"?
As quick and dirty as I can do it--(we should probably go off-line):
Studies of perception in psychology traditionally were limited to the
"stimulus object," that aspect of sensory experience derived from reponses
to environmental impingements, and especially the visual sensory responses.
Generally, "exteroception" consisted of sensory data from the so-called
"five senses." Exteroception reified gives us the "objective" or
"empirical" reality of the traditional western world, along with the
doctrine of imagistic imitation in thought, art and religion a la Hobbes,
Newton, and the Medieval Church on through Locke.
In the latter half of the prior century, perceptual studies took on a new
look, at
least in part because developmental studies and in part because of better
understanding
of the role of the brain's reticular activiating system which made sense of
the idea "meaning precedes
perception." One developmental argument can be found in MURPHY, G., and
HOCHBERG,
J. Perceptual development: some tentative hypotheses, Psychol Rev., 1951,
58, 332-349.
They described two other classes of sensory data, interoception (including
affect and drive states)
and proprioception (including motion, position, kinesis generally). These
classes of sensory data
were seen to be a part of a unitive, on-going organic process in experience,
and separable only in
representations of experience.
As a side note, I find this more holistic view of information processing,
coupled with the old notion
of "participation" helpful in operationalizing the concept
"intersubjectivity," perhaps especially for Schutz's phenomenology.
I think it is not very useful to speak of signs as existing in the same
process as existential objects, but if we must, perhaps we can say, "Yes,
signs exist, but much faster than objects do."
This I already commented...
Best regards, and thanks again Bill for your stimulating comments.
I return your kind comments and add best wishes for your provocative
theoretical work. I'll be delighted
if you square the circle and prove me wrong.
Bill
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