[peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" metaphor

[Benjamin Udell]

Charles, Jim, Gary, Joe, Jacob, list,   >[Charles] I didn't meant to intimate that you are inarticulate or that I had no inkling of how your position differs from Peirce's.  I have asked for additional clarification because I have been trying to formulate for myself a reasonably succinct statement of your position relative to Pierce's that might serve as a benchmark for further conversation.  I have suspected that in addition to your penchant for "quadricity" you might disagree with Peirce on some ontological, epistemological, and phenomenological issues which, in responding to my posts, your might address, and which, it seems to me that, somewhat obliquely, in your last two posts you have.  Assuming that what I have referred to as assessing the "fidelity" of a sign's representation of it object is or includes what you are calling "verification," and, without going into further detail, here is how I presently see it.   >[Charles] I understand Peirce to say that there are two interrelated but distinguishable semiosical triads, namely, the triad (Interpreter - Sign - Object) and the triad (Interpretant - Sign - Object).    I think that, when Peirce uses the word "interpreter," he usually intends to refer to the mind or intelligence which is doing the interpreting. If that's the case, then, since Peirce says that semiosis _always_ involves a mind or quasi-mind, it follows that the elements Object - Sign - Interpretant - (Quasi-)Mind ((Quasi-)Interpreter) are all always involved in semiosis.  I doubt however, that Peirce regarded them as two distinguishable triads which add anything genuine-polyadically new to each other (much less as a tetrad), and or as involving some relation unaccounted for in the Object-Sign-Interpretant triad.  I'd say that, in Peircean terms, the mind is indeed a grand version of the interpretant; it's a grand interpretant.  However, I take this Peircean view as analogous to a view that the info-theoretic recipient or, more exactly, a grand version of the info-theoretic recipient, is just a grand version of the decoding, which would be to miss the reasons _why_ the recipient catches redundancies and inconsistencies other than those caught by the decoding, as I discussed in an earlier post "Re: The "composite photograph" metaphor", which I sent August 12, 2006 (a minute before midnight, so you may have it as August 13th) and which gmane has here http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/1292 . What I'm saying is that I think that the mind, intelligence, or person, is not a only a grand object, a grand sign, and a grand interpretant, but instead also a grand recognition. (I don't quickly find such definition of "mind" by Peirce as might lead me to a word other than "grand" in this context, but perhaps there is one.)    If we were standing on the street and talking informally, I would say, "interpretants are not, per se, substantiated, and that's because the experience relevant for doing so is outside them; so I don't see why you would suppose that they would ever substantiate anything, no matter what lengths and layers of interpretation are laid on." If you denied it, I'd ask, which part do you deny -- that they are not, per se, substantiated? That the experience relevant for doing so is outside them? That, being unsubstantiated, they can't substantiate other things? How on earth could they do that without a context shift, a change of subject (as for instance a conjecture does indeed prove that somebody's able to do some conjecturing)? And so forth. And at bottom, I'd be wondering, _why would a bunch of people think that lots of interpretation, lots of construing, would prove anything? It's just a bunch of interpretation._   I've wondered, too speculatively perhaps, once or twice whether it's because of the neologism "interpretant." It can make one think that the idea involves some technical sense which removes it from the ordinary sense of "interpretation." But the only sense to which it narrows down the word "interpretation" is that of an interpretational product, or the product's content, as opposed to the interpretational activity/process leading up to it (and, of course, against Tom Short I argued that the neologism was explainable as being a good idea, and as being seen by Peirce as a good idea, in that regard for various reasons; but I suppose that there are some things which an anti-neologismist will never understand (sigh)).  And the only way that anybody's suggested whereby the word "interpretant" expands on the word "interpretation," is in making more opportunity to see that _the interpretation is not necessarily a human interpretation_  (even Tom replied that that was a good explanation for Peirce's neologism). Apart from those considerations, an interpretant is just an interpretation.  After all, the interpretant does not give experience of the object. Experience of the interpretant does not give experience of the object. Etc. However, by the time one encounters Peirce's discussions of collateral experience and sees that experience of the object is "outside the interpretant," one may already have formed a rather hardened sense about the interpretant as something which could be verificatory about the object.  But, as I've said, this is probably too speculative, and moreover it would require still more of a stretch to adapt such an explanation to Peirce himself personally.   >[Charles] Your references to extrasemiosical collateral experience appear to me to focus on the triad (Interpreter - Sign - Object) and to isolate the (Interpreter - Object) relation (extrasemiosical collateral experience) from an Interpreter's relation to signs, interpretants of signs, and objects of signs--the semiosical (Interpretant - Sign - Object) relation.  That is, there is an immediate--non-mediated and, hence, cognitively autonomous relation between cognizing subjects and objects consisting of phenomena and/or things in themselves who are in some sense able to "see" or "recognize" objects and relations between and among objects as they _are_ independent of how they are represented by signs and their interpretants.  On this account of cognition, signs and systems of signs are "instrumental" auxiliaries to cognition and their semiosical instrumentality is subject to being and is consciously or unconsciously continuously being extrasemiosically evaluated, validated, or "verified" by cognizing subjects; a process which Peirce, who makes cognition and cognitive growth an exclusively semiosical process, ignores.   Partly we get into a question of what one means by "semiosis" -- in the Peircean sense I'm talking about something "outside" semiosis -- but, as I've said in various posts, I am not discussing an unmediated cognition.   I said, in August 19, 2006 [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" metaphor http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/1317 : 66~~~ "To say that establishment or verification are a fourth element is to say that, in being mediated by signs and interpretants, experience is also mediated -- or is, at any rate, structured and restructured -- by establishments and verifications, in the small and in the large. " Here I meant that some might argue that this is not "mediation" in the strictest sense, that sense in which for instance one says that the sign mediates between object and interpretant, but the interpretant does not mediate between object and sign. ~~~99   I said, August 12/13, 2006 [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" metaphor http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/1292 : 66~~~ There is this experience, of them collaterally to one another, which seems, for its part, the experience, to rely on mediation by some unconscious substrate such that one's experience of object, sign, and interpretant is direct but mediated. But if this unconscious substrate does not itself involve unconscious recognition and unconscious experience, then it is a mistake to suppose it to be an inferential, semiotic process at all -- it is instead at best an information process basically vegetable-organismic in kind, further analyzable into material and mechanical processes, though, at every stage of the reduction, we know that something is lost.  However, as I said, there seems good reason to think that there _are_ unconscious inference processes. My guess is that they "work their way down" pretty deep, and get rather strange, but are still inference processes. ~~~99   I said, in July 29, 2006 [peirce-l] Re: MS 399.663f On the sign as surrogate http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/1270 : 66~~~ I hope it's clear now that I agree that it's all mediated. That doesn't mean that it's not sometimes direct. Peirce distinguishes between "immediate" and "direct." A lens, for instance, mediates, but one sees directly through the lens and indeed could not see clearly at all but for certain lenses." ~~~99   I both agree and disagree with Jim's statement that "That one has some sort of non-representational "knowledge" of objects against which one can compare or verify one's representational or semiotic knowledge . . ." seems to be a commonplace notion that Peirce rejects."   I agree insofar as I agree that Peirce rejects some sort of unmediated, non-semiosic or extra-semiosic knowledge which would arise without the involvement of representation. Moreover, in that regard, I agree with Peirce in rejecting it.   I disagree insofar as I hold that Peirce talks about _direct but mediated_ experiences of objects and insofar as Jim's thinking tends to lead to the elimination of the object altogether behind logically bad regression, an infinity of layers of representations, the nearest of which is the only thing which one is "actually observing" and which one in fact can't observe since one can observe only a representation of it, which in turn one also can't observe, etc., etc., etc.  If you are observing -- soever mediately but still directly -- a thing as your focus of interest, then not only is it, indeed, your semiotic object, your subject matter, but, also, you are observing it directly, though soever mediately, as your semiotic object. If, instead, you are observing it for that which it conveys to you about some other object, then you are observing it as a sign; and you are observing (soever mediately) your sign, and not some further interposed sign about your sign.  I don't think that Peirce rejects that sort of thing and I agree with Peirce in not rejecting it.   But as to an "unmediated cognition," I'm arguing (1) that that simply is a confused way to look at it, because these "extrasemiosic channels" are themselves _not unmediated_ (though they can be direct), but instead _are semioses_ which (A) happen not to be in question as semioses at the time (like the interpretant's separate relation to the object, which also is analyzable into a semiosis, and like the recipient's undiagrammed "other ways" of knowing about the source) and (B) may be largely unconscious (e.g., processes involved in perception), and (C) are outside only of a given semiosis up to the point in its evolution where it arranges for them (e.g., scientific "special experiences") or takes them in, and (2) that furthermore it is the "learningful" nature of semiosis to incorporate them into itself over time. I'm saying that semiosis -- deliberate or nondeliberate, controlled or uncontrolled, conscious or unconscious, in the large or in the small -- consists of elements {Object - Sign - Interpretant - Recognition (verification, establishment, etc.)} and that a recognition is not "outside of" semiosis a.k.a. the inference process, but instead involves semiosis's checking itself (spot-checking at least) against that which it represents, be it via retained experiences which retain their experiential substantiative legitimacy or via newly acquired experiences, and checking itself not just in the sense of cybernetic feedback governing behavior, but in the sense of learning which leads to reinforcement, undermining, augmenting, diminishing, renovation, redesign, etc., etc., of the _semiosic system_'s very structure, design, habits (including habits of objectification, representation, interpretation, and establishment), the semiosic system's very character.  An individual vegetable organism does not evolve. A mind _does_ evolve.   Best, Ben Udell http://tetrast.blogspot.com/ --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com