Dear Jim, list,
> Dear Ben, Folks--
>[Jim] Thanks for the reassuring clarification, Ben. Here's my thought on the
>matter for today.
>[Jim] The distinction between the knowledge we gain from direct acquaintance
>with an object verses the knowledge we gain of the same object through a
>symbolic sign of that object is that direct aquaintance is mediated by an
>actually indexed icon of the object whereas indirect symbolic aquaintance is
>mediated by an imputed icon of the object.
You've shifted the semiotic reference frame. For another mind my acquaintance
may be merely a sign -- an index with an icon. If they were my index & icon,
then, as per Peirce, I couldn't get acquaintance or experience from them. So we
note that most observers will not have direct access to the oberving mind in
question, and that therefore for most observers the experience belonging to the
observing mind in question will be a sign rather than an experience. And this
we call 'mediation.' It's not really mediation, though; it's only similar to
mediation. The genuine mediation by semiosis is in the fact that the observing
mind in question is in and subject to some underlying semiosis whereof the
observing mind in question is unconscious, and this involves unconsciousness
not only about objects, signs, and interpretants, but also even about
recognitions, (dis-)verifications, learnings. If it doesn't involve learning
and (dis-verification), then it's not semiosis, but merely preprogrammed
information processing which, apart from the perspective of the recipient,
learning, and evolution, is triadic -- source, encoding, decoding -- which is
stuff which probably does mediate at some deep unintelligent level. It is only
at the individual vegetable level that such a structure can be considered, in
some qualified sense, to comprehensively characterize a system.
The other observing minds need to avoid the move toward solipsism and, in any
case the move into vegetabilism, which is involved in failing to see that the
mind in question has experiences and observations which are not _that_ mind's
interpretations, even though those experiences and observations are not
themselves experiences and observations belonging to the other observing minds.
Those more tangible and visible and glossable indices and icons and symbols --
break it down into those? It really is not so unlike saying that we're just
atoms and molecules, but it's even less justified.
It is difficult enough to grasp the interpretiveness of those signs which
clarify in terms of values and interests and standards of practical bearing and
non-banality rather different than our own, the values and interests of other
species, other communities, other _kinds_. The interpretant selects
ramifications, specializing "down" from the universe represented by the sign.
It will be that much more difficult to grasp the recognitiveness of objects --
or I should say experiential subjections -- which are those of individual minds
other than our own, caught up in different places and times in the tapestry of
history and geography..
The analysis of experience which breaks experience down into mediative elements
of object, sign, and interpretant but not also of unconscious recognitions,
unconscious "experiences" of them in respect of each other, is simply leaving
something out.
And it involves an unnecessary complication of the language of description. I
see and handle the thing -- it is my focus of interest, and it has a certain
forcefulness and resistance, and a certain appearance. Calling those indices
and icons when I'm just interested in them for themselves complicates the issue
unnecessarily, and will lead to one's calling an icon's appearance also an
icon, and that second icon's appearance, in turn, also an icon. Meanwhile, the
unconscious mediation (which I agree is there) via indices and icons will also
have unconscious interpretants and verifications. At least, at the atomic
level, there is no appearance of little interpretant and verification
structures which go simply ignored. Thus the analysis of experience into
entirely non-experiential semiotic elements is less justified than the analysis
of mind/brain down to mere atoms.
By your reasoning and your use of the hidden semiotic-reference-frame shift,
one could likewise analyze the triad down to dyads and those down to monads (a
reductive analysis about which I went into some detail some months ago). All
defenses of the triad which work by the reduction of experience to
object-sign-interpretant that I've seen have involved the same abandonment of
triadist defenses against dyadism and monadism in order break tetradism's
defenses.
>[Jim] The meaning of symbols depends in part upon the reliability of
>linguistic conventions, customs and habits. The meaning of icons depends
>primarily upon the reliability of direct observation.
>[Jim] Ideally the meanings we assign to our symbols are rooted in aquaintance
>with the actual objects to which they refer, but customs take on a life of
>their own and are notoriously susceptible to the distorting influence of such
>factors as wishful thinking, blind allegiance to authority, tradition and the
>like. Science and common sense teach us that it is useful to periodically
>compare our actual icons with our theories and symbolic imputations of them.
If those "actual icons" are, in terms of practical bearing, our semiotic
objects, then it's trivial to call them icons. It's important that one can do
so, and the triviality is not trivial. They're icons in virtue of resembling
themselves as objects. They're indices in virtue of pointing themselves out as
objects. They (the actual singular objects) can even be symbol-replicas of
themselves as objects -- why not? The sign is not the object except in the
limit case where indeed it is. The symbol merely imputes quality or reaction
without presenting them, except in a limit case where it imputes just that
which it (or its replica) presents. Why not? But, all the same, this renaming
of things as signs rather than as objects is strictly a rhetorical procedure
and doesn't go to the argument, because it is generally positive-phenomenally
true that the mind often focuses on things as objects, subject matters, focuses
of interest, and the mind's doing so is essential to semiosis; otherwise for
the mind the semiosis would tend not to be _about_ anything.
>[Jim] Symbols provide indirect aquaintance with objects. Actual observation
>of objects provides direct aquaintance. However in both cases the aquaintance
>(in so far as it provides us with a conception of the object) is mediated by
>signs. In the case of direct aquaintance the sign is an icon. In the case of
>indirect aquaintance the sign is a symbol with an imputed icon.
>[Jim] Whenever we make comparisons we do so with signs. Mere otherness is
>basically dyadic. Comparison is fundamentally triadic. "A is not B" is not a
>comparison but merely an indication of otherness from which we gain no real
>sense of how A compares to B. On the other hand the analogy that "A is to B
>as B is to C" is a comparison which actually tells us something about the
>relative characters of the elements involved.
>[Jim] Comparing a collateral object with a symbol for a collateral object is
>really a matter of comparing the meaning of an actual icon with the meaning of
>an imputed icon. We are never in a position to compare an actual object with
>a sign of that object because we have no conception of objects outside of
>signs.
You've gotten to this point by _discarding the conception of the object_.
You've reduced the semiotic triad to a sign-interpretant _dyad_. The thing
which is the object is, in another frame of reference and interest, a sign.
Maybe it's a sign in virtue of it's representing simply itself, in which case
the sign-object distinction is merely formal. So, by reference/interest-frame
shift and/or by the case of the merely formal distinction, you've gotten
collateral experience to be among mere signs -- by the sacrifice of the object.
Also you've gotten into contradiction to Peirce. By "collateral" he does not
mean experience with the system of signs, he means what is collateral to the
system of signs in respect of the object. A seeming exception to this, which he
himself outlines clearly enough, is when the object is a sign in its signhood,
like the word _soleil_ as object taught by the teacher, where the definition is
the sign about the word, the student's understanding of that definition is
presumably the interpretant, and the teacher's using the word in sentences
provides the collateral experience. So, when the object is a sign in its
signhood, then the collateral-experience constraints still apply _mutatis
mutandis_.
>[Jim] Sometime I think, Ben, that you are just blowing off the notion that
>all our conceptions of objects are mediated by signs. You say you agree with
>this formulation but when it comes to the collateral object you seem to resort
>to the position that direct aquaintance with the collateral object is not
>"really" mediated by signs but outside of semiosis.
Where do I seem to do such? I've said, many times now, that I do think that
it's mediated, but not only by signs but also by acquaintances, experiences,
etc. There's some kind of learning in visual perception, for instance, which is
not merely after-image stuff, compensation for motion, etc. Some years ago
somebody came out with a bunch of complicated stereoscopic patterns such that
if you crossed your eyes you would eventually see a clearcut "plateau" facing
you with its top standing forth three-dimensionally from or "hovering above"
the rest. What struck me was that when I did this repeatedly with the same
stereoscopic pairs, my visual system seemed to learn to find the plateau very
quickly, though I was unconscious of the learning; it seemed to "just happen."
Without going into an extended speculative analysis, this seems to me like a
case of unconscious inference, learning, recognition, verification, my visual
system's learning from experience as if there were some unconscious-to-me sort
of experience which it were gaining from all this.
That's just an example. I wouldn't limit to the "more biological" systems the
unconscious semiosis which keeps from announcing itself. If I can say so
without committing myself to particular theories of psychology, it seems to me
that there's all kinds of unconscious, pre-conscious, semiconscious stuff going
on, some of it dealing with suppressing or amplifying logical implications
which are "just there," I mean not "just there" but there not because biology
or psychology specifically "put" them there but because in evolving a mind
capable of inference processes, they've opened the mind and the world in which
it is embedded to being determined by general things like pi and other abstract
forms and many other things. This sounds like saying that the mind opens a door
to Platonia, a door through which determination rushes into the mind and from
thence into the rest of the world, and I wouldn't take that literally, like as
if I were talking only about Platonia and pure mathematical forms, or as if
Platonia were someplace. Still, signs and recognitions and inference can be,
let's say, really and actually powerful, and so a mind seems to need a good
deal of unconscious "buffering," "amplification," etc., or some such things. I
guess what I'm wondering is whether there's some sort of general,
cenoscopic-level necessity for a mind to be partly unconscious. But that leads
into the question of what consciousness is, and I find that a really difficult
one.
Now, the question arises, given the rough definition of my sense of "direct"
which I just gave to Bill -- in what sense do I think that a direct experience
is mediated if in effect I think that it's mediated by things which "keep
themselves out of the way" and don't make much difference to the "brute"
determination incoming to the mind? Isn't all that direct experience mediated
by the mind's past experience, doesn't the mind fit it into its world in ways
which objectify it, represent it, interpret it, and establish it in various
degree and respects? Well, yes, the direct experience is mediated in those
ways, or else it wouldn't be experience, at least not intelligent experience.
I'm not sure how to put this, since I'm improvising now, just as I did in my
definition of "direct" to Bill. The experience is direct and "smoothly"
mediated by past experience NOT because prior experience makes no difference to
it, but rather insofar as the differences which past experience makes come into
relief by consideration of would-have-beens, consideration of how the mind
would have cognized if its past experience had been different, all such that
_within_ the single actual situation the mediation is not working as a
significant _variable_. Come to think of it, people who continually focus on
would-bes and would-have-beens in their personal lives at every level ("nice
restaurant, but what if we had gone to the other one?") ("What if I had married
so-&-so?") are said to have trouble experiencing things "directly,"
experiencing them "for what they are" -- they're so busy "living in the
conditional" -- sounds like a song. One thing that I'm sure of -- I'll want to
keep an idea of "shortest distance" in my definition of "direct" -- though it
won't always be the "shortest physical distance, a spacetime geodesic" etc. - I
mean by a parsimonious, extremally short "path" in whatever _practical_ sense.
>[Jim] But what Peirce means (as I understand him) is that the collateral
>object is not actually iconized in the symbol that stands for it but is merely
>imputed to be iconized. To experience the actual icon we must experience the
>collateral object itself. That is the sense in which the collateral object is
>outside the symbol but not outside semiosis.
Well, I keep saying that the object and the experience of it are not outside
semiosis. But I include in semiosis -- as inference process and as inquiry
process -- the experience formed as collateral to object, sign, and
interpretant in respect of one another. I justify it by reference to the
powerful logically determinational role of such experience. And that's what's
outside the relevant sign system. But the relevant sign system does not, in my
view, provide all the essential elements for a given semiosis, nor do I think
that said sign system plus the object provide all the essential elements. There
must be experience of the object and indeed of the sign system. The word
"semiosis" comes ultimately from a Greek root meaning "sign." Yet, to equate
semiosis with inference process and inquiry process, is to say that semiosis is
not merely a sign process -- it has not only signs in two aspects -- (1)
"pre-interpretant" or interpretand sign and (2) the interpretant sign -- but
also two objects, which are the semiotic object and the experiential subject or
subjection of the mind. Recognitive experiences and the objects which form
aspects of them are in fact the semiotic objects of much experience.
>[Jim] One of the recurring problems I personally have in understanding Peirce
>is that I am often unsure in a particular instance whether he is using the
>term sign to refer to a symbol, an icon or an index. Morevover when it comes
>to icons and indexes I am often unclear as to whether he means them as signs
>or as degenerate signs. Maybe this is where I am going astray in my present
>analysis of the role of the collateral object in the verification of the sign.
I don't know. Generally when Peirce says "sign" I take him to mean any kind of
sign unless there's something in the context to make me think that he means a
specific kind of sign. That's with the exception of the early writings like "On
a New List of Catories" whereing his usual icon - index - symbol trichotomy
appears as {"likeness"} - {"sign" or "index"} - {"general sign" or "symbol"}
--. As to index or icon as signs or degenerate signs, I'm not sure what are the
ramifications which you're looking at.
>[Jim] In anycase I continue to find this discussion helpful. Best wishes to
>all--
I hope the discussion is helpful. It's certainly been helping me. I said a week
or so ago that I wanted to go quiet, and started getting a bit more
harder-edged than usual and all that. The whole thing seems to have had the
predictable (I should have foreseen it, but I really didn't)
reverse-psychological effect and I'm getting all the argument that I can
handle. Get regular work? Oh yeah, I have to get around to that. I see you've
written me another post. I've some chores and some existing to do first, so
till later today --
Best,
Ben
http://tetrast.blogspot.com/
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