List, Just to give a concrete example, I'll venture here a phenomenological analysis of a paragraph of text that was posted to the list recently. You will notice in this text the familiar phenomenon of cherry-picking quotations to reinforce an argument, but the phenomenon I'd like to analyze here is less common and less visible to the casual reader. Here's the text, exactly as it appeared on the list:
And since matter-is-mind within Peircean analysis, then, this triadic process is operative throughout the physical, chemical, biological and conceptual realms. 'Matter is effete mind" 6.25. And "what we call matter is not completely dead bu is merely mind hidebound with habits" 6.158. "he whole action of the mind [is] a part of the physical universe" 6.61 Obviously the element of Thirdness is predominant in this item, as it is in any text, especially a symbol composed of words. (It is also an "intellectual construction," to use a term that has occurred repeatedly in this thread.) Its Secondness consists primarily in its reactivity to other actual texts (i.e. Secondness to them), but also in its specific references directing our attention to one of the texts to which it is Second, Volume 6 of the Collected Papers of C.S. Peirce. These (shorthand) references are symbols functioning indexically. Its Firstness is its 'theme' or unifying idea, which does not exist in the strict Peircean sense until it is embodied. I'll use "matter-is-mind" as a shorthand for its verbal embodiment in this text. The next phrase, "within Peircean analysis", might represent the Firstness of the Secondness of this text, as it presupposes the prior (and continuing) existence of a discipline called "Peircean analysis" and situates matter-is-mind as characteristic of that discipline, without giving us any further information about it. Now we can turn to the "less common and less visible" phenomenon which occurs in this text. For that purpose I'll begin with the indexical citation at the very end of the text. If we actually look up the prior text it refers to, we find it embedded in an 1892 text by Peirce entitled "The Doctrine of Necessity Examined," Peirce's attack on the determinism which was very much in vogue at the time, and the article where he introduced his anti-necessitarian doctrine tychism (see the introduction to CP 8 for details). The paragraph cited in the text above, CP 6.61, begins with one of many reasons Peirce gives for rejecting the doctrine of the necessitarians: "Necessitarianism cannot logically stop short of making the whole action of the mind a part of the physical universe." But in the text we are analyzing, this text is "quoted" as follows: "he whole action of the mind [is] a part of the physical universe" 6.61. The missing first letter of "the" is just an ordinary typo, but the "quote" as a whole exemplifies the phenomenon of misquotation. It not only represents the original text inaccurately, it represents Peirce as asserting an idea which in fact he was ascribing to the necessitarians, against whose doctrine he was arguing. (The rest of Peirce's paragraph goes on to explain why that idea is untenable.) A further question arises when we focus on the Thirdness of this phenomenon, because then we have to consider the interpretant of the text we are examining (as well as its putative object, "Peircean analysis," and the idea which it predicates of that object, "mind-is-matter.") If we take the interpretant as the information conveyed to the reader, we ought to ask whether this particular misquotation belongs to the species of misinformation or disinformation. This distinction has become a matter of public debate lately, especially in the U.S., where it makes a crucial pragmatic difference whether a disseminated untruth is merely mistaken or was actually intended to deceive. Donald Trump's lies about the "stolen election" are a paradigmatic example: were they "honest mistakes" (because he was himself misinformed) or were they criminal acts intended to subvert American democracy? Should disinformation sites be shut down by the social media platforms on which they appear? The question is nowhere near so consequential in the case of the misquotation we are analyzing, but it still makes a pragmatic difference. If it was just an "honest mistake" on the writer's part, an honest scholar would own up to it when it was flagged, and perhaps correct it. But if it deliberately misrepresented Peirce's views as conforming to the writer's own idea, then it would be much more damaging to the scholar's reputation for trustworthiness, at least among those familiar enough with Peirce's writings to recognize the misrepresentation. And if that kind of "disquotation", to coin a term, emerged over time as a recognizable pattern in the writer's work, especially within a pattern of quoting only phrases out of context and rarely whole sentences, trust would simply evaporate. This was an attempt to begin with a Peircean phenomenological analysis of a text-as-phenomenon and develop it step by step into a semiotic (and informational and pragmaticistic) analysis. I'm not sure whether it's the kind of analysis that other contributors to this thread have been suggesting, but it's about as close as I can come, for now anyway. Gary f.
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