[PEIRCE-L] RE: signs, correlates, and triadic relations
Continuing with "Nomenclature and Divisions of Triadic Relations":
After introducing the three trichotomies of signs, Peirce embarks on a
digression (from his main task of classification) which is mainly about the
nature of propositions and arguments and the difference between them. But
this 'digression' is very important for bringing us back to the logical
context of the whole essay, and for grounding it in the pragmatic realm of
"mental acts," which when uttered become what we call "speech acts". Here
I'll present CP 2.252 in full, beginning with the definition of "argument"
which came at the end of my last post in this thread.
CP 2.252. An Argument is a Sign which, for its Interpretant, is a Sign of
law. Or we may say that a Rheme is a sign which is understood to represent
its object in its characters merely; that a Dicisign is a sign which is
understood to represent its object in respect to actual existence; and that
an Argument is a Sign which is understood to represent its Object in its
character as Sign. Since these definitions touch upon points at this time
much in dispute, a word may be added in defence of them. A question often
put is: What is the essence of a Judgment? A judgment is the mental act by
which the judger seeks to impress upon himself the truth of a proposition.
It is much the same as an act of asserting the proposition, or going before
a notary and assuming formal responsibility for its truth, except that those
acts are intended to affect others, while the judgment is only intended to
affect oneself. However, the logician, as such, cares not what the
psychological nature of the act of judging may be. The question for him is:
What is the nature of the sort of sign of which a principal variety is
called a proposition, which is the matter upon which the act of judging is
exercised? The proposition need not be asserted or judged. It may be
contemplated as a sign capable of being asserted or denied. This sign itself
retains its full meaning whether it be actually asserted or not. The
peculiarity of it, therefore, lies in its mode of meaning; and to say this
is to say that its peculiarity lies in its relation to its interpretant. The
proposition professes to be really affected by the actual existent or real
law to which it refers. The argument makes the same pretension, but that is
not the principal pretension of the argument. The rheme makes no such
pretension.
A few years after the Syllabus, Peirce remarked in a letter to Welby that he
would like to "write a little book on 'The Conduct of Thoughts'" - that is,
on how thoughts, considered as signs, behave; and he would focus on "what we
may, from one point of view, regard as the principal kind of signs," namely
dicisigns (SS 195-7, EP2:477-8). In the Syllabus he had not yet coined the
term "semiosis" for the behavior of signs, but we can see at least the
beginnings of Peirce's concern with what signs (especially propositions) do
in this paragraph of NDTR. The claim that the proposition "professes to be
really affected by the actual existent or real law to which it refers" is a
version of the claim that the proposition (or its not-necessarily-symbolic
basis, the dicisign) represents itself as well as its object. As Peirce put
it in the aforementioned letter, in the dicisign "there is one distinct part
appropriated to representing the object, and another to representing how
this very sign itself represents that object.. In 'John is in love with
Helen' the object signified is the pair, John and Helen. But the 'is in love
with' signifies the form this sign represents itself to represent
John-and-Helen's Form to be." (That part is the rheme involved in the
dicisign.)
The next paragraph, and my next post, will consider how the argument also
"professes" or represents itself, but takes this recursive conduct to
another level.
Gary f.
} Everything which is present to us is a phenomenal manifestation of
ourselves. [Peirce] {
http://gnusystems.ca/wp/ }{ Turning Signs gateway
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[PEIRCE-L] When worlds collide
New blog post: Peirce on Secondness, selfhood and reality. http://gnusystems.ca/wp/2016/01/when-worlds-collide-and-collude/ gary f. - PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
Re: RE: [PEIRCE-L] signs, correlates, and triadic relations - The union of the units unifies the unity
Jerry, list, Jerry, you wrote: The terms "coupling" and "grammar" are used in the senses of CSP. Coupling > referring to CSP's paper on the logic of Copula. Grammar in the typical > sense that that one may find in the classical text by Otto Jesperson, *The > Philosophy of Grammar *or in CSP's writings*.* Ah, coupling in the sense of the copula. That is very helpful, thank you. As for grammar, it is clear that you mean speculative grammar then, though this has not always been clear to me in your posts using the term. Of course speculative grammar is not the same thing as syntax, since a division between syntax and semantics does not fit neatly in Peirce's speculative grammar. This is largely because of the idea of the sign as a triadic relation, which is not simply a syntactical structure to which a semantics can be applied, but rather the very structure of meaning. The reason I have been confused is that it has sometimes seemed to me that you meant syntax rather than speculative grammar. "Unit" being a term of one-ness, such as the 7 basic units of physics > (mass, distance, time, temperature, light, electricity and "mole". Or > integers as numbers. Equally applicable to the basic units of chemistry (92 > different logical structures with names) and biology (cells, etc). Take > you pick for meaningfulness of the term for you and for your personal > philosophy. Sounds good. I don't see this as necessarily in disagreement with what I said, so I am content to leave it at that. But, you wrote: > Going beyond the part of the real that we perceive, and grasping it as a > whole, requires the whole work of understanding. > This is what motivated my questions: > In what sense are your using "whole-ness" where the suffix -ness infers > changing an adjective into a noun -in the grammatical sense of the > wholeness of the smoke or the sense of the wholeness of interpretation? Well, I did not use the term "whole-ness", so I suppose you meant that when I use the term "whole", in one case it at least really means "whole-ness". For one, I don't see the whole of the smoke as something grammatical, but ontological. The whole of interpretation, on the other hand, will be semiotic(al?), which will include the grammatical. I think this answers your question, though it suggests that the idea of the whole is different in kind in the case of smoke from what it is in the case of interpretation. I am not prepared at this time to articulate the differences in these kinds of wholes, because I have an intellectual project I am going to be devoting myself to for a few months. Is it correct to read this paragraph that for the term "smoke", one can > assign an arbitrary number of different percepts? And hence, the each > different percept would lead to a different perceptual judgment? In other > words, in this specific case, the premises implicit to the scenario can > lead to an arbitrary number of arguments that are consistent with symbols > and legisigns? Much hinges on the sense of 'arbitrary' here. If by arbitrary, you mean in the sense of judgement as in arbitration, there is some truth to that. If by arbitrary you mean willy-nilly or at random, then no. Consider that there are different experiences we have of smoke. Suppose one had an experience of smoke three days ago when sitting by a fireplace. Now suppose one has an experience of smoke right now from someone smoking a cigarette nearby. These are two different experiences, with different percepts, resulting in different perceptual judgments. But the term 'smoke' is still applied to both. If we wanted to treat of specific experiences of smoke such that we could classify different kinds of smoke, there would be a need for arbitrating which percepts of smoke had to with which specific kinds of smoke. This would help in identifying different chemical components, which later could help us to identify new experiences of smoke as being of one kind or another, and so understand what the smoke is composed of when it is experienced, and thus of how the smoke is related to other percepts and what might be expected in future percepts in the vicinity of the smoke. I'm not altogether sure I understood what the question was driving at though, so I can only hope this helps clarify my way of thinking about it. What do you wish to express when you think of "correspondence" in this > context of yoking? Well, I thought that I had just made that clear. Allow me to quote myself from the passage to which you responded with this question, which I think answers the question: "Put in terms of correspondence, I suppose that the fact that the object responds to our interactions in the way we predict is what reveals that there is a correspondence between our concept of the object and the object as it is in itself." Correspondence, then, is just the fact that the object responds in the way we predict it will, when we interact with it. If it does not, then our idea of the object fai
