from:"Frederik Stjernfelt"

Dear Franklin, lists,

Many important questions indeed!

I concur with Gary that Frederik's post was a very informative post, 
particularly the last part of it.

Depends upon how you define empiricist. I do not deny that Peirce strongly 
emphasized the role of empirical knowledge!

And what definition of empiricist do you think would apply to Peirce? Simply 
someone who strongly emphasized the role of empirical knowledge, while 
nevertheless advocating non-empirical knowledge as well?

Something like that. P seldom used the word empiricist. Sometimes he refers 
to the British empiricists, sometimes to James' radical empiricism which he 
equated with pragmatism. I do not remember seeing him using it about himself. 
Of course the later version of empiricism a la Vienna (sense data + 
tautological logic) had not seen the light of day at the time so he could not 
refer to that (and he was definitely not an empiricist in that narrow sense) …

I would not say it was the entire point. The initial point was simply to find 
out what in the world those Kandinskys were really about ...

In a post in the Ch.9 thread, I noted that I agreed with you about the 
Kandinskys, that they should have been included in publication of the Ms. 
However, after going through the chapter, you ended up saying that it was all a 
red herring, and ultimately led to theorematic reasoning as the way to take 
instead towards hidden properties and natural kinds. In the context of the book 
as a whole, which is explicitly aimed at introducing and defending the dicisign 
idea in order to advance your work from Diagrammatology, I think it clear that 
the overall take-away point of the chapter is its significance for diagrammatic 
reasoning, and theorematic reasoning in particular. But yes, I overstated it 
when I said that it was the entire point. I apologize for overstating my case.

I suggest P gave up the Kandinskys graphical experiment because he realized 
it led nowhere in its present shape - in that sense it was a red herring. I 
guess he realized that in order to address real kinds, such figures would have 
to be made up of graphical properties with formal dependency relations between 
them - which was not the case in the graphical formalism he was experimenting 
with in that case. But if that is the case,  that was no small result, and I 
think the whole development of the notion of icon, diagram, and of theorematic 
reasoning comes out of that train of thought in P

I had said: In the thread for Ch. 9, I already noted that I couldn't find in 
the quoted passage from Peirce where he says that a definition of natural kinds 
is that they are classes which have more properties than their definition 
(NP, p.255).

You replied: It is in the OLEC - Writings vol. 1, page 418. I think there is 
an error in the ref. saying 419, sorry for that.

This is really confusing. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of the Writings. 
What I do have is your book and the online copy of ULEC at 
cspeirce.comhttp://cspeirce.com/. In your book (p.234, 2nd fn), you noted 
that OLEC is published as ULEC in Writings vol. 2, not vol.1, and the pages are 
70-86; so they do not include 418 or 419. As to any mention of Writings vol. 1 
and p.419, I do not see that anywhere in Ch.9. Is there a different version 
published in W 1 as well, which includes discussion of natural kinds? The ULEC 
copy at cspeirce.comhttp://cspeirce.com/ contains no such reference to 
natural kinds. Furthermore, you say on p.255 the following: In the brief 
paragraph preceding the graphical experiments of Ms. 725, Peirce proposes no 
less than three different definitions of natural classes, two of them negative: 
they are 1) classes which are not mere intersections of simpler natural 
classes, 2) classes which have more properties than their definition, 3) 
classes without [sic] an Area. As to the brief paragraph you quote in full 
that is an addendum discussing natural kinds, I can find no reference regarding 
classes which have more properties than their definition. Please help me out 
here?

Frankly, I am away in a summer house right now so I cannot consult my Writings 
copies either. The ref. in ch. 9 is to W 1, 418 and the year is given there as 
1866, is it not? As far as I can find on the internet,  this ref.  is correct, 
and the text referred to is not the OLEC, but the fourth Lowell lecture. So the 
error is not in that reference, but  rather in the sentence you quote where I 
ascribe that position to MS. 725 as well.

But analytic quantities are also quantities - so you can also multiply them to 
give an area?

Looking at paragraph 6 of the ULEC at cspeirce.comhttp://cspeirce.com/, we 
can see that Peirce would say we cannot. Introducing the multiplication of 
breadth and depth is preceded by this statement in the text: By breadth and 
depth, without an adjective, I shall hereafter mean the informed breadth and 
depth. This will of course include the breadth and depth mentioned in

[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8553] Re: Natural Propositions,

Dear Gary, lists -

You are right about the structure of the book. In some sense, chapters 1-7 
conduct one long argument centered around the Dicisign concept, while chapters 
8-11 are more like addenda going in different directions, though not entirely 
unrelated.

Best
F

Den 01/05/2015 kl. 15.36 skrev Gary Fuhrman 
g...@gnusystems.camailto:g...@gnusystems.ca
:

Frederik, Franklin, lists,

This is a very helpful post (as usual for Frederik!) and does clarify the 
nature of theorematic reasoning, but I still have to admit that the chapter 
about the “Kandinskys” and the follow-up to it strike me as more of an appendix 
to the book than an integral part of its argument. I know Franklin is working 
on the question of how Chapter 10 relates to the book, so I’m looking forward 
to that (and to Frederik’s response) as a good way of bringing our seminar to a 
close. I think I can speak for others who haven’t posted much lately in saying 
that this latter part of the seminar has been very fruitful.

Gary f.


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8480] Natural Propositions. Compositionality

Dear Joseph, lists -

H …

I think that the answer must be yes. In an event, e.g. the fall of a stone, you 
may prescind 1.  the qualities (the weight of the stone), 2.  the thisness 
(this event, involving this particular stone here-and-now) and finally you may 
discriminate the regularity 3. that stones in a field of gravity, in general, 
are subjected to a force …

Best,
F

Den 27/04/2015 kl. 00.34 skrev 
joe.bren...@bluewin.chmailto:joe.bren...@bluewin.ch:

Frederik,

Thank you for this clear statement of the relations between categories qua 
categories. Do the same types of distinction apply to the relations between the 
members of the categories? I feel that this question may be badly posed, so 
please let me try this: for any process in which Thirdness, Secondness and 
Firstness are instantiated do the indicated relations apply?

If the answer to this is no, is this what it is implied by the absence of 
compositionality?

Thank you,

Joseph

Message d'origine
De : stj...@hum.ku.dkmailto:stj...@hum.ku.dk
Date : 26/04/2015 - 13:33 (PST)
À : biosemiot...@lists.ut.eemailto:biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee, 
PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edumailto:PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edu
Objet : [biosemiotics:8477] Re: Natural Propositions,

Dear Gary, John, lists

It is correct that Firstness is no abstraction in the sense of Hypostatic 
Abstraction (even if the term Firstness is such an abstraction). But Firstness 
as such is an abstraction in the sense of prescission or prescissive 
abstraction - It is often overlooked how P's categories, already from their 
emergence in the 1860s, are tightly connected with the epistemologic means of 
accessing them - namely, his three types of distinction, dissociation,  
prescission and discrimination, respectively.
In Diagrammatology ch. 11 (2007), I made this summary:

(…)  the three categories are interrelated as follows (arrow here meaning 
possibility of distinction; broken arrow impossibility):

1. --/-- 2.   2. --/-- 3.

The categories may not be dissociated.

1.   2. 1. --/-- 2.
2.   3. 2. --/-- 3.
1.   3. 1. --/-- 3.

A lower category may be prescinded from a higher, not vice versa.

1.   2. 1.  2.
2.   3. 2.  3.
1.   3. 1.  3.

All categories may be discriminated from the others.

So, 3. necessrily involves 2. and 1., and 2. involves 1. - so that 1. can be 
reached by prescission from 3. and 2. Thus 1. is not first in any temporal or 
phenomenological sense - it is not like we begin with firstness in order to 
build up the higher categories - rather, we isolate, by prescission, the lower 
from taking our point of departure in the higher.
In cognition, this corresponds to the idea that we are always-already within 
the chain of inferences from one proposition to the next - but preconditions of 
that chain in terms of simpler signs (e.g. tones, tokens, icons, indices, 
rhemas) may be adressed by prescission (so that the whole semiotic theory forms 
a sort of anatomy of the chain of arguments which is really, as a whole, the 
starting point). This is why neither semiotics nor, correlatively, metaphysics 
are compositional in Peirce.

Best
F



Den 26/04/2015 kl. 18.04 skrev Gary Richmond 
gary.richm...@gmail.commailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com
:

John,

The percept within the perceptual judgment--as I noted Nathan Houser as 
saying--is a firstness. The percept is not an abstraction. As a sign its a 
rhematic iconic qualisign.

Best,

Gary





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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8547] Re: Natural Propositions,

Dear Franklin, lists,
:
Frederik, thank you for sending this off-list exchange to the lists. I think 
Tommi explicated more fully my own concerns regarding abduction and the a 
priori, and your response is very helpful for understanding your view. I can 
hardly believe that you deny Peirce is an empiricist, but I suppose I will have 
to accept it and let it go at that.

Depends upon how you define empiricist. I do not deny that Peirce strongly 
emphasized the role of empirical knowledge!

I too share Tommi's concerns. It seems to me that most folks here don't 
understand that you view theorematic reasoning as the road to identifying 
natural kinds, although it is clear from your concluding paragraphs in Ch. 9 
that this is exactly what you believe; indeed, that was the entire point of 
writing that chapter, was it not?

I would not say it was the entire point. The initial point was simply to find 
out what in the world those Kandinskys were really about ...

But in the realm of such forms, we are back to diagrams and diagrammatical 
reasoning. And here, again, it remains central to Peirce that such diagrams may 
give occasion of 'theorematic reasoning' whose aim it is exactly to discover 
properties of their objects which were not mentioned in the explicit 
construction of the diagram--corresponding to the definition of the class.

So the idea of the additional, hidden properties to be deduced kept their 
place in Peirce's doctrine, so that the 'system of forms' of the 'Minute Logic' 
may give rise to natural classes for the same reasons sketchily outlined in MS. 
725. So, the strange drawings at the end of that Ms. may have put him on an 
important track, realizing that the fascinating diagrammatic experiments with 
Cows and Red Cows were originally motivated by a red herring. (NP, p.257)

In the thread for Ch. 9, I already noted that I couldn't find in the quoted 
passage from Peirce where he says that a definition of natural kinds is that 
they are classes which have more properties than their definition (NP, p.255).

It is in the OLEC - Writings vol. 1, page 418. I think there is an error in the 
ref. saying 419, sorry for that.

I also gave in that post a response to a statement made on the same page, It 
is hard to see why Red Cows should not have an Area in the simple b x d sense 
defined in the OLEC; as defined in the OLEC, it makes perfect sense because 
artificial classes cannot involve synthetic propositions, only analytic logical 
quantity of breadth and depth.

But analytic quantities are also quantities - so you can also multiply them to 
give an area?

The position that natural kinds must have an area, or information, is still 
important, as is the point that area or information has to do with synthetic 
propositions, and not merely the analytical ones found in deductive reasoning, 
including theorematic diagrammatic reasoning. Theorematic reasoning cannot be 
the way we get to natural kinds.

Peirce's point in theorematic reasoning is that there are deductive reasonings 
which are not analytic - in the sense that they give access to theorems which 
do not lie directly (as corollaries) in the definition of terms (cf. the 
example with Euclid's proof of the angle sum of the triangle which can not be 
conceptually deduced from the triangle definition). So actually I find the 
corollarial/theorematic disctinction is a good bid of where to find the 
analytic/synthetic distinction in Peirce. I discussed this in ch. 8 of 
Diagrammatology (2007); as far as I remember, Sun-Joo Shin made that point 
earlier.

Here are some important consequences. One is that the theorematic type of 
deductive reasoning process involves an abductive trial-and-error phase (in 
order to find the right new elements to add or manipulations to make with 
your diagram). This points to the distinction - blurred in Kantian notions of 
the a priori - between the necessity of deductive procedure and the logical 
necessity of the results of that procedure. These are not at all the same thing 
(and I believe it is the same distinction which is addressed in the 
Husserlian-inspired tradition speaking about fallibilist apriorism). If the 
two were the same thing, all deductive procedures would be but algorithms, 
logic would be trivial, all of math would be easy tautologies, and it would be 
difficult to understand why Fermat's last theorem would take centuries (and 
most of Andrew Wiles' life) to prove.

Another important consequence pertains to natural kinds. Franklin sounds 
cocksure saying Theorematic reasoning cannot be the way we get to natural 
kinds.. I am not sure there is such a thing as the way we get to natural 
kinds. But I find there is good reason to suppose that theorematic reasoning is 
involved in addressing natural kinds. That has to do with Peirce's idea that 
all sciences involve - implicitly or explicilty - structures inherited by 
mathematics. If some empirical findings have been mathematically structured,

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8508] Re: Natural Propositions,

Dear Howard, lists -

Den 28/04/2015 kl. 12.44 skrev Howard Pattee 
hpat...@roadrunner.commailto:hpat...@roadrunner.com

At 05:18 AM 4/28/2015, Frederik Stjernfelt wrote:
[snip]
 - Dicisigns - applies to biosemiotics as well. To me, this forms part of a 
naturalization of semiotics. But, simultaneously, a naturalization which takes 
generalities such as empirical universals as well as mathematics/logic as parts 
of nature.

I have argued that to be consistent with the physicists' view of natural laws, 
the first phenomenon occurred with the first self-replication (as did the first 
self, the first semiosis, and the first evolvable life, etc.).

I think we're in agreement here. To me, semiotics and biology are co-extensive.

Pansemioticians like Peirce think differently about natural laws and origins.

I do not think Peirce is consistently a pan-semiotician (even if that tendency 
can most certainly be found in his work, so can counter-tendencies). We covered 
this ground before, did we not?

I have three questions about your view:
(1) What parts of nature do you include in naturalization of semiotics?
I am not sure I understand the question. I do not think the results of 
mathematics are a human invention. I think mathematics is part of nature in the 
sense that it contains structures which are as they are without human agency - 
no matter whether they have physical realizations or not. They may be seen as 
hypothetical or modal in order to avoid naive Platonism.
(2) Do you think of mathematics and logic as a part of (subset) of semiotics?
No. I rather think semiotics is a subset of logic in Peirce's broad 
epistemological conception of logic.
(3) When in the history of the universe do you say the first proposition occurs?
By the first semiosis.

Best
Frederik


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8508] Re: Natural Propositions,

Dear Howard, lists,

Den 28/04/2015 kl. 14.47 skrev Howard Pattee 
hpat...@roadrunner.commailto:hpat...@roadrunner.com
:

At 07:04 AM 4/28/2015, Frederik Stjernfelt wrote:

[Howard's] questions about your view:
(1) What parts of nature do you include in naturalization of semiotics?
I am not sure I understand the question. I do not think the results of 
mathematics are a human invention. I think mathematics is part of nature in the 
sense that it contains structures which are as they are without human agency - 
no matter whether they have physical realizations or not. They may be seen as 
hypothetical or modal in order to avoid naive Platonism.
(2) Do you think of mathematics and logic as a part of (subset) of semiotics?
No. I rather think semiotics is a subset of logic in Peirce's broad 
epistemological conception of logic.
(3) When in the history of the universe do you say the first proposition occurs?
By the first semiosis

Good. I think we agree except for your placing logic and math as more general 
than semiosis. Are you thinking of logic and math as cases of natural laws?

In some sense yes, but they  are not empirical laws like physical laws.

Or are they conditions for describing laws?

Indeed they are, but more than that.  Parts of mathematics which are not (yet?) 
applied in any science are unproblematically developed. So I would not 
subscribe to Quine's idea that it is utility in physics which is the only 
validity test for math

How do you test their validity?

We will have to ask mathematicians. Internal consistency, fit with other parts 
of mathematics, things like that.
Attempts to reduce math to applicability, mental construction, symbol use, etc. 
appeare to me to transgress ontological parsimony and rather become ontological 
stinginess. In a certain sense, the ontology of mathematics remains an open 
question. I like Peirce's idea saying that all of math consists of hypotheses 
only so it contains no positive or empirical knowledge - a sort of hypothetical 
Platonism. But that is probably not the last word on that issue.  In that 
sense, I can understand why it may be seen as a too easy gesture on my part to 
categorize math as part of nature. I just think that whatever ontology math 
proves to have, it will have to be part of nature in a broad sense.

Best
F



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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8517] Re: Natural Propositions,

Dear Sung, Howard, lists -

I tend to agree with Kauffman that some some sort of proto-metabolism must have 
been the earliest quasi-life (like his autokatalytic sets), rather than DNA 
first or membranes first etc - for the reason that self-sustaining cycles seem 
to be the first candidate to local teleology. Later aspects of that cycle will 
be needed and hence proto-meaningful for earlier aspects. So, once there is a 
metastable autokatalytic set in the primordial soup, it will be able to recruit 
membranes, and recruit RNA and later DNA for its replicability … something like 
that. It will also involve generality in the sense, that specific phases of the 
catalytic chain possibly may be satisfied by several different, but related, 
substances - in that case, they will be so to speak categorized as functionally 
the same (a bit like E. Coli being able to digest many different carbohydrates 
…)

Best
F



Den 28/04/2015 kl. 17.38 skrev Sungchul Ji 
s...@rci.rutgers.edumailto:s...@rci.rutgers.edu
:

Frederik, Howard, Lists,


Frederik answered By the first semiosis to Howard's question, When in the 
history of the universe do you say the first proposition occurs?


Frederik,  can you speculate on what you think was the first semiosis like ?

Would you agree that whatever it was, it must have been an irreducibly triadic 
process, or a self-organizing chemical reaction-diffusion system, similar to 
the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction or the artificial Krebs cycle of the Matsuno 
type?

All the best.

Sung




On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 7:04 AM, Frederik Stjernfelt 
stj...@hum.ku.dkmailto:stj...@hum.ku.dk wrote:
Dear Howard, lists -

Den 28/04/2015 kl. 12.44 skrev Howard Pattee 
hpat...@roadrunner.commailto:hpat...@roadrunner.com

At 05:18 AM 4/28/2015, Frederik Stjernfelt wrote:
[snip]
 - Dicisigns - applies to biosemiotics as well. To me, this forms part of a 
naturalization of semiotics. But, simultaneously, a naturalization which takes 
generalities such as empirical universals as well as mathematics/logic as parts 
of nature.

I have argued that to be consistent with the physicists' view of natural laws, 
the first phenomenon occurred with the first self-replication (as did the first 
self, the first semiosis, and the first evolvable life, etc.).

I think we're in agreement here. To me, semiotics and biology are co-extensive.

Pansemioticians like Peirce think differently about natural laws and origins.

I do not think Peirce is consistently a pan-semiotician (even if that tendency 
can most certainly be found in his work, so can counter-tendencies). We covered 
this ground before, did we not?

I have three questions about your view:
(1) What parts of nature do you include in naturalization of semiotics?
I am not sure I understand the question. I do not think the results of 
mathematics are a human invention. I think mathematics is part of nature in the 
sense that it contains structures which are as they are without human agency - 
no matter whether they have physical realizations or not. They may be seen as 
hypothetical or modal in order to avoid naive Platonism.
(2) Do you think of mathematics and logic as a part of (subset) of semiotics?
No. I rather think semiotics is a subset of logic in Peirce's broad 
epistemological conception of logic.
(3) When in the history of the universe do you say the first proposition occurs?
By the first semiosis.

Best
Frederik



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--
Sungchul Ji, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology
Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology
Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy
Rutgers University
Piscataway, N.J. 08855
732-445-4701

www.conformon.nethttp://www.conformon.net/


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8505] Re: Natural Propositions,

Dear Gary, John, lists -

John wrote:

I think we have converged a lot, and I think the issues are much more clear. My 
nagging doubt at this point is that as a naturalist I want to see a continuity 
between biosemiotics and cognitive semiotics (if I can call it that).

I agree. This is why I argue in the book that Peirce's non-linguistic, 
non-anthropocentric conception of propositions - Dicisigns - applies to 
biosemiotics as well. To me, this forms part of a naturalization of semiotics. 
But, simultaneously, a naturalization which takes generalities such as 
empirical universals as well as mathematics/logic as parts of nature. A more 
inclusive naturalism, if you will, than the one coming out of Quine's 
naturalization of epistemology.

Best
F

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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8481] Re: Natural Propositions,

2015-04-27 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Gary, lists -
But my argument was not at all to deny firstness. It was just to give the 
argument that no category ever appears isolated.
And that there is a hiearchy, paradoxically beginning with Thirdness because it 
involves 2 and 1 so that focusing on Firsts involves the prescissive bracketing 
of 2 and 3.
Best
F

Den 27/04/2015 kl. 01.37 skrev Gary Richmond 
gary.richm...@gmail.commailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com
:

Frederik, lists,

You write, But pain involves secondness. No doubt. I had already written 
there is certainly secondness involved in my unexpected sudden eye pain 
example.

But, unless one wants to deny the reality of 1ns, as apparently John would, 
then one must admit that pain--and, as Peirce says, each unique instance of 
pain--has its own distinct character, it's unique quality (firstness).

And are the three phenomenoloogical categories ever found apart from the others 
in reality? Peirce says no (although one may predominate).

So to say that pain involves secondess doesn't deny firstness at all as I see 
it.

Best,

Gary



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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8465] Re: Natural Propositions

2015-04-27 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Tommi, lists

You're right, the correct quote is:

Secondness is the mode of being of that which is such as it is, with respect 
to a second but regardless of any third (8.328)

Best
F


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http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .

[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8455] Re: Natural Propositions, Ch.

2015-04-26 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear John, Stan -
Thirdnesses in nature are kinds, patterns, laws, generalities - Peirce 
sometimes used gravitation as an example.
Best
F

Den 26/04/2015 kl. 15.05 skrev Stanley N Salthe 
ssal...@binghamton.edumailto:ssal...@binghamton.edu
:

John -- It would be useful to have an example of mediation/Thirdness in Nature 
that does not depend upon human discourse.

STAN

On Sat, Apr 25, 2015 at 9:00 PM, John Collier 
colli...@ukzn.ac.zamailto:colli...@ukzn.ac.za wrote:
Stan, list,

No, mediation, or thirdness does not depend on language. There are many cases 
of irreducible triads in nature other than in languages as the term is usually 
understood, and as Stan uses it below. You don’t have to be a pansemiotician to 
accept that.

It is one thing for us to have mediate consciousness of generality and for 
there to be a generality that is not reducible to its instances. The idea that 
we create such things through the power of our thought is, frankly, ridiculous.

Peirce once said: The agility of the tongue is shown in its insisting that the 
world depends upon it. Charles Peirce CP 8.83 (1891). That sort of thing is 
best left to coffee shop philosophy.

The distinction made in the first paragraph above needs to be made, even for an 
antirealist, or they soon get tied in knots. I won’t proceed to tie the knots.

John

From: Stanley N Salthe 
[mailto:ssal...@binghamton.edumailto:ssal...@binghamton.edu]
Sent: April 25, 2015 10:39 AM
To: biosemiot...@lists.ut.eemailto:biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee
Subject: [biosemiotics:8441] Re: Natural Propositions, Ch.

Gary -- Regarding:

That's right--rather than immediate consciousness of generality, we have 
mediate consciousness of same.

S: Here again I see the necessity of social construction. Mediation generally 
arrives via language, and languages are many and differ among themselves. So 
Thirdness would differ from language group to language group and therefore is 
not 'real' in the realist sense.

STAN

On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 7:54 PM, Gary Richmond gary.richm...@gmail.com wrote:
That's right--rather than immediate consciousness of generality, we have 
mediate consciousness of same. This is one of the principal reasons why I 
consider Peirce's idea of the tripartite/tricategorial minimum of time being 
the moment (cf. Bergson's duree) versus the (abstract) instant to be so 
important.

[Gary Richmond]

Gary Richmond
Philosophy and Critical Thinking
Communication Studies
LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
C 745
718 482-5690

On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 6:39 PM, Edwina Taborsky tabor...@primus.ca wrote:
Gary R - exactly. Thanks for providing the quote.

There is no 'immediate consciousness of generality' and 'no direct experience 
of the general'...and Thirdness is a factor of our perceptual judgments; that 
is, reasoning, which is to say, the act-of-Thirdness, (and I include 
physico-chemical and biological systems in this process) is grounded in the 
experience of perception.

Edwina
- Original Message -
From: Gary Richmond
To: biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee
Cc: peirce-l at list.iupui.edu
Sent: Friday, April 24, 2015 5:33 PM
Subject: [biosemiotics:8435] Re: Natural Propositions, Ch.

If you object that there can be no immediate consciousness of generality, I 
grant that. If you add that one can have no direct experience of the general, I 
grant that as well. Generality, Thirdness, pours in upon us in our very 
perceptual judgments, and all reasoning, so far as it depends on necessary 
reasoning, that is to say, mathematical reasoning, turns upon the perception of 
generality and continuity at every step (CP 5.150)

[Gary Richmond]

Gary Richmond
Philosophy and Critical Thinking
Communication Studies
LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
C 745
718 482-5690

On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 5:28 PM, Tommi Vehkavaara tommi.vehkava...@uta.fi 
wrote:
Edwina

If I can see right you are disagreeing with Peirce, then.
However, I have a suspicion that there is not much real disagreements, but you 
just use words differently as me (or Peirce). I can easily agree that Generals 
(...) are not akin to discrete matter or that we don't directly experience 
them as 'things-in-themselves'. A general is not a separate existentiality.

But your statement that We extract/synthesize generals within our direct 
empirical experience via our reasoning/cognition I do not think is the whole 
story when it comes to Peirce's logical theory of perception (in 1903). That is 
(approximately) what happens in abductive reasoning, but its limit case, the 
formation of perceptual judgment is not reasoned because there is no 
self-control, nor question about its validity - it is always valid about the 
percept.

Yours,

-tommi


Edwina wrote:
Tommi, I'm going to continue to disagree. Generals, which are Thirdness, are 
not akin to discrete matter in a mode of Secondness. Peirce is following 
Aristotle in asserting that we know the world only through our direct 
experience of it.

[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8467] Re: Natural Propositions,

2015-04-26 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Gary, lists -
But pain involves secondness - it is not imagined pain - you refer to real pain 
which implies there's something actually acting in your eye - so it is not the 
pure quality, it is quality coupled with the insistence of secondness. Your 
blinking eye works in order to get rid of the existing particle, not only to 
address a quality of feeling. By the same token, pain involves thirdness - the 
complex of pain and blinking reflex has a purpose, that of cleaning your eye, 
and behind that is a biological habit acquired over millenia of selection. So 
the felt pain is only prescinded from this background … that would be my 
version …  Qualities without secondness are but possibilities …
Best
F

Den 26/04/2015 kl. 18.46 skrev Gary Richmond 
gary.richm...@gmail.commailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com
:

John,

I experience qualities as such and often before I've labeled them x, y, or z. 
Walking along the street on a windy day a sharp dust particle hits my eye. 
Although there is certainly some secondness involved, I experience pain before 
I think 'pain'. Maybe other people do experience such things differently.

Best,

Gary


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8466] Re: Natural Propositions,

2015-04-26 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

ps - Peirce's three distinctions are subtypes of partial consideration -

F

Den 26/04/2015 kl. 18.37 skrev John Collier 
colli...@ukzn.ac.zamailto:colli...@ukzn.ac.za
:

Gary,

I would say it is an abstraction from the perceptual judgment, where 
abstraction is understood as Locke’s partial consideration. At least that is 
the way I seem to experience things myself. Perhaps others are different.

John


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Fwd: [biosemiotics:8438] Re: Natural Propositions, Ch.

2015-04-25 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Gary, lists

In the discussion of this P quote
:
If you object that there can be no immediate consciousness of generality, I 
grant that. If you add that one can have no direct experience of the general, I 
grant that as well. Generality, Thirdness, pours in upon us in our very 
perceptual judgments, and all reasoning, so far as it depends on necessary 
reasoning, that is to say, mathematical reasoning, turns upon the perception of 
generality and continuity at every step (CP 5.150)

it may be too easy to get the impression that as there is no immediate 
consciousness of generality, there must be, instead, perception as immediate 
consciousness of First- and Secondness from which generatlity is then, later, 
construed by acts of inference, generalization etc. But that would be to 
conform Peirce to the schema of logical empiricism which seems to have grown 
into default schema over the last couple of generations.
And that is not, indeed, what Peirce thought. What IS immediate consciousness 
about in Peirce? He uses the term in several connections. Sometimes he says it 
is a pure fiction (1.343), sometimes he says  it is identical to the Feeling 
as the qualitiative aspect of any experience (1.379) but that it is 
instantaneous and thus does not cover a timespan (hence its fictionality 
because things not covering a timespan do not exist).
But Feelings are Firstnesses and, for that reason, never appear in isolation 
(all phenomena having both 1-2-3 aspects). So immediate-consciousness-Feelings 
come in company with existence (2) and generality/continuity (3). That is why 
what appears in perception is perceptual judgments - so perception as such is 
NOT immediate consciousness. It is only the Feeling aspect of perception 
which is immediate - and that can only be isolated and contemplated 
retroactively (but then we are already in time/generality/continuity). 
Immediate consciousness, then, is something accompanying all experience, but 
graspable only, in itself, as a vanishing limit category. Thus, it is nothing 
like stable sense data at a distance from later generalizations.

Best
F


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Fwd: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:8389] Re: Natural Propositions,

2015-04-25 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Lists -
The below exchange jumped off lists, but here it is
F


Start på videresendt besked:

Fra: Tommi Vehkavaara tommi.vehkava...@uta.fimailto:tommi.vehkava...@uta.fi
Emne: Vedr.: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:8389] Re: Natural Propositions,
Dato: 26. apr. 2015 00.09.36 CEST
Til: Frederik Stjernfelt stj...@hum.ku.dkmailto:stj...@hum.ku.dk
Cc: Tommi Vehkavaara tommi.vehkava...@uta.fimailto:tommi.vehkava...@uta.fi


Dear Frederik

Thank you for your patient explication, that cleared a lot - it is just that my 
understanding is too loaded on Kantian distinction of a priori and a posteriori 
(although that seems to be a distinction that cannot be clearly made) that my 
mind rebels against this kind of definition - why these necessary relations 
should be called a priori (compare Peirce's ethics of terminology). But 
obviously they are just two different concepts that are referred by the same 
word and if there is any meeting point it is in mathematics (and perhaps in 
logic too).

However, it is still not clear to me does this your a priori concern concepts 
or directly objects, the necessity here, at least seems to be some kind of 
metaphysical (or just physiological in case of food?) necessity and not the 
logical/cognitive one.
What bothers me that at least in my reluctant mind this seems to lead back to 
some kind of metaphysical priorism or even foundationalism.

Yours,

Tommi

BTW, you sended your reply only to me, not to lists, and therefroe I too 
replied to you only though it could have gone to lists.

Lainaus Frederik Stjernfelt stj...@hum.ku.dkmailto:stj...@hum.ku.dk:

Dear Tommi, lists -

I have been busy all day and see the discussion has already run several rounds. 
But let me try to answer Tommi's question about P's two gates criterion.

The same question could be posed not with food as an example, but pertaining 
to Peirce's characteristics of the whole apparatus of his own logic and 
semiotics as the A Priori theoy of signs which I quoted a few days ago. How 
could that be compatible with the passports-at-both gates claim which you quote?

Obviously, A Priori could not mean prior to senses as you say. But that was 
not the definition I was discussing. I was discussing a definition which meant 
describable in terms of necessary relations. As the great quote which Jon cited 
from Ketner a couple of posts ago, necessity here should be understood as 
necessary in terms of relations between aspects of the object - not necessary 
in the sense that everybody thinking about that object will necessary think the 
right thing about it (hence fallibilist apriorism). It is the Kantian error to 
identify these two and thus place the a priori in the subject - the 
early-Husserlian alternative is to place it in the object. Peirce did not 
develop any more detailed doctrine about the a priori, but I think the way he 
uses it in the quote about his own logic - and his general stance that concepts 
are not ideas in the mind of a subject - places him closer to the objective 
conception than the Kantian one.

The example about food would be, then, that both everyday and scientific 
experience points to the fact that the consumption of organized energy (in the 
shape of light rays, carbohydrates, proteins, etc, etc.) driving metabolism 
followed by the excretion of less organized energy forms a necessary part of 
what it means to be alive. There could be no life without energy exchange with 
its surroundings.  It would be in that sense that food* or nourishment would 
be an a priori category.

Remark also that the passports-gates claim by Peirce does not amount to 
empiricism. He speaks about the elements of every concept. It would be a 
misreading of that to think those elements were sense data or anything of the 
sort - cf. Peirce's idea about the direct observability of generality.

Best
F


It is not clear to me how the Austrian (Brentano-Husserl-Smith) conception 
about fallible apriori categories like food, organism, etc. could be 
compatible with Peirce's conception of pragmatism, at least as formulated and 
argued in Peirce's Harvard lectures 1903:
?The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of 
perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever 
cannot show its passports at both those two gates is to be arrested as 
unauthorized by reason.? (EP 2:241, CP 5.212, 1903)
For me at least this appears rather as a quite explicit denial that there could 
be room for a priori concepts or categories (and mathematics included), if by a 
priori is meant prior to senses. I cannot see how Peirce's idea that we are 
able to observe real generals directly, could change the situation in any way, 
because our access to generals (whether real or not) has nevertheless 
perceptual origin.

So it is not clear what is your position here, is it that you favor the 
fallible a priori -doctrine over this Peirce's idea about the logical role of 
perception in cognition, or do

[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8416] Natural Propositions,

2015-04-24 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear John, lists -

A very central comment. Issues of classification are fundamental. And abduction 
is the first step in establishing classifications.

One of the things I argue in Natural Propositions is that Peirce's alternative 
conception of propositions offers a radical reclassification of the whole field 
of logic-epistemology-cognition-perception which I think has certain virtues. 
This is easily misunderstood because readers frown on one immediate consequence 
which runs counter to their received view (e.g. that propositions may include 
pictures or need not involve consciousness or may befound in animals, etc.) and 
then quickly refuse to try go grasp the whole edifice.

Best
F

Den 24/04/2015 kl. 01.13 skrev John Collier 
colli...@ukzn.ac.zamailto:colli...@ukzn.ac.za:

Bob,

The problem I see with that is it assumes that the classes on which the 
induction works are given already. This is also a problem with Bayesian 
methods. One of the problems in science is that the classes are often not 
obvious, and scientific work often involves reclassifications. In the case of 
people working with different paradigms (say, for example, of information), the 
problem can be intractable until some overarching view is found or constructed.

Everyday concepts like emeralds and green may not seem to cause any trouble, 
but then there is Nelson Goodman’s (in)famous grue paradox.

Abduction comes first because it gives the conditions for belonging to a class 
(one that is to be hoped to be scientifically useful).

Best,
John



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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8402] Natural Propositions,

2015-04-24 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Howard, lists -
Not a bad description -
F

Den 23/04/2015 kl. 15.24 skrev Howard Pattee 
hpat...@roadrunner.commailto:hpat...@roadrunner.com:

At 12:57 AM 4/23/2015, Joseph Brenner wrote:
Peirce's 'lumping' of the alleged opposites of induction and abduction is, 
rather the recognition that the opposition between them is not so absolute, and 
indeed they have 'a common feature'. Further, if the criterion for judgement is 
only the effectiveness of the arguments they yield, this is not the difference 
between yes and no. This is my answer to Howard's question.

Thank you, Joseph, for a very pragmatic answer with which I agree. I still 
prefer to think of induction and abduction as a case of complementarity -- two 
logically incompatible views, both irreducible one to the other, but both 
necessary in the search for truth..


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8377] Re: Natural Propositions, Ch. 10:

 of a hypothesis to 
the deduction of consequences, altogether a priori on your account?

-- Franklin


On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 12:22 PM, Frederik Stjernfelt 
stj...@hum.ku.dkmailto:stj...@hum.ku.dk wrote:
Dear Franklin, lists -

Sorry for having rattled Franklin's empiricist sentiments with references to 
the a priori!
Empiricists seem to have an a priori fear of the a priori … but no philosophy 
of science has, as yet, been able to completely abolish the a priori - even 
logical positvism had to admit logic as a remaining a priori field 
(reinterpreting that as tautologies, that is true).
I should probably have given a note here to my own stance on the a priori - for 
the interested, I wrote a bit about it in ch. 8 of Diagrammatology (2007). My 
take on it there comes more from the early Husserl than from Peirce: the a 
priori has nothing to do with Kantian subjectivity, rather, it consists in 
dependence structures of objectivity - this makes it subject to fallibilism -  
the a priori charts necessities - these come in two classes, formal ontology 
and material ontology - the former holds for all possible objects, the latter 
for special regions of reality (like physics, biology, society) - no discipline 
can function without more or less explicit conceptual networks defining their 
basic ideas - being fallibilist, a priori claims develop with the single 
scientific disciplines …

I happen to think this Husserlian picture (for a present-day version, see Barry 
Smith) is compatible with Peirce's classification of the sciences where, as it 
is well known, the upper echelon is taken to be a priori in the sense of not at 
all containing empirical knowledge while the lower, positive levels inherit 
structures from those higher ones, co-determining the way they organize and 
prioritize their empirical material.
So, it is in this sense of material ontology that I speak of biogeographical 
ontology and and the ontology of human culture development involved in 
Diamond's argument. Given these assumptions, Diamond's argument, so I argue, is 
a priori. His conclusion that Eurasia privileges the spread of domesticated 
animals does not depend on the empirical investigation of early cultural 
contacts, human migrations or trade routes across the continent - but only on 
the general knowledge that climate is (largely) invariant along latitudes and 
that the spead of human cultures involves that of domesticated animals (the two 
ontologies I claim are involved).
As you can see my concept of ontology is deflated - which is also in concert 
with the ontological commitment in some Peircean ideas (cf. the idea that what 
exists is what must be there for true propositions to be true, 5.312) - so I do 
not participate in the analytical quest for the most meagre ontology possible … 
I would rather say that ontology should comprise general concepts necessary for 
the sciences at all levels (from elementary particles and genes to empires, 
wars, media and real estate …)

Best
F





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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8363] Natural Propositions, Ch. 10:

Dear Howard, lists -
The distinction between food and poison belongs, I would say, to the apriori 
concepts of biology - not of logic.
As indicated, this is not the Kantian conception of a priori. For those 
interested in the competing notion of a priori, see ch. 8 of my Diagrammatology 
(2007). Or Barry Smith's In Defense of Extreme (Fallibilistic) Apriorism 
(http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/In-Defense.pdf)
Best
F

Den 21/04/2015 kl. 01.43 skrev Howard Pattee 
hpat...@roadrunner.commailto:hpat...@roadrunner.com
:

At 12:22 PM 4/20/2015, Frederik Stjernfelt wrote:
Sorry for having rattled Franklin's empiricist sentiments with references to 
the a priori!
Empiricists seem to have an a priori fear of the a priori … but no philosophy 
of science has, as yet, been able to completely abolish the a priori . . .

This is clearly one philosopher's opinion, but to another rattled empiricist it 
sounds like anthropocentric question-begging. Does the information that 
distinguishes food from poison in the gene of E. coli or the nervous system of 
C. elegans depend on an a priori logic? Do I need an a priori logic to 
distinguish food from poison?

From what sources do you choose your logical a priori information?

Howard


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8389] Re: Natural Propositions, Ch.

Dear Howard, lists -

At 04:16 AM 4/21/2015, Frederik Stjernfelt wrote:

The distinction between food and poison belongs, I would say, to the a priori
concepts of biology - not of logic.

HP: What is food for a cell is decided by the evolutionary history of the cell
as recorded by its heritable information.
There are no a priori foods as illustrated by the many
extremotrophshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremotroph. My favorite
extremotroph is the fungus that eats compact
http://www.nature.com/news/2001/010627/full/news010628-11.html disks. I would
not say calling a CD food is an a priori biological concept.

Haha! But that is not the argument. The argument that the categories food and
poison are a priori, not which substances are nourishing or poisonous for the
single type of organism.

FS: As indicated, this is not the Kantian conception of a priori. For those
interested in the competing notion of a priori, see ch. 8 of my Diagrammatology
(2007). Or Barry Smith's In Defense of Extreme (Fallibilistic) Apriorism (
http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/In-Defense.pdfhttp://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/In-Defense.pdf
)

HP: The Smith paper was confusing. Smith concludes: Certain pre-empirical
synthetic intrinsically plausible propositions thus require ontological
correlates which are their truth-makers. Hence, there are intelligible
structures in the world, which we could also call 'a priori structures'.
How are these structures distinguished from the concept of natural laws?

I would not say the exact laws which involve empirical matter, like the size of
constants.

Best
F

[PEIRCE-L] Re: Natural Propositions, Ch. 10. Corollarial and Theorematic Experiments with Diagrams

Dear Jon - 
Another great quote from the canon. 
It distinguishes between two dimensions of necessity in the investigation of 
signs: 
that of the result of the investigation (which is there) and that of the 
process of investigation (which needs not be there, as all processes are 
fallible).
Fallibilist necessity, as far as I can see. 
Best
F

Den 22/04/2015 kl. 00.18 skrev Jon Awbrey jawb...@att.net
:

 Frederik, Jeff, List,
 
 Yes, but, we have to take Peirce at his own meaning.
 The sense that he attached to the complex of words
 including à priori, formal, and (quasi-)necessary
 in the context of defining logic and scientific
 inquiry is a very particular normative sense
 that is not often grasped by readers today.
 
 See this bit of the canon:
 
 http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2012/06/04/c-s-peirce-%E2%80%A2-logic-as-semiotic/
 
 Regards,
 
 Jon
 
 
 On 4/21/2015 4:47 PM, Frederik Stjernfelt wrote:
 Dear Jeff, lists,
 You are certainly right these concepts come in variants. That was why I 
 attempted to present the early 20C Austrian roots of my objective conception 
 as against the subjective Kantian one.
 Peirce seemingly changed views on the a priori over time - or used the 
 notion with different meanings. In 1909 he wrote it would seem proper that 
 in the present state [of] our knowledge logic should be regarded as 
 coëxtensive with General Semeiotic, the a priori theory of signs.
 Best
 F
 
 Den 21/04/2015 kl. 17.55 skrev Jeffrey Brian Downard 
 jeffrey.down...@nau.edumailto:jeffrey.down...@nau.edu:
 
 Lists,
 
 Peirce provides us with a definition of the distinction between what is a 
 priori and what is a posteriori in the Century Dictionary.
 
 Here it is:  from the former, from that which precedes; hence from 
 antecedent to consequent, from condition to conditioned, or from cause to 
 effect.
 
 Peirce took himself to be working from an account that traces its roots back 
 to Albert of Saxony in the late Medieval period.  He distinguishes between 
 demonstratio a priori, which is reasoning from causes or first principles to 
 effects, and demonstratio a posteriori, which is reasoning from effects to 
 causes, which merely proves the fact without showing why it must be as it 
 is.  It is clear that this Latin terminology is being used to characterize 
 an important Aristotelian division between two ways in which we might claim 
 to know things.  Peirce adds that, in the 18th century, demonstratio a 
 priori was applied to reasoning from a given notion back to the conditions 
 which such a notion involves.  He goes on to distinguish between this modern 
 use of the distinction and Kant's particular use of it--which is to employ 
 it as an adjective in cases where there are disparate elements that are 
 combined in cognition.  So, in cases where our knowledge might be based, in 
 part, on empirical e
 vidence, there might also be a priori elements supplied by the power of the 
 understanding that are necessary for the possibility of such experiential 
 cognition.  The forms of space and time, for example, are held to be a priori 
 elements in our experiential cognition.
 
 As a person who was trained in an analytically oriented department, my early 
 sense as a graduate student who was working on Kant was that a rather marked 
 rupture occurred in the early 20th century as logical positivists and 
 analytically minded philosophers started using the distinction in rather 
 novel ways. The novelties they introduced only confused matters further when 
 they tried to draw on these concepts in order to reconfigure the distinction 
 between the analytic and the synthetic.  It would be good, I think, to be 
 clear about where we are using 20th century versions of these terms to make 
 our points and where we are trying to use the terms in the ways that Albert 
 of Saxony, Leibniz, Kant, Hamilton--or Peirce--was using them.
 
 --Jeff
 
 
 Jeff Downard
 Associate Professor
 
 
 
 -- 
 
 academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey
 my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/
 inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
 isw: http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/JLA
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Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:8389] Re: Natural Propositions, Ch.

Dear Howard, lists -

At 10:20 AM 4/21/2015, Frederik Stjernfelt wrote:
Howard said: There are no a priori foods as illustrated by the many 
extremotrophshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremotroph.

FS: Haha! But that is not the argument. The argument that the categories food 
and poison are a priori, not which substances are nourishing or poisonous for 
the single type of organism.

HP: I would say your statement that food and poison are a priori categories is 
only a proposition. It is not an argument. I agree that your realist mental 
construct of an abstract or universal category like food is logically 
irrefutable (except to me it violates parsimony).

So I will only restate the empiricist's concept of food as whatever organisms 
actually eat that keeps them alive. In evolutionary terms survival is the only 
pragmatic test. How do logic and universal categories explain anything more?

I think we have been through this before. You say Food as whatever organisms 
actually eat  - but this IS a universal category. It does not refer to 
empirical observations, individual occurrences, protocol sentences, 
measurements in time and space, all that which empiricism should be made from. 
It even involves another universal, that of organism. It is no stranger than 
that.

So I see no parsimony on your part. I see that you deny the existence of the 
universals you yourself are using.

But I'd be really curious to hear more about your take on the 
corollarial/theorematic distinction !

Best
Frederik


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Re: [biosemiotics:8342] Re: [PEIRCE-L] Natural Propositions, Ch. 10: Corollarial and Theorematic Experiments with Diagrams

Dear Ben, lists -

Thanks for two mails. The first largely resumes parts of my chapter and indeed 
Peirce's basic ideas of theorematicity - although it is not entirely correct 
that P saw his distinction as relative to intellect so that which is 
corollarial to a grownup will be theorematic to a child. Peirce insisted that 
theorematicity consists in the addition of something new to a problem - an 
additional object, manipulation, abstraction, perspective, etc. If once you 
know which such addition to add in the single case, the remaining problem 
becomes corollarial, but that has nothing to do with the intellect of the 
reasoner. A stupid but well-informed person may repeat Euclid's theorematic 
proof of the angular sum of the triangle, while an uninformed genius may be 
unable to find that proof - and still the proof requires the addition of 
auxiliary lines to the triangle no matter what.

But you address other important things. It seems as if, to some degree, Peirce 
without saying it assumes something like the discovery/justification 
distinction. When saying mathematical reasoning is deductive, this seems to be 
a justification claim merely, because in the actual procedure of searching for 
the proof of a theorem, Peirce realizes there may be an abductive 
trial-and-error phase, particularly in the theorematic cases where it is not 
evident which new element to add to your problem (is there also something akin 
to an inductive phase in mathematical proofmaking, e.g. when mathematicians 
compare and evaluate their result with respect to its potential effects in 
other areas of math?). So even if mathematics is the science that proceeds by 
deductive reasoning, there are non-deductive phases in it (discovery), even if 
the results are deductively valid (justification).

My idea with Wegener's map was, of course, to find a theorematic example from 
applied math. In such a case both the mathematical formalism (here, 
approximately Euclidean geometry) and the basic assumptions of the material 
field (geology) must be part of the status quo to which a new element, 
manipulation, principle etc. should be added. The transformation making the two 
continent coasts meet is trivial in the Euclidean sense, but the change in 
underlying geological ontology (from the axiom that continents are eternally 
stable to the axiom that they float on the surface of the earth) indeed 
requires the addition of a new idea. In some sense, the radicality of this new 
idea is eased by the triviality of the transformation in purely geometrical 
terms. What prompted the idea of generalizing the mathematical notions of 
corollarial/theorematic to the applied sciences, of course, is Peirce's 
classificaiton of the sciences where math is number one, implying that all 
other sciences wihtout exception use mathematical structures - but 
simultaneously that generalization cannot take place without introdcuding basic 
principles of those lower sciences, thereby modifying the corr/theor. 
distinction to some degree because it now has to involve ontological 
assumptions regarding positive knowledge. But still I think it makes good sense.

Best
F


Frederik, lists,

I'm dissatisfied with my previous post in this thread, I feel like I've missed 
the forest for the trees. While I'm not convinced that there's a theorematic 
applied deduction in the Wegener example, still, the idea of continental drift 
is not merely a simplifying explanation of the fit between continental 
coastlines, it's also an idea that anybody would call nontrivial. It involves a 
complex new idea, and, if true (as it turned out to be), would foreseeably be a 
basis and foundation for much further discovery.  Its nontriviality doesn't 
give it intrinsic abductive merit in the way that its plausibility does, but 
said nontriviality still makes it something to be prized if it pans out (as it 
did). But so far, that's the nontriviality of prospective discoveries, what 
about a nontriviality of how one got to the abduction of continental drift? I'm 
trying to think of some parallelism between its abduction and theorematic 
deduction, so as to analogize the idea of abductive nontriviality to deductive 
theorematicity. Roughly, something involving nontrivial changes of standing 
beliefs about geology, changes equivalent to the idea of continental drift. 
Well, when even I think I'm talking too much, it's time I call it a day.

Best, Ben

:


Franklin, lists,

I think that Frederik is largely assuming Peirce's terminology. Peirce uses the 
words 'schema' and 'diagram' pretty much interchangeably.

Here are some key quotes on which Frederik is basing his discussion of the 
theormatic-corollarial distinction. 
http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/corollarial-reasoning

I once did a summary (footnoted with online links) of key points (at least as 
they seemed to me at the time); here it is with a few adjustments of the links:

Peirce argued that, while finally all deduction

[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8115] Pragmatism About Theoretical Entities

Dear Jon, lists,

Sorry again for an answer a bit belated.

Den 17/03/2015 kl. 20.22 skrev John Collier 
colli...@ukzn.ac.zamailto:colli...@ukzn.ac.za:

Thanks, Frederik. I think that to properly call a view Platonist it must reject 
the existence of particulars in favour of universals. Russell fits this 
description because fairly early in his (long) career he explicitly rejected 
particulars, and argued that instances were combinations of “compossible” 
universals (whence his structuralism, and perhaps a “contraction to 
individuals”). One can be a Platonist about some domains but not others. For 
example there are Platonists about numbers and other parts of mathematics 
(Gödel), and there are the opposite about numbers (Mill and Phillip Kitcher, 
for example), but not necessarily about scientific laws. Hartrey Field famously 
rejected numbers altogether, at least with respect to the world of science.  
His motivation was an extreme nominalism.

Peirce was not a Platonist in the sense above, with his distinction between 
existing and being real. I suppose (no reason to think otherwise so far) that 
this extends to signs.

You're right. But Peircean Existence is not the same thing as individuals being 
completely determinate - here, he instead invokes the Scotist notion of 
haecceity to account for existence. As to his more extreme, he means 
stronger rather than weaker. I think Peirce's idea is that when Scotus says 
that universals are contracted in particulars, Scotus thereby makes place ofr 
universals to be reducible to the classes of individuals instantiating them - 
here Peirce's continuity theory of universals make universals exceed any 
possible number of realizations of them, hence more strong.
But I am not quite sure how he slices it to get a position that is more extreme 
than (weaker than?) Duns Scotus, which is pretty weak, but still allows 
universals that are not instantiated. Or perhaps I am missing what he means by 
‘extreme’ here. I parted company with my coauthors of All Things Must Go over 
the existence of structures that don’t interact, for of which in principle we 
could have no knowledge. This seemed to me to violate a Peircean principle that 
they started the book with, which is basically the pragmatic principle.

Interesting!
Best
Frederik

In any case, we agree on openness of universals.

Regards,
John


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Natural Propositions, Ch. 10: Corollarial and Theorematic Experiments with Diagrams

Dear Ben,  Franklin, lists,

Den 19/04/2015 kl. 20.05 skrev Benjamin Udell 
bud...@nyc.rr.commailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com:


Franklin, lists,

I agree with Jon, thanks for your excellent starting post.

You wrote,

[] Why can't corollarial reasoning, which involves observation and 
experimentation, reveal unnoticed and hidden relations? After all, on p.285-6, 
Frederik mentions the work of police detective Jorn Old Man Holm and his 
computer program, which Frederik describes as a practical example of 
corollarial map reasoning (p.285). In this example, Holm uses the corollarial 
reasoning to reveal information about the whereabouts of suspects. Doesn't the 
comparison of the map reasoning with suspects' testimony end up revealing 
unnoticed and hidden relations?



There's a distinction that some make between complexity and mere complication. 
Corollarial reasonings may accumulate mere complications until the result 
becomes hard to see, although it involves little if any complexity in, more or 
less, the sense of depth or nontriviality.

I don't know whether there's a theorematic approach to Jørn Holm's 
diagrammatization that would show its result in a nontrivial aspect, and anyway 
its diagrammatic, pictorial presentation already leaves one in no doubt that a 
pattern is revealed.

Certainly the comparison between Holm's map and suspects' testimony may give 
nontrivial results - but that comparison was not my point -
My argument, which I may not have made sufficiently clear in the chapter, is 
that the small step from having spatiotemporal cell phone information 
represented in long lists of coordinates - and to synthesize that same 
information in one geographical map, is a corollarial step. It does not contain 
any new information which was not already there in the list, but it brings the 
information together in one conclusive sign so as fo facilitate the charting of 
e.g. the trajectory of single cell phones on the map.

I admit it is more difficult, in general, to precisely extend the 
corollarial/theorematic distinction to applied cases - but as you can see I did 
the attempt picking map examples. The central problem for my pov seems to be 
that in applied cases you should not only include what is given in axiomatics 
(topographical maps largely respecting Euclidean geometry) but also in the more 
or less implicit ontological assumptions in the area of application - this is 
why i count Wegener's map experiment as theorematic. Taken as pure geometry, it 
is a trivial translation to move South America eastwards to compare its 
coastline with Africa's - but in terms of geology, it requires the addition of 
a new idea - namely that continents may move.

Best,
Frederik

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Stjernfelt: Chapter 9

Dear Franklin, Cathy, Lists -

A small clarification: Peirce's BxD=A idea, I think, should not be taken a 
device for the arithmetic calculation of exact information size - it is rather 
the proposal of a general law relating Breadth and Depth. His idea comes from 
the simple idea that when intension is zero, there is no information, while 
when extension is zero, there is also no information - and that is the relation 
of the two factors in a product.  (It is a bit like his first Boole-inspired 
definition of universal quantification as a product - he defines truth as 1, 
falsity as 0,  then, in order to be true, each single case of a universal 
proposition should be true - if any single one of them is false, the total 
product of them all will be zero.)
The BXD=A idea allows him to investigate what happens if intension or extension 
are in- or decreased, etc. - even if not being able to express that in precise 
numbers.

Best
F


Den 20/04/2015 kl. 01.14 skrev Franklin Ransom 
pragmaticist.lo...@gmail.commailto:pragmaticist.lo...@gmail.com:

Cathy, lists,

Well, look at this way: It is possible for there to be objects in the senses 
which are yet not perceived, because we do not yet have any idea of what it is 
to which we are looking. It takes a hypothesis to introduce a new idea to us to 
explain what it is, which hypothesis we can then put to the test. In order to 
do so, we must determine what kinds of characters to look for (deduction helps 
here) and then look for existent objects (induction) to learn whether the 
purported relations between characters obtain in fact, and in this way we come 
to understand the thing which we are experiencing. It is of course induction 
which gives us more information; abduction simply gives us the idea which needs 
to become informed, and deduction is merely explicative, based on relating the 
idea to other ideas and previously gathered information regarding those ideas.

Obviously, we cannot conduct induction without end, because that is a practical 
impossibility. Our 'sum', as you put it, far from being always an infinity, 
will very likely never be an infinity in practice, in whatever sense you mean 
to understand the application of infinity to a 'sum' of information. Of course, 
as an ideal, where science, the community of inquiry as such, continues to 
investigate, it is possible for the information of an idea to reach a much 
greater 'sum' than would otherwise be possible for individuals such as you or 
me. But it is a commonplace of science that ideas that work and continue to 
work are understood more thoroughly in their relations to other ideas over the 
course on inquiry. This means of course that not only the breadth, but also the 
depth of the idea continues to grow. As a result, typically, rather than 
tending to make comparisons moot, we start to see a hierarchy of ideas and 
related sciences appear.

Consider this passage: The former [Cows] is a natural class, the latter [Red 
Cows] is not. Now one predicate more may be attached to Red Cows than to Cows; 
hence Mr. Mill's attempts to analyze the difference between natural and 
artificial classes is seen to be a failure. For, according to him, the 
difference is that a real kind is distinguished by unknown multitudes of 
properties while an artificial class has only a few determinate ones. Again 
there is an unusual degree of accordance among naturalists in making 
Vertebrates a natural class. Yet the number of predicates proper to it is 
comparatively small (NP, p.238, quoting Peirce). We can see here that further 
simplifications are introduced, so taking what is learned about various 
vertebrates, a new idea, that of vertebrates, appears which simplifies the 
characters involved. Conversely, species under vertebrates will become much 
more determinate in terms of their characters, but be simplified with respect 
to their extension.

You said above: Under synechism every real object has an infinite number of 
attributes, and every meaningful predicate or general term effectively has an 
infinite number of aspects, so a simple multiplication of B x D is pointless. 
And yet natural kinds appear, in which certain attributes, predicates, or 
aspects appear significant, and others do not. It is precisely the work of 
abduction to simplify what is observed so that what is essential is grasped, 
and not simply a never-ending multitude of characters. Such simplification is 
always with respect to a purpose. With respect to natural kinds, such purpose, 
or telos, is objective, and we see nature all around us selecting certain 
characters over others as more significant. If this were not true, natural 
science would be impossible. As to real objects, yes they have an infinite 
number, but not all of them are relevant to the purpose of interaction with the 
real object. Certain meaningful attributes are selected for in attention in 
order to aid conduct with respect to some purpose at hand. Information

[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8363] Natural Propositions, Ch. 10:

Dear Franklin, lists -

Sorry for having rattled Franklin's empiricist sentiments with references to 
the a priori!
Empiricists seem to have an a priori fear of the a priori … but no philosophy 
of science has, as yet, been able to completely abolish the a priori - even 
logical positvism had to admit logic as a remaining a priori field 
(reinterpreting that as tautologies, that is true).
I should probably have given a note here to my own stance on the a priori - for 
the interested, I wrote a bit about it in ch. 8 of Diagrammatology (2007). My 
take on it there comes more from the early Husserl than from Peirce: the a 
priori has nothing to do with Kantian subjectivity, rather, it consists in 
dependence structures of objectivity - this makes it subject to fallibilism -  
the a priori charts necessities - these come in two classes, formal ontology 
and material ontology - the former holds for all possible objects, the latter 
for special regions of reality (like physics, biology, society) - no discipline 
can function without more or less explicit conceptual networks defining their 
basic ideas - being fallibilist, a priori claims develop with the single 
scientific disciplines …

I happen to think this Husserlian picture (for a present-day version, see Barry 
Smith) is compatible with Peirce's classification of the sciences where, as it 
is well known, the upper echelon is taken to be a priori in the sense of not at 
all containing empirical knowledge while the lower, positive levels inherit 
structures from those higher ones, co-determining the way they organize and 
prioritize their empirical material.
So, it is in this sense of material ontology that I speak of biogeographical 
ontology and and the ontology of human culture development involved in 
Diamond's argument. Given these assumptions, Diamond's argument, so I argue, is 
a priori. His conclusion that Eurasia privileges the spread of domesticated 
animals does not depend on the empirical investigation of early cultural 
contacts, human migrations or trade routes across the continent - but only on 
the general knowledge that climate is (largely) invariant along latitudes and 
that the spead of human cultures involves that of domesticated animals (the two 
ontologies I claim are involved).
As you can see my concept of ontology is deflated - which is also in concert 
with the ontological commitment in some Peircean ideas (cf. the idea that what 
exists is what must be there for true propositions to be true, 5.312) - so I do 
not participate in the analytical quest for the most meagre ontology possible … 
I would rather say that ontology should comprise general concepts necessary for 
the sciences at all levels (from elementary particles and genes to empires, 
wars, media and real estate …)

Best
F

Den 20/04/2015 kl. 04.07 skrev Franklin Ransom 
pragmaticist.lo...@gmail.commailto:pragmaticist.lo...@gmail.com:

Ben, lists,

The connection you drew between the first and the fourth definitions of 
theorematic reasoning is quite interesting; I had not thought of conceptual 
analysis in quite that way. At least, though, the complexity of the diagram or 
icon is likely more complicated in the case of theorematic reasoning than in 
corollarial reasoning. I suppose I somehow think that a theorematic reasoning 
is often a previous corollarial reasoning but with something novel introduced, 
which would make the theorematic reasoning straightforwardly more complicated 
than the corollarial reasoning.

Part of my concern about the relationship between theorematic reasoning and 
abductive inference is that Frederik isn't just attempting to discuss 
mathematics when treating of theorematic diagrammatic reasoning. Rather, the 
significance is for all knowledge. Because the mathematical-diagrams are 
ubiquitous, and because Frederik takes the mathematical diagrams to be a 
priori, this means that all knowledge includes the a priori as a constituent 
element. This is a very Kantian move, repeated by C.I. Lewis in his Mind and 
the World-Order. I am quite wary of this move.

I think it very important the way you put the following: The conclusions are 
aprioristically true only given the hypotheses, but the hypotheses themselves 
are not aprioristically true nor asserted to be true except hypothetically, and 
this hypotheticality is what allows such assurance of the conclusions, although 
even the hypothesis is upended if it leads to such contradictions as render the 
work futile. And then part of your quote from Peirce: Mathematics merely 
traces out the consequences of hypotheses without caring whether they 
correspond to anything real or not. It is purely deductive, and all necessary 
inference is mathematics, pure or applied. Its hypotheses are suggested by any 
of the other sciences, but its assumption of them is not a scientific act. 
There are two things to be said about this. The first is that the hypotheses 
are originally suggested by experience. The

[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8112] Pragmatism About Theoretical Entities

2015-03-17 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear John, lists,

It may not be extreme, but I think that most current realist metaphysicians 
(ones who accept universals as real, like myself and David Armstrong, for 
example) take a line closer to the Duns Scotus one. The more extreme view seems 
to most to be difficult to distinguish from Platonism (e.g., my otherwise hero 
Bertrand Russell, who came to reject particulars entirely). This isn't to say 
that universals are not open-ended at any time, and that something can come to 
fall under a universal.

I think the crux about P's realism is exactly this: that universals are 
open-ended at any time. He does not himself identify this with Platonism. But 
what is Platonism exactly, other than a pejorative which many positions use to 
profile themselves against?


However, Frederik, there are two slippery terms in your answer that I would 
like more elucidation on, contracted in and comprise. My understanding of 
Armstrong, for example, does not have universals comprised of instances, but 
their reality does depend on their instantiation. Myself, I take a view 
slightly weaker than Armstrong in one sense, but stronger in another, and think 
that universals are made necessary only by logic (including 2nd order logic) or 
instantiation, in which case they are identical to natural kinds. I would not 
use the word comprise to describe this.

Funnily, you address the same terms in my short summary as did Jon Awbrey. 
Contracted is just referring to Peirce - to his late revision of his diamond 
example from How to make our ideas clear:
Even Duns Scotus is too nominalistic when he says that universals are 
contracted to the mode of individuality in singulars, meaning, as he does, by 
singulars, ordinary existing things. The pragmaticist cannot admit that. 
(1905, 8.208)
 Interestingly, a bit later in the same paper he addresses your issue about 
things, here understood as absolute individuals which he takes not to exist: 
For I had long before declared that absolute individuals were entia rationis, 
and not realities.
As to comprise, I shall not insist on that term,  the important idea is just 
that P takes universals to be continua and so to exceed any possible amount of 
individual realizations.

Best
F


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: Pragmatism About Theoretical Entities

2015-03-11 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Jon, lists - 
You're right about the economy principle. But it is interesting when it was 
first articulated as an explicit doctrine.
Calling Peirce's realism extreme, I was only quoting the man, calling himself 
a scholastic realist of a somewhat extreme stripe (5.470)
The extremity lies in that P considered himself more realist than Dus Scotus 
because he rejected his idea that univerals are contracted in particulars (P 
claimed that universals comprise more than any possible number of particular 
instantiations).
Best
F

Den 11/03/2015 kl. 21.25 skrev Jon Awbrey jawb...@att.net
:

 Inquiry Blog
 http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2015/01/20/pragmatism-about-theoretical-entities-1/
 
 Peirce List
 JA:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/15467
 FS:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/15800
 
 Frederik, List,
 
 Welcome one more time to the fray, where you'll find a rich array
 of loose threads to tangle with and loose thoughts to wrangle with,
 against the day, ever looming, of weaving whole cloth a Persian rug.
 
 I think we can safely stipulate that Principles Of Intellectual Economy (POIE)
 have been with us from the time when poets and philosophers first drew breath,
 or swords, as the case my be.  I was becoming concerned from the tenor of our
 discussions about nominalism and realism that we were drifting to extremes --
 I don't think of Peirce as promoting any kind of extreme realism as I don't
 think pragmatism is about extremes.  So I gave it my best try at writing up
 a balanced account of the opposing pans, nominalism and realism, placing the
 pragmatic maxim at the examen or fulcrum.
 
 Regards,
 
 Jon


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Pragmatism About Theoretical Entities

2015-03-09 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Sorry to have been away from the discussion for a while. 

Jon is right that the Pragmatic Maxim is a version of the Razor. 
But the ontological Razor was no invention of Ockham and so is not wed to 
nominalism in particular. 
Already Peirce's realist hero, Duns Scotus,  used the Razor two generations 
before Ockham: Numquam pluralitas est ponenda sine necessitate. - Never 
postulate a plurality of entities without necessity. So the Razor is just as 
compatible with Scotist realism. It all depends upon what is considered 
necessary. 
But the Razor seems to have been around in the 13C, it was probably not Scotus' 
invention either. 

F

Den 20/01/2015 kl. 02.34 skrev Jon Awbrey jawb...@att.net:

 Peircers,
 
 By theoretical entities I mean things like classes, properties, qualities, 
 sets, situations, or states of affairs, in general, the putative denotations 
 of theoretical concepts, formulas, sentences, in brief, the ostensible 
 objects of signs.
 
 A conventional statement of Ockham's Razor is, “Entities shall not be 
 multiplied beyond necessity.”
 
 That is still good advice, as practical maxims go, but a pragmatist will read 
 that as practical necessity or utility, qualifying the things that we need to 
 posit in order to think at all, without getting lost in endless 
 circumlocutions of perfectly good notions.
 
 Nominalistic revolts are well-intentioned when they naturally arise, seeking 
 to clear away the clutter of ostentatious entities ostensibly denoted by 
 signs that do not denote.
 
 But that is no different in its basic intention than what Peirce sought to 
 do, clarifying metaphysics though the application of the Pragmatic Maxim.
 
 Taking the long view, then, pragmatism can be seen as a moderate continuation 
 of Ockham's revolt, substituting a principled revolution for what tends to 
 descend to a reign of terror.
 
 Regards,
 
 Jon
 
 http://inquiryintoinquiry.com
 
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[PEIRCE-L] bankrupt suicide again

2015-03-09 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Ben, lists, 

I strongly appreciate the persistent work Ben has been doing in tracing out, 
over many postings, the implications of Peirce's problems with the strange 
rule. I think Ben is quite correct in locating the ambiguity in the quantifier 
some, taken to mean sometimes a certain one, sometimes  some - one or 
several. 
But I think there may lie a further reason behind this - linked to Ben's 
reinterpretation in terms of modal logic where a necessity operator 
distinguishes the two cases otherwise identified by the strange rule. When 
introducing his discussion of the strange rule in the April 1906 note, Peirce 
connects it to a modal observation:   … I soon discovered, upon a critical 
analysis, that it was absolutely necessary to insist upon and bring to the 
front, the truth that a mere possibility may be quite real. Why does he do 
that, as the bankruptcy-suicide inference is ordinary first order logic without 
any modal semantics on the surface? I think it is because what Peirce would 
like to catch is the meaning of that sentence (taken in ordinary language) that 
there is a causal-tendency link between the bankruptcy of husbands and the 
suicides of their wives. So that the wife-suicide is a real possibility 
actualized by the husband-bankruptcy. This is obviously indicated by saying 
that a certain one wife commits suicide if HER husband etc. This is not full 
necessity, but real possibility (because other wives with bankrupt husbands 
may escape suicide even if threatened by it as a real possibility). So - I 
think - Peirce's idea is that the strange rule equates the mere possibility 
of There is some married woman who will commit suicide in case A husband fails 
in business.  with the real possibility in the claim connecting the two: 
There is some married woman who will commit suicide in case HER husband fails 
in business. - which he did not like because he wanted to distinguish those 
two types of possibilities.
Of course, real possibility is not logic, it is material ontology not even 
captured by standard modal logic. 
As Ben rightly indicated, this unease comes from reading more (ordinary 
language) meaning into logical expressions than their formal definition allows 
for. But simultaneously, this excessive meaning is scientifically important - 
the mature Peirce, after 1897, seeing real possibilities as implied by 
scientific laws, regularities, tendencies, patterns etc., regarding how certain 
predicates, more or less strongly, determine others. This can not be logically 
expressed in any simple way, and I think that was what tormented Peirce … 

Best
F

Den 18/02/2015 kl. 15.41 skrev Benjamin Udell bud...@nyc.rr.com:

 Peirce said there is some one individual of which one or other of two 
 predicates is true ABOUT a specific proposition that he was discussing. So 
 you need to read that specific proposition in order to understand what Peirce 
 meant by there is some one individual etc.: There is some married woman 
 who will commit suicide in case her husband fails in business. which, Peirce 
 finds, turns out to be equivalent to if every married man fails in business 
 some married woman will commit suicide.


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7962] Natural Propositions:

2015-01-18 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Stan, lists -

But Stan commits the same mistake of trying to purge one universal by means of 
another - this time culture is the new universal assumed to be more real than 
evolution … In Stan's argument, cultures are assumed to be real and to 
determine minds of different individuals … (which I believe is not simply 
another universal with realist pretense, but a false such universal, but that 
is another issue).
Everytime somebody tries to give a nominalist reduction of some universal 
assumed to be real - they invariably invoke OTHER universals which THEY assume 
to be real. So they remain realists.

Best
F

Den 18/01/2015 kl. 21.21 skrev Stanley N Salthe 
ssal...@binghamton.edumailto:ssal...@binghamton.edu:

Frederik writes:

Dear Stan, lists -
I am making no claims as to trends etc. - I am making the very simple case that 
evolution is a real process.

S:  Well, as our culture is the only one to elicit belief in the reality of 
biological evolution, this would mean that we alone, of all human cultures, 
have discovered this truth about the world!  On the contrary, a nominalist can 
assert that evolution actually exists, outside of minds educated in our 
culture, only in texts and other embodiments in the communication media of our 
culture. It is a belief that has considerable evidence marshaled from several 
sciences in its support. Taking it to be ‘real’ in the realist sense does no 
harm to the concept, and is helpful to those studying evidence for it.

Then, Edwina writes:



I think Stan was referring to the very definition of 'what is evolution'. The 
neoDarwinians have a very simple (simplistic?) definition which rejects any 
notion of there being 'potentialities',  'probabilities' or 'possibilities' . 
There's the status quo genes; there's natural selection; and that's it.

S: There are two neoDarwinian views of evolution.  In the Fisherian view, it is 
progressive change in gene frequencies of an evolving population. In the 
Wright-Dobzhansky view it is the continuation in existence of a population 
despite various environmental changes that threaten it with extinction.

STAN

On Sun, Jan 18, 2015 at 1:30 PM, Edwina Taborsky 
tabor...@primus.camailto:tabor...@primus.ca wrote:
Stan and Frederik: I think that you both are talking about different issues. 
It's not whether or not evolution is a 'real process', or even about the notion 
of 'realism' vs 'nominalism' (whether one uses the scholastic or non-scholastic 
definition of those two terms). I think Stan was referring to the very 
definition of 'what is evolution'. The neoDarwinians have a very simple 
(simplistic?) definition which rejects any notion of there being 
'potentialities',  'probabilities' or 'possibilities' . There's the status quo 
genes; there's natural selection; and that's it.

Edwina
- Original Message -
From: Frederik Stjernfeltmailto:stj...@hum.ku.dk
To: biosemiot...@lists.ut.eemailto:biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee ; Peirce 
Discussion Forum (PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edu)mailto:PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edu)
Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2015 1:20 PM
Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7955] Natural Propositions:

Dear Stan, lists -
I am making no claims as to trends etc. - I am making the very simple case that 
evolution is a real process.
And I am adding that attempts to make nominalist reconstructions of the concept 
evolution do not fail to introduce other universals taken for real, such as, in 
Stan's account, the notions of generation, fossil, construct, etc.
Best
F

Den 18/01/2015 kl. 16.43 skrev Stanley N Salthe 
ssal...@binghamton.edumailto:ssal...@binghamton.edu:

Frederick --  Your assertion that the results of selections at different levels 
might be taken to show real tendencies transgresses the neoDarwinian 
perspective on selection (and, of course, they own the concept at present!), 
which is that there are no real trends across generations.  All selection 
pressures would be generated from moment to moment according to bearing 
conditions.  Thus, for example, suppose we observe in the fossil record an 
increase in the length of rhinoceros horns over many generations, or over 
sequences of species in the fossil record.  A neoDarwinian would NOT claim that 
there was a trend toward larger horns.  Such a trend observed after the fact 
would be held to be a nominallst construct.

STAN






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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7957] Re: Natural Propositions:

2015-01-18 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Edwina, lists -

The neo-Darwinist conception of evolution works nicely as an example, exactly 
because it is so stripped-down.
Even a concept as naked as that refers to real universals - as Edwina writes, 
to genes, and natural selection.

F


Den 18/01/2015 kl. 19.30 skrev Edwina Taborsky 
tabor...@primus.camailto:tabor...@primus.ca
:

Stan and Frederik: I think that you both are talking about different issues. 
It's not whether or not evolution is a 'real process', or even about the notion 
of 'realism' vs 'nominalism' (whether one uses the scholastic or non-scholastic 
definition of those two terms). I think Stan was referring to the very 
definition of 'what is evolution'. The neoDarwinians have a very simple 
(simplistic?) definition which rejects any notion of there being 
'potentialities',  'probabilities' or 'possibilities' . There's the status quo 
genes; there's natural selection; and that's it.

Edwina


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7955] Natural Propositions:

2015-01-18 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Stan, lists -
I am making no claims as to trends etc. - I am making the very simple case that 
evolution is a real process.
And I am adding that attempts to make nominalist reconstructions of the concept 
evolution do not fail to introduce other universals taken for real, such as, in 
Stan's account, the notions of generation, fossil, construct, etc.
Best
F

Den 18/01/2015 kl. 16.43 skrev Stanley N Salthe 
ssal...@binghamton.edumailto:ssal...@binghamton.edu:

Frederick --  Your assertion that the results of selections at different levels 
might be taken to show real tendencies transgresses the neoDarwinian 
perspective on selection (and, of course, they own the concept at present!), 
which is that there are no real trends across generations.  All selection 
pressures would be generated from moment to moment according to bearing 
conditions.  Thus, for example, suppose we observe in the fossil record an 
increase in the length of rhinoceros horns over many generations, or over 
sequences of species in the fossil record.  A neoDarwinian would NOT claim that 
there was a trend toward larger horns.  Such a trend observed after the fact 
would be held to be a nominallst construct.

STAN



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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7943] Natural Propositions:

2015-01-17 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

but Howard, saying this, you assume natural selection to be a real process - 
and not just a linguistic convention …

F

Den 17/01/2015 kl. 21.28 skrev Howard Pattee 
hpat...@roadrunner.commailto:hpat...@roadrunner.com:

Thank you Ben for a clear answer. I would say, then, that in thinking about 
formal mathematics Peirce was to some extent nominalistic, which of course 
leaves him free to be realistic about diagrams and physics. The basis for 
considering logic to be realistic is still mysterious to me.

Of course there is still a great epistemic variety among today's mathematicians 
and physicists, largely because of great mysteries. Natural selection has made 
sure we begin life as naive realists which is necessary for immediate survival. 
However, as physics has had to rely more and more on creative imagination for 
models of events, which are way beyond natural senses and common sense, it is 
only reasonable that the models become more nominalistic.

Howard


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7918] Re: Natural Propositions:

2015-01-16 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Jeff, lists

 
 You've asked a series of questions.
 
 1.  Do list members find Frederik's notion of two kinds of iconicity of 
 interest and value? If so, what is that value?  It isn't clear to me what the 
 value is of suggesting that Peirce is working with two notions of 
 iconicity--despite Peirce's own efforts to develop a unified conception.  
 I'll agree that there are a number of aspects that are involved in Peirce's 
 conception of iconicity, and that we can draw on the EGs as a tool for 
 clarifying some of the aspects that might be hard to articulate using other 
 means.  What is more, I accept that Peirce was motivated by the aim of 
 developing an optimally iconic graphical logic.  Frederik is clear that he 
 takes himself to be refining Peirce's conception of the icon because he 
 believes there are lingering confusions and vagueness in his conception.  
 Having said that, I don't think that the separation between the two notions 
 clarifies matters in the way I was hoping it might.

Which clarification did you hope for? 
I do not speak about lingering confusions and vagueness. I think there are two 
pretty precise, different conceptions. But no-one needs despair, as they need 
not contradict one another. Peirce just does not make explicit the difference 
between them - which I think it would be a service to Peirce scholarship to do. 
One conception is what i call operational. It compares iconic representations 
after which inferences may be made from them/ theorems may be proved from them. 
Measured on this criterion, Peirce's Beta Graphs are equivalent to his Algebra 
of Logic system of predicate logic (logic of relations) of 1885. Optimality 
comes into the question when Peirce compares the two representations and judge 
Beta Graphs superior, not because they can prove more theorems, but because of 
their higher degree of iconic representation of logic relations. 
These are obviously two different conceptions. Operational iconicity seems 
basic; optimality is an extra criterion introduced in order to distinguish 
competing representations of the same content. 


 2.  Also, what  does one make of Frederik's notion that the introduction of 
 would-bes greatly modifies Peirce's conception of Thirdness and that it 
 enriches the pragmatic maxim in now involving real possibilities?  I don't 
 think that Peirce introduced a new concept of would-be's.  

 This seems to imply that he didn't have a conception, and that he later saw 
 there was something he had missed.  Rather, he had an account of how we might 
 interpret conditionals, and he later sees that his logical theory leads him 
 to treats some arguments as bad that are really good (and vice versa).  As 
 such, he is modifying his semiotic theory and then revising his metaphysical 
 account of real possibilities in light of revisions that he made in his 
 theory of logic.  I do agree that the revisions in his logical theory involve 
 a developing sense of how we might understand the role of triadic 
 relationships in semiotics.
 

It is generally assumed that Peirce only introduced real possibilities around 
1896-97 - Max Fisch famously charted this as yet another step in the 
development of Peirce's realism and even calls it the  most decisive single 
step in that development. Would-bes is another term for real 
possibilities.  Later P himself made the famous self-criticism of his 1878 
conception of pragmatism, now deemed too nominalist, the argument centered on 
different interpretations of the hardness-of-the-untested-diamond example. 

Best
F


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7918] Re: Natural Propositions:

2015-01-16 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Howard, lists,

I think we have covered this ground before, even pretty extensively so.
Peirce was 1) a scientific realist in the standard sense of assuming the 
independent existence of objects. 2) Extreme refers to his scholastic realism 
- assuming the reality of some universals. His own pet example was gravity and 
other natural laws.
Howard seems to remain sceptic vis-a-vis the reality of universals - even if he 
admitted being tempted by realism exactly as to natural laws, as far as I 
recall. Peirce would limit real possibilities to those demonstrated by or 
indispensable to sciences.

Best
F



Den 17/01/2015 kl. 02.26 skrev Howard Pattee 
hpat...@roadrunner.commailto:hpat...@roadrunner.com
:

It is generally assumed that Peirce only introduced real possibilities around 
1896-97 - Max Fisch famously charted this as yet another step in the 
development of Peirce's realism and even calls it the  most decisive single 
step in that development. Would-bes is another term for real possibilities.

At 12:37 PM 1/16/2015, Gary R wrote:

I also believe that Peirce's moving more and more to an extreme realism has a 
decided impact on all aspects of his work in the final decades of his life, 
including his semiotics and especially his pragmatism.

HP: Extreme realism is a mystery to me without a clear description of what it 
entails and excludes. As I have asked before, what reason or pragmatic 
justification can you give for believing in just one of many irrefutable and 
undemonstrable ideological metaphysics?

From SEPhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism/ 
Realismhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism/: Although it would be 
possible to accept (or reject) realism across the board, it is more common for 
philosophers to be selectively realist or non-realist about various topics: 
thus it would be perfectly possible to be a realist about the everyday world 
of macroscopic objects and their properties, but a non-realist about aesthetic 
and moral value. In addition, it is misleading to think that there is a 
straightforward and clear-cut choice between being a realist and a non-realist 
about a particular subject matter. It is rather the case that one can be 
more-or-less realist about a particular subject matter. Also, there are many 
different forms that realism and non-realism can take.

HP: Can someone briefly state Peirce's limits on would bes and real 
possibilities? Or at least can you give some explicit examples?

Howard


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Stjernfelt Seminar: Chapter 7, Dicisigns Beyond Language ~ 7.1

Dear Doug, lists,

Thanks for a good summary of Ch. 7.
Here a few comments.

F

Den 12/12/2014 kl. 03.57 skrev Douglas Hare 
ddh...@mail.harvard.edumailto:ddh...@mail.harvard.edu:


Stjernfelt Seminar: Chapter 7: 7.2-7.3

How should we classify the various different types of diagrams which can serve 
as predicates? According to our author, “Linguistic predicates seem to form one 
end of a range with very detailed, essentially continuous predicates like 
Myers' 4-D computer model or topographical maps in the other end” (NP, 188). It 
remains unclear to me why we should accept this linear description. I'm also 
curious why Stjernfelt does not discuss Peirce's late theory of hypoicons 
(images/diagrams/metaphors) at this point or mention his late realization of 
the importance of general icons.

Perhaps the author feels as if he has already covered this technical material 
in Chapter 4 of Diagrammatology, but I would like to know if he has changed his 
mind since he wrote in 2007 “that the category of pure diagrams is coextensive 
with mathematics as such. This implies that the question of pure diagram 
taxonomies is inevitably entangled in the large questions of the foundations of 
mathematics (Diagrammatology, 111).

You're right, I think i already covered the images/diagrams/metaphors 
trichotomy in Diagrammatology. I do not think I have changed my mind about pure 
diagrams since 2007 - pure meaning diagrams without reference to empirical 
matters-of-fact.

What is clear is that the author defines a continuous diagram as one in which 
“every connected part of the same dimension is, in itself, a diagram” (NP, 
188). Of course, this quality often comes up against the limitation of 
granularity, usually the fact that sometimes we cannot “zoom-in” any more based 
on observatory or technical limitations when viewing images. An interesting 
relation seems to hold between Dicisigns with continuous predicates and 
linguistically-stated or algebraic-expressed propositions. For example, a 
computer model like that of Myers can be conceived as one Large Dicisign given 
“the continuity of its predicate and the unambiguousness of its object 
reference to a duration of space-time embedding the assassination event. Such a 
Dicisign directly refers to a whole continuum of objects present in the 4-D 
space-time slice which is depicted” (NP,188).

Although the Myers' model allows for Euclidean translations of objects across 
diagram space, it apparently does not allow us to vary object shapes within the 
experiment.

No, that would infringe on the purpose of that diagram - to establish as 
detailed as possible facts on the ground during the assassination. This aim 
involves the idealized (but not unreasonable) assumption that the involved 
objects are stiff during the small timeslice charted. Allowing for the 
variation of object shapes would prevent this purpose.

As example of diagram types which do admit variation, the author points to both 
pure and empirical examples: the triangle, the elephant species Loxodonta 
africanus, the structure of Congress and makes a brief comparison to Husserl's 
notion of eidetic variation. But given that a taxonomy of subtypes of diagrams 
is a desideratum of future research, in 7.2 we are not treated to an exhaustive 
outline but rather a “sketch” of vistas for more clearly elucidating 
structures, objects of, and purposes of diagram predicates given a Peircean 
reading of modern cognitive fields.

I do think a taxonomy of diagrams is a huge desideratum - and there is no lack 
of existing proposals for such a taxonomy. Most probably,  several such 
taxonomies will have to be combined. But the close relation of pure diagrams to 
math implies - I think that diagram taxonomies must be connected to issues in 
the foundations of mathematics. So I think the development of diagram 
taxonomies requires far more than Peirce scholarship …
Here, I limit myself to discussing the much simpler issue of possible 
text-image-gesture combinations within the framework of Dicisigns - also to 
avoid the obvious trap of assuming the painting-with-a-legend example to 
indicate that text subjects/image predicates should be the typical or even the 
only such combination.

In Section 7.3: Propositions in the Wild—Combining Available Signs into 
Dicisigns, we find that subject-predicate Dicisign structure does not map 
isomorphically onto word-image conglomerates in mixed-media, but rather offers 
different possibilities for fulfilling the truth-bearing role of the functional 
doubleness of Dicisigns (NP, 190). Beyond the permutations of subject/predicate 
coupling already discussed, we also find various S-P combinations in which 
gestures play both roles (c.f. the typology on NP, 190).

As suggestions for further taxonomical advances, the author suggests more 
nuanced distinctions between diagrams and pictures, the introduction of 
sense-modalities on top of vision, a finer distinction between diagrams

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Stjernfelt Seminar: Chapter 7, Dicisigns Beyond Language ~ 7.1

Dear Gary, Doug,  lists,

I do think the upshot of taking thinking about thinking and hypostatic 
abstraction as human privileges must be that non-human animals are (largely) 
incapable of second-order logic, both in the standard sense of quantifying over 
predicates, but also in the more cognitive sense of being able to form 
abstractions based on already established thought content. I do not know about 
trained parrots and chimps which are known to be brought to surprising semiotic 
abilities. Cognitive ethology seems to be in an exciting period finding more 
and more  complex behaviours in many species so I would not categorically 
preclude non-humanoids from any aspect of thinking about thinking - rather, 
I'd take it as an empirical hypothesis that much human activity is highly 
dependent upon it while most non-human activity does not depend upon it.

The German senses of objective and subjective seem to derive to a large 
degree from Kant, and it is true Peirce strives not to use them. Instead, he 
uses subject in the logical sense involved in Dicisigns - and also in the 
related common-sense use of meaning the subject matter, the focus of 
discussion - while, as you know, he uses object about that which is referred 
to by a subject. I think Doug is right in bringing it up here in connection 
to the Peirce-Clark Extended Mind discussion, for one of the main reasons I 
think Peirce wishes to avoid the German subject-object dichotomy is in order to 
avoid subjective idealism - you know: ideas are figments of the psyche which 
are projected onto an outside object thereby covered by those projections and 
hence unknowable in itself. This is why Peirce's notion of mind tends to 
confuse many - it is not something in the head - it refers to structures of 
entities, no matter whether those structures are in the world or in the head. 
In a certain sense it is a version of objective idealism - which, of course, 
Peirce interprets scientifically - objective ideas being the subject of 
science, not only of metaphysical speculation.

Best
F


Den 14/12/2014 kl. 14.11 skrev Gary Fuhrman 
g...@gnusystems.camailto:g...@gnusystems.ca:

Doug, in answer to look your request,
If anyone can elaborate on how Peirce used the terms “subjective” and 
“objective” differently from the 'varieties of German senses', I am confused 
about how the quotation from the letter to Lady Welby on p. 194 makes his 
approach an original one.

The standard usage of the terms “subjective” and “subjectivity” are descended 
from the “German” senses to which Peirce refers (and objects). Peirce’s reasons 
for avoiding those usages are somewhat complex, and I’ve dealt with the issue 
in Chapter 12 of my work in progress, Turning Signs. Here’s the most directly 
relevant excerpt — the links included here will not work in this email, so if 
you want to further into these matters, you’ll need to read the webpage version 
at http://www.gnusystems.ca/rlb.htm#bjctv.

gary f.

Chapter 
2file:///C:\Users\The%20Story%20Book\Documents\gnoxic\sitemirror\dlg.htm#Ten 
directed your attention to ‘the tension between language, which is essentially 
public, and experience, which is necessarily private.’ Since then we have been 
using the word ‘experience’ in a more Peircean way, with reference to the 
‘Outward Clash’ or collision of expectation with reality which manifests 
Secondness as otherness. Both uses are salient.
We are accustomed to speak of an external universe and an inner world of 
thought.… Experience being something forced upon us, belongs to the external 
type. Yet in so far as it is I or you who experiences the constraint, the 
experience is mine or yours, and thus belongs to the inner world.
— Peirce (CP 
7.438-9file:///C:\Users\The%20Story%20Book\Documents\gnoxic\sitemirror\dsn.htm#outworld)
We are also accustomed to speak of the experience belonging to the inner world 
as ‘subjective’ and the experience of the external world as ‘objective’ – even 
though the world is inside 
out.file:///C:\Users\The%20Story%20Book\Documents\gnoxic\sitemirror\nsd.htm 
As we saw in Chapter 
10file:///C:\Users\The%20Story%20Book\Documents\gnoxic\sitemirror\cls.htm#conthought,
 the Century Dictionary tells us that the word ‘thought’ can refer either to 
the ‘subjective element of intellectual activity’ or to ‘the objective element 
of the intellectual product’ of thinking. But 
thepolyversityfile:///C:\Users\The%20Story%20Book\Documents\gnoxic\sitemirror\dlg.htm#polyv
 pervading language is even more strikingly exemplified by the history of the 
adjectivesobjective and subjective.
According to currently common usage, knowledge of X is objective to the extent 
that it reflects the way X really is in itself (independently of anyone's 
knowledge or perception), and subjective to the extent that it is due to the 
habits or intentions of the knower. A purely subjective idea would have no real 
relation to external reality; a purely objective ‘perception’ would be

Re: [biosemiotics:7769] [PEIRCE-L] Stjernfelt Seminar: Chapter 7, Dicisigns Beyond Language ~ 7.1

Dear Gary, Douglas, lists,

Thanks to Gary for the reference to the Harvard lecture draft. I went back and 
reread that (pretty fantastic btw) piece of prose. Gary's right about P's 
waverings (as he calls it) regarding the relation between the categories and 
the three argument types, ab-, in- and deduction (which is the 1-2-3 sequence 
followed in this text). In the deleted part added as s footnote in Turrisi's 
edition to which  Gary also refers, P. leaves the question undecided.
I think there is no doubt in the overall perspective that Peirce stuck, despite 
these waverings, to the ab-, de-, in-sequence in the larger perspective of the 
mature version of his logic - this is supported by his stable dichotomy of 
deductions (corollarial vs. theorematic, to which I return in a later chapter) 
and his (a bit less) stable trichotomy of inductions (pooh-pooh, quantitative, 
and qualitative, respectively) - given P's argument that Secondnesses give rise 
to dichotomies, Thirdnesses to trichotomies.
But despte this fact there is indeed good reason to investigate the arguments 
for the two different versions - the ab-in-de sequence dominated P's earlier 
years so it is really a case with much wavering on his part. The argument for 
the ab-in-de sequence in the deleted part of the Harvard lecture draft go as 
follows: ab-in-de function by means of icons, indices, and symbols, 
respectively - and induction has two subtypes (here, quantitative and 
qualitative) while deduction has three (here, three of the normal four types of 
syllogisms of which the fourth is claimed reductible).
In addition to the dichotomy-trichotomy argument, the corresponding arguments 
for the ab-de-in sequence often relies upon taking that sequence as a typical 
procedural sequence in the logic of discovery: abduction first proposes a 
hypothesis on the basis of some facts; deduction then takes this hypothesis as 
an ideal model and infers some necessary consequences from it; induction 
finally tests those deductive results by comparing them to empircal samples. 
(But is there necessarily any strong link between the 1-2-3 classification and 
the sequence of procedure?)
I think, however, that the decisive argument for finally settling on the 
ab-de-in sequence was Peirces double identification of deduction with 
diagrammatical reasoning and with mathematics (diagrams being seconds in the 
image-diagram-metaphor trichotomy) - instead of the identification of deduction 
with symbol-supported reasoning in the 5th Harvard lecture.
A third sequence which P often gives in the 1900s is de-in-ab which does not 
seem to refer to categories nor to procedure, but rather to the falling order 
of degree of validity (from necessary over probable to possible) - probably 
also an order of importance, deduction often (also in Gary's Harvard lecture) 
being described as the overall argument type which the other two somehow feed 
into.

All this said, I think a commentary on a meta-level should be added. I am not 
certain that 1-2-3 sequenceing in terms of the categories should always have 
first priority when discussing Peircean triadic distinctions. Of course, it is 
easy to get this idea from the classification of sciences where categories 
belong to Phenomenology, being second only to Mathematics in the hierarchy. But 
P's own practice counts against taking this Comtean hiearchy itself as a 
sequence of inference from top to bottom so that lower sciences should receive 
dictates by higher ones. There's a traffic also in the bottom-up direction - 
the lower sciences receive principles from the higher ones, alright, but the 
higher ones articulate those principles by abstracting from the matter of the 
lower ones. This latter is especially the case regarding the relation between 
logic and categories where P follows Kant's idea that the categories should be 
abstracted from logic. This implies that logic is actually the source of the 
categories (which is also evident from many P claims already in the 1860s). So 
even if, in the hierarchy of the ideal, static end point of inquiry, categories 
give principles to logic, in the ongoing process of discovery it is rather the 
categories which are abstracted out of logic. So before the final doctrine of 
categories is consummated, we should not be able to expect them to be able to 
legislate over logic - also because of the simple fact that Peirce discovered a 
whole lot more of logic than about category phenomenology which remained 
ambiguous (cf. the enormous amount of very different descriptions of the 
categories - as compared to the far larger stability of the description of 
ab-de-in, irrespectively of their sequence). This is why I generally hesitate 
to call in the categories as final arbiters of trichotomy issues lower in the 
system.

Finally, Doug asked about Bellucci's claim about an internal ab-de-in sequence 
within deduction. I perfectly agree with that suggestion - I think I also 
address it a

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Stjernfelt Seminar: Chapter 7, Dicisigns Beyond Language ~ 7.1


Dear Michael, lists,

Thank you for a whole essay on markedness - a great essay. I certainly agree 
with the importance of Jakobson's ideas about assymmetry relations as central 
to language - as well as with his insistence that semantic issues should 
receive priority.

It is not completely correct, however, that I have not adressed these issues 
(certainly not in the NP now discussed, but I did spend a chapter of 
Diagrammatology on it (ch. 7 on mereology)), Michael may be right I did not go 
far enough in that direction. My argument there was that Jakobson's markedness 
doctrine is motivated by mereology (the asymmetry between part and whole) and 
thus comparable to (and probably inspired by)  Husserl's dependency calculus of 
the 3rd Logical Investigation as well as to Peirce's attempt at a dependency 
calculus of the 1-2-3 categories (this is developed a bit in ch. 11 of that 
book).

I still have an uncompleted pet project of taking this investigation further to 
cover also Hjelmslev's vast extension of markedness (he strongly disagreed with 
Jakobsonian binarism and made a more complex taxonomy of many different types 
of opposition) … maybe there is some undiscovered gold to be found there … I 
hope to get around to this someday …

Best
F


Den 17/12/2014 kl. 03.44 skrev Michael Shapiro 
poo...@earthlink.netmailto:poo...@earthlink.net:

Doug, Gary,
Apropos of diagrammatization in language, there is now a 
considerable body of work done in a Peircean mode that Stjernefelt does not 
take account of in either of his books, and this is understandable in view of 
the fact that he is not a linguist. At the risk of losing most of the 
participants, perhaps the discussion can be enhanced by taking the following 
methodological considerations into account.
What needs underscoring first is the role of asymmetry in the 
manifestation of linguistic signs, specifically in its conceptual bond with 
complementarity and markedness. The unequal evaluation of the terms of 
oppositions in language has been an important notion of linguistic theorizing 
since at least the heyday of the Prague School’s chief Russian 
representatives––Trubetzkoy, Jakobson, and Karcevskij. The clearest early 
expression of its role is in Jakobson, when he characterized the asymmetry of 
correlative grammatical forms in morphology as two antinomies: (1) between the 
signalization and non-signalization of A; and (2) between the non-signalization 
of A and the signalization of non-A. In the first case, two signs referring to 
the same objective reality differ in semiotic value, in that the signatum of 
one of the signs specifies a certain ‘mark’ A of this reality, while the 
meaning of the other makes no such specification. In the second case, the 
antinomy is between general and special meaning of the unmarked term, where the 
meaning of the latter can fluctuate between leaving the content of the ‘mark’ A 
unspecified (neither positing nor negating it) and specifying the meaning of 
the unmarked term as an absence.
In focusing on the paradigmatic asymmetry of linguistic signs 
expressed by the polar semiotic values of marked and unmarked (superimposed on 
oppositions in phonology, grammar, and lexis), the early structuralists appear 
to have glossed over a cardinal syntagmatic consequence of markedness: 
complementarity. If the conceptual system which underlies and informs grammar 
(and language broadly conceived) consists of opposite-valued signs and sign 
complexes, then whatever syntagmatic coherence linguistic phenomena have in 
their actual manifestation must likewise be informed by principles of 
organization diagrammatic of this underlying asymmetry. The only aspect of the 
asymmetric nature of linguistic opposition that allows access to structural 
coherence is the complementarity of the terms of the asymmetry, the markedness 
values. The systematic relatability of the complementary entities and of their 
semiotic values is assured by the binary nature of all opposition, which 
balances the asymmetry of the axiological superstructure by furnishing the 
system of relations with the symmetry needed for the identification and 
perpetuation of linguistic units by learners and users.
Moreover, in explaining the cohesions between form and meaning 
complementation of markedness values is seen to be the dominant mode of 
semiosis––so much so that replication is confined to the structure of 
desinences and the expression of further undifferentiated members of the 
hierarchy of categories. Given the common understanding of undifferentiated 
contexts, statuses, and categories as marked in value (Brøndal’s principle of 
compensation), it is clear that replication is itself the marked (more narrowly 
defined) principle of semiosis, vis-à-vis its unmarked (less narrowly defined) 
counterpart, complementation.
Complementation actually has two aspects or modes of manifestation, 
which

Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:7544] Natural Propositions, 6.3 - 6.8

2014-12-26 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Howard, lists,

Sorry for having been away from the discussions for some time. Hope to catch up 
a bit in the Christmas week.


HP: Chapter 6 is full of examples of signaling and communication by special 
purpose symbols. What is missing is the fact that the existence of all 
thesespecial purpose Dicisigns and perception-action cycles depends on the 
information expressed by the general purpose language of the genes. This 
includes the construction of the nervous systems that can also learn. By 
general-purpose language I mean a communicable (heritable) 
open-ended(evolvable) symbol system that instructs all the organism's special 
purpose signaling, perceiving and acting systems.

Howard is right that genes play a central role in the introduction of the 
semiotic aspect of the world. However, I think he makes it too central by 
simply assuming genes form a general purpose language on which all other 
symbols are dependent.
This discussion is related to the phil-of-biology question of what came first, 
the DNA, the RNA, the cell, the cell membrane, etc.? It seems quite improbable 
to me that a fully equipped general-purpose language emerged as a whole. The 
genes are marvellous regulators but they did not create the processes which 
they regulate. That is why I side with the cell-first proponents in that 
discussion - like Kauffman or Deacon. The basic characteristic of the cell 
seems to be stable, self-sustaining metabolism - supposedly emerging in a 
nutrient-rich environment where chemical cycles from and - in some cases - 
become stable over time - Kauffman's autocatalytic networks, Deacon's autocells 
or autogens. Only later those stable, circular processes acquired membranes to 
further support their stability and genetic regulators to facilitate their 
reproduction. Taking such a picture to approach the order of origin, my 
argument rests on this idea: that the first germs of semiotics lies in the 
metabolic cycle. The metabolic cycle can be said to need certain chemicals in 
order to close the circle - this seems to me a plausible first, primitive 
intention.



Also, I don't find any clear distinction between the language in which the 
symbolic information is expressed and the consequent physical action that is 
instructed or constrained. For example, Frederik speaks of the perceptual 
Dicisign reading the active site followed by the action Dicisign of swimming 
(p. 145). He goes on to say that this is not merely a causal process and that 
the semiotic aspect of this process lies in the fact that the weak local 
interaction makes a whole class of surface stimuli from different sources give 
rise to the same typical behavior. Thus it is the fact that the bacterium does 
not interact causally with the whole of the molecule (before consuming it, that 
is) but merely weakly interacts with a spot on its perimeter which is a 
precondition for its turning a semiotic and not merely causal process.

I do not follow this semiosis vs. causality distinction. There is no reason why 
the actions of the bacterium could not, in principle, be completely causally 
described by chemical and physical laws given the genetically constructed 
molecules. On the other hand, there is a good reason why the order of thesymbol 
sequences forming the language of the genes cannot be causally determined or 
explained by any laws.

I do not think the distinciton between semiosis and causality is as brutal as 
assumed here. I rather think that the fact that primitive metabolism may have 
phases which may be served by different but related molecules (e.g. different 
carbohydrates) could be a first germ of generality.

My reference to the weak molecular forces (van der Waals bonds, hydrogen bonds) 
refers to a later phase where we already have full competent organisms like 
bacteria -  because it is those forces which allow for very primitive organisms 
to detect the presence chemical compounds without entering into full chemical 
covalent action with those compouts (such action immediately destroying those 
compounds, of course, and in some cases, themselves).

All in all, genetic semiosis - which Howard speaks about as being not 
determinable by physical laws -  I take to be the amazing result of early 
biosemiotic evolution rather than its starting point.

Best
F




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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7430] Natural Propositions, Chapter 5 : Cognition as biologic

Dear Gary, lists -
I think this is a very nice combination of Damasio's account and mine between 
which I do not see any insurmountable difference - thanks!
Actually, I thought of involving Rosen's notion of anticipation when writing 
the chapter - but it was already too long -
Best
F

Den 14/11/2014 kl. 21.54 skrev Gary Fuhrman 
g...@gnusystems.camailto:g...@gnusystems.ca:

On reflection, though, I think they can easily be combined into a single 
consistent account, which goes something like this:

“To address Umwelt facts” is, most basically, to survive in one’s environment; 
for any organism capable of acting at all, that means acting appropriately for 
its “purposes” (survival, homeostasis, reproduction) in its current situation. 
A more complex organism will require more complex action habits, which will 
contitute an internal system of mediating between sensing and acting — an 
Innenwelt, a cognitive system. Its “logic” is knowing the right thing to do, 
which entails that it must instantiate a logic which is also semiotic 
(mediative). This instantiation is of course constrained by laws of physics and 
biology (i.e. the embodiment of a semiotic process must be physically and 
biologically possible).

But what governs the evolution and development of such systems, constrained as 
it is by natural selection, is the more general logical and semiotic 
requirement for the Innenwelt or self-guidance system to addressUmwelt facts. 
And as it becomes more complex, this internal system must increasingly monitor 
itself as well as its current situation, in order to adapt its own habits 
dynamically. Regardless of how it is physically instantiated, it also needs to 
dynamically project internalizations of Umwelt facts into the future. It 
becomes what Robert Rosen called an “anticipatory system.”


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Re: [biosemiotics:7435] [PEIRCE-L] Natural Propositions, Chapter 5: Universes of Discourse and Umwelt theory

Dear Mara, Garys, lists -
A good summary.
But I do not think neutral objects are confined to human being Umwelt only. It 
is correct that Uexküll sometimes said things in that direction, just as, other 
times, he said the opposite.
But we have no reason to assume that mammals or birds, e.g., have a functional 
relation to every medium-size stone they perceive - rather, animals able to 
navigate their way through  surroundings to find or flee from the functional 
parts of the Umwelt (like predators, preys, conspecifics, nourishment, shelter 
etc.) will have to be able to cognize those non-functional parts of their 
Umwelt - that is, neutral objects.
Best
F

Den 18/11/2014 kl. 02.07 skrev Gary Richmond 
gary.richm...@gmail.commailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com:

Mara, Gary F. Lists,

Thank you for your recent, exhilarating and insightful dialogue on several key 
issues taken up in Chapter 5 as it helped clarify much which I just couldn't 
seem to get my head around regarding the dorsal stream and how Frederik employs 
the logical lessons which Hurford draws from the dorsal split, 'correcting' his 
logic in extrapolating adroitly to that of Peirce's and the dicisign. I can't 
say that I'm yet wholly secure in these matters, but your discussion was 
decidedly helpful

A kind of model of the dialogical thinking you've been doing which helped me so 
much, to rather break through to a better understanding of some of the 
principal themes of Chapter 5, occurs at the conclusion of Gary's most recent 
post in the chapter thread.

GF. . . that’s why the ventral/dorsal should not be regarded as an absolute 
split, but rather as a differentiation of the perception part of the cycle — 
just as the subject/predicate split is not absolute in Peircean semiotic logic 
(NP §3.10).
MW: Isn't that what makes objects in the Umwelt always have functional meaning, 
i.e., the lack of neutral objects in non-human species? In other words, 
wouldn't the Subjects of these natural propositions already be laden with some 
type of Predicate -- e.g., danger/GET AWAY FROM -- to enter the Innenwelt at 
all?
GF Yes — or if we regard the Innenwelt as the home base of predicates, and the 
Umwelt (or universe of discourse) as the domain of subjects, the dorsal stream 
would be providing feedback to the Innenwelt, which will then feed forward into 
perception in the next turn of the semiotic cycle, calling in more detailed 
information from the ventral stream. (Except that the division into separate 
‘cycles’ — like the division of semiosis into separate ‘signs’ — is somewhat 
artificial, an attempt to pin down these continuous processes so that we can 
diagram them. . . Surely action and perception must be running in parallel in 
the brain, not taking turns.)
I hope we’re thinking along the same lines here, and perhaps clarifying the 
connection between dorsal/ventral and subject/predicate.

I would say that you are both most certainly clarifying the connection between 
dorsal/ventral and subject/predicate. Indeed it occurs to me, as perhaps it 
does to some others on the Peirce list in particular, that while I find the 
discipline of biosemiotics fascinating, interesting, and important, and imagine 
that Frederik's book may contribute to expanding not only its but all semiotic 
horizons (which, of course, is why we're doing a seminar on it) that it is 
immensely helpful to read just the kind of exchange you've been having. In fact 
it proved considerably more valuable than reading the source material I 
excerpted and posted links to earlier in this thread, material which actually 
tended to complicate matters for me (and perhaps some other 
non-biosemioticians) and, so, muddy the waters a bit. So, thanks again.

Best,

Gary R


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Continuity, Generality, Infinity, Law, Synechism, etc.

Dear Jeff, Michael, Gary R, Lists,

Peirce's engagement with continuity is a huge issue (see books by Kelly Parker 
and Matthew Moore addressing this). One comment - when writing Diagrammatology 
(2007) I spent considerable time grappling with this issue for the evident 
reason that many diagrams from continuous representations and, what is more, 
that continuous interpretations and manipulations of them seem to be the key to 
the generality of claims inferable from them (a large appendix of the book 
addresses Peirce's discussions of Cantor etc.). 
My conclusion, however, was that Ps interest in the continuum was not only 
mathematically but also metaphysically motivated. Peirce wanted a concept of 
the continuum sufficiently strong to support his scotist realism - the latter 
restatable as the claim that the reference of a true universal is a set of 
cases which exceeds any extension in terms of sets of past, actual, and future 
single cases. It is an open question, however, if that desideratum may not be 
satisfied with a weaker notion of the continuum than Peirce's strong wish for a 
supermultitudinous collection transgressing all Cantorian Alephs …

Best
F


 It was not my intention to raise hard questions about the later stages in 
 development of Peirce's account of continuity.  Rather, I was merely 
 suggesting that our inquiries concerning such difficult conceptions should be 
 guided by a clear understanding of the methods we'll use.  As such, I asked:  
 What might we do to arrive at greater clarity...about continuity and the 
 continuum?
 
 My aim in the email sent as a follow-up was to offer two suggestions by way 
 of an answer about what we could do.
 
 1.  First, we can model the efforts to gain greater clarity about the 
 conception of continuity on Peirce's earlier efforts to deal with similarly 
 difficult conceptions--such as those of of relative, relation and 
 relationship. (CP, 3.456)  Such efforts should start with an attempt to 
 improve our concepts at the level of the first grade of clarity.  Towards 
 this end, we can focus on the things we typically say using the conceptions 
 and the things we typically say about the conceptions.  So, the points I was 
 making about the way we use the terms 'continuous', 'continuity' and 
 'continuum' were just initial efforts to make some progress in improving our 
 clarity about the familiar ways we already use the terms.  The points might 
 seem trivial, or obvious, but this is where we should start.  Once we've 
 arrived at greater clarity at the first grade, we can then turn to the second 
 and then the third grade of clarity--where we will use the pragmatic maxim to 
 move beyond abstract definitions to explanations that can be put to the test.
 
 2.  As we work our way to better abstract definitions and then towards more 
 fruitful hypotheses concerning the nature of continuity, it will likely be 
 worth our while to draw on the clarifications Peirce has provided of the 
 conceptions of relative, relation and relationship in order to refine our 
 explanations.  So, we might ask, what kind of relationship is involved in 
 saying that the experience of things changing from one time to the next is an 
 experience of continuous change?  What kind of relation does the memory of 
 something that happened in the past have to that which is taking place in 
 experience right now?  Drawing on the clarifications that he has provided, 
 the memory of something happening in the past is one relative, and the 
 experience of what is happening now is another relative, and we can ask what 
 kind of relationship holds between these two relatives.  What kinds of 
 relatives are these?  Are they monadic, dyadic or triadic relatives?  If they 
 are dyadic or triadic, in what ways might they be degenerate or genuine?  
 Considered in separation from one another (by abstracting from the relation 
 that holds between them), the relatives are just an icon or image without a 
 local habitation and a name.  Moving to questions about how we might arrive 
 at more clarity at the second grade, let us ask who kind of relationship (or 
 fundamentum relationis) holds between these relatives?  The relation is the 
 relationship considered as something that may be said to be true of one of 
 the objects in the relationship.  So, we could ask how some qualities of 
 experience in a larger continuum of possible feelings are located at one time 
 in a larger continuum of times in our experience, and how that relative 
 stands in relation to the relative that is experience when we notice that 
 things have later changed.  At this grade of clarity, we are treating the 
 relatives a nominal relatives.  How might we make our way to a third and 
 higher grade of clarity?  As we examine these experiences, we need to ask 
 what suppositions need to be made about the continuum of feeling and the 
 continuum of time in order to explain the connections that are formed between

[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7524] Natural Propositions 6

Howard, great, almost Voltarian oneliner ...

Den 25/11/2014 kl. 14.16 skrev Howard Pattee 
hpat...@roadrunner.commailto:hpat...@roadrunner.com:

Natural selection only works after you are dead. Semiosis allows selection 
while you are still alive.


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7625] Re: Continuity, Generality,


Dear Stan, lists -
:

F: So Howard's claim about the indecidability of epistemologies does not extend 
to his own basic epistemologic assumptions which remain stably realist.

S: I do not recall that Howard has urged the philosophical realist argument.

??? Of course he hasn't. He has urged the indecidability of epistemologies (of 
realist vs. nominalism etc.)
But my argument is that before considering epistemologies at all, he has set up 
a scene consisting of matter, symbols, laws which are then taken for granted as 
BEFORE any epistemological indecidability ...




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Re: [biosemiotics:7617] Re: [PEIRCE-L] Continuity, Generality, Infinity, Law, Synechism, etc.

sounds like a great solution! - but meticulously distinguishing what is realist 
in science and what is not is different from indecidability …
F

Den 01/12/2014 kl. 21.08 skrev Howard Pattee 
hpat...@roadrunner.commailto:hpat...@roadrunner.com
:

By undecidable I was thinking of the typical philosopher's either-or views 
between epistemologies, or the ideological commitment to a single epistemology. 
In physics, each case requires a pragmatic decision. I appear to be a realist 
toward events that I cannot conceive of as depending in any way on my 
existence. That would include the concept of natural laws. I appear as a 
nominalist toward those aspects of events which are dependent on my choice or 
intervention. That usually includes aspects of observation and measurement (the 
quantum measurement problem may require something new). The concept of 
probability has to be viewed at least two ways.


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7373] Natural Propositions

2014-11-07 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Howard, lists -

I am not sure. Much of the yet unresolved discussion of QM have to do with 
deciding which ontological commitments come with the Schrödinger equation. As 
far as I have understood, there is no scientific agreement about this (unlike 
basic knowledge about iron and cakes etc.). Copenhagen intepretation, Everett 
interpretation, Penrose interpretation and others. As long as this is the case, 
one interpretation is as good as the other - so in this case you're right about 
the undecided plurality of positions - until further notice, that is.
But this is not generalizable to the idea that all scientific knowledge is 
subject to the same ambiguity.

Best
F


Den 07/11/2014 kl. 14.49 skrev Howard Pattee 
hpat...@roadrunner.commailto:hpat...@roadrunner.com
:

At 03:51 PM 11/6/2014, Frederik wrote:

Dear Howard, list
This is where our ways part.

HP: I'm not sure why. My 25 words was just trying to sound like a nominalist. 
It is not my view, as the other 700 words tried to explain.

Suppose I agree to be a realist about iron, baking pies, round objects, etc., 
but prefer a nominalistic view of Schrödinger's wavefunction. That is, I assume 
Ockham's parsimonious attitude that the wavefunction is just the minimum 
subjective degrees of belief I need to predict the probability of an event. 
(This is sometimes called Quantum 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bayesianism 
Bayesianismhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bayesianism.)

Do our ways still part?

Howard


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7370] Natural Propositions and continuity

2014-11-06 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Howard, Gary, lists -

It is certainly correct, as Howard says, that Peirce also maintained the 
irreducibility of discreteness to continuity and vice versa. In his categories, 
2-ness is discrete, 3-ness is continuous. It is also correct that this is far 
from trivial. Actually Peirce thought - and I think he was right - that the 
issue of continuity is one of the deepest in philosophy and science.

Peirce refused the attempts to reduce continuity to any transfinite number and 
tried - unsuccesfully - to fashion his own version of Cantor's set theory in 
the 1890s where he attempted to prove that the continuum was a 
Supermultitudinous set transgressing all transfinites. I covered some of that 
in Diagrammatology (2007) - others addressing these issues in Peirce include 
Kelly Parker, Matthew Moore and Fernando Zalamea.

But Peirce indeed claimed there was a strong connection between the 
continuous/discrete issue and logic. Thus, his version of scholastic realism 
(the reality of some universals) claims that such universals are continuous in 
the sense that no, not even infinite, set of particular occurrences of a 
universal can exhaust the meaning of that universal. This, of course, is an 
anti-extensional theory of meaning. The meaning of the universal red, e.g. 
can not be defined by pointing to the extension of red objects (also apart from 
the practical impossibility actually of establishing that extension … even if 
that extension could be established, it would not exhaust the meaning of 
red). So, such universals are taken to form a continuous regularity of the 
universe apart from the sum of instances any knower may be acquainted with.

But he did not claim continuity thereby simply swallowed the instantiations. 
Here, he often uses the metaphor of judge and sheriff. There may be general 
laws (patterns, tendencies etc.) of the universe, but they have no power unless 
they are actually instantiated in discrete singulars (like the rulings of a 
judge have effect only if there is a sheriff able to force people to obey …).

Best
F

Den 05/11/2014 kl. 22.35 skrev Howard Pattee 
hpat...@roadrunner.commailto:hpat...@roadrunner.com:

At 07:46 AM 11/5/2014, Gary Fuhrman wrote:
Is that what you mean by saying “that neither conceptually nor formally can 
discreteness or continuity be derived from or reduced to the other”, and that 
Peirce had tried to do that? I don’t find any such assertion in the online 
article you cite.

HP: Yes. And you are obscuring the point, which is the logical irreducible 
complementarity of discrete and continuous models. The authors I have read 
explain how Peirce tried to relate discrete and continuous models and my 
assertion is that he ended up with the same result as Aristotle, Euclid, Kant, 
Cantor, and Dedekind, i.e., that there is a logical problem constructing a line 
out of points, counting the reals, or creating infinity from infinitesimals. 
Peirce tried this with all of these complementary pairs.

Gwartney-Gibbs in Continuous 
http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/SAAP/USC/DP16.html 
Frustrationhttp://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/SAAP/USC/DP16.html 
concludes: [Peirce] realizes that “discrete” mathematics can account for only 
the first two forms of mathematical reasoning concerning finite and [countably] 
infinite collections.  The third form, concerning true continua, on the other 
hand, must be produced in the processes of topical geometry. Peirce's topical 
geometry is based on his intuitive phenomenology, not formal logic.

Howard






Anyway, in case it’s not evident how continuity (i.e. Thirdness) is related to 
logic, semiosis and cognition, the following passage from CP 7.535-6 (undated) 
may be helpful:

In short, the idea of continuity is the idea of a homogeneity, or sameness, 
which is a regularity. On the other hand, just as a continuous line is one 
which affords room for any multitude of points, no matter how great, so all 
regularity affords scope for any multitude of variant particulars; so that the 
idea [of] continuity is an extension of the idea of regularity. Regularity 
implies generality; and generality is an intellectual relation essentially the 
same as significance, as is shown by the contention of the nominalists that all 
generals are names. Even if generals have a being independent of actual 
thought, their being consists in their being possible objects of thought 
whereby particulars can be thought. Now that which brings another thing before 
the mind is a representation; so that generality and regularity are essentially 
the same as significance. Thus, continuity, regularity, and significance are 
essentially the same idea with merely subsidiary differences. That this element 
is found in experience is shown by the fact that all experience involves time. 
Now the flow of time is conceived as continuous. No matter whether this 
continuity is a datum of sense, or a quasi-hypothesis imported by the mind into 
experience, or

[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7377] Re: Natural Propositions and continuity

2014-11-06 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt


Den 06/11/2014 kl. 17.11 skrev Jeffrey Brian Downard 
jeffrey.down...@nau.edumailto:jeffrey.down...@nau.edu
:
Dear Jeff, lists,

I do not think this P-quote deals with the reduction of individuals to 
generalities. It deals with the status of possibilities - it is pertaining to 
possibilities he claims the absence of distinction of individuals (cf. the 
apple pie again: the recipe does not distinguish between different particular 
cakes realized from it).  But existing individuals and processes are not 
possibilities - P over and over refers to the irreducibility of individual 
existence or haecceity as he calls it with a Scotist term.
Against actual existence, then there are Possibilities, to P falling in two 
groups - mere possibilities, firstnesses, which are vague - and real 
possibilities, thirdnesses, which are general. Generality is often identified 
with continuity.
My contention is that P's strong interest in mathematical continuity is, in the 
end, metaphysically motivated. He wanted a mathematical tool to describe the 
reality of thirdness.

Best,
F


Gary F., Howard, Frederik, Lists

In his discussion of topological connectedness in the New Elements of 
Mathematics, Peirce does seem to say that we can construct discontinuous 
relations from processes of generation that are continuous.  We do it by 
intersecting the things we've generated, which is a process of separation.  He 
seems to say the same thing in Reasoning and the Logic of Things when he is 
discussing the 3 basic kinds of topological discontinuities in one dimensional 
spaces.  Having said this much about mathematical continuity and discontinuity, 
it isn't clear to me what Peirce's position is with respect to reducing our 
philosophical conceptions of discontinuity or discreteness (I am supposing they 
are not equivalent) to a philosophical conception of continuity.  What is clear 
is that Peirce thinks the philosophical difficulties involved in trying to 
arrive at greater clarity with respect to our conceptions of continuity and 
discontinuity are greater than those we face in mathematics.  As such, we
 should use mathematics as our guide in philosophical inquiry.

I don't see Peirce using the language of reduction in this philosophical 
context--at least not very often.  Here is one place where he does talk in this 
way:

When we say that of all possible throws of a pair of dice one thirty-sixth 
part will show sixes, the collection of possible throws which have not been 
made is a collection of which the individual units have no distinct identity. 
It is impossible so to designate a single one of those possible throws that 
have not been thrown that the designation shall be applicable to only one 
definite possible throw; and this impossibility does not spring from any 
incapacity of ours, but from the fact that in their own nature those throws are 
not individually distinct. The possible is necessarily general; and no amount 
of general specification can reduce a general class of possibilities to an 
individual case. It is only actuality, the force of existence, which bursts the 
fluidity of the general and produces a discrete unit. Since Kant it has been a 
very wide-spread idea that it is time and space which introduce continuity into 
nature. But this is an anacoluthon. Time and space are continuous
 because they embody conditions of possibility, and the possible is general, 
and continuity and generality are two names for the same absence of distinction 
of individuals. (CP 4.172)

I would add that, whatever we might say about continuity and discontinuity, it 
will probably be an oversimplification to suppose that his phenomenological 
categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness (and the associated relations 
of the monad, dyad, and triad) can be lined up in any easy way with these 
conceptions.  That is, the dyad is not relation of discreteness or of 
discontinuity.  Rather, the relation of the dyad is involved in these 
conceptions.  So, if we can show that the relation of the dyad can't be reduced 
to the triad another because they are both elementary, it does not follow that 
discontinuity or discreteness can't be reduced to continuity.

--Jeff


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7380] Re: Natural Propositions and continuity

2014-11-06 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Gary, lists,

I vaguely recall a picture connecting 1-2-3 - some possibilities (1) seep 
through the cracks of existence (2) to become real (3) habits …
I don't recall where it is from …

But whaddabout Jim Hurford and his challenging hypothesis of the visual/dorsal 
split realizing propositions in animal minds?

Best
F

Den 07/11/2014 kl. 00.07 skrev Gary Richmond 
gary.richm...@gmail.commailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com
:

Frederik, lists,

I agree with your contention that P's strong interest in mathematical 
continuity is, in the end, metaphysically motivated. He wanted a mathematical 
tool to describe the reality of thirdness. Paul Forster takes this strong 
interest up from the standpoint of pragmatism, highlighting, as do you, 
Peirce's arguments against psychologism and nominalism, most especially in 
consideration of the philosophy of science (NP, 106).

What I am unclear about concerns what you wrote immediately before the sentence 
I just quoted:

Against actual existence, then there are Possibilities, to P falling in two 
groups - mere possibilities, firstnesses, which are vague - and real 
possibilities, thirdnesses, which are general. Generality is often identified 
with continuity.

But thirdnesses, especially as habits and laws (natural and man made) by 
definition and in fact mediate between firstnesses and secondnesses. What is 
general, habitual, lawful, sometimes--indeed quite often enough in nature--will 
be realized in the actual world, say, as a new species. So, in a sense, 
can-be's (1ns) may become would-be's (3ns) if the conditions were to come into 
existence, and in that case, if they do they are realized in actual lawful 
existence, in the lawfulness which, seemingly, contra what you just wrote ( 
But existing individuals and processes are not possibilities - P over and over 
refers to the irreducibility of individual existence or haecceity ). So, 
what I'm saying is that thirdnesses most certainly do figure in, for example, 
all processes, such as those we find in any organism.

So, thirdness is not just a form of possibility, for certain generals (laws) 
are active in existent nature. New processes and structures evolutionarily may 
come into being but, when they do, that which would-be is now functioning 
through processes and the like. But, perhaps this is too obvious to mention?

Best,

Gary R


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:7261] Re: Natural Propositions Chapter 4

2014-11-04 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Howard, lists -

I stumbled over a text bite from mid-October which gave me the idea that there 
may be some terminological confusion at the root of some of our discussions.

Den 20/10/2014 kl. 18.19 skrev Howard Pattee 
hpat...@roadrunner.commailto:hpat...@roadrunner.com:

HP: Exactly. More generally, do the symbols of the genes code only 
nominalistically for specific amino acids, or do they code realistically 
foruniversal functions like catalysis and self-replication? The evidence seems 
clear that gene symbols code for both, as well as many other conditional and 
control activites that can't be called either specific or universal.

Here, Howard couples nominalism/ realism with specific/ universal. But this is 
strange to me.

 Specific, of course, comes from species, all the way back to Aristotle 
(species/genus or eidos/genos) - and species, of course is a general concept, 
a universal (in traditional discussions, the staple example of universals are 
animal species such as lions). So specific terms are also universals. They come 
in many different degree of generality: artifacts - furniture - chairs - 
armchairs - Louis XVI armchairs - red Louis XVI armchairs are all 
universals on different levels of generality. What is not universals is 
particulars, individuals: this armchair. The nominalism/realism issue 
pertains to whether all such universal terms are only figments of the mind, 
grouping together particulars in reality which have nothing at all in common 
(nominalism) or whether there is some fundamentum in re in certain universals 
(but not all universals, I think most scientists agrees that universals like 
demons, ether, unicorns, fairies, maybe gods  have no fundamentum in 
re).

Conversely, realism could not be the claim that signs refer to the most general 
functions as in Howards's quote. Realism is the claim that some predicates (or 
codes) refer to real structures of the world (round has its fundamentum in 
re in the existence of round objects, iron has its fundamentum in re in the 
existence of objects made out of iron).

But I think I can see where Howard is heading in the quote. I think he is right 
that gene symbols code for functions both on a specific and a more general 
level - on several levels of generality, as it were.  But all functions are 
general. This lies in the fact that several, numerically distinct events or 
processes can serve the same function. As with Peirce's example : baking an 
apple pie, you (and the recipe you follow) have only a general conception of 
the cake you intend. Many different, idividual baking processes may satisfy the 
recipe. The recipe speaks of, e.g. 4 apples, not about 4 particular, 
identifiable apples found on a particular branch on a particular tree in a 
particular orchard in Massachusetts at a particular date. - But the resulting 
cake is not general.

Best
F

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Natural Propositions Chapter four, Proto-propositions

2014-11-03 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Clark, lists -
As I write in the book, I think there must be posited a continuous scale 
between Dicent Indexical Sinsigns in one end and full Symbolic Propositions in 
the other.
Given that, I think it is easy to recognize symbols in non-human animals. The 
requirement is that they are habitual, stable, repeatable, future-oriented and 
with a general meaning. All this goes for, e.g., firefly signaling, covered in 
ch. 6.
Of course, this depends upon accepting phylogenetically established behaviour 
as habitual. But I do not see why the distinction between phylo- and ontogeny 
should have anything to do with habit in the Peircean sense of the word. The 
species-specific firefly code seems a habit evolved over many generations of 
natural selection. In ordinary parlance, it is true, we tend to associate habit 
with regular behaviour developed in the lifetime of an individual. But that is 
not the case in Peirce's vast generalization of the term.
As to signs in biology, I think simpler organisms even have signs which are 
MORE stable and repeatable than higher organisms. The possibility for one-shot 
propositions only seems to me to occur to pretty intelligent organisms.
Best
F

Den 03/11/2014 kl. 04.40 skrev Clark Goble 
cl...@lextek.commailto:cl...@lextek.com
:


On Nov 2, 2014, at 1:24 PM, Frederik Stjernfelt 
stj...@hum.ku.dkmailto:stj...@hum.ku.dk wrote:


There is a bit terminological confusion here. Peirce's distinction within 
Dicisigns was between propositions and quasi-propositions, the latter being 
those Dicisigns which are not symbols.

I wanted to talk about this earlier when it was covered in the book. 
Unfortunately I was rather swamped and am only now getting to this.

The reason to separate dicisigns into those with symbols and without is 
obviously a very natural and clear one. As you develop things in the book you 
focus on these non-symbolic dicisigns as natural propositions.

As I read through this though I wondered if we can have symbol-signs in 
non-human minds. I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with examples 
where that arbitrariness that is characteristic of symbols is present 
naturally. Unfortunately I’ve not come up with any good examples outside of 
computer based programs. Those are controversial due to the role of human 
intelligence in starting the process.

I was wondering if anyone else had any thoughts in this regard. (Apologies if 
this was covered - I’m working backwards from newest posts)

The closest I could come up with are animal calls, such as bird songs. It seems 
those are arbitrary but I’m not sure they function quite as symbolic signs let 
alone full dicisigns. Also most signs like these in nature while arbitrary in 
one sense are not-arbitrary in important other senses due to the nature of 
their evolution.


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7259] Natural Propositions, Chapter 3.14 (conclusion)

Dear Gary, lists -
A good Damasio finding. There are rather different viewpoints in the Cog Sci 
communities - some of them, including also the Andy Clark school, refuse 
neurocentrism and the idea that cognition arises only with neural tissue.
Best
F


Den 19/10/2014 kl. 15.27 skrev Gary Fuhrman 
g...@gnusystems.camailto:g...@gnusystems.ca:

The final section of NP Chapter 3, rather than summarizing what has gone 
before, looks ahead to the chapters which will explore the “actual implications 
of Peirce’s doctrine of propositions”. For me, the most interesting of these 
implications is the possibility of a deeper insight into the connections 
between human cognition and that of other sentient beings.

I must say that before I was drawn into Peirce’s work, and then into 
Stjernfelt’s, I never expected to find any such insights in the history of 
logic. I was more inclined to look for them in the work of thoughtful 
neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio. Just to give one example from the 
first chapter of his recent (2010) work, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the 
Conscious Brain, p. 27:
In brief, the conscious mind emerges within the history of life regulation. 
Life regulation, a dynamic process known as homeostasis for short, begins in 
unicellular living creatures, such as a bacterial cell or a simple amoeba, 
which do not have a brain but are capable of adaptive behavior. It progresses 
in individuals whose behavior is managed by simple brains, as is the case with 
worms, and it continues its march in individuals whose brains generate both 
behavior and mind (insects and fish being examples). I am ready to believe that 
whenever brains begin to generate primordial feelings—and that could be quite 
early in evolutionary history—organisms acquire an early form of sentience. 
From there on, an organized self process could develop and be added to the 
mind, thereby providing the beginning of elaborate conscious minds. Reptiles 
are contenders for this distinction, for example; birds make even stronger 
contenders; and mammals get the award and then some.
Most species whose brains generate a self do so at core level. Humans have both 
core self and autobiographical self. A number of mammals are likely to have 
both as well, namely wolves, our ape cousins, marine mammals and elephants, 
cats, and, of course, that off-the-scale species called the domestic dog.

Peirce’s doctrine of the dicisign as the core semiotic structure of the 
proposition provides another angle from which to investigate the relations 
between self-control and sentience, consciousness and language, cybernetics and 
psychology. That’s my perspective on it, anyway. I’d be interested in hearing 
from others — especially those with little previous interest in logic — what 
they hope or expect to find as we venture further into Natural Propositions. 
Tomorrow, Tyler Bennett will lead us into Chapter 4.

gary f.


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:7252] Re: Natural Propositions Chapter 4


Dear Howard, Gary, lists,

I think Howard and myself are on the same main line here, even if not in all 
details.
 I think Howard's generalization of language goes too far because that seems 
to require an elaborated system to exist as a prerequisite to even the very 
first occurrences of signs in early life. I find it implausible such a system 
was in place well before any individual sign. My own generalization of 
proposition, I think, is less demanding.

I also infer that Frederik would interpret the deflated truth value of a 
primitive proposition as its survival value.

I am not sure I agree here. I think even the deflated truth value differs from 
survival value. I can imagine cases where a true sign adds to survival value 
not because of its truth but because of some accidental feature by it. I can 
also imagine cases where a true sign is neutral as to survival value …
I agree with that interpretation, but could a realist be satisfied with that 
interpretation of truth? Also, how is a genetic instruction (an imperative or 
conditional) interpretable as a proposition?

I have no hesitation against accepting that as a proposition. But that has to 
do with the definition of that word. Peirce - as I reconstructed in ch. 3 - saw 
propositions as an ideal content which may, subsequently, be put to use in 
different speech acts such as assertions, imperatives, interrrogatives, etc. 
But because assertions are taken as the prototypical proposition act, also in 
Peirce, a terminological confusion may arise from calling assertions simply 
propositions.
Most simple propositions in biosemiotics are rather imperatives involved in 
conditionals - like If X, do Y …

Best
F

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Natural Propositions Chapter 4

Dear Jon, lists -

I do not think that jumping out of the pan of psychologism into the pyre of 
biologism is doing logic, pragmatisim, or semiotics much good.

So watch out for that ...

Ha! - point taken!
But I do not see the interest in tracing the development of semiotic and logic 
capabilities through biological evolution as necessarily leading into 
biologism, as long as you do not aim to reduce those capabilities to their 
biological instantiations - let alone aim to make them relative to such 
instantiations in each species, leading to relativism …

Best
F

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Fwd: [PEIRCE-L] Natural Propositions Chapter four, Proto-propositions



Dear Jerry, lists -

There is a bit terminological confusion here. Peirce's distinction within 
Dicisigns was between propositions and quasi-propositions, the latter being 
those Dicisigns which are not symbols. (One confusion comes from the fact that 
Peirce often uses Dicisign and proposition interchangeably, such that 
propositions have two subtypes: propositions and quasi-propositions - this 
seems sloppy but is widespread in everyday language, think of Cows having the 
two subtypes Cows and Bulls (Jakobson's markedness))
James Hurford whose ideas I discuss in a later chapter uses proto-proposition 
to refer to parts of proto-thought in higher animals (specifically monkeys).
I do not think these two concepts, quasi and proto, are identical.

Best
F

Den 23/10/2014 kl. 19.09 skrev Jerry LR Chandler 
jerry_lr_chand...@me.commailto:jerry_lr_chand...@me.com:

Tyler, List:

I am a quite uncertain about the meaning of the term proto-proposition

Could you hew-out a rough definition of your meaning?

It would be helpful, but not necessary, to place the notion of 
proto-proposition in relation to the terms of the triadic triad.

It would also be helpful but not necessary to know whether or not a 
proto-proposition should be thought of a form of an antecedent.

Cheers

Jerry


On Oct 23, 2014, at 10:56 AM, Tyler Bennett wrote:





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Re: [biosemiotics:7289] [PEIRCE-L] Natural Propositions Chapter four, Proto-propositions

Dear Jeff, Gary, lists
Den 24/10/2014 kl. 00.10 skrev Jeffrey Brian Downard 
jeffrey.down...@nau.edumailto:jeffrey.down...@nau.edu:

Gary R., Lists,

Here is a minor point.  You say:  But Frederik is arguing in his book that the 
other two, the Dicent Indexical Legisign and the Dicent Indexical Sinsign, may 
at times and in ways function in a manner similar to the Proposition in that 
they can convey information. Thus, these other dicentic signs may be referred 
to as Quasi-Propositions.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that Peirce is providing a real definition 
of the nature of the dicisign that generalizes from the nature of the 
proposition so as to articulate what is necessary for any to convey information 
and represent something as being true--without yet stating the reasons for its 
being true?

I think this is more accurate. Dicent indexical Legisigns and Dicent Indexical 
Sinsigns not only can but DO convey information - that follows from the 
definition of Dicisigns. (Of course that information may be false, irrelevant, 
vague, etc.)

F


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7309] Natural Propositions chapter four

Dear Tyler, Gary, lists

I have nothing against a taxonomic approach, as Tyler calls it. We should 
certainly develop means to distinguish the simple E.Coli cognition of sugar 
from the richness of human propositions - my argument is just that these 
taxonomic means are not to be found in Peirce's three basic trichotomies. And 
why should we expect those trichotomies to cover both basic types and 
chronological development? - to me this is a kind of Hegelian error. Imagine if 
physicists in 1920 said: now, we have discovered the electron, the proton, and 
the neutron. This beautiful theory simultaneously gives us the key to 
cosmological evolution: first there were electrons, then protons were added, 
and finally neutrons … Or if linguists said: the evolution of language begins 
with nouns, then come verbs, finally adjectives ...

But this is not the same thing as saying that the chronological evolutionary 
issue is not open to OTHER taxonomical concepts. I think such concepts shall 
have to do with degrees of articulation, degress of explicitness, degrees of 
self-control, degrees of ontogenetic learning, degrees of nesting of signs, 
degrees of cross-modal perceptual integration, degrees of action alternatives 
(semiotic freedom), degrees of predicate number and richness, etc. - 
particularly, I think hypostatic abstraction may address one of these issues, 
that of explicitness. Jesper Hoffmeyer and myself wrote a paper some time ago 
on important semiotic steps during evolution - it is awaiting publication in a 
book Kalevi Kull is editing.

Best
F


Den 31/10/2014 kl. 15.01 skrev Tyler Bennett 
rogueb...@hotmail.commailto:rogueb...@hotmail.com:

Gary F, list,

Thank you for your detailed comments and I apologize for the gap in 
communication.

Gary F. wrote: You suggest that an “alternative solution” to the problem you 
raise “would be to cede symbols to all instances of semiosis (or at least to 
some non-humans)”. Do you mean that at least some semiosis other than human 
varieties should be regarded as symbolic? If so, I don’t get what problem it’s 
supposed to solve, or how it’s relevant to the idea that inference is implicit 
in all cognitive semiosis. This is part of the Dicisign doctrine, and symbols 
are not essential to the functioning of Dicisigns in the way that icons and 
indices are; so what difference does it make whether we “cede symbols” to 
instances of non-human semiosis?

The problem has to do with associating the highest types of sign use to all 
instances of semiosis, as Frederik does with NP. When we do this, we lose the 
ability to meaningfully class different types of sign use. I proposed that 
either symbols should be reserved for higher sign types than at least the E. 
coli bacteria (Edwina's stated preference), or we should cleave to the later 
Peirce where there are twenty types of legisign, in which case there is plenty 
of room to both describe the symbol use of non-humans as well as retain some 
sign types for the description of verbal language (There are plenty of scholars 
who believe the taxonomic application of sign types is an inappropriate use of 
Peirce. I am not one of them).

To clarify, when I speak of the taxonomic approach I think mainly of Deacon's 
use in Symbolic Species of the icon-index-symbol trichotomy for distinguishing 
verbal language semiosis from other kinds. As you know this approach is 
somewhat maligned in for example The Symbolic Species Evolved, where Frederik 
has an article that says the bare use of the object dimension 
(icon-index-symbol) is insufficient for this task (He does not say that such a 
classificatory approach is not possible. He only says Deacon's attempt is an 
oversimplification). I also think of Kalevi Kull's use of the object dimension 
to classify vegetative animal and cultural forms of semiosis.

Dicisigns do indeed involve icons and indices in a more explicit way than 
symbols, however the fact remains that Frederik associates symbols and even 
arguments with all instances of semiosis. For example here:

Thus, the perceptual Dicisign  of reading the active site on a carbohydrate 
molecule--a proto version of the proposition 'This is sugar'--is followed by 
the action Dicisign of swimming in that direction--to form an argument: 'If 
sugar, swim in its direction. This is sugar. So, swim in its direction'. That 
this forms a very primitive argument--and not merely a cause-effect chain--can 
be induced from the fact that the E. coli may be fooled by artificial sweetener 
whose molecules  possess the same molecular surface configuration as the active 
site in carbohydrates--but otherwise have a rather different chemistry without 
the easily releasable covalent binding energy of carbohydrates (145-146).

In the footnote there he reaffirms that this is a deductive argument. The only 
distinction he offers between this and verbal language for example is that the 
E. coli behavior is a very primitive argument. This distinction is

[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7204] Example of Dicisign?

Dear Stan, lists,
That is a beautiful picture, and certainly a good candidate for an important 
type of conceptual development. But I am not convinced it is the only type. 
There could also developments beginning with a pretty precise but narrow 
conception … I think different development patterns as to breadth and depth of 
conceptions may be envisaged, but I have no clear picture of all possibilities …
Best
F

Den 11/10/2014 kl. 21.15 skrev Stanley N Salthe 
ssal...@binghamton.edumailto:ssal...@binghamton.edu:

Frederick -- You mention that:

 But also vague claims are dicisigns …

As one with great interest in vagueness from the point of view of development, 
where I understand immature systems to be relatively vague compared to the 
later stages that might develop from them.  The point here is that development 
out of vague precursors can be visualize as a tree, with the vague form at its 
root.  Possible end branches can be quite different from each other, the vague 
beginning being a general condition from which all particulars could emerge.  
These particulars would embody also the effects of historical accidents, and 
these would modify the underlying system in unpredictable ways. Would all the 
possible end branches, as explicit  dicisigns, be included under the original 
vague one?

STAN


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7038] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 3.3

Dear Garys, lists,

There is certainly no disparaging in Peirce's claim that icons and indices are 
degenerate as compared to symbols. The concept comes from mathematics, conic 
sections in particular, where figures like hyperbolas and ellipses are 
considered non-degenerate while figures like parabolas, circles, crossing 
lines, points etc. are degenerate because of the fact that the latter result 
only from certain singular values of the function, typically where one variable 
assumes the value 0 and vanishes. So the idea is that circles, e.g., are but 
ellipses where the two foci becomes one and the figure simplifies 
correspondingly. This implies that such figures are rare limit phenomena as 
compared to ellipses. In P's sign theory, the analogy will be that icons and 
indices without symbolic aspects are rare limit phenomena - while symbols 
typically involve indexical and iconical aspects.
In the third trichotomy, I have not seen P use the term degenerate in the 
same way - but he does say that all rhemes are but fragmentary signs while 
dicisigns are but states in the moving process of arguments. In that sense, I 
think it would not be strange to assume that rhemes and dicisigns are 
degenerate arguments. Given the way P constructs his semiotics, it would not be 
strange to say that all of the 9 simpler signs in the Syllabus 10-sign 
combinary are degenerate as compared to arguments. I think I discussed this a 
bit in Diagrammatology under the headline of the physiology of Arguments - the 
metaphor indicating that lower sign types like icons or dicisigns etc. form a 
sort of organs in the body of arguments …

Best
F


Den 01/10/2014 kl. 01.10 skrev Gary Richmond 
gary.richm...@gmail.commailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com
:

Gary, lists,

GF: By shifting the emphasis (in his definition of “fact”) from that Secondness 
to its structure — which is that of a proposition or dicisign, and therefore 
partakes of Thirdness — I think Peirce was adding another dimension to the mode 
of being of “fact”.

I would tend to agree that Peirce did indeed add exactly this new dimension to 
the mode of being a fact in his reflections ca. 1904, moving from his late 19th 
century emphasis on itsexistential 2ns to examining its structure as a dicisign 
at the beginning of the 20th.

Continuing with our ongoing analysis of genuineness and degeneracy in this 
regard, you wrote regarding a passage you quoted (EP2:274):

GF: [That t]his shows at least that genuineness and degeneracy are not absolute 
qualities but always relative to a function. So even though Peirce gave the 
icon and index the “disparaging name” of “degenerate” in KS, he also pointed 
out that they (especially when combined!) can carry out semiotic functions that 
the symbol is incapable of except by involving them.

Yes, no doubt mathematical ideas related to degeneracy can help us overcome a 
linguistic tendency to think perhaps a bit disparagingly of degeneracy in 
semiotic relations when such is not at all Peirce's intent. But this is still a 
vexing issue for me. For example, you wrote:

GF: I wonder, too, if the dicisign and the proposition itself can be described 
as “degenerate” relative to the argument, which is the most complete and 
complex of all sign-types because it separately indicates its interpretant — 
and which, for that very reason, can only be a symbol. Is that the main reason 
why the symbol is the most genuine member of the first (icon/index/symbol) 
trichotomy of signs?

But in looking for telling passages related to genuine relations, I came 
across this.

A proof or genuine argument is a mental process which is open to logical 
criticism.  CP 2.26

Perhaps one needn't make too much of this apparent equivalence of 'proof' and 
'genuine argument', but it does make me  abit unsure about your thought that 
the dicisign might be described as 'degenerate' relative to the argument. I 
think there may be good reasons to think that that's a pretty good abduction, 
but I'm not yet entirely convinced.

At CP 5.76 Peirce refers to the symbol as the relatively genuine form of 
Representamen in relation to the index and the icon. Again one needn't make 
too much of the phrase 'relatively genuine', but I'm not exactly certain now 
how much to make of it. Maybe it simply means what we've always taken it to 
mean in this context, but why then relatively?

As for the 'genuine index' in consideration of the dicisign, although you (or 
Frederik?) may have already quoted some of this passage, I found it of the 
greatest interest, although I not quite yet sure exactly what to make of it.

. . . Now in analyses hitherto proposed, it seems to have been thought that if 
assertion [. . .] were omitted, the proposition would be indistinguishable from 
a compound general term--that A man is tall would then reduce to A tall 
man. It therefore becomes important to inquire whether the definition of a 
Dicisign here found to be applicable to the former [. . .] may

Re: [biosemiotics:7061] Re: [PEIRCE-L] Example of Dicisign?

Dear Gary, lists,

I think Gun country counts as a Dicisign - it makes a pretty straightforward 
claim which could be translated into the linguistic utterance like The US is a 
gunlike country. Of course, as in many artworks, the dicisign character is 
deliberately weakened in order to leave some space for reflection for the 
observer - what is gunlike more precisely? Probably it refers to the 
interpretations of the 2nd amendment, the amount of privately-owned guns 
etc.but that is not stated explicitly. But also vague claims are dicisigns …

Best
F

Den 02/10/2014 kl. 21.37 skrev Gary Richmond 
gary.richm...@gmail.commailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com
:

Evgenii, lists,

I would say that 'Gun Country' is a dicisign.

Although I've haven't delved into it deeply, in Tony Jappy's book, Introduction 
to Peircean Visual Semiotics, one finds a test Peirce gives of what may count 
as a dicisign as a footnote in chapter 6, one of the places in the book where 
Jappy discusses the dicisign (206, n. 10). I've provided the full paragraph of 
the Peirce quotation of which Jappy gives only the first three sentences which 
I've put in italics.

The readiest characteristic test showing whether a sign is a Dicisign or not is 
that a Dicisign is either true or false, but does not directly furnish reasons 
for its being so. This shows that a Dicisign must profess to refer or relate to 
something as having a real being independently of the representation of it as 
such, and further that this reference or relation must not be shown as 
rational, but must appear as a blind Secondness. But the only kind of sign 
whose object is necessarily existent is the genuine Index. This Index might, 
indeed, be a part of a Symbol; but in that case the relation would appear as 
rational. Consequently a Dicisign necessarily represents itself to be a genuine 
Index, and to be nothing more. At this point let us discard all other 
considerations, and see what sort of sign a sign must be that in any way 
represents itself to be a genuine Index of its Object, and nothing more. 
Substituting for represents to be a clearer interpretation, the statement is 
that the Dicisign's Interpretant represents an identity of the Dicisign with a 
genuine Index of the Dicisign's real Object. That is, the Interpretant 
represents a real existential relation or genuine Secondness, as subsisting 
between the Dicisign and its real Object. But the Interpretant of a Sign can 
represent no other Object than that of the Sign itself. Hence this same 
existential relation must be an Object of the Dicisign, if the latter have any 
real Object. This represented existential relation, in being an Object of the 
Dicisign, makes that real Object, which is correlate of this relation, also an 
Object of the Dicisign. CP 2.310

Having read that, what do you (and others think)? Is Gun Country a dicisign?

Best,

Gary R





Gary Richmond
Philosophy and Critical Thinking
Communication Studies
LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
C 745
718 482-5690

On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 3:15 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi 
use...@rudnyi.rumailto:use...@rudnyi.ru wrote:
A question to better understand what dicisign is. Can one say that Gun Country 
by Michael Murphy is a dicisign?

http://www.artprize.org/michael-murphy/2014/gun-country

Best wishes,

Evgenii


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7042] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 3.3

Dear Jerry, lists -

I think you are right chemistry played a central role in Peirce's dicisign 
conception. He saw both the predicate part and the subject parts as atoms with 
valencies which fit each other when forming the molecule of the dicisign. He 
even compared the two with halogens and alkali metals in the periodic table of 
the elements (corresponding, of course, to one-slot predicates only) - I quote 
this in Natural Propositions.
As to the wording, you write decisigns - I have never seen that spelling but 
it would not surprise me to find it in P's unpublished pages. Dicisigns is 
one among several terminological proposals for the naming of generalized 
propositions - others include Dicent Signs and Phemes. Dicisign refers to the 
latin verb dico - I say - chosen, I think, to underline that Dicisigns are 
signs that say something about something.

Best
F

Den 01/10/2014 kl. 19.04 skrev Gary Richmond 
gary.richm...@gmail.commailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com
:

Gary F, lists,

Gary wrote that in rereading the Speculative Grammar part of the Syllabus that 
this struck him:

GF: that the interpretant of a dicisign or proposition represents the sign 
itself as well as its object, and represents it as an index — which, strictly 
speaking, lacks the generality which makes the argument a symbol and thus more 
genuine.

I think that your rewording is helpful (but then see the CP 2.293-4 quoted 
below which tends to complicate the matter for me); and, further, that your 
notion that the reason that Peirce did so much self-rewording was to get 
through to the real, general, genuine Thought that was . . . a piece of the 
Truth and not a more (mere) personal expression of it, makes good sense. I'm 
not sure that his re-wordings always made his thinking more transparent, but 
often enough they did.

You also asked why I thought that Peirce's comment that A proof or genuine 
argument is a mental process which is open to logical criticism

GR: . . . is in any way incompatible with the notion that the dicisign might be 
described as 'degenerate' relative to the argument.

First, would you say that a 'proof' is but a species of genuine argument? While 
it makes a kind of sense to me to say that the dicisign is degenerate relative 
to the argument, I wonder if this isn't straining Peirce's terminology a bit. 
Perhaps I was thinking that Peirce speaks in places of degenerate symbols per 
se. For example:

. . . while the complete object of a symbol, that is to say, its meaning, is of 
the nature of a law, it must denote an individual, and must signify a 
character. A genuine symbol is a symbol that has a general meaning. There are 
two kinds of degenerate symbols, the Singular Symbol whose Object is an 
existent individual, and which signifies only such characters as that 
individual may realize; and the Abstract Symbol, whose only Object is a 
character. CP 2.293

I think the meaning here is fairly clear, that there is one kind of genuine 
symbol (one having a general meaning--but that would seem to apply to symbols 
other than the 'proof' would it not?) and two kinds of degenerate symbols, the 
Singular (its object being an individual) and the Abstract (its object being a 
character). But in speaking of the immediate interpretant of an index, Peirce 
goes on to say:

Although the immediate Interpretant of an Index must be an Index, yet since its 
Object may be the Object of an Individual [Singular] Symbol, the Index may have 
such a Symbol for its indirect Interpretant. Even a genuine Symbol may be an 
imperfect Interpretant of it. So an icon may have a degenerate Index, or an 
Abstract Symbol, for an indirect Interpretant, and a genuine Index or Symbol 
for an imperfect Interpretant. CP 2.294

I'm having considerable difficulty parsing this second paragraph, especially as 
to how he's using the terms 'imperfect' and 'indirect' (as opposed to 
'intended'?) But it seems to me that it might be important--especially in 
getting at the concept of genuine--to try to grasp Peirce's meaning here.

Best,

Gary R


Gary Richmond
Philosophy and Critical Thinking
Communication Studies
LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
C 745
718 482-5690

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 11:31 AM, Gary Fuhrman 
g...@gnusystems.camailto:g...@gnusystems.ca wrote:
Gary R,

Yes, that quote at the end of your post (CP2.231, also EP2:282-3) is worth 
reflecting on in this context; but then that’s true of the whole Speculative 
Grammar section of the Syllabus. Every time I read part of it, it seems that 
another word in the crossword puzzle gets filled in, because of clues I’ve 
picked up since the previous reading. This time around, what comes to the fore 
is that the interpretant of a dicisign or proposition represents the sign 
itself as well as its object, and represents it as an index — which, strictly 
speaking, lacks the generality which makes the argument a symbol and thus more 
genuine. I’m not making it any more clear than Peirce

[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7099] Re: Example of Dicisign?

Dear Ben, lists -
Good summary. I discuss some early arguments by Peirce pertaining to these 
distinctions in a later ch. of NP.
Best
F

Den 05/10/2014 kl. 16.19 skrev Benjamin Udell 
bud...@nyc.rr.commailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com
:


Gary F., Tom, lists,

A predicate's denotation can be narrowed (and anyway can't be broadened) by an 
index attached to it. The resultant compound's denotation is thus the index's 
denotation. So one could get to thinking that the index does the denoting, 
while the icon or symbol does not. Yet the falsehood of a proposition is 
reflected in a clash of denotations: 'Jack is a farmer' is false if 'farmer' 
does not include Jack in its denotation, which amounts to the same thing as 
that Jack lacks the characteristic signified by 'farmer'.

Predicates, rhemes, etc., can and do denote. (Also, both subject sign and 
predicate sign are rhemes.) I don't think that Peirce, for his part, ever said 
or implied otherwise.

As to the Salisbury quote:

[Quote Peirce]
This has to do with the distinction of logical Extension and Comprehension 
which Professor Bowen teaches was discovered by the Port Royalists although it 
was pretty well known in the middle ages. Enough so for John of Salisbury to 
refer to it as  quod fere in omnium ore celebre est, aliud scilicet esse quod 
appellativa _significant_, et aliud esse quod _nominant_. Nominantur 
singularia, sed universalia significantur. By _appellativa_ here he means as I 
take it adjectives and such like.
[W 2.328 in Ockham, Lecture 3 on British logicians, 1869]

Note there Peirce identifies the notion of logical Extension with the idea of 
naming, not just of describing. Singulars are denoted, named ('singularia 
nominantur'), not only by proper names (proper nouns) but also by common names 
(common nouns). 'Lion' is a name for lions; it also signifies certain 
characters. (Translation of Salisbury's quote: which almost in everyone's 
mouth frequently is that one thing clearly is that which appellatives signify, 
and another is that which they name. Named are singulars, universals are 
signified.)

Best, Ben


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7093] Re: Natural Propositions,

Dear Howard, lists,
Very good - what should be added is just that bits are symbols in another sense 
than Peirce's sense of symbol.
Maybe we can compare it to the old vocabulary of structural linguistics - words 
are made up of units which may be signs (in-flat-ion), but each of these are 
made up of units which are not themselves signs because not having any meaning 
i-n, f-l-a-t, etc.). The bits of information theory are constituents of signs, 
meaningless when taken one by one, but constituting signs in their combinations.
Best
F

Den 05/10/2014 kl. 03.53 skrev Howard Pattee 
hpat...@roadrunner.commailto:hpat...@roadrunner.com
:

At 01:39 PM 10/4/2014, Gary Fuhrman quotes Peirce:

Peirce: When an assertion is made, there really is some speaker, writer, or 
other signmaker who delivers it; and he supposes there is, or will be, some 
hearer, reader, or other interpreter who will receive it. It may be a stranger 
upon a different planet, an æon later; or it may be that very same man as he 
will be a second after. In any case, the deliverer makes signals to the 
receiver.

HP: Here is another view of how this works. In our case, from the moment we 
type an assertion, draw a diagram, or attach a photo, all the communicated 
information is immediatelycoded into bit sequences by Boolean algebra (not 
logic) and transmitted worldwide by Hertzian waves or light (the same thing at 
shorter wavelengths). In principle, all the coding can be done by Peirce Arrows 
(NAND gates) and all the electrons and waves obey Maxwell's equations. At the 
receiver sequences are decoded, and the sender and receiver do not care about 
the math, physics, or the bit sequences, which is precisely why the bit 
sequences are pure symbols and not icons, indices, or any tokens with intrinsic 
physical similarities or meanings.

In the language of physics, the conditions for a pure symbol vehicle with the 
function of efficiently communicating information of any type is that neither 
the physical structure nor the sequential order of the symbols are determined 
or influenced by physical laws. That means the sequences do not differ 
significantly in energy or forces between them. All efficient information 
structures like sequences and memories are called energy degenerate.

That does not mean communication is independent of laws. The 2nd law of 
thermodynamics says that every bit of information added, erased, coded, decoded 
or used will dissipate a little energy (On the Internet this adds up to 
enormous energy dissipation). Also, the speed and size of symbol manipulating 
chemistry in brains or hardware gates is limited by quantum mechanics.

In the language of Communication Theory, for efficient communication of any 
type of information, all the meaning should be hidden by codes that translate 
the information into meaningless symbols.

Howard


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:7208] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 3.3

thanks, that is a helpful overview!
F

Den 11/10/2014 kl. 21.46 skrev Gary Richmond 
gary.richm...@gmail.commailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com
:

Frederik, lists,

So glad to learn that your health is improved, Frederik. It's terrific having 
you active again in the seminar.

Here's a little chart showing the terminological variations Peirce experimented 
with on the traditional triad: term/proposition/argument which I gleaned from 
NP 3.9.


(1903) Rheme


Dicisign


Argument


(1903) Sumisign


Dicisign


Suadisign


(1903) Single sign (substitutive sign)


Double sign (informational sign, or, quasi-proposition)


Triple sign (rationally persuasive sign, or, argument)


(1903) Rhema


Proposition


Argument


(1906) Seme


Pheme


Delome


I found the third column of particular interest, especially his referring to 
the Rheme as a 'substitutive sign' (or what we'd call today a 'propositional 
function').

Gary



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Re: [biosemiotics:6973] [PEIRCE-L] RE: Natural Propositions, Chapter 3.1

Dear Jeff, Gary, lists -
Sorry for being absent from the discussion - I fell ill during traveling in 
Germany but am now back on the horse.

Jeff, it is certainly an interesting and important idea to compare Peirce's 
mature doctrine of the Dicisign from the years after the turn of the century 
with his early takes on propositions.
I have not done that in my book, focusing instead upon the detail of the 
doctrine developed especially after the Syllabus (1903) - because it is here 
Peirce gets the idea to generalize his basic trichotomies to cover all signs 
(so that, e.g., any sign is a Rheme, a Dicisign, or an Argument).
The comparison I make in the book is more addressing competing notions of 
propositions as in Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein than to earlier accounts - but 
I would like to hear your opinions on how  earlier accounts may throw light 
upon Peirce's conception.

Best
Frederik

Den 24/09/2014 kl. 15.50 skrev Gary Fuhrman 
g...@gnusystems.camailto:g...@gnusystems.ca:

Jeff, I think what you have in mind here is a more 'advanced' stream of our
seminar, i.e. for those who are  trying to work more systematically through
his philosophical position. But since we expect that many of those
following this seminar are not trying to do that, it's likely that those who
aren't Peirce specialists will need a more entry-level approach in order to
get the gist (and the importance) of Peirce's take on propositions. For this
more basic approach, consideration of the respective accounts of the
proposition offered by Whewell, Mill and Kant, though relevant, might be
more distracting than helpful. So although I hope to read what you say on
the subject, and the proposed answers to your questions, most of my own
limited time and energy will be devoted to that more basic approach, leaving
the more advanced stream to you. Come to think of it, maybe we should divide
up Chapter 3 between us in that way, rather than me taking the first half
and you the second half (as the schedule says). But you and I can discuss
that offlist.

I suppose Frederik will probably have good answers to the questions at the
end of your post, but you may have to wait awhile for them, as he's 'on the
road' in Germany this week and may not have time to post.

gary f.

-Original Message-
From: Jeffrey Brian Downard [mailto:jeffrey.down...@nau.eduhttp://nau.edu/]
Sent: 23-Sep-14 6:05 PM
To: biosemiot...@lists.ut.eemailto:biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee; 'Peirce List'
Subject: [biosemiotics:6973] RE: [PEIRCE-L] RE: Natural Propositions,
Chapter 3.1

Gary F., Jon, Lists,

Looking back on my own struggles to find coherence in Peirce's published and
unpublished writings, I now think that the early lectures 1865-6 are
actually quite a good place to start--at least when one reaches the point of
trying to work more systematically through his philosophical position.
That, I believe is what Jon was pointing to when he suggested that Peirce's
later accounts of the different kinds of sign functions and relations were
already present--sometimes in a quite a clear form--in the early lectures.
Jon also referred to the 1870 essay on the logic of relatives, and that is
more challenging for those of us who do not already find themselves at home
in the worlds of logic and math--or do not find themselves at home in the
world of Peirce's particular views on logic and math.

As we make our way into Peirce's account of the dicisign and the logical
character of the proposition, I think these early essays are particularly
helpful--in part because they show us there is remarkable continuity in the
development of his thought on these logical matters from the very get
go--and also because it provides a clear window on what exactly is providing
much of the larger context and background we would need to study in order to
deepen our understanding of what he is trying to do and what is guiding the
development of his thought.

Following this lead a bit, I think it will be helpful as we make our way
through Chapter 3 of NP to consider the respective accounts of the
proposition offered by Whewell, Mill and Kant, and then to consider their
views in relationship to the larger historical trends.  As we know, Peirce
was drawing a number of key insights from his careful examination of the
Aristotelian theory of the syllogism.  In order to understand these
insights, it is good to consider the development of logical accounts of
deduction, induction and hypothesis--and the features of the premises and
conclusions (i.e., the propositions) that function in such forms of
argumentation--from the Port Royal Logic up through the modern period.  As
we can see from Questions Concerning Certain Faculties, Consequences and
Further Consequences, he's trying to identify the roots of the most basic
mistakes that were made in this tradition as a whole.  Focusing on the
account of the proposition in this tradition, we can see that Peirce is
questioning a number of the key assumptions that were made

Re: [biosemiotics:6973] [PEIRCE-L] RE: Natural Propositions, Chapter 3.1

Dear Clark, lists -
Mathematics certainly deals in propositions according to P.
P's general philosophy of math claims that math is about forms of relations, 
and that those abstract objects are addressed by the help of diagrams. 
Existing, particular, physical diagram tokens permit the access to diagram 
types, in turn incarnating forms of relations. This implies that such diagrams 
form the predicate parts of Dicisigns, while accompanying symbolic guidelines 
and indices provide the subject parts of those Dicisigns.
Best
F

Den 24/09/2014 kl. 19.18 skrev Clark Goble 
cl...@lextek.commailto:cl...@lextek.com:

One other brief thought.

Something I’ve not seen discussed much in the literature is the relationship 
between mathematics and propositions. (This may just because admittedly I’ve 
not sought out such discussions) Propositions are usually taken as linguistic 
with fairly strict boundaries on what counts as language. Now clearly Peirce’s 
dicisigns can handle equations and other meanings written via highly symbolic 
notation or even graphs. Traditional philosophy would need at best these to be 
translated into language first I think.

I’d think we also fall into the question of mathematical foundations as well. 
Those who see mathematics as pure syntactical manipulation probably are fine 
with there being no propositions for math. Those who see more meaning in math 
probably need to deal with this. (Whether platonists or otherwise)


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Re: [biosemiotics:6973] [PEIRCE-L] RE: Natural Propositions, Chapter 3.1

Dear Clark, lists,

Den 25/09/2014 kl. 19.22 skrev Clark Goble 
cl...@lextek.commailto:cl...@lextek.com:


On Sep 25, 2014, at 8:50 AM, Frederik Stjernfelt 
stj...@hum.ku.dkmailto:stj...@hum.ku.dk wrote:

This isn’t to say Heidegger and Peirce are the same. Just that I think the move 
towards an externalist approach to mind in Heidegger is also made in Peirce. 
And it’s precisely within the proposition (or more expansively the dicisign) 
that Peirce makes this move. I suspect both of them are making this move due to 
influence from Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception. (I think this is 
explicit for Heidegger although I’m not sure) Within the analytic tradition a 
lot of this is “solved” via judgments. This doesn’t quite work since we then 
have to ask what makes judgements possible.

That is a good point. I think Peirce's analysis attempts to ground the basic 
logic of Dicisigns in topology (co-localization being basically a topological 
concept) - I think Husserl went in the same direction when attempting to ground 
logic on geometry (in Erfahrung und Urtheil) …

I should note that it’s precisely in Husserl’s grounding logic in geometry that 
Derrida makes his critique. Now this is one place where many Husserlians say 
Derrida misreads Husserl. However it’s also where Derrida breaks from Husserl 
and moves more into a Peircean direction. (I’d also add that it’s where Derrida 
tends to be clearer than usual) It’s been a very long time since I last read 
Derrida’s intro to Origin of Geometry. So I’m loath to say too much. 
Effectively though Derrida sees Husserl as introducing the relationship between 
ideal objects and signs. (He attributes to Husserl being the first philosopher 
to do so, but clearly that’s not the case) Where Derrida sees Husserl still 
tying meaning to subjectivity Derrida sees it in signs. (The play of difference 
is effectively Peirce’s later conception of sign with a distinction between 
dynamic and immediate objects) As I said one can dispute Derrida’s reading of 
Husserl rather easily. However effectively he’s critiquing a dyadic 
(topological) conception with a process based trichotomy sign. This becomes 
much more clear in the first half of On Grammatology where he says Peirce comes 
closest to what he’s arguing. (Although my sense is he hadn’t read much Peirce 
- certainly not the mature stuff like his letters to Lady Weby which anticipate 
much of what Derrida does later)

I am quite sure Derrida never read much Peirce and I have a hard time seeing 
them go in the same direction. As far as I recall the Peirce references of the 
Grammatology, Derrida only focuses upon infinite semiosis, delighting in the 
interpretation that the chain of signs ever bars us from reality - quite the 
opposite of Peirce to whom that chain brings us ever closer …

Now a possible place we have a divide between Heidegger and Peirce is found 
within your quote from EP 2:311. There the copula joins not the two signs 
“Socrates” and “wise” but their replicas. For Heidegger the copula shows the 
objects of both.

So, a collapse of sign and referent.

Yes and no. This is a place that it really depends upon “which” Heidegger you 
read. There are quite a few quite different takes on Heidegger. I think some of 
Thomas Sheehan’s work has reduced that somewhat. At least we see a lot less of 
the “word mysticism” type of Heideggarianism. I favor a strong realist take on 
Heidegger where he just had a poor vocabulary to discuss what he was after. 
That is most of Heidegger’s work is just about meaning and its source.

While not necessary to this take, I think a common view within this reading 
translated into Peirce’s taxonomies would be to see Heidegger as focused on the 
copula as index but moving to a general sign analysis. (Thus his concern with 
being within a painting which effectively is the same shift Peirce makes 
shifting to the dicisign) In this take Heidegger’s has a coherent focus even 
through his later work on the openness that allows objects to become 
meaningfully present to people. This is the index and it would be an index to 
both a representation and an other index. So effectively I read Heidegger as 
eventually reaching the dicisign although there may be subtle differences. 
(Certainly there are different focuses)

Now there may be even here some differences. Heidegger moves from the focus on 
the copula (being) to der geoworfene Entwurf and then to Ereignis. That’s 
sometimes translated as the appropriation of existence to sustain the clearing. 
The clearing is the phenomenological clearing away of previous experiences of 
firstness to a new experience of firstness such that this reflects iconical, 
indexical and most significantly symbolical phenomenological experiences. That 
is there’s always a move so it is a process. One way to look at this is as the 
change in indices within us.

But this is going farther afield from just a consideration of the dicisign 
which is a far more

Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6952] Re: Natural Propositions

Dear Cathy, lists
Good point
F

Den 29/09/2014 kl. 02.37 skrev Catherine Legg 
cl...@waikato.ac.nzmailto:cl...@waikato.ac.nz:

Dear All,

Yes, just to reiterate what has also been said by Jeff D in his post in this 
thread – the key criterion for thought, and intelligent thought, is not 
consciousness but self-control. I would go so far as to say that these are 
quite orthogonal. One can have consciousness without self-control, and 
self-control without consciousness.

Best regards,
Cathy


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Natural Propositions • Selected Passages

Dear Jon, lists
Peirce use the concept degenerate in his sign theory in analogy to the 
geometric sense of the term.. Referring to conic sections, certain sections are 
generic (hyperbolas, ellipses) while other sections are degenerate because 
corresponding to non-generic cases where one or more variables vanish 
(parabolas, circles, crossing lines, point). Thus, degenerate cases only exist 
as limit cases of generic ones - (but there is nothing impure in being a 
circle …). Thus, isolated icons and indices exist, but only as limit cases of 
symbols - of which full, general propositions constitute the center category 
(this is paraphrasing the Kaina Stoikheia from memory).
Best
F

Den 27/09/2014 kl. 06.00 skrev Jon Awbrey 
jawb...@att.netmailto:jawb...@att.net:

Pure Icon and Pure Index.  What in the world could those be?
And how could a degenerate something be a pure anything?
And while we're at it, must there also be pure symbols, too?


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2

Dear Clark, lists  -

But aren't formal and material causes just re-baptized in physics as constants 
(of laws), as types of forces or particles, or as boundary conditions?

Best
F



Den 22/09/2014 kl. 15.59 skrev Clark Goble 
cl...@lextek.commailto:cl...@lextek.com
:


On Sep 21, 2014, at 9:13 PM, Clark Goble 
cl...@libertypages.commailto:cl...@libertypages.com wrote:


On Sep 18, 2014, at 8:49 AM, Gary Fuhrman 
g...@gnusystems.camailto:g...@gnusystems.ca wrote:

Clark, in reference to the Peirce passage you quoted about the “community of 
quasi-minds”, you said that “While we could obviously and perhaps should 
discuss this purely as efficient causation, I love how Peirce discusses it 
instead in terms of signs.” But it’s not at all obvious to me how or why we 
could or should discuss this purely as efficient causation. To me, the material 
and formal (if not final) causes of the fact determined by this process appear 
much more prominent than the efficient causes.


Typically physicists and most physical scientists avoid material and formal 
causes in the Aristotilean sense. They become more the properties or 
information that changes. Since the focus is on those changes of state the 
focus is really on efficient causation with little focus on material or formal 
changes - they are simply bracketed and left uninvestigated usually.

When they are investigated by truly theoretical physicists and occasionally 
philosophers things get tricky. One could well argue, for instance, that most 
of string theory is really a theory about material and formal causes for 
instance. While I honestly don’t think most physicists are instrumentalists 
like Feynman, I do think they adhere to a certain instrumentalist ethos that 
says one should leap into the abyss of worrying about ultimate stuff beyond 
what we can empirically talk about clearly. (Which is why string theory has 
long been so controversial, IMO)

The reason this is important is of course how physics conceives of formal and 
material causes tends to view them as somewhat illusionary. That is they are 
emergent phenomena but there’s always the assumption of a true reduction to 
basic physics is in theory possible. (This is different from the reductionism 
of description that I take Frederik was addressing a few weeks ago) So to a 
physicist to only real form and material are the ultimate constituents of the 
universe, whether they be strings, quantum fields or whatever they turn out to 
be. And the reason talk of formal or material causes is pointless is because we 
don’t know the ultimate constituents (or if people think they do, it’s merely 
talk about strings)

I’m not saying this is the only way one could talk about this sort of thing. 
But I do think this is, in practice, the way physicists and to only a slightly 
lesser extent chemists think about all this. Biologists are a different beast 
of course.


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Re: [biosemiotics:6943] Re: [PEIRCE-L] Natural Propositions: revised schedule

Dear E, G, lists
I also have no idea as to how Peirce would pronounce it.
I chose dee-see-  for these reasons:
The C I pronounce as S for the reasons Edwina quotes - in the traditional 
pronunciation of Latin words, C is generally S before front wovels like I
The I I pronounce as EE because that is generally the pronounciation in 
derivations of the Latin verb Dico (such as dictate, Indication etc.) -
Best
F

Den 22/09/2014 kl. 16.02 skrev Edwina Taborsky 
tabor...@primus.camailto:tabor...@primus.ca
:

As you say, Gary F, it's a trivial but interesting question on pronunciation.  
I myself, to myself, pronounce 'dicent' as 'die-cent'; rather than 'decent' yet 
also with the  soft c. And 'dicisign' also with the soft c.  My 'cultural norm' 
(shades of Stan!) suggests a soft c after the vowels of 'e' and 'i' and a hard 
c after the vowels of 'a' and 'o'.

Edwina
- Original Message -
From: Gary Fuhrmanmailto:g...@gnusystems.ca
To: biosemiot...@lists.ut.eemailto:biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee ; 'Peirce 
List'mailto:PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edu
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2014 9:06 AM
Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Natural Propositions: revised schedule

There have been a few changes in the projected seminar schedule since I posted 
it last, so here it is again.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to raise a rather trivial question about 
the pronunciation of “dicisign” and “dicent”. At the Peirce Centennial 
conference, I heard these pronounced (by Frederik, for one) with a soft c, so 
that “dicent” sounds exactly like “decent” and “dicisign” has two sibilants in 
it. To me, on the other hand, it comes naturally to pronounce both with a hard 
c, like the c in “indicate” (which of course comes from the same root). I 
haven’t found any clues as to how Peirce pronounced it, or any conclusive 
reason for preferring one pronunciation over the other, but I do prefer the 
hard c, and i’m curious whether others have strong preferences.


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:6952] Re: Natural Propositions

Dear John, lists,
I think you're right - Peirce saw thought as an argument chain whose resting 
points were propositions.
Best
F

Den 22/09/2014 kl. 18.46 skrev John Collier 
colli...@ukzn.ac.zamailto:colli...@ukzn.ac.za
:

At 01:41 PM 2014-09-13, Frederik wrote:
Dear Sung, lists -
To take thought to be but the result of thinking is an idea that may lead us 
astray - especially if you take thinking in all its aspects to be a 
psychological process only.
Thought is not determined by thinking only but, importantly, by the object of 
thought and the structure of sound reasoning.
So, you might as well say that thought is the result of the norms of reasoning 
and the features of the object thought about. Thinking then is the process 
combining these - but not the process producing thought as such. Just like the 
TV-series you watch is not the product of the printing of the DVD only. Or the 
meal you prepare in your casserole is not only the product of the cooking 
process - but also of the objects you add to the casserole and the recipe you 
follow.
Best
F

I agree with what you say here, but I was wondering if it does not go further. 
Frege used thought to refer to propositions, as I understand him, and I am 
not clear whether Peirce did the same. (I studied with a number of Frege 
experts, but never had a Peirce expert on my committee, though my thesis does 
make homage to Peirce.) I am thinking in particular of a peculiar passage that 
Vinicius Romanini brought to my attention:

() if, for example, there be a certain fossil fish, certain observations upon 
which, made by a skilled paleontologist, and taken in connection with chemical 
analyses of the bones and of the rock in which they were embedded, will one day 
furnish that paleontologist with the keystone of an argumentative arch upon 
which he will securely erect a solid proof of a conclusion of great importance, 
then, in my view, in the true logical sense, that thought has already all the 
reality it ever will have, although as yet the quarries have not been opened 
that will enable human minds to perform that reasoning. For the fish is there, 
and the actual composition of  the stone already in fact determines what the 
chemist and the paleontologists will one day read in them. () It is, therefore, 
true, in the logicians sense of the words, although not in that of the 
psychologists, that the thought is already expressed there (EP2: 455).

This passage makes much more sense to me, and fits much better my information 
based ontology, if thought means what I would mean by proposition.

John

Frederik wrote:

Thinking, in this sense, may be the object of,(6729-1)
psychology thought not so .


Can you separate thinking and thought?  Isn't the latter the result of the
former?  If so, why can't the latter be the object of psychology as well ?

With all the best.

Sung


John Collier 
colli...@ukzn.ac.zamailto:colli...@ukzn.ac.za
Philosophy, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa
T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292   F: +27 (31) 260 3031
Http://web.ncf.ca/collier
http://web.ncf.ca/collier


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:6961] Re: Natural Propositions,

Dear John, lists
OK, that clarifies things.
Best
f

Den 23/09/2014 kl. 11.35 skrev John Collier 
colli...@ukzn.ac.zamailto:colli...@ukzn.ac.za
:

At 10:50 PM 2014-09-21, Frederik wrote:
Dear Stan, lists,

The problem here is a bit as when Collier thought all the world was in the 
head - for where is that head? in the world? in another head?

Please don't attribute that to me. I was quoting a friend making an ironic 
statement about tendencies in philosophy, especially Putnam's internal realism. 
Implicitly he agreed with you, and so would I.

John


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:6976] Natural Propositions, Chapter 3.2

Edwina, lists,
In the ten-sign list of the Syllabus, the Dicent Symbolic Legisign is but one 
of three types of Dicisigns. So you can not identify the two. I discuss the 
other two, Dicent Indexical Sinsign and Dicent Indexical Sinsign, in the 
chapter.
Best
F

Den 24/09/2014 kl. 15.16 skrev Edwina Taborsky 
tabor...@primus.camailto:tabor...@primus.ca
:

I'm confused by this argument.

My understanding of 'symbol' is that it refers to a singular and specific 
relation; that between the  Representamen and the Object - which can be 
'iconic, indexical or symbolic'.

The dicisign, on the other hand, is the full triad, a dicent symbolic legisign 
- i.e. all three parts of the triad (Object-Representamen-Interpretant) are 
involved.

Therefore, I am confused by the reference below to 'symbol' and 'does not 
mention the dicisign at all'. The two are not comparable in my view.

And how can a dicisign - which i understand to mean a 'dicent symbolic 
legisign' be 'non-symbolic'? Or are you referring to the dicent indexical 
legisign?

My apologies for the confusion.

Edwina


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Re: [biosemiotics:6973] RE: [PEIRCE-L] RE: Natural Propositions, Chapter 3.1

Dear Clark, lists,

Den 24/09/2014 kl. 22.17 skrev Clark Goble 
cl...@lextek.commailto:cl...@lextek.com
:

On Sep 24, 2014, at 1:16 PM, Gary Richmond 
gary.richm...@gmail.commailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com wrote:

In any event, I'm finding section 4. of New Elements of especial interest and 
want to discuss the passage discussing the copula as an index and the way that 
in the proposition Socrates is wise, for example, that . . .it is not the 
two signs 'Socrates' and 'wise' that are connected, but the replicas of them 
used in the sentence (EP2:110, emphasis added).

Peirce’s treatment of the copula as an index is rather important I think in the 
history of being within philosophy. Again, while I’m often critical of 
continental philosophy at least this is an issue they recognize. Within the 
analytic tradition it tends to just be glossed over and ignored beyond a quick 
appeal to Kant’s “existence is not a predicate.”

I’ve only gone through chapter 3 in Frederik’s book and I want to reread that 
before moving on to 4. So I don’t know if Frederik delves into that issue 
beyond the  brief discussion in chapter 3. I don’t have his book handy to refer 
to that section, but again this seems important.

I do think this is important. I discuss it in relation to P's idea of a syntax 
for Dicisigns in general. Here, his argument is that the tokens of the Subject 
and Predicate, respectively, must be placed alongside each other - so as to 
mirror the co-localization of Subject and Predicate in the object (if the 
Dicisign is true, that is).
If not the tokens of two sides of a Dicisign are co-localized, in some sense, 
they will fail to function as a Dicisign (the painting and its title must not 
be separated by a long distance in time or space if not otherwise brought  
together …)
Actually, I think this is pretty deep - in the sense of when we discover 
something basic, hitherto unnoticed, right before our eyes. I elaborate a bit 
more on its possible consequences in ch. 4.

In continental philosophy this ends up being discussed a lot due to the place 
Heidegger gives it contra Husserl. A common critique of Heidegger many make is 
that he confuses a logical or semantic issue as an ontological one. (i.e. apply 
Frege against Heidegger) In this tact the meaning of the copula is tied to the 
meaning of the two parts and exists purely as a kind of intent.

By making the copula an index (in the robust sense he gives indices) Peirce 
goes well beyond the Frege inspired approaches. I honestly think Heidegger and 
Peirce are very similar in their approaches if not the same here. Heidegger 
famously talks about being not being a being, nor a property of beings, nor a 
concept etc. It mediates between concepts and beings but is itself not 
something mediated. While I think it fair to criticize the clarity of 
Heidegger’s language (although he is working within the Cartesian and 
Husserlian tradition) I think he really is speaking of the copula (being) as an 
index. Further it’s a robust index such that it is a sign and not merely a 
relation between two things.

This isn’t to say Heidegger and Peirce are the same. Just that I think the move 
towards an externalist approach to mind in Heidegger is also made in Peirce. 
And it’s precisely within the proposition (or more expansively the dicisign) 
that Peirce makes this move. I suspect both of them are making this move due to 
influence from Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception. (I think this is 
explicit for Heidegger although I’m not sure) Within the analytic tradition a 
lot of this is “solved” via judgments. This doesn’t quite work since we then 
have to ask what makes judgements possible.

That is a good point. I think Peirce's analysis attempts to ground the basic 
logic of Dicisigns in topology (co-localization being basically a topological 
concept) - I think Husserl went in the same direction when attempting to ground 
logic on geometry (in Erfahrung und Urtheil) …

(Heidegger gets at this in many places although I vaguely recall Peirce arguing 
along similar lines although I can’t find where) If there is a genuine index in 
the proposition then of course that explains why judgments are possible.

I’d add that, while we aren’t discussing it, I think the iconic component of 
the dicisign for Peirce also pops up in various places in Heidegger. For 
instance his discussion of the lógos of the phenomena we have a icon/index pair 
such that objects show themselves. For Husserl we get an ideal meaning and for 
Kant we get a representation. While Peirce has a representational aspect, his 
icons are far more powerful than what Husserl or Kant supply. Especially when 
tied with the index.

Further given the place of the index and his logic of vagueness Peirce is able 
to explain propositions that gesture towards the unknown. That becomes quite 
important within the Heideggarian tradition - especially where it’s pushed by 
Gadamer, Derrida and Ricouer.

Now a possible

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:6908] Re: Natural Propositions,

Dear C, B, lists -
Scares me as well - is this really so widespread among philosophy students? Why 
don't they study sociology instead, then?
And why should we be culturally sensitive at all? We have only reached to 
where we are now by being INsensitive to a lot of cultural ideas - including 
theocracy,  witchhunt, absolutism, inquisition, clan rule, feudalism, 
totalitarianism, just to take a few highlights from the European tradition …
Open-minded sounds better to me - if it does not mean one is obliged to 
accept everything …
Best
F

Den 23/09/2014 kl. 20.27 skrev Benjamin Udell 
bud...@nyc.rr.commailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com
:

Cathy, list,

Thanks! But you're scaring me with some of the things that you say. [...] 
first-year philosophy students, most of whom come in thinking that some kind of 
social constructivism is the only educated or open-minded or ‘culturally 
sensitive’ view of the world – I am currently being reminded

Some have said here that Stan's kind of social constructivism is an extreme 
kind. Is that the kind that you mean?

Best, Ben


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:6995] Re: Natural Propositions

Dear Gary, lists -
This is correct. This is also why not every phase of thought needs 
consciousness - even if Peirce was very insistent on thought being 
self-controlled. But he also realized self-control come in many degrees, not 
all of them necessarily conscious - even if consciousness probably allows for 
unprecedented degrees of self-control.
 Thus, he attributed to animals some degree of self-control. As to humans, he 
famously saw perceptual judgments as part of logic even if not subject to 
self-control. Thus, we must assume conscious self-control to be undertaken 
regularly during reasoning, but not necessarily all of the time. Rather - as 
Howard has often pointed to - many important discoveries entering the chain of 
reasoning are due to ideas and inspiratjons whose origin are neither conscious 
nor deliberate. Self-control here lies in the ensuing tests of them, not in 
their origin.
Best
F

Den 25/09/2014 kl. 16.48 skrev Gary Fuhrman 
g...@gnusystems.camailto:g...@gnusystems.ca
:

Stephen, Peirce sees conscious thinking as Thought (i.e. a sign) actively 
taking consciousness and directing it, rather than the other way round, as you 
here (and most people generally) see it. That’s one reason why Peirce takes the 
trouble to criticize psychologism.

gary f.


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:6901] Re: Natural

2014-09-22 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Howard, lists -

Den 22/09/2014 kl. 02.47 skrev Howard Pattee 
hpat...@roadrunner.commailto:hpat...@roadrunner.com
:

But Howard, this is a different position than the one you presented in the 
earlier quote just some lines before. There, each foundation of math was 
legitimized by specific tasks - now they are deemed mere empty epistemological 
conventions.

HP: I did not say that epistemologies are empty. I meant only the arguments for 
a winner epistemology are empty. All these epistemological models in our 
brains have proven historically to be full of meaning, or at least useful for 
creative thinking. As I try to get across, they are complementary. What I have 
not found productive are the ones like the 2000 years of argument over  
realism vs. nominalism. Few working scientists argue this way any more. Some 
logicians and philosophers still do.

The sports metaphor of one winner is ridiculous, I agree. But there are very 
good arguments that some epistemologies (e.g. the audacious proposal by the 
logical positivists) are untenable. And the fact that discussion has taken 
place in 2000 years does not imply there is no progress.

FS: It may well be the case, as you suggest, that there is no simple solution 
to be found  in any of the foundation headlines stemming from the crisis around 
1900. But that might just as well be a sign this field is still open for 
further investigation and progress.

HP: These argumentshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics 
were more than headlines. What would you call progress? Elimination of one 
epistemology?

Speaking about strawmen, I think you're making one now by trying to make me 
this sports referee eliminating all but one winner. As to the 
nominalism/realism issue there are - as you know - many different types of 
nominalism and realism, including various compromise proposals. A good argument 
for some version of realism is that even nominalists continue to use certain 
general terms (the mind, human brains) in a way suggesting they refer to 
structures in reality.

FS: I still think this discussion address deep issues which are not solved by 
archiving the whole field as one of indifferent conventions.

HP: I agree (except indifference is not the same as complementary). This 
discussion is great! My last complaint of unproductive arguments was too 
strong. Of course I agree we should openly consider the values of all 
epistemologies. But I do not see the value of trying to eliminate all of them 
except Peirce's, whatever it is.

I am not convinced Peirce was right in everything. I do think he had a good 
proposal for an epistemology of mathematics (that abstract objects are 
accessible via the manipulation of tokens of diagrams presenting, in turn, 
diagram types) - but the sciences have progressed since Peirce's time and I 
think epistemology should be done by continuous consideration of ongoing 
scientific development (including the human and social sciences).

Best
F


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:6936] Re: Natural Propositions,

2014-09-22 Thread Frederik Stjernfelt

Dear Jeff K, lists -
I merely reproduced P's argument for his hierarchy of sciences from memory 
because it came up in the list discussion - it is not something playing a 
prominent role in the argument of my book (apart from the issue of 
(anti-)psychologism).
Best
F


Den 22/09/2014 kl. 06.50 skrev Kasser,Jeff 
jeff.kas...@colostate.edumailto:jeff.kas...@colostate.edu
:

I'm not sure that I follow you here, Frederik. If the lower sciences provide 
data for the higher ones, how can they fail to function as tests for the 
higher ones? I'm not talking about conclusive tests, of course. Surely 
there's plenty of mediation by auxiliary hypotheses, and so one could maintain 
claims from the higher sciences even if they seem to conflict with results 
from the lower ones. More importantly, it can be very difficult to get the 
lower-level data to bear on higher-level claims.  But I think Ben's earlier 
post nicely brought out Peirce's challenge to himself and to other logicians to 
find ways to do just that, and that certainly sounds like testing to me. 
Perhaps Peirce's ordering of the sciences has the consequence that an idealized 
intellect would not need lower-level data in order to test higher-level claims, 
but we're not such intellects, and I share Ben's sense that Peirce felt 
significant doubt about some of his logical claims in the absence of
lower-level confirmation of those claims.(I leave as an aside for now the 
interesting questions this raises about the notion of a positive reason for 
doubting; I find this notion intriguing and unclear myself.)  I don't think 
that your example of mathematics is persuasive, since the gap between 
mathematics and positive sciences seems to me different in kind than that 
between higher and lower sciences of positive fact. But I might just be 
misunderstanding you. Do you perhaps want to deny that the special sciences 
actually provide data for logic? One might think that all of the relevant data 
is cenoscopic rather than idioscopic? I think that fits some of the most 
important cases well; Peirce wasn't talking about the special science of 
psychology when he talked about tracing the pragmatic maxim back to 
psychological claims like the ones in Fixation connecting belief and 
action. He was talking about cenoscopic psychology, not idioscopic. But you 
seem in your message be
low to permit logical sciences to learn from special science!
s and to

have their claims confirmed by results in special sciences. And it seems to me 
that there's no confirmation w/o the possibility of disconfirmation, and again 
that sounds like testing. As we now approach the heart of your book, I'll 
understand if you're too busy to reply, but I'll be interested to get some 
clarification from you if you get a chance.

Best to all,

Jeff K.


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Being Trivially A Sign

Dear Jon, Tom, lists
Well spoken Jon, I think this also covers my position.
The pre-semiotic world is full of connections, causal, morphological, formal, 
which may be taken, in the semiotic processes of biology, as a basis for signs.
Best
F

Den 19/09/2014 kl. 20.10 skrev Jon Awbrey 
jawb...@att.netmailto:jawb...@att.net
:

Joseph, Tom, List,

Any thing at all (an embedding context, a moment in time, an active situation, 
or whatever it may be) that serves to connect an index with its object may do 
that without regard to its possible service as a sign in some other connection.

So it's not so much the existential nexus or point of connection being 
trivially a sign as its contemplated status as a sign being irrelevant to its 
function as a connector.

Regards,

Jon

Tom Gollier wrote:
Joseph, List:
I haven't seen an answer to your inquiry, but I, like you, would be
interested in what would be trivial and non-trivial when it comes to an
index.
Tom


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[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:6895] Re: Physics Semiosis

Dear Koichiro, lists

At 9:54 PM 09/19/2014, Frederik wrote:

In intellectual history I think the idea that cyclic, self-sustaining processes 
may play a special role in biology goes at least back to Kant (in the latter 
half of the 3rd Critique).

  Philosophically, it could be okay. In practice, however, it says nothing 
special about the empirical likelihood of the emergence of such a cycle.

That is certainly right. Kant's deliberations are sketchy at best. Stil, 
getting the basic idea is not a bad achievement. But maybe there were 
anticipators before Kant, I do not know -

A key issue must be how the cycle carrying the capacity of searching for the 
needed resources from within could come into being in the first place. The 
relationship between the whole reaction cycle and the component reactants looks 
quite subtle, like the advertisement of life insurance repeating “all for one, 
and one for all”.

That is correct. We would certainly like to see empirical candidates for such a 
simple cycle outside of the protective membrane of a cell (which forms another 
very basic prerequisite to semioitic processes proper, would be my guess).

Best
f


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Natural Propositions

great!
F

Den 20/09/2014 kl. 05.01 skrev Jon Awbrey 
jawb...@att.netmailto:jawb...@att.net
:

A nominalist in name only would be a nominal nominalist.
But a real nominalist would be a contradiction in terms.

Checkmate ...

Jon


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Beyond the Correspondence Theory of Truth

Dear Jon, Howard, lists,

As far as I can make out, there are important relation between Hertz' basic 
ideas and Peirce's.

To Peirce, the relation of similarity connecting a diagram to its real-world 
object is not necessarily easy to grasp - on the contrary, in many cases it 
requires protracted work of both empirical and theoretical stripe. In Peirce's 
doctrine of how reasoning with diagrams is undertaken, however, the central 
idea is that the manipulation possibiliites of the diagram correspond (to some 
degree) to the real transformation possibilities of the object depicted by the 
diagram. So this is an operational definition of diagrammatic iconicity which I 
think is non-trivial because it removes similarity far away from the simpler 
examples of immediately recognizing perceptual aspects of one object in 
another. So, I think this relation between manipulation possibilities in the 
diagram and real relations in the object (Peirce) corresponds to Hertz' idea of 
the narrow strip connecting the consequences in the model with the 
consequences in reality.

That said, there's a large difference in rhetoric between the two which may be 
superficial but still may lead us astray. Hertz' dramatic language of the cold 
and alien world of actual existence on the one hand and mere associations of 
the mind on the other paints a sort of existentialist picture of man as an 
isolated loner in the universe, a bit like Jacques Monod a century later. 
Nothing of the kind is found in Peirce's general description of knowledge which 
assumes a far more intimate relation between man and reality. Maybe this 
difference in style is connected to Hertz' seeming idea that the universe 
consists of little more than actual existence while Peirce, of course, takes 
reality to encompass also, in addition to actual existence, all sorts of laws, 
patterns, tendencies not reducible to such existence (but here, my knowledge of 
Hertz may be insufficient).

In any case, despite these differences, I think there's an important core 
shared by the two: the procedural, operational possibilities of a good model 
mirrors those ot the object modeled - that is a relation which is most often 
not direct and often hard to establish.

Best
F


Den 20/09/2014 kl. 16.43 skrev Jon Awbrey 
jawb...@att.netmailto:jawb...@att.net
:


Thread:
HP:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/14168http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/14168
JA:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/14169http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/14169
HP:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/14177http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/14177

Howard,

I was responding to your assertion that Peirce agreed with Hertz's epistemology.

The snippets you cite all echo one version or another of the
so-called correspondence theory of truth, also known as the
mirror of nature theory of science because it assumes a purely
dyadic form of correspondence: analogies, diagrams, morphisms, etc.

The correspondence theory is naturally everyone's first theory of truth,
but not all reflectors on the mirror theory stop with that as their next
best guess.  It was roundly criticized by some of the Ancients, by Kant,
and even though he took it as a useful first stepping stone, by Peirce.

As reflected in the images and metaphors you invoke, the correspondence theory 
of truth leads to a very Cartesian view of things, a very Saussurean take on 
the use of signs, and it issues in all the false problems of symbol grounding 
that so bedevil some corners and cul-de-sacs of the cognitive cottage 
industries.

That alien world is no alien void, it is a plenum that we live our lives in 
and play our parts in.  The whole modifies the part that we are and the part 
that we are modifies the whole.  Many of those modifications, inside our skins 
and out, amount to models and theories that we use to understand a part of what 
is going on.  The business of signs and inquiry is not mirrorly a reflection of 
the whole but a form of participation in the world that leads to understanding.

Regards,

Jon

HP:Peirce, as a chemist (1887) also agreed with Hertz's epistemology (1884):

 The result that the chemist observes is brought about by nature
  [Hertz: “the image of the consequents of nature”]; the result that
  the mathematician observes is brought about by the associations of
  the mind. [Hertz: “consequents of images in the mind”] ... the power
  that connects the conditions of the mathematicians diagram with the
  relations he observes in it is just as occult and mysterious to us
  as the power of Nature that brings about the results of the chemical
  experiment. [W:6, 37, Letter to Noble on the Nature of Reasoning,
  May 28, 1987. (1897)]

HP: Hertz: As a matter of fact, we do not know, nor have we any means
   of knowing, whether our conception of things are in conformity with
   them in

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Icons Indices