[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Jim, list, Oops, erratum: I wrote: "Darned if I know what it'd mean for a particle to go at lightspeed -- tau zero -- in a circle and thus coincide with itself indefinitely many times all at once.)." I was thinking of the particle's "own" viewpoint. (Technically, it doesn't even have one -- a lightspeed particle has no rest frame of reference. One does speak of "tau zero" even though maybe technically one should say that rest mass and proper time are "meaningless" rather than "zero" for lightspeed particles. "Tau" (sometimes spelt out informally in Roman characters instead of expressed by the Greek letter; I just discovered that gmane doesn't keep the Symbol font formatting, and I can't use the Unicode character without causing problems) is a system's proper time, its time in its own rest frame.) In any case, the circling lightspeed particle would not coincide with itself indefinitely many times or even once. At Dtau=0, it's still traveling at the quite non-zero and positive Dd/Dt = 1, even though, if by a miracle it were sentient, then it would experience no passage of time (that's why photons and the like don't age -- there's no such thing as "old" light -- the Doppler shift is something else -- lightspeed particles are pristine, agelessly young, the angelic ambassadors of morning, etc.) Sorry about that! -- Ben --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Dear Ben, You wrote: Yeah, I think that the idea is that Peirce was _already_ working on the questions of classifying the elements when Mendeleev published his.Periodic Table. Peirce might have already worked out some of the picture, so it could have been contemporaneous with his work on philosophical threefolds. Anyway, he'd have understood a triangle-like structure in Mendeleev's table without Mendeleev's having draw him a picture, and at that point, if not earlier, it would have HAD to give him pause. I mean, if one is of a mind to look across diverse fields for a recurrent pattern of logical categories, then one is going to _look_ at that sort of thing. Response: Yes I agree Peirce would see a triad whether it was mentioned explicitedly or not. But in the case of the periodic table does the resultant pyramid reflect the true conjunction of three aspects or is it merely dyadic relations in the shape of a pyramid? Off-list, Gary Richmond, who's quite busy, sent me this: 66~~ Chemistry expresses itself in Peirce's valency theory (the term is not his but Ken Ketner's who hasn't been given enough credit yet for his work in this area, something you hinted hadn't been developed in Pierce, etc.). In any event, see the reduction thesis at work in organic chemistry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_nomenclature Trichotomy, the reduction thesis, the development of EGs, etc. all come from Peirce's knowledge of and work in chemistry. In some writings he makes this explicit. ~~99 Response: Yes. I do think that somewhere Peirce himself speaks of the valence of relations. I will try to find a reference. As for mass, Peirce did not really consider physical quantities of that kind in his philosophy, especially since energy in its relationships required extensive special experiences to understand and quantify. I've talked about how -- because of the consideration of a finite constant signal-speed limit and its ramifications for measurement acts and for the unification of the conceptions of space and time -- special relativity may be able to be better based on the general and philosophical level than Newtonian physics was. Anyway, Peirce did explicitly consider (physical) matter a second -- effete mind, spent, exhausted, all birthed-out. Response: I'm not sure if you are saying the same thing in your opening sentence as in your closing sentence. They seem somewhat contradictory to me. In my view Peirce seems to consider the notion of matter (as that which offers resistance) to be an example of otherness. And I think he would possibly agree that a specific location (here vs there or vice versa) is also a form of secondness. Most fundamentally I think he equates secondness as being a dyadic relation which (as I understand it) means that two (and only two) aspects are involved. For me secondness is fundamentally the notion of otherness and correlation itself Why would you consider, as a Second, an index relative to you, but consider as a First and a quality, some indices mutually relative to one another? If the indices' mutual relationality to one another is a form and quality, why isn't _an_ index's relation a form and quality, indeed its representational relations, to its object and to you -- why isn't that a form and quality and firstness? Response: OK, rightly or wrongly the distinction I'm trying to make is, I think consistent with Peirce, that firstness such as qualities/forms are defined solely with respect to themselves and that secondness such as location/mass can only be defined with respect to an other. Indeed that secondness is the relationship of otherness as exemplified by the resistance of mass to movement form one location to another. Or (as you put your finger on it :) the correlative relationship by which something is pointed to or more generally that any two things are correlated in time and space. Forms can of course be describe in terms of the relationships of their parts to one another but the essence of form is that it is a cohensive whole that constitutes the organization of an object in space and time. Once you are talking about a whole as made up of parts then you are not talking about the quality of the whole but of the relationship of its parts and each of these relationships constitutes a form or quality in itself. I think to get at what I'm talking about it is helpful to think in terms of a single object and try to separate what constitutes its form and what its mass. I think the two are different modes of the same being. And I might add that the object you have in mind is a third mode -- the representational mode. Just reread your remarks and want to add that in some sense one could call the mass of an object one of its qualities but Peirce does not because he recognized or at least claimed that mass or resistance was a dyadic relationship and that form was monadic.
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Ben,
[[ I haven't read Eco or Quillian, and what little I've been able to
garner today from the 'Net about Model Q is vague to me. I think I'm
going to get the Eco novel which makes use of it. It sounds like a heck
of a good novel. ]]
I guess you mean Baudolino -- thanks for mentioning the novel, i'd
been totally unaware of it! The Name of the Rose was the first Eco i
read, but since then i've found his theoretical works more engaging than
his novels. However Baudolino is now on sale (24% off) at Amazon ...
[[ Indra's net seems a concept simple enough on the surface. ]]
I haven't got much deeper than the surface myself, as i only became
aware of Hua-yen last year (through my study of Dogen, the one writer
other than Peirce that i'm most engaged with these days; it's part of
his philosophical background).
[[ A meaning space -- it depends on what one means by meaning. Do
you mean a value, an importance, the evoking of a difference made? Or by
meaning do you mean a kind of evidencing, a
confirming/corroborating/disconfirming, etc., as to facts? ]]
Neither, i'd say -- something simpler, and synchronic rather than
dynamic. Conceptual space might be a better term for many purposes.
But if anyone has the time and inclination to look into the idea
further, i'd better just put the current draft of my chapter about it
online, rather than paraphrase it here. However this part of the draft
is already slated for some revision, because it doesn't yet reflect the
changes induced in my thinking by contact with Peirce. So i don't really
expect that you or other list members will be motivated to spend an hour
checking it out.
Hmmm. We same to be drifting away from New Elements here ...
gary F.
}The simple fact is that no measurement, no experiment or observation is
possible without a relevant theoretical framework. [D.S. Kothari]{
gnusystems }{ Pam Jackson Gary Fuhrman }{ Manitoulin University
}{ [EMAIL PROTECTED] }{ http://users.vianet.ca/gnox/ }{
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[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
on paper, or in Internet searches and encyclopedia = articles, which are pretty much what's available to me. Yes. But first, the issue of Feyman diagrams. These diagram's presuppose continuous functions and physical laws. Chemistry presupposes invisible particles, indivisible particles, individual particles. In a certain sense, the atomic numbers are an index, an exact index for durable electrical particles. Physicians have elaborated vast collections of (subjective?) indices for describing diseases. Within the International System of Units, many indices are constructed, for example, the index for hardness. The geneticists have elaborated a symbolic system for representing genes and logical relations among them (cis, trans, a distance metric). Genes are also invisible particles, but usually genes do not function individually or independently but as part of the entire system of the organism. As for physical thought, it focuses on a few concepts, mass, space, time, motion, energy, and uses continuous variables to associate these variables. These are summarized by the natural international system of units (De tracy, about 1800 and subsequent elaborations) which promote substitution of one concept for another. Chemical symbols can not be substituted one for another, that is, iron can not be substituted for gold. The implications of this simple fact profoundly influence one's philosophy of science if it is accepted at face value. (Perhaps this is one point of interest to Victoria.) (I am attempting to provide short answers in a language for non- specialists. If I have failed, please let me know and I will make an effort to reformulate the grammar but not the concepts. Transdisciplinary communication is extra-ordinarily difficult.) Pick up an introductory chemistry text and ask yourself, do these sentences fit with what is written there? Now, I must run. I leave two wide open questions: Was the motivating force for Peirce's synthesis of his logical system the chemical symbol system? What argues AGAINST this possibility? Cheers Jerry On May 9, 2006, at 1:06 AM, Peirce Discussion Forum digest wrote: Subject: Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? From: Benjamin Udell [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 16:54:09 -0400 X-Message-Number: 8 Jerry, Your thumbnail sketch of chemical logic seems clear to me, and my = memories from long-ago high-school chemistry fit with it. The striking thing to a gawker like me who knows very little about = chemistry is those symbols, and it's encouraging to one's intuition to = be reassured that chemists themselves find the symbols striking, a theme = worth addressing. The idea seems to be that one thinks the chemistry = through those symbols; the symbols so empower chemical thought that = chemists make a theme of it. What I wonder are two things: 1. I've seen that it's called a logic. I'd like to ask, just to be = sure, are its characteristics distinctly logical, order-theoretic, or = anything like that, as opposed to, say, abstract-algebraic, or = enumerative-combinatorial, or even graph-theoretic? 2. Is there anything that you think comparable with chemical thought's = use of chemical symbolism, using signs -- diagrams, symbols, semblances, = or indexes -- in any other major research fields physical, material, = biological, or social/human? Physicists use Feynmann diagrams, but those = don't seem to have anything like the prominence in physics which = chemical symbolism has in chemistry. On the other hand, I'm hardly one = to know. But when I think of physical thought, I think of mathematical = expressions a lot more generally, rather than just of visual diagrams. = As for some analogous sort of key vehicle of biologists' thinking, -- I = can't even think of a typical biologist, there seem such diverse = kinds, at least on paper, or in Internet searches and encyclopedia = articles, which are pretty much what's available to me. Best, Ben Udell - Original Message -=20 From: Jerry LR Chandler [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Peirce Discussion Forum peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu Sent: Saturday, May 06, 2006 7:39 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? Ben: My comment is from a chemical perspective. It may or may not be of = help to you. On May 6, 2006, at 1:06 AM, Peirce Discussion Forum digest wrote: But first, on a general note, let me say that among the issues driving = my current display of confusion error, is the question: if = comprehension is for quality predicate, while denotation is for = objects (resistances/reactions), then what dimension is for = representational and logical relations themselves? Words like not, = probably, if, etc. do not designate either qualities or objects, nor = do they represent objects as having this or that quality. Names of chemical substances are always a subject of a chemical = sentence. A chemical sentence
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Ben, Jim, c.,
[[ Signs are built into complex signs and it wouldn't be helpful to have
a level of internal structure where semiotics must dispense with its
usual conceptions in order to reach. ]]
Having thought it through further, i think what you say here makes more
sense than what i said earlier to Jim. Actually, just about all you've
said in yesterday's posts on this thread make a lot of sense to me. If i
don't directly acknowledge other parts of them, it's because i don't
want to tucker you out any further (or myself either)!
However i do have a question about part of your message addressed to
Jim:
[[ A form is a set of locations, pointing at each other. If you consider
the inside apart from the outside, then you leave the larger concrete
world out of it, which is really to leave yourself out of it, since all
locatings in the larger world are by reference to yourself, and
certainly not with regard to any ultimate frame of reference or ultimate
shape of the concrete world, which are things that we know next to
nothing about. So the mutual pointings of the parts of the form are
still there, and they compel your attention, but you've left out their
reference _to_ you in _your_ specific location in the world. This lets
you impersonalize and abstract the form. It still has its center of
focus, and the solar system has its center of gravity whether it's
wheeling around the galaxy or adrift in one of the great voids. I think
that with this discussion of centers of gravity you're really dealing
with a separate issue, that of how one speaks of the precise location of
an extended object, as well as deciding what really orbits what, which
are issues exactly alike for an extended part as located relative to its
a particular whole and for a system located in the larger concrete
world. Anyway the form is still a structure of mutually opposed
indices, forces, motions potential actual. Form is not a quality. A
form may be abstracted for its appearance, but it may also be abstracted
for the capacity of its parts to represent one another -- denote one
another, map to one another. That's what a mathematical diagram is
about. It doesn't need even to be visual. It could consist in a formula
or array of algebraic symbols. ]]
This seems tantalizingly close to a concept that i've vaguely
recognized, and been trying to specify with more precision, for a couple
of decades now. I call it meaning space and think of it as the
structure of an organism's Innenwelt (J. von Uexkull's term), or its
model of the world -- so it's more of a universe than what you're
talking about here, but structurally similar. I picture it as a
multidimensional network of mutually defining nodes. One chapter of my
work in progress is devoted to it, and i despair of explaining it more
concisely than that ... but what they call the net of Indra in Hua-yen
(Buddhist) philosophy seems pretty close to it, and closer still is the
Model Q developed by M. Ross Quillian and described by Umberto Eco in
_A Theory of Semiotics_ (2.12). Does this sound at all familiar to you,
or connected with what you're saying above?
Jim, i'm glad you like my tagline collection -- it may prove to be my
main contribution to the world! The one below is a bit of a problem:
after lifting it from a Jane Siberry CD, i came across a very similar
statement made much earlier by some famous physicist, but failed to make
a note of that, so now i don't know who it was ... can anybody here tell
me the original source?
gary F.
}I was sure until they asked me ... now I don't know. [Jane Siberry]{
gnusystems }{ Pam Jackson Gary Fuhrman }{ Manitoulin University
}{ [EMAIL PROTECTED] }{ http://users.vianet.ca/gnox/ }{
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[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Dear Jim, list, One thing is that I wouldn't underrate the importance of the conception of resistance/reaction -- I wouldn't replace it with location. Location has a lot to do with resistance and reaction! Space, shortest distances, straight lines, least action, fields, -- there's quite a set of interrelated ideas there, for my part I wish I knew how to untangle them, but there they are. In talking about the meaning of the object, it's hard not to take the object as a sign. Seed as sign of the tree to come. But if the idea of a tree is the interpretant, and the seed is the sign, what is the semiotic object? As far as I can tell, the semiotic object needs to be some already given thing taken as topic. In some cases, maybe it's hard to be more specific about the semiotic obect than simply to say, well, the world, existence, is the semiotic object, or maybe the world's future, if that future is taken for granted as being at least going to happen, as vague as that future may currently be. If the future tree is taken for granted, and we're looking at the seed for info about what kind of tree, then the tree in its vague, unclassified aspect, would seem to be the semiotic object. But there's no getting at those things without taking into account not only location and properties, but also the ifs, ands, and buts, and novelty, and probabilities, and feasibilities and optima -- all that stuff pertaining to whetherhoods, modalities, alternatives, etc., which matter in referring to a thing, and which aren't really properties or locations. Yet sometimes these iffy things seem to semi-congeal to a kind of property or modification of a thing, I think particularly of its value, the difference that it would make, for a living thing. In what state a thing would be proven as to its value or otherwise -- the legitimacy or legitimation of a thing as being whatever it's supposed to be. And as a symbol can symbolize value (connotatively/comprehensionally, I suppose) and whetherhoods (logical relation, alteration of comprehension), it can even symbolize legitimacy, accreditation, status, as yet another kind of modification, even if it does not in fact confer legitimacy; and it can also symbolize shifts of denotation, a thing's or various things' mapping to another thing or things, and these mappings are also not really locations or properties of the thing. I admit this is getting murky. I just have to call it a night! Anyway, thanks for your further thoughts. Best as always, Ben - Original Message - From: Jim Piat [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Peirce Discussion Forum peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu Sent: Saturday, May 06, 2006 10:28 AM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? Dear Ben, Folks-- I'm just back from a walk and thought a bit more about what we are discussing. I'd like to try to clear up a couple of things I presently poorly. First, I said whew in response to one of your comments. I meant something more like Wow! Objects are refered to in terms of either their properties or their locations. Locations seems to mean -- geographically and historically, up through the point of identifying which things they are. Also in terms of whether and with or despite what ifs, ands, or buts, what novelty, what probability, what feasibility optima, they did/do/will/would have their identities modifications. Also rankings, convertibility, quantity, arrangement, etc., as what relatively or correlatively to other objects Alone, neither definition adequately conveys the meaning of an object. In the case of location what is missing is an account of an object's qualities and what they connote. Obviously knowing that we are refering to an object that is located at such and such a place tells us very little about the meaning of that object unless we have collateral experience with the object itself. On the other hand the meaning or consequences of an object does depend in part on its context or location. A police officer located in a squad car seen from your rear view mirror as you are speeding down the highway means something quite different than that same officer located a the local dunkin donuts having coffee. Symbols are objects that perform a very special function. They represent other objects. For one object to represent another the lst object called a sign must accomplish two distinct functions. First the sign must indicate which or what object it is representing. As discussed above, two aspects of the object being represented must be refered to or indicated. First the location of the object being represented must be indicated. Second the properties or qualites of the object being represented must be identified. The usual way of indicating the location of an object is by somehow calling attention to this location. This can be done in a number of ways but the common element they all share is directing our senses
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Jim,
[[ How would you account for the fact that word such as conjunctions and
prepositions can stand by themselves as sentences? ]]
I don't believe that's true. A single-word sentence can sometimes be
understood as a sign, but the understanding depends on a situational
context -- which means that the word does not really stand by itself
even though it may be the only audible part of the utterance.
I recall reading an anecdotal example of such an utterance -- i'm pretty
sure it was in Peirce, but can't remember where, and i don't have a
keyword with which to search for it.
[[ I'll grant you they serve primarily to indicate structural
relationships among the various parts of sentences (and are so
frequently employed that it is not surprising they would be short and
few in number) but I still think they function as signs. They represent
meaning and this is preeminently the domain of signs. ]]
Yes, my previous message said (at the end) that they function
semantically as well as syntactically. But i'd prefer to say that
semiosis -- at least in the case of language -- includes both semantics
and syntax. So these words function semiotically, but not as complete
signs in themselves; so i question whether they denote or signify
anything separable from what the complete sign (*in* which they
function) denotes or signifies.
I think the question here is closely related to one addressed by Peirce
in New Elements III.4 -- in the discussion of fragmentary signs
starting near the bottom of p. 309 in EP2.
[[ On the other hand I think an agrument can be made that syntax is a
form of representation and not merely a collection structural features
that serve to hold the parts of a sentence together. ]]
That's pretty close to Talmy's argument in his work on cognitive
semantics. Or as you put it later in your message, syntax is a form
of structural semantics -- semantics embedded in structure. I'm with
you on that.
[[ In fact it is my view that all syntax is really just a short cut for
expressing common meanings
(such as who is the agent and who the patient) that are embedded in
nearly all sentences. ]]
Yes. I'd say that agency is (a name for) one of those core concepts
represented in syntax itself.
gary F.
}The meaning of a word is its use in the language. [Wittgenstein]{
gnusystems }{ Pam Jackson Gary Fuhrman }{ Manitoulin University
}{ [EMAIL PROTECTED] }{ http://users.vianet.ca/gnox/ }{
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[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Dear Gary,
Man!
As in no man is an island, there is nothing new under the sun and in one
sense nothing is ever used alone because every thing and every usage is
embedded in some context. So, Peirce's own context dependent arguments
notwithstanding (from page 309), I think one can also make the argument that
for every utterance or object there is a context in which it functions as a
sign and one in which it does not. That said, it may well be as you suggest
that in the context of a sentence (which I think you and I both agree is a
sign) prepositions and conjunctions (at least in some cases) function not a
signs but merely as fragmentary signs or structural elements that are only
meaningful in the context of the full sign or sentence itself. Seems to me
Frege made a similar point about the meaning of words but I may well be
mistaken about this.
So, following your helpful comments, where I find myself at this point is
toying with the notion that everything can be interpreted as a sign or
object depending upon the context just as everything can be interpreted as
part or whole depending upon context. Another of the great dualities I
suppose -- text vs context. Perhaps it is the resolution of this duality
(when context becomes text) that is the moment of conception, consciousness
and representation --- to reduce the manifold of sensuous impressions to
unity.
Thanks again Gary. Very interesting and helpful. I always enjoy your
remarks and love those post script aphorims. Recently read a collection of
Wittgensteins myself. -- which naturally I can't lay my hands on just now
when I want it. Something like Cultural Investigations -- Mostly remarks
(gatherered from various lecturers etc) about doing philosophy, being jewish
and what not.
}The meaning of a word is its use in the language. [Wittgenstein]{
gnusystems }{ Pam Jackson Gary Fuhrman }{ Manitoulin University
}{ [EMAIL PROTECTED] }{ http://users.vianet.ca/gnox/ }{
Best wishes,
Jim Piat
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[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? (CORRECTION)
Dear Ben, Joe, Folks-- Ben, I can't always follow your mercurial explorations, elaborations, counter arguments and interesting asides so I'm just going to quote Peirce from the penultimate paragraph of the New List (which you may have already quoted yourself in which case I beg your apology while I wipe the egg off my face). BEGIN QUOTE: The other divisions of terms, propositions, and arguments arise from the distinction of extension and comprehension. I propose to treat this subject in a subsequesnt paper. But I will so far anticipate that, as to say that there is, first, the direct reference of the symbol to its objects, or denotation; second the reference of the symbol to ground, through its object, that is, its reference to the common characters of its objects, or its connotations; and third, its reference to its interpretants through its object, that is , its reference to all the synthetical propositions in which its objects in common are subject or predicate, and this I term the information it embodies. And as every addition to what it denotes, or to what it connotes, is effected by means of a dinstinct proposition of this kind, it follows that the extension and comprehension of a term are in an inverse relation, as long as the information remains the same, and that every increase of information is accompanied by in increas of one or other of these two quantities. It may be observed that extension and comprehension are very often taken in other senses in which this last proposition is not true. END QUOTE: Cheers, Jim Piat --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? (CORRECTION)
Jim, and all,
I've been very much enjoying reading this thread and, indeed, all the
activity of late on the list has been of interest to me. Alas, I
continue to be up to my neck in work so I can't actively participate in
any of the threads at the moment (a condition which no doubt some here
might hope would continue indefinitely :-). But I thought I'd at least
post these companion pieces to the New Elements quotation you posted.
This one simple reinforces those ideas.
CP 3.608 Dyadic relations between symbols, or
concepts, are matters of logic, so far as they are not derived from
relations between the objects and the characters to which the symbols
refer. Noting that we are limiting ourselves to modal dyadic relations,
it may probably be said that those of them that are truly and
fundamentally dyadic arise from corresponding relations between
propositions. To exemplify what is meant, the dyadic relations of
logical breadth and depth, often called denotation and connotation,
have played a great part in logical discussions, but these take their
origin in the triadic relation between a sign, its object, and its
interpretant sign; and furthermore, the distinction appears as a
dichotomy owing to the limitation of the field of thought, which
forgets that concepts grow, and that there is thus a third respect in
which they may differ, depending on the state of knowledge, or amount
of information. To give a good and complete account of the dyadic
relations of concepts would be impossible without taking into account
the triadic relations which, for the most part, underlie them; and
indeed almost a complete treatise upon the first of the three divisions
of logic would be required.
Here is a version of the Breadth X Depth = Information analysis:
CP 2.418
What are thus referred to, so far as they are known, are:
First, The informed breadth of the symbol;
Second, The informed depth of the symbol;
Third, The sum of synthetical propositions in which the symbol is
subject or predicate, or the information concerning the symbol.P1
CP 2.419
By breadth and depth, without an adjective, I shall hereafter mean the
informed breadth and depth.
CP 2.419
It is plain that the breadth and depth of a symbol, so far as they
are not essential, measure the information concerning it, that is, the
synthetical propositions of which it is subject or predicate. This
follows directly from the definitions of breadth, depth, and
information. Hence it follows:
First, That, as long as the information remains constant, the
greater the breadth, the less the depth;
Second, That every increase of information is accompanied by an
increase in depth or breadth, independent of the other quantity;
Third, That, when there is no information, there is either no depth
or no breadth, and conversely.
CP 2.419
These are the true and obvious relations of breadth and depth. They
will be naturally suggested if we term the information the area, and
write--
Breadth X Depth = Area
I was earlier thinking that the formula Breadth X Depth = Information
might parallel what Parmentier called the vector of determination in
semiosis, that "the object determines the sign for the interpretant" in
the order 2/1/3, that is, secondness, then firstness, then thirdness
(this being a logical and not a temporal ordering):
sign
2/1/3 | interpretant
object
However, since at the moment I cannot find a compelling reason why the
formula Breadth X Depth = Information could not be Depth X Breadth =
Information, and because Peirce comments (in the quote you posted in
response to Ben and which appears below my message) that as concerns
depth, the "reference of the symbol to ground" is "through its
object" (so that perhaps even a quasi-dialectical vector or
order 1/2/3 may be implied), I will tentatively not insist that a
vectorial relation is involved here (but this is very tentative and it
would seem to me possible that indeed the breadth may need to precede
the depth). So:
depth ('reference of the symbol to ground, through its object, that
is, its reference to the common characters of its objects, or its
connotations")
2/1/3 and/or? 1/2/3 | information ("reference to all the
synthetical propositions in which its objects in common are subject or
predicate")
breadth ("direct reference of the symbol to its objects, or denotation")
Enough for now. Thanks to you and all for stimulating and challenging
posts.
Gary
Jim Piat wrote:
Dear Ben, Joe, Folks--
Ben, I can't always follow your mercurial explorations, elaborations,
counter arguments and interesting asides so I'm just going to quote
Peirce from the penultimate paragraph of the New List (which you may
have already quoted yourself in which case I beg your apology while I
wipe the egg off my face).
BEGIN QUOTE:
The other divisions of terms, propositions, and arguments arise from
the distinction of extension and comprehension. I propose to treat
this subject in a subsequesnt paper. But I will so far
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Jim, list, Ben wrote: (Beginning with a quote from my earlier remarks) [Jim] One can indicate the location of an object (or at least to its center of gravity). An object which perfoms this function is called an index. One can not readily point to the quality or form an object because form is not a matter of the object's location but of how the object is organized in space and time. [Ben] To the contrary, I think that one can and does point out a form, run one's finger around it, and point out qualities, shine lights on them, and so forth. One can point things out in music while the music is playing. Spatial form is especially subject to being traced out. And the presentation of an icon requires pointing out the icon itself. It was greenish-blue -- like this thing here. [Jim] Well, here we differ. I maintain that it is extremely important to keep in mind the conceptual distinction between Peircean firstness (quality or form) and secondness (reaction or inertia). I further believe that all those aspects of an object which we refer to as its qualities are a manifestation of the object's form which in turn I believe is equivalent to the object's organization in space and time. In turn I contend that an object's inertia mass or resistance to movement is in effect a matter of its location in space and time. The idea of a thing's relative spatiotemporal location's giving it its inertial and gravitational properties was proposed by Mach in physics but has not won general acceptance. [Jim] I think this analogy works both figuratively and literally. But apart from whether one accepts this physical analogy there remains a concpetual distinction between form and location which I think you have conflated in your example above. In your example of pointing out an objects form musically or spatially what you have illustrated in not form per se but the location of an object whose form you wish to highlight. One locates an object that has form but form itself can not be pointed to as having a specific location because form is a matter of organziation not merely location. This sounds like you're talking not about pointing out a form, pointing out its various parts, but about pointing out the _idea_ of form, or pointing out an idealized abstracted form in the sense of its not having a singular location. Now if somebody doesn't get that I'm pointing at the quality rather than the thing, then it may be a challenge to get the idea across, and other blue things may be helpful. If I want to point out the form as a separable idea, then icons are a good way to go too. But I may be concerned to point the form out but not as either an individual thing or as a qualitative appearance. Now, whether the setting is in a specific concrete place or in a vague somewhere or a general anywhere, once you're there, the form consists in the relationality among the locations, to which you can point and, more importantly, which point to one another, and the form is the very balance holding among those mutual pointings-at. From among hundreds of stars you point out seven bright ones to somebody, and have thereby pointed out the constellation which they make, and they point at one another in such a way as to make it easier for the observer to pick them out. Insofar as the form consists in mutual pointings, it shouldn't be considered a quality like blue. The main difference between a structure of force and movement, and an unbalanced force or movement, is just that -- balance imbalance. Force and momentum are *distance* quantities (in a sense that mass, energy, and power are not), and are alliances of magnitude with *direction*, and, when various forces or motions are opposite to one another, and to the extent that they're collectively balanced, they make a structure, with aspects positional, kinetic, static, dyanamic. A structure is essentially an arrangement of forces or motions which are balanced, stably or unstably, such that any unbalanced portion of the force or motion is attributed to the force or motion of the observed system as a whole with respect to an observer at rest. Differently moving observers will therefore divide external motion (potential actual) from internal motion (potential or actual) differently! So as different as they are by being internal and external, inside and outside, these things are the same thing in complementary modes, each is the other inside out. The form may be abstracted unto diagramhood, where the parts are denoting each other. That's beyond concerns with quality of appearance or with location with respect to the observer. [Jim] Form refers to the relative location of parts of whole not to the overall location of the whole itself. Conversely location is not a matter of form because location can have a unique center of gravity or focus which can be pointed to or denoted. Note that Peirce treats indexicality in terms
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Gary F, list, [Gary] I've been following this thread with great interest -- following in the sense that it's always a step or two ahead of me! But i'd like to insert something with reference to Ben's question about words like not, probably, if, etc. [Gary] I don't think it is helpful to consider such words as signs; rather they constitute part of a sign's internal structure, the sign proper being a statement, sentence, or proposition -- or minimally, what Peirce calls a term. In linguistics, words like if are sometimes called structure words as opposed to content words, a distinction that is sharper than it may appear at first glance. Structure words, such as conjunctions, appear in closed classes with a relatively small membership. In English, for instance, there are probably less than a hundred prepositions (even counting those no longer in current use), and the addition of a new preposition to the language is extremely rare, compared to the frequency with which we add new nouns, verbs and adjectives (those being open classes). The structure words sound like that which Jon Awbrey once quoted Peirce calling pure symbols -- and, or, of. The paucity of structure words, especially those of the syntactical kind which I've been discussing, is quite understandable. In one or another old file marked Don't Look! (please look) some of us have sets of invented syntactical words and if you have that, then you know how difficult it is actually to use them, even privately. Playing with the skeletal system of ordinary language is uncomfortable. Some languages like German don't even regularly form distinct adverbs. We're likelier to invent exactly defined syntactical written symbols (like the arrow) than words, and otherwise we make do with abstractions. Signs are built into complex signs and it wouldn't be helpful to have a level of internal structure where semiotics must dispense with its usual conceptions in order to reach. As the more complex signs are built, those internal structural links are expanded; they don't stay out of sight. Representational relations are internal, in a way; or if representational relations are an external character or effect of a sign, then the qualities (which they alternate, attribute, impute, etc.) are internal characters, internal resources of a sign, which sounds good, since now it sounds like I'm describing symbol and icon, respectively, in a reasonably recognizable way. One way or another, each is the other turned inside out, like probability and statistics, or like linear energy and rest mass. The more habitually we divide them, the more we make it take a person with crazy hair to reunite them. Now, Peirce has already included representational (logical) relations as a fundamental category. And he has a class of signs -- symbols -- which represent by reference to representational relations embodied as an interpretant. Symbols are amazingly versatile and can represent abundant objects and qualities. I don't see why we can't regard them as sometimes directly representing representational relations as well, rather than treating representational relations as some sort of virtual particles to be barely glimpsed in the midst of other goings-on. I've been discussing the not, if, etc., as pretty straightforward generalized ways of altering (not merely modifying) comprehension and discussing the symbol as pretty much telling the interpretant to negate, probabilize, logically condition, etc., a given predicate or proposition. The symbol does so as representing, and determined by, its object. And I think that Jim got it right with what I called his treating not as an elliptical not Once we apply not to blue, we have a comprehension and denotation for the new predicate not blue. But we don't have a way to describe the representational contribution of the not itself. Now, I'm not against looking at classes and all that, but I'd like the description to be true to the experience that I have when I simply say the word not. I'm not sure how to see this as some sort of 2nd-order comprehension or denotation, and I think of it as a kind of transcomprehensioning, which sounds 2nd-orderish or 2nd-intentional, but not remains a 1st-order term indispensable at any level (or you could make do with not both...and... but in the end it's the same thing). [Gary] Another relevant distinction from linguistics is between semantics and syntax. If we want to study what (or how) how closed-class words mean, then we have to focus mainly on syntax, or the structure of utterances as determined not by objects denoted or qualities signified but by the structure of the language itself. That's another reason to regard signs for representational relations as symbols. The symbol is a sign defined by its effect on the interpretant in virtue only of an established rule or habit (e.g., that of an animal species or a human culture) (a rule or habit of
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Gary F., list An addendum [Gary] Another relevant distinction from linguistics is between semantics and syntax. If we want to study what (or how) how closed-class words mean, then we have to focus mainly on syntax, or the structure of utterances as determined not by objects denoted or qualities signified but by the structure of the language itself. [Ben] That's another reason to regard signs for representational relations as symbols. The symbol is a sign defined by its effect on the interpretant in virtue only of an established rule or habit (e.g., that of an animal species or a human culture) (a rule or habit of treating an icon as an icon or an index as an index doesn't count toward making it a symbol). So when the symbol's purpose is contribute a representational relation, then the circle just gets drawn somewhat smaller. Now these sound like the pure symbols that were a source of much argument here a while back. I don't think that a mind, or anything which could be called a sub-mind (in a dialogical sense), could get by (though some algebraists supposedly don't do so badly) purely on symbols, let alone, purely on pure symbols. I would like to add that, insofar as semiotics is not confined to the study of ordinary language, it is more open to taking into account linguistic structure influences coming from the nature of logical and mathematical challenges and how these challenges are met. Aerodynamic challenges influence the evolution of flying animals; information-theoretic problems influence biological phenomena. Issues of inference and reason, logical structures, influence rational beings in their evolution personal, societal, maybe biological. When the objects denoted are representational relations, these determine signs and interpretants in the resulting semiosis. The conception of semiotic object is obviously correlated with the conceptions of substance, subject, resistance/reaction, etc., but that correlation is not an equation, and there is no obvious reason for a representational relation _not_ to serve as a semiotic object, even though it's not a tangible resistance or whatever. When one's language and thought have representational relations as semiotic objects, one's language and thought open themselves to being determined by them toward one's understanding and knowing about representational relations. This is an influence by something more than culture, even if it is through culture, an influence by something more than culture to the extent that representational relations are not idiosyncratic, arbitrary human or cultural phenomena or inventions. Best, Ben --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Dear Ben, Gary, Folks-- Ben wrote: The center of gravity is not always the center of compelling interest. A tall boat with big sails, you may point at its mid-height in order to point it out. Its center of gravity may be lower. And there are physical forces besides gravitation. My response: Right. I wish I had not confused the issue by adding these comments about the center of gravity. The reason I did was because I was trying to distinguish (in my own mind) between the form and inertial mass of an object. I had in mind a physical metaphor. Form is how the mass of an object is organized in space and location is its center of gravity. But, I agree that in a larger sense one's focus of interest may be other than the physical center of gravity. (Though if you you'll forgive me your example reminds me of how fast President Reagan's metaphor about a ship or plan being dead in the water spread like wildfire and now every man of substance has gravitas.) Ben wrote: (Beginning with a quote from my earlier remarks) One can indicate the location of an object (or at least to its center of gravity). An object which perfoms this function is called an index. One can not readily point to the quality or form an object because form is not a matter of the object's location but of how the object is organized in space and time. To the contrary, I think that one can and does point out a form, run one's finger around it, and point out qualities, shine lights on them, and so forth. One can point things out in music while the music is playing. Spatial form is especially subject to being traced out. And the presentation of an icon requires pointing out the icon itself. It was greenish-blue -- like this thing here. My response: Well, here we differ. I maintain that it is extremely important to keep in mind the conceptual distinction between Peircean firstness (quality or form) and secondness (reaction or inertia). I further believe that all those aspects of an object which we refer to as its qualities are a manifestation of the object's form which in turn I believe is equivalent to the object's organization in space and time. In turn I contend that an object's inertia mass or resistance to movement is in effect a matter of its location in space and time. I think this analogy works both figuratively and literally. But apart from whether one accepts this physical analogy there remains a concpetual distinction between form and location which I think you have conflated in your example above. In your example of pointing out an objects form musically or spatially what you have illustrated in not form per se but the location of an object whose form you wish to highlight. One locates an object that has form but form itself can not be pointed to as having a specific location because form is a matter of organziation not merely location. Form refers to the relative location of parts of whole not to the overall location of the whole itself. Conversely location is not a matter of form because location can have a unique center of gravity or focus which can be pointed to or denoted. On the other hand, the essence of form can not be captured by mere denotation and must instead be conveyed or refered to by connotation, implication or illustration. One can of cource say an object with the form I wish to convey is located there and thus denote a particular form in that sense. But denoting is not connoting. Indexes denote, icons connote. The crux of denoting is to locate an object (of whatever form) in space and time. The crux of iconizing is to present the form of an object regardless of where it might be located in space or time. It is generally agreed that in everyday experience different objects may have the same form but can not have the same location and that the same object can have different locations. But there is less agreement as to whether or not an object can change its form and remain essentially the same object. All of which is to argue that form and location are conceptually distinct notions which can be used to cross reference one another but ought not be conflated in ones thinking. Ben wrote: What the iconic presentation of appearances makes possible is the representation of things that are too remote or otherwise inconvenient to be pointing at, and the representing of things with more generality. My response: Yes, this is true. but I don't think is contrary to what I'm saying above. Ben wrote (begining with a quote from my earlier remarks) [Jim] However one can illustrate the form or quality of an object by providing a copy of another object that has similar properties. An object that performs this function is called an icon. To adequately represent or stand for an object's meaning we must refer to both its connotation and location. Moreover, I think it is a mistake to restrict the notion of objects to concrete
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Ben quotes Peirce as follows: 66~ A symbol, in its reference to its object, has a triple reference:-- 1st, Its direct reference to its object, or the real things which it represents; 2d, Its reference to its ground through its object, or the common characters of those objects; 3d, Its reference to its interpretant through its object, or all the facts known about its object. What are thus referred to, so far as they are known, are:-- 1st, The informed _breadth_ of the symbol; 2d, The informed _depth_ of the symbol; 3d, The sum of synthetical propositions in which the symbol is subject or predicate, or the _information_ concerning the symbol. ~99 And then says: Information may in some sense incorporates that which involves representational relations, but I don't think that that's the dimension of represenational relations per se. Well, why not, Ben? Think of information in terms of an informing of something, or of becoming informed by somethingof or about something.think of it as an impression of form on something that thus becomes informed by it, i.e.takes on a certain form in virtue of thatt. I am reminded of the locution It impresses me (or him or her)-- or perhaps he or she -- is impressed by such-and-such.) The predicate brings form to the subject, in-forms the subject. Infomation could be regarded as a certain aspect of representation, i.e. the diminsion of represeentation as regarded in a certain special way. Predication is a synthesizing of predicate and subject, as informationis is a synthesizing of breadth and depth, and informing of breadth with depth. I'll continue with your response later, Ben.. But this seemed worth remarking by itself. Joe . -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.385 / Virus Database: 268.5.5/333 - Release Date: 5/5/2006 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? (CORRECTION)
CORRECTED VERSION OF PREVIOUS POST : Ben quotes Peirce as follows: 66~ A symbol, in its reference to its object, has a triple reference:-- 1st, Its direct reference to its object, or the real things which it represents; 2d, Its reference to its ground through its object, or the common characters of those objects; 3d, Its reference to its interpretant through its object, or all the facts known about its object. What are thus referred to, so far as they are known, are:-- 1st, The informed _breadth_ of the symbol; 2d, The informed _depth_ of the symbol; 3d, The sum of synthetical propositions in which the symbol is subject or predicate, or the _information_ concerning the symbol. ~99 And then says: Information may in some sense incorporates that which involves representational relations, but I don't think that that's the dimension of represenational relations per se. MY RESPONSE: Well, why not, Ben? Think of information in terms of an informing of something, or of becoming informed by something or about something; .think of it as an impression of form on something that thus becomes informed by it, i.e.takes on a certain form in virtue of that. (I am reminded of the locution It impresses me (or him or her)-- or perhaps he or she is impressed by such-and-such.) The predicate brings form to the subject, in-forms the subject. Infomation could be regarded as a certain aspect of representation, i.e. the dimension of representation as regarded in a certain special way. Predication is a synthesizing of predicate and subject, as information is a synthesizing of breadth and depth, an informing of breadth with depth. I'll continue with your response later, Ben.. But this seemed worth remarking by itself. (Sorry for the sloppiness of the uncorrected copy originally posted.) Joe . -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.385 / Virus Database: 268.5.5/333 - Release Date: 5/5/2006 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? (CORRECTION)
- Original Message - From: Joseph Ransdell [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Peirce Discussion Forum [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, May 06, 2006 7:16 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? (CORRECTION) CORRECTED VERSION OF PREVIOUS POST : Ben quotes Peirce as follows: 66~ A symbol, in its reference to its object, has a triple reference:-- 1st, Its direct reference to its object, or the real things which it represents; 2d, Its reference to its ground through its object, or the common characters of those objects; 3d, Its reference to its interpretant through its object, or all the facts known about its object. What are thus referred to, so far as they are known, are:-- 1st, The informed _breadth_ of the symbol; 2d, The informed _depth_ of the symbol; 3d, The sum of synthetical propositions in which the symbol is subject or predicate, or the _information_ concerning the symbol. ~99 And then says: Information may in some sense incorporates that which involves representational relations, but I don't think that that's the dimension of represenational relations per se. MY RESPONSE: Well, why not, Ben? Think of information in terms of an informing of something, or of becoming informed by something or about something; .think of it as an impression of form on something that thus becomes informed by it, i.e.takes on a certain form in virtue of that. (I am reminded of the locution It impresses me (or him or her)-- or perhaps he or she is impressed by such-and-such.) The predicate brings form to the subject, in-forms the subject. Infomation could be regarded as a certain aspect of representation, i.e. the dimension of representation as regarded in a certain special way. Predication is a synthesizing of predicate and subject, as information is a synthesizing of breadth and depth, an informing of breadth with depth. I'll continue with your response later, Ben.. But this seemed worth remarking by itself. (Sorry for the sloppiness of the uncorrected copy originally posted.) Joe Dear Joe, Ben-- I'm talking too much and promise to make this my last comment for the day -- but I want to say that I think representation of meaning is a commonly held implicit definition of information though it may seldom be expressed in those words. I look in the dictionary and find information: something told or facts learned; news or knowledge. To me all of these definitions imply the meaning of some event has been represented to someone. I think that for Peirce to represent is to inform. And I might add I think Peirce in some ways also anticipated Shannon's measure of information when he analyzed the fixation of belief in terms of removing doubt or reducing uncertainty.I look forward to your further exchanges. Cheers, Jim Piat --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Ben Udell wrote: But first, on a general note, let me say that among the issues driving my current display of confusion error, is the question: if comprehension is for quality predicate, while denotation is for objects (resistances/reactions), then what dimension is for representational and logical relations themselves? Words like not, probably, if, etc. do not designate either qualities or objects, nor do they represent objects as having this or that quality. What, then, do they connote? What do they denote? Dear Ben, Here's my take on the questions you raise above. I would say that symbols convey information and that they represent or stand for the meaning of objects. Objects (which may be tangible or abstract) have both qualities (forms) and locations (centers of gravity). The meaning of an object (its consequence for other objects) depends upon both the objects qualities and location. One can indicate the location of an object (or at least to its center of gravity). An object which perfoms this function is called an index. One can not readily point to the quality or form an object because form is not a matter of the object's location but of how the object is organized in space and time. However one can illustrate the form or quality of an object by providing a copy of another object that has similar properties. An object that performs this function is called an icon. To adequately represent or stand for an object's meaning we must refer to both its connotation and location. Moreover, I think it is a mistake to restrict the notion of objects to concrete tangible entities -- An object is anything that can be represented. Abstract objects such as relations also have forms and locations that can be connoted and denoted as discussed below. It is my view (and I think Peirce's) that words or symbols such as not, probably, if etc refer to and stand for abstract objects (relations) that have that do indeed have specifiable forms and locations. Not, for example can, perhaps, be loosely defined as the abstract quality of lacking membership in a particualar class. Many, perhaps all, objects can participate in the abstact relational quality of not being a member of some class. And these sorts of abstract relations can be illustrated and pointed to. What makes not and all other abstractions difficult to conceive and illustrate is that abstractions are not forms or qualities of concrete objects themselves but are forms of the way in which concrete objects relate to one another.Logical relationships are abstact properties of the time/space continuum in which all concrete objects swim. To illustrate them we need to point to actions (and their consequences) over time and involving more than one concrete object. That's why math is not for all of us -- me for example. A symbol that does not perform the iconic and denotative function is like a gesture without movement -- sound and fury signifying nothing. Again, myself a good example. But most of all -- Thanks for all the interesting observations and references. Much food for thought in what you've provided. Cheers, Jim Piat --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Jim, Ben, list Jim wrote: An object is anything that can be represented. Abstract objects such as relations also have forms and locations that can be connoted and denoted as discussed below. It is my view (and I think Peirce's) that words or symbols such as not, probably, if etc refer to and stand for abstract objects (relations) that have that do indeed have specifiable forms and locations. Not, for example can, perhaps, be loosely defined as the abstract quality of lacking membership in a particualar class. Many, perhaps all, objects can participate in the abstact relational quality of not being a member of some class. And these sorts of abstract relations can be illustrated and pointed to. What makes not and all other abstractions difficult to conceive and illustrate is that abstractions are not forms or qualities of concrete objects themselves but are forms of the way in which concrete objects relate to one another.Logical relationships are abstact properties of the time/space continuum in which all concrete objects swim. To illustrate them we need to point to actions (and their consequences) over time and involving more than one concrete object. I would tend to agree with this analysis, Jim. I'm trying to remember if you tried to make it when Jon Awbrey was arguing for pure symbols a while back. This would seem to address that issue rather neatly. Gary Jim Piat wrote: Ben Udell wrote: But first, on a general note, let me say that among the issues driving my current display of confusion error, is the question: if comprehension is for quality predicate, while denotation is for objects (resistances/reactions), then what dimension is for representational and logical relations themselves? Words like not, probably, if, etc. do not designate either qualities or objects, nor do they represent objects as having this or that quality. What, then, do they connote? What do they denote? Dear Ben, Here's my take on the questions you raise above. I would say that symbols convey information and that they represent or stand for the meaning of objects. Objects (which may be tangible or abstract) have both qualities (forms) and locations (centers of gravity). The meaning of an object (its consequence for other objects) depends upon both the objects qualities and location. One can indicate the location of an object (or at least to its center of gravity). An object which perfoms this function is called an index. One can not readily point to the quality or form an object because form is not a matter of the object's location but of how the object is organized in space and time. However one can illustrate the form or quality of an object by providing a copy of another object that has similar properties. An object that performs this function is called an icon. To adequately represent or stand for an object's meaning we must refer to both its connotation and location. Moreover, I think it is a mistake to restrict the notion of objects to concrete tangible entities -- An object is anything that can be represented. Abstract objects such as relations also have forms and locations that can be connoted and denoted as discussed below. It is my view (and I think Peirce's) that words or symbols such as not, probably, if etc refer to and stand for abstract objects (relations) that have that do indeed have specifiable forms and locations. Not, for example can, perhaps, be loosely defined as the abstract quality of lacking membership in a particualar class. Many, perhaps all, objects can participate in the abstact relational quality of not being a member of some class. And these sorts of abstract relations can be illustrated and pointed to. What makes not and all other abstractions difficult to conceive and illustrate is that abstractions are not forms or qualities of concrete objects themselves but are forms of the way in which concrete objects relate to one another.Logical relationships are abstact properties of the time/space continuum in which all concrete objects swim. To illustrate them we need to point to actions (and their consequences) over time and involving more than one concrete object. That's why math is not for all of us -- me for example. A symbol that does not perform the iconic and denotative function is like a gesture without movement -- sound and fury signifying nothing. Again, myself a good example. But most of all -- Thanks for all the interesting observations and references. Much food for thought in what you've provided. Cheers, Jim Piat --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Joe, list, I had a thought about an topic from February 2006. - Original Message - From: Joseph Ransdell To: Peirce Discussion Forum Sent: Friday, February 10, 2006 9:32 AM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? [Ben] Yet attributions, ascriptions, copulations, distributions, etc., etc., of predicates to subjects, or of accidents to substances, or of qualities to reactions, all have a certain similarity and parallelism. Then when we associate connotation in one way with firstness, quality, iconicity and, in another way, with thirdness, meaning/implication/entailment, we get confused. Or at least I get confused. [Joe] That is exactly the confusion that I was trying to express, Ben. I've come to think that the mistake here is to associate connotation generally with firstness, quality, iconicity on account possibly mainly of the prominence of the case of a descriptive predicate term, the case which has been the focus of the connotation x denotation = information discussions. If the connotation is, as Peirce says elsewhere, the meaning or significance which gets formed into the interpretant, then we should recognize -- as equally valid modes of connotation along with the connoting of a quality -- symbolic designation of an object, and the symbolizing of a representational relation. In a way, the real odd man out is _denotation._ Not that the conception of denotation isn't valid. sign icon -- resembling, portraying | interpretant - | symbol - | evoking, connoting object -- index - pointing at, pointing to The main difference between Peirce's account of connotation the everyday logical account, is that he at least sometimes equates connotation with significance, significance presumably including implication, while the everyday account, I think, tends to equate connotation with meaning in the sense of _acceptation_ (and perhaps with a meaning arising in an obvious way through a compounding of acceptations). For what it's worth, it also seems to me that, if an evocation/connotation distinction is to be made, it might be better made between that which is evoked information and that which is evoked (soever informatively) as subject matter or as a given. Under this account, icons and indices would generally not _connote_, though they easily _evoke_. Best, Ben --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
fication of John Peter is simply an individual object of consciousness (usually a man, though it may be a dog, or a doll) whom it has been agreed to designate by that name; but the banal signification, to one who knows John Peter well, is very extensive. Peirce: CP 2.433 Cross-Ref:†† 433. The same characteristics apply to propositions as well as to terms: thus the complete signification (or implication) of All x is y is all its valid consequences, and its complete application (or range) is all those descriptions of circumstances under which it holds good--that is to say, all its sufficient antecedents. Peirce: CP 2.434 Cross-Ref:†† 434. A general term denotes whatever there may be which possesses the characters which it signifies; J. S. Mill uses, in place of signifies, the term connotes, a word which he or his father picked up in Ockham. But signify has been in uninterrupted use in this sense since the twelfth century, when John of Salisbury spoke of "quod fere in omnium ore celebre est aliud scilicet esse appellativa significant, et aliud esse quod, nominant. Nominantur singularia; sed universalia significantur."†1 Nothing can be clearer. There is no known occurrence of connote as early as this. Alexander of Hales (Summa Theol., I. liii) makes nomen connotans the equivalent of appellatio relativa, and takes the relation itself as the accusative object of connotare, speaking of "creator" as connoting the relation of creator to creature. So Aquinas, In sentent., I. dist. viii. q. 1, Art. 1. Subsequently, because adjectives were looked upon as relative terms, white being defined as "having whiteness," etc., the adjective was looked upon as connoting the abstraction, but never unless its supposed relative character was under consideration. Tataretus, for example, who wrote when the usage was fully established, will be found using such phraseology as the following: "Nulla relativa secundum se habent contrarium, cum non sint qualitates primae, sed solum relativa secundum dici, et hoc secundum esse absolutum et significatum principale eorum et non secundum esse respectivum et connotativum." Chauvin †2 (1st ed.) says: "Connotativum illud est cuius significatum non sistit in se, sed necessario ad aliud refertur, vel aliud connotat. V. g. Rex, magister, primus." Peirce: CP 2.434 Cross-Ref:†† It unfortunately happened, as the above quotations show, that the precise meaning recognized as proper to the word "signify" at the time of John of Salisbury (a younger contemporary of Abelard) was never strictly observed, either before or since; and, on the contrary, the meaning tended to slip towards that of "denote." Yet even now the propriety of John's remark must be recognized. Peirce: CP 2.434 Cross-Ref:†† A number of works were written in the middle ages, De modis significandi, based upon Priscian (a contemporary of Boëthius), who in turn followed Apollonius the bad-tempered, "grammaticorum princeps," who lived in the time of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius. Cf. also Thurot, Notices et Extraits des MSS. xxii. Pt. II, and Duns Scotus, Works, Lyons edit. 1. Ben wrote, Joe, list,I had a thought about an topic from February 2006.- Original Message - From: "Joseph Ransdell" To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" Sent: Friday, February 10, 2006 9:32 AM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? [Ben] Yet attributions, ascriptions, copulations, distributions, etc., etc., of predicates to subjects, or of accidents to substances, or of qualities to reactions, all have a certain similarity and parallelism. Then when we associate connotation in one way with firstness, quality, iconicity and, in another way, with thirdness, meaning/implication/entailment, we get confused. Or at least I get confused. [Joe] That is exactly the confusion that I was trying to express, Ben. I've come to think that the mistake here is to associate connotation generally with firstness, quality, iconicity on account possibly mainly of the prominence of the case of a descriptive predicate term, the case which has been the focus of the "connotation x denotation = information" discussions. If the connotation is, as Peirce says elsewhere, the meaning or significance which gets formed into the interpretant, then we should recognize -- as equally valid modes of connotation along with the connoting of a quality -- symbolic designation of an object, and the symbolizing of a representational relation. In a way, the real "odd man out" is _denotation._ Not that the conception of denotation isn't valid. sign icon -- resembling, portraying | interpretant - | symbol - | evoking, connoting object -- index - pointing at, pointing to The main difference between Peirce's account of connotation the "everyday" logical account, is that
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Dear Ben, thanks for your reply, I'll respond as soon as possible in detail. The transitivity is not so much of an issue. I can explain that. Asymmetry then isn't a problem either. The difficulty was, to find out what the true (logical) nature of quasi-periodicity is. I can show that Peirce's notion of probability, contrary to what Hilary Putnam surmised, is exceedingly advanced. The curious thing is, that what I found at the same time elucidates the hitherto so strange seeming structure of the Peirce Continuum (true continuity). I can show what it is in mathematical terms now. I can show what the Bernoulli numbers and probability have to do with it, too. And I now have a really thorough understanding of the structure embodied in the New List of 1867 with surprising connections. Seems perhaps I really have made a curious discovery. Nevertheless I am quite distressed. These things are, in terms of mathematical analysis, a true nightmare as you know, except you find the right point of view. It's very difficult to find the right mathematical context to put it in. Somehow this thing is too big. If you don't find a suitable context, you are utterly lost. Nobody will ever understand what you mean and there will be nothing but a big mess. Fog and confusion. I feel I have to talk with someone. Maybe Helmut Pape in Bamberg. Email discussion is such a difficult ballgame. Please be patient with me, Ben. I must say, whatever your damned fourth category is, what you write is exceedingly inspiring for me! I don't know why;-) I think I had better sleep over this, but it seems to me that this won't go away anymore. Eadem mutata resurgo Your Thomas. --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
in response to Benjamin Udell's message On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 22:31:19 +0100 Ben, thanks for your response. You write: I read about his Three Worlds picture in an earlier book of his, one which I understood only middlingly well. I once read a whole book explaining Goedel's incompleteness proof, but I just don't feel sure-footed on the subject, so I won't be the one to convince Penrose of anything if that's what it takes!. Penrose's Three Worlds strike me as possibly Peircean in ancestry, but it's not clear to me how best to align it with Peircean conceptions. Its structure, a cycle though the Worlds that gives you A, B, C, A, B, C... etc., doesn't seem a typically Peircean kind of determinational structure. Well, if it gives you A, B, C, A, B, C... etc., then it equally gives you B, C, A, B, C, A... etc. and C, A, B, C, A, B... etc.. And somehow these three sequences are the same sequence. Well, it's a very far cry ideed, but thinking along these lines you'll have in germ part of the keynote of the proofstructure of Robert Burch's Peircean Reduction Thesis. Hope this is cautiously enough expressed;-) I disagree with both Penrose and Peirce on Three Worlds, but I think Peirce's view is better thought out. Tegmark's four Levels, though more physics-oriented, and philosophically less explicit (unless I'm discerning too much into it), make more sense to me, which is not to say that I think that Tegmark's Multiverse theory or his views of what comprises math are true. Never heard about Tegmark, but such ideas seem to me to be quite common. Reminds me of Gotthard Guenther's Pluriversum and his non-aristotelean logic. Royce is similar too. Decidedly Hegelian all that. Well, peirce-l isn't really a project. Sure. It'not a project. It's a community. That's more isn't it? Ben, you write: I don't take a view on whether asymmetry or symmetry is more basic. If I see an equivalence in place A, and a strict implication in place B, and a strict reverse implication in place C, then I try to figure out a place D figure out what take the form of the mutual non-implication there. I like to trace out, extend, complete patterns, usually by finding a pair of mutually independent yet logically twinned bivaluate parameters. and You're the first person since I joined peirce-l who has suggested that I might be on the right track with structures even though they're noticeablyfourfold rather than Peirceanly threefold. If you hadn't really noticedtheir fourfoldness, you may wish now to reconsider! For me this sounds very much like you are replacing Peirce's categorial structure with a boolean lattice: two poles intertwined and in between two other poles. So you make this Peircean structure stronger. Very remarkable what Joe Ransdell recently replied to you saying: Is a fourthness required for the analysis of number? As I recall it the Peano Postulates make do with 0 through 3. Yes, Hegelian philosophy is in a certain sense just a philosophical/logical interpretation of number theory. I do not say that there is anything wrong with your approach. It's very strong indeed. Only maybe some time you'll have to choose whether you prefer incompleteness or undecidability;-) I would say that we have to go into the direction of weakness, however tempting and even fruitfull in certain aspects the other direction may be. Thirdness is just the personified violation of the law of excluded middle. With fourfoldness as a stronger system you exactly close the door to this. But Peirce doesn't simply introduce an additional truth value. He does something exceedingly subtle, so that in a sense the tertium non datur isn't even really violated. His tertium is form and not truth value. [Thomas] I guess we should discuss this how it pulls double-direction trick off further. No mercy!-) This is very important and something that seems to me to have been neglected as yet! I've wondered about it. I've been toying with the idea of intelligence as a kind of localized or individualized sink for a while now, involving both the running uphill and running downhill of the system, somehow. Toying is about all that I can do with it. I don't know whether it's original. I mean, obviously things like the soul is memory have been said since as long as anybody can remember. Yet to try to take that retention idea seriously in terms of entropy, order, etc., that's something such that I wonder whether anybody has done it. (Less work for me down the road.) A sink of what, exactly?--a sink of something sufficiently general in conception to relate it to biological, material, dynamic systems. And again, obviously it's been taken seriously in some sense, because of computers retaining memory (and, among other things, overheating). But I don't know what the big picture is between (a) memory, attachment, skill, adherence, and (b) things like entropy, order,
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Ben, You concluded: If Peirce was correct in what he offered, with a notable tone of scientific caution, as an explanation for science's finally having significant success, then what made the difference for science was the practice of verification, disconfirmation, etc. I believe that, if his semiotics omits such as a semiotic stage or element, then it is not logic. But the greatest logician since Aristotle in my opinion--I mean Peirce, not you :-) --the very inventor/discoveror of logic as semeitoic doesn't say that that there are no things like psychology and sociology, and especially psychic experience and social experience, life lived in the experimental laboratory, for example, something which is strongly suggested--at least to me--in the remark occurring just before the above quoted conclusion of your post: [BU] As a sign, man evolves, but man evolves as a sign because he evolves as a recognizant and as a semiotic and experientialsubject. There are richnesses of life which go beyond mere logic as semeiotic (even for the logician and scientist!) and involve the "whole of life" psychology sociability including the pyschic and social confirmation of hypotheses through experiments leading to the development of new or transformed theories and methods following from these--and it's here that I believe you recongizant belongs. Of course there most certainly is a need in inquiry both formal and informal for the "stage or element" of verification, disconfirmation, etc. Still, I am still not at all convinced that it is an element of semiosis as such, rather it is itself (as you say) the result of dependent upon semiosis--some actual fact of its occurring in some particular situation in some person or machine, say. Perhaps I have been guilty of confusing terminological matters somewhat, and especially in my early discussions (but even more recently) by myself trying to fit your "recognizant" into semiosis itself, wanting to find some place for what I still believe to be a powerful notion, but now not in relation to semeiotic as such, but in relation to the inquiry process as such, and to society, to the evolution of the individual (psychology) and community, etc. Perhaps when someone else on the list (or off) grasps what you're saying as being essential to logic as semeiotic--so essential, you hold, that if one "omits such as a semiotic stage or element, then it is not logic," and can perhaps rephrase or add to your argument in some way that clarifies and crystallizes it for those of us who just don't see this putatively fatal flaw in Peirce's semeiotic and the need for a fourth semeiotic element, then I will be forced to revise my thinking in the matter. Certainly you are well aware that I've tried to grasp your argument over many months and in hundreds of hours of study but have not been able to the recognizant as a necessary element or stage of semeiosis (although undoubtedly a necessary one in inquiry). As I recently noted, this may be the result of a lack in me. But I would like to see you convince at least one Peircean of the truth of your argument concerning the inadequacy of a triadic semeiotic. As for my musings on hubris, which you mentioned in your long post, in that regard I am always thinking of this passage where Peirce reflects on his own intellectual habit to avoid this. CP 6.181 There is one intellectual habit which I have laboured very seriously to cultivate, and of which I have a number of times experienced advantages enough, each one of them, to repay all the work I have done toward acquiring it: I mean the habit, when I have been upon the point of assenting, in my own mind, to some conclusion, [and when] I knew that some other mind (whose ways of thinking were very unlike my own, but whom I had known to have reached, in his way, truths not easy to reach) had considered the matter and had reached a conclusion inconsistent with the one that was recommending itself to me, of pausing, endeavoring to put myself in that other's point of view, reconsidering more minutely my whole reasoning, seeking to weld it to other reasonings and reflexions which all sound thinkers would approve, and doing my best to find weak points in the reasoning I came so near to embracing. I should not venture to recommend the cultivation of this habit to any of those who set up their own accidental impossibility of conceiving, as a permanent and essential one, before which all other men ought to crook the knee; since the very essence of their mental malady consists in an exaggerated loyalty to their own principles, i.e. a heartfelt and rather intolerant religion whose divinity is their past mental selves. Perhaps I myself need to work harder to acquire this habit of great intellectual integrity. For the moment I'll conclude with some quotations from the Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898 to perhaps suggest better what I meant above by saying that "there are richnesses of life that go beyond mere logic as
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Gary, Jim, Joe, Thomas, list, Erratum. In fact I should probably have cut the kinematic quantities out since there's room to explain what the heck I'm thinking about with them, but, since I mentioned them, I should at least get them right. Change of observer's time should appear where I put "1" (unity). Change of the observed's own time is "Dt" often called "change of tau." I should also have added "(with lightspeed c held equal to 1)." ARX. (Arche.) Saturation, struggle, instability, mobility, forcefulnessDd = =TLO. (Telos as teleiosis.) Illumination, culmination, vigor, immoderation, energeticism. Dt-Dt =|X|= MES.(Meson.) Incubation, mediation, moderation,patience (like processual steadiness). Dt = = NTL. (Entelecheia.) Verification, establishment, stability, firmness (like structural integrity) Dt-Dd Sorry about that! Best, Ben --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Dear Ben , Folks-- Ben wrote: But, again,why is the interpretant's separate leg to the object "part" of the semiosis, but the recognition's separate leg to the object _not_ "part" of the semiosis in question? That's just inconsistent.If the interpretant's separate leg to the object is essential to making the semiosis triadic, then why isn't the collaterally based recognition's separate leg to the object essential in making the semiosis tetradic? In fact, that'sessential to why semiosis is tetradic. And then, Ben, you answer your own question (at least to my satisfaction) by saying: At no stage does semiosis happen in a vaccuum.The criterion of whether something is or isn't part of the semiosis in question is,simply that the thing arise in the course of the semiosis in question and as determined by the semiosis in question at least up to that point, and contribute semiotic determination from its point onward to any further development of the semiosis in question. The recognitionarises as determined by the semiosis and in the course of the semiosis, it is determined by the semiosis and by the object and other semiotic elements through the semiosis and collaterally by the object of the semiosis, and from that point onward _any and all_ further development in the semiosis in question is also determined, logically, semiotically,by that recognition.That recognition isa decision point in the semiosis in question. It's part of the semiosis in question, very much so indeed. What follows, Ben, are just some thoughts on the issues you raise. Not refutations of your thoughts -- just collateral. Part of the same thread and thus something we have, I think, in common. Perhaps, when a person first learnsthe meaning of a symbol (for example a young child first symbolizes the object tree) what that person acquires is a habit which is continually being modified or learned anew. From start to finish the process of learning the meaning of a symbol is the same -- a process of acquiring the habits of use of a community of sign users. The first exposure to the use of the word treeinvolves the modification ofold habitsand this continues throughout ones participation in semiosis. We never learn a totatly new habit even when we first acquire the use of a new symbol. We are a symbol or creature of habit from the get goand all learning or interpretation is a modification of some prior habit. The winowing of alternative interpretations or modification of prior habits based upon collateral experience occurs with every use or exposure to a symbol -- from begining to end. And we don't learn or acquire new symbols outside of a community of folks who already use that symbol or some close approximation of it. And all conscious perception is a matter of symbolization. (I'll just assert that -;) Collateral experience of an object is not some sort of priviledge experience that is more fundamental than the symbolic experience of or reference to an object. They are the same sort of experience. In both cases what constitutes our conception of the object is not some entitity existing outside of semiosis but rather a "habit of reference or use" that is embedded in that collective community activityof coordinatingour behavior toward a common goal of group survival.Objects are known only through our shared communal habits of reference. And these habits are continually being modified individually and collectively -- whether they involve children just learning them or old folks trying desparately to recall them. We don't live in a a world ofsymbols along side a world of objects.The world of objects exists for us only within our world of symbols. This is not to say we have invented the objects by some feat of imagination but merely that we have no access to them other than through symbolization. Symbolization is our window to what we commonly call being aware of or perceiving objects.To perceive a tree is to symbolizea tree -- to acquire a habit of referencecommon to one's language community. All of our habits from start to finish are embedded in a context that is continually shifting. Adjusting our habits to this shifting context is what we call learning. Just some thoughts, Ben. Enjoying your discussion with Gary Joe and others. Jim Piat --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Ben, you say: I don't pose a tetradic reduction thesis applicable to all relations. I just say that there's a fourth semiotic term that isn't any of the classic three. A sign stands for an object to an interpretant on the basis of a recognition. I think that an increasingly good reason to suppose that recognition can't be reduced to interpretant, sign, and object, is that nobody has done so in any kind of straightforward way. REPLY: Has anybody tried? BEN: Basically, signs interpretants lack experience conveyable to the mind. How will you reduce experience of them respecting the object, reduce such experience into things that lack experience conveyable to the mind? Where did the experience vanish to? You can analyze, but not reduce, experience into such by shifting phenomenological gears, semiotic frame of reference, etc. REPLY: I don't see anything reductive in assuming that the analysis of cognition, including recognition, can be done in terms of a signs, objects, and interpretants as elements of or in cognitive processes, andif this involves shifting phenomenological gears and semiotic frames of reference then so be it.. Your suggestion that recognition should be acknowledged to be a distinctive fourth factor seems to accomplish nothing other than to make it impossible to analyze recognition at all since the conception of it is already given, as a sort of logical primitive, prior to its use as an analytic element. But the truth is, Ben, that I just don't understand your argument. I just can/t follow it, and I can't really answer you effectively for that reason. I guess I will have to leave that to Gary for the time being and hope that I will in time come to understand what you are getting at. I always take what you say seriously, at the very least. Joe Ransdell -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 267.15.8/260 - Release Date: 2/14/2006 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Dear Ben, Just to let you know that I've been reading and enjoying your many recent comments. I haven't commented because I can't keep up with your pace -- but hopefully I will catch up some in time. I especially enjoying your persistent examination of what it means to interpret something. The way I confuse myself on this issue is to repeatedly disregard the notion that all is interpretation (ie we begin with the given of interpretation as the means by which we experience the world) and instead fall into what I consider the trap of begining with objects as existing apart from our semiotic experience of them and then to somehow try to make sense of a objects that do not exist as I have mistakenly posited them. I must remind myself that its signs all the way down. An infintitude of signs (which are interpretants) within which are objects as one pole of a tri-polar infinitely nested or enfolded reality of signs -- unfolding behind us and we stumble backwards into the future, eyes firmly fixed on the past searching for clues as to where we might be tending. The present (as I understand it) is the continuous unfolding of the potential (which is the future) into the actual (which is the past). This continuous circular ever expanding and informing process or re-presentation of the present I understand to be semiosis -- however it's spelled.None of which do I take to be a refutation of any that you've said -- just my way of paying my respects to what you are saying as part of what seems to me a list wide attempt to sort it all out. A common interest. Best wishes, Jim Piat --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Joe, Ben, List, Joe wrote: I don't see anything reductive in assuming that the analysis of cognition, including recognition, can be done in terms of a signs, objects, and interpretants as elements of or in cognitive processes, andif this involves shifting phenomenological gears and semiotic frames of reference then so be it.. I would agree that "the analysis of cognition, including recognition [and, I would add, even whatever of 'memory' is logically analyzable GR], can be done in terms of signs, objects, and interpretants" and, indeed, see no other way to analyze it. Joe continues: Your suggestion that recognition should be acknowledged to be a distinctive fourth factor seems to accomplish nothing other than to make it impossible to analyze recognition at all since the conception of it is already given, as a sort of logical primitive, prior to its use as an analytic element. I would fully concur with this analysis. Joe continues by stating: But the truth is, Ben, that I just don't understand your argument. I just can/t follow it, and I can't really answer you effectively for that reason. I guess I will have to leave that to Gary for the time being and hope that I will in time come to understand what you are getting at. I'm afraid that I apparently either haven't understood Ben's argument or, if I have, that Ben has quite rejected my analysis as you can see from his blog comments referring to earlier discussions on this list (which I've copied just below). Joe concludes: I always take what you say seriously, at the very least. I take Ben's thinking seriously as well, but sense that he will try to fit triadic semeiotic to the Procrustean bed of his fours as he was fully committed to them well before coming upon Peirce's semeiotic (and, of course, for the reasons he has given which I too cannot follow). So I hope that others will argue these points with Ben as I have pretty much 'shot my wad' in the matter. Here's some of Ben's reflection on Bernard Morand and my earlier arguments as they appear on Ben's blog. Ben writes: One might argue, as Gary Richmond and Bernard Morand have argued at Joseph Ransdells peirce-l electronic forum, that the recognition, observation, etc., are the integrity of the triad or of the evolvent semiosis over time, and are their totality and locus. Yet the recognitional and observational relationships are distinguishable from the triadic relationships of objectification, representation, interpretation, since the relevant observation/recognition is collateral to sign and interpretant in respect to the object, and is not merely their totality and locus while not really being anything more than them. Furthermore, by the same method one could argue that the interpretant sign is really just the integrity or maybe instead the clarity of an object-sign dyad and that no further distinct relationships need be invoked in order to conceive of the interpretant. And so forth. Gary has also argued that since he is the sign, he already is the observation, they arent different things etc. (In a similar argument, he argues that the universe is an interpretant and already has all its observations, etc.) Yet this involves ignoring the shifts of semiotic reference frame whereby we say that a thing is a semiotic object in one sense or set of relations, and is a sign in another sense or set of relations, etc., and it leads to a hypostatization of object, sign, etc., even while Gary claims that it avoids the hypostatization to which he claims that the conception of the recognizant amounts. Furthermore, by the same method one could argue that one is already the pre-interpretant sign, one doesnt need a separate interpretant, it would just be a hypostatization, one is both and its all one, etc. Meanwhile, the recognizant is not a hypostatization; something is no more a recognizant in every set of relations than it is an interpretant in every set of relations, or a sign in every set of relations, or a semiotic object in every set of relations. Garys arguments are, in a sense, too powerful; they reduce the semiotic triad itself away. Well, I don't necessarily agree with Ben's conclusions, but I have been unsuccessful on list and off (and including discussions relating to the Peircean 'reduction thesis' 'valency analysis' 'existential graph analysis' etc. which support the argument that three semeiotic elements are necessary and sufficient. But perhaps anticipating your argument reproduced above, Joe, Ben has also written: There remains the argument that collateral experiences, recognitions, etc., are not semiotic and dont belong with object, sign, and interpretant. Yet, thats just to say that verification, disconfirmation, etc., are concerns at best adjacent to, but still outside of, logic and semiotics; the scientific process, then, for example, falls outside of semiotic concerns to the extent that the scientific process is verificational, disconfirmatory,
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Joe, list, [Joe] Ben, you say: [Ben] I don't pose a tetradic reduction thesis applicable to all relations. I just say that there's a fourth semiotic term that isn't any of the classic three. A sign stands for an object to an interpretant on the basis of a recognition. I think that an increasingly good reason to suppose that recognition can't be reduced to interpretant, sign, and object, is that nobody has done so in any kind of straightforward way. [Joe] REPLY: [Joe] Has anybody tried? Well, yes, Gary Bernard tried, and both of them put some effort into it. Martin Lefebvre also gave it a shot or two. I pondered their efforts for quite some time. It's what I was talking about when I said in my previous post: 66~~~ - It's been said that recognition collateral experience are a generalized context, but that context is not what I meant by recognition nor what Peirce meant by collateral experience. I've meant, for instance, your seeing somebody wear a hat just as you expected. Or like somebody talking about a bird and your checking their comments against your experiences of particular birds. - It's been said that recognition experience are mediated or made of signs interpretants. Those involve shifts of the semiotic frame of reference, which is a legitimate analytic move, but not a legitimate reductive move. - It's been said that the evolution of a triad -- somehow -- conveys experience without the members of the triad doing so. If there's a relationship among object, sign, interpretant, a relationship which conveys experience of the object, then that relationship IS experience of the object and is not reducible to object, sign, interpretant -- and we're back at talking about the familiar subject of phenomenology vs. physiological analysis of vision. ~~~99 The first counterargument above was Gary's, and I agreed that there is a large context of experience collateral in many ways to many things, and it's an interesting and, I find, illuminating line of thought, because there IS a common solidary experiential context, the solid intertanglement of the anchorages of one's many recognitions, one which I've come to think is illuminating in regard to assertions. However it's just not what I was talking about in discussing recognitive experience formed as collateral to the sign interpretant in respect of the object -- such experience is formed in terms of its references to the other semiotic elements, and is quite distinguishable from the generalized context. If I was supposed to be checking whether some water boiled in a pot when I was instead checking whether somebody wore a certain hat as I expected, I will hear a lot about the specific referential differences between those collaterally based recognitions from whomever I promised that I would keep an eye on the pot of water. Gary has also made a more advance form of the argument, in which he said that man is sign, the whole universe is a sign, why does one need confirmation? My answer was twofold, one, that by that kind of reasoning, (1) one doesn't even need an interpretant, since one is already the sign, the universe is already the sign, and (2) that most signs and interpretants aren't like that anyway, and that they should not be regarded as false partial versions of the big sign which is oneself or the grand sign which is the universe. We have to deal with signs interpretants as they commonly are. There was actually more argument related in various ways to this, more of it is coming back to me as I write this, but let me move on. The second counterargument has been made in one form or another by you, Gary, Martin Lefebvre, and others. I addressed it in the passage above and continually throughout the post. My past discussions of phenomonological versus physiological-analytic viewpoints have been addresssed in part to it. The third counterargument was developed by Gary Bernard in three-way interchange with me. That which I said in the quoted passage above was actually a brief form of a new response by me on it. My other response was that this object-experience-generating relationship should be tracked down in order to test whether it indeed is reducible to object, sign, or interpretant. The triad's integrity, conceived-of as object-experience formed as collateral to sign interpretant in respect of the object, is the conception of a semiotic fourth without calling it that. Now, if sign interpretant did not, as such, convey experience, yet some aspect or relation among them did so, perhaps over time, then we would say that they DO convey experience of the object, in virtue of that very aspect or relation. And if they conveyed object-experience but only after sufficient time and evolution, then, too, we would say that they DO convey experience of the object, just not instantaneously or as quickly as one might like. Peirce says not merely that signs don't convey experience of
[peirce-l] (peirce-l) Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
ation about which object we
can only approach indefinitely, as to a limit. 2. The material system is time-nonsymmetric, stochastic-processual, in which the system at a given stage is only ALMOST the system at another given stage, i.e., a SIGN to us of the system at other stage. 3. The vegetable-level biological system is time-nonsymmetric but LOCALLY pointed thermodynamically in the opposite direction from that of its material world, from which it filters order and is an INTERPRETANT to us. 4. The intelligent living system is time-nonsymmetric but INDIVIDUALLY pointed variously in both directions thermodynamically -- as living thing, it filters for order -- as intelligent, it is a sink, retaining sign-rich disorder as recorded -- I don't know how it pulls double-direction "trick" off -- anyway it is a RECOGNITION which we are.The sign defined by its relationship to recogition is a proxy.ERGO: As sign, man is most of all a proxy. At intelligent life's best, only indefinitely
approached, intelligent life is a genuine, legitimate proxy acting deciding on behalf of the ideal, in being determined _by_ the ideal. Intelligent life shouldn't let it go to his/her head, though. Hard it is to be good; harder still to confirm solidify it by entelechy = by staying good = continual renovation and occasional rearchitecting (entelechy is not necessarily a freeze) amid changingevolvable conditions. Best, Ben - Original Message - From: "Benjamin Udell" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2006 11:15 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW
ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? Jim, list,Jim Piat wrote: [Joe Ransdell] Good point, Gary. Still another way of thinking about it might be to suppose that the emphasis is supposed to fall on "thing" rather than "sign": "no sign is a real THING" rather than "no sign is a REAL thing"; but that doesn't sound very plausible to me. I like your solution better. Joe Ransdell [Jim] While we're raising questions about the distinctions among such notions as the real, the existent and the true (their relationships to the categories etc) Are you disagreeing with Peirce here? It's okay to disagree with him, I do too, but I'm wondering whether that's what you're doing. Here's Peirce's view:1. The possible | 3. The (conditionally) necessary ("would have to" approx. = "should"), the real 2. The actual, the reactive, the existent"Truth" in Peirce's use of the word is the property of a true proposition, its property
of corresponding to fact, though it could also correspond to a law regarded as a fact.I'll give this a try. Keeping in mind that these are correlations, not equations:1. Term (seme, etc.) - (univocality?) -- (case in the sense of question, issue, matter, _res_?) --- possibility. | 3. Argument -- validity -- law --- (conditional) necessity. 2. Proposition - truth -- fact --- actuality.[Jim] -- I'd like to throw in a related question: Does existence as a mode of being ever occur outside of representation or thirdness (as a mode of being). Or is existence (and objects conceived of as merely existing -- ie something less than signs) something that always swims in the contiuum of representation. My take has been that existent objects are always also embodied signs, but that embodied interpretants aren't so common. I'd have to dig. I seem to remember Peirce talking about genuine phenomenal thirdness as not being everywhere -- but I also
remember thinking that he was talking in terms of the interpretant, and not of "just any" signs -- i.e., it was the thing about embodied interpretants again. Peirce doesn't use the phrase "embodied interpretant," as I recall. Gary used it I picked it up from him.Now, Peirce says that an index doesn't necessarily resemble its object at all, and that it indicates its object whether we notice or not -- the relationship with its object is one of actual resistance or reaction (when the index a sinsign; otherwise, the relationship of its replica with the object). If I think of such reactions, I think vaguely of forces, variational principles, etc. And I think of effects which quantitatively and qualitatively differ a lot from their causes.In the case of icons, Peirce is more likely to think in terms of mathematical diagrams. He thinks that mathematical structures and patterns are real, and are real thirdness (I think). However, I don't know what
Peirce thinks about iconicity in statistical patterns and processes in material nature -- I don't mean in the sense of statistical patterns making pictures of physical objects, if that ever happens. I mean in the sense that there are statistical pro
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Ben: I will have to leave it to Gary R. and Jim to respond to whatever it is you are doing here. I just don't follow what is going on, what the problem is to which what you say is an answer or clarification or whatever.. (That is not a way of dismissing what you say, but just a personal confession of bewilderment.) Joe - Original Message - From: Benjamin Udell [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Peirce Discussion Forum peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu Sent: Tuesday, February 14, 2006 5:30 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? Jim, list, A few corrections, then a discussion which may be of interest to, ahem, not only Sir Piat, but also Sir Ransdell Sir Richmond. Interpretants iconicity are dealt with, eventually. I beg a little patience on this one, good Sir Knights, unsheathe thy swords not too quickly. (Note to self: ask them later what, if any, effect this near-flattery had on them.) Correction: I left reality accidentally off this trikon, now I've put it where I originally meant to: 1. Term (seme, etc.) - (univocality?) -- (case in the sense of question, issue, matter, _res_?) --- possibility. | 3. Argument -- validity -- law --- (conditional) necessity, reality. 2. Proposition - truth -- fact --- actuality. Correction the second, I said: ...we did not find resemblance embodied except in compromise form with indexicality, in material kinships I think that Peirce would take the embodiment of mathematical diagrams as the embodiment of icons and as not needing to be in something like the compromise form with embodied indexicality which I was discussing as material kinship. I forgot that at that moment because I generally think of the mathematical diagram not as an icon of its object but instead as an instance of a sign defined by that support which it would supply to recognition (of its experimentational decision-process legitimacy), across any all disparities of appearance (and of time, place, modality, universe-of-discourse, etc.) between said sign its object. \ 1. If a genuine sign's ground is an abstraction which, by its categorial character, neither opens nor closes questions (i.e. it keeps information the same), then the ground is a reaction or resistance, a concrete factual connection with its object. Then the sign itself is an index. (I strongly suspect that this info-preservative kind of abstraction can indeed be called an abstraction; but, if not, then not.) 2. If a genuine sign's ground is an abstraction which, by its categorial character, only opens questions (only removes information), then the ground is, to that extent, a quality, a semblance, a sample aspect apparent as sustained and carried on by the sign so long as the sign is true to itself in this. (To gain such a sign brings an increase of information, of course, but I am focusing on the info relationship between the ground and that from which it is abstracted.) Then the sign itself is an icon. 3. If a genuine sign's ground is an abstraction which, by its categorial character, only closes questions (only adds information), i.e., reduces away or sums over all factors seen as extraneous to the abstraction's purpose, then the ground is, to that extent, a meaning or implication, a gist, an effect that it will, by habitual tendency, have on the interpretant, of making the interpretant resemble the gist, in meaningfully _appearing_ as -- without iconically resembling -- the object. (This is clarified further down.) 4. If a genuine sign's ground is an abstraction which, by its categorial character, both opens closes questions (removes some information adds some information), then the ground is, to the extent, a validity, soundness, legitimacy (in that respect in which the sign counts _experientially_ as the object itself without necessarily being confused with the object at all), a support which the sign would most naturally and directly supply to its recognition, a support via its reacting legitimately in some respect as -- without indexically pointing to -- the object itself, and the reaction or resistance being _with the recognizant._ Then the sign itself is that which I call a proxy. Its ground's abstraction involves a closing and settling of questions (adding of information) as to what object-related information is relevant, (e.g., There are five initially selected objects in question, it doesn't matter whether we miscounted them or whether they're really oranges, etc.) and an opening of questions (removal of information) (e.g., how would the five behave and interact and collaborate with us, the mathematical observer-experimenter, sheerly in virtue of their fiveness, supplying us with answers to _fresh and unforeseen_ questions in accordance with _the rules_ of fiveness? I.e., in the concrete world, the question, for instance, of 5^3=? is taken as closed in the sense that the world will behave as determined by the answer
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Ben, list, this thread on The New Elements of Mathematics started with Charles Peirce writing: None of them approved of my book, because it put perspective before metrical geometry, and topical geometry before either. Even today if one would consider to engage in the project of writing such a book, one should really think twice. Nobody has a really good idea how to write it and if it were written, nobody would understand it, and if one would understand it, one would have to unlearn lots of things one already knows and that only for a curiosity. One criterion for scientific progress is, that a new theory should explain everything that the preceding ones explained and something else besides (ha!). Charles was, together with his father Benjamin Peirce, part of a movement in 19th Century mathematics called Universal Algebra. Others were e.g. William Rowan Hamilton and Hermann Grassmann. All of them or their followers erected a philosophy on their mathematical ideas, by the way. What Felix Klein has written about Hermann Grassman's Ausdehnungslehre (Theory of Extension) in his Lectures on the Development of Mathematics in 19th Century (1926) applies to Charles Peirce too and is still considered relevant today. The main point is on page 178 in my Springer Reprint of Klein's book (I believe there exists an English translation too). It is this: The grand project in mathematics for much more than a century now has been arithmetization¨, i.e. to reduce mathematical structures to the abstract structure of the natural numbers. If you put the continuous before the discrete, then you are not alone in history, but nobody has as yet really succeeded with such a project. The problem is, simplistically speaking, that, starting with a continuum, you will have great difficulties to introduce discrete entities, except by way of an arbitrary addition. So the relevant book today is David Hilbert's Grundlagen der Geometrie¨ (Foundations of Geometry). There are today followers of the other approach, especially in Grassmann's footsteps, e.g. David Hestenes with his Geometric Calculus¨ and Geometric Algebra¨, but their success, despite some very striking simplifications and insights, till today is quite limited. It is more or less regarded as a curiosity, some flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness��� ... On the other hand there is in Sir Roger Penrose's Road to Reality¨ (now we come to the noble celebrities) an introductory chapter on The roots of science¨ and especially Three worlds and three deep mysteries¨ (chap 1.5) with the usual Popperian sermon preached (sorry, Sir Karl Raimund). But one deep puzzle¨ for Sir Roger is why mathematical laws should apply to the world with such phenomenal precision. Moreover, it is not just the precision but also the subtle sophistication and mathematical beauty of the successful theories that is profoundly mysterious¨(p.21). Finally Roger Penrose writes in this context: There is, finally, a further mystery concerning figure 1.3, which I have left to the last. I have deliberately drawn the figure so as to illustrate a paradox. How can it be that, in accordance with my own prejudices, each world appears to encompass the next one in its entirety? I do not regard this issue as a reason for abandoning my prejudices, but merely for demonstrating the presence of an even deeper mystery that transcends those that I have been pointing to above. There may be a sense in which the three worlds are not separate at all, but merely reflect, individually, aspects of a deeper truth about the world as a whole of which we have little conception at the present time. We have a long way to go before such matters can be properly illuminated.¨(pp. 22/23) Noble words to be considered well! But don't tell Sir Roger about the sign and it's interpretants. That will not do for him. There are a lot of philosophical soap shops out there. You had better understand fully what his problems are in the next 980 or so pages of mathematics and physics that come then, before you tell him about The New Elements of Mathematics���. So what we do with Peirce's work appears to the outside world either as a more or less philatelistic pastime with historical curiosities. It's all good and fine and edifying and very logical except for a few paradoxes here and there, perhaps. Or else you start getting your hands really dirty and do whatever it takes to find out what is going on behind the scenes. We had better find out and make our mistakes as quickly as possible in order not to flog a dead horse, I believe. Enough name dropping for now. Ben, you write: begin citation 1. The idealized system of motions forces -- classical Newtonian or pure-quantum-system -- is time- symmetric, completely deterministic in the given relevant sense, unmuddled, pure OBJECT to us,
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
material world, from which it filters order and is an INTERPRETANT to us. 4. The intelligent living system is time-nonsymmetric but INDIVIDUALLY pointed variously in both directions thermodynamically -- as living thing, it filters for order -- as intelligent, it is a sink, retaining sign-rich disorder as recorded -- I don't know how it pulls double-direction trick off -- anyway it is a RECOGNITION which we are. The sign defined by its relationship to recogition is a proxy. ERGO: As sign, man is most of all a proxy. At intelligent life's best, only indefinitely approached, intelligent life is a genuine, legitimate proxy acting deciding on behalf of the ideal, in being determined _by_ the ideal. Intelligent life shouldn't let it go to his/her head, though. Hard it is to be good; harder still to confirm solidify it by entelechy = by staying good = continual renovation and occasional rearchitecting (entelechy is not necessarily a freeze) amid changing evolvable conditions. Best, Ben - Original Message - From: Benjamin Udell [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Peirce Discussion Forum peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2006 11:15 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? Jim, list, Jim Piat wrote: [Joe Ransdell] Good point, Gary. Still another way of thinking about it might be to suppose that the emphasis is supposed to fall on thing rather than sign: no sign is a real THING rather than no sign is a REAL thing; but that doesn't sound very plausible to me. I like your solution better. Joe Ransdell [Jim] While we're raising questions about the distinctions among such notions as the real, the existent and the true (their relationships to the categories etc) Are you disagreeing with Peirce here? It's okay to disagree with him, I do too, but I'm wondering whether that's what you're doing. Here's Peirce's view: 1. The possible | 3. The (conditionally) necessary (would have to approx. = should), the real 2. The actual, the reactive, the existent Truth in Peirce's use of the word is the property of a true proposition, its property of corresponding to fact, though it could also correspond to a law regarded as a fact. I'll give this a try. Keeping in mind that these are correlations, not equations: 1. Term (seme, etc.) - (univocality?) -- (case in the sense of question, issue, matter, _res_?) --- possibility. | 3. Argument -- validity -- law --- (conditional) necessity. 2. Proposition - truth -- fact --- actuality. [Jim] -- I'd like to throw in a related question: Does existence as a mode of being ever occur outside of representation or thirdness (as a mode of being). Or is existence (and objects conceived of as merely existing -- ie something less than signs) something that always swims in the contiuum of representation. My take has been that existent objects are always also embodied signs, but that embodied interpretants aren't so common. I'd have to dig. I seem to remember Peirce talking about genuine phenomenal thirdness as not being everywhere -- but I also remember thinking that he was talking in terms of the interpretant, and not of just any signs -- i.e., it was the thing about embodied interpretants again. Peirce doesn't use the phrase embodied interpretant, as I recall. Gary used it I picked it up from him. Now, Peirce says that an index doesn't necessarily resemble its object at all, and that it indicates its object whether we notice or not -- the relationship with its object is one of actual resistance or reaction (when the index a sinsign; otherwise, the relationship of its replica with the object). If I think of such reactions, I think vaguely of forces, variational principles, etc. And I think of effects which quantitatively and qualitatively differ a lot from their causes. In the case of icons, Peirce is more likely to think in terms of mathematical diagrams. He thinks that mathematical structures and patterns are real, and are real thirdness (I think). However, I don't know what Peirce thinks about iconicity in statistical patterns and processes in material nature -- I don't mean in the sense of statistical patterns making pictures of physical objects, if that ever happens. I mean in the sense that there are statistical processes whereby random fluctuations and differences cancel out to a common middle or average, and a stage of a process can be predictably similar to a current stage depending on how recent or soon-to-arrive it is at the time of the given curren stage. There are other kinds of widespread similarities -- typical percentages of various substances in widely dispersed material, so on. Now insofar as we're talking about embodied iconicity, it's not just about resemblances, but about resemblances arising among things reactively or resistantially related -- in other words, a lot of things with family kinships, things made of the same kinds of stuff often from common
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
On Fri, 10 Feb 2006 14:32:22 +0100, Joseph Ransdell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What I am especially concerned with at present is the distinction he is often more or less consciously working with between expressedthought and thought which occurs silently. In general, he is as muchconcerned to establish something about unexpressed thought as he is aboutexpressed thought, though we usually content ourselves with regarding him as being concerned only with the latter. The philosophical movehe is making is not merely to establish that expressed thought --taking the form of word-signs -- has all of the features which arerequired for the purposes of logic, so that logic can proceed on thebasis of verbal expressions of thought -- things that appear on blackboards or pieces of paper -- without being defeated by the inability to access invisible -- or, more generally, imperceptible -- thought, but also to establish that unexpressed thought, though often non-linguistic because it makes do with a person's personal and unshared symbolically functioningnotation, is nevertheless capable of being regarded AS being symbolicjust as a word is. In other words, he seems to regard the introductionof the conception of the symbol as a way of getting past the limitationsimplicit both in the word thought but also implicit in the word word. On can thus talk indifferently of words OR thoughts. The so-called linguistic turn is the turn to expressed thought -- the internal dialogue is just the externally observable dialogue imagined to be what also transpires imperceptibly because it really makes no difference what occurred imperceptibly, anyway -- but Peirce didn't merely make the linguistic turn but also re-turned to the unexpressed to reclaim it, as it were, on the basis of its presumed equivalence to what he has established about linguistically expressed thought. The linguistic turn replaces thought by word; the semiotic turn and return replaces both word and thought by symbol (though also of course by icon and index as appropriate, too). Maybe that is not an important further step but only a gratuitous addition that really has no logical significance, but I think Peirce did regard it as a significant move. Dear Joe, I am delighted that you have written the above and I appreciate very much that you put Jerry Dozoretz' paper on The Internally Real, The Fictitious, And The Indubitable on the Arisbe website. Jerry Dozoretz' paper is most admirable in its insightfulness and clearness. Now we are really beginning to bring things down to earth. We have here a new aspect of Peirce's work, though it is certainly not another aspect in the sense of being remote from the main body or in any way detached. It, on the contrary, touches the very heart, the kernel of it all. Let me please start with the distinction between a mere fiction and a mathematical hypothesis, which latter is partly fictious too. Structurally this is exactly the difference between the relatives -- is lover whatever is loved by -- and -- is both lover of and lover of everything loved by -- as Peirce compares them in L 224 which I cited in my recent paper that I sent you off list. The first one amounts to simple transitivity, the second one embodies what I sometimes call super-transitivity or general transitivity (when I speak to myself). There is a most beautiful example for the very keen sense mathematicians have for this distinction. Richard Dedekind's epochal work on Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?, where he derives the structure of the natural and real numbers, though admired for the construction of the real numbers by the Dedekindscher Schnitt (Dedekind Cut), has always been regarded by mathematicians as dubious concerning his founding of the natural numbers: The central element in Dedekind's derivation is Dies ist ein Gedanke meiner Gedankenwelt which exactly amounts to the first relative above, i.e. simple transitivity. So far some very real world historical background. Joe, you write: What I am especially concerned with at present is the distinction he is often more or less consciously working with between expressed thought and thought which occurs silently and later ...Peirce didn't merely make the linguistic turn but also re-turned to the unexpressed to reclaim it It is at this point perhaps best, if I refer to Jerry Dozoretz' paper in order to answer to you as directly as possible, since we have both read the paper. I would like to make three points: The first is, that Jerry Dozoretz' ground is the very same ground Peirce refers to in the New List of 1867. Jerry Dozoretz writes: there is for Peirce a kind of middle ground, as it were, which is neither fictional and thereby unreal nor yet real in the aforementioned sense. In what follows I shall endeavor to show that in order to isolate and describe the middle ground mentioned we shall
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
[JOE] I don't understand yet how these terms are being
used in a way that satisfies me that I understand what those distinctions
really are. I was shocked, for example, to find Peirce saying that no sign
is a real thing, though he does go ahead to explain this in such a way that
it does not seem to involve a retraction of his realism about signs after
all. But I don't really understand that yet.
[gary F] I wonder if Peirce might have cleared this up a little -- without
losing the shock value of no sign is a real thing -- by saying also that
no thing is a real sign. (Since a thing can be at best a *replica* or
token of a sign.)
gary
}The Realized One comes from nowhere and goes nowhere; that is why he is
called the Realized One. [Diamond-Cutter Sutra]{
gnusystems }{ Pam Jackson Gary Fuhrman }{ Manitoulin University
}{ [EMAIL PROTECTED] }{ http://users.vianet.ca/gnox/ }{
---
Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Good point, Gary. Still another way of thinking about it might be to
suppose that the emphasis is supposed to fall on thing rather than sign:
no sign is a real THING rather than no sign is a REAL thing; but that
doesn't sound very plausible to me. I like your solution better.
Joe Ransdell
'.
- Original Message -
From: gnusystems [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: Peirce Discussion Forum peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu
Sent: Saturday, February 11, 2006 2:15 PM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
[JOE] I don't understand yet how these terms are being
used in a way that satisfies me that I understand what those distinctions
really are. I was shocked, for example, to find Peirce saying that no sign
is a real thing, though he does go ahead to explain this in such a way that
it does not seem to involve a retraction of his realism about signs after
all. But I don't really understand that yet.
[gary F] I wonder if Peirce might have cleared this up a little -- without
losing the shock value of no sign is a real thing -- by saying also that
no thing is a real sign. (Since a thing can be at best a *replica* or
token of a sign.)
gary
}The Realized One comes from nowhere and goes nowhere; that is why he is
called the Realized One. [Diamond-Cutter Sutra]{
gnusystems }{ Pam Jackson Gary Fuhrman }{ Manitoulin University
}{ [EMAIL PROTECTED] }{ http://users.vianet.ca/gnox/ }{
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[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Good point, Gary. Still another way of thinking about it might be to suppose that the emphasis is supposed to fall on thing rather than sign: no sign is a real THING rather than no sign is a REAL thing; but that doesn't sound very plausible to me. I like your solution better. Joe Ransdell Dear Joe, Gary Folks-- While we're raising questions about the distinctions among such notions as the real, the existent and the true (their relationships to the categories etc) -- I'd like to throw in a related question: Does existence as a mode of being ever occur outside of representation or thirdness (as a mode of being). Or is existence (and objects conceived of as merely existing -- ie something less than signs) something that always swims in the contiuum of representation. My personal understanding is that Peirce views objects as something which we abstract from triadic or representational experience. IOWs in the act of perceiving an object we are engaged in representation. However, I do not take this interpretation of Peirce to mean that Peirce is arguing that objects do not exist outside of our representation of them because clearly he is not saying this. The fact that objects exist (and are thus real in his definitional sense of the real as that which exist apart from what we imagine) does not mean that we have access or experience of objects apart from the triadic or representational mode of being of which they are inextricably embedded. Nor I might add does it mean that objects as we experience them representationally are necessarily other than what they are -- in contrast to the view that we experience objects through some distorting lens. What we experience is always a part of the truth -- our error is not that what we perceive is distorted but that we mistake the small part of the truth that we perceive (from our limited POV) as being the whole truth! This view raises the question (I guess I'm trying to suggest an answer to my own questions -- so my larger question is how does this solution seem to yall) what then is the distinction between objects such as trees and objects such as the word tree which are replicas of signs (or representamen of representations -- is that the correct usage of these terms btw). My answer is that both are abstractions. All are signs. So called objects are merely signs that we have not interpreted as signs. So called objects are signs in the universal mind of god or the universe -- but it is only when we use these objects as signs for other objects that we think of them as signs. IOWs what we have here is a confusion of level and meta level -- a sort of category mistake. All is a sign -- all things are signs and all of reality is merely a matter of signs interpreting signs. Indeed the modes of being called qualtiy reaction and interpretation can each be conceptually abstracted from the all inclusive reality of a universe of signs which is itself a sign -- but all experience (in the fullest sense of the word) is a matter of representation.At least I take this to be the overall thrust of Peirce's comments though I must admit that in some context and on some occassions his comments do seem to suggest that we can experience or know objects or reactions without representation. But as to the specific quote above -- I'm inclined to go with the reading you suggest above, Joe. Gary's reading (while a good way of illustrating the question or problem) changes the logic of Peirces statement. Yours, for me, clarifies Peirces remark in what strikes me as a most plausible way. Signs are not mere things -- however real. In fact, as I've argued above, what we call things are actually abstracted from signs. Things are mere replicas of signs as Gary has pointed out. -- on a related note: Wittgenstein points out (according to PMS Hacker) that when we say such things as I have a pain supposing we are describing an internal object such as the sensation of pain we are instead actually expressing the pain itself. The expression is less an indicative symbol of pain as an exclamatory index of pain. I mention this because I think it may have some bearing on the issue of the so called internal vs external nature of experience. IOWs some seemingly symbolic sentences are actually merely indexes -- dressed up in the traditional form of symbolic sentences. This misunterpretation of how we are using language when speaking of such things as feeling and thoughts (as I understand Wittgenstein) accounts for much of the confusion we have about private language intuition and the like. I think Peirce may be saying saying something similar. And finally, (trying to squeeze a lot into this quick weekend note) -- I found a passage of Leo Strauss on interpretation vs explanation (and how to read texts in general) that I think is interesting both in terms of our reading of this text as well as giving
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
the existent, the actual. [JOE] That is what occasioned my expression of puzzlement. I was not intending to be arguing that we can dispense with any of the three -- being, existence, reality -- as Gary is perhaps construing what I was saying, but wanting to say only that I don't understand yet how these terms are being used in a way that satisfies me that I understand what those distinctions really are. I was shocked, for example, to find Peirce saying that no sign is a real thing, though he does go ahead to explain this in such a way that it does not seem to involve a retraction of his realism about signs after all. But I don't really understand that yet. I don't think I've got anything to say on this further at present which will be helpful to anybody, though.I do find your reflections on this helpful, but I can't go significantly beyond them so far. Joe Ransdell - Original Message - From: Benjamin Udell [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Peirce Discussion Forum peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu Sent: Friday, February 10, 2006 1:23 AM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? Joe, Gary, list, [JOE] I AM satisfied with Peirce's account of signs in works of fiction, Ben, and agree with all that. I don't know why you would think otherwise. I guess I just misunderstood you, or maybe I used too strong a word satisfied -- I meant, not that you had decided that that Peirce's ideas on the subect were unsatisfactory, but rather that he had not made satisfactorily clear something in them. Not that you in fact meant that either. I just had this feeling that you were talking about being puzzled about things that had seemed resolved, rather than puzzled about aspects newly seen or newly interesting. [BEN] Thirdness of predication? Where does Peirce associate quality with thirdness predication (in contradistinction to firstness a predicate)? [JOE] I find it difficult to think of a predicate without thinking of a predication and a quality is what is predicated. Do you perceive any difficulties in that? If the quality is the predicate content, can the hypostatic abstraction, regarded as being predicated, be regarded as only a first? I think I misunderstood your use of the word predication. Evidently you're using it with predicate according to such distinctions as representation / representamen, interpretation / interpretant, and quality / quale (where blackness as a quality is a kind of 'being black' and is a referring to blackness in the other sense, the sense of blackness as a ground, a pure abstraction of the cognitive/sensory content). I thought that, by predication, you meant a joining of predicate with subject, because I thought that you associated thirdness with predication in some sort of _distinctiveness_ from subject predicate. But you didn't mean that. You were just talking about predicate, predication, quality, etc. (I hope I got it right this time!) In what special way does a predicate have to do with thirdness, that a subject doesn't? The only way that I can see to do something at all like that, is, by associating a distinctive thirdness with the joining, or disjoining, or qualified joining, etc., of predicate to subject. Now, as semiosis, the predicate predication, subject subjection, and copula copulation, all have thirdness. But across their shared thirdness, they differ, or seem to differ, as: 1. Description / predicate / quality |3. Copulation / copula / representation 2. Designation / subject / reaction or at any rate that's where the conceptions seem to tend to, except that, for some reason, Peirce doesn't see the copula as any sort of version, vehicle, or berth of logical relations, probability relations, etc. Yet attributions, ascriptions, copulations, distributions, etc., etc., of predicates to subjects, or of accidents to substances, or of qualities to reactions, all have a certain similarity and parallelism. Then when we associate connotation in one way with firstness, quality, iconicity and, in another way, with thirdness, meaning/implication/entailment, we get confused. Or at least I get confused. I think that the root of the problem is the historical and still mostly current use of connotation to refer to a SYMBOL's sign-power to represent BOTH quality representation alike. Is this where a seeming distinctive thirdness of the predicate arises? Yet Peirce says somewhere that the interpretant (i.e,. the interpretant qua interpretant) ties or relates predicates to subjects. (For my part, I would restrict connotation to qualities, invent some word for the erstwhile 'connotation' of representation, and say that an icon connotes insofar as it does not fully and precisely embody present the quality which is to be predicated of the subject. The icon connotes the object's quality by the resemblance of the icon's quality's to the object's quality; the difference between the icon's quality the object's quality
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Ben All, Ben, thanks for continuing to make relevant Century Dictionary material readily available for ease of list discussion. For a moment, however, I'd like to consider not "fact" vs "event" but your question concerning "reality" vs "actuality". You first quoted Peirce then commented::: 66 No sign, however, is a real thing. It has no real being, but only being represented. [] I might more easily persuade readers to think that affirmation was an index, since an index is, perhaps, a real thing. Its replica, at any rate, is in real reaction with its object, and it forces a reference to that object upon the mind. 99 66 For reality is compulsive. But the compulsiveness is absolutely _hic et nunc_. It is for an instant and it is gone. Let it be no more and it is absolutely nothing. The reality only exists as an element of the regularity. And the regularity is the symbol. Reality, therefore, can only be regarded as the limit of the endless series of symbols. 99 [BU] I thought that reality was marked by pattern habit and by conditional necessity, the character of that which would have to be. The element of compulsiveness as a _hic et nunc_ thing was, I thought, actuality. [BU] Well, those are just some questions, maybe I've gotten mixed up, I had thought that I had a pretty good sense of those words' Peircean acceptations. I don't think you've "gotten mixed up" at all, that Peirce in any number of places distinguishes the real (associated especially with thirdness) from the actual (associated especially with secondness) in the sense you've mentioned. For example, the distinction appears prominently in the Neglected Argument. Of course, the New Elements was written a few years before the N.A., while, as Joe Ransdell has pointed out, the NE cannot be considered at all a finished work (he N.A. was a published essay). I think however that Peirce makes the distinction in any number of places before and after the NE (I haven't the time now to hunt up some examples but I'm fairly certain they are there to be had), while he is also in a few places rather "loose" in his use of real and reality (that is, there are places where he should have written actual or actuality to refer to the existent hic et nunc but slips into the vernacular). I too must admit to being a bit taken aback to read in the NE that "reality is compulsive" in the passage you quoted. Still, by the end of that passage one gets a sense of what Peirce is getting at, that that which is compulsive and "absolutely hic et nunc. . .is absolutely nothing," that it must be contextualized, so to speak, within some real continuity to be something (that is, endure beyond the instant). For me these are important categorial distinctions which we ought to make even if Peirce gets a little terminologically loose in places. Gary R. --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Ben, list, Here's a good example of Peirce making the distinction real vs existent (note especially, the external world, (that is, the world that is comparatively external) does not consist of existent objects merely, nor merely of these and their reactions; but on the contrary, its most important reals have the mode of being of what the nominalist calls mere words, that is, general types and would-bes.): CP 8.191. . . .Thus, for example, the real becomes that which is such as it is regardless of what you or I or any of our folks may think it to be.†4 The external becomes that element which is such as it is regardless of what somebody thinks, feels, or does, whether about that external object or about anything else. Accordingly, the external is necessarily real, while the real may or may not be external; nor is anything absolutely external nor absolutely devoid of externality. Every assertory proposition refers to something external, and even a dream withstands us sufficiently for one description to be true of it and another not. The existent is that which reacts against other things. Consequently, the external world, (that is, the world that is comparatively external) does not consist of existent objects merely, nor merely of these and their reactions; but on the contrary, its most important reals have the mode of being of what the nominalist calls mere words, that is, general types and would-bes. The nominalist is right in saying that they are substantially of the nature of words; but his mere reveals a complete misunderstanding of what our everyday world consists of. Here's an interesting passage where he comments on the vernacular use of real (according to the usage of speech, the real, but more accurately, the existent object): CP 5.473 But now when a microscopist is in doubt whether a motion of an animalcule is guided by intelligence, of however low an order, the test he always used to apply when I went to school, and I suppose he does so still, is to ascertain whether event, A, produces a second event, B, as a means to the production of a third event, C, or not. That is, he asks whether B will be produced if it will produce or is likely to produce C in its turn, but will not be produced if it will not produce C in its turn nor is likely to do so. Suppose, for example, an officer of a squad or company of infantry gives the word of command, Ground arms! This order is, of course, a sign. That thing which causes a sign as such is called the object (according to the usage of speech, the real, but more accurately, the existent object) represented by the sign: the sign is determined to some species of correspondence with that object. Got to run now. Gary --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Joe, Gary, Thanks, Gary, for letting me know that I'm not out to lunch on this one. I think that you're right, that the same distinction appears, just with different words, and when Peirce gets down to the business of defining, he's persistently clear which words mean what. Joe, you'll certainly stimulate curiosity regarding your questions regarding existence reality. I actually thought that you were satisfied with Peirce's account of signs in works of fiction, etc. Why shouldn't they have their own reality? It's semiotically representational but it's not pure artistic whim if it's any good. Like what Sorrentino said -- a patch of color here, one there, a third, and suddenly the painting has the painter trapped -- artistically trapped, really-artistically trapped. In asking actual or real things to serve as signs one may tap into their actualities or realities as things in such a way as to commit to their actual or real processes wherever they may lead -- one rides them but gives them their head, steering here, trying to direct or channel there -- as, for instance, going where an analogy may lead, unexpectedly, into falsehood, truth, irony, mere cleverness, whatever. If these things are already multidimensional in their universes of discourse, their behavior as objects and as signs, etc., etc., well, that's arich instrument that one is playing. Thirdness of predication? Where does Peirce associate quality with thirdness predication (in contradistinction to firstness a predicate)? I took it like so: 1. Description (quality) | 3. Copulation (representation) 2. Designation (reaction) The description (or 'descriptor') is predicated of the designatee, the subject. The 'copulation,' which a relatedidea tothat of 'predication,'may come with some pretty complex logical qualifications or conditions, probability qualifications or conditions, etc., in which other implicit subjects predicates may be vaguely involved intermixed -- it doesn't have to be purely "and," "or," "not." If a law is not just a common character shared by a collection's members, then it presumably involves, is like a "fabric" of, such conditions and dependences. I don't know that Peirce takes "copulation" to all that extent, though I wonder why he would give it such a prominent place otherwise. (I of course always take it to all that extent, but that's me.) Best, Ben - Original Message - From: Joseph Ransdell To: Peirce Discussion Forum Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2006 3:14 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? I don't know whether Peirce is terminologically loose or not when it comes to "real" as distinct from "existent" but there is something that is still puzzling to me in that distinction, much in the same puzzling way "quality" shows upsometimes as firstness but sometimes as if it has the thirdness of predication. In the case of reality, there is the further complication, too, of the fact that he recognizes a reality of sorts in the "internal" world, too. As it happens, I am just now readying a paper for Arisbe by Jerry Dozoretz, which was in Peirce Studies I, which you may or may not be acquainted with called "The Internally Real, the Fictitious, and the Indubitable", in which the idea of internal realityis carefully worked out.It will probably be tomorrow before I manage to get that up, but you'll probably want to read that before concluding anything about the real and the existent. Joe Ransdell - Original Message - From: Gary Richmond To: Peirce Discussion Forum Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2006 12:52 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? Ben All, Ben, thanks for continuing to make relevant Century Dictionary material readily available for ease of list discussion. For a moment, however, I'd like to consider not "fact" vs "event" but your question concerning "reality" vs "actuality". You first quoted Peirce then commented::: 66 No sign, however, is a real thing. It has no real being, but only being represented. [] I might more easily persuade readers to think that affirmation was an index, since an index is, perhaps, a real thing. Its replica, at any rate, is in real reaction with its object, and it forces a reference to that object upon the mind. 99 66 For reality is compulsive. But the compulsiveness is absolutely _hic et nunc_. It is for an instant and it is gone. Let it be no more and it is absolutely nothing. The reality only exists as an element of the regularity. And the regularity is the symbol. Reality, therefore, can only be regarded as the limit of the endless series of symbols. 99
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Well, I'll sleep on it, Gary, and see how it looks to me tomorrow. Joe - Original Message - From: Gary Richmond To: Peirce Discussion Forum Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2006 8:52 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? Joseph Ransdell wrote: I stlll seem to see a difficulty, Gary, in the idea of existence as reality at an instant, which would appear to be a flash devoid of resistance even. But if the instant is to be construed instead as something enduring across some spread isn't it reality? Why the need for the notion of existence? It seems to have no distinctive role to play. I do not see any reason to conflate the Three Universes of Experience, Joe, and why you would suggest that we cannot presciind one from the others mystifies me. Peirce speaks of existence, categorially associated with secondness, as the class. This sort of prescinding allows him, for example, and as I've suggested in an earlier post today, to criticize Hegel's tendency to disvalue the clash. "Why the need for the notion of existence?" I have no idea why a Peircean would even ask the question.Gary---Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED] No virus found in this incoming message.Checked by AVG Free Edition.Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 267.15.2/253 - Release Date: 2/7/2006 No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 267.15.2/253 - Release Date: 2/7/2006 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
At 02:37 AM 2/2/2006 Thursday, you wrote: Kirsti, Bernard On the matter of Icons, mere icons, pure icons, and so on,.. snip 31.1.2006 kello 20:13, Bernard Morand kirjoitti BM: To continue the discussion, we find pure icons in the following passage of New Elements and pure indices will appear later. I mention this with regard to a precedent discussion between Joe and Jon relative to pure symbols. I think that pure as to be taken here in the same sense as we could consider pure symbols. But in fact my question is elsewhere: at the end of the quote Peirce makes the point that An icon can only be a fragment of a completer sign. I am not sure of what he is saying here. Answers are welcome! Under the assumption that a pure icon is an iconic sign such that it presents itself through the category of Firstness, represents its object under the category of Firstness, and is interpreted to the extent permitted by the category of Firstness, I understand pure icon as operationally equivalent to a Rhematic Iconic Qualisign. This is, perhaps, importing a later Peircean arrangement into the context of the earlier New Elements, and so may be considered an invalid interpretive move by more New Critical proponents of a close reading of the text. But allowing for this move, the pure icon as a qualisign does not even make any claims as to its existence. In Arnold's example, the uninterpreted, barely noticed flash of light in the quad -- since at the very least it actually happens -- would seem to me to be at least a Rhematic Iconic Sinsign. The example that I have used for students to illustrate the 1-1-1 pure icon is to imagine that children's game called I See Something or I Spy With My Little Eye wherein one player (call him the Spy) announces a color of some object in view and the second player (call her the Guesser) must guess the identity of that object. Now imagine a game where the Spy is cheating and announces I spy with my little eye something red! But he sees no such object at all; he is merely lying. The Guesser begins scrying the entire visual field searching for some object that has the quality of redness. Only the Spy knows that red in this case is a pure icon, and as such, of course, conveys no real information about the object. Only if that icon is embodied within an index (the perception of red from an object that actually looks red), can the icon operate as a proper fragment of a sign capable of being asserted. Although I rather like this example, I have to admit that in the context of the passage in New Elements, Peirce seems to be thinking of a sign that actually exists. And passage in question arises through Peirce's discussion of the degenerate forms of a sign (and by sign I understand him to mean legisign) Peirce uses the term degenerate in its technical mathematical sense. My Century Dictionary gives: editing out the etymologies and the literary examples given degenerate: (verb) 1. To lose, or become impaired with respect to, the qualities proper to the race or kind, or to a prototype; become of a lower type. 2. To decay in quality; pass to an inferior or a worse state; suffer a decline in character or constitution; deteriorate. degenerate (adjective) 1. Having lost, or become impaired with respect to, the qualities proper to the race or kind; having been reduced to a lower type. --Specifically 2. Having fallen into a less excellent or a worse state; having declined in physical or moral qualities; deteriorate,; degrade. 3. Characterized by or associated with degeneracy; unworthy; debased; applied to inanimate objects. Degenerate form, of an algebraic locus, a locus of any order or class consisting of an aggregation of lower forms. Thus, two straight lines form a degenerate conic. It is this last definition that most applies here. The degenerate legisign is analogical to the degenerate conic section, wherein a shape (two straight lines) does in fact satisfy the equation for what is properly a three dimensional shape of the two cones. And a further mathematical degeneracy of the conic section results in a single point, two moves away form the proper three dimensional geometrical interpretation of the equation. In some likewise manner, the pure index can be seen as a degenerate form of the proper legisign (like the two dimensional intersecting lines), while the pure icon is one step further deracinated, something like the point with respect to the cones. If a sign is seen as an assertion, this degenerate icon might be understood as the icon of a logical predicate, cut off from relation with its logical subject and hence only a fragment of an assertable (legi)sign. Or I may be misinterpreting everything severely. By way of introduction, I am finishing a dissertation in English which traces the use of the term hyperspace in nineteenth and early twentieth century popular culture, and which relies heavily on a quasi-Peircean cultural semeiotics. Quasi- because I realize I am likely
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
PS I should add, since I noticed that I commented on the classification of the sciences in my off-list note to Bernard, that when I wrote that Peirce's classification of the sciences was a "very trichotomic and catenaic thing" that I would emphasize the former suggesting that while there are perhaps catenaic divisions in the classification (for example, the division of the special sciences into physical and psychic "wings"--but note that even these are trichotomically arranged into nomonological, classification, and descriptive branches), Peirce's classification is, as he comments in one of his explications of it, for the most part trichotomically divided because "the genus of relatively genuine Thirdness will subdivide by Trichotomy just like that from which it resulted. Only as the division proceeds, the subdivisions become harder and harder to discern." GR Peirce: CP 5.72 Cross-Ref: 72. The relatively degenerate forms of the Third category do not fall into a catena, like those of the Second. What we find is this. Taking any class in whose essential idea the predominant element is Thirdness, or Representation, the self-development of that essential idea -- which development, let me say, is not to be compassed by any amount of mere "hard thinking," but only by an elaborate process founded upon experience and reason combined -- results in a trichotomy giving rise to three sub-classes, or genera, involving respectively a relatively genuine thirdness, a relatively reactional thirdness or thirdness of the lesser degree of degeneracy, and a relatively qualitative thirdness or thirdness of the last degeneracy. This last may subdivide, and its species may even be governed by the three categories, but it will not subdivide, in the manner which we are considering, by the essential determinations of its conception. The genus corresponding to the lesser degree of degeneracy, the reactionally degenerate genus, will subdivide after the manner of the Second category, forming a catena; while the genus of relatively genuine Thirdness will subdivide by Trichotomy just like that from which it resulted. Only as the division proceeds, the subdivisions become harder and harder to discern. Gary Richmond wrote: Bernard, list, Bernard, I trust you won't mind my copying the email I sent you the exact moment prior to receiving you message on list. I had just written to you (I've corrected one typo): [off-list] Dear Bernard, I'm "up to my neck in work" as we New Yorkers like to say, but I wanted to comment that this last message of yours was pure philosophy :-) brilliant, succinct (a quality I very much admire), while I concur with you in the matter. However, for this very reason (related to the catena idea) I still don't see why you recently expressed the notion that the New Elements concerns are essentially metaphysical, and I wonder this exactly in the light of Peirce's classification of the sciences (a very trichotomic and catenaic thing) which puts metaphysics after semeiotic, etc., so metaphysics employs all three elements and stages of the inquiry process, not just deduction, but first abduction, and finally induction expressed in an actual experiment (in metaphysics a mental experiment--the special sciences to follow will take up the concrete realities that can be discerned through special observations). You've suggested that metaphysics (like mathematics) is a deductive science. On what do you base that idea? Anyhow, this was mainly to express admiration and appreciation of your most recent post. Best regards, Gary orum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
A 13:51 31/01/2006 -0500, Skagestad, Peter a écrit : Bernard, Gary, and list, The English wording is Every decoding is another encoding. It is uttered repeatedly in Small World by the fictional Professor Zapf, who references Peirce as the father of semiotics, so David Lodge had at least heard of Peirce. He later heard even more. After quoting this saying in one of my papers (I think it was in Peirce and Contemporary Thought), I sent Lodge a copy, for which he professed himself most grateful. Peter Thanks for the details Peter. I had forgotten them. It's nice to see that D. Lodge had heard of Peirce and may be read about him. I suppose that you have read the novel Thinks... the subject of which turns around Artificial Intelligence. I don't remember if he is referring to Intelligence Augmentation as such. I was a little bit disappointed when reading this one because I felt that the author had got second hand documentation without being directly involved with the milieu he was reporting (evidently Small World was exactly the other way). But this was just an impression. Bernard From: Bernard Morand [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tue 1/31/2006 1:13 PM To: Peirce Discussion Forum Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? A 20:19 30/01/2006 -0500, Gary Richmond a écrit : Bernard, list, You concluded your post by quoting (or paraphrasing?) David Lodge to the effect that Every decoding is a new encoding. Of course this can be interpreted as exactly the point of the New Elements approach. As Peirce puts it: In so far as the interpretant is the symbol. . . the determination agrees with that of the symbol. . . It's purpose. . .is to represent the symbol in its representation of its object; and therefore, the determination is followed by a further development in which it becomes corrected. EP2: 323-324 This, then, is exactly the entelechy of the symbol: symbols grow as Peirce elsewhere expresses it. He continues: By virtue of of this [that it is of the nature of a sign to be. .a living general] the interpretant is animaaed by the original replica. . . with the power of representing the true character of the object. . . In these two steps, of determination and of correction, the interpretant aims at the object more than at the original replica and may be truer and fuller than the later. Of course the implications of this are profound, for as Peirce comments: The every entelechy of being lies in being representable. . .[so that] there can be no reality which has not the life of a symbol. EP2: 324 Gary Gary and list, My reference to D. Lodge was somehow interrogative because I know it only through the French edition : Tout décodage est un nouvel encodage. I was not sure that the phrasing in the original English edition was what I was writing. (As a matter of fact I suppose that D. Lodge did not read Peirce but some ideas in his novels sound peircian) To continue the discussion, we find pure icons in the following passage of New Elements and pure indices will appear later. I mention this with regard to a precedent discussion between Joe and Jon relative to pure symbols. I think that pure as to be taken here in the same sense as we could consider pure symbols. But in fact my question is elsewhere: at the end of the quote Peirce makes the point that an icon can only be a fragment of a completer sign. I am not sure of what he is saying here. Answers are welcome ! Bernard ---Quote New Elements The more degenerate of the two forms (as I look upon it) is the icon. This is defined as a sign of which the character that fits it to become a sign of the sort that it is, is simply inherent in it as a quality of it. For example, a geometrical figure drawn on paper may be an icon of a triangle or other geometrical form. If one meets a man whose language one does not know and resorts to imitative sounds and gestures, these approach the character of an icon. The reason they are not pure icons is that the purpose of them is emphasized. A pure icon is independent of any purpose. It serves as a sign solely and simply by exhibiting the quality it serves to signify. The relation to its object is a degenerate relation. It asserts nothing. If it conveys information, it is only in the sense in which the object that it is used to represent may be said to convey information. An icon can only be a fragment of a completer sign. --- __ Bernard Morand Département Informatique Institut Universitaire de Technologie BP53 14123 Ifs Cedex France TEL (33) 02 31 52 55 34 FAX (33) 02 31 52 55 22 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.iutc3.unicaen.fr/~moranb/ __ --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Bernard, I have read Thinks, and I thought Lodge goes much easier on AI professors than on English professors. Maybe he has mellowed with age or maybe, as you suggest, he is simply much more familiar with English professors. No offense to either AI professors or Enlish professors on the list, but we are talking satire here:-) Cheers, Peter From: Bernard Morand [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wed 2/1/2006 10:06 AM To: Peirce Discussion Forum Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? A 13:51 31/01/2006 -0500, Skagestad, Peter a écrit : Bernard, Gary, and list, The English wording is Every decoding is another encoding. It is uttered repeatedly in Small World by the fictional Professor Zapf, who references Peirce as the father of semiotics, so David Lodge had at least heard of Peirce. He later heard even more. After quoting this saying in one of my papers (I think it was in Peirce and Contemporary Thought), I sent Lodge a copy, for which he professed himself most grateful. Peter Thanks for the details Peter. I had forgotten them. It's nice to see that D. Lodge had heard of Peirce and may be read about him. I suppose that you have read the novel Thinks... the subject of which turns around Artificial Intelligence. I don't remember if he is referring to Intelligence Augmentation as such. I was a little bit disappointed when reading this one because I felt that the author had got second hand documentation without being directly involved with the milieu he was reporting (evidently Small World was exactly the other way). But this was just an impression. Bernard From: Bernard Morand [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tue 1/31/2006 1:13 PM To: Peirce Discussion Forum Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? A 20:19 30/01/2006 -0500, Gary Richmond a écrit : Bernard, list, You concluded your post by quoting (or paraphrasing?) David Lodge to the effect that Every decoding is a new encoding. Of course this can be interpreted as exactly the point of the New Elements approach. As Peirce puts it: In so far as the interpretant is the symbol. . . the determination agrees with that of the symbol. . . It's purpose. . .is to represent the symbol in its representation of its object; and therefore, the determination is followed by a further development in which it becomes corrected. EP2: 323-324 This, then, is exactly the entelechy of the symbol: symbols grow as Peirce elsewhere expresses it. He continues: By virtue of of this [that it is of the nature of a sign to be. .a living general] the interpretant is animaaed by the original replica. . . with the power of representing the true character of the object. . . In these two steps, of determination and of correction, the interpretant aims at the object more than at the original replica and may be truer and fuller than the later. Of course the implications of this are profound, for as Peirce comments: The every entelechy of being lies in being representable. . .[so that] there can be no reality which has not the life of a symbol. EP2: 324 Gary Gary and list, My reference to D. Lodge was somehow interrogative because I know it only through the French edition : Tout décodage est un nouvel encodage. I was not sure that the phrasing in the original English edition was what I was writing. (As a matter of fact I suppose that D. Lodge did not read Peirce but some ideas in his novels sound peircian) To continue the discussion, we find pure icons in the following passage of New Elements and pure indices will appear later. I mention this with regard to a precedent discussion between Joe and Jon relative to pure symbols. I think that pure as to be taken here in the same sense as we could consider pure symbols. But in fact my question is elsewhere: at the end of the quote Peirce makes the point that an icon can only be a fragment of a completer sign. I am not sure of what he is saying here. Answers are welcome ! Bernard ---Quote New Elements The more degenerate of the two forms (as I look upon it) is the icon. This is defined as a sign of which the character that fits it to become a sign of the sort that it is, is simply inherent in it as a quality of it. For example, a geometrical figure drawn on paper may be an icon of a triangle or other geometrical form. If one meets a man whose language one does not know and resorts to imitative sounds and gestures, these approach the character of an icon. The reason they are not pure icons is that the purpose of them is emphasized. A pure icon is independent of any purpose. It serves as a sign solely and simply by exhibiting the quality it serves to signify. The relation to its object is a degenerate relation. It asserts nothing. If it conveys information, it is only in the sense in which the object that it is used to represent may be said to convey
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Whoops! A small correction: I should have concluded by saying that I am UNABLE to say whether the students followed my example any better than before! AS --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Theresa and list: I hadn't read your message below when I sent off the self-correction in my most recent message , but as you can see I agree with your correction of my mistake there. I referred to the wrong lecture. I don't believe that the point I was making was mistaken, though, -- but I will have to return to that in that message I am currently composing. As for the rest of it, I still do not see anything in what you say about Royce which makes it implausible that Peirce would be concerned to communicate with him using a common way of framing the topics. He had very good reason to do so, first because Royce was already being influenced by him, as he surely knew, and second, because Royce was the one and only figure in the philosophy department at Harvard who understood his work and its tendencies and saw in it something like the value which Peirce himself saw in it and who could be counted upon to do what could reasonably be done to keep his thinking alive in that crucially important intellectual milieu. (We only have to reflect upon what happened to Peirce's intellectual legacy at Harvard in consequence of Royce's death only two years after his own to see just how important that relationship with Royce was for the future of his work.) When his hopes for support for his magnum opus on logic were dashed in 1902, Peirce was -- and there is plenty of evidence that he knew that he was -- entering into a period in which he was racing against death as regards the realization of his ambitions to do what he believed he had a mission to do, and it is surely improbable in the extreme that it would not occur to him at that time to take advantage of the opportunity that Royce's growing discipleship opened up. What more could he have asked for than what Royce subsequently did in fact start doing for the future of his work? Yet you seem to be insisting that it is somehow improbable that he would want to address himself to that opportunity. If you were merely saying that I hadn't established that Peirce actually did make some move in that direction in the New Elements I wouldn't be arguing with you since I hadn't claimed to have established that evidentially in any message thus far. But I am instead trying to duly acknowledge that you have that sort of objection to it, and am answering it accordingly. And my answer is that I just don't find anything in what you say which suggests such an improbability. It surely is not the fact of their disagreement about certain things, important as they may be, which makes that improbable, given what they shared in common as regards the problematics of philosophy as each of them understood it, and I don't find any other reason being given than their doctrinal disagreement. In any case, I will go ahead to make the positive case for it, and I hope to make clear in doing so why it might be worth doing so, though it is hardly a matter of profound importance. But don't misunderstand me on one thing, Theresa: I do think it is important to pursue these things far enough that we at least understand what we are disagreeing about and why, regardless of whether others agree on the value of this sort of discussion or not. Joe Ransdell. - Original Message - From: Theresa Calvet [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Peirce Discussion Forum peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2006 5:08 AM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? Joe and list, You have not convinced me and I do not read the supplementary lecture (Lecture Seven) of the 1903 Harvard Lectures as you do and suggest that this lecture may well have been addressed directly to Royce and to his students. The discussion of the map [the example of the self-representing map] is in the Third Lecture. In Peirce's manuscript, writes Turrisi, Peirce denied credit both to himself and to Royce for the origin of the metaphor, but claims to have used it himself some thirty years earlier (p. 104). Is there something shameful in Peirce addressing the interests of the one philosopher capable of understanding him sufficiently well to promote his philosophy in his own work and in that of his students?, you ask. No, of course not. But is this one philosopher Royce, and is this what Peirce is doing in his Harvard Lectures? Peirce, just as undiplomatically as I usually write, wrote in his December 1 (1902) letter to James that what he (James) termed pragmatism happened to be in need of some modification - one could also read the 1903 lectures on pragmatism, delivered at Harvard, and Turrisi suggests this, as an elaboration on these same corrections of the version of pragmatism that James had so famously set forth. And this explains James reaction to the First Lecture and what he wrote to Miller five days after Peirce's first lecture. That is why I did mention James (and Peirce's letter to Christine Ladd-Franklin). No, I do not see (and you say that it must be that I see!) an equivalence of sorts
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Joe and list, Your impression of Peirce's character is probably right, but I still insist on I what I was trying to say: In 1905, in What Pragmatism Is, when Peirce distinguishes pragmaticism from other species of prope-positivism, he writes (and this was published in The Monist) the following: first, its retention of a purified philosophy; secondly, its full acceptance of the main body of our instinctive beliefs; and thirdly, its strenuous insistence upon the truth of scholastic realism (or a close approximation to that, well-stated by the late Dr. Francis Ellingwood Abbot in the Introduction to his Scientific Theism). (EP2, p. 339; CP 5.423). In this paper, after saying that he had awaited in vain, for a good many years, some particularly opportune conjuncture of circumstances that might serve to recommend his notions of the ethics of terminology, Peirce tells us that finding his bantling pragmatism so promoted, he feels it is time to kiss his child good-bye and relinquish it to its higher destiny, while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce the birth of the word pragmaticism, which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers (EP2, pp. 334-335; CP 5. 414) - Royce is not once mentioned in this paper. In The First Rule of Logic (the fourth Cambridge College Lecture, delivered on 21 February 1898), where Peirce puts forward the rule that in order to learn you must desire to learn and, at least implicitly, contrasts his Will to Learn with the Will to Believe of James, just after having recalled ,one of the most wonderful features of reasoning and one of the most important philosophemes in the doctrine of science, (...) namely, that reasoning tends to correct itself, and the more so the more wisely its plan is laid, and said that it appears that this marvellous self-correcting property of Reason, which Hegel made so much of, belongs to every sort of science, although it appears as essential, intrinsic, and inevitable only in the highest type of reasoning which is induction. But the logic of relatives shows that the other types of reasoning, deduction and retroduction are not so thoroughly unlike induction as they might be thought (...). Namely, in the logic of relatives, treated let us say, in order to fix our ideas, by means of those existential graphs of which I gave a slight sketch in the last lecture, [we] begin a deduction by writing down all the premises. Those different premises are then brought into one field of assertion, that is, are colligated, as Whewell would say, or joined into one copulative proposition. Thereupon, we proceed attentively to observe the graph. It is as much an operation of observation as is the observation of bees, the following bracketing material was struck out : (I am happy to find this points receives valuable confirmation of an entirely independent thinker, whose care and thoroughness gives weight to all he says, Dr. Francis Ellingwood Abbot) (EP2, p. 45) Royce is mentioned in MS 908 The Basis of Pragmaticism (fifth attempt, probably written in December 1905): I have already given the reasons which convince me that if philosophy is to be made a science, the very first price we must pay for it must be to abandon all endeavor to make it literary. We must have a vocabulary in which every word has a single meaning, whether definite or vague; and to this end we must not shrink from inventing new words whenever they are really needed. (...) It was in seeking to fulfill that condition that I invented the word pragmaticism to denote precisely what I had formerly invented pragmatism to mean (...). (...) I ventured to recommend that this word should be used to denote that general opinion about the nature of the clear apprehension of thought which is shared by those whom all the world calls pragmatists, and who so call themselves, no matter how one or other of us might state the substance of that accord. After a good deal of reflection and careful rereading, I have come to think that the common pragmatistic opinion aforesaid is that every thought (...) has a meaning beyond the immediate content of the thought itself, so that it is as absurd to speak of a thought in itself as it would be to say of a man that he was a husband in himself or a son in himself, and this not only because thought always refers to a real or fictitious object, but also because it supposes itself to be interpretable. If this analysis of the pragmatistic opinion be correct, the logical breath of the term pragmatist is hereby enormously enlarged. For it will become predicable not only of Mr. Royce (who, apart from this analysis, impresses me quite decidedly as a pragmatist), but also of a large section of the logical world, -perhaps the majority-, since ancient times (EP2, pp. 360-361). I will not recall here what James, on March 31 (1903), five days after Peirce's first lecture, on pragmatism and the normative sciences, what James wrote in a letter he
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
have been addressed directly to him and to his students. For although it was William James who set the series up, it was not him or those who might have been primarily attached to him as students whom Peirce was primarily addressing -- James didn't even show up for any but the first lecture -- but rather the students in the department of philosophy who were primarily Royce's students, or at least this is surely true of the specially scheduled Seventh Lecture in particular, since the topic substantially includes further discussion of the topic of the Supplementary Essay in The World and the Individual. Now Peirce had very good reason to go about this in a way which involved a particular appeal to Royce's interests because Royce's interests by this time were Peirce's interests, whose philosophy Royce was constantly tending to conform himself to in certain respects. The reason I think disagreement about what Royce was as a philosopher and what he was for Peirce is at the basis of your misunderstanding of what I am saying is that in your message you repeatedly cited something or other pertaining to William James although I said nothing about William James. It must be, then, that you see an equivalence of sorts of James and Royce in some relevant respect, and then suppose that an inference is to be drawn about Royce's relation to Peirce on that basis. Now, since James is notoriously uneasy both with science in general and mathematics in particular, your assumption must be that Royce is similarly suspicious of, perhaps even hostile to, science in general and mathematics in particular; for this is the hostility alluded to in the material you quote and reference. But that is not what Royce was all about nor would Peirce have thought of him in that way. On the contrary, Royce was Peirce's ally, already beginning to champion his cause. Why is this important? Because it is in knowing who Peirce was addressing that we are given the clues we need as to why he is saying them. Of course, this must be shown in detail in interpreting the text, and I intend to do this. But Jean-Marc and Bernard are quite mistaken, in my opinion, in their view that it is better just to start from the text without understanding such matters of context as this. In this case, that means understanding to whom Peirce is speaking in what he is saying. I cannot think of what reason they could give for such an interpretational maxim as that. Joe Ransdell - Original Message - From: Theresa Calvet [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Peirce Discussion Forum peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu Sent: Saturday, January 28, 2006 8:07 AM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? Joe and list, Your impression of Peirce's character is probably right, but I still insist on I what I was trying to say: In 1905, in What Pragmatism Is, when Peirce distinguishes pragmaticism from other species of prope-positivism, he writes (and this was published in The Monist) the following: first, its retention of a purified philosophy; secondly, its full acceptance of the main body of our instinctive beliefs; and thirdly, its strenuous insistence upon the truth of scholastic realism (or a close approximation to that, well-stated by the late Dr. Francis Ellingwood Abbot in the Introduction to his Scientific Theism). (EP2, p. 339; CP 5.423). In this paper, after saying that he had awaited in vain, for a good many years, some particularly opportune conjuncture of circumstances that might serve to recommend his notions of the ethics of terminology, Peirce tells us that finding his bantling pragmatism so promoted, he feels it is time to kiss his child good-bye and relinquish it to its higher destiny, while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce the birth of the word pragmaticism, which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers (EP2, pp. 334-335; CP 5. 414) - Royce is not once mentioned in this paper. In The First Rule of Logic (the fourth Cambridge College Lecture, delivered on 21 February 1898), where Peirce puts forward the rule that in order to learn you must desire to learn and, at least implicitly, contrasts his Will to Learn with the Will to Believe of James, just after having recalled ,one of the most wonderful features of reasoning and one of the most important philosophemes in the doctrine of science, (...) namely, that reasoning tends to correct itself, and the more so the more wisely its plan is laid, and said that it appears that this marvellous self-correcting property of Reason, which Hegel made so much of, belongs to every sort of science, although it appears as essential, intrinsic, and inevitable only in the highest type of reasoning which is induction. But the logic of relatives shows that the other types of reasoning, deduction and retroduction are not so thoroughly unlike induction as they might be thought (...). Namely, in the logic of relatives, treated let us say, in order to fix our ideas
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Joe and list, If I had more time I would really try to write more on Peirce's review of Royce's The World and the Individual, but will only insist now on what Peirce himself wrote in that review: The truth is, that Professor Royce is blind to a fact which all ordinary people will see plainly enough; that the essence of the realist's opinion is that it is one thing to be and another thing to be represented; and the cause of this cecity is that the Professor is completely immersed in his absolute idealism, which precisely consists in denying that distinction. (...) Professor Royce, armed with his wrong definition of realism (...) (CP 8.129-130), and his conclusion: Now lets us address a few words to the author. A healthy religious spirit will not allow its religion to be disturbed by all the philosophy in the world. Nevertheless, a philosophy of religion deeply concerns us all. It is not a religious, but an intellectual need to bring our ideas into some harmony. Prof. Royce has inaugurated a vast reform (...).What he has done is merely a preliminary essay. It is a pity that it fills a thousand pages. We want another book of about the same size; only instead of being written in the loose form of lectures, we want it to be a condensed and severe treatise, in which the innumerable vague and unsatisfactory points of the present exposition shall be minutely examined, in which all the new conceptions of multitude and continuity, and not merely that of an endless series, shall be applied not merely in the single narrow way in which that one is here applied, but in every way, not merely to the one matter to which it is here applied but to every subject of metaphysics from top to bottom, together with whatsoever other exact diagrammatic conceptions can be produced, and the whole reasoning, so far as it is demonstrative, be rendered diagrammatic, and so far as it relates to questions of fact be made scientific. (CP 8.131). Read this conclusion together with the letter Peirce wrote to Royce (27 May 1902) and particularly this paragraph: Your best years of philosophic reflection are still before you. The tome is ripe and you are the very man to accomplish the great achievement of covering that distance [between Philosophy and the rest of the peaceable sciences]. Yet you could not do it with your present views of logic, antagonistic to all that is possible for progressive science. My entreaty is that you study logic. (CP 8. 117, footnote 10). I agree that Peirce here was implicitly opposing himself to Royce as a Pragmatist (and a Realist) vs. a non-Pragmatist. But I disagree with what Joe suggests [And what I am suggesting is that at least some of what I find most puzzling in what Peirce is saying in certain places in the New Elements seems to me to be being said by him as a kind of emulation of Royce's way of framing those grand questions about being, purpose, perfection, entelechy, and so forth. I am not suggesting that Peirce was changing his view but that he was filling it out in certain ways so that his view and Royce's would be regardable or comparable with use of a common vocabulary, expressing to some extent a shared sensibility, etc. There are a number of different themes mentioned in the New Elements which Peirce shared with Royce To me these are important clues as to what Peirce was saying and why he was saying it]. Joe also asks Does anyone know of anyone who is working on a overall comparison of Royce and Peirce, i.e. of Peirce's influence on Royce? If one wants to read what I consider a mistaken account not only of Peirce's influence on Royce but of pragmaticism, then one could read Ludwig Nagl's Beyond Absolute Pragmatism: the Concept of Community in Josiah Royce's Mature Philosophy, published in Cognitio, Vol. 5, N. 1 (January-July 2004), pp. 44-74). Theresa Calvet --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Theresa and list: Theresa, you say: I agree that Peirce here was implicitly opposing himself to Royce as a Pragmatist (and a Realist) vs. a non-Pragmatist. But I disagree with what Joe suggests [And what I am suggesting is that at least some of what I find most puzzling in what Peirce is saying in certain places in the New Elements seems to me to be being said by him as a kind of emulation of Royce's way of framing those grand questions about being, purpose, perfection, entelechy, and so forth. I am not suggesting that Peirce was changing his view but that he was filling it out in certain ways so that his view and Royce's would be regardable or comparable with use of a common vocabulary, expressing to some extent a shared sensibility, etc. There are a number of different themes mentioned in the New Elements which Peirce shared with Royce To me these are important clues as to what Peirce was saying and why he was saying it]. REPLY: I don't know what it is in what I say that you disagree with, unless you read me as suggesting that Peirce was somehow pandering to Royce in formulating things as he does in the New Elements. Maybe I should explain that my point was not that, but rather that Peirce had good reason to formulate his views in a way that would make contact with the way Royce formulated his, which is surely in the spirit of cooperative inquiry and the legitimate aims of philosophical rhetoric. But maybe that is not what you had in mind. You go on to say: [THERESA:] If one wants to read what I consider a mistaken account not only of Peirce's influence on Royce but of pragmaticism, then one could read Ludwig Nagl's Beyond Absolute Pragmatism: the Concept of Community in Josiah Royce's Mature Philosophy, published in Cognitio, Vol. 5, N. 1 (January-July 2004), pp. 44-74). REPLY: Thanks for the reference on that. Some time when you have time, I wonder if there is some especially important thing way in which you think Nagl misconstrues Peirce's influence on Royce, i.e. what it is in Royce's later view he thinks of as due to Peirce which really is not. A related but distinct question which I've wondered about but not got around to investigating is whether Royce modified his absolute idealism in the direction of Peirce's conditional idealism in consequence of Peirce's advice and criticism? This would go towards answering the question of whether Royce actually became an inheritor of Peirce's pragmaticism in in his later work or was tending in that direction when he died. In any case, it is was a disaster for Peirce that Royce died when he did since it left Peirce without defense against the savaging of his Nachlass at Harvard, among other things, such as whatever other tendencies were at work there that resulted in his marginalization. . Joe Ransdell -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 267.14.22/239 - Release Date: 1/24/2006 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
A 16:16 25/01/2006 -0600, Joseph Ransdell a écrit : I don't know what it is all about and am by no means confident that I would be able to figure this out by myself. I'm not starting the discussion from the position of someone who thinks they already understand it. I don't know what the proper context for this paper is as regards his other work in the period of the turn of the century and a few years thereafter. I have a hunch that it might be occasioned by his review of Royce's The World and the Individual or some subsequent reflection on that. The date assigned to the New Elements (1904) seems to be tentative so it could perhaps have been written several years earlier than that, but 1904 may be correct nonetheless. But it just doesn't seem to me to have the feel to it that suggests a thematic affinity with the various attempts to formulate pragmatism that came to dominate his attention from around 1903 on nor does it seem to be of a piece with the Syllabus of Logic stuff of 1903 or with the Classification of the Sciences stuff or with the Normative Science material or with the Minute Logic, which he abandoned work on after 1902, when the Carnegie Application fell through around the beginning of 1903. But it does seem to me to be the sort of stuff he might be likely to be talking about if he had already done the reviews of Royce's The World and the Individual (both volumes) and decided subsequently to accommodate himself to Royce's sensibility as much as possible. I mean, why is he getting into all of that metaphysical stuff about the entelechy and the Absolute and doing so in the context of discussion of the basis of formal logic in the theory of the proposition and the assertion? I haven't made any attempt to verify that by digging into the Royce-connected stuff of the early 1900's or thereabouts but am wondering if anyone else has any opinion on that? It is not my favorite topic, as I am very uneasy with that sort of metaphysics, but Peirce certainly had good reason to want to accommodate Royce's interests along that line, given the latter's position at Harvard and the fact that there was some real affinity with Royce -- some disagreement, to be sure, but some real affinity nonetheless. Did you ever get into Royce, Clark? It is the sort of stuff you are probably at home with, and I am sure there are others as well who know something about Royce. Kelly Parker does but I don't know if he is currently on the list, and there was somebody else who mentioned Royce not too long back as well. (Gary Richmond, maybe?) It's just a guess, and I have nowhere in particular to go with it myself at this point, but it seems worth mentioning in an attempt to reduce the bewilderment of it. Joe Ransdell I would suggest to take another direction to try answering the question of what the New Elements are about. Not to try searching into the context of his work at this time, which would certainly be useful but for which we will find nothing but indices. It would be more fruitful to examine the text we have at hand, some kind of endoporeutic method if I can say so. The first thing that always appeared strange to me is that Peirce is beginning with a long development about Euclid's exposition. But we know that precisely a great revolution had already taken place in mathematics under the auspice of non euclidian geometries. I think Peirce is here just saving what had made the value of euclidian geometry in his view, the deductive method as well as the associated style of exposition. This style amounts to some general and abstract statements, which are just set down in order to show their necessary consequences. The logical structure of the exposition has not to be made explicit because it is to the reader's activity to realize it for himself. Finally, what Peirce is undertaking here is to deliver elements of his semiotic doctrine in a related form: A scholium is a comment upon the logical structure of the doctrine. This preface is a scholium. (EP2, p. 303). In brief I think Peirce is revisiting the basic points of his semiotic doctrine of the time, in order to see what he could further make of it, but without ordering nor explaining it, that is to say without making any kind of argument in the proper sense. Probably, there is one recurring topic among others to which Peirce was giving a special attention, the properties of a final (and future) cause which has actual consequences (in the present). Everyone will recognize here the problem of the truth of the pragmatic maxim. This is to my sense what Gary has noticed just in time in his recent post : The essence of the relation [of interpretation of a sign in another sign] is in the conditional futurity; but it is not essential that there should be absolutely no exception. (Peirce, CP 8.225) In this order of things, the problem of methods is crucial and this same problem makes the distinction between Theory and Practice one of the basic
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
and at a time when American philosophy and intellectual culture was becoming radically anti-Germanic (because of the War) hence radically hostile to anything smacking of idealism, which was the mark of Germanic philosophy at that time. Russell moved in on American philosophy during that period, with his talent for self-promotion at the expense of others, eclipsing Peirce as a logician, and I suspect that the appointment in the 1920's of Whitehead to what was, in effect, Royce's old position at Harvard as the master figure of philosophy of science had the same effect on Peirce considered as a philosopher of science, though it turned out to be Carnap and the Wiener Kreis people generally who captured both logic and philosophy of science in the 30's. In any case, Royce became such an albatross for Peirce -- this is, as I said, my guess -- that by the mid-30's even the references to Peirce in the footnotes of others who were working out of his ideas largely disappeared in new editions of their work. Just how deep and effective that sea-change of opinion was -- I mean the sea-change at the time of World War One and occasioned by it -- is indicated, I believe, by the fact that even today there seems to be a strong reluctance on the part of Peirce enthusiasts to have anything to do with Royce's work. The suggestion of Creath about Aristotelian conceptions looks promising, too, but I have no comment on that at this time. Joe Ransdell - Original Message - From: csthorne [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Peirce Discussion Forum peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2006 9:33 AM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? It does seem consistent, however, with the Harvard lectures of 1903 and, in particular, with Peirce's effort to systematically classify metaphysics there. In The Seven Systems of Metaphysics Peirce again declares himself an Aristotelian, praises Aristotle for recognizing at least two grades of being, and then indicates that Aristotle glimpsed the distinction between actuality and entelechy, complete reality. This all seems consistent to me with Peirce's long effort to move us beyond nominalism and existence to deeper notions of reality. The New Elements, in general, is shot through with efforts to recast Aristotelian common-places. I'm reading the distinction between Theory and Practice at the beginning of III.2. as picking up on Aristotle's two ideal men: the man of contemplation and the man of appropriate action. That is, semiotics allows us either to perfectly (in the long run) perceive complete reality; it also allows us (along with the rest of the semiotic universe) to make that reality. Creath Thorne -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 267.14.22/239 - Release Date: 1/24/2006 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
