Michael, List: Thanks for the additional reference. Does it reflect a change in your views about interpretants sometime between 1983 and 2002? Note 1 favorably cites Short 1996:511-512, which includes the following.
TS: I am dwelling on this point less in self-defense than because the confusion of interpretants with rules of interpretation is common among commentators on Peirce's semeiotic and is a serious error. It leads to, and perhaps it stems from, a conflation of Peirce's semeiotic with Ferdinand de Saussure's quite different "semiology." Saussure defined a sign dyadically as consisting of a signifier coupled with a signified; that is to say, a sign *is *a dyad. And that, already, is two differences from Peirce's view, in which a sign is defined triadically but not as a triad; instead, Peirce made a sign to be just *one of* a triad. ... Conversely, to treat Peirce's interpretant as a rule--worse yet, an invariably conventional rule--that determines a sign's object, would be to assimilate his semeiotic to Saussure's conventionalist system. And that would be to make nonsense of semeiotic, which embraces all manner of natural signs and nonhuman interpreters and *a fortiori* modes of interpretation not governed by conventions and sometimes not governed by rules of any kind. These remarks are fully consistent with the specific objections to your earlier book chapter that I raised in my last post--rules of interpretation are not *themselves *interpretants, they are the habits by means of which symbols *determine *their interpretants; a sign is not *itself *a triad, it is one *correlate *of a genuine triadic relation, along with its object and its interpretant; *interpretants *do not mediate between signs and their objects, *signs *mediate between their objects and their interpretants; and interpretants are not limited to *conceptual *phenomena (other signs), they can also be physical events or qualitative feelings. In fact, I generally agree with the article's one-paragraph summary of Peirce's theory of signs, each of which has two objects and three interpretants (pages 109-110). My only quibble, which is admittedly pedantic, is with the statement, "A sign is something non-arbitrarily interpretable as signifying an object (real or unreal)." For Peirce, a sign does not *signify *its object, it *denotes *its object and signifies its interpretant. Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Structural Engineer, Synechist Philosopher, Lutheran Christian www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt / twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt On Tue, Feb 6, 2024 at 8:10 AM Michael Shapiro <poo...@earthlink.net> wrote: > Those who are interested in exploring the concept of markedness as it > operates in the so-called "pass-key" of language as semeiotic, see the > attached article. >
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