This is the message that Ben mentioned that I missed sending to the list. I miss my old mailer. I also miss the relative reliability we had in our email before the power blackouts started en mass at the beginning of the year. Only two more years of them to go (sigh).
From: John Collier Sent: January 30, 2015 12:15 PM To: 'Benjamin Udell' Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Triadic Relations Thanks Ben. Your answer avoids the problems that I found with Gary’s answer. For the reasons I discussed in that answer I am uncomfortable with the “determination” talk, and I think I will avoid it in any case and use something more precise for the situations I deal with. In particular the idea of the object determining in Peirce undermines Putnam’s idea that “meaning is determined by us if it is determined by anything” that supports (but I think does not ensure) his argument for internal realism as opposed to metaphysical realism. Peirce was a metaphysical realist. But I wrote and published about this in 1990 without relying on the concept of determination, and I think I will continue that way. Back in those days I was inspired by Peirce (as I was in my dissertation in 1984), but avoided invoking him directly because of the confusion of interpretations. Putnam and Rescher, in particular, struck me as having got Peirce decidedly wrong, but even now they pull a lot of weight. John From: Benjamin Udell [mailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com] Sent: January 29, 2015 10:10 PM To: biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee<mailto:biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee>; 'Peirce-L' Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Triadic Relations John C., lists, John, you wrote, I guess I have trouble making sense of the notion of determination here. I know you are saying what Peirce says; that isn’t at issue for me. What bothers me is that without an interpretant there is no representamen, so the interpretant is necessary for the representamen. It isn’t sufficient, since there may be two or more representamens (ma?) with the same interpretant. So if sufficiency is necessary and sufficient for determination, then the interpretetant does not determine the representamen. There can be two representamens (or more) for the same object, so we have the same situation. So here it seems to me that the object does not determine the representamen. But then I think, similarly, the same representamen could have different interpretations, which would imply different objects, but the object is selected by the interpretant (isn’t it?) which seems to me to be determination. So I am no more clear than before. It seems to matter where you start. Or maybe there is a better notion of determination that resolves this that I have missed. On the word 'representamen' (I never miss an opportunity): "Representamina" (reprəzenTĂmina, rhymes with "stamina") and "Representamens" (reprəzenTĀmənz, rhymes with "laymen's") are both used as plurals by Peirce and John Deely. http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/rsources/representamen.htm<http://www.iupui.edu/%7Earisbe/rsources/representamen.htm> . These words come from repraesentamen, repraesentaminis, etc., used in New Latin by Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff, among others. What is it that somebody once said? - "I didn't have time to write more briefly." Anyway, something that has what it needs - connection to an object, resemblance to an object - in order to function as a representamen is in that sense at least a potential representamen. Traces of a forgotten language are potentially symbolic expressions to a mind today, as they actually were to minds past. It is often convenient to speak of such things as representamina even if they go actually uninterpreted, they still potentially help to bring truths, true propositions, to light, from latency to patency, or from potentiality to actual embodiment in a mind. Peirce somewhat widened the sphere of semiotic operation with his notion of a quasi-mind. Really key: Peirce doesn't mean 'determine' in a deterministic sense. Sometimes he speaks of semiotic determination as an influence. So 'necessary' and 'sufficient' are not the key ideas here. Even where a premiss set and a conclusion set are sufficient for each other, that's not enough to determine what inference will actually be made, when various inferences through equivalences could be made from the same premisses. If the same object leads at length to _conflicting_ interpretants, the interpretants can't all be valid or true or corresponding to the object. One or more of the interpretants may result from noise; they may have an unrecognized object (the source of the noise). If one has enough collateral experience, one may recognize that interfering object. The noise may have been introduced surreptitiously and deliberately. And so on. Generally interpretation involves selecting aspects of objects and signs for interpretation. That in and of itself doesn't affect or determine the dynamical objects as they really are. This comes down to a familiar ambiguity in words like "determine" and "decide". A jury is supposed to "determine" the facts of a case, and to "determine" guilt or innocence on that basis. This does not mean that the jury should cause or influence the facts or guilt or innocence. The jury is supposed to let the evidence determine the jury to recognition of the facts and to a finding of guilt or innocence. If somebody changes focus from one object to another, one says that they've "changed" their object of attention; but they haven't thereby altered either of the attended-to objects themselves. The idea of semiotic determination is simply the idea that semiosis reflects, is a process of reflecting, reality, sometimes by mind's or quasi-mind's _actively_ arranging for itself (as it were _passively_) to _be determined_ by the real to the truth; this activity involves the temptation to 'stack the deck', interfere with the object's determining minds to the truth about it. Anyway, material processes scramble information, life unscrambles not all of it but just some of it according to selective questions that life comes asking, in accordance with its own standards of value. If the selection is too capricious or not up-to-date with current conditions, then the life involved gets removed from the gene pool; the selective principle must reflect reality in its way, too. Best, Ben On 1/29/2015 1:13 PM, John Collier wrote: Ben, List, I guess I have trouble making sense of the notion of determination here. I know you are saying what Peirce says; that isn’t at issue for me. What bothers me is that without an interpretant there is no representamen, so the interpretant is necessary for the representamen. It isn’t sufficient, since there may be two or more representamens (ma?) with the same interpretant. So if sufficiency is necessary and sufficient for determination, then the interpretetant does not determine the representamen. There can be two representamens (or more) for the same object, so we have the same situation. So here it seems to me that the object does not determine the representamen. But then I think, similarly, the same representamen could have different interpretations, which would imply different objects, but the object is selected by the interpretant (isn’t it?) which seems to me to be determination. So I am no more clear than before. It seems to matter where you start. Or maybe there is a better notion of determination that resolves this that I have missed. Puzzled, John >From: Benjamin Udell [mailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com] Sent: January 29, 2015 7:23 PM To: biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee<mailto:biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee>; 'Peirce-L' Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Triadic Relations John C., Jeff, lists, John, You're right, in the sense of 'ordered pair' (e.g., such that, in set theory, _relation _ is defined as ordered pair), it's true that there's no intuitive sense of 'more' or 'less' or 'earlier' or 'later' to which the relation appeals as a rule. Every arbitrary sequence is ordered in a sense; the order for the sequence is given by the sequence itself and it may or may not follow some pattern of an iterated operation or the like. I thought that Jeff had an ordering rule in mind but maybe he didn't. I too said that we should not think of the object, sign, and interpretant as 'falling dominoes'. It's because falling dominoes are dyadic in action, while semiosis is triadic. You also say, I am not at all clear that there is a unique "order of semiotic determination" [End quote] The process of semiotic determination is what _defines _ sign, object, and interpretant. Some first thing (the sign) is determined by some second thing (the object) to determine some third thing (the interpretant) to be related to the second thing (object) as the first thing (sign) is related to the second thing (object). The order of semiotic determination directly reflects that. Insofar as something acts as a _source _ of semiotic determination, it is a semiotic object. A sign is a kind of means or mediator of semiotic determination, and an interpretant is a kind of end - usually a secondary end insofar as in its turn it is usually also a sign, a mediator toward further interpretation. (Peirce somewhere discusses the 'ultimate logical interpretant' which brings semiosis to a close and is not a sign, at least not a sign in the semiosis that leads to it, but a disposition to conduct thenceforward.) Best, Ben On 1/29/2015 3:52 AM, John Collier wrote: Ben, List, I believe that a weaker is required for an ordered triple. Any finite set can be ordered. The Axiom of Choice, which is controversial, implies that any set including infinite ones can be ordered. The order need not be anything like 'more' or 'less' in any intuitive sense. For example in a function, like f=ma, <m,a> is an ordered pair, one from one domain and another from another domain such that their product is in another domain which is the range of the function. Obviously, under the Newtonian interpretation m and a are not either more or less than the other in any intuitive (or even nondegenerate) sense. I think that this is worth remembering when thinking of Peircean triads in particular. I would go further than saying that we should not think of object, sign and interpretant as "falling dominos", since I am not at all clear that there is a unique "order of semiotic determination". This follows from the way I understand irreducible triads as not fully computable, and hence, inherently open-ended. Best, John -----Original Message----- From: Benjamin Udell Sent: January 28, 2015 7:07 PM To: biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee<mailto:biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee> ; 'Peirce-L' Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Triadic Relations Jeff, Jon, lists, I think that all that is required for an ordered triple, or an ordering of any length, is a rough notion of 'more' or 'less', for example an ordering of personal preferences, and this is enough for theorems, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem. Exact quantities are not required. In the case of object, sign, interpretant, insofar as the object determines the sign to determine the interpretant to be determined by the object as the sign is determined by the object, the order of semiotic determination is 'object, sign, interpretant', although object, sign, interpretant are not to be understood as acting like successive falling dominoes. Best, Ben On 1/27/2015 2:08 PM, Jeffrey Brian Downard wrote: [....] Here is the starting question: Doesn't the notion of an ordered triple require that we already have things sorted out in such a way that we are able to ascribe quantitative values to each subject that is a correlate of the triadic relation? [....]
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
