[peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" metaphor

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 12:47:02 -0700

Sorry, I forgot to compensate for an MS Outlook Express problem which involves URLs not getting copied properly. Now taken care of.
 
Charles, list,
 
>[Charles] With this post which exhausts all I am incluned to say in this context, I too will probably "go quiet."
 
>[Charles] On Sat, 26 Aug 2006 18:58:50 -0400 "Benjamin Udell" writes:
 
>>[Ben] Charles, list,
>> I guess it's hard for me to let any remarks about my ideas go by without response, but I still am inclined, as I've put it, to "go quiet."
>> Charles wrote,
 
>>>[Charles] .... [I would say that Ben’s “Recognition” is included in (not outside) the Interpretant as an element of the Interpreter’s contribution to its determination.] ....
 
>>[Ben] The recognition or recognizant, in the core narrow sense, is _defined_ as object-experience (of the acquaintance kind) formed collaterally to sign and interpretant in respect of the object; the recognizant is defined as something which, Peirce (usually) says, is not gotten from the sign and is outside the interpretant. So you're simply contradicting the definition.
 
>[Charles] I have said nothing that I see as contrary to what Peirce says about the role of collateral experience in sign processes.  In the situation where you saw smoke and went looking for a fire, seeing smoke functioned as a sign that you took as representing something other than smoke at at least two levels, a general and a singular.  Before you found and actually saw the fire, you interpreted seeing smoke (the sign itself, a sinsign, distinguishable from its objects and interpretants) according to a general rule (a legisign), something like, “Wherever there is smoke there is fire.” and according to a “singularization” of the rule something like, “With the smoke I presently see there is presently a fire.”  As Peirce points out, smoke would be uninterpretable as a sign of fire apart from your prior acquaintance with fire (and smoke also for that matter), but seeing smoke prompting you to look for fire and a particular fire was “mediated” by rules with which you were also already acquainted and apart from which you would not have “known” to look for fire.  I agree that a singular instance of seeing smoke and interpreting seeing smoke as a sign of fire occurs by means of collateral experience that would include “recognizing” smoke as smoke and not a cloud of steam or dust, fire as fire, etc. in which the interpretant of seeing smoke in its capacity as a singular sign played no part—outside, as you say, the interpretant.  But the collateral experience would also include having learned to act and acting as if a rule is true apart from which smoke, insofar as it is suited to function as a sign, could not be interpreted as a sign.  What I have been trying to say is that acts of interpretation which include recognition are semiosical, and that recognizing is an interpretant or included in interpretants of a sign or signs that are collateral to the interpretant of any particular sign.
 
(Assuming that you intend no practical difference made by differences between "recognizing" and "recognition" etc.) -- Insofar as "recognizing" in the current discussion is defined as "forming an experience as collateral to sign and interpretant in respect of the object," you're saying that an experience formed as collateral to sign and interpretant in respect of the object is an interpretant of that object. That's just a contradiction, both internally and to Peirce.
 
It is not an interpretant in Peirce's view, which is that acquaintance with the object is not part of the interpretant about that object.
 
From C.S. Peirce, Transcribed from Letter to Lady Welby Dec 23, 1908 (in _Semiotics and Significs: Correspondence Between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby_, ed. Charles Hardwick, Indiana U. Press, 1977, p.83) http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/terms/interpretant.html also at http://peircematters.blogspot.com/2005_02_01_peircematters_archive.html . Quote:
Its Interpretant is all that the Sign conveys: acquaintance with its Object must be gained by collateral experience.
End quote.
 
Note that Peirce does _not_ say that _collateral_ acquaintance with its Object must be gained by collateral experience. Peirce is not stating such a truism. Instead he says that acquaintance, any acquaintance at all, must be gained by collateral experience.
 
There is good reason for Peirce to hold that view, since experience of the sign of an object is not experience of that object, which in turn is because the sign is (usually) not the object, and part of the whole point of signs is to lead the mind to places where, in the relevant regard, experience and observation have not gone yet but could conceivably go.
 
This is as true as ever even when the experienced object is a sign experienced in its signhood or an interpretant sign experienced in its interpretancy. It is not clear to me whether you are tacitly disputing Peirce or believe that you are agreeing with him or are unsure of his view but are inclined to dispute him if it comes down to it. 
 
Peirce says that acquaintance with the system of signs is not what is meant by "collateral." He says that he is talking about observation or acquaintance or experience _of the object_ and that it is collateral _to the sign or system of signs_. The semiotician's correct application of that statement depends on the semiotician's _keeping track_ of _what is serving as the semiotic object_.
 
When the sign in its signhood, or the system of signs in their signhoods, is, itself, the semiotic object, then the same constraints involving collateral experience are to be applied _mutatis mutandis_, and Peirce does exactly that, in the example regarding the word _soleil_, an example which involves somebody's gaining collateral experience regarding an object (the Sun-sign which is the word _soleil_) about which the student has already had signs (the teacher's definition of the word _soleil_) and involving which the teacher proceeds subsequently to provide the student with collateral experience.
 
If a person points to it and says, See there! That is what we call the “Sun,” the Sun is not the Object of that sign. It is the Sign of the sun, the word “sun” that his declaration is about; and that word we must become acquainted with by collateral experience. Suppose a teacher of French says to an English-speaking pupil, who asks “comment appelle-t-on ça?” pointing to the Sun, . . . “C’est le soleil,” he begins to furnish that collateral experience by speaking in French of the Sun itself.
End quote.
 
The _meaning_ of the rule "where there's smoke, there's fire" is formed into an interpretant. The _legitimacy_ -- in whatever respect -- of the rule "where there's smoke, there's fire," is formed into a recognizant in that respect. You have been tracing, but misregarding as interpretational, the pattern whereby recognition, or the recognizant, is involved at every semiosical interstice, whether as a recognition of the internal cogency or at least internal consistency of the proposition "where there's smoke, there's fire," or as a recognition of its truly corresponding to its semiotic object, or as a recognition of its validity or cogency as an inferential outcome, or as a recognition of it in all those respects, which is a recognition of its soundness. I've been arguing, in effect, that the Peircean view of collateral experience contradicts regarding those recognitions as semiosical, i.e., as a process of signs and interpretants only -- and I've been arguing, in effect, for a redefinition of semiosis to include acquaintance, observation, experience of the object in such experience's role as (dis-)confirmatory of sign and interpretant, and my argument has involved my tracing the pervasive logically determinational involvement of such experience and my appealing to the common idea that _logic_ (which Peirce _equates with semiotic_), is about (dis-)verification, (dis-)establishment, (dis-)confirmation, (dis-)corroboration, etc.
 
>[Charles] Beyond the primitive perceptual event “seeing” a virtually meaningless “something,” any meaning that accrues to seeing something by means of which it is recognizably (a classification) and recognizable as (a singularization of a clsssification) smoke rather than steam (which for a young child it might not) is semiosical. 
 
Again, and to the contrary, Peirce says: "Its Interpretant is all that the Sign conveys: acquaintance with its Object must be gained by collateral experience." Peirce seeks to confine the role of such acquaintance to that of a precondition for semiosis. But there is nothing there about such acquaintance's being only a bare, rudimentary, initial experience. Whether it is initial experience, or further experience, and even whether the experience is gained before the sign and interpretant or, as in Peirce's _soleil_ example, after them, it is outside the sign or the interpretant of the object.
 
>[Charles] Apart from acting as if rules that are linguistic and/or embedded in habits are in some sense true or valid, neither you nor I nor anyone else seeing smoke would look for fire, and no particular instance of seeing smoke, following it to its source, and, sure enough, seeing fire, can “verify” that a rule of thumb like, “Wherever there is smoke there is fire.” is true.  What if you had been unable to find a fire before the smoke disappeared?  Would you have then concluded that your seeing smoke was an illusion of some sort?
 
Acting as if a rule expressed in language or embedded in habit were true or valid may be deliberately experimental or based on the agent's experience. In either case it is always a test, more or less called-for, more or less intentional, more or less serious, more or less not-merely-formal, etc. It may be meaningfully called a test of a rule insofar as, whether it was deliberate or not, the intelligence will learn (whether such was its purpose or not in the case) from the outcome and reinforce or revise its rules, its system, accordingly.
 
You seem to be using the word "verify" in a different sense than that which I have repeatedly stipulated that I am using the word. I have been using it as a forest terms for the various trees of "confirmation," "corroboration," "establishment," etc. I doubt that Peirce uses the word in the absolute sense in which you seem to be using it, since he says that modern students of science have achieved their success by an improved understanding and practice of *_verification_*.
 
From the Collected Papers of C.S. Peirce Vol. I, I. General Historical Orientation, 1. Lessons from the History of Philosophy, Section 3. The Spirit of Scholasticism, Paragraph 34, http://www.textlog.de/4220.html . Quote:
34. Mr. George Henry Lewes in his work on Aristotle(1) seems to me to have come pretty near to stating the true cause of the success of modern science when he has said that it was *_verification_*. I should express it in this way: modern students of science have been successful because they have spent their lives not in their libraries and museums but in their laboratories and in the field; and while in their laboratories and in the field they have been not gazing on nature with a vacant eye, that is, in passive perception unassisted by thought, but have been *_observing_* -- that is, perceiving by the aid of analysis -- and testing suggestions of theories. The cause of their success has been that the motive which has carried them to the laboratory and the field has been a craving to know how things really were, and an interest in finding out whether or not general propositions actually held good -- which has overbalanced all prejudice, all vanity, and all passion. Now it is plainly not an essential part of this method in general that the tests were made by the observation of natural objects. For the immense progress which modern mathematics has made is also to be explained by the same intense interest in testing general propositions by particular cases -- only the tests were applied by means of particular demonstrations. This is observation, still, for as the great mathematician Gauss has declared -- algebra is a science of the eye,(2) only it is observation of artificial objects and of a highly recondite character. Now this same unwearied interest in testing general propositions is what produced those long rows of folios of the schoolmen, and if the test which they employed is of only limited validity so that they could not unhampered go on indefinitely to further discoveries, yet the *_spirit_*, which is the most essential thing -- the motive, was nearly the same. And how different this spirit is from that of the major part, though not all, of modern philosophers -- even of those who have called themselves empirical, no man who is actuated by it can fail to perceive.
End quote. [bold & italics at the Website]
 
>[Charles] .... What if you had been unable to find a fire before the smoke disappeared?  Would you have then concluded that your seeing smoke was an illusion of some sort?
 
There is tautologously no need to adequately _verify_ such a rule's being true for a particular case _before_ adequately verifying its being true for that same particular case. If I hadn't been able to check yet, I would conclude that I had had not yet sufficient opportunity to observe whether the rule held true in that case. Now, I have actually seen large amounts of smoke pouring out of a small enclosure, and found that the enclosure's inside was not afire.  Somebody had set off a bunch of smoke bombs in that enclosure. Well, one could note that there were tiny fires, little rapid oxidations, inside the smoke bombs themselves. It depends on what is meant in the saying "where there's smoke, there's fire," which is an intentionally vague rule, actually.
 
> Would you have concluded that the rule of thumb, “Wherever there is smoke there is fire.” is false?
 
Not without adequate opportunity to (dis-)verify it. Now, as a matter of fact, the rule of thumb "Wherever there's smoke there's fire" is used in English much more generally than about fires. It is used about any sort of problems or discrepancies. And in that frequent sense it is frequently regarded as being an unreliable rule. I have sometimes heard it characterized -- by entirely unphilosophical people and in affairs of daily private life -- as "pure BS." This disparaged sense is one in which a suspicious appearance is regarded as proof of wrong's being done, and is associated with people who sit smugly in petrified mediocrity waiting for the world to make a false move. The sense is disparaged because it involves casually shifting the burden of proof onto the accused even when, as is often the case, the accused should have a presumption of innocence.
 
>[Charles] I believe that you may be conflating Peirce’s distinction between signs and replicas of signs by criticizing his theory of signs in terms of experience and conduct mediated by signs together with sign replicas about which Peirce has relatively little to say.  I also believe that you are ignoring Peirce’s critique and rejection of the possibility of universal doubt—as if doubting were as easy as lying—in his discussions of the relation between doubt and belief.  In short, it appears to me that you are interpreting Peirce “nominalistically.”
 
To the contrary, a recognition in its singularity is not a replica of an interpretant legisign. This is because the recognition is a kind of acquaintance with the object, and
- a mind's interpretant legisign of an object is not that mind's acquaintance with the object, and
- a mind's acquaintance with the interpretant legisign is not that mind's acquaintance with its interpretant legisign's object, and
- a mind's replica of a legisign is not that mind's acquaintance with that legisign's object or with an instance of that object, and
- a mind's acquaintance with its replica of a legisign is not that mind's acquaintance with that legisign's object or with an instance of that object.
 
Furthermore to the contrary, the doubting of a general rule or a general proposition is not automatically a hyperbolic, universal, Cartesian doubt such that Peirce would reject it. Above in this post, in his discussion of verification, Peirce discusses "testing general propositions by particular cases" as part of the normal process of research both in modern times and in earlier times. I can only wonder what sort of testing you think that I've been discussing.
 
Best, Ben
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