REPLY:
I would say that his theory of representation has to be capable of articulating that distinction or there is something wrong with it, but I don't think that it is to be looked for merely in the distinction between the dyadic and the triadic but rather in something to do with the different functions being performed by icons, indices, and symbols, and that the distancing or detachment you are concerned with is to be understood especially in connection with the understanding of the symbol as involving an "imputed" quality. What this says is, I think, that we do not interpret a symbol as a symbol unless we are aware both that the replica we are interpreting is one thing and that what it means is something other than that, namely, the entity we imagine in virtue of its occurrence. Explicating that will in turn involve appeal to the functioning of a quality functioning as an icon of something the replica indexes.
Of course we are not normally aware of all of that when we are actually undergoing the experience of understanding what someone says, for example, but something that is actually very complex really must be going on nonetheless, as seems clear from, say, what is happening when we are watching a drama on a stage in front of us and are capable of understanding what is being said and done in the play AS action in a play and are able to be engaged by the actor's actions as being at once the entity enacted and a mere enacting which is NOT what is enacted. What never ceases to amaze me is the way in which I find myself able to be responsive to the actors as if they are something which I know at the very moment to be quite different from what they actually are. How is that dual consciousness possible? What is all the more amazing to me is that the ability to interpret actions as mere representative acts rather than as the actual acts which they appear to be actually seems to be earlier in our development than our ability to interpret things for what they literally are. Why do I say this? Because I am thinking about the way in which young animals -- like dogs and cats, say -- spend their early lives merely pretending to be fighting with one another and only later put the skills acquired in play into action as serious or non-playful actions. They bite but from the very beginning do so in such a way as to make it only a pretense bite by stopping just before it gets serious. Of course they are not always successful at this. I have a cat who is extraordinarily playful but unfortunately doesn't always judge accurately just how far to go in playing, whereas other cats I have had usually are pretty good about never making that sort of mistake from the beginning. But one would think that the playful act is necessarily more complex than the serious act since it seems to involve the animal being aware both of what it is to bite and of what is required in order for it to only seem like but not be a real bite. How is it that play can come first? it bespeaks a complexity that somehow is accomplished without any awareness at all on our part.
I am sort of rambling on on this point, but let me try to illustrate it another way. It seems at first to be reasonable to suppose that our ability to understand the nature of symbolism is something that we are, as highly enculturated people with a long history of accumulated sophistication about things, just now acquiring an ability to grasp, as is shown by the way we flounder around in our theories of meaning and representation long after we have figured out so much about the nature of mathematical entities and the entities which the hard sciences study. But we are only just now getting around to understanding something about representation in a theoretical way. Yet a reading of The Sacred Pipe, the text authored orally by the Sioux wise man Black Elk (written down by an anthropologist with the translational aid of Black Elk's son, as I recall), suggests that Black Elk actually had a clarity of understanding about the symbolic/iconic significance of the basic cultural practices of the Sioux, prior to the conquest, which is unparalleled by any other religious text that I have any acquaintance with. He goes through ritual activities in great detail, explaining every action taken in terms of its representative qualities AS representative qualities without showing even a trace of confusion between the literal and symbolic at any point. in other words, that book shows a genuinely semiotical level of understanding so sophisticated and dsciplined as to suggest that the coming of civilization, which means the destruction of tribal life, actually involved a regression in human intelligence in at least one fundamental respect that has yet to be recovered. The point is that this seems to exemplify in another way the same thing that is puzzling about the seeming priority of playfulness to seriousness.
Well, anyway, the point I was intending to make initially was simply that what you are wanting to account for, which is the difference between participative and observational awareness, seems to me to hinge importantly on understanding the way symbolism in particular functions, which has to be explicated in terms of the cooperative functioning of icons and indices. This may tie in with what Martin was getting at, at least in part.
Joe
From: Jim Piat <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Peirce Discussion Forum <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>
Sent: Saturday, September 9, 2006 1:44:02 PM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: "reduction of the manifold to unity"
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