Hi Joe,
It has been a very long time away from this list! I just happened to read
your wonderful post to Jim on the nature and primacy of play/art/craft, all
of which as you suggest seem to be cognitively far more complex, and yet
precedes what one would think of as the logical sequence of cognitive
development or our general ability to make sense of things around us. It is
truly amazing, and never as much reflected on it, till I read your post! I
just happened to recollect that Peirce had an unusual interest in the notion
of play through his readings of FCS Schiller (Please, correct me if I'm
wrong on this!).
No wonder then that kids as they learn to make sense of things around them,
get to be such good actors!
Shekhar Veera
The Woodlands, TX
From: Joseph Ransdell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>
To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: "reduction of the manifold to unity"
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 10:19:31 -0700 (PDT)
Just now getting arond to addressing your question of several days ago,
Jim: you formulate it towards the end of your message as follows:
JP: I don't see how a sign can represent without there being an observor
role which is functionally distinct from the role of mere participant. So
anyway that's my question -- is Peirce's theory of representation and the
sign meant to imply or address this issue of an observor or am I just
misreading something into it that is not there. I will be greatly
dissapointed if such a notion or something akin to it is not part of what
is intended by the idea of a triadic relation as being above and beyond
that of a mere dyadic relation. But then there are those Peirce comments
about consciousness being a mere quality or firstness so I'm not so sure.
OK -- I hope I have made clear the nature of my concern and look forward
to any comments you might have. I realize I'm drifting a bit from the
initial question that started this exchnage but I for me the questions are
very much related. I'm trying to get at and understand the relation of the
sign as carrier of meaning and as
that which gives rise to the feeling we have of being not simply
participants in a world (like colliding billiard balls) but of also being
observors of this participation -- aware of our nakedness and so on. The
notion that in the beginning (of awareness) was the word.
REPLY:
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
----- Original Message ----
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"
Dear Joe,
Thanks for your informal and very helpful response. I think I was
misunderstanding the introductory passage in the New List. So I have a few
more questions. First some background. My understanding is that signs
refer to and stand for the meaning of objects. In standing for objects
signs can be useful tools for communicating about objects as well as for
conducting thought experiments about objects. But it is their function of
referring to objects that I want to focus upon and ask you about. It seems
to me that in defining signs as referring to objects part of what this
definition implies is that the sign user is in the position of standing
outside (or perhaps above and beyond) the mere reactive world of the object
being referred to and observed. IOWs the sign user has a POV with respect
to the object that is beyond a mere indexical relationship. That being an
"observor" or spectator requires a level or dimension of detachment that
goes beyond the level or dimension
of attachment that is involved in "participation with" or reacting to an
object. And so I'm thinking that an indexical representation is more than
just a tool for indexing an object or giving voice to one's sub or
pre-representational understanding of an object. I'm thinking that
representation is also (and perhaps most importantly) the process by which
one achieves the observational stance. Or, to put it another way, that the
capacity to step back from the world of objects and observe them as
existing is one and the same as the capacity to represent objects. That,
in effect, the ability to represent is the foundation of being an observor
in a world of existing objects as opposed to being merely a reactive
participant in existence. . Actually, as I think about this a bit more,
maybe it is not simply the sign's function of "referring" but also the
signs function of "standing for" that creates, presumes or makes possible
the "observor" POV. But however one cuts it
I don't see how a sign can represent without there being an observor role
which is functionally distinct from the role of mere participant. So
anyway that's my question -- is Peirce's theory of representation and the
sign meant to imply or address this issue of an observor or am I just
misreading something into it that is not there. I will be greatly
dissapointed if such a notion or something akin to it is not part of what
is intended by the idea of a triadic relation as being above and beyond
that of a mere dyadic relation. But then there are those Peirce comments
about consciousness being a mere quality or firstness so I'm not so sure.
OK -- I hope I have made clear the nature of my concern and look forward
to any comments you might have. I realize I'm drifting a bit from the
initial question that started this exchnage but I for me the questions are
very much related. I'm trying to get at and understand the relation of the
sign as carrier of meaning and as that
which gives rise to the feeling we have of being not simply participants
in a world (like colliding billiard balls) but of also being observors of
this participation -- aware of our nakedness and so on. The notion that
in the beginning (of awareness) was the word.
Thanks again -- I look forward to any comments, advice and suggestions you
or others might have. I am very eager to get clear on this point. So drop
whatever you are doing ...
Best wishes,
Jim Piat
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