[peirce-l] Re: Existent vs Real
Dea Folks, I'm thinking it might be helpful to try to distinguish between the notions of real and true. One can contrast real with imaginary and true with false. Some further preliminary thoughts below. As in maybe--- Peirce proposes that being comes in three modes -- the potential, the actual and the tending toward. He calls all three modes real -- as opposed to mere fictions, figments of the imagination, or as some might say nominally real or real in name only. So then what is a fiction? Fictions, in my view, are category mistakes. As when when we mistake one catergory of reality for another. For example, when we miscategorize something that is potentially real as something that is actually real. Mistaking one form of reality for another is the sort of category mistake we call a fiction. However if we examine the sort of error we can make within each category of being we come upon the notion of truth vs falshood. For example to mistake the impossible for the potential is a falsehood within the potential mode of being. Likewise to mistake what has occured for what has not occured is a falsehood within the actual/perceptual mode of being. Finally to mistake the tending toward for what is not being tended toward is a falsehood within the category of science. The distinction between real and true, that arises from the above viewpoint, becomes a matter or how both the real and the true are established. Real is established by dtermining not whether something conforms to fact or reason but whether or not it has been rightly classified as potential, actual or tending toward. True, on the other hand, is a matter that depends upon determining whether something conforms to observation and logic. Put still another way -- Being is divided into three kinds of reality and within each of these real modes of being (feeling, reactions, and thoughts) truth can be established by appeals to observation and logic. To say something is unreal is to say it has been miscatergorized. To say something is untrue is to say it has been mistakenly observed or reasoned. Maybe-- Cheers, Jim Piat And Ben -- I would still want to argue that all of these errors are at root instances of the general rule that all error is a matter of mistaking the whole for the part. Error lies not in misperception but in drawing a false conclusion. And overgeneralizing from one's personal limited experience to god's will is in my limited experience the universal error underlying all errors. In this way all we experience is both true but not the whole truth. No one is wrong -- but neither is any individual by his or herself entirely correct. By its very nature of affording more than one POV the ultimately truth of reality is a property of the whole and error of the part. Perhaps. --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Ben, you say: I don't pose a tetradic reduction thesis applicable to all relations. I just say that there's a fourth semiotic term that isn't any of the classic three. A sign stands for an object to an interpretant on the basis of a recognition. I think that an increasingly good reason to suppose that recognition can't be reduced to interpretant, sign, and object, is that nobody has done so in any kind of straightforward way. REPLY: Has anybody tried? BEN: Basically, signs interpretants lack experience conveyable to the mind. How will you reduce experience of them respecting the object, reduce such experience into things that lack experience conveyable to the mind? Where did the experience vanish to? You can analyze, but not reduce, experience into such by shifting phenomenological gears, semiotic frame of reference, etc. REPLY: I don't see anything reductive in assuming that the analysis of cognition, including recognition, can be done in terms of a signs, objects, and interpretants as elements of or in cognitive processes, andif this involves shifting phenomenological gears and semiotic frames of reference then so be it.. Your suggestion that recognition should be acknowledged to be a distinctive fourth factor seems to accomplish nothing other than to make it impossible to analyze recognition at all since the conception of it is already given, as a sort of logical primitive, prior to its use as an analytic element. But the truth is, Ben, that I just don't understand your argument. I just can/t follow it, and I can't really answer you effectively for that reason. I guess I will have to leave that to Gary for the time being and hope that I will in time come to understand what you are getting at. I always take what you say seriously, at the very least. Joe Ransdell -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 267.15.8/260 - Release Date: 2/14/2006 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Dear Ben, Just to let you know that I've been reading and enjoying your many recent comments. I haven't commented because I can't keep up with your pace -- but hopefully I will catch up some in time. I especially enjoying your persistent examination of what it means to interpret something. The way I confuse myself on this issue is to repeatedly disregard the notion that all is interpretation (ie we begin with the given of interpretation as the means by which we experience the world) and instead fall into what I consider the trap of begining with objects as existing apart from our semiotic experience of them and then to somehow try to make sense of a objects that do not exist as I have mistakenly posited them. I must remind myself that its signs all the way down. An infintitude of signs (which are interpretants) within which are objects as one pole of a tri-polar infinitely nested or enfolded reality of signs -- unfolding behind us and we stumble backwards into the future, eyes firmly fixed on the past searching for clues as to where we might be tending. The present (as I understand it) is the continuous unfolding of the potential (which is the future) into the actual (which is the past). This continuous circular ever expanding and informing process or re-presentation of the present I understand to be semiosis -- however it's spelled.None of which do I take to be a refutation of any that you've said -- just my way of paying my respects to what you are saying as part of what seems to me a list wide attempt to sort it all out. A common interest. Best wishes, Jim Piat --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Stauss on Interpretation
Dear Folks, As promised, a quote from Leo Strauss' essay on Spinoza in Persecution and the Art of Writing. Not at all the elitist view of reading the greats that I had mistakingly come to think Strauss might have been advocating. In any case I thought it might be fun to read in light of the discussion of what Peirce was about in the New Elements. QUOTE: To understand the words of another man, living or dead, may mean two different things which for the moment we shall call interpretation and explanation. By interpretation we mean the attempt to ascertain what the speaker said and how he actually understood what he said, regardless of whether he expressed that understanding explicitly or not. By explanation we mean the attempt to ascertain those implication of his staements of which he was unaware. Accordingly, the realization that a given statement is ironical or a lie, belongs to the interpretation of the statemnt, whereas the realization that a given statement is based on a mistake, or is the unconscious expression of a wish, an interest, a bias, or a historical situation, belongs to its explanation. It is obvious that the interpretation has to precede the explanation. If the explanation is not based on an adequate interpetation, it will be the explanation, not of the statement to be explained, but of a figment of the imagination of the historian. It is equally obvious that , within the interpretation, the understanding of the explicit meaning of a statement has to precede the understanding of what the author knew but did not say explicitity: one cannot realize, or at any rate one cannot prove, that a statement is a lie before one has understood the statement in itself. The demonstrably true understanding of the words or the thoughts of another man is necessarily based on an exact interpretation of his explicit statements. But exactness means different things in different cases. In some cases exact interpretation requires the careful weighing of every word used by the speaker; such careful consideration would be a most inexact procedure in the case of a casual remark of a loose thinker or talker. In order to know what degree or kind of exactness is required for the understanding fo a given writing, one must therefore first know the author's habits of writing. But since these habits become truly known only through the understanding of the writer's work, it would seem that at the beginning one cannot help being guided by one's preconceieved notions of the author's character. The procedure would be more simple if there were a way of ascertaining an author's manner of writing prior to interpreting his works. It is a general observation that people write as they read. As a rule, careful writers are careful readers and vice versa. A careful writer wants to be read carefully. END QUOTE Hey ain't this a joy! I could go on but I'm getting tired of typing and there really is no good stopping point. Elsewhere he points out that writers do not always state their views in the most pointed or blatant way because throughout history ideas that run counter to the powers that be are not tolerated. This does not in my view endorse some elitist interpretation of any of the great writer's of the past. On the contrary -- just an honest commmon sensical acknowledgement of the tendency of those in charge to punish and therebye suppress the expression of opposition views. In my view there can be no justice without equality of power -- there can be a temporary peace achieved by supression, but this is neither just nor lasting. As the doctors say the above is has been signed but not read -- in this case typed but not checked for errors. That's a great one isn't it -- signed but not read. The ability to deny responsiblity should be so easy. But in fairness to the doctors I don't think they ought to be held repsonsible for what others might make of a mere procedural note -- really I don't. Jim Piat --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Joe, Ben, List, Joe wrote: I don't see anything reductive in assuming that the analysis of cognition, including recognition, can be done in terms of a signs, objects, and interpretants as elements of or in cognitive processes, andif this involves shifting phenomenological gears and semiotic frames of reference then so be it.. I would agree that "the analysis of cognition, including recognition [and, I would add, even whatever of 'memory' is logically analyzable GR], can be done in terms of signs, objects, and interpretants" and, indeed, see no other way to analyze it. Joe continues: Your suggestion that recognition should be acknowledged to be a distinctive fourth factor seems to accomplish nothing other than to make it impossible to analyze recognition at all since the conception of it is already given, as a sort of logical primitive, prior to its use as an analytic element. I would fully concur with this analysis. Joe continues by stating: But the truth is, Ben, that I just don't understand your argument. I just can/t follow it, and I can't really answer you effectively for that reason. I guess I will have to leave that to Gary for the time being and hope that I will in time come to understand what you are getting at. I'm afraid that I apparently either haven't understood Ben's argument or, if I have, that Ben has quite rejected my analysis as you can see from his blog comments referring to earlier discussions on this list (which I've copied just below). Joe concludes: I always take what you say seriously, at the very least. I take Ben's thinking seriously as well, but sense that he will try to fit triadic semeiotic to the Procrustean bed of his fours as he was fully committed to them well before coming upon Peirce's semeiotic (and, of course, for the reasons he has given which I too cannot follow). So I hope that others will argue these points with Ben as I have pretty much 'shot my wad' in the matter. Here's some of Ben's reflection on Bernard Morand and my earlier arguments as they appear on Ben's blog. Ben writes: One might argue, as Gary Richmond and Bernard Morand have argued at Joseph Ransdells peirce-l electronic forum, that the recognition, observation, etc., are the integrity of the triad or of the evolvent semiosis over time, and are their totality and locus. Yet the recognitional and observational relationships are distinguishable from the triadic relationships of objectification, representation, interpretation, since the relevant observation/recognition is collateral to sign and interpretant in respect to the object, and is not merely their totality and locus while not really being anything more than them. Furthermore, by the same method one could argue that the interpretant sign is really just the integrity or maybe instead the clarity of an object-sign dyad and that no further distinct relationships need be invoked in order to conceive of the interpretant. And so forth. Gary has also argued that since he is the sign, he already is the observation, they arent different things etc. (In a similar argument, he argues that the universe is an interpretant and already has all its observations, etc.) Yet this involves ignoring the shifts of semiotic reference frame whereby we say that a thing is a semiotic object in one sense or set of relations, and is a sign in another sense or set of relations, etc., and it leads to a hypostatization of object, sign, etc., even while Gary claims that it avoids the hypostatization to which he claims that the conception of the recognizant amounts. Furthermore, by the same method one could argue that one is already the pre-interpretant sign, one doesnt need a separate interpretant, it would just be a hypostatization, one is both and its all one, etc. Meanwhile, the recognizant is not a hypostatization; something is no more a recognizant in every set of relations than it is an interpretant in every set of relations, or a sign in every set of relations, or a semiotic object in every set of relations. Garys arguments are, in a sense, too powerful; they reduce the semiotic triad itself away. Well, I don't necessarily agree with Ben's conclusions, but I have been unsuccessful on list and off (and including discussions relating to the Peircean 'reduction thesis' 'valency analysis' 'existential graph analysis' etc. which support the argument that three semeiotic elements are necessary and sufficient. But perhaps anticipating your argument reproduced above, Joe, Ben has also written: There remains the argument that collateral experiences, recognitions, etc., are not semiotic and dont belong with object, sign, and interpretant. Yet, thats just to say that verification, disconfirmation, etc., are concerns at best adjacent to, but still outside of, logic and semiotics; the scientific process, then, for example, falls outside of semiotic concerns to the extent that the scientific process is verificational, disconfirmatory,
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Joe, list, [Joe] Ben, you say: [Ben] I don't pose a tetradic reduction thesis applicable to all relations. I just say that there's a fourth semiotic term that isn't any of the classic three. A sign stands for an object to an interpretant on the basis of a recognition. I think that an increasingly good reason to suppose that recognition can't be reduced to interpretant, sign, and object, is that nobody has done so in any kind of straightforward way. [Joe] REPLY: [Joe] Has anybody tried? Well, yes, Gary Bernard tried, and both of them put some effort into it. Martin Lefebvre also gave it a shot or two. I pondered their efforts for quite some time. It's what I was talking about when I said in my previous post: 66~~~ - It's been said that recognition collateral experience are a generalized context, but that context is not what I meant by recognition nor what Peirce meant by collateral experience. I've meant, for instance, your seeing somebody wear a hat just as you expected. Or like somebody talking about a bird and your checking their comments against your experiences of particular birds. - It's been said that recognition experience are mediated or made of signs interpretants. Those involve shifts of the semiotic frame of reference, which is a legitimate analytic move, but not a legitimate reductive move. - It's been said that the evolution of a triad -- somehow -- conveys experience without the members of the triad doing so. If there's a relationship among object, sign, interpretant, a relationship which conveys experience of the object, then that relationship IS experience of the object and is not reducible to object, sign, interpretant -- and we're back at talking about the familiar subject of phenomenology vs. physiological analysis of vision. ~~~99 The first counterargument above was Gary's, and I agreed that there is a large context of experience collateral in many ways to many things, and it's an interesting and, I find, illuminating line of thought, because there IS a common solidary experiential context, the solid intertanglement of the anchorages of one's many recognitions, one which I've come to think is illuminating in regard to assertions. However it's just not what I was talking about in discussing recognitive experience formed as collateral to the sign interpretant in respect of the object -- such experience is formed in terms of its references to the other semiotic elements, and is quite distinguishable from the generalized context. If I was supposed to be checking whether some water boiled in a pot when I was instead checking whether somebody wore a certain hat as I expected, I will hear a lot about the specific referential differences between those collaterally based recognitions from whomever I promised that I would keep an eye on the pot of water. Gary has also made a more advance form of the argument, in which he said that man is sign, the whole universe is a sign, why does one need confirmation? My answer was twofold, one, that by that kind of reasoning, (1) one doesn't even need an interpretant, since one is already the sign, the universe is already the sign, and (2) that most signs and interpretants aren't like that anyway, and that they should not be regarded as false partial versions of the big sign which is oneself or the grand sign which is the universe. We have to deal with signs interpretants as they commonly are. There was actually more argument related in various ways to this, more of it is coming back to me as I write this, but let me move on. The second counterargument has been made in one form or another by you, Gary, Martin Lefebvre, and others. I addressed it in the passage above and continually throughout the post. My past discussions of phenomonological versus physiological-analytic viewpoints have been addresssed in part to it. The third counterargument was developed by Gary Bernard in three-way interchange with me. That which I said in the quoted passage above was actually a brief form of a new response by me on it. My other response was that this object-experience-generating relationship should be tracked down in order to test whether it indeed is reducible to object, sign, or interpretant. The triad's integrity, conceived-of as object-experience formed as collateral to sign interpretant in respect of the object, is the conception of a semiotic fourth without calling it that. Now, if sign interpretant did not, as such, convey experience, yet some aspect or relation among them did so, perhaps over time, then we would say that they DO convey experience of the object, in virtue of that very aspect or relation. And if they conveyed object-experience but only after sufficient time and evolution, then, too, we would say that they DO convey experience of the object, just not instantaneously or as quickly as one might like. Peirce says not merely that signs don't convey experience of
