Frances to Ben and others...
Recognizants you define as the experiences in mind of objects acting
as signs. If the experiential recognition however is itself not acting
as a sign or as part of a sign situation, then it is for the signer
only collateral to semiosis. This hence implies that not all
phenomenal things that exist in the world are signs or objects of
signs, or perhaps even prone to teleonomic designs and assigns.
If the pragmatist thrust on the matter is correctly understood by me,
the experience for Peirce when it is deemed within semiosis is
itself held by him to be a sign, and therefore an objective logical
construct. Just exactly what kind of sign it is remains unclear for
me. It may go to informative grammatic effects, or evaluative critical
worths, or rhetorical evocative responses; and all in the Morrisean
pragmatic manner, if it can be put that way. On the other hand, the
experience may be partly preparatory to semiosis, and thus often
collateral to signs. All things that are felt to continue evolving in
the world and that are given uncontrolled to sense after all are
phenomenal representamen that exist as objects, but not necessarily
objects that act as signs. This may be the condition for experiencing
and recognizing objects, whether the objects and recognizants are
signs or not. Besides differentiating these states or kinds of
objects, there must also be a differentia maintained between
representamens and signs, because there are phenomenal representamens
that are continuent but not existent, and thus that are not objects or
signs, nor interpretants.
You stated earlier that by recognizant is meant some experiential
recognition, formed as collateral to the sign and its interpretant in
respect of its object. This means that where a normal human signer
senses the object, they then recognize that object as being as they
interpreted some sign to represent that object. The experiential
recognizant therefore would strictly not be in semiosis nor be a sign.
In other words, if the sign and interpretant do not carry or convey
any direct experience of the object, then the idea that any dependent
familiar understanding of the sign is thus outside the interpretant.
The sign may have the recognizant as an object and content it carries
or have it as an interpretant effect, but otherwise the sign and
interpretant would not intrinsically be the experienced recognizant
itself. The recognizant cannot be, within the same relation or mind,
the mental experience or recognition of the object, and also the sign
or interpretant of the object. To hold that both exist simultaneously
in semiosis or in the same mind would be a logical contradiction.
Signers need the experience and recognition of objects, because signs
and interpretants in semiosis themselves do not convey the experience
of the objects that they signify or mean. The experience and
recognition of objects is thus necessarily collateral to the signs
that signify those objects. If the experiential recognizant is not
part of semiosis, then its presence in the act must therefore be
accounted for by other means or in ways other than semiosic.
When the experience however is perhaps deemed before and outside
semiosis but within synechastics as a phenomenal representamen that is
an object but not yet fully a sign, then the experience here might
be held by him to be a phaneron that acts as a signer, such as the
maker or giver or sender or framer or driver or taker or user of a
sign. For example, if a phenomenal object by itself alone acts solely
as a representative sign of itself as its own object to itself for
itself, as an isolated evolving atom might, then that phaneron acts as
a signer and is engaged in an act of experience to the extent that
it can do so. If this pushes the experience too far back into its
primordial physiotic beginnings, then the same synechastic state might
exist in biotics for say a newborn organism. One thorn here of course
is that it renders some experiences like that of some objects or of
some representamens or of some phenomena as being independent of
semiosis, at least in their early evolutionary growth, which may not
be allowed for the experience by Peircean pragmatism. The main point
to remember for me perhaps is that signs objectively and logically
continue to exist in the absence of mind or life or matter. They may
be accidentally discovered as dispositions by thinkers, but they are
not arbitrarily invented as deliberations by them; at least not as
logicomathematic constructs. This presumably would go to the idealism
of pragmatist realism; and why Peirce tried to avoid positing any
global sense of psychologistic subjectivism into his brand of logic
and semiotics.
For me to fully appreciate what is meant by the concept of your
recognizant requires a fuller assay of objects, as they might be
given to sense in all of their various being. My thrust here is that
there may in fact be objects that act as synechastic objects
