[peirce-l] Re: MS 399.663f On the sign as surrogate
Joe, Ben, list,
Joseph Ransdell wrote:
I hope Stjernfelt's paper is made generally available soon. He
has an important paper in Transactions of the Peirce Society 36 (Summer
2000) called "Diagrams as Centerpiece of a Peircean Epistemology".
Stjernfelt's paper,"Two Iconicity Notions in Peirce's Diagrammatology"
presented at ICCS in Aalborg, Denmark this month (Springer Lecture
Notes in Artificial Intelligence #4068) indeed seems to be a companion
piece to "Diagrams as Centerpiece of a Peircean Epistemology," perhaps
representing a refinement and development of the ideas presented in the
earlier paper. [However, the former paper also includes analyses not
present in the ICCS piece and is very well worth reading in its own
right. It is one which I return to again and again and have annotated
profusely. A rereading since my return from Denmark confirms for me
your statement, Joe, that it is "an important paper"--as is, I might
add, the lead piece in that Summer 2000 volume of Transactions, Joe's
"Peirce and the Socratic Tradition."]
In the present paper Stjernfelt distinguishes two complementary notions
of iconicity which he terms *operational* and *optimal* and, further,
ties the second later notion to Peirce's movement towards the "extreme
realism" in which, for example, the famous *diamond example* (in
consideration of the pragmatic maxim) is reinterpreted to include real
possibilities ("would-bes"). In Stjernfelt's reading the earlier
"operational criteria" involves not only the icon resembling
(sharing characteristics with, etc.) its object, but the heart of the
operational definition is that there is the construction of a diagram
involved in all reasoning, so that by diagram observation and
manipulation we may obtain new information. This
"operational definition" refers exactly to that manipulation and
observation.
But it would appear that Peirce concludes that the operational
notion--as powerful as it is--finally results in too broad a definition
of iconicity for some purposes. For prime example in logic it would
seem that Peirce's Alpha and Beta EGs are strictly equivalent to
propositional logic and first order predicate logic respectively. But
Peirce (who after all invented the algebraic versions although his own
notation in not used today) found his graphic forms "more iconic" than
the earlier representations. Thus, for example, even in his Beta
graphs the line of identity is preferred to the convention of
*selectives* which Peirce introduced to avoid "a thicket" of lines of
identity in complex graphs.
I cannot begin to suggest how much more complex and subtle Stjernfelt's
analysis is as compared to my crude outline above. And I would
encourage those who have access to Springer editions to read it. (I
might add that it has particular relevance to my own diagrammatological
work in trikonic.)
Gary
Ben, list:
Thanks for the response, Ben, and for the news from Gary about the
conference. I hope Stjernfelt's paper is made generally available soon. He
has an important paper in Transactions of the Peirce Society 36 (Summer
2000) called "Diagrams as Centerpiece of a Peircean Epistemology"..
I'm caught by a luncheon engagement and can't do more at the moment than to
add some more quotes to provide some background for sorting out the
imputation factors along the lines you are suggesting: These are all from
the early years (1865-1873):
..
---
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[peirce-l] Re: MS 399.663f On the sign as surrogate
Joe, list, I thought I was so concise that it was okay to pull the topic in my favorite direction, since it seemed brief. But I have to make some additions and corrections. Best, Ben - Original Message - From: Benjamin Udell [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Peirce Discussion Forum peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2006 9:01 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: MS 399.663f On the sign as surrogate Joe, list, Thank you! Those quotes are both apropos and interesting in other ways. Excessively brief samples: Peirce: The point of contact is the living mind which is affected in a similar way by real things and by their signs. And this is the only possible point of contact. The mind alone recognizes sign and interpretant as corresponding to the real. Yet that mind's recognition of the signs' corresponding to the object is not the mind's sign for the object yet is the mind's _something_ regarding the object, something involving experience of the object. Maybe it's just that, experience, and experience is something outside semiosis, technically non-semiotic in that sense, and supporting semiosis by external pressure? (No, I don't think that, in case anybody is wondering :-)) and Peirce: 1. Truth belongs to signs, particularly, and to thoughts as signs. Truth is the agreement of a meaning with a reality. 2. The meaning -- to lekton -- is the respect in which signs which translate each other are conceived to agree. It is something independent of how the thing signified really is and depends only on what is conveyed to whoever interprets the sign rightly. Thirdness is reference to an interpretant. The interpretant is the sign's meaning. The meaning is the respect in which signs which translate each other are conceived to agree, and is independent of how the thing signified really is. ADDITION: Peirce wrote in 1870 of the meaning's independence from how the thing signified really is. I didn't look closely enough at that yesterday and I mistook the direction of the independence. He seems to have meant not the real's independence of yours and my opinion, but rather a determination of the interpretant by the sign but not by the real object. If that's what he meant, then obviously he later changed his mind, and discussed the object as determining the sign interpretant but as doing so in possibly a misleading way. However, one way or another, the interpretant, the meaning, is not the selfsame thing as the truth, the recognition-worthiness, or the recognition. (End of addition). BUT -- truth is the agreement of a meaning with a reality and _belongs to signs_. So signs have truth, soundness, legitimacy -- and it's not an non-semiotic issue; and it's not their meaning, value, etc., per se. It's a further relationship of meaning, a relationship to the real. Is truth a sign's being in 'real relation' to the object? Can an index -- when defined as a sign defined in particular cases by a real relation with its object -- be defined as sign defined in particular cases by its truth, its legitimacy, its deserving of recognition as true? This does seem a consequence of Peirce's view. CORRECTION: Actually, even when the index's definition includes not singularity but only real relatedness to its object, it is also specified that the index is in real relation with a singular, reactive/resistant object. No sign is defined as being in real relation with its object irrespectively of the object's category; it's as if a sign can be in real relation only with a singular. (End of correction) I've said in other posts why I don't think that this works for the index as usually conceived -- the index's representation of some other object is just as mistakable as an icon's representation of another object. ADDITION CORRECTION: To say that a sign is defined by its truth or legitimacy, is to say that it is a sign whose function is to establish or confirm or corroborate something. Also, a sign's being interpreted or even defined as verificatory (in whatever sense) doesn't prove that the sign _is_ verificatory, and a sign's being verified as verificatory may also be mistaken. The reason that an index is not nicely definable by its truth (or its truth about a singular) is not some supposedly implied infallibility, but instead that its pointing function is quite distinguishable from a verificatory function. Every sign has some sort of verificatory status, just as every sign has meaning, but to be defined as pointing is not the same thing as to be defined as verificatory. Nevertheless, it is useful to look at the idea, that the index must point to its object successfully, the idea the object must exist, or behave as the index indicates it to behave, in order for the index to be an index, as opposed to the idea that the index's supposed object must be supposedly existent, singular, reactive/resistant or behaving in a particular way. (End of addition correction).
[peirce-l] Re: MS 399.663f On the sign as surrogate
Ben says: I thought I was so concise that it was okay to pull the topic in my favorite direction, since it seemed brief. But I have to make some additions and corrections. Ben, I hadn't read your latest message in responding to your earlier message as I do below, and am not sure whether your subsequent comments bear on what I say or not but will just go ahead and post them anyway. (I should add that the MS from which the quote you are commenting on is drawn was not completely quoted by me and what was omitted is perhaps pertinent to it, given the direction you went from it. I will perhaps post the whole thing separately in a later message.) Ben says: ===QUOTE BEN Peirce: The point of contact is the living mind which is affected in a similar way by real things and by their signs. And this is the only possible point of contact. The mind alone recognizes sign and interpretant as corresponding to the real. Yet that mind's recognition of the signs' corresponding to the object is not the mind's sign for the object yet is the mind's _something_ regarding the object, something involving experience of the object. Maybe it's just that, experience, and experience is something outside semiosis, technically non-semiotic in that sense, and supporting semiosis by external pressure? (No, I don't think that, in case anybody is wondering :-)) ==END QUOTE=== REPLY: I wonder if in talking about correspondence, you are looking for something that just isn't to be found, Ben, namely, a statement of verification of a certain cognitive claim that is something other than a mere repetition of the same claim because it claims that the claim corresponds to the way the object actually is. (I say this in view of your opinion that confirmation or verification is a logically distinct factor that Peirce fails to take due account of as a logically distinct fourth factor in his category theory.) Let us suppose that some person, P1, makes a certain knowledge claim, C1, about a certain object, O, namely, that O is F. And let us suppose that a second person, P2, makes a claim, C2, about that claim, saying, yes, O really is as P1 claims it is, namely, F. (In other words, he makes what may seem to be a verifying claim.) And suppose that P2's claim differs from P1's claim not as regards any difference in evidential basis for saying that O is F but only because C2 is about the relationship between claim C1 and O and their observed correspondence, whereas C1 is just about O. (In other words, P1 is merely saying that O is F whereas P2 is saying not only that O is F but also that P1 is saying that O is F and is therefore speaking the truth.) Supposing that the two persons are equivalent as regards their generally recognized status as people who try to speak the truth. Question: Is P2's claim that P1 is speaking the truth a verification of P1's claim? Given that there is no difference in their evidential base and that P1 and P2 are on par as recognized truth-tellers, it would seem not. Why? Because P1's simple claim that O is F could just as well be taken as verification by P1 that P2 is right in claiming that O is F. The general point is that in thinking about the need for verification you are thinking of a verifying statement -- a verification -- as differing from the statement being verified because the verifier is performing an act of comparison of correspondence that is of a different logical type than the act of making the claim being verified, whereas the one is logically on par with the other. Thus e.g. when one gets a second opinion from another physician, let us say, one is not ipso facto getting an opinion that can either verify or disverify the first, though we may mistakenly think that this is what we are doing. But a second opinion is just a further opinion, as a third, fourth, etc., and it doesn't make any difference which one comes first. Of course, we could take the second opinion as verification of the first provided we brought to bear some further considerations, but amongst them would NOT be the fact that one of them could be construed as differing from the other because it involved a comparison of the other as an opinion with the object of that opinion. In other words, there is never really any such thing as a correspondence comparison of opinion and fact or sign and object of sign in the sense you implicitly have in mind. Joe Joe Ransdell [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.10.3/395 - Release Date: 7/21/2006 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: MS 399.663f On the sign as surrogate
Joe, list, Thank you for your response, Joe. Comments interspersed below. - Original Message - From: Joseph Ransdell [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Peirce Discussion Forum peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2006 1:29 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: MS 399.663f On the sign as surrogate [Joe] Ben says: I thought I was so concise that it was okay to pull the topic in my favorite direction, since it seemed brief. But I have to make some additions and corrections. [Joe] Ben, I hadn't read your latest message in responding to your earlier message as I do below, and am not sure whether your subsequent comments bear on what I say or not but will just go ahead and post them anyway. (I should add that the MS from which the quote you are commenting on is drawn was not completely quoted by me and what was omitted is perhaps pertinent to it, given the direction you went from it. I will perhaps post the whole thing separately in a later message.) [Joe] Ben says: ===QUOTE BEN Peirce: The point of contact is the living mind which is affected in a similar way by real things and by their signs. And this is the only possible point of contact. The mind alone recognizes sign and interpretant as corresponding to the real. Yet that mind's recognition of the signs' corresponding to the object is not the mind's sign for the object yet is the mind's _something_ regarding the object, something involving experience of the object. Maybe it's just that, experience, and experience is something outside semiosis, technically non-semiotic in that sense, and supporting semiosis by external pressure? (No, I don't think that, in case anybody is wondering :-)) ==END QUOTE=== [Joe] REPLY: [Joe] I wonder if in talking about correspondence, you are looking for something that just isn't to be found, Ben, namely, a statement of verification of a certain cognitive claim that is something other than a mere repetition of the same claim because it claims that the claim corresponds to the way the object actually is. (I say this in view of your opinion that confirmation or verification is a logically distinct factor that Peirce fails to take due account of as a logically distinct fourth factor in his category theory.) [Joe] Let us suppose that some person, P1, makes a certain knowledge claim, C1, about a certain object, O, namely, that O is F. And let us suppose that a second person, P2, makes a claim, C2, about that claim, saying, yes, O really is as P1 claims it is, namely, F. (In other words, he makes what may seem to be a verifying claim.) And suppose that P2's claim differs from P1's claim not as regards any difference in evidential basis for saying that O is F but only because C2 is about the relationship between claim C1 and O and their observed correspondence, whereas C1 is just about O. (In other words, P1 is merely saying that O is F whereas P2 is saying not only that O is F but also that P1 is saying that O is F and is therefore speaking the truth.) Supposing that the two persons are equivalent as regards their generally recognized status as people who try to speak the truth. [Joe] Question: Is P2's claim that P1 is speaking the truth a verification of P1's claim? Not in any strong sense. Instead it is assertion, a sign, claiming a verification. The moment we move the conception of verification to such a plane, we get away from what verification is about. Now, the assertion may be, for P2, a part, an outward growth of that verification, helping solidify and store it in his memory (years later P2 forgets the incident but sees his notation of his verification and, based on good experience -- i.e., pre-verified by past good experience -- with his own past notations about verifications, he counts the notation itself as verification). Whether it's a verification to anybody else depends on the evidentiary value which, based on experience, they assign to P2's assertions. In talking about verification, it is important to specify, for what mind. You're speaking of it as if it were a kind of universal act of verification, or an act of verification to mind of God or to the mind of the semiotician studying the scenario. The semiotician may take a stand as to whether C C2 are correct or not, or may treat the scenario as an example where the semiotician does not know whether they're true. Especially in the latter case the question arises of whether P2 took the proper measures in order to make a reasonably good (though not infallible) verification of C. Verificatory ( disconfirmatory) methods can be distinguished from interpretive methods. This doesn't mean that verification is merely a method. There is considerable singularness about verification, even in mathematics -- in diagrammatic observation. In constructing a model of it, we lose sight sometimes of the fact that we're talking about a relation of a model to a
