Frances to Cheerskep and others... Thanks for the excellent subjectivist overview. Your psychologistic stance in regard to most arbitrary signs of verbal language is pretty much agreed to, but only within that lingual limit. Here are a few quick reactions of mine up for correction. (1) Your "notional" take on signs like words is likely good to a degree when applied only to genuine lingual symbols. When applied to other conventionally degenerative symbols like rituals and emblems, or to causal indexes like imprints and symptoms, or to formal icons of objective similarity, then the "notional" stance as a global theory of all signs will fail. (2) Signs are ordinary objects, such as marks on paper or tones in space or shocks of energy, that are assigned by natural disposition to stand for other objects at the behest of nonhuman or human signers, which signers may be the referred objects themselves as say atoms or neurons. Signs in general by this realist and objectivist account may not "have" stuff or "react" well, but signs do in fact at least "bear" content and "yield" value and "endure" usage, and also "incite" or "excite" signers to action, even in the absence of the normal human mind. (3) The thought of a signer is not in the mind, any more than the motion is in the body when the body is moving in motion, but rather the thought is in the sign objectively that the signer senses when in a relation with the sign, be the sign a mark or tone or gest or word or book. (4) Thought can be initiated by sense and mind via icons like pictorial depictions, or via indexes like abnormal infirmities, or via symbols like lingual propositions. The mental result may be a vision or a notion or a nomination. Thought by the mind can thus be nondiscursive or rediscursive or discursive. The content and idea born by say a drawn iconic image may evoke a related vision, but the content and idea is not a mental construct, nor is the visual thought of it in the mind. (5) The concept of the Peircean "interpretant" sign as an objective grammatical effect of the initial "representant" sign or vehicle should perhaps be taken up here as a thread, because it may adequately address many of the concerns you raised.
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, September 29, 2008 3:48 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Community Vocabulary Geoff asks: If forum members read and remember new definitions of say Peircean terms then: do individuals in the community alter their vocabularies? First make sure you have a serviceably clear idea in mind when you say 'vocabulary'. When we hear a word... (I'll pause there to address our excellent verbal-inconsistency watchdog, Michael Brady: Yes, in one of my more formally philosophic modes, I've said there "are" no words. I stand by my argument for saying that (don't worry -- I won't repeat it here!). But in this less formal forum context right now, it's serviceable to use the term. It's true -- almost everyone who reads the scription 'word' will conjure a somewhat muddled notion, but it is unlikely to be muddled in a way that prevents my communicating the core notion I want to convey at this moment. Everything -- including both muddlement and communication -- is a matter of degree.) So, to continue from the point where I was so tediously interrupted: When we hear a word, the notion that arises in our mind may be thought of as being of two sorts: The public associations, and the private ones. We tend to use 'vocabulary' to indicate words with generally accepted public notions -- the notions we can expect most of the pertinent community to entertain. These are the notions that dictionary-definitions aim to occasion. If we say Jones "has a very large vocabulary" usually what we intend to convey is that Jones's memory contains a very large number of words with which he associates notions that are at least roughly like the notions that will arise in the minds of most people in a given community. Thus we may talk of a "Peircean" vocabulary, a Swedish vocabulary, and the vocabularies of various "cultures" -- the "art world", the internet, and even obscene words. So, yes, we may reasonably say a vocabulary is altered when you "learn new words". Notice: a new "definition" acquired does not regularly mean all the old notions are displaced, eradicated. Thus much of what we think of as "alteration" is ADDITIONAL notion that stirs with a given word. Peirce was his own worst obstacle in two ways. The first was in his invention of a superfluity of neologisms, and of new, unique notions he wanted to be conveyed when he used old, familiar words -- e.g. his notions of 'sign' etc. He was usually motivated by a salubrious intention: to reduce confusion -- but, accept for those willing to put in an immense amount of study of Peirce without yet much evidence he was worth it, he compounded confusion. Everyone who knew Peirce agreed he was very smart -- but regularly exhibited bad judgment. The second was in his acceptance or invention of cripplingly mistaken notions. Frances, in a spurt of her admirable industry, recently posted over 8,000 words of Peirce teachings. I shake my head at the teachings' combination of opacity and error -- most of which error is not unique to Peirce. One example: the assumption that signs -- e.g. words -- DO things. But words are inert. They do not "signify", "designate", "refer to". Inert, insensate, ink on paper DOES nothing. The contemplating mind carries out all the action -- especially in its associating a scription with remembered previous notion. That general error is manifested to this day by philosophers as revered as Saul Kripke who thinks "names" "pick out" subjects. Underlying this error is the mistaken conviction that there is some sort of illy-thought-out, mind-independent "connection" between a scription and that other mind-independent entity, the word's "meaning". A Fregean might say, "Well, it's not the word that does anything, it's the MEANING of the word." Which simply compounds the errors involved. Allied to this misake is the curiously unexamined notion behind the word 'to have'. Too briefly, I'll assert the alleged action of "having" is a chimera. Nothing "has" anything (in particular a "meaning'). You don't even "have" money in the bank. Look hard: if you examine that notion closely, you will see it is a cluster of predictable observable actions and outcomes -- none of which entails the existence of the action "to have" (or "own", or "belong" etc -- all similar chimeras.) (Classical positivism as a philosophic position crashed and burned -- but it's a mistake to believe that mut imply there was no worth to any of it (including some essentially Peircean notions).) 'To have' is a word that has emerged to "account for" the results of the mind's repeated associations, all of which are easily "accounted for" by repeated juxtapositions in our experience. Point at a dog repeatedly, and say "dog" to your child. As the child gets older you'll be pointing at other things and
