On Jul 27, 2009, at 10:34 PM, Frances Kelly wrote:
In Peircean pragmatism there is "existential graphing" but no mention of mapping at all, at least that could be found by me. The science of psychology in his day was usually held to be a branch of philosophy, which may explain the absence of psychical mapping in his writings. If his logical graphing is held to be somewhat equivalent to psychical mapping, then something might be made of this. It would all turn on signs and especially on icons. Perhaps other members might shed some light on this question.
Thank you for looking into this. What I had in mind wasn't whether Peirce literally used the term "mapping," but how he described the way correlations are structured between two ideas or an idea and an external entity. That is what I had in mind. More exactly, I am thinking of how we use many different kinds of representations--from maps as such, drawings that graphically depict terrain features, to drawings that depict objects, to ad hoc maps like using the salt and pepper shaker and a knife to represent a street and two buildings. I don't think language works like this, as a map, but in a different way, as a process of symbolizing and then manipulating symbols according to rules of syntax and grammar and other aspects of usage. I think gestures are different, too, from largely unambiguous signs (pointing) to more elaborately abstracted gestures like wiggling your open hand as you say "iffy" or undulating your hands and arms as you describe a melody, or simply shrugging your shoulders.
Perhaps his "existential graphing" describes what I am interested in, some formalized way of establishing discrete correlations between different concepts, A for a, B for b, C for c, etc. Analogies and metaphors break down under the stress of fitting all the parts of one part onto the other part, but they are forms of concept mapping, just as the salt and pepper shakers are crude forms of physical mapping.
I have been interested in the range of degrees of "realism" in pictures, from the "highly realistic" to the "very abstract," from a painting by Estes or Bouguereau, say, or any of the many tromp l'oeil paintings, which shows a great degree of accuracy in emulating the retinal effects of the subject to, say, a drawing by Schiele, which is extremely convincing but clearly not "naturalistically" detailed. I believe that the high degree of naturalism in paintings expedites the mental interpretation that follows, and by comparison, as the degree of naturalistic finish lessens, the interpretation relies more and more on using a kind of "language" in which the lines are "read" to "depict" the details of the subject. Thus, there is a large category of pictures that are not "naturalistic" in the manner of tromp l'oeil, but are readily recognized as realistic pictures. Then at the other end are the representational pictures whose forms of portrayal do not rely on close correlation to the subject (Gaugin, for example), and I believe we "read" these more so that we see them as some kind of natural-looking proxy or miniature or surrogate. I am fascinated how cartoons and caricatures work, how we see and read them and parse our way through the unrealistic nature of cartoons. I'm really intrigued by the way we recognize public figures in political cartoons, and can recognize the president in cartoons by different artists. This circles around and touches again on the idea of "reading" the pictures, almost as if they were composed of letters, because the cartoonist relies of repeated set-piece forms, from Obama's big ears to Bush's upper lip with its pointed septum, to Clinton's chubby cheeks and bulbous nose, etc.
So, that's what I have in mind, and I was wondering where in Peirce he discusses or describes the way we correlate one idea and something else.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [email protected] http://considerthepreposition.blogspot.com/ Subscribe: [email protected] Unsubscribe: [email protected]
