Frances to William and others... (1)
The state of notions in the self, as given by the self or the other, or as taken from the self or the other, are signs and are thus necessarily interpreted, clearly yielding a notion less than the original. The fact that the notion is exchanged either inside or outside the self is perhaps irrelevant. (2) Attempting to correlate uttered notions sent by and of the other with those notions received by and of the self, or to correlate the taken notions of the self with the given notions of the other is likely possible, but only if some degree of interpretation is accepted into the mix. For the self to agree with what the other said is to also agree with what the self guesses the other said, which is in effect to agree with the self and perhaps also with the other, but likely more than the other. In any event, a guess is an inferred interpretation. The effect of interpretation of course is for the self to get a reduced and degraded or degenerative notion, whether the notion is mainly of the self or the other. (3) Peirce held that all which can be felt or sensed or known are reduced to indirect phenomena, and that these degraded phenomena exist as objects, and that all objects are signs of other objects. Phenomenal objects furthermore can be metaphysical or physical or psychical. An idea for example is a mental object, which is also a psychical sign of some other object in the mind. The issue now turns on how subjectivity can be related to this objectivity. (4) Your attempt to blend a notion of the self with a notion of the sign is intriguing to me because of my interest in Peirce and his pragmatist semiotics. Both pragmatism and semiotics are of course filled with terns. For example, signs are icons or indexes or symbols, grounds are similar or causal or conventional, objects are possible or actual or agreeable, contents are abstract or concrete or discrete, effects are immediate or dynamic or mediate, responses are emotional or practical or intellectual, and so on. The tern of tones and tokens and types act mainly as subordinate signs, but by analogy they are applied in pragmatism to all phenomena. To blend these terns with the psyche and its inner notions is a challenge. The pragmatist mind is reportedly of sensation or sense, and volition or will, and cognition or thought. This tern however is objectively logical and may not get to the core of subjectivity. In any event, objectivity must be related to subjectivity, because the physical brain and body after all houses the psychical mind and thought. (5) My tentative stance on subjectivity, and for it to be consistent with Peircean terns, is to hold the human psyche as being a brain full of sign senses, and a mind full of sign objects, and a thought full of sign systems. The subjective observation of phenomena by the psyche might yield in mind a vision as an impression, or a notion as correlation and association, or a nomination as a mention and gestation and notation. The expression of the observation to others can also be in the form of an objective vision or notion or nomination. (6) The mental psyche of the human being overall would then be the subjective umbrella under which might fall something like the self and the subject and the person. The self would be the inner hidden tone and sign vehicle of the psyche. The subject would be the private token and referred object of the psyche. The person would be the outer public type and interpreted effect of the psyche. The tonal self gives rise unconsciously to say speech that the human uses, but the human cannot talk to the self. The token subject is the human talking to its own human being in say silent thought. The typical person is the presentation of the human to others in ordinary everyday life. (7) There are several tenets of semiotics that this stuff might fall under. The token or subject and referred object determines the tone or self and sign vehicle, and the tone then determines the type or person and interpreted effect. The tone and the token lay joined together in a ground of formal iconic similarity or causal indexic contiguity or conventional symbolic arbitrarity. The tone directly moderates between the token and the type which are indirectly separated. The type in turn governs and controls the relation between the tone and token in the ground to assure some degree of normality. All in the world that can be felt or known must be done only by the sense of existent phenomena in the form of a token. To sense a tone or a token or a type is to sense a token of them. The token does not make the tone or the type, but rather stands for them. The tone is a fleeting mystical construct or effervescent quality, and to point to a tone is to necessarily point to a sample token that resembles and simulates that tone. The type is a rigorous mental construct or emergent law, whose presence can only be manifested by a substantive token. This is the brute fact of life, to struggle with effort as humans attempt to make sense of the oppositional tokens that bombard them. (8) There is admittedly a lot in this stance to wrestle with as far as the subjectivity of notions goes. The challenge for me is to try and fit this psychical stuff into a frame that is consistent with the phenomenal categories and semiotic signs of pragmatism. This task seems to be an ongoing and unending work in progress, but so be it. (9) Peirce was admittedly a backwoodsman, attempting to clear a speculative and tentative trail for others to cultivate. He built a rough system of the world based upon his own sound observation of phenomena, and left the details to be filled in by future consultants and specialists and experts. In the opinions of leading academics, for any learned expert scholar to now ignore or reject Peircean philosophy is downright unreasonable and irrational and illogical. Peirce had gone to great effort in an attempt to correct the wrongs of philosophy in his day, and by all reliable accounts he succeeded admirably. He has also made philosophy and metaphysics into what is now heralded as being scientific.
