Frances to William and others... Pragmatism posits that the vast majority of experts have expressly observed that all objects and signs and signers are natural in that they are phenomenal, and in being phenomenal they are categorical. The categories of phenomena felt sensed by experts have been found as terns made of qualities and facts and laws. All signs are determined by their objects as both objects and their referent signs lay in a common limited ground. The determining grounds of signs are mainly formal or causal or conventional. These grounds are given to signers who find them, rather than taken by signers who make them. The phenomenal structure of signs is the result of dispositional tendencies, in that objects are naturally inclined to be assigned as signs and reassigned to be signs of other objects. The presence of this categorical structure is no more rigid than any other infinite continuum in the world, be it time or space or gravity or energy or light or matter.
The eventual use of signs in the mind of learned humans is as symbols to make logics real. The pure objective logics found to exist in the world can only be accessed indirectly, due to the limits of life and sense and mind, so that the logics in mind is a degraded and degenerative version of pure logics as represented by signs. In regard to the signs of semiotic signage systems and of linguistic language systems it is my understanding that pragmatists hold semiotics to be logics in the broadest manner possible, and to be a theoretical science, while they hold linguistics to be only a practical science, having nothing to do with logics at all. The signs of logics are hence not dependent on say the contexts or contacts or exchanges or concords of signers. All signers however do bring some "collateral paradigm experience" with them to the task of signing with signs, but this experience is dispositional and habituated, rather than contextualized or segregationist or even linguist. (The lingual theory of Roy Harris is vaguely familiar to me and roughly remembered from my past studies. As recalled it is a very good theory of language signs under structural linguistics. Let me get back to the list later with some views on this verbal sign theory.) -----Original Message----- From: William Conger [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, 02 January, 2011 11:01 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Tokens as Signs in Art and Nonart (...new thread from "Is today's [art?] irrelevant?") In response to Frances. Your comment below is interesting but dense. Pragmatism, in an effort to account for all the different ways a sign functions, seems to add fixed categories of signs instead if simply seeing a sign as organic, its function being a product of creative contextualization. This is where Roy Harris' Integrationist linguistics is most useful. It's basic notion is that the sign is created by language/communication and not that language/communication is facilitated or validated by fixed signs. Harris calls that pre-fixed sign concept "segregationist" to denote the assumption that signs are permanently stable and segregated from the fluidity of language and communication. He reverses the usual order and says that the sign is a result of of it is perceived. Why have all those different types of signs, tokens, replicas, tones, and the like when an organic concept of sign is sufficient. I'd be very interested in Frances' take of Roy Harris' Integrationist linguistics. He takes pains to discuss is theory in its contrast to both Peirce and Saussure. ----- Original Message ---- From: Frances Kelly <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, January 2, 2011 6:05:55 AM Subject: Tokens as Signs in Art and Nonart (...new thread from "Is today's [art?] irrelevant?") Frances to William and others... You wrote earlier about tokens as individual works and the global truths they may signify or the common concepts they can evoke. You seemed to conclude that this blending of the individual with the communal might be a thorn for pragmatism. It is correct that the presence of particular individuals in the world has indeed been a pragmatist problem, but one that has seemingly been tentatively resolved. In its attempt to account for the common properties of individual members and their communal groups, the philosophy of pragmatism under its semiotics has posited the semantic theory of tones and tokens and types, which are a trident of immediate subordinate signs that are preparatory to the immediate pragmatic effects of those same signs but as conceivably interpreted. Peircean philosophy however becomes admittedly fuzzy in the face of the different individual tokens regarded as works of art and as acts of tech and as ideas of science. To escape the haze by saying that the singular artistic and technical and scientific tokens as members of both art and tech and science as typical classes are together seeking to merge into something global such as a belief in truth for example is perhaps not clear enough. This attempt at clarity by pragmatism in using say beauty or goodness or truth or whatever as a common eventual factor fails especially if there is no recognition by pragmatism that the concept of art and the concept of tech and the concept of science are to be held as or derived from different separate tokens, and for these unique or peculiar tokens to even go on and further signify or evoke different separate concepts. If sole objects of art or tech or science are not found to objectively share some common global factor with each other or all together, then the theory of objective norms and classes would fail. The existence of art and tech and science as external umbrellas would then indeed be irrelevant, aside from being subjective mental constructs such as notions or nominations or stipulations. It is correct that for pragmatism a token is a sign that can eventually stand for or evoke a concept, and further that a singular token may refer to a singular concept, but it is also correct that a singular token can refer simultaneously or sequentially to several similar or different concepts, and further that several similar tokens will even refer simultaneously or sequentially to a singular concept. This mixed relation of token works and acts and ideas to typical kinds and sorts and classes, and further to the conceivable consequences the tokens and their types evoke, therefore often seems to be a contradiction of the pragmatist theory of tones and tokens and types. The theory of singular tokens being individual and particular and unique and peculiar and definite is indeed somewhat difficult to define as pragmatism attempts to posit it. It might help therefore to first locate tokens formally within pragmatist semiotics, before attempting to broadly apply them referentially and instrumentally in situations of semiosis, such as in acts of art and tech science. Under the first grand division of semiotics called informative analytics or grammatics, its second dimension after immediate syntactics is called immediate semantics. It holds three groups of subsigns called qualisigns and sinsigns and legisigns. To be tridentially consistent with the phenomenal categories of realist pragmatism, these groups are structured as a trichotomy. The one qualitative qualisign is a tone. The two singular sinsigns are tokens and replicas. The three lawful legisigns are types and codes and semes. It is of interest to note that variant codes of types are not replicant tokens of types, but are coincidental alignments with types, yet may impact on the issue at hand. At a narrow micro level, examples of linguistic verbal codes would be those that substitute for grammatical alphabets, or those that serve as synonyms and metonyms. At a broader macro level, cultural and social codes can impact on acts like art and tech and science in ways that formal and natural tokens would be disabled or inefficient or inadequate. An individual token that is similar to another individual token, like a replicate pair of identical clones for example, will nonetheless be found definitely different even if only at some far distant indefinite point. If a token is ever held to be different from any other token, which it should be, then it probably will be found as different in the long run, regardless of whether it ever actually will be found different. It is the
