Jeff D, Gary R, Paul C, all three of your contributions throw lots of light on the issue.
Based on the latter two, I would opine that “suprasubjective” probably would have served Peirce’s purposes as a logician better than “intersubjective”, if he’d had the opportunity to choose between them. But that’s because logic, even in the broader semeiotic sense, is mainly concerned with the nature of inquiry as an approach to truth. Harari’s concerns in Nexus are framed in terms of information rather than logic or semiotic, and as he says, information networks can be (and increasingly are in our time!) indifferent to truth. As Paul pointed out to me offlist, Harari is writing for the mainstream, not for Peirceans or semioticians. “Intersubjective” is much more useful as a mainstream term than “suprasubjective” (which doesn’t even appear in the OED). But as I see it, Peirce’s concept of information (and of communication) is perfectly compatible with Harari’s. Both are compatible with Gregory Bateson’s definition of information as “any difference that makes a difference”, and I use all three in Turning Signs, which (like Nexus) is aimed at a mainstream audience as opposed to a specialist audience. (Though Harari has obviously had more success in that respect!) Harari is mainly a historian, and his book certainly demonstrates that the intersubjective realities propagated by information networks (such as social media) make a difference to the behavior, both personal and collective, of the “subjects” who engage with them. In that sense they are pragmatic realities. I don’t see how we can deny that the stories we find on Facebook or YouTube are real, although we can frequently deny their factuality or truth. They are real because they have power to affect social relations, which in turn have powerful effects on the biophysical reality of the more-than-human world. If I may bring in an old-fashioned term, they have rhetorical power. Whether they are entia rationis in the Peircean sense or not, such stories are “real powers in the world without any figure of speech” (Lowell Lecture 5, 1903: https://gnusystems.ca/Lowell5.htm#KS3f). And Peirce says this even in a logical context. Love, gary f. Coming from the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Paul Cobley Sent: 14-Jan-25 03:46 To: [email protected]; Gary Richmond <[email protected]>; [email protected] Cc: Robert Junqueira <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Intersubjective Reality Dear Gary F, Gary R, Robert, List, Thanks to Gary R for intervening and making some of the points that I would have made whilst I was away from email – although Gary R does so more eloquently than I could. Firstly, we were originally discussing the issue of ‘reality’, but Robert was right to raise the issue of linguistic communication because the whole point of Deely’s work (or one of them) is that humans are not simply to be defined as ‘verbal’. We share with non-human animals a very extensive non-verbal semiosis. Anthroposemiosis is verbal and non-verbal, as Sebeok repeatedly stipulates, and it fosters a particular reality. Secondly, I never suggested that Deely’s sometimes mysterious 2009 book offers an answer. In this business, we don’t trade in answers. That said, I think it’s quite persuasive. Purely objective realities are fictions which carry such weight that they come to feel, through intersubjective interactions, almost as if they are realities in themselves. To address this, though, there needs to be a radical re-thinking of objectivity and subjectivity. As we all know, objectivity, in common parlance, implies a view that is outside all events in question and can take an Olympian, ‘objective’, ‘realistic’ perspective on them. (That’s a fiction in itself, but let’s leave that aside for a moment). Subjectivity, on the other hand, is the realm of, well, a ‘subjective’ view – absolutely tied to the relative positions of the participants of the events. I have been schooled in the Kantian and poststructuralist definition of subjectivity in which humans are subject to their positions. This has a bearing on the matter of reality, of course, but can also be left aside for a moment. For many years, I thought that Deely’s version of the objectivity/subjectivity couplet – certainly in need of revision, as Heidegger insisted in 1946 – as well as Deely’s distinction between thing, object and sign, was, in most ways, an independent formulation. I’m grateful, therefore, to Gary F for providing Peirce’s definition from the <https://gnusystems.ca/TS/rlb.htm#bjctv> Century Dictionary. This is precisely the understanding of ‘objective’ with which Deely was working, referring to an object’ in the sign/representamen, object, interpretant triad. The most convincing part of Deely’s argument on this matter for me, representing a major development of semiotics, I’d argue, concerns the ‘suprasubjective’. As Gary R says, the “suprasubjective provides the foundation for shared meanings, that is for the intersubjectivity”. Put another way, the very possibility of relation (singular), provides the grounds for relations (plural). A typical Deely example (2017) distinguishes between intersubjective and suprasubjective relations: We are supposed to meet for dinner; you show up and I don’t (or vice-versa), and you are annoyed until you find out that I died on the way to the dinner. At my moment of death, at the moment I ceased to have a material subjectivity encounterable in space and time, the relation between us went from being intersubjective as well as suprasubjective to being only suprasubjective; yet under both sets of circumstances I (or you) as the objective terminus of the dinner engagement remained suprasubjective (if not intersubjective!) as a constant influencing the behavior of the one still living in whom the relation retained a subjective foundation as a cognitive state provenating the relation as suprasubjectively terminating at an ‘other’. Thus, the sign – or semiosis – on the one hand, consists not in an ‘objectivist’, determinate entity that is sustained by intersubjectivity, but in a thoroughly malleable relation that is indeterminate in respect of its terminus except insofar as it is understood by agents within the relation. On the other hand, the sign is suprasubjective in that its force – like that of fictions and the law – endures even when one or more of the subjects is removed. Best, Paul Deely, John (2017) ‘Ethics and the semiosis-semiotics distinction’, Special issue of Zeitschrift für Semiotik ed. Morten Tønnessen, Jonathan Beevor and Yogi Hendlin, 37 (3-4): 13-30.
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