Jon, List, Jon, you are as articulate as you always are (appreciated) but I cannot agree with you on two points. One, I think it useful to think with Saussure when reading Peirce so long as you do not take Saussure for Peirce (I read a book I want to cite — just by description here — some time ago which was a very long study on the history of each figure and where each diverged on very specific points of order: I found that to be excellent, though all I can remember is that it featured each in the title?
Also, on the apriori and the real. I mean, this should be easy. If a real (or the real) is that which is what it is regardless of what is thought/experienced (and Peirce makes this distinction over and over) then it corresponds very simply to Kant's notion of the apriori (or Kant's apriori — his general use of that term which indicates "beyond experience" which is also that which covers "things" which are however they are regardless of one's experience or thoought). I think the onus is on Peirce (or rather the Peircean community) to demonstrate how radical the difference is in that one respect (real/beyond experience...) when Peirce flirts with it fairly explicitly. Best, Jack ________________________________ From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, August 4, 2025 11:25 PM To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Semiosic Ontology (was Spencer-Brown's concept of 'reentry') Helmut, Jack, List: Peirce metaphysically defines exist as "react with the other like things in the environment" (quoted yesterday) and the real as "that which holds its characters on such a tenure that it makes not the slightest difference what any man or men may have thought them to be, or ever will have thought them to be" (CP 6.495, c. 1906). Accordingly, everything that exists is real, so every sign token is real; but there are realities that do not exist, including signs in themselves, although not every sign type is real. Most notably, the types that comprise languages and other humanly devised sign systems are as they are only because people think about them that way, such that their definitions are their immediate interpretants. For example, it is merely due to long-established conventions that an adult male human is designated by "man" in English, "Mann" in German, "homme" in French, etc.; but it is a real fact that those words currently mean what they do within those languages, and because they are (more or less) directly translatable into each other, they are different types of the same real sign. Moreover, all three instances of those words in the previous sentence have a different tone from the rest, in accordance with the convention of enclosing each in quotation marks when referring to it as a type instead of using it as a token; and the two non-English word-instances have another different tone, in accordance with the convention of italicizing foreign language terms. I believe that it is a mistake to mix Saussurean and Peircean terminology, dyadic semiology/linguistics with triadic semiotics, because they are very different and ultimately incompatible conceptualizations. Saussure's "signifier" effectively reduces signs to tokens (spatiotemporal entities), and his "signified" conflates the object and interpretant instead of carefully distinguishing them as Peirce vigorously advocates. The latter's "commens" (or "commind") is not a broad community of sign-users, it is "that mind into which the minds of utterer and interpreter have to be fused in order that any communication should take place," which "consists of all that is, and must be, well understood between utterer and interpreter, at the outset, in order that the sign in question should fulfill its function. ... No object can be denoted unless it be put into relation to the object of the commens" (EP 2:478, SS 196-7, 1906 Mar 9), which object is the overlapping collateral experience/observation of the utterer and interpreter. From Peirce's standpoint, it is also incorrect to equate "the real" with "the a priori" and/or that which is "beyond experience." He maintains that nothing that is real is beyond possible experience or otherwise incapable of being cognized, which is why he rejects Kant's "thing-in-itself" as we discussed at considerable length on the List about two years ago. It "can neither be indicated nor found"--it is not part of anyone's collateral experience/observation, and thus always absent from the commens--so "no proposition can refer to it, and nothing true or false can be predicated of it. Therefore, all references to it must be thrown out as meaningless surplusage" (CP 5.525, c. 1905). Instead, Peirce maintains that "we have direct experience of things in themselves" (CP 6.95, 1903), and that the dynamical object of any sign "is itself something in the nature of a representation, or sign,--something noumenal, intelligible, conceivable, and utterly unlike a thing-in-itself" (CP 5.553, EP 2:380, 1906). In my own formulation, to be at all is to be representable. Accordingly, confining the interpretant to "an effect upon a person" is "a sop to Cerberus, because I despair of making my own broader conception understood" (EP 2:478, SS 81, 1908 Dec 23). As Peirce put it in a contemporaneous letter to a different correspondent, "My idea of a sign has been so generalized that I have at length despaired of making anybody comprehend it, so that for the sake of being understood, I now limit it, so as to define a sign as anything which is on the one hand so determined (or specialized) by an object and on the other hand so determines the mind of an interpreter of it that the latter is thereby determined mediately, or indirectly, by that real object that determines the sign" (NEM 3:866, 1908 Dec 5). This thread is about his broader conception--his generalized idea of a sign--which encompasses the entire universe, not merely languages and other humanly devised sign systems. Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Structural Engineer, Synechist Philosopher, Lutheran Christian www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt<http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt> / twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt<http://twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt> On Mon, Aug 4, 2025 at 1:50 PM Jack Cody <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Helmut, Jon, List. "A sign is not real. But a sign contains something real: There is always something, that is discernable from its environment, without which the sign would not function." — Helmut R. I tend to agree with Helmut here. I do not think it contains something — although you could argue on a signifer/signifed basis that the signifer points to the signified and that in abstract linguistic usage that which most signs (banal language use) "contain" is that connection: the relation, Pavlovain in its arbitrariness, between signifier and signified. Saussure would call this the "social product" which is deposited in the brain in what Peirce might call the "commens" or community (of speakers). Real, insofar as that term is used here, surely must be that which is (true) regardless of whatever anyone may experience/think (this is properly apriori). In that respect, I have to, and this is more metaphysical (though necessary) conclude with Helmut that it's unlikely "signs" are "real" in that apriori (beyond experience) sense. Not entirely sure of where Peirce stood upon the issue beyond two or three quotations that as I've noted before, though I am a ways from producing my own work here, I do not find consistent. That is, the "apriori" in Kant (whom we know Peirce "more than admires" but whose "noumenal" Peirce cannot accept) — that apriori is that which is "beyond experience" but necessarily exists. It is remarkably close to what Peirce would call that "real" insofar as I have ever understood Peirce here (though Peirce doesn't want to pay what is often cited as the "noumenal price"). Just some thoughts. Best Jack ________________________________ From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> on behalf of Helmut Raulien <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Sent: Monday, August 4, 2025 5:40 PM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>; [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: Aw: [PEIRCE-L] Semiosic Ontology (was Spencer-Brown's concept of 'reentry') Jon, List, A sign is not real. But a sign contains something real: There is always something, that is discernable from its environment, without which the sign would not function. With "discernable" I mean that a thought-experimental alien, who is maximally different from us, would see that there is something special, without knowing its meaning. Like us seeing the "Wow"- signal in extraterrestrial waves- which might be just due to random chance though, as i donot say, that everything discernable is a sign, but only the other way around. An object does not have to be discernable, it might be a probe of the ocean or a coordinate in empty space. The universe is discernable from its environment, although in this case the environment is an inner environment: Something particular. It is easy to discern an universal law from a cultural rule, or a human right based on the castegorical imperative from a dancehall dress code. So the universe is a sign. Best regards, helmut
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