Gary F., List: I appreciate the subject line, emphasizing that the semeiotic whole is ontologically prior to its constituent parts (top-down); not the other way around, as if the former were *assembled *from the latter as its basic units in the reductionist sense (bottom-up). The entire universe is not *composed *of individual signs as its building blocks, it is instead *perfused *with signs (CP 5.448n, EP 2:394, 1906)--a vast symbol that *involves *indices and icons (CP 5.119, EP 2:193-4, 1903).
I have indeed regularly quoted that 1906 passage in R 295 (finally published at LF 3/1:234-5) to support my conception of the universe as one immense sign, a semiosic continuum, an ongoing inferential process--an argument from which we prescind facts as represented by propositions using names, those "smaller" signs thus being artifacts of analysis along with their associated objects and interpretants (see also CP 2.27, 1902). I also maintain that perception is likewise an undivided whole from which we prescind predicates, hypostasize some of them into subjects, and attribute others to those subjects in propositions, namely, perceptual judgments-- "the first premisses of all our reasonings" (CP 5.116, EP 2:191, 1903). I provide a few quotations from Peirce to support that understanding in section 3.5 of my "Semiosic Synechism" paper ( https://philpapers.org/archive/SCHSSA-42.pdf). Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Structural Engineer, Synechist Philosopher, Lutheran Christian www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt / twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt On Wed, Oct 1, 2025 at 11:38 AM <[email protected]> wrote: > If I may, I’d like to move on to some *a posteriori* reasoning (i.e. > evidence from the “positive sciences” of phenomenology, neuropsychology and > biology) that seems to support aspects of Peirce’s category-based > semeiotics. > > Helmut, some time ago you expressed some skepticism about my remark in a > post that perceived objects are “artifacts of analysis” just as signs are. > I didn’t have the time to clarify what I meant back then, but perhaps I can > make up for that now, by offering this link: > https://gnusystems.ca/TS/scp.htm#csptd . > > I’m sure that 1906 passage has been cited here before (probably by JAS), > but not the neurobiological work that supports it, which begins here: > https://gnusystems.ca/TS/sdg.htm#x13 . That passage from *Turning Signs* > also links to the one above. > > Love, gary f > > Coming from the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg >
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