Thanks, Gary, I appreciate the effort you've been making to follow and feedback
on that. I'm sorry
it's such slow going but that's just what it takes to develop all the details
of the picture from
what our Peirce left still in the darkroom. And we're only in the first
foothills of the ascent.
The "Seeker Of Continuities Reconstructing All Theoretically Enlightening
Scenarios" in me selected
Peirce's 1870 Logic of Relatives to focus on partly because we can discover in
it the embryo of his
much later work on logical graphs, at the same time pre-empting the historical
revisionism of many
later writers who try to assimilate Peirce's logic to schools of thought he had
already outmatched.
Regards,
Jon
Gary Fuhrman wrote:
Jon,
I assume your reference to the "bi-semiotics list" was spelt that way
intentionally, to hint that
it's "still too embroiled in dyadic styles of S-R behaviorism to convey the core of what Peirce
was saying." Though I don't entirely agree with that, you may be right that the dyadic style
"comes from failing to grasp the basic concepts of the logic of relatives and the mathematics of
relations." So I am trying (though not always successfully) to follow your thread on Peirce's
1870 paper. I'm more interested in the Existential Graphs, actually, but I think it's wise to
approach Peirce's system from as many angles as possible.
gary f.
-----Original Message----- From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 20-Mar-14 1:53 PM To:
Gary Fuhrman Cc: [email protected]; Peirce List Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Thirteen Ways of
Looking at a Blackboard ...
Gary,
Speaking of Wallace Stevens ...
I have sampled but a fraction of what floats over from the bi-semiotics list, but nothing I've
sampled so far tempts me to seek for more. By and large it all evokes a reminiscence of the kind
of stuff I used to read from Carnap and Morris back in the 1960s -- not as far off-base from
Peirce as some have said, not with a grain of charitable interpretation anyway, but still too
embroiled in dyadic styles of S-R behaviorism to convey the core of what Peirce was saying.
That largely comes from failing to grasp the basic concepts of the logic of relatives and the
mathematics of relations.
It has always been hard for Peirceans to make much headway through the mists of syntax generated
by logical atomizers, but a failure to understand the difference between objects and signs makes
the going go from tough to retrograde.
Regards,
Jon
Gary Fuhrman wrote:
I think this discussion on the biosemiotics list has been very fruitful, and would like to add
a few metacomments which I’m also copying to peirce-l because they relate directly to Peirce’s
logic and semiotics. By the way, the subject line I’ve copied here comes from John Deely, and
appears to be truncated, but I’ve left it because it reminds me of a line from Wallace Stevens:
“Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.”
First, I think a comparison of Deely’s “spiral” of semiosis with Vinicius Romanini’s “solenoid
of semiosis” would throw a lot of light on Peirce’s classification of signs. Both are
represented in sets of youtube videos: see
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=E9651802BCDC14BF and
http://www.minutesemeiotic.org/
Both of these, as far as I can tell, adhere to the ethic of terminology which prescribes that
once somebody has named an identifiable phenomenon or concept, and that name has been accepted
in that field, future workers in that field should maintain that usage of that term, for the
simple reason that any specialized field requires a consistent lexicon shared by all the
workers in that field. (However, nobody should expect such consistency to prevail in other
contexts, including interdisciplinary dialogues, where the terms have to be explicitly defined
or their usage inferred from the context.) Within the field of Peircean semiotics, Deely and
Romanini have been working pretty much independently, as far as I know, and that’s why the
comparison of “spiral” and “solenoid” should illuminate how Peircean semiotics is evolving. I
would not, however, recommend either of the above to beginners in Peircean semiotics; they
would be much better off to start with the de Waal book on Peirce, in my opinion.
The second metapoint I’d like to make, or reiterate, is that the products of
any analysis — the
“elements” identified by it — are determined not only by the inherent
qualities of what’s
being analyzed, but also by the purpose of the analysis. Peirce’s analysis of
semiotic
phenomena is essentially a logical analysis: starting with the traditional
question of how
arguments work, he proceeded to analyze arguments into propositions,
propositions into subject
and predicate (and copula), those elements of the proposition into signs, etc.
His aim was to
make this analysis as elementary and as universal as possible, so that it
generates terms
capable of explaining how the most primitive forms of semiosis are related to
the most highly
developed form, which is the argument. Part of that explication relates human
reasoning to the
much more comprehensive “logic of the universe” which we call the “laws of
nature”.
On the biosemiotics list, we have at least two “semiotic” analyses which differ from the
Peircean because their purposes are different. One is Howard Pattee’s, and his purpose, as far
as I can tell, is to restate (I won’t say “solve”) the traditional “symbol-matter problem” in
physics. Since he limits himself to the specialized lexicon of physics, and has no interest in
logic (not even in the forms of reasoning employed by physicists), he has no use for the
Peircean analysis of signs, and generalizes from this to the vociferously expressed opinion
that biosemiotics has no use for the minute Peircean analysis of semiosis. (Yet, oddly enough,
he also claims that his usage of the term “symbol” is the same as Peirce’s).
The other analysis, also delivered quite vociferously, is Edwina Taborsky’s. She also insists
that her analysis is Peircean to the core, but I think she’s just about the only one who
believes this. As far as I can tell, the purpose of her analysis is to work out a consistent
pansemiotic theory of the “organization of matter”, using a quasi-mathematical method. From
what I’ve seen, her analysis is very clever and does appear to be consistent. Personally I have
found no use for it, because to me it seems to be purely mathematical, i.e.
hypothetical
rather than experiential. Mathematicians may well feel differently. Anyway I
would classify
Taborskian pansemiotics as a separate and distinct branch of theoretical
biosemiotics, one that
biologists in particular have little use for, because it doesn’t clearly
distinguish between
semiosis and physical existence. One can’t explain a special relationship
between life and
signs on that basis, and that is the relationship that most biosemioticians are
interested in.
I don’t expect that either Edwina or Howard will accept my description of their work, and
that’s fine, I only mention them to illustrate my point that the products of analysis are
partially determined by the purposes of the analysis. I do think this is important for a basic
understanding of Peirce, because his analyses varied with his purposes. For instance, sometimes
his analysis of the proposition would “throw into the subject everything that
can be removed
from the predicate”, while at other times, what the predicate is depends on
what we choose to
consider as a subject. (This wording is from the article by Francesco Bellucci
on “Peirce's
Continuous Predicates” in Transactions 2013, no. 2, pp. 178-202.) I think if we
kept this in
mind — and recognized ‘that it is no inconsiderable art, this business of
“phaneroscopic”
analysis by which one frames a scientific definition’ (EP2:403) — it would
eliminate many
“logomachies” or terminological disputes which serve no useful purpose.
gary f.
From: Deely, John N. [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 19-Mar-14 6:34 PM To:
[email protected] Subject: [biosemiotics:5459] Re: What kind of sign is ANYTHING called
"a ...
The “representamen” is not a relation, but one of three terms within or “under” a single
triadic relation, the one that serves as the sign-vehicle (one of Peirce’s terms, by the way).
The “significate” (or object) may or may not be an existential unit in itself: Napoleon as
Emperor of the French at one time was such an “existential unit in itself”; Hamlet as Prince of
Denmark never was. So there can often be a dyadic interaction with resultant dyadic relation
between representamen and significate.
A relation I not an action but rather a suprasubjective connection or link that arises from
actions. The representamen as such is such because of the postion it occupies in a given
triadic relation; but the representamen is indeed often a thing, like that red-colored octagon
with white markings commonly called “a stop sign”. What doesn’t represent another than itself,
insofar as it does not, is simply not actually a representamen.
It remains that what you call the “triadic sign” is the consequent of one relation irreducibly
triadic; whence there is no such thing as “a non-triadic sign”; a system of signs indeed is a
set of relations; but a given “sign” is a set of terms united under one relation.
(Try that video -- http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=E9651802BCDC14BF --
all five parts,
however.)
Cheers
--
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