Excellent outline, Vinicius. I very much like your relationship between Psi and Phi
----- Original Message ----- From: Vinicius Romanini To: Catherine Legg Cc: Peirce List Sent: Friday, March 21, 2014 12:54 PM Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] RE: [biosemiotics:5459] Re: What kind of sign is ANYTHING called "a Dear Cathy, Yes, and I also remember us having a good milkshake for lunch that day. What I call the solenoid of semeiosis is a diagram of my understanding of the relations among the sign aspects. Topologically, the solenoid is torus that connects its end with its own beginning (like the ancient ouroboros, for instant). It is identical to the Moebius strip and Klein's bottle, all of them having this same property of turning around itself. I use the solenoid to explain my periodic table of classes of signs. Actually, I call it "periodic" for the single reason that the solenoid has periods. The best way to present my table would be as the form of a snail. It is presented in my website as a flat triangular figure because it makes easy to deal with it. I have a hard time explaining all this and usually the first question I get when people first see it is about the "holes" in the periodic table, which are there precisely because it is a 2D projection of a 3D figure. The mapa mundi also has holes (or deformities) due to the same reason. The solenoid is better understood if you choose a bottom-up analysis. The loops or periods represent habit formation among the aspects. The first loop, at the bottom, represents the "habit of habit breaking" (Psi), while the second represents the "habit of habit taking" (Phi). Together, these two loops express how the sign develops toward the final interpretant. When the habits of these two loops are balanced, we observe intelligence and life. It is what Peice calls the entelechy or the "perfect sign". If the habit of the loop Phi becomes too strong, it suffocates the period bellow and we observe the diminishing of the novelty in semeiosis, up to the point we have only cristalized spacetime (the vacuum, for instance). On the other hand, if the "habit of habit breaking" becomes predominant as to dissolve the "habit of habit taking", we have the rapid growth of entropy and homogenization (an explosion, for instance). In neither cases life and intelligence is possible. A gradient between the two extremes would account for anything we can observe. The same goes to the periods above. Using some formation rules, I was able to extract from the solenoid all 66 possible classes of signs. It would be too complicated to explain it in this short outline, but you can have a hint of how it works by figuring out how I define the representamen (S, or the sign itself) caught in semeiosis. Whenever S and FI (final interpretant) are both qualities, we have qualisigns. Whenever both S and FI are secondness, we have sinsigns. Whenever both S and FI are thirdness, we have legisigns. Degenerations are acconted when we have different categories in S and FI. For instance, if S is thirdness and FI is secondness, we have replicas (wich are secondness of thirdness). With some similar rules, I correctly get Peirce's 10 genuine classes of signs in the same relation they appear in Peirce's famous triangle (they are pictured in bold in my periodic table), and then expand them to 66 classes based on all their possible degenerations. Basically, that's what the solenoid is about. Vinicius 2014-03-21 5:20 GMT-04:00 Catherine Legg <[email protected]>: Hi Gary! Thanks for this overview of the contemporary bio-semiotic landscape as you see it. I find such synoptic thinking really helpful myself. I just have a couple of scattered remarks. In Sao Paulo in November 2012 I went to a very interesting presentation by Vinicius on his solenoid of semiosis. My understanding is that it is considerably more complex than a simple spiral insofar as it draws on Peirce's 'three threes' of sign-analysis (qualisign-sinsign-legisign, icon-index-symbol, term-proposition-argument) which produce 9 possibilities. Its diagram was at least three dimensional on the screen if I remember rightly. Perhaps Vinicius, who I understand is on the list, can tell us more. Regarding your criticism of Edwina's view that, "it doesn't clearly distinguish between semiosis and physical existence" How does one clearly distinguish between semiosis and physical existence? J Cheers, Cathy From: Gary Fuhrman [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, 21 March 2014 4:44 a.m. To: [email protected] Cc: Peirce List Subject: [PEIRCE-L] RE: [biosemiotics:5459] Re: What kind of sign is ANYTHING called "a 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 ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm . -- Vinicius Romanini, Ph.D. Professor of Communication Studies School of Communications and Arts University of Sao Paulo, Brazil www.minutesemeiotic.org www.semeiosis.com.br Skype:vinicius_romanini ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
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