Sorry, extended typo, corrected in dark red between asterisks below. - Ben
Jeff, list,
I made the point in those concrete terms, e.g., biological, partly
because biosemioticians have been reading peirce-l lately, and partly
because the concrete is often easier to discuss, and I figured that if I
discussed the concrete in a sufficiently panoramic way, it would
compensate for the lack of abstractness appropriate to a more formal
discussion of basic elements of semiosis. I would, if pressed, try to
generalize the argument into cenoscopic terms although I'm afraid that
I'd end up hand-waving to some extent.
Tom seems to minimize the importance of a Comtean classification. I
don't do that, but rather than bracketing I'd just try to keep track of
what is a general principle (say, in normatives) and what is a special
example (say, in metaphysics). For my part I don't trust generalizations
at any level enough to completely bracket particulars; one's general
ideas may be biased just as one's special cases may be. I remember
working at inputting contract info (including financial terms, payment
amounts, etc.) at a publishing house decades ago. They brought the
electronic system online in order to test *it against the trusted old*
hand-written system; what they found was that the old hand-written
system itself was messed up; so they kept running the two systems for
comparison against each other for some period, trying to get the true
picture sooner or later.
Best, Ben
On 3/26/2014 3:02 PM, Jeffrey Brian Downard wrote:
Ben, List,
You say: "I agree with Gary about the role of purpose in
interpretation. Vinicius does, however, seem to allow of it in
connection with the final interpretant, and to wish merely that Kees
had somehow put it into those terms. On the other hand, I think
Vinicius underplays the role of purpose. It's hard to see why
interpretation would take place at any level except for an end,
bringing standards and norms of value into play. The world in its
thermodynamic decay scrambles information, and life prospers in
sorting some information out as more important, valuable, to the
purpose, for life; some call it 'decoding', which makes sense provided
that one remembers that there is in life a purpose or function of
extracting information from mixed and scrambled signs and sign
systems, both as to particular questions and in general ways that 'add
value' (e.g., not just deducing whatever is deducible, but, since no
deduction concludes in anything really new or complicative, deducing
that which nonetheless brings a new or nontrivial perspective to the
premisses). If one conceives of inference or interpretation as taking
place in some more or less 'quasi' way at purely material and dynamic
levels, then one still needs to suppose an end, even if that end
merely be thermodynamic decay or the conservation of certain physical
quantities - i.e., probable and (in the classical limit) extremal
outcomes. These things do not involve retroactive efficient (agential)
causation by ends. In inference, aim or purpose 'solicits' (to borrow
a Scholastic term) and guides determination by the premisses; the
reasoner hopes and supposes that there are ways to do that without
stacking the deck, i.e., without interfering with the determination to
truth."
Your explanation is quite clear and to the point. Having said that,
I'd like to raise the following question. To what extent should we
bracket metaphysical questions about the reality of the purposes that
seem to govern biological, chemical, physical processes? T.L. Short
seemed to think it worth the while to get those questions on the table
at the very start of his discussion of Peirce's semiotics. I will
admit that it makes sense to canvass all of the possibilities as we
start to classify different kinds of representamens and relations and
then build explanations of the growth of semiotic systems. After all,
we wouldn't want to leave important classes out of our explanations.
Having said that, shouldn't we bracket the metaphysical questions out
of a concern that in our eagerness to give answers to these questions
we might bias the normative inquiry?
--Jeff
Jeff Downard
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
NAU
(o) 523-8354
________________________________________
From: Benjamin Udell [[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2014 8:58 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] de Waal Seminar: Chapter 5, Semeiotics, or the
doctrine of signs
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