Jeff, Oh dear. :-) I've been trying to be ruthless lately in limiting my email exchanges, even when the incoming messages are as interesting as yours have been; but I can't just ignore one that addresses me directly ... not even on April Fool's day ...
Responses inserted below, marked gf]. gary f. -----Original Message----- From: Jeffrey Brian Downard [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 1-Apr-14 1:26 PM Hi Gary F., List, You say: "Im not as eager to argue against pansemiotics as some people are, I just dont have much use for it." Let's separate two kinds of questions: 1. What positions did Charles Peirce take as he developed one or another set of arguments? gf] I don't think Peirce took a position either for or against pansemiotics, or at least I don't recall anyplace where he did. On this point I disagree with Winfried Nöth, who says on p. 41 of his _Handbook_ that "Peirce defended a pansemiotic view of the universe." His evidence consists of two quotes; one is the "perfused with signs" remark that I already commented on, and the other is from a letter to Welby, where he says "it has never been in my power to study anything,mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semiotic (SS 1977, 856). But what this says to me is that semeiotic is the meta-study of all studies (since all study, like all thought, is in signs), and that he was more interested in it than in any more specialized study for that very reason. It doesn't say that all the phenomena studied by special sciences are signs. Rather they are all *objects* of signs, and Peirce was personally inclined to study them as such. 2. Independent of what Peirce might have accepted or rejected, what is the truth of the matter with respect to a given question? gf] That's the question I don't want to argue, the ontological question of whether a "pansemiotic view of the universe" is "true" or not. When you say that you are not eager to argue against pansemiotics, you seem to be saying that you don't accept the position--but that you don't want to get bogged down arguing for or against the position. Life is short, and you have other more pressing things that need to be done. In saying that, are you stating that you don't have much use for the position as an interpretation of Peirce, or that you don't have much use for it as an account of the truth of the matter? gf] I don't have much use for it in either sense. I don't find it informative about Peirce's semiotic, or appealing as a metaphysical position. Those are different senses, of course, but they're hard to pry apart in my earlier message to Cathy where my argument was based on logic but also on phaneroscopy, and was expressed in Peircean terms, as I usually do on the Peirce list. My reason for asking for clarification is simply that I want to understand the other things you are saying. gf] I'm humbled and gratified to hear that you consider them worth the effort! --Jeff ________________________________________ From: Gary Fuhrman [[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2014 7:20 AM Cathy, Im not as eager to argue against pansemiotics as some people are, I just dont have much use for it. You ask about the significance of separating semiosis from physical existence. My question is, What kind of separation are we talking about? I think the issue is clearer if we look at the common distinction, which Peirce fully recognized and even insisted upon, between the physical and the psychical. Peirce discerned a continuity between them, formulated for instance in his doctrine that matter is effete mind. Recognition of any relationship is impossible unless the relata are distinct; so in that sense, yes, Thirdness comes after Secondness. (I dont like to put it that way, though, because Thirdness is no less elementary than Secondness.) And the clearer the distinction, the more clearly the relationship can be formulated. Unless the separation is absolute, made with an axe as Peirce put it, like the Cartesian mind/matter dualism, so you get unrelated chunks of being. Peirce made it very clear that physically existing signs (sinsigns) are replicas of signs (legisigns) which do not physically exist, but rather govern physical events. More generally, he distinguished between types and tokens, between reality and existence. Without such distinctions, his synechism would be meaningless. Thats why Im inclined to think that a pansemiotic view tends to undermine a synechistic view. But this is not necessarily true of all pansemiotic views. gary f.
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