Franklin, Ive just got back to this post (and your even longer one that followed) because I was immersed in the train of thought I posted today under the subject line What kind of sign is a gene? which is, I think youll agree, relevant to your questions that Ive been appearing to ignore. I did miss your earlier reference, through Liszka, to the 1865 lecture which Peirce later reworked as his 1867 paper on breadth and depth.
Actually Im pretty much in agreement with what you say both here and in your other post. But then Im not sure that I understand Vinicius side of the debate, so Im not going to take sides. gary f. From: Frank Ransom [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 3-Apr-14 9:35 PM Gary, Vinicius, List, Sorry that I haven't replied sooner; I was busy with working up my response to Jon's posts -- deceptively small posts, I should say. In this post I'll respond to Gary. I'll be responding to Vinicius's posts separately, which responding will probably not come today since technical language would appear to be on the table now and, being prone to peripateticism, I have a lot of walking to do. I should just say that I very much look forward to responding to Vinicius's posts. As I said before: "James Jakob Liszka, in his A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce, mentions in his chapter on speculative grammar, section on interpretants, that "Peirce defines information as the quantity of the interpretant (W 1: 465)."" I bring this up just to remind that this way of talking about information is Peirce's own idea, not mine; I'm just trying to make sense of it...like you? I agree with what you said about the proposition. As for the interpretant and depth: are you referring to my reference to Vinicius' statements about comprehension and misinterpretation? If misinterpretation is, obviously, a problem of interpretation, and also has to do with the comprehension of the symbol, then I take Vinicius to be saying that interpretants have to do with depth. Quoting again from Vinicius' third installment in his posts, 4th point, "Misinterpretation is the lack of information on the side of intepretant (and interpreters), so that collateral experience is not mature enough to produce a true symbol - a symbol which effect is general interpretants that embody the form of the dynamic object." "misinterpretation is lack of information on the comprehension of a term." If you look over my posts again, you will find that I am asking questions about this, not assuming it. But in asking the questions, I'm not trying to just deny his claims; rather, I'm looking for clarification of how these things work out, and remain positive about it, because I could intuitively understand his choice of distinction between misrepresentation and misinterpretation and that there was the chance Peirce had supposed it too. After asking these questions and seeing Vinicius's initial response, I started questioning the motivations behind the misrepresentation/misinterpretation distinction that he draws. For my part, though perhaps now modified in light of reading Jon's treatment of the early lectures on information and the comments and questions I posted about them, I can give you an idea of how I view the relation between comprehension and interpretant. Consider that I am objecting to the separation of extension from comprehension in the problem of misinterpretation; whereas I take Vinicius to be holding up the idea that problems with extension have to do with misrepresentation; see his 4th point in that post again, regarding "lack of extension". The position I present is that not only comprehension, but also extension, has to do with interpretants; and, in particular, information, as synthetic comprehension and extension, has to do with interpretants. So far as I see it, this is clearly articulated by Peirce in "Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension". Peirce also says this, and in more than just one way, in his early lectures of information (those lectures which Jon treats of). If one wants to object to this position, I don't exactly disagree to the objection. In fact, it would only go to show what fuels my own desire to distinguish between the early and late theories and figure out what exactly has changed in Peirce's theory of information. I give here a quote from Peirce, taken from Jon's "Selection 16" in his online treatment: "Thus every increase in the number of equivalents of any term increases either its extension or comprehension and conversely. It may be said that there are no equivalent terms in logic, since the only difference between such terms would be merely external and grammatical, while in logic terms which have the same meaning are identical. I fully admit that. Indeed, the process of getting an equivalent for a term is an identification of two terms previously diverse. It is, in fact, the process of nutrition of terms by which they get all their life and vigor and by which they put forth an energy almost creative since it has the effect of reducing the chaos of ignorance to the cosmos of science. Each of these equivalents is the explication of what there is wrapt up in the primary they are the surrogates, the interpreters of the original term. They are new bodies, animated by that same soul. I call them the interpretants of the term. And the quantity of these interpretants, I term the information or implication of the term." (Peirce 1866, Lowell Lecture 7, CE 1, 464465). And from "Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension": "§6. The Conceptions of Quality, Relation, and Representation, applied to this Subject In a paper presented to the Academy last May, I endeavored to show that the three conceptions of reference to a ground, reference to a correlate, and references to an interpretant, are those of which logic must principally make use. I there also introduced the term "symbol," to include both concept and word. Logic treats of the reference of symbols in general to their objects. A symbol, in its reference to its object, has a triple reference:-- 1st, Its direct reference to its object, or the real things which it represents; 2d, Its reference to its ground through its object, or the common characters of those objects; 3d, Its reference to its interpretant through its object, or all the facts known about its object. What are thus referred to, so far as they are known, are:-- 1st, The informed breadth of the symbol; 2d, The informed depth of the symbol; 3d, The sum of synthetical propositions in which the symbol is subject or predicate, or the information concerning the symbol." Like Gary, I too want to understand what to make of this, since I tend to think of the comprehension and extension in terms of icons and indices, not so much in interpretants. But in my post to Jon, I suggest that possibly some combination of both takes is necessary to fully grasp the idea of information. Thinking about it now, the use of a symbol in new propositions will make the propositions interpretants of the symbol, which interpretants might be expected to inform the symbol; so that its interpretants are its information. Maybe this gets into just what the relationship is between icons, indices, and symbols. I might have thought of symbols as interpreting icons and indices, but perhaps we could also say that icons and indices interpret symbols? Or, maybe it is better to say that icons and indices that inform the new propositions will, by way of the new propositions, in some way serve as interpretants of the symbol, though properly it will be the propositions themselves which are genuinely the interpretants of the symbol. Hmm, I am not sure. I'm open to thoughts about this. Also, touching on a later post, I too was a little confused that Peirce refers to the weathervane as a proposition and not a dicent. I'll have to mull a little a bit over Gary's explanation of it and get my mind back into the minutiae of speculative grammar. My thought would have been that weathervane is a term, but I suppose if we look at a particular object that is understood to point in the direction of the wind because the wind causes it to do so, we would identify it as a weathervane, virtually asserting "this object is an indicator of the direction of the wind", and such proposition could turn out false. But it doesn't make weathervane, as a symbol, false; it only turns out that the symbol doesn't apply to this instance (anymore, if it did before and is now broken), because the proposition, as an interpretant of the term weathervane, turns out false. -- Franklin
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