RE: [PEIRCE-L] de Waal Seminar: Chapters 7 & 8

[Michael Shapiro]

Gene, list,

Structuralism properly understood does not exclude process or growth, just the opposite, so calling Peirce's doctrine "processualism" is both redundant and terminologically inadvisable, given the latter's unusualness. Cf. my 1991 book's title The Sense of Change: Language as History.

Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: Eugene Halton
Sent: Apr 27, 2014 12:02 PM
To: "PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edu"
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] de Waal Seminar: Chapters 7 & 8

Response to Michael Shapiro’s post that Peirce should be seen as a structuralist. Shapiro: “The use by Peirce of the form "rationalized" (rather than "rational") as a modifier of "variety" in the quotation above should be taken advisedly. This use of the participial form, with its adversion to process, should serve as a caveat that when Peirce talks about "objective idealism," what he ought to have said is "objectified idealism."

 

Peirce: “The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws” Peirce, CP 6.25.

 

Note “becoming.” And even those physical laws are still subject to evolution. A habit is a process, semiosis is an inferential process, “rationalized variety” is a kind of habituated variety yet still in process. I see no reason for calling Peirce a structuralist, since even a structure, in Peirce, is a habit-process, however slow or even seemingly invariant that inveterate habit may be: it remains potentially subject to growth. Why not simply acknowledge Peirce’s thoroughgoing processualism?

 

Gene Halton

 

 

From: Michael Shapiro [mailto:poo...@earthlink.net]
Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2014 7:51 AM
To: PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edu
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] de Waal Seminar: Chapters 7 & 8

 

Dear Fellow-Listers,

I'd like to offer up the following as a take on ch. 7 and an anticipation of ch. 8, from the perspective of a non-philosopher interested in developing a Peircean theory of language for the twenty-first century:

            Because he was a practicing scientist in the modern sense, Peirce is the one great philosopher who escapes my definition of a philosopher as someone who only solves problems of his own devising. This makes him also a proto-structuralist (a structuralist avant la lettre).

            The essential concept of structuralism, whether applied to physics or linguistics or anthropology, is that of invariance under transformation. This makes theory, following Peirce's whole philosophy and his pragmaticism in particular, the rationalized explication of  variety: "[U]nderlying all other laws is the only tendency which can grow by its own virtue, the tendency of all things to take habits .... In so far as evolution follows a law, the law or habit, instead of being a movement from homogeneity to heterogeneity, is growth from difformity to uniformity. But the chance divergences from laws are perpetually acting to increase the variety of the world, and are checked by a sort of natural selection and otherwise ... , so that the general result may be described as 'organized heterogeneity,' or, better, rationalized variety'' (CP 6.101). Or, translating law and habit into the appropriate phenomenological category: "Thirdness ... is an essential ingredient of reality" (EP 2:345).

               Once we properly understand structuralism not as the putatively debunked epistemology that originated in Geneva with Saussure, but rather as the revised, essentially correct version originating with Jakobson in Prague and Hjelmslev in Copenhagen, we can recognize the patterning of Thirdness and Secondness in language––the so-called "passkey semiotic"––for what it is. Consequently, the fundamental notion of alternation between basic form and contextual variant becomes understandable as immanent in theory, and not merely a construct or an artifact of description. The importance of this notion cannot be overestimated.

               A child learning its native language, for instance, is exactly in the same position as an analyst. It has to determine which linguistic form is basic, and which is a contextual variant. Take a simple example from English, that of the voiceless stops

               English voiceless (actually, tense) stops are aspirated when they are word-initial or begin a stressed syllable, as in pen, ten, Ken. They are unaspirated when immediately following word-initial s, as in spun, stun, skunk. After an s elsewhere in a word they are normally unaspirated as well, except when the cluster is heteromorphemic and the stop belongs to an unbound morpheme; compare dis[t]end vs. dis[tʰ]aste. Word-final voiceless stops are optionally aspirate.

               This variation makes aspiration non-distinctive (non-phonemic) in English, unlike, say, in Ancient Greek or Hindi, where aspirated stops change the meaning of words by comparison with items that have their unaspirated counterparts ceteris paribus.

               I think it is only by taking such variation for what it is, i. e., the working out of Thirdness in the context of Secondness,  that we can we understand what Peirce had in mind with his version of Pragmatism.

Best regards,

Michael

P. S. The use by Peirce of the form "rationalized" (rather than "rational") as a modifier of "variety" in the quotation above should be taken advisedly. This use of the participial form, with its adversion to process, should serve as a caveat that when Peirce talks about "objective idealism," what he ought to have said is "objectified idealism." This slight grammatical change puts the meaning of the phrase (and the doctrine!) in a whole new––and completely acceptable––light.

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