Dear Michael,
Sorry, but it is not in the least redundant to characterize
Peirce’s philosophy as processual. It clarifies what pervades his thinking.
Calling Peirce a structuralist, on the other hand, does not, in my opinion.
Gene
From: Michael Shapiro [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2014 12:11 PM
To: Eugene Halton; [email protected]
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] de Waal Seminar: Chapters 7 & 8
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: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>"
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:[email protected]]
Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2014 7:51 AM
To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
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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