Dear Gary - Thanks for these comments which are indeed most helpful. Peirce's basic semiotic triads qualisign-sinsign-legisign; icon-index-symbol, and rheme-dicisign-argument have very often been mistaken for mutual classifications of empirical signs. But they rather refer to aspects of empirical signs, and most empirical signs include several of those aspects. Thus, pure indices or pure icons, e.g. will be marginal exceptions. The reason is that to P the main phenomenon is reasoning, the chain of arguments - and the whole of the semiotic machinery is developed to understand the physiology of reasoning - so icons, rhemes, etc. refer to specific aspects of the chain of reasoning. Best F
Den 02/09/2014 kl. 16.09 skrev Gary Fuhrman <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> : Thanks for getting this thread started, Frederik. I hope the discussion of “anti-psychologism” (due to start next week, led by Jeff Kasser) will help to resolve some of the past debates we’ve had on the biosemiotics list about the relationship between logic and psychology. One comment I’d like to add to your introduction here: several members of this list have incorporated the terms icon, index and symbol, used in a more or less Peircean way, into their biophysical evolutionary and origin-of-life theories. But they have had little or no use for Peirce’s other two sign trichotomies, and often use that first trichotomy in an exclusive sense, as if a given sign had to fit into one (and only one) of those types. I think your book will change all that, showing as it does a dicisign — that is, a sign complete enough to be true — must involve both iconic and indexical components, but does not have to be symbolic. But a really basic introduction to the other basic sign types might be useful at this stage, for those who aren’t familiar with them. Icon/index/symbol is the trichotomy of signs according to their relations to their objects, and probably needs no introduction here. The trichotomy according to the mode of being of the sign itself is qualisign/sinsign/legisign (Peirce experimented with other names for them, but these are the most widely used). A qualisign is a quality that is a sign; a sinsign is an existing thing or actual event that functions as a sign; a legisign is a law (such as a law of nature, a rule or a habit) that functions as a sign, mostly by governing actual occurrences. The other trichotomy is according to the sign’s relation to its interpretant, and was recognized in traditional logic as term/proposition/argument — an argument being a sequence of propositions, and a proposition a combination of terms. But traditional logic was hampered by its close connection to language and the grammar of languages. It was to escape this limitation that Peirce generalized those concepts (as you aptly put it) to create the trichotomy rheme/dicisign/argument. Thus the new term dicisign was crucial for Peirce’s explanation of cognitive semiosis as more basic than either human thinking or language (and therefore basic to both). I won’t go into this further until we get to Chapter 3, but I thought it would be best to set the stage now. gary f.
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