Dear Edwina, list - I think Edwina is right here. It is no argument against pan- or physiosemiotics to say that physics should be processes of pure secondness. If such processes exist, they would indeed be completely random and follow no laws - as all laws, due to their generality, are thirdnesses in Peirce's system. Peirce actually did believe in the existence of absolute chance - but he did not identify it with physics. Not all triadicity and thirdness is semiotic - that is my conclusion. In Peirce, claims pointing in both directions can be found, so this is not a question which can be solved by Peirce philology. Rather, it should be solved by looking to what the sciences are actually doing. So ,to me, the decisive argument against pan- or physiosemiotics is that I have never seen any semiotic redescription of physical processes (like: the crater is an index of the meteor) adding the tiniest bit to our knowledge of physics. In that sense, such description seems superfluous. Quite the contrary is the case in biology where semiotic concepts abound. Best F
Den 05/09/2014 kl. 19.48 skrev Edwina Taborsky <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> : No - to say that 'brute secondness' is a property of physicochemical interactions is not a denial of semiosis for two reasons. The simplest and most irrelevant is that a semiosic sign, a triad, can be entirely in a mode of Secondness. The more basic reason is that IF 'brute secondness' were the only categorical mode in operation, such physico-chemical interactions would be totally random, chaotic and without any continuity of type. That is obviously, empirically, not true. Edwina
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