Dear Jeff, lists Thank you for good questions. The gneralization that Jeff sums up in two points indeed forms my starting point (and was considered in the Diagrammatology book of 2007).
Here, it is taken as the premiss to the vaster generalization that logic/semiotics is independent of any particular implementation or incarnation of it. In that sense, semiotics and logic are independent of psychology, biology, sociology etc. So we should not ask: what is it in evolution/ the brain/ history which has produced logic and semiotic structure? We should rather ask: how do evolution/ the brain/history adapt to logic and semiotic structure? If we do that, we become able to avoid the idee recue that logic is a part of language - rather, language is one special way of processing logic and semiotics. This is especially evident in Peirce's functional definition of propositions - "Dicisigns" - without any reference to human languages nor consciousness. So, that gives a bit of the answer to Jeff's first question. It is not a new assumption that logic in the narrow sense is independent of the empirical sciences - even the logical positivists believed that (hence their name) - they just wanted to avoid the a priori by saying all of logic is tautological. But Peirce's broader notion of logic, identifying it with semiotics and taking it to comprise theory of science, claims a far wider domain to be autonomous and the possible object of study in and of itself. It will have corollaries such as: even communication in remote galaxies will have to use icons and indices and to connect them into propositions (Terrence Deacon once called this "extraterrestrial semiotics") - even if the perceptual organs of the relevant aliens may detect rather different physical and other properties than do ours, and even if their nervous systems may be rather differently constructed. This, then, is why I consider the possibility, only vaguely hinted at in Peirce, of seeing animal cognition and communication as already using Dicisigns. Jeff's second question I have to quick answer to (maybe not even a slow answer). But let me say a bit of the direction in which I think we should look. Logic and semiotics are indeed, in Peirce's system, normative disciplines, and, for that reason, higher in the system of sciences than psychology and biology, presumingly being special sciences in the physical and psychical realm respectivly, into which Peirce (strangely dualistically!) divides the empirical sciences. And, so Peirce's idea, the special sciences may look to the higher sciences for principles. So they should, inter alia, look to logic and semiotics. This would be an answer from P's classification of the sciences. But there is something unsatisfactory about it. It is a vast area indeed which is covered by logic in Peirce's broad sense (semiotics, logic, methodeutics - generalized from medieval trivia of grammar, logic, rhetoric) - and the way we study it is not (only) one of armchair speculation - as you might guess when you see it characterized as an "a priori" field. This takes us into the interesting discussion of what "a priori" might mean. The Kantian standard of course is that it refers to the forms and concepts of consciusness which are used by the transcendental subject to shape experience. This is deeply subjectivist, of course, and is rejected by Peirce. I think the implict notion of the a priori in Peirce rather comes closer to Husserl's important rearticulation of the a priori in the 3rd logical investigation according to which the a priori is not in the subject, but consists of dependency relations in the object. Such dependency relations are found also at the bottom of the vocabularies and sets of hypotheses in each of the special sciences - something which is developed in our time by Barry Smith. This is probably why Peircean semiotics, even if autonomous, is developed in practice in an interplay with the sciences involving the empirical deployment of semiotic structures, such as linguistics, aesthetics, psychology, neurology, biology, mathematics, etc. These sciences, themselves, have their basic ontological assumptions and sometimes new empirical results fine-tune or even change those assumptions. That Peircean logic depends upon deep knowledge of such special sciences is especially evident in the case of the "methodeutic" parts of logic, roughly corresponding to philosophy of science. As every P reader knows, he himself extracts ideas and observations for methodeutics from actual and historical problems in the sciences. Here, he is on a par with another of my heroes, Ernst Cassirer who also did theory of science on a non-armchair basis by actually going deeply into sciences as different as relativity theory and art history in order to investigate their philosophy of science. So even if normative sciences and special sciences - cf. Jeff's second question - are distinguished in P's system, and even if the normative sciences are (rightly, I think) conceived to be ontologically independent from the special sciences, I think this is not the same thing as claiming the normative sciences can be developed, in practice, without any regard to the special sciences. Rather, the special sciences constitute the repository from which the structures of the normative sciences may be extracted. Best F Den 06/09/2014 kl. 19.32 skrev Jeffrey Brian Downard <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>: Lists, One of the claims made in the first chapter of Natural Propositions that caught my eye is that “Peirce’s redefinition of propositions under the generalized notion of “Dicisign”, however, forms but one node in a vast redefinition of the whole field of cognition . . . .” (NP, 2) I’d like to ask a couple of questions about how we should think aboutthis redefinition of the field. Let’s take a closer look at the way Frederik introduces this line of thought. He says: “At the core of Peirce’s rearticulation of the cognitive field, then, is a daring generalization.” There are two parts to this generalization: 1) “all of mathematics is developed by diagrammatical reasoning.” 2) “all deductive reasoning is undertaken by such diagrammatical reasoning” (NP, 3) He then offers a long quote from MS 634 that sums up the ambitions involved in rearticulating the cognitive field. After giving a short overview of how the chapters fit together, he concludes by saying that the most important offering of Peirce’s semiotics is “a renewed outlook of the whole of the ‘cognitive field,’ enabling us to envision the exploration of routes not taken, both in terms of further conceptual development and experimental investigations.” I agree with Frederik’s claim that Peirce is dramatically reconceiving the boundaries of logic as semiotic. Having said that, here are two questions I’d like to think about a little more as we prepare to head into chapters 2 and then 3: First, what are the other key developments in Peirce’s normative science of semiotics that—in addition to a deeper appreciation of the role of diagrams in deductive reasoning--are driving this rearticulation of the cognitive field? Second, if the normative science of semiotics is being broadened, how might we understand the boundaries of this science? That is, where does normative science of semiotics stop and special science of biology or psychology start? --Jeff Jeff Downard Associate Professor Department of Philosophy NAU (o) 523-8354
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
