John, my responses inserted (and this is going to the Peirce list as well as the biosemiotics because the thread has been common to both):
From: John Collier [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 30-Jan-15 5:44 AM Here is a message I sent Gary when I could not post to the list due to the fallout of rolling power outages. They are supposed to continue for at least two years (sigh). The damage to South Africa will be immense, but at least I can transfer my posting accounts to my Canadian email. Fortunately my home ISP, unlike the University one, is very robust. As I said in my post, I took determine to be being a sufficient condition for. gf] Yes, that’s the problem. That gives the right direction, whereas as I pointed out, the narrowing of conditions (necessary condition) does not. I don't mean fully determinate by any means. That would be necessary and sufficient. gf] I don’t see how considerations of necessary and sufficient conditions are relevant to determination in the semiotic sense, but it’s evident that trying to apply them to it causes confusion. Suppose two people read a poem. There is a single representamen, but their interpretations could be very different, and there would be different objects. gf] You can say that there is a single representamen, in the sense that it’s the same poem that is printed in every copy of it and read in every reading of it. I guess what you mean is that different readers would have different ideas of what the poem is about, and this is true because each actual reading of a symbol is another instance of semiosis. This implies that the representamens as well as the objects and interpretants are different, so your first premiss does not hold. What the poem is about, at any given reading or performance of it, is partially determined by the circumstances of the reading: any indexical component of the symbol can only come from those circumstances, and thus determine the breadth of the poem (considered as a proposition), while its depth is determined by the reader’s experience and habits. Alternatively, if we say there is a single representamen in all readings, it’s a type of which each reading is a token, and it has a single object as well — but a necessarily vague one, because the connections between the poem and its object are entirely verbal. Or we could go even further and say that the object of a poem is created by the poet, just as a mathematical object is created by the mathematician. Either way, the dynamic object of that sign does not vary with the interpretants of the various readings. It might take several hermeneutic cycles to settle into an interpretation of a symbol such as a poem, but each reading or re-reading proceeds on the assumption that the object of the sign does not change. Otherwise the reader is assuming that the symbol can mean whatever he thinks it means; in which case its communicative or informative value is zero. You might say that the immediate object does change as the circumstances of reading vary, but I don’t think that clarifies the meaning of “determine”. Of course there would also be different signs in Peirce's sense, but we are talking about one part of a sign determining another (in some way I have yet to determine). gf] I take it that by “part of a sign” you mean one of the three correlates of the triadic relation. If, if the sign is given then all the parts are fully determined, then each part determines the others in virtue of being a member of the (same) sign relation. gf] Not so, when a sign relation is defined as one in which the object determines the representamen to determine an interpretant sign of the same object. Semiosis is precisely that process of determination; so the sign is not “given with all the parts fully determined”. This is trivial, so we need to consider degenerate cases to avoid triviality and also multidirection determination. gf] Sorry, you’ve lost me there! I don’t know what you mean by “degenerate cases”. Are you implying that a sign “given with all the parts fully determined” is a genuine case of semiosis? If so I disagree. Your selecting a specific instance of a sign just makes my case for me. So I assumed that was not what Peirce could have meant (assuming of course that he meant anything; a wise man once told me that if you puzzle carefully over something someone said and you still can't make it out, then it is acceptable to consider the possibility that it does not make sense -- George Boolos). gf] Acceptable to consider the possibility, of course. But it’s more than acceptable to consider the possibility that it really does make sense to others who say that it does. Surely, as in the poem example, it is the interpretant is that determines the object; gf] Surely not! objects aren't around to be grasped independently of how we interpret whatever signs we come across. gf] If an object is real, then it is what it is no matter what anybody thinks about it. Again, this is definitive of reality, at least for Peirce and for me, and I think for any pragmatist. So you’re saying there are no real objects. In that case I don’t think there are any real signs either. But if there is only one sign in question, then it determines the sign as a whole, and the other components as a result. But this is trivial, as I said. gf] Trivial maybe, but certainly not true! Not of the sign as defined by Peirce. And also multidirectional determining, which was my original worry. gf] Going out on a limb here, I’m going to assume that what you call “multidirectional determining” is what others call polysemy, or ambiguity, which is characteristic of symbols. In my book (Turning Signs) I started calling this “degeneracy”, with the biological usage in mind. But later I started using that term in the Peircean (mathematical) sense, and it would have been confusing to use it both ways, so I invented a new word for it, “polyversity” — the quality of symbols such as words which enables the same words to have different meanings and the same meanings to be expressed in different words. What I learned from Peirce while writing is that the only cure for polyversity (if it’s something you worry about) is genuine indexicality. Of course, if the “multidirectional determining” you’re worried about is something different, then my remarks about polyversity are of no use to you! gary f. } Lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth. [Hazlitt] { <http://www.gnusystems.ca/gnoxic.htm> www.gnusystems.ca/gnoxic.htm }{ gnoxics
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