> On Nov 30, 2015, at 7:22 AM, Edwina Taborsky <[email protected]> wrote: > > Agreed. As I've said, I don't agree with confining the term 'sign' to refer > to and only to one single Relation in the whole triad; that of the > Representamen or ground. That transforms this one Relation, the > Representamen, from being the vital mediative action in a full process and > makes it into almost a Sovereign Will Agent. Such a privileging and > reductionism ignores that a Sign (full triad) functions and can only function > not within one Relation but within three Relations, and furthermore - as that > full triadic process, the Sign emerges within the semiosic process and takes > on an existential material nature. So, that full triad, the Sign, functions > and exists as a molecule, a cell, a weathervane, a word, an argument.
Well yes and no. I’m not sure what you mean by sovereign will agent. Almost sounds like libertarian free will which I’m not sure Peirce is committed to. Going back to Scotus, who I linked to, the key notion is determination. The object determines the interpretant via the sign-token. I think it follows from Peirce’s semiotics that this entails that the sign-token must determine the interpretant. I don’t think “sovereign will” makes sense in this context, which tends to be a more internalist nearly Cartesian way of thinking. Nor do I think this is really the third person conception of physicalists of the nominalist bent. (Which frankly is most of them) The medievals had a middle voice as did the Greeks but that way of thinking tends to be rare in modern philosophy. It is an important point in Heidegger and many who followed in that vein. Interestingly relative to Scotus the middle voice argument usually is made by the proponents of analogy against Scotus. Heidegger sees this voice as key to understanding the pre-socratics (since he’s caught up on Plato being the source of philosophical error as much if not more than Descartes). So his examples of “to arise” (middle voice) and “to give birth to” (active voice) arise both out of medieval but also these early Greek ways of speaking. The key to the middle voice is that things happen without necessarily someone or something making them happen. The actor is just missing. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s what I take Peirce to be doing with his sign-process. This may just be me inappropriately reading Heidegger’s notion of aletheia into Peirce’s signs. But I think the sign-token is this vehicle that clears a space for this unveiling of the object. The relationship between object and interpretant through the sign-token is this happening in the middle voice. More key, is that I think one can see inquiry as being the clearing that lets this happen. So there’s a certain quietism in both Peirce and Heidegger tied to this middle voice. To my eyes, this middle voice is why Peirce’s externalism is so important. Properly speaking while the object determines the interpretant the sign is necessary. Not only is this a middle term in terms of the diagram, but it also is a middle voice. So to your point about will, I think the middle voice tends to clear that problem up.
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