Gary F - I certainly consider all ten classes as genuine Signs. I don't think this suggests an ambiguity in the meaning of 'genuine' and 'degenerate' but rather, an ambiguity in your definition of the Sign.
You, as I understand it, confine the meaning of 'Sign' to be a synonym for 'Representamen. This leads, I think, to an understanding of the Sign as really a Saussurian Sign, with the Signifier=Object; and the Signified=Interpretant. Obviously, I reject this dyadism. I consider the Peircean Sign to be an integral triad of three Relations: That between the Representamen and Object; that of the Representamen in itself; and that between the Representamen and the Interpretant. [See 8.344--] So, if you consider only the Representamen as the Sign, then, I don't see how you can define it, on its own, as genuine or degenerate. It isn't that the Representamen can't act as a sign [Representamen] unless it is embodied; it isn't a Representamen UNLESS it is embodied. Otherwise, you are moving into Platonism which does accept non-embodied Forms. [And yes, I'm aware of Peirce's terms of "it cannot actually act as a sign until it is embodied" 2.244. I don't see how a Sign (the triad) with all three Relations in a mode of Firstness is degenerate or even 'doubly degenerate'. After all, Firstness as a categorical mode, has no nature of degeneracy. The genuine and degenerate forms of the Categories, is another issue, where, as we know, Peirce considers that Firstness has no degeneracy; Secondness has both a genuine and degenerate mode (2-2 and 2-1); and Thirdness has both a genuine and two degenerate modes (3-3, 3-2, 3-1). When Peirce refers to a genuine or degenerate index, he is referring to its categorical mode of Secondness. That is, the modal categories in themselves are genuine or degenerate not the Relation. I don't see that a Qualisign, which is in a mode of pure Firstness (and not 3-1) can be degenerate as compared to a Sinsign or Legisign. How can 'a normal Qualisign' be disembodied? There's no such thing in Peirce as a 'free-floating Representamen'. That's Platonism. Edwina ----- Original Message ----- From: [email protected] To: 'Peirce-L' Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2015 11:31 AM Subject: [PEIRCE-L] RE: signs, correlates, and triadic relations Moving on to the first trichotomy of sign types in “Nomenclature and Divisions of Triadic Relations”: CP 2.244: According to the first division, a Sign may be termed a Qualisign, a Sinsign, or a Legisign. A Qualisign is a quality which is a Sign. It cannot actually act as a sign until it is embodied; but the embodiment has nothing to do with its character as a sign. [As a Sign, this “quality” must be a correlate of a triadic relation with its Object and Interpretant, “by which triadic relation the possible Interpretant is determined to be the First Correlate of the same triadic relation to the same Object, and for some possible Interpretant” (CP 2.242). Yet it cannot act as a sign until it is embodied, i.e. until it becomes involved in at least a dyadic relation, and thus enters the universe of existence. Yet its significance is its quality (not its embodiment), and qualities being monadic, there is no real difference between Sign and Object (or Interpretant either). So I think we might call this a doubly degenerate kind of triadic relation, where the Sign is virtually self-representing, and self-determining as its own Interpretant. Compare the “self-sufficient” point on a map which Peirce offers as an example of doubly degenerate Thirdness in his third Harvard Lecture, EP2:162.) Or, since this degeneracy is relative, we can say that the Qualisign is degenerate relative to the Sinsign and to the Legisign (just as the Icon is degenerate relative to the Index and the genuine Symbol, according to Peirce in both the third Harvard lecture of 1903 and “New Elements” of 1904). On the other hand, some semioticians say that all ten of the sign types defined in NDTR, including the Qualisign, are genuine Signs. This flags a possible ambiguity in the concepts of genuine and degenerate; and possibly this problem is related to the concepts of embodiment, just introduced, and of involvement, which is introduced in the next paragraph:] 245. A Sinsign (where the syllable sin is taken as meaning “being only once,” as in single, simple, Latin semel, etc.) is an actual existent thing or event which is a sign. It can only be so through its qualities; so that it involves a qualisign, or rather, several qualisigns. But these qualisigns are of a peculiar kind and only form a sign through being actually embodied. [Evidently it is the involvement of qualisigns in a Sinsign — which, I suppose, constitutes their embodiment — that makes them “peculiar,” because a “normal” Qualisign is disembodied (and does not act as a Sign). But perhaps this will be clarified by the definition of Legisign, which I’ll leave for the next post.] Gary f. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------- 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 .
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