Hello Gary F., List, I'd like to learn more about the way Peirce is drawing on the phenomenological categories as he categorizes different kinds of signs and sign relations. Focusing on this first division between qualisign, sinsign and legisign, what guidance are we getting from Peirce's account of the more degenerate and more genuine features of the categories. In "Peirce, Phenomenology and Semiotics," (In the Routledge Companion to Semiotics), Nathan Houser provides the following table as a way of clarifying Peirce's account of the universal categories.
Structure of the Phaneron 1. Universal categories: forms of firstness a. Firstness b. Secondness c. Thirdness 2. Universal categories: forms of secondness a. Qualia (facts of firstness) b. Relation (facts of secondness) c. Representamen (facts of thirdness) 3. Universal categories: forms of thirdness a. Feeling (signs of firstness) b. Brute fact (signs of secondness) c. Thought (signs of thirdness) While I like the general idea of trying to figure out how the different aspects of Peirce's account of the categories might be fitted together, I'm not able to square what Nathan is providing in this table with the various texts on phenomenology and phaneroscopy. Does anyone have suggestions for how we might either justify this account or how we might modify it to make it fit better with what Peirce says? The reason I ask is that Nathan offers a number of rich suggestions for thinking about the ways that Peirce is drawing on the universal categories in phenomenology for the purposes of setting up the 10-fold classification of signs in the semiotic theory. As such, I'd like work this out in some more detail. In order to stimulate some discussion, let me point out that Peirce offers some interesting remarks about the degenerate forms of the universal categories in the Collected Papers at 1.521-44. He describes, for instance, the differences involved in the firstness and secondness of a second, and the those involved in the firstness, secondness and thirdness of a third. Any ideas about how we might draw on these distinctions for the purposes of justifying or amending the kind of table that Nathan has offered? --Jeff Jeffrey Downard Associate Professor Department of Philosophy Northern Arizona University (o) 928 523-8354 ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2015 9:31 AM To: 'Peirce-L' 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.
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