Jeffrey, list - I think the differentiation between 2-2 and 2-1 as modal
categories refers to their functioning within an interaction (Relation) as
independent or dependent.
So, a Relation in a mode of pure Secondness acknowledges the separate
existential reality of the two 'nodes' - the wind pushing the wooden
weathervane is a 2-2 Relation between the Representamen/wooden ground and
the wind.
A Relation in a mode of degenerate Secondness acknowledges the non-separate
existential reality of the two nodes - the photocopy of the painting..This
photocopy 'second' is a 'Firstness/icon' of the painting. Or, as the
Peircean example - a spontaneous cry as a reaction.
Edwina
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeffrey Brian Downard" <[email protected]>
To: "Peirce-L" <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, December 05, 2015 10:16 PM
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] RE: signs, correlates, and triadic relations
Gary R., List,
My suggestion was that we look at what Peirce has to say about degenerate
cases in the Lowell Lectures of 1903. Let's start with the examination of
seconds and secondness at CP 1.528. Let me try to provide a little bit of
order to what he says so that we can pinpoint anything that catches our
attention:
1. Thus we have a division of seconds into those whose very being, or
Firstness, it is to be seconds, and those whose Secondness is only an
accretion.
a. This distinction springs out of the essential elements of Secondness.
b. For Secondness involves Firstness.
c. The concepts of the two kinds of Secondness are mixed concepts composed
of Secondness and Firstness.
d. One is the second whose very Firstness is Secondness.
e. The other is a second whose Secondness is second to a Firstness.
2. The idea of mingling Firstness and Secondness in this particular way is
an idea distinct from the ideas of Firstness and Secondness that it
combines.
a. It appears to be a conception of an entirely different series of
categories.
b. At the same time, it is an idea of which Firstness, Secondness, and
Thirdness are component parts, since the distinction depends on whether the
two elements of Firstness and Secondness that are united are so united as to
be one or whether they remain two.
3. This distinction between two kinds of seconds, which is almost involved
in the very idea of a second, makes a distinction between two kinds of
Secondness;
a. namely, the Secondness of genuine seconds, or matters, which I call
genuine Secondness, and
b. the Secondness in which one of the seconds is only a Firstness, which I
call degenerate Secondness;
c. so that this Secondness really amounts to nothing but this, that a
subject, in its being a second, has a Firstness, or quality.
Notice that, in (1) and (3), he points to two distinctions: two kinds of
seconds; and two kinds of secondness. It would help, I think, if we could
pair up some examples of each of these things. What would count as an
example of the two sorts of seconds, and what would count as an example of
each of the two sorts of secondness?
As we reflect on these distinctions and try to come up with some examples, I
wonder how these distinctions compare to the table that Nathan has offered
for the universal categories. One thing that bothers me about Nathan's
table is that it does not appear to match Peirce's account of these
different sorts of degeneracy and genuiness of seconds and secondness. The
same holds when it comes to thirds and thirdness. My aim is to trace, as
best as we are able, Peirce's suggestions for how we should bring better
clarity to our understanding of relatives, relationships and relations. His
recommendation is that we draw on the pragmatic maxim for clarifying our
understanding of the key notions. At the second grade of clarity, here is
what we have:
I. A relative, then, may be defined as the equivalent of a word or phrase
which, either as it is (when I term it a complete relative), or else when
the verb "is" is attached to it (and if it wants such attachment, I term it
a nominal relative), becomes a sentence with some number of proper names
left blank.
II. A relationship, or fundamentum relationis, is a fact relative to a
number of objects, considered apart from those objects, as if, after the
statement of the fact, the designations of those objects had been erased.
III. A relation is a relationship considered as something that may be said
to be true of one of the objects, the others being separated from the
relationship yet kept in view. Thus, for each relationship there are as many
relations as there are blanks.
This account is meant to help us clarify our conceptions of logical
relatives, relationships and relations. How might this logical analysis
help clarify the tones and conceptions that we are working with in
phenomenology? My hunch, and it is only a guess, is that it might help to
think of what is first, second or third as kinds of relations, and of
firstness, secondness and thirdness as relationships. My reason for
venturing this guess is that he says this at 1.526:
i. When we think of Secondness, we naturally think of two reacting objects,
a first and a second. And along with these, as subjects, there is their
reaction.
ii. But these are not constituents out of which the Secondness is built up.
iii. The truth is just reverse, [in] that the being a first or a second or
the being a reaction each involves Secondness.
So, the terms "first" and "second" pertain to the objects thought of as
standing a particular sort of relation. The objects themselves may be
different sorts of things. Peirce distinguishes in the "The Logic of
Mathematics" between essential dyads and accidental dyads, where the latter
kind of dyad is separated into inherential and relative dyads. These kinds
of dyads are the only ones that are distinguished based on the the kinds of
subjects (i.e., the kinds of objects) are being brought into relation with
one another. The secondness pertains to the kind of relationship that we
attend to when we consider the manner of connection separately from the
objects.
In order to make more progress, I suspect that we will need to move from the
second to the third grade of clarity about the character of relatives,
relationships and relations. In doing so, we will need to turn our
attention from logical analyses of concepts to the study of the formal
relations that are fundamental, for instance, in mathematics. That, at
least, is what Peirce seems to suggest in "The Logic of Relatives" when he
turns to Kempe's analysis of mathematical form as he works his way up to a
third grade of clarify about these matters. In short, understanding
Peirce's phenomenological analyses of the distinctions he is drawing between
different sorts of seconds and secondness will require that we do what is
necessary to move to this third grade of clarity. After all, Peirce points
out that this mathematical manner of thinking about formal relations is one
of the keys to doing inquiry in phenomenology. Any ideas about how we might
go about doing this?
--Jeff
Jeffrey Downard
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
Northern Arizona University
(o) 928 523-8354
________________________________________
From: Gary Richmond [[email protected]]
Sent: Saturday, December 05, 2015 3:37 PM
To: Peirce-L
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] RE: signs, correlates, and triadic relations
Jeff, list,
It would be helpful if you'd explain what exactly you find problematic in
Nathan's outline. I may have some bones to pick with it myself--although I
think it's generally useful--at very least for stimulating a discussion. But
my 'bones' may be different from yours. So what bothers you here?
Best,
Gary R
[Gary Richmond]
Gary Richmond
Philosophy and Critical Thinking
Communication Studies
LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
C 745
718 482-5690
On Sat, Dec 5, 2015 at 5:02 PM, Jeffrey Brian Downard
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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<tel:928%20523-8354>
________________________________________
From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
[[email protected]<mailto:[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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