Clark, list,
Those seem to be passages from the Wikipedia Charles Sanders Peirce
article or the Wikipedia Semiotic elements and classes of signs article
in the form that they had some years ago as a result of my edits. Two of
the paragraphs were already there, written by I don't know who, maybe
Jon Awbrey.
Since that time I made two significant edits:
2. Object:
i. Immediate object: the object as represented in the sign [DELETE],
a kind of statistical, "average" version of the given object [END
DELETE. Gary Richmond, as I recall, convinced me that my text there was
mistaken].
ii. Dynamic object: the object as it really is [INSERT], on which
the immediate object is founded "as on bedrock" [END INSERT]. Also
called the dynamoid object, the dynamical object.
At the Wikipedia articles there are footnotes with references to primary
sources, often with links to the primary sources.
Best, Ben
On 6/21/2016 9:31 PM, Clark Goble wrote:
On Jun 21, 2016, at 1:55 PM, Gary Richmond <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
One interesting think in Parker’s book is the cosmological element in
the development of the categories.
Whoops. One interesting /thing/… LOL. Sorry for all the typos. I
wrote that quickly. Hopefully I don’t make an embarrassing mistake in it.
One addition is this explanation of the sign that Ben put together
some years ago.
1. Sign: always immediate to itself.
2. Object:
i. Immediate object: the object as represented in the sign, a
kind of statistical, "average" version of the given object.
ii. Dynamic object: the object as it really is. Also called the
dynamoid object, the dynamical object.
3. Interpretant:
i. Immediate interpretant: total unanalyzed effect of the
interpretant on a mind or quasimind, a kind of starting point of
the dynamic and final interpretants, a feeling or idea which the
sign carries with it even before there is an interpreter or
quasi-interpreter.
ii. Dynamic interpretant: the actual effect (apart from the
feeling) of the sign on a mind or quasi-mind, for instance the
agitation of the feeling.
iii. Final interpretant: the effect which the sign _would_ have
on any mind or quasi-mind if circumstances allowed that effect to
be fully achieved. The final interpretant of a response about the
weather about which one has inquired may consist in the effect
which the true response would have one's plans for the day which
were the inquiry's purpose. The final interpretant of a line of
investigation is truth and _would_ be reached sooner or later but
still inevitably by investigation adequately prolonged, though the
truth remains independent of that which "you or I" or any finite
community of investigators believe.
The immediate object is, from the viewpoint of a theorist, really
a kind of sign of the dynamic object; but phenomenologically it is
the object until there is reason to go beyond it, and somebody
analyzing (critically but not theoretically) a given semiosis will
consider it to be the object until there is reason to do otherwise.
To say, therefore, that thought cannot happen in an instant, but
requires a time, is but another way of saying that every thought must
be interpreted in another, or that all thought is in signs. (C.S.
Peirce, CP 5.254).
Peirce referred to his general study of signs, based on the concept of
a triadic sign relation, as semiotic or semeiotic, either of which
terms are currently used in either singular of plural form. Peirce
began writing on semeiotic in the 1860s, around the time that he
devised his system of three categories. He eventually defined semiosis
as an "action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of
_three_ subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant,
this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into
actions between pairs". (Peirce 1907, in Houser 1998, 411).
1.. A _sign_ (also called a _representamen_) represents, in the
broadest possible sense of "represents". It is something interpretable
as saying something about something. It is not necessarily symbolic,
linguistic, or artificial.
2.. An _object_ (also called a _semiotic object_) is a subject matter
of a sign and an interpretant. It can be anything discussable or
thinkable, a thing, event, relationship, quality, law, argument, etc.,
and can even be fictional, for instance Hamlet. All of those are
special or partial objects. The object most accurately is the universe
of discourse to which the partial or special object belongs. For
instance, a perturbation of Pluto's orbit is a sign about Pluto but
ultimately not only about Pluto.
3.. An _interpretant_ (also called an _interpretant sign_) is the
sign's more or less clarified meaning or ramification, a kind of form
or idea of the difference which the sign's being true would make.
(Peirce's sign theory concerns meaning in the broadest sense,
including logical implication, not just the meanings of words as
properly clarified by a dictionary.) The interpretant is a sign (a) of
the object and (b) of the interpretant's "predecessor" (the
interpreted sign) as being a sign of the same object. The interpretant
is an _interpretation_ in the sense of a _product_ of an interpretive
process or a _content_ in which an interpretive relation culminates,
though this product or content may itself be an act or conduct of some
kind. Another way to say these things is that the sign stands for the
object to the interpretant.
Some of the understanding needed by the mind depends on familiarity
with the object. In order to know for what a given sign stands, the
mind needs some experience of that sign's object collaterally to that
sign or sign system, and in this context Peirce speaks of collateral
experience, collateral observation, etc.
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