> On Jun 23, 2016, at 2:16 AM, John Collier <[email protected]> wrote: > > The “average” notion is distinctly misleading. Suggests an external averager > that does not exist. It is an abstraction at best, and typically ignores > aspects of the dynamics object (but I think could even get it entirely wrong > and still be the immediate object – it depends on context for this to happen) > <> Part of the problem with the word “average” is which sense of average we mean. There are a few places where Peirce uses it but it’s clear from context he means “most of the time” or a notion closer the modal average.
i.e. The truth is that induction is reasoning from a sample taken at random to the whole lot sampled. A sample is a random one, provided it is drawn by such machinery, artificial or physiological, that in the long run any one individual of the whole lot would get taken as often as any other. Therefore, judging of the statistical composition of a whole lot from a sample is judging by a method which will be right on the average in the long run, and, by the reasoning of the doctrine of chances, will be nearly right oftener than it will be far from right. (CP 1.93) I get what Ben was originally doing in that quote I offered. I feel bad I brought it up uncritically from not reading through the rest of the thread. I primarily brought it up as a quick list of the structure of a sign for Jerry Rhee. I’m glad Ben mentioned he’d quickly fixed it. That said, the distinction between the dynamic and immediate object and how the immediate object becomes the immediate object is quite interesting. It gets at some of the key issues in the move to a more externalist type of phenomenology in the Continental tradition. (Largely due to the shift by Heidegger in Being and Time away from Husserl’s somewhat more Cartesian approach) If you have an externalist phenomenology you have to deal with the difference between the real object as it is and how it presents itself to a person. Heidegger takes a somewhat poetic approach with the metaphor of “unveiling” making use of a lot of Greek etymology. (Some good, some clearly fanciful) However the emphasis is always that somehow it’s the objects themselves given to us phenomenologically in a stronger sense than how Husserl has the objects themselves. The distinction itself of course goes back to Descartes but was given a particular form by Kant in the noumenal/phenomenal distinction. Peirce famously gets rid of noumenal as an unavailable thing in itself. Although I think how to read Peirce carefully here is still somewhat controversial. Peirce recognizes what after Quine we’d call the theory laden nature of observation. If Quine is moving away from the naive approach of the Vienna positivists then Peirce’s own verification principle also ought be examined carefully. I think Peirce avoids the positivist problems both due to the pragmatic maxim being far broader but also because it’s only a criterion of meaning, not truth. While Peirce’s maxim isn’t quite unpacked the same way, it ends up making meaning tied to a set of background practices of verification. So his diamond example of hardness is tied to the ways we’d test hardness. Those in turn are practices that are theory laden. I don’t recall off the top of my head if Peirce makes the theory ladenness of the maxim explicit anywhere. But it seems straightforward to understand how it is even if he never gives quite the same sort of analysis of say Heidegger’s tool-use. I bring all of this up as a round about way of getting at the notion of averageness. It’s the notion that I think Heideggarians sometimes call everydayness. In Heideggarian phenomenology this is often looked at negatively because it’s how we’re caught up in social practices that hide the object from us phenomenologically. We don’t pay attention to how the object exceeds our expectations given to us culturally. Interestingly in the 21st century Heideggarians often influenced by pragmatism then took a more careful look at everydayness and appreciated it in a more positive sense. (Here meaning pragmatism in a broad sense as much influenced by Dewey and James as Peirce) Why I actually like averageness, despite it’s problems, is that as a term it communicates well the idea of exceptions from the typical (in the sense of either mode or mean). As such it gets at the gap between the immediate object and dynamic object. The dynamic object can only determine the immediate object through what is common or typical for the interpreter that is current in their environment before the sign is uttered. This is key. This aspect of the immediate object has to be in the environment and must be there before the sign becomes a sign. A few quotes (emphasis mine): …philosophists are in the habit of distinguishing two objects of many signs, the immediate and the real. The former is an image, or notion, which the interpreter is supposed to have already formed in his mind before the sign is uttered. Thus, if a person, with a view to combatting an exaggerated admiration of ability, remarks that Richard III appears to have been an able ruler, it is a hundred to one that he never read any first hand testimony concerning Richard, and does not suppose that his interlocutor knows any more about the real Richard. He refers merely to the current notional Richard. (“Pragmatism” MS 318:16-7 — 1907) Every sign must plainly have an immediate object, however indefinite, in order to be a sign. In conversation, it will often be expressed, not in words, but by the environment of the interlocutors. (“Pragmatism” MS 318:24-5 — 1907) The way the sign function is by using the immediate object to point at the dynamic object. That is the relation is essentially indexical. This is how Peirce avoids the problem of correlates in say Cartesian philosophy. Both the dynamic and immediate object are always essentially part of the sign. This is Peirce’s externalism and how he goes “to the objects themselves” as Heidegger puts it without the problem of Cartesian approaches to phenomenology (whether Husserl, Kant or Descartes) It’s important to realize that Peirce’s use of dynamic/immediate objects are wrapped up in a conception of the sign as a process rather than a moment. We really can’t separate out this notion of the sign from Peirce’s conception of inquiry rather than static epistemology as the way to think about meaning. We must distinguish between the Immediate Object, - i.e., the Object as represented in the sign, - and the Real (no, because perhaps the Object is altogether fictive, I must choose a different term; therefore:), say rather the Dynamical Object, which, from the nature of things, the Sign cannot express, which it can only indicate and leave the interpreter to find out by collateral experience. (“Letters to William James” EP 2.498 — 1909) It’s in this collateral experience where Heidegger’s authentic/inauthentic distinction arises. Despite the unfortunate moral connotation of Heidegger’s terminology, the basic idea is just the object in experience as it is only in the average everydayness of sense versus an experience which exceeds this typical everydayness (and that we notice). All of this is a long winded way of saying that while there are problems with Ben’s original use of “average” there are quite a few ways where I think it gets at something fundamental in the dynamic/immediate object distinction.
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