Gary R, Jeff, Jon S et al.,
A bit of synchronicity just now … Tomorrow night, as it happens, I’ll be discussing Chapter 18 of my book Turning Signs with a small group of readers. When I “completed” the book a year and a half ago, I promised myself not to make changes to it unless I found outright mistakes in it that needed correction. But today I made some fairly significant revisions to a part of that chapter, http://www.gnusystems.ca/TS/scp.htm#nvlvn, because it deals with the three trichotomies (in NDTR) that we’ve been discussing here, and as a result of that discussion, I was too dissatisfied with it to let it stand. You may be interested in looking at the revised version online (at the link given above) because it is my best attempt so far to explain the issues involved to an audience with minimal knowledge of semiotics. Of course, if any of you can see how I might improve it still further (for that audience), please contact me — there’s a button on the webpage itself for that very purpose. (Same goes for the rest of the chapter, if you want to read that for context.) Gary f. From: Gary Richmond [mailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com] Sent: 18-Apr-17 12:42 To: Peirce-L <peirce-l@list.iupui.edu> Subject: Re: Fw: [PEIRCE-L] Dyadic relations within the triadic Gary F, List, At first i consideried writing you off-list since apparently my brain isn't functioning sufficiently well enough yet so as to avoid making silly errors and then compounding them on the list! But I wanted to say something more publicly regarding your last post, so I've modified my draft message for this on-list posting. Yours is an excellent, as I see it and for my purposes, summary post; so for my own part, unless persuaded otherwise, I'm going to leave these matters--at least for now--as you have just analyzed them. I must admit that I haven't studied all the relevant texts recently, while in reviewing some of them I find that, for example, my marginal notes for the revision that the CP editors give in a footnote at 2.235 show that I disagreed with that editorial suggestion then and do so still (I found Peirce to be correct on categorial grounds). But how Peirce's ordering here can be--if it can be--reconciled with his later analyses I'll leave to others to research and theorize about. In some ways, and certainly aided by this threaded discussion and, especially, your most recent post, I am coming to think that this concern with correlates, sign parameters, categories, and the like not only will never be fully resolved a priori nor a posteriori--essentially for the principal reason you gave, namely, differences in "reflectional experience," but that the matter ever can be fully resolved for any community of inquiry, nor, perhaps, even for any individual inquirer; and from the discussion it has become clear that Peirce himself wasn't able to reach a satisfactory conclusion in these matters (although in time he might have). But I also think he contradicted himself much less than some here seem to imagine that he did; and, as I think you noted, he made a point of correcting such errors as he saw he'd made as a part of his own personal ethics of inquiry. This represents a kind of intellectual modesty that I've always admired in Peirce, something which seems rather rare in our era. But, of course, none of what I've just written is meant to suggest for a moment that work shouldn't continue in this area and, of course, it undoubtedly will! Indeed, despite my recent intellectual queasiness, I have found the current list discussion quite extraordinarily interesting and valuable, such that even if what I ultimately take away from it is that it is, a least for me, essentially an exercise in futulity, that itself represents a kind of fruit of the inquiry for me. Or, perhaps more to the point, my interests just don't seem to lie very deeply in this kind of inquiry (although perhaps once they did), and I now am feeling more and more compelled to turn to a consideration of how Peirce's phenomenology, semeiotics, pragmatism, etc. might be put to more, shall we say, practical use. By this I mean that sort of work which Arnold Shepperson attempted before his untimely death: applying certain principles--for example, the mathematical notion of abnumeral, or potential, collections-- to such fields as cultural and communication studies (for a brief discussion of his work in these areas see my article "Cultural Pragmatism and the Life of the Sign." http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/richmond/shepperson.pdf So, to conclude, while I'll continue to follow closely list discussions of correlates and such in consideration of divisions of sign classes and types, etc., I see that I haven't the heart--nor, apparently, the head!--for this kind of inquiry.at <http://inquiry.at> present. Again, thanks for this post which allowed me to better see just that. And thanks also to all the participants in this discussion whose cogent analyses allowed me to see that what I once thought to be so simple and obvious (the bases for the classification of signs) is hardly so. Best, Gary R
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