List - my few comments are
1] I don't think that Peirce confined semiosis to 'life', understood
as biological, but included the physic-chemical realm as well.
2] And yes, semiosis is a 'process' - a term for which I've been
chastised on this list for using - but it emphasizes the active
interaction that takes place within the triad.
3] I remain concerned about our understanding of Peirce's use of the
term 'subject'.
"But by “semiosis” I mean, on the contrary, 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."
As he says, it's an action involving THREE sites. BUT, I don't
think these three are each, before the semiosic interaction,
understandable as separate existences, as separate agents - the way
we commonly understand the grammatical term of 'subject'. By giving
them a different name [ sign, its object, its interpretant] and the
use of the term 'its' - the way I see it is that Peirce is pointing
out that they function, not as separate Subjects but as interactive
forms, each with a different function, within one process, the
semiosic process. In the next instant - that 'interpretant could
function as an Object within a different triadic process.
Edwina
On Fri 15/12/17 6:49 AM , g...@gnusystems.ca sent:
John,
Thanks for this, it’s helpful in reducing somewhat the vagueness
of Peirce’s references to physics and chemistry in Lowell 3.4 —
and answering the question I posed, which was badly put in the first
place. What I was trying to “get” was why Peirce would focus on
“substances” of this particular kind to argue for the reality of
Thirdness. There is certainly a conceptual connection between
Thirdness and life, and the phenomenon of chirality doesn’t strike
me as especially exemplary of that connection.
But now I see the historical context these lectures as an earlier
stage in the gradual shift from conceiving the essence of life as a
substance (such as “protoplasm” or in this case “active
substance”) to conceiving it as a process (such as
Maturana/Varela’s “autopoiesis” or Kaufmann’s
“autocatalysis” or Deacon’s “teleogenesis”). Nowadays we
all see an intimate connection between semiosis and the life process,
but we forget that Peirce did not introduce the term “semiosis”
until 1907. MS 318, where he introduced it, is perhaps a better
example of what Peirce was driving at in Lowell 3.4.
[[ (It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All
dynamical action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical,
either takes place between two subjects,— whether they react
equally upon each other, or one is agent and the other patient,
entirely or partially,— or at any rate is a resultant of such
actions between pairs. But by “semiosis” I mean, on the contrary,
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. Σημείωσις in Greek of the Roman
period, as early as Cicero’s time, if I remember rightly, meant the
action of almost any kind of sign; and my definition confers on
anything that so acts the title of a “sign.”) ]EP2:411]
But I don’t think anybody sees the “three-body problem” in
astrophysics, for instance, as embodying the kind of complexity we
see in a semiotic or a living process; so it’s not just the
interaction of any three subjects that constitutes Thirdness. “The
third Universe comprises everything whose Being consists in active
power to establish connections between different objects, especially
between objects in different Universes” (EP2:435, emphasis mine).
I don’t suppose that I’m telling readers of this list anything
they don’t already know, I’m just trying to articulate it in a
way that seems clearer to me than Lowell 3.4 does. Perhaps others can
clarify it better.
Gary f.
-----Original Message-----
From: John F Sowa [mailto:s...@bestweb.net]
Sent: 14-Dec-17 15:27
To: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Lowell Lecture 3.4
On 12/13/2017 7:56 AM, g...@gnusystems.ca [1] wrote:
> Peirce is referring to /organic/ compounds as “such active
substances.”
> But I still don’t know what he’s referring to as “those
substances
> which rotate the plane of polarization to the right or left.”
What
> would those be called by chemists today?
Many kinds of crystals and solutions rotate the plane of polarized
light. But organic molecules tend to be more complex than inorganic
molecules, and they frequently come in pairs that are identical,
except for *chirality* (left or right handedness).
The formulas of the L- and R- versions are identical, but because of
the geometry of the molecules, they differ in exactly the same way as
the right and left hands. When light passes through solutions of
those molecules, it reacts differently with the two kinds, but the
difference is only detected when the light happens to be polarized.
The two kinds of molecules are called *enatiomers* of each other.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enantiomer [2]
See below for an excerpt from the Wikipedia article about splitting
sucrose into *invert sugar*, a mixture of glucose and fructose.
John
___________________________________________________________________
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_sugar_syrup [3]
The term "inverted" is derived from the practice of measuring the
concentration of sugar syrup using a polarimeter. Plane polarized
light, when passed through a sample of pure sucrose solution, is
rotated to the right (optical rotation). As the solution is converted
to a mixture of sucrose, fructose and glucose, the amount of rotation
is reduced until (in a fully converted solution) the direction of
rotation has changed
(inverted) from right to left.
C12H22O11 (sucrose, Specific rotation = +66.5°) + H2O (water, no
rotation) → C6H12O6 (glucose, Specific rotation = +52.7°) +
C6H12O6 (fructose, Specific rotation = −92°)
net: +66.5° converts to −19.65° (half of the sum of the specific
rotation of fructose and glucose)
Links:
------
[1]
http://webmail.primus.ca/javascript:top.opencompose(\'g...@gnusystems.ca\',\'\',\'\',\'\')
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enantiomer
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_sugar_syrup
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