John,
Yes, I’m relieved that we’ve put the debate over “polyversity” behind us. As to your recommendations, all I can say is that I’ve already implemented them, though probably not in the way you would. But you’d have to read the whole essay (20 chapters) to see how the various factors you mention are integrated with the rest of the book. And one of the things I came to realize toward the end of the 15-year process of researching and writing it is that I can’t realistically expect more than a handful of people to actually read it. It’s too broad and eclectic to interest specialists in the various fields I’ve drawn information from, and it’s too challenging and academic (and long) for casual readers. More generally, people don’t read this kind of book any more, either in print or on the Net — at least, not with the kind of attention I give to reading Peirce — because such things are swept away in the flood of modern and postmodern media. So in my blog and my Peirce-l posts, I’ve gone back to very short forms, though still trying to point toward certain realizations that came to me through that 15-year voyage of discovery, and still hyperlinking to the larger context of Turning Signs in case someone might follow the links. I’m grateful to life for such a learning opportunity, and I can only hope that others with a philosophical bent will embark on such voyages of their own, undeterred by the unlikelihood that anybody will read the finished product. As Ursula Le Guin wrote, “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” Gary f. -----Original Message----- From: John F Sowa [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 15-Jan-18 16:49 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] definitions and ethics of terminology Gary, We have both wasted too much time in debating the word polyversity. I did read your chapter, and I'll make a recommendation. But you, as the author, are free to accept or reject my comments as you please. I promise that I won't complain one way or the other. > no part of my definition of “polyversity” was intended for use by > specialists in linguistics... Perhaps, but you did cite Talmy. And I thank you for doing so. I bought his two volumes shortly after they were published (2003) and read some, but not all of his 1000+ pages. Your comments led me to review his examples of conceptual alternativity and his ideas of using different "windows" to focus attention on different aspects of a scene. When I first read that, I wasn't thinking of Peirce's categories. But I now realize that the mechanism of windowing is related to Peirce's triad of Mark, Token, Type. Any scene, by itself, has an open-ended variety of potential marks. A window consists of a pattern or structure of related types. By applying a window to a scene, the viewer interprets a subset of marks as a structure of tokens that correspond to the pattern of types in the window. Different windows correspond to different ways of interpreting and talking about a scene. My recommendation (which you may reject as you please) is to combine Peirce's categories with Talmy's cognitive-linguistic analyses. It's not necessary to go into all the linguistic detail of Talmy's two volumes. But Peirce was a master at combining multidisciplinary methods. I believe that he would approve of some such application of his categories. John
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