Jon, list,
Jon, I’m well aware that your “understanding is that what a Sign signifies are certain qualities/characters of its Dynamic Object, which taken together constitute its Immediate Object.” But I’m only interested in continuing this dialogue if we can base it on Peirce’s definition of the Immediate Object — not yours. The problem I have with yours is that you take it as definitive of the IO that “every sign” has one — including rhematic signs. But I have yet to see any text where Peirce refers explicitly to the immediate object of any rhematic sign. As Bellucci says (even in the paragraph you quoted from him!) only dicisigns are said by Peirce to have immediate objects, because a dicisign has two objects by definition.
Please review the Commens Dictionary entry for the IO (http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/immediate-object). (That was your serve, as it were, but I’m now returning it to your court.) Peirce’s definitions of the IO are stated there quite clearly, and I don’t think I need to repeat them again. But you’ve apparently paid attention only to the quotes in that entry that you can interpret as confirmations of your prior “understanding.” I think that’s a problem when your prior understanding becomes the basis of your definition.
Originally you said that “Peirce explicitly stated on multiple occasions that every Sign has an Immediate Object.” Now you admit that the “multiple occasions” are down to two; and those two are both excerpted from manuscript sources which, to my knowledge, have not been published. I haven’t seen those manuscripts (have you?) to ascertain what context those quotes were taken out of. I think this matters, because Peirce’s usage of the term “sign” — and thus of “every sign” — varies with the context in which he’s using it.
One obvious case in point is Kaina Stoicheia (KS). For instance, those “signs” which are designated as “sinsigns” in the 1903 Syllabus (and elsewhere) are excluded from the universe of “signs” in KS, by Peirce’s statement that “In the first place, a sign is not a real thing” (EP2:303). Also, KS declares itself to be a “scholium” (EP2:303); and “It is the Proposition which forms the main subject of this whole scholium” (EP2:311). In this scholium, Peirce often uses the word “sign” where the reference is to propositions, as we can see from the examples and the analysis he gives of these “signs.” For example (EP2:303-4):
[[ The sentence “Roxana was the queen of Alexander” is a sign of Roxana and of Alexander, and though there is a grammatical emphasis on the former, logically the name “Alexander” is as much a subject as is the name “Roxana”; and the real persons Roxana and Alexander are real objects of the sign. Every sign that is sufficiently complete refers to sundry real objects. ]]
In the context of KS, it’s clear that Peirce has propositional signs in mind in the sentence which begins “Every sign.” For all we know, the same may be true of his usage of “every sign” in the two quotes in the Commens entry where that phrase occurs. After all, Peirce was a logician, and logicians give most of their attention to propositions and arguments; Peirce’s “speculative grammar” is a branch of logic as semiotic, and his taxonomy (including the distinction between dynamic and immediate objects) is part of his speculative grammar. He quite naturally and often uses the terms “sign” and “symbol” as shorthand for the kind of sign that logicians are traditionally concerned with. That’s one reason why it’s unwise to ignore the context in which Peirce uses the word “sign” — and why there is no need to cite an “occasion where Peirce stated explicitly that only propositions have IOs.” It’s quite enough to see that everything Peirce does say about IOs is in a context of which the subject is propositions (or other dicisigns). You’re welcome to give a counter-example to that if you can.
Two of Peirce’s important innovations in logic are (1) his division of objects into dynamic and immediate (1904), and (2) his 1903 recasting of the term/proposition/argument trichotomy, which was a division of symbols, into the rheme/dicisign/argument trichotomy, where neither rhemes nor dicisigns are necessarily symbols. These two innovations are not unrelated. For one thing, they allow Peirce (and Stjernfelt and Bellucci) to say that not only propositions but dicisigns or “quasi-propositions” must have immediate objects, because the doubleness of object is built into the definition of the dicisign as well as the proposition.
Another connection becomes apparent when we consider that Peirce’s division of signs according to their immediate objects produces the trichotomy vague/actual/general. This appears in the Logic Notebook for July 7, 1905: “In its relation to its Immediate Object, it is Vagosign if it represents that Obj[ect) as possible, [it is] Actisign [if it represents that Object as] existent, [it is] General [if it represents that Object as] law” (R 339 DDR 247r). But this is prefigured in KS, where Peirce says (EP2:311) that “the distinctions of vague and distinct, general and individual are propositional distinctions.” Now, in KS Peirce ignores the dynamic/immediate object distinction (as well as the the proposition/dicisign distinction); but taking that into account, he is saying that the distinctions pertaining to the sign’s relation to its immediate object “are propositional distinctions.” That’s enough for me, and since you are quite familiar with KS, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be enough for you.
All of the above is to question your claim that “every sign,” presumably including at least the ten types defined in the Syllabus (if not the notorious 66), “has an immediate object.” If you’re going to stick to that claim, and base your definition of the IO on it, then I’m not interested in prolonging discussion on the matter. I’d prefer to focus on what Peirce actually says about immediate objects, in the contexts where he says these things, rather than argue for or against an abstract schema of sign taxonomy. Just my personal preference, of course.
Gary f.
From: Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]>
Sent: 21-Jun-18 23:46
To: Peirce-L <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Direct experience and immediate object
Gary F., List:
GF: Are you denying that indicating is an indexical function?
I am not convinced that Peirce intended "indicated" in that particular context to be strictly understood as entailing indexical function, since Qualities cannot indicate in that sense; after all, a Qualisign cannot be an Index. Just a couple of days later, he instead wrote that Descriptives "determine their Objects by stating the characters of the latter" (EP 2:484; 1908, emphasis mine), which is what I had in mind when I said earlier that a Descriptive Sign is precisely one that does refer to its DO "exclusively by describing it." That is why it is classified as a "Descriptive"!
GF: Can you give me one or two examples of these facts that you are referring to?
There are two cars located in the direction that the guy is pointing, relative to his current position. One of them is red, and the other is blue. The guy is calling someone else's attention to the red one.
GF: OK, if the Peirce quotes amassed by Bellucci don’t loosen your hold on the Fregean interpretation of the IO, I certainly can’t do better.
I am not necessarily endorsing the Fregean interpretation of the IO; for one thing, I do not know enough about Frege's views to judge them one way or the other. I am just continuing to define the IO as I have been doing for several months now--the partial combination of attributes of the DO by which the Sign denotes it.
GF: I would appreciate it, though, if you could cite one or two of the “multiple occasions”, other than early drafts of MS 318, where Peirce states explicitly that every sign has an Immediate Object.
Please review the Commens Dictionary entry for the IO (http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/immediate-object). Two of the quotes there state explicitly that "every sign" has an IO, only one of which is from MS 318. Many of the others say something like "a sign has two objects" or "there are two aspects of the Object," or simply define the two Objects in a way that at least implies that both pertain to any Sign. Can you cite even one occasion where Peirce stated explicitly that only propositions have IOs? As I have pointed out before, Bellucci bases this novel assertion on a single passage, which I believe he clearly misinterprets.
CSP: ... when we speak of the object of a sign ... we may mean the immediate object, the object as the sign represents it. For some signs separately represent their objects. Every proposition does so. (R 284:54-55)
FB: The immediate object is the "object as the sign represents it," that is to say, the object which those signs which separately represent an object do in fact represent. The sentence "for some signs separately represent their objects" is crucial here. Not all signs separately represent an object: rhemes do not; only propositions and proposition-like signs (dicisigns) do, because these signs have a part that indicates the object of which the other part says something. Thus, only signs of this sort can have an immediate object. For the immediate object is the "object as the sign represents it," and only proposition-like signs independently represent an object, and thus can be divided according to the way they represent the immediate object. (p. 294)
Bellucci's conclusion here simply does not follow; the fact that a Rheme does not separately or independently represent its Object obviously does not entail that it does not represent its Object at all, and therefore cannot have an IO. On the contrary, every Sign represents its Object--that is what it means for something to be a Sign in the first place!--and the IO is simply "the Object as represented in the sign" (EP 2:498; 1909). Furthermore, since only Arguments separately represent their Interpretants, Bellucci's reasoning implies that only Arguments can have Immediate Interpretants. Again, where did Peirce ever impose such a limitation?
Regards,
Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA
Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
