Jon, I have no particular problem with your “amendment” (and agree with at least part of it) so my inserted comments begin further down. I’ve changed the subject line to better reflect what we’re talking about.
Gary f. From: Jon Alan Schmidt <jonalanschm...@gmail.com> Sent: 29-Jun-18 21:05 Gary F., List: I would like to offer one minor amendment to the third paragraph of my previous post. A Sign only exists in Replicas--in itself, it is not the sort of thing to which temporality applies--and a concrete instance of semiosis only occurs when a Sign-Replica actually produces a Dynamic Interpretant in an interpreting Quasi-mind. Therefore, strictly speaking, it is the Sign-Replica that must temporally precede the Dynamic Interpretant. However, the Immediate Interpretant is the Form that the Sign communicates by means of the Sign-Replica; so it still seems right to say that the II temporally precedes the DI. In addition, I have now had a chance to study CP 4.583 a bit more closely. I think that the sentences that come right after what you quoted are highly relevant. CSP: But it is not true, as ordinarily represented, that a proposition can be built up of non-propositional signs. The truth is that concepts are nothing but indefinite problematic judgments. The concept of man necessarily involves the thought of the possible being of a man; and thus it is precisely the judgment, "There may be a man." The first statement affirms that propositions involve non-propositional Signs, in the technical sense that we have been discussing, but cannot be constructed from them; just as triads involve dyads, but cannot be constructed from them, and likewise for dyads with respect to monads. I suggest that this is because a proposition's Copulative logical structure--i.e., the continuous predicate--is not a Sign itself, but a relation among Signs. The other two statements clarify what Peirce meant by saying that "non-propositional signs can only exist as constituents of propositions"--the concept of man is precisely the judgment that there may be a man. This strikes me as at least loosely equivalent to a point that I have acknowledged before--the only logical difference between a Rheme and a proposition is that all of the blanks of the latter are filled by subjects. In that sense, a Rheme is an incomplete proposition, just as a concept is an indefinite judgment; and therefore its Replicas--such as "man" or "vase"--are effectively constituents of Replicas of that incomplete (and rarely expressed) proposition. Regards, Jon S. On Fri, Jun 29, 2018 at 4:36 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt <jonalanschm...@gmail.com <mailto:jonalanschm...@gmail.com> > wrote: Gary F., List: Getting work done on a Friday afternoon is always hard, and stimulating posts on Peirce-L do not make it any easier, since I cannot seem to resist the temptation to check for them every so often. :-) Again, Peirce was clearly giving a logical order at EP 2:481, based on how he stated R1 and R2 earlier in the same paragraph. Do you disagree? Do you hold that he was actually saying that a Possible can only be temporally succeeded by another Possible, and that a Necessitant can only be temporally preceded by another Necessitant? In any concrete instance of semiosis, the Sign--including its (internal) Immediate Interpretant--must temporally precede any Dynamic Interpretant, since the latter may never be produced at all; GF: Yes, the realm of dynamics — including not only DOs and Dis but also Sinsigns (or Actisigns as he called them later) — involves a temporal sequence, but not, I think, for the reason you give here. I think it’s because determination in that realm has a causal force which takes time and only works in one direction, namely forward in time. This I think is axiomatic in Peircean realism: if I say something about you, and what I say professes to be true, then you as the DO of my sign must exist, and must have whatever characters you have, independently of my saying anything about you — and therefore must exist before I say anything about you. This is not true of the immediate object of my sign, which as part of the sign, cannot exist before the sign. The scenario where the DI of that sign is “never produced at all” is impossible, a contradiction in terms, because by the definition of “sign,” an uninterpreted “sign” cannot occur as a sign in the realm of dynamics. and any Dynamic Interpretant must temporally precede the Final Interpretant, since the latter is only produced at the ideal end of the process in the infinite future. GF: Here I disagree. You seem to be thinking of the FI as the last in an infinite series of Dis, each of which occurs along a linear timeline. But if time is continuous, there can be no last in such an infinite series, because that would be a discontinuity. I take the Final Interpretant to be analogous to a Final Cause in causality, which (according to Peirce and Rosen) we must assume to be analogous to reasoning. I think that physics today offers us a better way to theorize about nonlinear causality than was available to Peirce, in the form of nonlinear dynamics. In a nutshell, when we reiterate a definite process thousands or millions of times, and observe the product at the end of each iteration, each product may be unique, but we will sooner or later recognize a pattern in the process that allows us to improve our predictions of what the product of the next iteration will look like; in the jargon of nonlinear dynamics, an attractor. But the attractor itself is never produced at all, and does not exist in linear time. I think the same is true of the “Final Interpretant” of a sign; which implies that the Dynamic Interpretant does not temporally precede it. To minimize confusion, I suppose that we should avoid using "determines" when describing this sequence. I don’t think the concept of “determination” need confuse us if we bear in mind that it has both strictly logical and temporal applications — which we interpret according to the context, like everything else. As you say yourself: The upshot here is that the division of the Interpretant into three is both a logical division and a temporal division, and they correspond to different (opposite) orders. Logically, the Destinate (Final) Interpretant determines the Effectual (Dynamic) Interpretant, which determines the Explicit (Immediate) Interpretant; temporally, the Immediate Interpretant precedes the Dynamic Interpretant, which precedes the Final Interpretant. Note that Bellucci (among others) agrees with me that Destinate=Final and Explicit=Immediate (p. 342). I did not ask whether the word "vase" by itself is an instance of semiosis, I asked whether it can exist as a Rheme apart from being incorporated into a proposition. Nothing can exist as a Rheme if it is not interpreted, because the Rheme is defined by what it is “for its interpretant.” No interpretant, no Rheme. And it cannot be interpreted as affording information about anything unless it is a component of an informational sign, namely a Dicisign. The case of a Seme is different, of course, as Peirce explains in the 1906 “Prolegomena”; as Bellucci observes, the Seme/Pheme/Delome trichotomy is more general than the Rheme/Dicisgn/Argument, which was itself more general than the traditional term/proposition/argument trichotomy; hence the new terms that he had to invent in each case. Nevertheless, the series of four letters that I typed and put within quotation marks is clearly a Sign-Replica--Peirce said that every repetition of the same word on a page in a book is a Replica of that word, which is a Rheme--and I suspect that it prompted some kind of (Dynamic) Interpretant in your mind when you (or anyone else) read it. That suspicion is a psychological one, not a logical one, and I can’t confirm or deny it, because I’m not sure that anything occurred in my mind on that occasion that would count as a Dynamic Interpretant in your terminology. Why would this not count as an instance of semiosis? Why would reading it in the dictionary not count as an instance of semiosis? Because it would not change the reader’s mind in any way, not even to confirm or reinforce a prior belief. Not unless he had some reason for looking it up, such as to resolve a nagging doubt that it was an English word included in the dictionary. Unlike the paragraph at EP 2:303-304, in the paragraph that you quoted from EP 2:310, Peirce was not discussing "the sign" in general; he was specifically referring to "the sign which joins 'Socrates' to 'is wise,' so as to make the proposition 'Socrates is wise.'" In other words, a proposition is certainly a connection of different words; but this is obviously not true of all Signs, since words themselves are Signs--namely, Rhemes. GF: Or namely, Terms; and as Bellucci (p. 101) puts it, “A term is a rudimentary proposition, and a proposition a rudimentary argument; the subject is a sign of the predicate, the premises are a sign of the conclusion: these were major claims already advanced in 1865.” But I think your later “amendment” (above) says pretty much the same thing. By the way, I think the biggest surprise I got in reading Bellucci’s book was that some points which I’d thought were discoveries of Peirce’s late years were already “advanced” in his early years. I just didn’t recognize them as such. As for Rhemes affording information, Peirce explicitly wrote that any Rheme, perhaps, will do so; he did not limit this characteristic to only the peculiar kind of Rheme that is involved in a Dicisign, as you seem to be doing. However, it makes sense that a Rheme would not typically be "informational," since Peirce defined information as the product of logical depth and breadth, and a Rheme can only have one or the other of these dimensions--not both. GF: Yes; and a Dicisign must have both. So we’re essentially in agreement there. If I may introduce a new subtopic to this discussion: I think the problem of finding an order of determination for the ten trichotomies of signs Peirce gave in 1908 is, as Bellucci says at the end of his Chapter 8, that the proper order of the ten is hierarchical rather than linear. And that they overlap to some extent. But I won’t try to summarize Bellucci’s argument to that effect. Regards, Jon S.
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