Jon, Your explanation confirms my hypothesis as to why you see a contradiction where Peirce evidently doesn’t. If you don’t mind a metaphor, you’re trying to fit Peirce’s terms together as if they were rigid pieces of a flat picture puzzle (rather than products of various logical analyses made from various points of view with occasional shifts of emphasis in a multidimensional study of semiosis). But if that’s your path of inquiry, far be it from me to block it. All I can do is try to explain why I take a different path, and I think my previous post does that, so no need to repeat myself.
I might however add a note about my practical methodology which I don’t think I’ve mentioned before. First, I prefer reading whole texts of Peirce, in which I try to follow his train of thought from point to point, rather than collections of snippets such as the Commens Dictionary. Once I’ve read them, if they tell me anything new, I collect them into a single ever-growing chronologically ordered megatext. Then, when I want to investigate Peirce’s usage of a single term such as “signification”, I do a search for the term (in this case I would search for “signif”) in that megatext. That way each hit occurs in a context with which I am already familiar, and some hits trigger adjustments in my current understanding of the depth of the term. Sometimes I go on to search the CP or other searchable collections for texts that aren’t in my collection. I realize this method is not for everybody, but it often reveals connections and nuances of Peircean thought that I hadn’t noticed before, and may explain some differences between my results and others. Gary f. From: Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]> Sent: 21-Jul-18 23:40 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Logical Depth and Signification Gary F., List: GF: Jon, you’re asking: If the logical depth/signification of a Sign corresponds to its Interpretant … then where does the Sign's information fit into the picture? But you’ve already answered that yourself: “The information (breadth x depth) of a Sign then corresponds to the unity of the Object with its characters; i.e., the Sign's Interpretant.” This is precisely what I see as contradictory. If breadth and depth are the two different dimensions of Peircean information, how could both depth and information somehow correspond to the Interpretant? Perhaps muddying the waters further, I just noticed that in NDTR (CP 2.257/260/262, EP 2:294-296; 1903), Peirce described each of the three types of Dicisigns as involving an Icon or Rheme to embody/signify/express its information and an Index to indicate/denote the Object/subject of that information. I would say instead that a Dicisign conveys its information by involving an Icon/Rheme to signify its depth and an Index to denote its breadth. GF: I’ve omitted “3ns/Entelechy” from the end of that sentence of yours because I think your use of those terms in that context is confusing--and may even be causing part of the problem you have with “reconciling” what you see as two completely different Peircean analyses. My objective over the last several months has been to map the process of semiosis and Peirce's terminology for its constituents to the Aristotelian concepts of Form/1ns, Matter/2ns, and Entelechy/3ns as he invoked them in "Sketch of Dichotomic Mathematics" and "New Elements." As I recently acknowledged, this is a kind of hypostatic abstraction within logic as semeiotic, but it might subsequently have application to metaphysics. I currently view the Interpretant (information/Entelechy) as the semiotic union of the Object (breadth/Matter) with its characters (depth/Form); i.e., "the attribution of a predicate to a subject" (R 200, CP 6.341; 1908, emphasis added). GF: One is the breadth/depth (extension/intension, extension/comprehension) dichotomy, which is a very old analysis of the meanings of terms, but which Peirce extended to apply to propositions and arguments as well. Peirce stated on a couple of occasions that he was using "breadth" and "depth" in a way that did not exactly match that "very old analysis" (e.g., CP 4.407; 1867). In fact, the ellipsis at the beginning of my excerpt from R 200 replaced the following text, which comes immediately after CP 6:347 in the manuscript. CSP: In a paper which I printed in 1867 [CP 4.391-426], I gave the principal senses in which the terms "logical extension" and "logical comprehension" have been widely employed by logicians. They are more numerous than ordinary students of the chief treatises on logic are aware. For such books are not usually read with sufficient thought for the gathering of exact ideas. I shall now simply select one meaning of each of those two logical "quantities," shall employ that one, and shall neglect the others. With that understanding, and without attempting any precise statement which would here be worse than superfluous, I will say that ... (R 200:E85-E86; 1908) I omitted all of this because what I quoted was already rather lengthy, but I did include Peirce's statement that breadth and depth apply "not only to propositions and to arguments, but also to icons, indices, and all kinds of signs." This brings to mind his comments in "New Elements" (EP 2:307; 1904) to the effect that a pure Icon would signify without denoting (i.e., have depth but no breadth), while a pure Index would denote without signifying (i.e., have breadth but no depth). GF: Another is the subject/predicate dichotomy which applies to propositions. Right, and as Peirce stated in R 200, "it is the predicates which express depth, and the subjects which indicate breadth." Yet he also wrote elsewhere that we can reach the limit of analysis--one that is not arbitrary--by throwing everything into the subject except the logical form of connection among its constituents, leaving only an "ultimate" or "continuous" predicate (CP 4.438, c. 1903; SS 71-72, 1908; cf. CP 8.352, EP 2:485, 1908). With this in mind, I currently find it conceptually preferable to distinguish predicates as expressing depth, subjects as indicating breadth, and the continuous copula as representing information. Predicates, subjects, and the continuous copula are the parts of a Sign; depth, breadth, and information are the corresponding properties of a Sign. GF: I’m going to speculate that the discrepancy you see results from your attempt to map dichotomies (breadth/depth, subject/predicate) onto the triad sign/object/interpretant. The fundamental question that we are exploring here is whether such dichotomies are present within the Object of the Sign or between its Object and Interpretant. But the latter is not properly treated as a dichotomy at all--the Sign, its Object, and its Interpretant are the three Correlates of an irreducibly triadic relation. By contrast, dichotomies are dyadic relations; and on that basis, it seems appropriate to assign them entirely to the Object--breadth and subject (denotation of Matter) to the Dynamic Object, depth and predicate (signification of Form) to the Immediate Object. Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt <http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt> - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt <http://twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt> On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 5:46 PM, <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Jon, you’re asking: If the logical depth/signification of a Sign corresponds to its Interpretan … then where does the Sign's information fit into the picture? But you’ve already answered that yourself: “The information (breadth x depth) of a Sign then corresponds to the unity of the Object with its characters; i.e., the Sign's Interpretant.” (I’ve omitted “3ns/Entelechy” from the end of that sentence of yours because I think your use of those terms in that context is confusing — and may even be causing part of the problem you have with “reconciling” what you see as two completely different Peircean analyses. Let me generalize from this a bit. We’re dealing with three analyses of informational semiosis here. One is the breadth/depth (extension/intension, extension/comprehension) dichotomy, which is a very old analysis of the meanings of terms, but which Peirce extended to apply to propositions and arguments as well. Another is the subject/predicate dichotomy which applies to propositions. The third is the standard trichotomy of the ‘elements’ or correlates in a triadic relation, namely sign/object/interpretant. Now, all three of these are analyses of the same semiotic phenomenon, when applied to the structure of propositions, as they all are. But these analyses are made for different purposes and they do not necessarily map onto each other cogently. Nor should they, when we consider that the products of these analyses of semiosic processes are not observable entities but entia rationis. As Peirce said in his description of the “perfect sign,” “The only signs which are tolerably fixed are non-existent abstractions.” And if a sign such as a proposition is not fixed, the components into which it is analyzed are even less fixed. Especially when you try to take their names and map them onto another analysis. I’m going to speculate that the discrepancy you see results from your attempt to map dichotomies (breadth/depth, subject/predicate) onto the triad sign/object/interpretant. As you say, the mapping of denotation, breadth and subject onto the object seems obvious. But then what do you map the depth, predicate and signification onto? The sign? The interpretant? Some blending of the two? Any of these choices can be made to work in some contexts, and in fact IS made to work in various texts embodying Peirce’s late semiotic. But none of these mappings give you an exact fit. For instance, the subject of a proposition is usually regarded as part of it, but the (dynamic) object of a proposition is external to it; so the “correspondence” between subject and object is not exact. That’s because analyses of continuous processes always have a degree of arbitrariness to them. Peirce’s late semiotic emphasizes this in the case of the subject/predicate analysis, but it applies to some degree to every analysis of semiosis — including the taxonomy of sign types. I hope this makes some sense, though it may not cause the discrepancy you see to disappear. Gary f.
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