Jon, That’s an interesting hypothesis, or set of hypotheses, but I don’t have any more specific comment on it, because I haven’t read that 1867 paper of Peirce’s since I published my paper on his concept of information in 2010.
I don’t think your contrast of “systematic” and “exegetical” quite captures the difference between our approaches, particularly if “exegesis” means “critical explanation or interpretation of a text” by means of another text. The more intensively I read a Peirce text, the less need do I see for a verbal “interpretation” of it; to me, once I’m sufficiently immersed in Peirce’s context and terminological habits, his text just means exactly what it says, and I tend to find rewordings of it lacking in one way or another — but I’m less and less inclined to attempt a competing rewording. This might be a good time to share something I came across in a Peirce manuscript recently, R 299 CSP 9-10: [[ … through all I write upon this subject I find myself in the plight that has incommoded every man who has attempted a thorough revision of philosophy; namely, that the old land-marks are so clean washed away that he knows not how to begin a description of any field of thought. If (to change the figure), he clothes an unfamiliar concept in the ready-made language of philosophy, he will get a horrible misfit. If, once a few categories are made clear, he resorts to definitions for the rest, even if he surmounts the difficulty of analysis, the very greatest of human minds will be apt to blunder in executing the correlative synthesis of an unfamiliar notion. He may, no doubt, explain himself by conducting his reader along the same path which he himself followed in reaching his new concept, the reader’s mind, being hurried in as many minutes over the course as the days, or perhaps weeks, that the pioneer’s exploration consumed, will be kept tense so long that, by an inexfugible law of chemistry, the brain becomes fatigued, and the thread of meaning gets lost. The whole difficulty reminds me of the difficulty of representing the geographical features of our Globe in a plane map. Each map-projection has its own characteristic failure; and perhaps that projection is best which has the faults of all the others, but has no one fault in so objectionable a degree as it must have had if that one had been its only fault. In like manner, I incline to think that the philosophist who has original conceptions to communicate will do best to reunite all three of the faults above-mentioned, in different judicious proportions in different cases. ]] If I had to give a name to what I try to do when reading Peirce, I might call it “correlative synthesis of the thread of meaning”! 😊 Anyway, metalinguistic digressions like this one make it clear that Peirce was acutely aware of how difficult it is to make anything clear to somebody else when you have to work with (and against) “the ready-made language of philosophy.” I’ve caught an inkling of this awareness in the course of working on my own book, although Turning Signs does not pretend to be “a thorough revision of philosophy.” Gary f. From: Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]> Sent: 25-Jul-18 12:28 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Logical Depth and Signification Gary F., List: This might strike you as another case of forcing together pieces from different puzzles, but I will throw it out there anyway. I have already noted that in CP 2.418 (1867), Peirce characterized logical breadth, depth, and information as follows. * Informed breadth is the Sign's "direct reference to its object, or the real things which it represents"; i.e., what he later called the Dynamic Object. * Informed depth is the Sign's "reference to its ground through its object, or the common characters of those objects"; i.e., what he later called the Immediate Object. * Information itself, the product of breadth and depth, is the Sign's "reference to its interpretant through its object, or all the facts known about its object." Just previous to this, in CP 2.407-417 (1867), Peirce identified three senses of breadth and depth that correspond to three distinct states of information. * Essential breadth and depth - knowledge of no facts, but only the meanings (definitions) of terms. * Informed breadth and depth - knowledge derived from experience, which always falls between the other two. * Substantial breadth and depth - knowledge of qualities/forms and things/substances themselves (absolute truth). It occurs to me now that these at least loosely parallel the three Interpretants of Peirce's much later semeiotic writings. * "... the Immediate Interpretant, which is the interpretant as it is revealed in the right understanding of the Sign itself, and is ordinarily called the meaning of the sign" (CP 4.536; 1906). * "... the Dynamical Interpretant which is the actual effect which the Sign, as a Sign, really determines" (ibid). "In its Active/Passive forms, the Dynamical Interpretant indefinitely approaches the character of the Final/Immediate Interpretant; and yet the distinction is absolute" (CP 8.315, EP 2:499; 1909). * "... the Final Interpretant ... is that which would finally be decided to be the true interpretation if consideration of the matter were carried so far that an ultimate opinion were reached" (CP 8.184, EP 2:496; 1909). Essential information is mere "acquaintance with the system of signs" (CP 8.179, EP 2:494; 1909). Substantial information is "the very fact, that is, the ideal sign which should be quite perfect, and so identical,--in such identity as a sign may have,--with the very matter denoted united with the very form signified by it ... the ultimate interpretant of every sign" (EP 2:304; 1904). Within these limits is what we might call experiential information--the kind that is routinely (and fallibly) obtained when Signs are "used by a 'scientific' intelligence, that is to say, by an intelligence capable of learning by experience" (CP 2.227; c. 1897). As for methodology, I have remarked before that yours is more "exegetical," while mine is more "systematic." This does not entail that they will always lead us to incompatible outcomes; on the contrary, they have the potential to complement and reinforce each other. However, we do seem to have different purposes underlying our efforts more often than not, and that cannot help but affect the results that we reach and how we evaluate them. 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 Sun, Jul 22, 2018 at 8:30 AM, <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: 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.
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