Jon, list, I see you’ve been making some progress, Jon, in your inquiry, though I don’t have anything very interesting to say about it. My own time has been split between finishing up my transcription of the Lowell Lectures and revising the late chapters of my book Turning Signs (which is not primarily about Peirce but is becoming ever more Peircean in the revisions.
My most recent work on that front is near the top of Chapter 15, “Context and content,” http://gnusystems.ca/TS/ntx.htm. It sort of fits with your subject line because it has something to say about signification, but may be of more use to those interested in the overlapping of semiotics with systems theory, biology and phenomenology. Part of the recent work has been to insert more links into the text which take the reader back to previous uses of some key terms (I provide these links instead of a glossary). Anyway it’s there for anyone who wants to take a look. As for the Lowells, I should be able to finish up the eighth and last lecture in the next week or two, making it possible to read the entire series of lectures, more or less as delivered, from beginning to end. I’m looking forward to that myself. Gary f. From: Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]> Sent: 29-Jul-18 18:47 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Logical Depth and Signification Gary F., List: When I call your approach "exegetical," what I mean is more or less what you described--reading and understanding the texts as written, without imposing any kind of external interpretative framework, or even one derived from the author's writings as a whole. The latter is more or less what I mean by my own "systematic" approach, and rewording is sometimes part of the process, along with assembling quotes from various places and times to serve as "proof-texts" for a particular thesis. Again, I would never claim that my method is "better," just more compatible with how my own mind works, especially when it comes to associating and organizing ideas. In this specific case, I find it fascinating to consider and explore the possibility that one of the key developments in Peirce's late semeiotic--his recognition, beginning in 1904, of two Objects and three Interpretants--might have already been present in some of his earliest works, at least in embryonic form, nearly four decades previously. So far, the only hint to this effect that I have found elsewhere is in chapter IV, "The Interpretants," of Jorgen Dines Johansen's 1993 book, Dialogic Semiosis: An Essay on Signs and Meaning. He identified nine different concepts of the Interpretant and arranged them along the spectrum of the corresponding states of information, from Essential (minimum) to Substantial (maximum). He then classified the first four as different specifications of the Immediate Interpretant, the middle one as the Dynamic Interpretant, and the last four as different specifications of the Final Interpretant (pp. 172-174). He also offered a possible clue to reconciling the inconsistency that I posited in the initial post of this thread. JDJ: ... a precise definition of information, although considered to be the product of both extension and comprehension, is more closely connected with comprehension than with extension, since it is defined as the 'amount of comprehension a symbol has over and above what limits its extension' (W 1:287; 1865). Information, then, is that part of the comprehension of a symbol which exceeds what is necessary to delimit its extension. (p. 147) As Francesco Bellucci put it in Peirce's Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics, "... there is no symbol that merely connotes the character contained in its definition without also connoting further characters, and thus embodying information about its object" (p. 41). In Peirce's own words ... CSP: Whatever symbol contains information contains more connotation than is necessary to limit its possible denotation to those things which it may denote. That is, every symbol contains more than is sufficient for a principle of selection. (W 1:282; 1865) CSP: ... every genuine symbol relates or purports to relate to some form embodied in its object. This is its connotation. It is, in fact, only by means of this reference to a form that a symbol acquires its applicability to the thing ... its denotation is created by its connotation. (W 1:287; 1865) Perhaps the tension that I have been sensing (rightly or wrongly) could be resolved by associating a Sign's Immediate Object with only the portion of its Depth that demarcates its Breadth, and its Interpretant (or Signification) with the remaining Depth--i.e., "its superfluous comprehension" (W1:467; 1866). From the quotes above, at first it sounds like the former is the Sign's Essential Depth and the latter is the difference between that and its Informed Depth. The problem is that Peirce explicitly linked a Sign's ground with its Informed Depth, not its Essential Depth, although what he said in the same passage about how the Sign's Interpretant corresponds to its information is not quite as straightforward. CSP: A symbol, in its reference to its object, has a triple reference ... Third, Its reference to its interpretant through its object, or all the facts known about its object ... What are thus referred to, so far as they are known, are ... Third, The sum of synthetical propositions in which the symbol is subject or predicate, or the information concerning the symbol. (CP 2:418; 1867) In this context, "information" is clearly Experiential Information, while the sum of analytic propositions in which the symbol is subject or predicate is its Essential Information. Defined this way, Essential Information is distinct from Experiential Information, rather than included within it. Since Informed Breadth and Depth are the two dimensions of Experiential Information, presumably they are likewise distinct from Essential Breadth and Depth; so the question then becomes whether and how we can allocate Informed Depth as the Sign's ground between its Immediate Object and its Dynamic Interpretant. 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>
----------------------------- 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 .
