Jon, thanks for posting this. Responses inserted (paragraphs beginning GF: ).
Gary f. From: Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]> Sent: 2-Aug-18 14:52 To: [email protected] Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Objects and Interpretants Gary F., Gary R., List: Prompted by the on-List exchange below a couple of days ago, I looked up the referenced manuscript (R 9) on the Digital Peirce Archive (https://rs.cms.hu-berlin.de/peircearchive) and went about transcribing it, along with the accompanying ones (R 7-11) that all contain drafts dated by Robin as c. 1903? for a prospective work with the title, "On the Foundations of Mathematics." The two comments about a Sign being its own Object or Interpretant are both in the first paragraph, which I reproduce here. CSP: A sign is not a real thing. The same sign may occur, or as we may say, can be uttered, over and over again. We may call these things embodying the same sign replicas of it. They need not be alike as things. Man, homo, ἄνθρωπος are the same sign. A sign is intended to correspond to a real thing or fact, or to something relatively real; and this object of the sign may be the very sign itself, as when a map is precisely superposed upon that which it maps. It is a perfection in a sign if it separately represents its object; in which case it becomes a proposition, and is true or false. A sign is also intended to determine, in a mind or elsewhere, a sign of the same object; and this interpretant of the sign may be the very sign itself; but as a general rule it will be different. It is a perfection in a sign separately to signify its intended interpretant. If it does this, it becomes an argumen[ta]tion or argument. (Some pedants insist on the former word; but the very best usage supports the latter.) Gary F.'s suggestion that this "is obviously a partial draft of what became the 'New Elements' essay" is warranted by the overall subject matter and even just the opening sentence, which appears intact in the final version (EP 2:303; 1904). In the hope of prompting some further conversation, I offer the following observations. Peirce's example of a Sign that is its own Object is "when a map is precisely superposed upon that which it maps." This calls to mind the aphorism, "The map is not the territory," which is derived from Alfred Korzybski's statement that "A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness." In Peirce's terminology, a map is an Icon--more specifically, a Diagram--of the territory that it represents; and as he said about an Icon in R 7, "Its object is whatever that resembles it its interpretant takes it to be the sign of, and is a sign of that object in proportion as it resembles it." Since any Object obviously resembles itself in every possible way, it is always an Icon of itself; i.e., the territory is an exact map of itself, although no longer very useful for being so. GF: Yes, a map which could be “precisely superposed” over its territory would either have a very small and flat territory, or would be very unwieldy. But I take Peirce’s idea to be that there is no difference in form between a pure icon and its object — which can’t be an existing thing but would have to be a mere possibility. He says somewhere that there are no pure icons, anyway. Peirce also explicitly affirmed at least once that an Object can contain an Index of itself. CSP: An Index can very well represent itself. Thus, every number has a double; and thus the entire collection of even numbers is an Index of the entire collection of numbers, and so this collection of even* numbers contains an Index of itself. (CP 2.311, EP 2:276; 1903) *This seems like a possible mistake on Peirce's part, since "all" would make more sense here; i.e., the collection of all numbers contains an Index of itself, namely, the collection of even numbers. GF: I think Peirce’s point is that both collections (all numbers and even numbers) are infinite and of denumeral multitude. It’s related to his oft-expressed point that a part is not necessarily smaller than the whole, when both are infinite, as the number of possible points on a continuous line is. He explains all this in Lowell 6. However, I suppose that just as every Object is an Icon of itself, arguably every Object is an Index of itself. I seem to recall that Peirce somewhere denied that a quality (1ns) or thing (2ns) merely representing itself qualifies as a Sign (3ns). GF: You might be thinking of CP 2.230 (1910), where he says that “in order that anything should be a Sign, it must “represent,” as we say, something else, called its Object, although the condition that a Sign must be other than its Object is perhaps arbitrary, since, if we insist upon it we must at least make an exception in the case of a Sign that is a part of a Sign.” Or possibly EP2:161-2 (also CP 5.71), from the Harvard Lectures; there, as also in CP 2.230, Peirce uses the example of a map “laid upon the soil” of the country it represents. The gist is that a point on such a map, if superposed on the part of the country where that point is represented to be, represents itself by a doubly degenerate Thirdness. However, I have not yet been able to find a passage to that effect, other than the various places where he clearly stated that a Sign's Dynamic Object is external to and independent of the Sign. Peirce gave no example of a Sign that is its own Interpretant, instead simply noting that "as a general rule it will be different." My best guess as to what he might have had in mind is the translation of the same Sign from one language to another. He mentioned earlier in the paragraph that "Man, homo, ἄνθρωπος are the same sign"; i.e., these are all Replicas of the same Sign. When an English-speaker as the Utterer says "man," and a French-speaker as the Interpreter thinks "homme," this is arguably a case where the Dynamic Interpretant is "the very sign itself," although necessarily a different Instance of it. GF: Yes — although it would seem confusing to say that a different instance, or any instance, is "the very sign itself," and maybe that’s why this part of the draft didn’t make it into “New Elements.” Finally, Peirce called it "a perfection in a sign if it separately represents its object," and likewise "a perfection in a sign separately to signify its intended interpretant." In other words, a Proposition is a more perfect Sign than a Term, and an Argument is an even more perfect Sign than a Proposition. This is consistent with his remarks in "New Elements" about Signs that are "sufficiently complete" to denote Objects and signify characters (EP 2:303-304); that "An icon can only be a fragment of a completer sign" (EP 2:306), which he also stated in R 8, where he went on to say that an index such as the exclamation "Oh!" is likewise "only the fragment of a sign"; and that "a symbol, if sufficiently complete, always involves an index, just as an index sufficiently complete involves an icon" (EP 2:318). We discussed on the List what the perfect Sign might be a few months ago (https://list.iupui.edu/sympa/arc/peirce-l/2018-03/msg00085.html). GF: Yes. And this implies that a sign having a part of itself that represents an object which is not the sign itself — in other words, the Secondness or “dyadic relation” between sign and object — makes that sign more complete, or closer to perfection perhaps, than a sign which does not involve that dyadic relation. 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>
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