On 4/18/2019 11:27 AM, Jon Alan Schmidt wrote:
Now, when we say that a flower /is /blue, I agree that we are not claiming that a flower /is identical to/ blueness; instead, we are saying that a flower /possesses the character of/ blueness. Likewise, there is a sense in which we can say that a Symbol /is /indexical or iconic, in that it has /parts /that possess these characters.
I agree with everything up to the last line. The word 'part' is much more precise than the word 'involve'. A formal theory about parts and wholes (mereology) is very precise. Informal language about parts and wholes is almost as precise, and it can usually be mapped to and from whatever version of mereology is appropriate. As Peirce said (CP 4.237),
It is easy to speak with precision upon a general theme. Only, one must commonly surrender all ambition to be certain. It is equally easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague. It is not so difficult to be pretty precise and fairly certain at once about a very narrow subject.
If we translate talk about mapping signs to existential graphs, then we have "a very narrow subject" about which we can be "pretty precise and fairly certain at once." But when we're talking "upon a general theme" about signs and their application to a continuous world with a continuous range of perception and action, we "must commonly surrender all ambition to be certain." It's possible to talk about parts of an icon, because it has a physical extension. An EG, as a diagram, is an icon that has parts. Peirce talked about those parts in detail. Since symbols are derived, by habit or convention, from icons, the mark that is interpreted as a symbol could have parts -- for example, parts of a traffic light or letters of a word. But those parts, by themselves, have no independent meaning. But I can't recall any case where Peirce used the word 'part' to talk about the meaning of a symbol. Do you know of any examples? When extending Peirce's terminology to new areas, his work on EGs is sufficiently narrow to support precise applications. But even as late as 1907, he considered "semeotic" to be "too vast, the labor too great, for a first-comer". I think we should be cautious about extending his terminology to areas where he didn't go. See below for the quotations from the end of my note with the subject line "Peirce was fallible, and so are we". John ___________________________________________________________________ I am, as far as I know, a pioneer, or rather a backwoodsman, in the work of clearing and opening up what I call semeotic, that is, the doctrine of the essential nature and fundamental varieties of possible [semeosis]; and I find the field too vast, the labor too great, for a first-comer. [MS 318:96; CP 5.488 (1905); EP 2:413 (1907); note date discrepancies because of many variants of this MS] What has chiefly prevented my publishing much has been, first, that my desire to teach has not been so strong as my desire to learn, and secondly, that so far from there being any demand for papers by me, I have found considerable difficulty in getting them printed as a favor to myself. [L75 (1902)] The truth is that I am far too well acquainted with the depths of my own stupidity to know what it is to be satisfied with any product of my mind. [MS 316a] I have always been so ardently bent upon correcting and improving my own opinions and conceptions that before I would reach the later chapters of a long book, those that I had written earliest would appear to me poor, and the whole plan of the work, which, of course, had been laid out first of all, to be unenlightened. [MS 694, 1902] When I first got the general algebra of logic into smooth running order [in 1884], by a method that has lain nearly twenty years in manuscript and which I have lately concluded is so impossible to get printed that it had better be burned, — when I first found myself in possession of this machinery I promised myself that I should see the whole working of the mathematical reason unveiled directly. [MS 303] For years in the course of this ripening process, I used for myself to collect my ideas under the designation fallibilism; and indeed the first step toward finding out is to acknowledge you do not satisfactorily know already; so that no blight can so surely arrest all intellectual growth as the blight of cocksureness; and ninety- nine out of every hundred good heads are reduced to impotence by that malady — of whose inroads they are most strangely unaware! [fragment, c. 1897] All that you can find in print of my work on logic are simply scattered outcroppings here and there of a rich vein which remains unpublished. Most of it I suppose has been written down; but no human being could ever put together the fragments. I could not myself do so. [MS 302, 1903]
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