I haven’t been following this thread (or group of threads) closely, but I noticed that in the discussion of the ‘hexad’ there’s been a call for more concrete examples, an interest in biological applications, and a question about the linearity of the “order of determination,” especially in regard to the three interpretants. In this post I’ll try to address all of those.
In a 1909 letter to William James where Peirce explains the difference between Immediate and Dynamical Objects (CP 8.314, EP2:498), he follows up with a specific example drawn from ordinary conversation to illustrate his distinctions between the two Objects and three Interpretants of a Sign: [[ For instance, suppose I awake in the morning before my wife, and that afterwards she wakes up and inquires, “What sort of a day is it?” This is a sign, whose Object, as expressed, is the weather at that time, but whose Dynamical Object is the impression which I have presumably derived from peeping between the window-curtains. Whose Interpretant, as expressed, is the quality of the weather, but whose Dynamical Interpretant, is my answering her question. But beyond that, there is a third Interpretant. The Immediate Interpretant is what the Question expresses, all that it immediately expresses, which I have imperfectly restated above. The Dynamical Interpretant is the actual effect that it has upon me, its interpreter. But the Significance of it, the Ultimate, or Final, Interpretant is her purpose in asking it, what effect its answer will have as to her plans for the ensuing day. I reply, let us suppose: “It is a stormy day.” Here is another sign. Its Immediate Object is the notion of the present weather so far as this is common to her mind and mine,— not the character of it, but the identity of it. The Dynamical Object is the identity of the actual and Real meteorological conditions at the moment. The Immediate Interpretant is the schema in her imagination, i.e. the vague Image or what there is in common to the different Images of a stormy day. The Dynamical Interpretant is the disappointment or whatever actual effect it at once has upon her. The Final Interpretant is the sum of the Lessons of the reply, Moral, Scientific, etc. Now it is easy to see that my attempt to draw this three-way, “trivialis,” distinction, relates to a real and important three-way distinction, and yet that it is quite hazy and needs a vast deal of study before it is rendered perfect. ]] Referring to his wife's question as a sign, Peirce says that its ‘Dynamical Object is the impression which I have presumably derived from peeping between the window-curtains.’ Now suppose we regard this ‘peeping’ along with the deriving of an ‘impression’ from it as itself an instance of semiosis or “sign-action.” The biological embodiment of such a process always requires a flow of energy (as well as the flow of time). The continuity of this energy flow, and thus of the semiosic process, makes it somewhat problematic to label its parts as if they were discrete. The energy flow involved in this particular sign is already implied by Peirce's reference to his ‘impression’ as the Dynamical Object of another sign (his wife's question). We, including Peirce, often speak of a perceived or denoted Object as if it were an individual object or static thing; but more strictly speaking, the Object of an indexical sign is ‘in dynamical (including spatial) connection both with the individual object, on the one hand, and with the senses or memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign, on the other hand’ ( <http://www.gnusystems.ca/BaldwinPeirce.htm#Indexi> Baldwin's Dictionary, ‘Index’). Peirce wrote this before he made the distinction between Immediate and Dynamical Objects, but if every sign has both kinds of object, we should be able to analyze the ‘dynamical connection’ between external object and internal nervous system in a way that distinguishes the two objects. In thermodynamics, we typically observe an energy flow from “source” to “sink.” But in the biology of a semiosic process such as visual perception, we find that energy flows are much more complex, and often recursive. Peirce referred to ‘senses or memory’ as one end of the dynamical connection which has the individual external object at the other end; but due to advances in neuroscience since the time of Peirce and James, we now know that the dynamical connections (energy flows within the brain) between senses and memory are themselves extremely complex and recursive. It is pretty well established now that within the hierarchical brain structure, perception involves a top-down flow of memory-based ‘prediction’ and a bottom-up flow from the sense organ's point of contact with the external world (in visual perception, the retina). The form of each flow constitutes information, and the perceptual processing consists mostly of the two flows influencing each other, so that the top-down flow is modified on the way down by news of ‘prediction error’ coming from lower levels of the process, while the bottom-up flow is also modified by (for instance) the top-down control of eye, head and body movements. To fill out the details of this rough sketch of ‘predictive processing,’ see (for instance) Andy Clark's Surfing Uncertainty (2015). With this in mind, let us return to a biosemiotic analysis of Peirce's ‘impression’ which he identified as the Dynamical Object of his wife's question. We could also take it as an interpretant of the perceptual sign whose Dynamical Object is the form or pattern of the energy flow from his retina toward the higher levels of the visual system in his brain. In that case, the Immediate Object of the perceptual sign would be his memory-based prediction of what he was likely to see when he looked out the window. This is not a conscious prediction, of course; it is embodied as the form or pattern of the top-down energy flow in the visual system in his brain. But it fits Peirce's description of the Immediate Object as internal to the sign (process) while the Dynamical Object is relatively external. (I say ‘relatively’ because the entire semiosic/perceptual process is taking place within the brain, although its points of contact with the world external to the brain (e.g. the retina) are often crucial to determining its interpretant). To further simplify our biosemiotic analysis, the Immediate Object in perception is a top-down energy flow while the Dynamical Object is a bottom-up flow from the point where the sense organs connect with the external world. But since these Objects are not separate and independent flows (let alone individual objects), it would be unrealistic to arrange them in a linear order of determination. We would have to represent their relations in the way that Peirce's EGs represent the Composition process of Terms, Propositions and Arguments: ‘namely, each component must be indeterminate in some respect or another; and in their composition each determines the other’ (CP 4.572, 1906). More generally still, we can say that perception and action, as constructed by brain processing, are ‘both co-determined and co-determining’ (Clark 2015, 176). If the same is true of cognition and behavior, which occur at higher spatial and temporal scales, this would suggest that the order of determination among the sign, the two objects and the three interpretants is also nonlinear, at least in some contexts. It follows that a context-free schema which imposes a fixed order of determination on the components of all semiosic processes is unlikely to be realistic for any universe of actual processing (as opposed to mathematical abstractions). I will leave it to the reader to reconsider the signs, objects and interpretants identified by Peirce in the conversational example above, and judge for him- or herself whether a single linear order of determination applies to its six components. Gary F. } Now we never can know precisely what we mean by any description whatever. [Peirce, CP 7.119] { <http://gnusystems.ca/wp/> http://gnusystems.ca/wp/ }{ transition conversation
----------------------------- 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 .
