Von: g...@gnusystems.ca
An: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu
Betreff: [PEIRCE-L] diagrams of semiosis
Jon, list,
I decided to change the subject line, as we’re not really talking about communication here.
JAS: In CP 1.345-347 (1903), Peirce is talking about genuine triadic relations, and "representing" or (more generally) "mediating" is just such a relation with three subjects--the sign, its object, and its interpretant.
GF: I think this is a misleading schema if it obscures the fact that mediation is a process and the description of it as a relation is abstracted from that process. It doesn’t explain how mediation works, or how it differs from other genuine triadic relations. Merrell’s inserting it into a circular process diagram, and his verbal reading of it, is an attempt to explain the relation in terms of the process it is abstracted from. Whether it’s a successful attempt or not is a judgment call that every interpreter will have to make. I included it in Turning Signs because I read it as quite consistent with the theory of semiosis rest of the book. I must admit that its language does not sound much like Peirce’s speculative grammar as developed from 1903 on. Merrell’s approach is perhaps summed up in the final sentence of the quote I included in the “Comminding” section of my book: “We sense, once again, the spiralling process of signs becoming signs, signs translated, translating themselves, into other signs.”
There’s a Peirce quote elsewhere in my book, from 1902 (R 599), which does sound more Merrellian, and I think helps to explain why the distinction between interpreter and interpretant should not be made “with an axe,” as Peirce puts it in his critique of dualism. So I’ll leave the last word to Peirce:
CSP: The sign is never the very object itself. It is, therefore a sign of its object only in some aspect, in some respect. Thus, a sign is something which brings another sign into objective relation to that sign which it represents itself, and brings it into that relation in some measure in the same respect or aspect in which it is itself a sign of the same sign. If we attempt to say what respect or aspect it is in which a sign is a sign of its object, that respect or aspect must then appear itself as a sign. Its own full aspect, the sign cannot evoke or endeavor to evoke. It is only some aspect of that aspect that it can aim to reproduce. Here again there will be an endless series. But this aspect is only a character of the necessary imperfection of a sign. A sign is something which in some measure and in some respect makes its interpretant the sign of that of which it is itself the sign. It is like a mean function in mathematics. We call φx,y a mean function of x and y, if it is such a function that when x and y are the same, it is itself that same. So a sign which merely represents itself to itself is nothing else but that thing itself. The two infinite series, the one back toward the object, the other forward toward the interpretant, in this case collapse into an immediate present. The type of a sign is memory, which takes up the deliverance of past memory and delivers a portion of it to future memory.
Gary f.
From: Jon Alan Schmidt <jonalanschm...@gmail.com>
Sent: 22-Jun-20 20:48
To: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Communicating An Idea
Gary F., List:
GF: I anticipated this kind of puzzlement on the part of some readers, and that’s why I inserted this warning just before the Merrell quote
I took that warning into account, which is why I talked about the "experiencing bodymind" rather than the "subject." I assume that Merrell is referring to what Peirce typically calls the "interpreter," at least in his later writings.
GF: Yes, a graph with three tails represents a genuine triadic relation; but here you are forgetting that a graph is itself a sign, and in this context (part of Lowell Lecture 3), Peirce does not use the “tripod” to represent the O-S-I relation. It represents a generic proposition with three subjects (the lines of identity) connected to a “spot” representing the predicate (and labelled with a letter).
I am not forgetting or overlooking any of that. In CP 1.345-347 (1903), Peirce is talking about genuine triadic relations, and "representing" or (more generally) "mediating" is just such a relation with three subjects--the sign, its object, and its interpretant. Hence the proposition expressed by the relevant graph is "a sign represents its object to its interpretant" or "a sign mediates between its object and its interpretant." What still puzzles me accordingly about Merrell's incorporation of the "tripod" into his diagram is his evident association of both a sign and its interpretant with the "experiencing bodymind"; as you put it, "his description of the semiosic process makes it almost entirely internal to the 'subject' organism."
GF: There is no way that a single graph can represent an interpretant as such, because the generation of an interpretant is a process, and the only way to represent a process in EGs is by means of the sequence of graphs determined by the transformation rules.
My understanding is that real semeiosis is a continuous process, while an individual sign token's determination of an individual interpreter to an individual (dynamical) interpretant is a discrete event that we prescind from that process. The interpretant itself is neither a process nor an event, but rather the resulting effect of a particular sign token on a particular interpreter--either a feeling, an exertion, or another sign; again, something discrete that we prescind from the continuous process of real semeiosis. That being the case, a single graph can represent an interpretant when it is a sign, especially when it is a proposition; for example, the interpretant of an argumentation is its conclusion.
GF: Here again I read Peirce as affirming the continuity of interpreter and interpretant as an aspect of the continuity of semiosis as process.
I agree, but I believe that we must still carefully distinguish an interpreter as a quasi-mind from an interpretant as a determination of that quasi-mind by a sign. On the other hand, as I have noted previously, according to Peirce a "quasi-mind is itself a sign, a determinable sign" (SS 195, 1906); so there is a sense in which, at any given moment, an interpreter is the combined interpretant of all the signs that have previously determined it. "For any set of Signs which are so connected that a complex of two of them can have one interpretant, must be Determinations of one Sign which is a Quasi-mind" (CP 4.550, 1906). Is this what you have in mind?
Regards,
Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA
Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ► PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . ► To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message NOT to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with no subject, and with the sole line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm . ► PEIRCE-L is owned by The PEIRCE GROUP; moderated by Gary Richmond; and co-managed by him and Ben Udell.
