Jerry, Gary, list,
I should not comment on a paper when I've only read the abstract, but
I wonder if ROSSELLA FABBRICHESI's "universal language" idea might be
translated into "universal semiosis" with better effect. Languages
are certainly not universal, as they evolve in time and in
environments, but the mechanisms underlying semiosis may well be, and
probably are, universal. By mechanisms I just mean the different ways
habit-taking sets in, by different kinds of association and selection.
Jerry's summary of the paper is more interesting to me than the
author's abstract. (I had to look up "ostension.") I agree with the
idea that action is essential to Peirce's semiotics; interpretants are
responses to representamen as signs of objects. The effect of such
responses either confirms the object or doesn't. Therefore I see no
reason to object to Jerry's comment that a living system must "ACT on
the signification of the signals in such a manner AS TO PROSPER" if
prospering can mean the continuation or improvement of its models of
the world. That all seems clear enough. What I don't understand is
what Jerry means by this: a living system "acquire[s] signs from its
current situation." Jerry presents this as the argument he rejects,
but I don't know whose argument that is or what it means to acquire
signs from the current situation. I also can't conceive of "the mere
mental" that doesn't involve physical action at some level, electro-
chemical reactions and selection processes.
I think I said this before, but overall what JR's paper does for
teleology is this. An argument in an essay is, obviously,
teleological insofar as it was written by an author with an object in
mind (notwithstanding deconstructionism, but that's a whole other
aside). However, his focus on the spontaneity of the signs themselves
and the agency of the signs themselves makes an essay a little more
like a sign system in nature that doesn't have an author and still
conveys a meaning.
Tori
________________________________________________
Victoria N. Alexander, Ph.D.
Dactyl Foundation
64 Grand Street
New York, NY 10013
212 219-2344
On Aug 16, 2011, at 2:41 PM, Gary Richmond wrote:
List, Jerry, Tori,
(a) Signs, in the Peircean sense, are not mere signals. According to
Peirce, they have the living quality (feeling) that gave life to the
cosmos from the get go (either that or one is going to have to (1)
take a theological stance, which Peirce decidedly does not, or (2)
the advent of complex organization systems, life, for prime
example, remains a great mystery (which, of course, in a sense it
is--but not a dualistic and mechanical one!) The triadicity of
Peirce's theory, especially his valency theory, allows for that kind
of evolutionary bifurcation which (from the standpoint of teleology
and self-organization), and as Ilya Prigogine titles one of his
books, can create "order out of chaos' (it might not, of course, as
all evolutionary "experiments" aren't successful by a long shot).
(b) Your phrase, the "necessity to act separates the mere mental
from the existential" represents, to my way of thinking, exactly the
dualism which Peirce was at pains to overcome, so I guess we're back
to a kind of materialism--a reduction to the 'existential'. It seems
to me that a number of scientists still seem stuck in that dualism
(which treats mind as an epiphenomenon).
Re: Fabbrichesi's abstract:
(a) The very title of the paper suggests a bias, that this
"inconspicuous. . . tradition" represents some sort of
"scripture" (whatever that means).
(b) The project of "discovering a universal language" is something
which Peirce strongly and decisively argues against (sources
forthcoming if desired).
(c) Peirce's Existential Graphs represent an important part of the
second of the logical trivium, as you put it, Jerry, namely,
critical logic. They are hardly the whole or even the most of it, as
Fabbrichesi seems to suggest. Indeed, the third part of it,
speculative rhetoric (also called methodeutic, or theoretical
rhetoric, or semiotic rhetoric, etc.), called by Peirce the "most
living" branch of semeiotic, is exactly prepared for by theoretical
grammar (not linguistic grammar, btw) and critical logic. So, the
most one might claim is that Existential Graphs represent an
important aspect of "logic as logic" (another expression for Peirce
uses for critical logic).
(d) In sum, Fabbrichesi seems not to "sustain" anything regarding
Peirce's theories of logic as semeiotic, continuity, teleology,
evolution--all directed toward a view of semiosis concerned not at
all with "discovering a universal language" but, rather, with
inquiring into how order develops out of chaos.
Thus, I tend to agree with Soren Brier when he writes: "I believe
that the biosemiotics that Sebeok. . . developed on a Peircean
theorectical basis can be applied as a framework for integrating the
various ontological levels of description. Within such a framework
we further need to develop a theory of possible interactions
among. . . levels and types of causality [something like Brier's
five levels of reality, namely: 1. the quantum vacuum fields, 2. the
physical level, 3. the chemical level (information), 4. the level of
the semiotics of living systems', 5. human semiosis. GR] . . .
(Soren Brier, Cyber Semiotics: Why Information is Not Enough, 430).
I should add that I am finding Brier's and Noth's suggestion that
there are "protosemiotic" relations as well as semiotic ones
helpful. Indeed, the informational interactions at the chemical
level would seem to be exactly this kind of relation. Yet, as Brier
suggests, these levels need to "be understood within a framework of
Peircian bisosemiotics that introduces a theory of pure feeling, the
law of mind and meaning, into its basic ontology." Reductionism in
science doesn't, of course, allow for any such thing.
So, following Brier, I think we need to develop "an inclusive
heterarchy, in that the natural habits--which we call laws--are the
broadest and most universal ordering principles. Basically, these
habits create order" (Brier, 439). This creating of order out of
chaos is a principal thrust of Peirce's scientific project which
Fabrrichesi appears to grossly misrepresent.
Best,
Gary
>>> Jerry LR Chandler <[email protected]> 8/16/2011 1:02 PM >>>
(Edited for parallelism in third sentence of the second paragraph.)
List, Gary, Tori:
Below is an abstract that does not mention the term 'teleology',
but, in fact, IMHO and idiosyncratic philosophy, gets to the heart
of the issues of ostension. Much is to be learned by comparing the
current paper under discussion to this paper by Rossella Fabbrichesi.
One ought to consider that any living system must not only acquire
signs from its current situation, but also ACT on the signification
of the signals in such a manner AS TO PROSPER. This necessity to
act separates the mere mental from the existential. This necessity
for action separates traditional biosemiotics from semiotics,
chemistry from physics, perplexity from complexity. In human
societies, this includes the genesis and sustaining of the
community, the common social and cultural structures inherited from
the past generations. In short, the problem is not one in which a
sign generates an infinite ingress into further signs, but rather
that the living system creates actions from the signs.
Idiosyncratically Yours
Cheers
Jerry
Iconic thought and diagrammatical scripture:
Peirce and the Leibnizian tradition
ROSSELLA FABBRICHESI
Abstract
I will sustain in this article that Peirce can be seen as the last
great representative
of that inconspicuous but persistent tradition that, from the
thirteenth to
the seventeenth century, spent its energies on discovering a
universal language.
His project of Existential Graphs is in fact grounded on the
isomorphism
among a Sheet of Assertion, in which Graphs-signs are drawn, a Mind,
with its
thoughts-signs, and the Universe, with its facts-signs. In the same
sense, Leibniz
worked on his Characteristica Universalis, seen as a general
Encyclopedia
or alphabet of human thoughts, and a pictum mundi amphitheatrum.
Keywords: Peirce; Leibniz; existential graphs; Characteristica
Universalis;
universal language; icon
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