It appears that my connectivity problems have been resolved and that I can now post directly to the forum. I’ll catch up with unanswered posts in batches tonight and tomorrow and then I’ll try to respond more quickly and on a one to one basis. Tonight I’ll comment on the 3 Oct posts from Gary Fuhrman, Stephen Rose, Irving Anellis, and Jon Awbrey.
Gary Fuhrman wrote that JR’s first Peirce quote (quoted by Irving) pretty well justifies the claim that 90% of Peirce’s philosophical output is directly concerned with semiotic. Gary suggests that it was Peirce’s late identification of logic with semiotic that helps us understand JR’s claim: “if the claim were that 90% of his philosophical work is concerned with logic (in the broad sense), hardly anybody would balk at that.” Irving and Jon add some clarity to what this broad conception of logic might include. I agree that logic as semiotic (even “formal semiotic” as Peirce says in the quote Jon gave) is a broad conception of logic and that it was not until rather late in his career (around 1905) when Peirce embraced this broad view, but almost from the beginning of his career Peirce held that logic was a branch of semiotic. As early as 1865 he defined logic as the science of the conditions which enable symbols in general to refer to objects. But I do not agree that Peirce’s late identification of semiotic with logic, or the quotation where Peirce claims that from the age of 12 or 13, after taking up his brother’s copy of Whately’s “Logic,” that he had never been able to study anything except as a study of semiotic, justifies JR’s remark that 90% of Peirce’s philosophical output is directly concerned with semiotic unless we only mean that Peirce’s semiotic understanding informed all of (at least 90% of) his work. But that is not to say that all of, or at least 90% of, Peirce’s work is directly concerned with semiotic, if by semiotic we mean the explicit study (science) of signs and their functioning (attending to Peirce’s classification of sciences). But it may be that a strict adherence to Peirce’s classification of the sciences is too rigid for JR’s purposes and that all he meant was the weaker claim that in most of his writings, at least his philosophical writings, Peirce brought his semiotic understanding to bear, just as he also brought his mathematical understanding to bear; I have no quarrel with that. If I correctly understand Stephen’s point, he is suggesting that trying to work out these fine points of Peirce’s intellectual development is “somewhat ancillary”—ancillary, I take it, to the more immediate task of using Peirce’s ideas and insights to help better understand vital issues we face today. Although this may be true, we are nonetheless engaged in a “slow read” of a 23 page paper and anything JR says about the development and meaning of Peirce’s ideas is grist for the mill (forum). Although I do not want the slow read to deviate too far from an exegesis of JR’s text, I would be delighted if separate lines of discussion branch off to deal with related issues and/or applications of Peirce’s ideas. _________________________________________________________________ Nathan Houser Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Senior Fellow, Institute for American Thought Indiana University at Indianapolis -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jon Awbrey Sent: Monday, October 03, 2011 3:00 PM To: Gary Fuhrman Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [peirce-l] “Some Leading Ideas of Peirce's Semiotic” CSP = well, you know ... GF = Gary Fuhrman GF: I agree with Jon, and I think the first Peirce quote that JR includes in his paper pretty well justifies the remark that 90% of his "*philosophical* output" is directly concerned with semiotic. The only thing that makes it a bit odd is that it represents a retrospective relabelling on Peirce's part. If the claim were that 90% of his philosophical work is concerned with logic (in the broad sense), hardly anybody would balk at that. But it was only late in his career that Peirce began to use the term "semiotic" (however we spell it) and identified logic with it. So it's a bit like JR's claim that his 1867 "New List" is the basic text on his "phenomenology" even though Peirce didn't use that term for it until 1902; but in the case of "semiotic" we have a stronger textual mandate for applying the term retroactively. Yes, Peirce's definition of "logic" as formal semiotic, along with his definition of "formal" definitely come into play here. CSP: Logic will here be defined as formal semiotic. A definition of a sign will be given which no more refers to human thought than does the definition of a line as the place which a particle occupies, part by part, during a lapse of time. Namely, a sign is something, A, which brings something, B, its interpretant sign determined or created by it, into the same sort of correspondence with something, C, its object, as that in which itself stands to C. It is from this definition, together with a definition of "formal", that I deduce mathematically the principles of logic. I also make a historical review of all the definitions and conceptions of logic, and show, not merely that my definition is no novelty, but that my non-psychological conception of logic has virtually been quite generally held, though not generally recognized. (C.S. Peirce, NEM 4, 20–21). CSP: http://mywikibiz.com/Sign_relation#Definition Regards, Jon -- facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JonnyCache inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/ mwb: http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey policy mic: www.policymic.com/profile/show?id=1110 knol: http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/3fkwvf69kridz/1 oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to [email protected] with the line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to [email protected]
