List, Jon, Sally, Nathan, Gene:
On Oct 5, 2011, at 12:20 AM, Jon Awbrey wrote:
> The crux of both the political issue and the semiotic issue rests squarely
> with
> the concept of representation.
This comment is sort of a ramble over various topics from recent contributors.
In W1, p. 256, Harvard Lecture VIII, Forms of Induction and Hypothesis, CSP
asserts:
"The first distinction we found it necessary to draw - the first set of of
conceptions we have to signalize-form a triad
Thing Representation Form.
... The thing is that for which a representation might stand prescinded from
all that would constitute a relation with with any representation. The form is
the respect in which a representation might stand for a thing, prescinded from
both thing and representation.
... We found representations to be of three kinds
Signs Copies Symbols
... By a symbol I mean one which upon being presented to the mind-without any
resemblance to its object and without any reference to a previous
convention-calls up a concept."
In W1, Lowell Lecture IX, p. 477
"The first division which we are to attempt to make between different kinds of
symbols ought to depend on their intention, what they are specially meant to
express-whether their peculiar function is to lie in their reference to its
ground, in reference to their object, or their reference to their interpretant.
... which has meaning...
... so that ... expressing a thing or things in their internal character- "
I quote these earlier assertions (1865, 1866) because they appear to provide
the seeds of the trees of relations that CSP was to develop. The nature of
representation appears to be a fulcrum between things and forms. (In modern
scientific terms, the nature of correspondence relations between facts and
narratives.)
Jon: How does your notion of political representation ground itself in such
assertions?
Sally: How would you find a relation to Wittgenstein (Or Herr M. Heidigger!) in
such assertions?
At issue, it seems to me, is the question of the distinction between
prescinding and abstracting.
For prescinding allows one to preserve the internal structure of the category
of things while abstracting from a Peircian thing to a mathematical point (or
set of points) does not. The Positivist view necessitates a point-wise
structure for scientific trees.
(see W1, p. 518, "Prescinding and abstracting are two terms for the same
process...")
Nathan: JR notion that 90% of CSP is this or that is an hypothesis that seems
to be a diminishment of CSP's lifework. Anything less than 100% postulates is a
division of an indivisible. What would the other 10% be?
Gene: What is the status of representation in the social sciences? Is it
either prescinding or abstracting? Or what?
As I noted at the outset of this post, it is a ramble. But, these are the
connections I find from my pentadic view of Aristotelian categories. At a
minimum, the exercise of writing these notes created imaginative images in my
own readings of W1.
Cheers
Jerry
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