Joe, Gary, list, >[JOE] I AM satisfied with Peirce's account of signs in works of fiction, Ben, >and agree with all that. I don't know why you would think otherwise.
I guess I just misunderstood you, or maybe I used too strong a word "satisfied" -- I meant, not that you had decided that that Peirce's ideas on the subect were unsatisfactory, but rather that he had not made satisfactorily clear something in them. Not that you in fact meant that either. I just had this feeling that you were talking about being puzzled about things that had seemed resolved, rather than puzzled about aspects newly seen or newly interesting. >>[BEN] Thirdness of predication? Where does Peirce associate quality with >>thirdness & predication (in contradistinction to firstness & a predicate)? >[JOE] I find it difficult to think of a predicate without thinking of a >predication and a quality is what is predicated. Do you perceive any >difficulties in that? If the quality is the predicate content, can the >hypostatic abstraction, regarded as being predicated, be regarded as only a >first? I think I misunderstood your use of the word "predication." Evidently you're using it with "predicate" according to such distinctions as "representation / representamen," "interpretation / interpretant," and "quality / quale " (where blackness as a quality is a kind of 'being black' and is a referring to blackness in the other sense, the sense of blackness as a ground, a pure abstraction of the cognitive/sensory content). I thought that, by "predication," you meant a joining of predicate with subject, because I thought that you associated thirdness with predication in some sort of _distinctiveness_ from subject & predicate. But you didn't mean that. You were just talking about predicate, predication, quality, etc. (I hope I got it right this time!) In what special way does a predicate have to do with thirdness, that a subject doesn't? The only way that I can see to do something at all like that, is, by associating a distinctive thirdness with the joining, or disjoining, or qualified joining, etc., of predicate to subject. Now, as semiosis, the predicate & predication, subject & subjection, and copula & copulation, all have thirdness. But across their shared thirdness, they differ, or seem to differ, as: 1. Description / predicate / quality |>3. Copulation / copula / representation 2. Designation / subject / reaction or at any rate that's where the conceptions seem to tend to, except that, for some reason, Peirce doesn't see the copula as any sort of version, vehicle, or berth of logical relations, probability relations, etc. Yet attributions, ascriptions, copulations, distributions, etc., etc., of predicates to subjects, or of accidents to substances, or of qualities to reactions, all have a certain similarity and parallelism. Then when we associate connotation in one way with firstness, quality, & iconicity and, in another way, with thirdness, meaning/implication/entailment, we get confused. Or at least I get confused. I think that the root of the problem is the historical and still mostly current use of "connotation" to refer to a SYMBOL's sign-power to represent BOTH quality & representation alike. Is this where a seeming distinctive thirdness of the predicate arises? Yet Peirce says somewhere that the interpretant (i.e,. the interpretant qua interpretant) ties or relates predicates to subjects. (For my part, I would restrict "connotation" to qualities, invent some word for the erstwhile 'connotation' of representation, and say that an icon connotes insofar as it does not fully and precisely embody & present the quality which is to be predicated of the subject. The icon connotes the object's quality by the resemblance of the icon's quality's to the object's quality; the difference between the icon's quality & the object's quality is "traversed" by implicit or explicit understanding of how, under the given circumstances, the icon would only somewhat weakly or vaguely -- or over-strongly or over-precisely -- present the quality of the subject/object.) Now, semiotic elements are in one sense all thirds. But the interpretant is, among the semiotic elements, both categorially & semiotically the thirdish or tertian third. So I don't see why the predicate would be the third among subject, predicate, and their juncture, disjuncture, etc. If one sees simply subject & predicate and discards the idea that their union is at all salient, then it's that much harder to see how a distinctive thirdness of the predicate comes about. We say that the interpretant is another sign. We may say that a given interpretant is basically an icon; yet if it were really just an icon of the object, or even if it were really just a composite icon-index-symbol of the object, then the interpretant would not seem much like an interpretant but "mostly" a "mere" sign; I mean, that the interpretant would be representing its interpreted sign in such an opaque & cryptic way, as to require further interpretation in order to bring that representational relation and indeed the interpreted sign itself to clearer light. If the interpretant presents itself AS an interpretant representing a specific sign as well as an object, and IF that "pre-interpretant" sign does NOT present itself in any clarity or detail as an interpretant, but has only the barest presumption of being an interpretant (i.e., taken as a sign, it's taken as determined _somehow_, through some semiosis, be this soever opaque & cryptic, by its object), THEN the difference is that the interpretant also represents a logical relation with a significant degree of clairty, while said pre-interpretant sign does not represent a logical or inferential relation with a significant degree of clarity. As sign, the interpretant may be, for instance, iconic. Yet, in presenting itself as a clarified entailment or implication, it brings a distinctly logical or semiotic relation to light. So in terms of correlations or associations: 1. Description / predicate / quality / sign |>3. Copulation / copula / representation / interpretant 2. Designation / subject / reaction / object >[JOE] ... If the quality is the predicate content, can the hypostatic >abstraction, regarded as being predicated, be regarded as only a first? A hypostatic abstraction of a quality has some secondness AND some thirdness about it. One is casting, representing, interpreting (hence, 3rdness) a quality as sort of a substance or, after the dropping of substance & being from the categories, as sort of a reaction or resistance. If the conception of substance is retained in Peirce's category system, it appears to be as the conception of a certain kind of secondness or resistance. Now, I've thought that, in the Peircean view, one predicates something as if predicating a quality, but that in fact one is not limited to qualities for predicating. Syntactical and other grammatical roles have significant parallelisms with categorial roles. But are grammatical roles bound to phaneroscopic categories? I mean, for instance, when I write: 1. Description / predicate / quality / sign |>3. Copulation / copula / representation / interpretant 2. Designation / subject / reaction / object I see these as correlations, not as equational or equivalential relationships. One can predicate a reaction of some subject, and this is to cast, syntactically, the reaction as a quality. Just as a designation requires for an index to be supplied, so a description requires for an icon to be supplied, and this could be an icon portraying something as a reaction or as being in reaction. In the older category system which included being, accident, & substance, the most natural thing to say was that one predicated (though not in the Aristotelian sense!) the accident of the substance. In the later category system, this becomes, to say that one predicates a quality of a resistance/reaction as subject. A combination of parallelism with some sort or degree of unboundness between grammatical roles & phaneroscopic categories empowers language & thought, allows freer manipulation and application of conceptions, not to mention, lets us manage such conceptions without having to commit ourselves to fully clarified or, in any sense, final categorizations of the things of which we conceive. Hypostatic abstraction is among our ways of taking advantage of this. A kind of "modificationalization" or "accidentization" or "qualitatization" is another way, as when we say something is French and mean not in particular that it is French in quality, but rather that it is actually French, from France, and has been in a certain kind of reaction with France, such that in some sense it is a little piece of France. Now, if the pure abstraction is a ground, then what is a pure qualitatization of a reaction, or a pure accidentization of a substance? What is it even in terms of abstraction and concretion? I have no idea, I'm improvizing at the moment! It would certainly help to know where such things would be useful or needful, just as it helps to know that abstraction is needful in mathematics. Anyway, I suspect that it's as if the formation of a proposition leads to a polymorphous play of roles, abstractions, & who knows what, in potentia, so that seconds can take on firstness, vice versa, maybe all combinations, but in any case, such that all will take on a certain thirdness, for the formation of a proposition is semiosis. So a quality's taking on thirdness in that regard is just as a reaction's doing so. Of course maybe you meant some other kind of association between predicate and thirdness. But if subject, 2ndness, reaction & predicate, 1stness, quality, all take on a kind of thirdness in semiosis, for instance the formation of propositions and terms, then it shouldn't be surprising that possibility & actuality/existence take on a certain reality and persistence in real processes. Of course an existence/actuality/reactivity without persistence would be almost nothing, maybe a self-contradiction, like the pure pointlike singular. These are the sorts of things about which in the past you've spoken in terms of "dimensions." Sure, they're still puzzling, as such things always are. But in pointing at them and their familiar oddities now with special force, what particular puzzzle are you pointing to? Peirce in Kaina Stoicheia speaks of the real as the _hic et nunc_ and as only part of a pattern. That's just not how he usually talks about the real. Instead it's how he talks about the existent, the actual. To the extent that one restricts the existent super-finely to the _hic et nunc_, it is indeed hardly a candidate for existence, and has that much more trouble as a candidate for reality, certainly as a candidate for a thing really distinct in its ways; instead it is more likely to be generic, or to be such that it might as well be generic, because there is so little persistence in its differences from other existents . One might say that it's still a candidate for "no-frills reality" -- it is at least here rather than in Andromeda, and so on -- if it persists at all, it persists long enough for that sort of thing. Best, Ben --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
