Ben says:
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.
[JOE] That is exactly the confusion that I was trying to express, Ben.
Then, dropping further down in your reply, you say:
[BEN] 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.
[JOE] I agree. Then, dropping down a bit further, you say:
[BEN] 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?
[JOE] What I am especially concerned with at present is the distinction he
is often more or less consciously working with between expressed thought and
thought which occurs "silently". In general, he is as much concerned to
establish something about unexpressed thought as he is about expressed
thought, though we usually content ourselves with regarding him as being
concerned only with the latter. The philosophical move he is making is not
merely to establish that expressed thought -- taking the form of
word-signs -- has all of the features which are required for the purposes of
logic, so that logic can proceed on the basis of verbal expressions of
thought -- things that appear on blackboards or pieces of paper -- without
being defeated by the inability to access invisible -- or, more generally,
imperceptible -- thought, but also to establish that unexpressed thought,
though often non-linguistic because it makes do with a person's personal and
unshared symbolically functioning notation, is nevertheless capable of being
regarded AS being symbolic just as a word is. In other words, he seems to
regard the introduction of the conception of the symbol as a way of getting
past the limitations implicit both in the word "thought" but also implicit
in the word "word". On can thus talk indifferently of words OR thoughts.
The so-called "linguistic turn" is the turn to expressed thought -- the
internal dialogue is just the externally observable dialogue imagined to be
what also transpires imperceptibly because it really makes no difference
what occurred imperceptibly, anyway -- but Peirce didn't merely make the
linguistic turn but also re-turned to the unexpressed to reclaim it, as it
were, on the basis of its presumed equivalence to what he has established
about linguistically expressed thought. The linguistic turn replaces
"thought" by "word"; the semiotic turn and return replaces both "word" and
"thought" by "symbol" (though also of course by "icon" and "index" as
appropriate, too). Maybe that is not an important further step but only a
gratuitous addition that really has no logical significance, but I think
Peirce did regard it as a significant move.
Over the years I recall reading several different books that claimed to
be able to teach people how to calculate with extraordinary rapidity and
accuracy involving mental moves and observations not described in the usual
instructions on how to perform calculations. (There are apparently a number
of such counting techniques which individuals seem to have mastered but
never seem to be able to explain clearly enough to others to have any effect
on the pedagogy of mathematics.) The ability of autistic "lightning
calculators" to calculate remote dates and weekdays, to count spilled
matches with a glance, and so on, or of musical geniuses to perform feats of
memory and musical construction that seem unbelievably difficult as
individual accomplishments but have been shown time and again to be
possible, and the like, seem to require being accounted for in ways that
seem impossible when construed merely as rapid movements which are
linguistic in character but which must be construed as involving symbolism
as well as iconism. I have a hunch that Peirce -- who had his own unique
and personal way of thinking things through -- was concerned with that, too,
though it was not high on the list of his priorities to develop any research
in that direction.
[BEN] 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.
[JOE] That is what occasioned my expression of puzzlement. I was not
intending to be arguing that we can dispense with any of the three -- being,
existence, reality -- as Gary is perhaps construing what I was saying, but
wanting to say only that I don't understand yet how these terms are being
used in a way that satisfies me that I understand what those distinctions
really are. I was shocked, for example, to find Peirce saying that "no sign
is a real thing", though he does go ahead to explain this in such a way that
it does not seem to involve a retraction of his realism about signs after
all. But I don't really understand that yet. I don't think I've got
anything to say on this further at present which will be helpful to anybody,
though. I do find your reflections on this helpful, but I can't go
significantly beyond them so far.
Joe Ransdell
----- Original Message -----
From: "Benjamin Udell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>
Sent: Friday, February 10, 2006 1:23 AM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
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
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