Joe, list > Ben says:
>> Peirce divides the discovery sciences into (1) mathematics, (2) cenoscopy >> (=philosophy), and (3) idioscopy (=the special sciences). Joe Ransdell has >> associated those, respectively with 1stness, 2ndness, 3rdness, though I >> don't know his argument for it or maybe he has a citation from Peirce. > REPLY: > Maybe I said that some place, Ben, but I don't recall ever THINKING that and > don't know why I would have said it. Do you happen to have the place where I > said it handy? if I did say it I probably shouldn't have, as I don't recall > any place that Peirce said it and it just doesn't seem to be true. There are > some divisions that seem to exemplify the categorial structure but not all > and not that particular one. You didn't, by any chance, confuse my saying > something about the classification of signs with saying something about the > classification of sciences? I'm sorry, Joe. I can't find it & I think it's best to assume that I've made an error. Maybe I got "lost" in reading Peirce-related papers at Arisbe and somehow got the notion that somebody else's paper was one of yours. I've searched through peirce-l messages, googled around on your name and words like "cenoscopy," and skimmed through various of your papers at Arisbe, and haven't found the passage of which I was thinking. What I remember is, reading something like what I described above, and thinking -- oh, that's what Joe thinks! I didn't know that he thought that. Later it kept coming back to me. Well, I guess somebody thought it and it verly likely wasn't you. I remember being quite struck by the passage and its saying something about mathematics as the study of qualities, and about the special sciences as the study of real representational or semiotic processes in the world. It hasn't come back to me yet how the passage associated cenoscopy/philosophy with resistance & reaction. Now that I think about it, it's also possible that the passage aligned the being / actuality / reality trichotomy with the three discovery sciences and I somehow automatically associated to the quality / reaction / representation trichotomy. Now it's starting to come back a little more. It's such a slow thing sometimes, to remember! I was going through peirce-l posts at the Lyris archive. (I no longer have the older posts because of the ruin of my old hard drive.) Now, if I can remember what I was looking for, and conduct the same searches again, -- I was looking for some posts on the Pragmatic Maxim. But in the course of search, I skimmed or glanced at, I think, 300 posts! This may take a while. > As for the concept of recognition being a fourth category, I just don't see > any reason to think it cannot itself be analyzed in terms of sign, object, > and interpretant relationships. Maybe it can't but nothing you have said > suggests to me that treating it as an irreducible quadratic relationship > would be of any help. Is a fourthness required for the analysis of number? > As I recall it the Peano Postulates make do with 0 through 3. I'm not familiar enough with the Peano Postulates to say. I don't pose a tetradic reduction thesis applicable to all relations. I just say that there's a fourth semiotic term that isn't any of the classic three. A sign stands for an object to an interpretant on the basis of a recognition. I think that an increasingly good reason to suppose that recognition can't be reduced to interpretant, sign, and object, is that nobody has done so in any kind of straightforward way. - It's been said that recognition & collateral experience are a generalized context, but that context is not what I meant by "recognition" nor what Peirce meant by "collateral experience." I've meant, for instance, your seeing somebody wear a hat just as you expected. Or like somebody talking about a bird and your checking their comments against your experiences of particular birds. - It's been said that recognition & experience are mediated or made of signs & interpretants. Those involve shifts of the semiotic frame of reference, which is a legitimate analytic move, but not a legitimate reductive move. - It's been said that the evolution of a triad -- somehow -- conveys experience without the members of the triad doing so. If there's a relationship among object, sign, interpretant, a relationship which conveys experience of the object, then that relationship IS experience of the object and is not reducible to object, sign, & interpretant -- and we're back at talking about the familiar subject of phenomenology vs. physiological analysis of vision. Basically, signs & interpretants lack experience conveyable to the mind. How will you reduce experience of them respecting the object, reduce such experience into things that lack experience conveyable to the mind? Where did the experience vanish to? You can analyze, but not reduce, experience into such by shifting phenomenological gears, semiotic frame of reference, etc. I see the things themselves, directly, yet my vision is mediated by signs. Peirce does make such a distinction between indirectness and mediation, as to help make this sound less paradoxical, but the phenomenological element remains essential. If we look at perception physiologically, we will note those Peircean trains of inference, none of whose interpretants we have the experience of seeing in the vision itself, any more than we discern the motions of light from the objects to our eyes. How would we check any of these theoretical analyses of experience into signs and interpretants? By experience. Recently I said, "I see the things themselves, the things are what I see, directly -- yet, my vision is mediated by signs, because, from a perceptual physiologist's viewpoint, my vision is a process mediated by (that which in Peircean terms are called) signs, and from that viewpoint my vision is indirect -- yet is so reliable and firm that it might as well be direct, and one can understand how I could experience it as direct or even be unable to avoid experiencing it as direct. It seems quite where, when, and like the obect is. If a thing is known in its effects, then, when the effects are seen in sufficient straightforward and thorough dependence on and sufficiency for the object, the effects are seen in equivalence to the object. And I am compelled to recognize some such signs as counting as -- having the full weight of -- the objects represented. They are signs from another viewpoint, but they're not signs to me, but are the objects themselves, and are seen _by me_ as signs only insofar as they in turn represent _other_ things -- another shift of viewpoint or semiotic frame of reference." That, which I experience as an interpretant, is no more capable of providing me with experiential confirmation, than that, which I interpret as a sign, is capable of providing me with interpretive clarification -- that's what the interpretant sign, relative to that previous sign, is for. But I need not only clarificatory interpretations but also experiential confirmations. Semiosis cannot long remain reasonable without confirmatory experience. Otherwise semiosis will get off the tracks and wander off into a dream world of untested hopeful monsters, untested mutant interpretants, and increasing difficulty in recognizing the difference between sense and nonsense. But it is not that semiosis must always be hyperconscious, deliberate, hyper-experiential. - Sometimes it is as if semiosis goes into an instinctual mode, spares itself most of the shambling around and endless retracing of steps involved in hyperconscious confirmings, reasonings to recognitive conclusions, and instead shoots along like emotion, like calculation, at lightning speed, to an illumination. - Sometimes, instead, semiosis seems to incubate, relaxing the stresses of an initial confrontation & grapplement with a problem, and unconsciously relaxes one assumption, then some other assumption, etc., refines measurements, things like that, seeking, through this incubation & gestation, to lead up to an illumination, a birth. As the illumination was like interpretation with little confirmation, so, likewise, the incubation is like representation, the development & refinement of a representation, with little interpretation. Instead, an interpretation, an illumination, is what is being sought though incubation. - And that initial confrontation & grapplement? Like objectification with little representation, a struggle to get control of the problem so that one could develop a working, incubatory representation of it. Helmholz+ Poincare picture of the creative process ------- correlatable semiotic phase Saturation --- objectification Incubation --- representation Illumination --- intepretation Verification --- recognition You can analyze, but not reduce, experience into signs & interpretants by shifting phenomenological gears, semiotic frame of reference, etc. In experiencing the sign & interpretant in respect to the object which they merely represent, one doesn't automatically do any shifting of phenomenological gears or semiotic frame of reference. One is observing object, sign, and interpretant together against one another, and one experiences them AS the sign, the meaning that one drew from the sign, and the object that they were about. And one experiences oneself AS experiencing those things, one confirms oneself AS confirming those things. It is only by looking at experience in "another way" that one will analyze the experience into interpretants & signs. That's not a reduction. If it were, then one would likewise reduce interpretants down into pre-interpretant signs, and reduce signs down into objects, and they would all be legitimate reductions, once we allow the reference frame shift as a legitimate reductive move. Reference frame shift is a way to stop noticing a semiotic element's polyadic references to the other semiotic elements. The interpretant is an anwer to, why does one ccare? What difference does the sign make? The recognizant is an answer to, on what basis does one know or learn that the interpretant is valid & true? Now, an index's power to point to where something is supposed to be, is not, per se, an evidentiary power. If the object is not actually there, then the seeming index isn't truly an index. That's all. That definitional dependency of the index's genuineness on the object's actually being there, is no source of the index's any evidentiary power. It is quite natural to be deceived by apparent indices, and not at all uncommon. Consider the case of identical twins. Consider the case of a bag's rustling, causing one to mistake a mouse for the wind. Pointing, being located in space & time, is one thing. Evidencing is another. Evidentiary power & legitimacy can't be ascribed to a sign except on the basis of collaterally based recognition. There is a dimension of sign-power whereby the sign can count as the object in some respect, an evidentiary power, a legitimacy, a recognition-worthiness. If the sign is, furthermore, _defined_ by its recognition-worthiness, then it is a proxy, legitimately "acting" & "decision-making" on behalf, as it were, of its object. That, as a practical matter, is the actual & real standard by which mathematical diagrams are developed, & not by a standard of resemblance to their object. One of the points of mathematics is to bridge enormous disparities of appearance. An appearance is a sample -- not necessarily a representative sample -- of a thing where the rest of the thing remains an open question, or is purposely, eyesight-blurringly turned into an open question. It is natural and reasonable to look for natural resemblances that are strong on the surface, since one doesn't see the depth but the depth is an open question that still matters. Things with like appearance are things of which we have acquired similar samples, similar tastes & savorings of qualities. From there we may ampliatively induce to a furthered trend of similarity. That is not what mathematical diagrams are about. The difference between icon as semblance and the mathematical diagram is like the difference between statistics and mathematical theory of measure & integration, or the difference between philosophy and the theory of ordered structures. You ask, of what use is the conception of a semiotic fourth? It allows us to characterize the evidentiary power of ALL signs. It allows us to consider legitimacy as a sign-power. A sign's legitimacy is formed into the recognition of the sign, just as a sign's meaning is formed into the sign's interpretant. And it allows us to define a kind of sign in relation to the recognition, so that we can understand how a sign can even for experiential, observational, and experimentational purposes count legitimately as the object, indeed of indefinitely many objects such that many of them are beyond our imaginings. In considering 'two' I consider not only the principle of 'two' but also, vaguely, every instance of two. All of this embodies and clarifies something that we already know -- that the constraint for collateral experience of the object is not all THAT strict. Such experience doesn't have to be direct. One can, on the basis of other experience, reasonably accept, as evidence, proxies & other signs. The experience is not experience of sign, interpretant, and object, in the way that it is experience of, say, three marbles. The experiential recognition takes form in references to itself, to interpretant, to sign, & to object. The experience is built out of structures & processes of its specific recognitional references to objects, signs, & interpretants. It's hard to imagine experience impoverished of the ongoing comparison of signs and interpretants against objects. This is what anything like intelligent experience is made of, is a fabric of. Parts of the great fabric of experience form themselves into specific relationships with objects, signs, & interpretants. It is useful to understand things about that. Objects, signs, & interpretants are phenomenologically part of the warp & woof of experience, not, phenomenologically, some foreign objects embedded in it. They're not all obscure. And the confirmation is that decisive moment, when we expose sign & interpretant to be determined again by the object and they stand up to the test. This confirmation solidifies the mind's information about the object, is not object, sign, or interpretant, and is decisive of any semiosis proceeding from there, so I don't see how it could fail to be helpful in understanding semiosis. And if semiotics is logic, and semiosis is logical process, then I simply don't see how things like confirmation, verification, disconfirmation could fail to be anything less than the heart of the matter, the most distinctively logical & semotic thing of all. I don't see how confirmation could fail to be anything less than the heart of the matter when the main thing that distinguishes us from the purely instinctual is our capacity to check our systems and "codes" of interpretation. Semiosis is sufficiently code-unbound to check its codes & systems. It is sufficiently code-unbound to perpetuate itself -- it retains what went before and keeps interpreting & checking the accumulating history as an accumulated whole, interpreting & checking interpretants AS interpretants, signs AS signs, etc., altering its systems & "codes" of signs & interpretants as seems best. Evolving itself, instead of leaving that job to biological evolution and its continual readiness to remove one from the gene pool. Indeed, the semiotic fourth allows us to put the semiotic elements into alignment with the info-theoretic set up of source, encoding, decoding, & recipient, and to see that the big differences involved at each step with the semiosis's being not so code-bound.. Anything that we call an experience, a familiarity, a perception, a recognition of the object, is something that, therefore, we cannot call a sign or interpretant of the object in the frame of reference in which it is an experience, familiarity, etc. When we bring sign & interpretant to the test against the observable real which they are supposed to represent, that is an experience with specific references to sign, interpretant, & object, and is decisive of further semiosis, and is, again, not sign, interpretant, or object in those relations in which it is the experience of them, yet is defined in the same terms as they are. It contains the familiarity-based understanding which they lack, it is that understanding solidified into a recognition. Best, Ben --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
