Dear Jim, > I want to respond to your post but could not find your blog site scroll bar > in order to read the collateral experience quotes. I want to review them > before commenting. Have you posted them elsewhere -- seems I recall you may > have.
> I think how we are viewing the distinction between a sign and an object may > be the cause of some of our disagreement. And frankly, for my part, I'm not > all that clear how Peirce veiws this distinction. Nor am I all that clear in > my own mind how Peirce views one's experience and or perception of an object > in comparison to one's experience of a sign. > My hunch is that you may suppose we experience objects unmediated by the > process of representation and thus must check our signs (or representations > of objects) againts these unmediated collateral experiences of objects. But > my hunch is that this is not Peirce's view of the matter. It's the phenomenology issue again. Peirce does think that we have direct experience of objects. Why would he go on about collateral experience of objects if they were just more interpretants incapable of conveying...experience!...of the object? Interpretants convey & clarify meaning, not experience. And it's fair to say that we experience the object as unmediated. Yet obviously it is mediated through one's interpretive physiological process. Sometimes we noticed that it is mediated through lenses, though we don't count lenses as signs, so that's not a logical mediation. Phenomenologically, my experience of the object is not, for me, some drawing or text produced for me by my physiology about the object. Instead, my experience is how I check signs & interpretations. Now, a little voice inside one's head says, "ah, but my experiences, they're really just signs or interpretants, I'm just seeing signs & interpretants of the things themselves, but not the things themselves." And then one starts walking around thinking, there are the sign & interpretants, and then there are these deceptive things, called "experiences," which pretend to be something more but one has unmasked them! The world is nothing but masks, signs, interpretants, says that voice. The object disappears in a maze of mirrors. That little voice is wrong. That's the little voice that says, "look! -- but don't touch!" Cruel little voice! Then Ahab ends up wanting to pierce the "paste-board mask." Only something that can be an object in its own right, can serve as a sign of another object. Art must itself be real, in order to reveal things. In its selectiveness, its style, it has its own reality & actuality. Nothing could be more artificial, and seem less artificial, the Hubert Selby, Jr.'s _Last Exit to Brooklyn_. Don't let all those falsehoods about its mad-rushing, "diarrhea-of-the-typewriter" prose fool you. That book went through at least a HUNDRED drafts (see Gilbert Sorrentino's article in the relevant issue of _Journal of Contemporary Fiction_). It was how Selby learned to write, with Sorrentino as his critical reader (they were childhood friends, a pair of Brooklyn wiseguys). > And even if I am mistaken about this, Peirce nonetheless did not seem to > think a fourht category was needed to explain the distinction between the > experience of an object and the experience of a sign -- though of course he > obviously does speak of collateral experience (but not, I think, as a > category apart from firstness, secondness or thirdness). I never said that Peirce thinks that either a fourth category or a fourth semiotic element is needed. Peirce could hardly have been clearer that he thinks that no fourth is needed. What I've been saying (for years now) is that Peirce is wrong about that, and that there is enough conflict among his ideas to show it -- specifically, that his own conceptions of objects, signs, interpretants, and (collateral) experience show it. The experience woven into semiosis is a fourth semiotic element. Why would experience, qua experience, have no logical role to play? Now, since I'm arguing that Peirce's own ideas lead or help lead to the need for a fourth, then obviously sometimes I will quote Peirce and so forth, and I will point out where an argument in defense of Peirce is an argument also in opposition to Peirce, as in the notion that an experience is, in the same relationships, a sign. This doesn't mean that I think that Peirce was completely right nor that all I want to do is clarify Peirce. To the contrary. I hold a variant viewpoint, I was pursuing fours before I ever read Peirce, developed quite a few of them before I ever read Peirce, etc., but I won't belabor that point since I've discussed it enough times in the past. And, since most of the arguments against the fourth are arguments which a dyadist could turn against the triad, I'll point that out as well -- how the defense of the triad against the dyad is at stake. I'll eventually do a table outlining how that works for most of the counterarguments among A-I in point 4 and how the Peircean challenge is to argue against the tetrad without arguing against the triad. If one admits that, by Peircean semiotics, a collaterally based experiential recogniton of sign, interpretant, & object in respect to one another is not, in the same relationships, a sign or interpretant of said sign, interpretant, & object in respect to one another, and thereby admits an irreducibility of the recognitional relationships, but goes ahead and argues that from some other viewpoint, a physiologist's viewpoint, my experience is a sign or interpretant, then one has fully & unilaterally disarmed oneself against dyadicists when they go right ahead, ignore triadic irreducibility, note that for somebody somewhere my wonderfully clarificatory interpretant is just an obscure, cryptic sign, and declare the triad vanquished & vaporized, by a triadist's own doing. > But first I wold like to look more closely at the quotes you've gathered and > also give your recent comments (which seem to bring the dsipute into better > focus -- at least for me) more study. Okay! I didn't expect yours and others' responses. I'm worn out! Best, Ben --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [email protected]
