Patrick, Jean-Marc, Jerry, Jim, Bill, List
J.Ch = Jerry Chandler
BB = Bill Bailey
J-MO = Jean-Marc Orliaguet
AS = Arnold Shepperson
The following remarks caught my eye as I read through the exchanges on this thread:
J-MO: ... the phenomenological approach which consists in studying how forms can be combined together have the advantage that there is no need to resort to teleology to explain how these forms (First, Second, Thirds) "can be seen to emerge" from semiosis.
JCh: ... the propensity of process philosophers to neglect the concept of inheritance of properties in time restricts the potential correspondence between process philosophy and scientific philosophy.
BB: The highly ephemeral acts of sign usage are "real" events in several related but distinct processes--e.g, those physical, physiological, psychological and sociological processes necessary to communication acts. It seems to me these different processes often get confused or conflated. Existential "objects" are also events, but typically in a much slower process that makes them available to our exteroception for comparatively vast periods of time, which we think makes them "empirically" real, extant. I think it is not very useful to speak of signs as existing in the same process as existential objects, but if we must, perhaps we can
say, "Yes, signs exist, but much faster than objects do."
J-MO: ... the phenomenological approach which consists in studying how forms can be combined together have the advantage that there is no need to resort to teleology to explain how these forms (First, Second, Thirds) "can be seen to emerge" from semiosis.
AS: Perhaps what these all point towards is Peirce's take on realism in semeiotic: that which is real (that is, that for which truth stands) SIGNALS itself in ways that can be comprehended through reasoning. The scientific apprehension of reality is that which is achieved through a mode of reasoning that itself SIGNALS its property of truth-value through the manner in which such reasoning about one facet of reality can be tested in so far as other facets of reality can, in the long run, be brought to signal their relations with still further facets of reality, ... and so on. That which SIGNALS may be an existent, a quality, or a relation: it seems to me that the nature of signs in semeiotic, as representamens (REPRESENTING reals, perhaps, as opposed to `merely' SIGNALLING reals?), must of itself take the form of something that brings into relation with each other relations that may not have signalled such a possibility before. Okay: this is rather clumsily put, but the point is that Jerry's point about the neglect of "the concept of inheritance of properties in time" sort of reinforced for me the need to understand the role of continuity in Peirce's thought, and especially in the form of the transitivity of representative phenomena (well, okay, signs). Hence my two-bits' worth about the importance of getting some grip on Peirce's mathematical work: if properties are to be inherited in time, then any attempt to comprehend this logically must, if we accept Peirce's ranking of mathematics as prior to philosophy in the classification of the sciences, must begin from a firm grasp of Peirce's work in the mathematics of continuity. I don't think that this requires that we all ditch our specialties and try to become mathematicians: but we can at least try to go that extra mile to get one step beyond, as Patrick put it, having "to take on trust anything that Peirce or Whitehead might have used mathematical forms of argumentation in order to "demonstrate" in detail."
Cheers
Arnold Shepperson
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