[peirce-l] Re: MS 399.663f On the sign as surrogate

[Gary Richmond]

Joe, Ben, list, Joseph Ransdell wrote: I hope Stjernfelt's paper is made generally available soon. He has an important paper in Transactions of the Peirce Society 36 (Summer 2000) called "Diagrams as Centerpiece of a Peircean Epistemology". Stjernfelt's paper,"Two Iconicity Notions in Peirce's Diagrammatology" presented at ICCS in Aalborg, Denmark this month (Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence #4068) indeed seems to be a companion piece to "Diagrams as Centerpiece of a Peircean Epistemology," perhaps representing a refinement and development of the ideas presented in the earlier paper. [However, the former paper also includes analyses not present in the ICCS piece and is very well worth reading in its own right. It is one which I return to again and again and have annotated profusely. A rereading since my return from Denmark confirms for me your statement, Joe, that it is "an important paper"--as is, I might add, the lead piece in that Summer 2000 volume of Transactions, Joe's "Peirce and the Socratic Tradition."] In the present paper Stjernfelt distinguishes two complementary notions of iconicity which he terms *operational* and *optimal* and, further, ties the second later notion to Peirce's movement towards the "extreme realism" in which, for example, the famous *diamond example* (in consideration of the pragmatic maxim) is reinterpreted to include real possibilities ("would-bes"). In Stjernfelt's reading the earlier "operational criteria" involves not only the icon resembling (sharing characteristics with, etc.) its object, but the heart of the operational definition is that there is the construction of a diagram involved in all reasoning, so that by diagram observation and manipulation we may obtain new information. This "operational definition" refers exactly to that manipulation and observation. But it would appear that Peirce concludes that the operational notion--as powerful as it is--finally results in too broad a definition of iconicity for some purposes. For prime example in logic it would seem that Peirce's Alpha and Beta EGs are strictly equivalent to propositional logic and first order predicate logic respectively. But Peirce (who after all invented the algebraic versions although his own notation in not used today) found his graphic forms "more iconic" than the earlier representations. Thus,  for example, even in his Beta graphs the line of identity is preferred to the convention of *selectives* which Peirce introduced to avoid "a thicket" of lines of identity in complex graphs. I cannot begin to suggest how much more complex and subtle Stjernfelt's analysis is as compared to my crude outline above. And I would encourage those who have access to Springer editions to read it. (I might add that it has particular relevance to my own diagrammatological work in trikonic.) Gary Ben, list: Thanks for the response, Ben, and for the news from Gary about the conference. I hope Stjernfelt's paper is made generally available soon. He has an important paper in Transactions of the Peirce Society 36 (Summer 2000) called "Diagrams as Centerpiece of a Peircean Epistemology".. I'm caught by a luncheon engagement and can't do more at the moment than to add some more quotes to provide some background for sorting out the imputation factors along the lines you are suggesting: These are all from the early years (1865-1873): .................. --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com