Ben says: "I thought I was so concise that it was okay to pull the topic in my favorite direction, since it seemed brief. But I have to make some additions and corrections."
Ben, I hadn't read your latest message in responding to your earlier message as I do below, and am not sure whether your subsequent comments bear on what I say or not but will just go ahead and post them anyway. (I should add that the MS from which the quote you are commenting on is drawn was not completely quoted by me and what was omitted is perhaps pertinent to it, given the direction you went from it. I will perhaps post the whole thing separately in a later message.) Ben says: ===QUOTE BEN================ Peirce: "The point of contact is the living mind which is affected in a similar way by real things and by their signs. And this is the only possible point of contact." The mind alone recognizes sign and interpretant as corresponding to the real. Yet that mind's recognition of the signs' corresponding to the object is not the mind's sign for the object yet is the mind's _something_ regarding the object, something involving experience of the object. Maybe it's just that, experience, and experience is something "outside" semiosis, technically non-semiotic in that sense, and supporting semiosis by external pressure? (No, I don't think that, in case anybody is wondering :-)) ======END QUOTE=============== REPLY: I wonder if in talking about correspondence, you are looking for something that just isn't to be found, Ben, namely, a statement of verification of a certain cognitive claim that is something other than a mere repetition of the same claim because it claims that the claim corresponds to the way the object actually is. (I say this in view of your opinion that confirmation or verification is a logically distinct factor that Peirce fails to take due account of as a logically distinct fourth factor in his category theory.) Let us suppose that some person, P1, makes a certain knowledge claim, C1, about a certain object, O, namely, that O is F. And let us suppose that a second person, P2, makes a claim, C2, about that claim, saying, yes, O really is as P1 claims it is, namely, F. (In other words, he makes what may seem to be a verifying claim.) And suppose that P2's claim differs from P1's claim not as regards any difference in evidential basis for saying that O is F but only because C2 is about the relationship between claim C1 and O and their observed correspondence, whereas C1 is just about O. (In other words, P1 is merely saying that O is F whereas P2 is saying not only that O is F but also that P1 is saying that O is F and is therefore speaking the truth.) Supposing that the two persons are equivalent as regards their generally recognized status as people who try to speak the truth. Question: Is P2's claim that P1 is speaking the truth a verification of P1's claim? Given that there is no difference in their evidential base and that P1 and P2 are on par as recognized truth-tellers, it would seem not. Why? Because P1's simple claim that O is F could just as well be taken as verification by P1 that P2 is right in claiming that O is F. The general point is that in thinking about the need for verification you are thinking of a verifying statement -- a verification -- as differing from the statement being verified because the verifier is performing an act of comparison of correspondence that is of a different logical type than the act of making the claim being verified, whereas the one is logically on par with the other. Thus e.g. when one gets a second opinion from another physician, let us say, one is not ipso facto getting an opinion that can either verify or disverify the first, though we may mistakenly think that this is what we are doing. But a second opinion is just a further opinion, as a third, fourth, etc., and it doesn't make any difference which one comes first. Of course, we could take the second opinion as verification of the first provided we brought to bear some further considerations, but amongst them would NOT be the fact that one of them could be construed as differing from the other because it involved a comparison of the other as an opinion with the object of that opinion. In other words, there is never really any such thing as a correspondence comparison of opinion and fact or sign and object of sign in the sense you implicitly have in mind. Joe Joe Ransdell [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.10.3/395 - Release Date: 7/21/2006 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [email protected]
