Joe, list, Thank you for your response, Joe. Comments interspersed below.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Joseph Ransdell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2006 1:29 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: MS 399.663f On the sign as surrogate >[Joe] 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." >[Joe] 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.) >[Joe] 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=============== >[Joe] REPLY: >[Joe] 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.) >[Joe] 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. >[Joe] Question: Is P2's claim that P1 is speaking the truth a verification of >P1's claim? Not in any strong sense. Instead it is assertion, a sign, claiming a verification. The moment we move the conception of verification to such a plane, we get away from what verification is about. Now, the assertion may be, for P2, a part, an outward growth of that verification, helping solidify and store it in his memory (years later P2 forgets the incident but sees his notation of his verification and, based on good experience -- i.e., "pre-verified" by past good experience -- with his own past notations about verifications, he counts the notation itself as verification). Whether it's a verification to anybody else depends on the evidentiary value which, based on experience, they assign to P2's assertions. In talking about verification, it is important to specify, for what mind. You're speaking of it as if it were a kind of universal act of verification, or an act of verification to mind of God or to the mind of the semiotician studying the scenario. The semiotician may take a stand as to whether C & C2 are correct or not, or may treat the scenario as an example where the semiotician does not know whether they're true. Especially in the latter case the question arises of whether P2 took the proper measures in order to make a reasonably good (though not infallible) verification of C. Verificatory (& disconfirmatory) methods can be distinguished from interpretive methods. This doesn't mean that verification is merely a method. There is considerable singularness about verification, even in mathematics -- in diagrammatic observation. In constructing a model of it, we lose sight sometimes of the fact that we're talking about a relation of a model to a territory. The result will be to hold, like Hawking and the early positivists, that we never deal with the territory but instead only with models or maps (I'm not using the word "model" in the mathematicians' sense). That is very different from saying that any territory can be analyzed into models from various viewpoints where "model" is understood as sign or interpretant. Clearly the mind does have experiences of objects, and the mind's experience of the object is not said mind's sign or interpretant of the object. He may take his having experienced it as a sign of something further. But that is something else. The difference is also in the fact that experience embodies partial or total existential consequences. By intelligent experiences which test one's interpretants (which are mere construals), an intelligence takes over the job of biological evolution which tends to punish bad interpretants by removing them from the gene pool. Here the Peircean usually says, "that's mere secondness." But the formation of the experience in reference to interpretant, sign, and semiotic object rules out the reduction of such experience to mere secondness. The experience, in its collaterality, is logically determined, and logically determines semiosis going forward. Therefore it is a semiotic (i.e. logical) element yet is neither the interpretant, sign, or semiotic object. In a sense it is a "second" object, just as the interpretant is a "second" sign. The experience, or the mind as the experiencing, is the _subject_ of cognition; one could use the old object-subject distinction from cognitive discussions philosophy to say: semiotic object, sign, interpretant, semiotic subject. (But I'll stick with calling it the "recognition," the "recognizant," or occasionally the "agnoscent.") When the experience is formed (as it usually is) collaterally to sign and interpretant in respect of object, then the connection is secured in the mind between signs & object. Since the object is not always available, one often makes do with evidentiary signs resting on a broader experiential basis. I.e., one has some slack in what one counts as verification adequate or inadequate, and what counts as the object and what counts as being as good as the object for observation and whether these amount to untested and wishful interpretations or well supported recognitions. It really is important for semiotics to recognize these differences if it is to deal with the difference between theoretical interpretations and actual confirmations, corroborations, etc. If, in Peirce's example, the first man did not take the second's claim of a boat in the distant water as acquainting him with the boat, then he would be taking it as only a sign of the boat (about which the second man goes on to claim that it carries only passengers, not freight). Indeed, luck can be involved as regards what is the real state of things, and there is no strict general algorithm for inquiry. How one uses this slack is itself tested over time. How soundly one verifies is tested over time, insofar as one builds and acts upon the verificatory experience. Once we see how the object-observational legitimacy of a sign is formed into a recognition just as the meaning is formed into an interpretant, we can understand how signs are actually evidentiary to minds and how it is that one reasonably does not collaterally check every sign and every interpretant at every moment. >[Joe] 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. At this point you've not only turned the verification into an assertion, you've adopted the viewpoint of a third party in the scenario, a third party with no opportunity to check up on what P1 & P2 did, and indeed to check up on the substance of their claims. Then you're asking, how would this third party know? What would be verification to that third party? Since P1 & P2 have not necessarily verified anything to P3, the answer is that any verification which has taken place is hidden from P3's observation, coarse-grained out. >[Joe] 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. Again, we need to focus on verification to whom? To what mind? The second opinion does differ to P2 since it is P2's "opinion" or indeed asserted observation, not somebody else's. P2 only heard what P1 said. P2 went and checked the object itself. Again, I'm not thinking of a statement as a verification, except in one or another secondary sense. I'm thinking of verificatory experiences by minds. It is different in logical type insofar as it involves bringing experience to bear on the correspondence of sign & interpretant to object and doing this by actual fact-checking and risk-taking. The sign & interpretant are sources of non-acquaintative info about the object. The answer to the question of what will count as solid verification in the particular case is like the answer to the question of what is the truth of the particular case: inquire into the truth of that particular case long enough, and find out. General features of verification can be reasonably established, by keeping in mind _to what mind_ the verification is to be. Best, Ben --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [email protected]
