Jim, list,
>>[Ben] That signs and interpretations convey meaning, not experience or
>>acquaintance with their objects, is not only Peirce's view but also the
>>common idea of most people. For instance, most people might agree that
>>expertise can sometimes be gained from books about their subject, but they
>>will disagree that experience with the books' subjects can be gained from
>>books. There is good reason for this.
>>[Ben] The expertise consists of conveyable information from books. The
>>experience involves dealing with and learning about the objects of experience
>>in situations with actual consequences. Even in math, when you stop to think
>>about it, you notice a big difference between reading about math problems and
>>working those math problems yourself.
>[Jim] Dear Ben,
>[Jim] Thanks for another helpful and interesting post!
>[Jim] You seem to be saying that we can have two types of aquaintance with
>objects. Either we can experience objects directly without the mediation of
>signs or we can experience the meaning of objects (but not the entirety of the
>objects themselves) through signs. Before continuing I want to make sure I'm
>understanding you on this point. Does your notions of direct aqauintance with
>objects (unmediated by signs or the process of representation) provide one
>with knowledge of the objects meaning?
Yes and no.
No: "Direct" and "unmediated" don't mean the same thing. There's lots of
"sub-logical" or "sub-semiotic" stuff going on. I don't mean "illogical,"
instead I mean, "not inference-processing." We perceive directly, but there's
lots of "mediation" by things -- dynamic, material, biological -- which we
don't perceive. Likewise in conscious experience there are contributions by
unconscious inference processes. If we order by principles of knowledge,
principles of how (on what basis, in what light) we know thing, then experience
comes first. When we analyze experience, we start breaking it down into
elements whereby we explain what we do experience.
We can break experience down into, for instance, dynamic processes (in which
I've said in the past that we should look for the involvement of 'inverse' or
multi-objective optimization), material stochastic processes, and
vegetable-level information processes. In idioscopy, if we order by explanatory
principles then we will put physics first, as usual. If we order by knowledge
principles, we will put inference processes first (in idiosocopy this means the
sciences of intelligent life). The maths are typically ordered in the "order
of knowledge" rather than an "order of being" -- ordered on principles of how
(on what basis, in what light) we know things, and structures of order and
deductive theory of logic are usually considered more basic and foundational.
This is the opposite of the situation in idioscopy.
Anyway, recognition, interpretation, representation, and objectification are
elements in a logical a.k.a. semiotic process. If we order by "explanatory
principles" aka the traditional "order of being," which corresponds to the
order of semiotic determination, then we explain by the object. Yet there is
more than objects in semiosis, and there is more than forces and motion in the
concrete world.
Yes: One can experience things (1) as semiotic objects and (2) as signs and (3)
as interpretants and (4) as recognitions. So make that four "kinds" of
experience instead of two. I don't really think of it as resulting in four
_kinds_ of experience, though. One can experience things as being,
respectively, (1) sources of semiotic determination, (2)
conveyers/facilitators/"encodings" of semiotic determination, (3)
clarifiers/"decodings" of semiotic determination, and (4)
establishers/"recipients" of semiotic determination. It can be noted here that,
when Peirce says that by "collateral experience" he does not refer to
experience with the sign system itself, he is not saying that there is no such
thing as experience with the sign system itself. The most thorough confirmatory
experience will be experience not exclusively of the object but also of the
signs & interpretants representing it, and indeed one checks that which was the
immediate object as well. One checks one's assumptions, premisses, everything
that one can. If one could not experience things as serving in all the various
elementary semiotic roles, then it would severely limit semiosis's reflexivity,
self-accessibility, self-testing power, its capacity to develop higher-order
and "meta" structures (semiosis about semiosis itself, etc.). I regard
higher-order structures as the rule, not the exception, in semiosis. E.g., I
regard sciences and maths as disciplines of knowing in or on what light or
basis one knows things; affective arts as disciplines of understanding in what
effects one feels things; political, military, and "power" affairs as "arenas"
of deciding (or its getting decided) who or what gets to decide things; etc.,
etc. So one can focus on a sign and treat it, in its very signhood, as a
subject matter, a semiotic object, of a higher-order or higher-intentional
semiosis which constitutes one's study of that sign.
When one experiences a thing directly, one experiences it in a recognition
formed collaterally to signs and interpretants which are thereby tested. If one
experiences it in defiance of prior expectations, then things which one took as
signs & interpretants are disconfirmed. When we stop and examine our
experience, we can notice a lot of this, I think, and it seems like mediation
to me. I also spoke of the idea of an "unassimilated shard of brute experience"
which I imagine as breaking through environing experience in such a way as to
cause a semiosis breakdown of some sort. I mean that I don't expect experience
always to be "nice and refined.".
>[Jim] Is it your view that even without signs (or the process of
>representation) that experience would be meaningful to us?
No. I mean, I don't think that experience is an "alternate channel," as if
semiosis were AM radio & experience were FM radio. I think that experience is
unconsciously mediated by all kinds of things, including but not limited to
inference processes, and that a mind is capable of experiencing things as
serving in any basic logical/semiotic role.
>[Jim] Is it your view that that signs and the process of representation are
>(merely) tools for comunicating or thinking about our experience but are
>otherwise not required for experience to be meaningful?
No, that's not my view.
>[Jim] Personally I don't think Peirce meant that we can conceive of objects
>without engaging in representation. ....
I, too, don't think that Peirce meant that and for my part I don't mean that
either.
>[Jim] .... We may have aquaintance with objects in the same sense that two
>billiard balls are aquainted when they collide but this is not triadic
>aquaintance for the billiard balls and conveys no meaning to them.
Well, I hope I've made clear at this point that I don't regard experience in
that way. I regard it as tetradic, not dyadic, and as formed collaterally to
sign and interpretant in respect of the object, and both determining semiosis
going forward, and, in its collaterality, determined logically by sign and
interpretant, and also by the object, both by the determination running through
the sign and interpretant, and by the collateral experience of the object
itself. This fourthness is the balancement & stability of forces in a system,
it is structure. It is not by any amount of interpretation or elucidation,
instead it is by collaterally based recognition, that one brings doubt
reasonably to stable rest on which one can act and build. Experience is one's
undergoing and supporting (or failure in supporting) of forces acting on one.
The treatment of secondness, as indifferently, unbalanced force and balanced
resistance, is an unfortunate conflation, just as if matter and action/energy
had been conflated. Force and structure are equivalent and complementary in the
same sense that matter and energy are equivalent and complementary.
This collateral accessing of the object is itself an experiential recognition
collateral to signs and interpretants, but is not _in question_ at the time, so
we don't analyze it down into signs and interpretants. It may be of a very
different kind than the signs and interpretants in question -- its inferential
elements may be barely conscious or largely unconscious and it may "feel" a lot
less mediated -- phenomenologically the object _is_ and you _know_ it. That's
people's favorite way. Check against those "channels" which are surest and most
habitual. In the same way, an interpretant's separate representation of the
object doesn't come from nowhere but is itself a semiotic product, quite
possibly the product of a collateral semiosis -- it's a collateral
understanding -- but such collateral semiosis just doesn't happen to be _in
question_ in the analysis at the time, and so we draw a straight leg of the
triangle running directly from intepretant to object, though, by analysis, we
could add nodes along that leg and break the leg down into sign, intepretant,
interpretant, etc. One doesn't fashion an interpretation in an interpretive
vacuum. One arrives at an interpretant or a theory in a larger interpretive or
theoretical context.
In information theory, the recipient is that for which the information emerging
from the decoding is redundant or not and is true or not, etc. The recipient
tests against the totality of information received through "other channels."
What other channels? They aren't drawn in the elementary diagram. They're not
in question. But they're there. Why does this recipient rather than a "second,
and bigger decoder" have this role? The decoder is more or less pre-set, a
result of evolution or design -- quite a lot of variability and responsiveness
presumably can be built in, too. But the recipient is, or counts as, the one
who would test and evaluate the information system itself, redesign it, even
junk it. The recipient becomes ultimately the architect and the "evolutionator"
:-). So it is with the recognizant as opposed to the interpretant.
>[Jim] For me, all meaningful experience is triadic and representational. That
>one conception of an object is taken as foundational for a particular
>discussion does not priviledge that object as the "real object" but merely as
>the object commonly understood as the criteria against which the validity of
>assertions will be tested. Its as though the discussants were saying that the
>object ultimately under discussion is "that one over there" or "the one
>described in this sentence" or whatever -- but hopefully always one which
>all participants to the discussion have at least in theory equal access. The
>issue of what constitutes a collateral object rests less on the distinction
>between direct aquaintance vs aquaintance through signs but one of private vs
>public access to the object.
>[Jim] A useful collateral object is one to which all discussants have equal
>access. The question being raised by collateral experience is really one of
>public vs private experience. The question is not whether the collateral
>object is known through representation or somehow more directly through dyadic
>aquaintance because (in my view) all meaningful experience (even so called
>direct experience) is mediated through signs.
That's not as Peircean as it may seem. The difference between private & public
is important in terms of what _can_ be shared or not, and not in terms of what
happens to be shared or not. If somebody complains of seeing a talking turkey
and nobody else can see it even though they look all around, the talking turkey
is, with a vanishingly small uncertainty, a delusion. That's a question not
just of actual sharedness but of sharability.
When one has various experiences and interpretations, etc., one is a commind of
various sub-minds; one is a particularly tight community. If I arrive at some
notion by a particular approach but I find myself unable to arrive at it by any
other approach, I start to think that I've made a mistake, because, in effect,
I can't share the notion even with myself.
The point is whether what we or I or you think true is really true or not. We
have these interpretants, these construals. Are they valid and true? The
interpretants formed in terms of conceivable experience which would have
conceivable practical bearing. Peirce says that repeatedly. Well, then, in
order to check them, we have to check experience -- rummage through past
experience and/or go about acquiring further experience. The interpretants
themselves invite us to do so. But no finite community is assured of reaching
the truth. When I assure myself that such-&-such is the case, I do so in a way
which I expect would convince other people following the same steps. In other
words, I apply a general standard of confirmation. None of us runs out and
grabs our neighbors to help us check and be sure whether the coffee is really
ready or not, and so on.
A old man who sometimes drank heavily in my building insisted that there was an
occasional leak from his bathroom ceiling. His apartment was such a mess that
who could be sure? Our Superintendent and our managing agent's investigator
both looked and couldn't find evidence of it, and the investigator made fun of
him to us. Most of us (on the board of directors) laughed. I still had my
doubts -- on the basis of having known the man for a while and on the basis of
experience with groupthink. One day the man called me into his apartment and
there the leak was, drip, drip, drip from the ceiling. I went and dragged the
co-op's president in to look at it, because I didn't want to hear later that I
was "just imagining things." And so we finally got a plumber to find the source
and do the repairs. Groupthink can be quite deluded.
Peirce decidedly disagrees that the real is that imagined thing which conforms
to others' imagined things. This follows from the fact that no finite actual
group of individuals has an assured access to truth or knowledge of reality.
Peirce decidedly disagrees that the real is defined as, or amounts to, that
about which you agree with the people around you or that about which you agree
with all the people on Earth. As a clinical psychologist, you're aware that
sometimes that coarse kind of epistemology is the only way to get some people
"back to earth" and a way for a psychologist to characterize non-delusionality
in simple social terms. It's also a way for the psychologist to keep himself or
herself from getting lost among the weirdos -- take the more general social
norms as the standard reference system. But it is a coarse tool, not a workable
philosophy, and in some cases it goes terribly wrong, as described in the old
book _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds_. Did you know
that Newton himself ridiculed one of the early financial bubbles as a sure
loser, but ended up investing in it? If I remember correctly, Newton ended up
losing money on it too. A delusion may be just a lot of hot air, but build the
right balloon, and the balloon does rise for a while, and it's tempting to
people to try to make a buck on it even if in the end one believes that balloon
will come down. And consider the popular, once nearly universal belief in
witchcraft, with attendant violence against accused witches. That's covered in
that old book, too.
>[Jim] The difference between reading about something and doing it is not a
>matter of representational vs non representational aquaintance but between
>two different representations of the same object. There are folks who can read
>about pro football who can not play it and there are folks who can play pro
>football who can not read. Representation of experience is required for both
>activities. The common object represented is neither the football-done nor
>the football-read but the quality of football that is common to and inheres in
>both. Some of the habits acquired in mastering one respresentation or
>conception are not the same as required for mastering the other.
To the contrary, books about football are only secondarily about
football-as-written-about. They are primarily about football actually played.
Football actually played is only secondarily about football-as-written-about
("If we run this play, the reporters will call us geniuses. Why not give it a
shot?"). People who can play football may, some of them, be unable to read
about it, but, one way or another, they can be told about it. The rendering
equivalent of experiences with objects to experiences with the faintest
representations of them, would leave the mind lost at sea. The given object
ends up nowhere and everywhere. And it's a package deal. If objects can't be
grappled with, then signs can't be grappled with, because now you're grappling
with a sign of a sign of ...(insert infinite series of "sign of" here) of the
sign on which you were supposedly focused. I think that you need to address and
confront logically the infinite regression which you set up. The way which you
distance yourself from objects results in your distancing yourself from any
representations through which you could still access them.
>[Jim] I don't mean for these last two paragraphs above to leap frog your
>answers but more as guides to what is troubling me and what I mean by my
>questions. Thanks again for your comments, Ben. I am still studying them, but
>want to make sure I'm understanding you as I go. Making sure I understand
>your distinction between direct aquaintance and sign mediated aquaintance
>seems an important lst step.
Well, let's hope there isn't another electrical blackout, or else this
discussion will pause. Or maybe let's hope that there is another blackout,
because I seem to have turned suddenly all too prolific! :-)
Best, Ben
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