Bill, Jim, list, >>>[Bill] I pretty well agree with the following two paragraphs [by Jim, much >>>further down now -- Ben]. I'd like to make some friendly amendments, >>>however. I don't think one sign carries more evidential weight than >>>another, but then I'm not clear on what you mean because I don't understand >>>how abstraction is related nor what your conception of it is in the >>>sentences below. Do you mean a visual experience of a the tree is more >>>particularized in terms of data than the visual or auditory experience of >>>the word tree? To say one of those is more or less abstract than the other >>>seems strange to me.
>>>[Bill] What I miss in your post, and in Ben's response, is a fuller >>>recognition of *usage* in sign function. You get to it at the end of first >>>paragraph below, in connection with abstraction, but you need to put it to >>>use at a more basic level. >>>[Bill] I agree that all we know (or know that we know) is mediated by signs, >>>including trees. We never apprehend the existential object we call tree." >> BU: For my part, I'd need some more examples of what you mean by usage in >> sign function. >BB: As Jim was offering his personal take on semiosis, I did the same, with >no concern for Peirce. (I hope if I stay here long enough and read enough, I >may someday be able to represent his views.) By "usage" I mean that a sign is >necessarily an act of using something as something other than what it >empirically is. As with any act, the function is what the instruments of the >act are used to do. >>BU: I think you may be setting the bar too high for what constitutes >>apprehension of an existential object. >BB: "Apprehension" was Jim's term, which I picked up. I'd prefer "perception >of an existential object," which seems to me to better locate the activity >within the perceiver. So I'd probably set the bar even higher than my post >implied. >>BU: If we never can apprehend an existent object, then we never can >>apprehend any existent signs of it, either. >BB: I don't see how that follows. My point only argues that all our >experience of the object is mediated in and through our sensory system, and >therefore we do not experience the object as it existentially is, but as our >sensory system responds to it and in terms our minds can make sense of it. The conception of "sign" is much more general than that of "sensory-system event." "Sign" just means something that conveys information about something. What reason could there be to think that perception is both impossible of the existent source of info and yet still possible of the existent conveyor of info? It seems quite arbitrary. If one makes a general statement that we never perceive existent objects, that applies to them whether they are serving as semiotic objects, or as signs, or as whatever else. One will more thoroughly perceive a thing if one perceives it as both source of its own and as conveyor others' info, and indeed in whatever semiotic role it fills. In particular, why would you think that a sensory-system event can perceive but other concrete objects/events can't? Sensory-system events are, if anything, harder to perceive, since they try to stay "in the background," be like the glass in the window or like the lens, the fluid, or the cornea of the eye. Sensory-system events come into relief when one is struggling a bit with some distortive effect, say in waking up, when one is a bit dizzy, or via the ingestion of alcohol or other drugs which will reveal to the mind, under abnormalized conditions, by the resultant contrast what an amazing job its systems do under normal conditions. It seems no easier and instead rather harder, to perceive sensory-system events from outside, as events in a nervous system, in such a way that one can perceive the 'objective' event in its connections to the experienced distortion as the experienced distortion's "other side." Now, a sensory perception scientist might say, "all we really perceive are sensory-system events." S/he means that it's all mediated through sensory-system events. S/he is concerned with the mechanisms involved, not with what _perceiving_ is. For many expository purposes of that person, the verbal confusion of the medium or channel with the object not only causes little problem, but is actually rather convenient, putting the audience's focus on events which, in order to let other events shine through, try to keep from standing out themselves. In this sense, his/her deviant use of the word "perceive" actually _depends_ on its deviance for its special force, and I remember feeling clever and jazzy (and rightly so) the first time I myself said it back many years ago...well, never mind that. It's definitely an intellectual thing to say, "stop the world, we're all deceived," turning everything upside down or inside out by the flick of a semantic switch. If it's not an actual index, it's very much like one, wrenching the semantics so as to get the audience to wrench its heads to look _at_ something which it usually looks _through_. One breaks through a clotted or hardened habitual linguistic medium by that kind of talk. What's not to like? It just isn't exactly true, is all. The object as it is even in its self-integratedness into an object is subject internally among its parts to the same barriers which you see between the perceiving subject and the perceived object. So how can it be an object itself, at all? Yet it's the natural way. We don't access things in spite of media but instead through them. Something which gives us information which is not necessarily firm enough for us to stand on and count as acquaintance with the info's subject matter, is called a mere sign about the subject matter (the semiotic object) rather than called the semiotic object itself. It's because of that, that it's the sign and not the object, rather than because it is not the whole object revealed inside & out, accessed, furthermore, somehow without intermediation. Sometimes things access us so forcefully and directly -- which is _not_ to say "unmediatedly" -- that it's as if they've seized and incorporated the medium, made it part of themselves, at least for a while. To ask of apprehension that there be no medium between it and the object, is to subject oneself to a conceptual "Big Rip" which ultimately tears every object apart, including those serving also as signs and interpretants. >>BU: We apprehend an existent object as something which tends to withhold much >>of itself from us, some of it actual but hidden beneath surfaces, some of it >>hidden in potency. Some things which are not parts of the object can still be >>signs about the object. Creating or destroying those things does not, per se, >>augment or diminish the object. So they are not parts of the object. Some >>things which _are_ parts or samples of the object, can also be signs about >>the object. Whether the aspect or face of it which is patent to us is the >>object perspectivally viewed or is a sign about the object, is a matter of >>whether we are asking about the greater object a question on the basis of the >>patent aspect as a sign about it. In respect of such question, the patent >>aspect is a sign. "Semiotic object," "sign," etc., are roles in logic and >>inquiry, roles assigned in terms of inquirial relationships arising in the >>study of the given subject matter. > BB: I think I can agree to all of that--I'm not too sure about an "object > withholding itself"--and all that follows: none of it seems to refute my > position that all information is necessarily mediated, and in the human's > case, by the sensory system and the use made of it by the mind. I hope it's clear now that I agree that it's all mediated. That doesn't mean that it's not sometimes direct. Peirce distinguishes between "immediate" and "direct." A lens, for instance, mediates, but one sees directly through the lens and indeed could not see clearly at all but for certain lenses. Best, Ben Udell --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [email protected]
