----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, August 19, 2006 2:21
AM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: The "composite
photograph" metaphor
Joe, Gary, Jim, Charles, Jacob, list,
It's obvious that in _some_ sense or other I disagree with Peirce
about how semiosis is related to experience. However, I think I find
sufficient material in Peirce to make the argument in Peirce's own terms,
especially in Peirce's discussions of collateral experience, where he plainly
says that one needs experience collateral to sign and interpretant of the
object in order to identify the object. And I don't get the idea of finding
the equation or dis-equation of an experience and a sign/interpretant so
confusing that "it literally makes no sense," so confusing that one can't make
sufficient sense of it in order to argue against it in terms of what
experience is, what interpretation is, etc.
If it were true that it is, -- in your words, "a confusion in virtue of
talking about the interpretant as being an 'experience or observation.' In
talking about the sign-object-interpretant relationships we are doing so in
the process of analyzing such things as experience or observation (or
verification) and it literally makes no sense to me put in that way," -- then
Peirce's discussions of collateral experience would make no sense. He's
far too specific in delineating relationships of semiosis to experience for
those delineations to be compatible with that which you say.
Why would Peirce say things like "All that part of the understanding
of the Sign which the Interpreting Mind has needed collateral observation for
is outside the Interpretant. .... It is...the prerequisite for getting any
idea signified by the sign."
Why would Peirce say, "Its Interpretant is all that the Sign conveys:
acquaintance with its Object must be gained by collateral experience"?
Note that he does not say that _collateral_ acquaintance with its
Object must be gained by collateral experience. He is not stating such a
truism. Instead, he says that acquaintance, any acquaintance at all,
must be gained by collateral experience.
Peirce is saying that the _representing_ of the object is never
an _acquainting_ with the object (except, as usual, in the limit
case where the representing sign and its object are the selfsame thing). But
that is just the sort of statement which you say _makes no sense_ to
you. How do you account for that? Do you deny that that's what he is saying?
If so, how do you justify such a denial?
I don't know why it makes no sense to you to speak of denying or
affirming that one's experience of an object is or isn't one's sign of an
object, least of all can I understand why this would be a consequence of
talking about object-sign-interpretant relationships in the process of
analyzing such things as experience or observation. You talk as though
experience were something like the moon or the color green or the letter "C,"
which one would certainly not expect to see treated as basic semiotic elements
on a par with object, sign, and interpretant.
But we have Peirce right above characterizing _all_ signs in terms
of experience and, in particular, distinguishing them -- _all_ of them
-- from acquaintance, observation, experience of the object. How could this
make sense if it doesn't make sense to speak of an object experience as being
a sign of the object or not being a sign of the object? I have only one Peirce
collateral-experience discussion which presents me with any problems for my
views or, more specifically, for my use of his views -- you have all the rest
of his collateral-experience discussions contradicting you. You say,
"The semeiotical terminology is properly used in explication of such notions
as that of experience, observation, verification, etc. and therefore signs and
interpretants cannot except confusedly be equated with such things as
observations or experiences or verifications." I would say that conceptions of
objects, signs, interpretants, and verifications are all of them analytic
tools for analyzing processes of objects, signs, interpretants, and
verifications (and more generally, experiences), and none of this stops us
from clearly dis-equating experiences/verifications from interpretations,
etc.
Or maybe you mean that sometimes one's experience of the object is one's
sign of the object, and sometimes not? I.e., that one only confusedly equates
or confusedly dis-equates them because there's no such general rule? But I
don't understand why anybody would think, that, even if only sometimes,
something serving as _another_ sign of the object in a given context
and situation would be a collateral experience of the object, when experience
of the object will be outside that sign qua
sign-in-that-situation-and-context. It's just a logical contradiction.
In a given situation for a given mind, experience of the object is outside the
sign, interpretant, and sign system. Therefore, in that situation for that
mind, that mind's experience of the object will not be serving as that mind's
sign or interpretant of the object.
Taking up another possible angle -- there is no more "difficulty" about
an object experience serving in a different context as a sign of the object,
than there is about an object serving also as a sign of another object. This
multiplying of roles no more keeps the relationship of experience and signs
from being characterized in general and regular ways than it keeps the
relationship of objects and signs from being characterized in general and
regular ways.
I also find that in your example, you imply (as I've noted) that at least
sometimes an interpretation _is_ a verification involving experience of
the object. But if my sign of an object were on some occasion my experience of
the object, why would I need collateral experience of the object in order, as
Peirce put it, to _gain acquaintance_ with the object? How could it
reasonably be said that my experience of the object is not my gaining some
acquaintance with the object? You also seem to edge away from the idea that
verification is actually a kind of experience of the object; you talk about
observations about patterns of reports and publications, and so forth -- about
signs which claim verifications, do quality control and "gatekeeper's" work on
verification claims and evidence, etc. I don't know why you bring those things
up when the discussion is on what verification is at core, not on how a
semiotician reading such reports and publications in a library would be able
to tell whether they represent solid verification and how they work as means
and signs of acceptance and recognition by the research community.
You have not provided any explanation for Peirce's views on collateral
experience, any way to reconcile them with your view, or what seems your view,
that we shouldn't think of acquaintance or experience with the object as being
either sign or not sign. It's very plain that it is _not sign_ except
in some given different set of semiotic relations, in no more earthquake sense
than a given semiotic object can be and indeed surely is a sign in some other
set of semiotic relations.
In the examples, across his various discussions, he usually talks about
collateral observations and experiences of the object, not collateral signs
and interpretants of the object. It doesn't sound like he means that the core
way to check on a book is to read some other book or books (except when the
first book is _about_ the other book(s)). His theory of inquiry
involves getting into lab and field. When Peirce discusses experience of
the object, he means something qualitatively different from signs of the
object and from experiences of signs of the object. (The clear general
dis-equation.) Signs are what help us go beyond experience such that
experience can more or less follow. Why would Peirce talk about how no index
of an object can be sure of leading you to the object if doesn't make sense to
plainly distinguish between an index which you observe of the object and your
observation of the object? If all that Peirce really meant by experience and
acquintance with the object were that "you've heard of it before," what would
all this business about direct observation, getting into lab and field, etc.,
be about?
When Peirce discusses a case of teridentity in "The Principles of
Phenomenology," at one stage he discusses a man seen twice, as two signs, two
"manifestations" of the man, and says "I can only identify them if I regard
them, not as the _very same_, but as two different manifestations of
the same man. But the idea of a _manifestation_ is the idea of a
sign."
I don't know what this manifestation would be if not a manifestation to
experience, such that the sign is something which one does experience even
when one does not experience the object quite adequately, as in the case of
the man whose identity across manifestations stands in enough question (even
if merely hyperbolic question) for the mind to ponder the man's identity
across manifestations. Even a manifest object, experienced as an object, is
experienced as sign and manifestation of itelf; the mind is regarding the
object in regard to the object, rather than as a sign of something else,
though it is that too. The full moon high in the night compels one's attention
even without its necessarily directing one's attention to some other thing as
the Moon's indexical object, which also happens often enough, as for instance
when one has heard that Venus will appear unusually close to the Moon.
To the extent that sign and semiotic object are not the selfsame thing,
but diverge, the sign is the _manifested_ side or at any rate some
manifestation somewhere, that which one _does experience_ and which
implies something about the object in some respect in which the object is not
manifest and not given to experience -- at least until one checks where the
signs suggest to look.
Your view, as you express it below is not that which follows logically
from your c1 & c2 example, that an experience in its recognitive aspect is
really an interpretation. Instead it's that it's a confusion to look at it one
way or the other such that, as a rule, a verification"is" or "isn't" an
interpretation, and that this has to do with semiotics' being a tool for
analysis of experience. I don't know what to make of that. Presumably
you don't mean that there's no practical difference between an interpretant
and the experience of an interpretant, or between a sign and the experience of
a sign, or between an object and the experience of an object. That would make
the conception of experience no more meaningful to semiotics than a constant
conversion-factor in a formula, and it would imply the denial that there are
objects (and signs and interpretants) which a given mind does not
experience. It would also imply that signs are unneeded since the object
is already the experience of the object. But instead of working like a
constant conversion-factor, some experiences, acquaintances, observations, are
more direct than others. One can also observe oneself observing, and observe
others observing. One can have reflexive experiences.
That semiotic elements should be undefined with respect to experience --
would be a considerable weakness in semiotics and a very great mistake. For
what could be more important to semiosis, more motivating and more
explanatory, than the fact that the mind experiences some things and not
others? What explanation of why we need signs could be given, if they have no
logically determinational relation to experience?
Peirce, perhaps, tried to restrict his conception of collateral
experience to prior experience, down to some way of already "having" an object
about which the sign could convey information. But the restriction just
doesn't work, for the same reason that he speaks of collateral experience of
the object rather than of collateral representations of the object.
The order of being is opposite to the order of knowledge.
Experience of the object varies in directness and firmness, and, if all that
one has are signs of an object itself _in question_, then how much does
one really have? The object which determines and in a sense "explains"
semiosis and experience as the result of the object's determinantly getting
through to the mind, is not the experience which establishes the object. And
the experience which establishes and firmly introduces an object as a suitable
object for semiosis, is not so different in kind from the experiences which
confirm and solidify those semiotic culminations which we call meanings and
interpretants.
Again and again, his examples burst the bounds of collateral
acquaintance's being merely about "already having an object for the sign" such
that having heard about the object would be always good enough. The two
friends by the sea? -- the listener's object becomes "a patch of sea" which
the listener actually sees -- then he accepts his friend's assertion of a boat
as his (the listener's) own acquaintance with the unseen boat (such is the
listener's recognition of his friend's discernment and experience) about which
the friend's assertions about its carrying passengers stand for the listener
as a sign. But the listener could just as well have regarded the boat-idea as
merely part of his friend's claim _about_ the familiar visible sea on
which the friend sees no boat. Then he would regard himself as much better
acquainted with the _idea_ of the boat's being out there that day, than
with a _fact_ of the actual boat's presence; and howsoever he regards
himself, in fact he is rather better acquainted with the idea than with the
actual boat itself. The word "Soleil"? The teacher defines it, _then_
starts using it in example sentences in order to provide collateral experience
of it, and that is a typical sequence in learning and teaching.
We think too often of objects already well established. The conceptions
of sign, object, even of interpretation and verification, are not
semioticians' or philosophers' conceptions introduced as novelties into the
world, but instead are a systematization of common ideas reflecting realities
of inferential processes. (I'm still trying to understand what you could mean
by saying that, because conceptions of signs and interpretants are used to
analyze experience, signs and interpretants can't be said not to be
experiences themselves in those relations in which they are a mind's signs and
interpretants.) A mind's particular concern with things as signs is in regard
to objects which stand in significant question as to their existence &/or
their character and conditions. People don't say "how do you interpret the
signs in that person?," instead they say "how do you read that person?" The
ideas are there and are part of the process.
The distinction between, on one hand, an interpretation and action based
on it, and, on the other hand, a confirmation and action based on it, is a
common idea and part of everyday life. It would be one thing to reject it,
argue against it, claim that it involves confusion and confoundment. But,
again, I don't get the idea of finding it so confusing that "it literally
makes no sense," so confusing that one can't make sufficient sense of it in
order to argue against it in terms of what experience is, what interpretation
is, etc.
Best, Ben
Ben says:
We've covered pretty similar ground before. You're saying that the
interpretant is not an interpretation but (1) an experience or observation of
the sign S1 in S1's representing and corresponding to the object, and also (2)
an experience or observation of the object itself. To the contrary, the
interpretant is a sign which _represents_ the sign S1 in S1's representation
of the object, and is a sign which separately _represents_ the object. Below,
I removed a ">" sign or two which I must have originally inserted by
mistake.
REPLY:
JR: Ben, your supposed correction of what I said is just another way of
saying what I said. The interpretant is defined as being a
representation (sign) of the sign as a sign of the object, and also as being a
representation (sign) of the object independent of that. Thus in
representing it diagrammatically one would show that by a referential arrow
running from the interpretant to the sign AS sign, i.e. to the referential
relation of the sign to the object, and by another referential arrow running
from the interpretant to the object, which shows that the interpretant is also
a sign of the object of the sign quite independently of its reference to the
sign.
I would never say what you impute to me in the first paragraph as what
needs to be corrected because it seems to me to be a confusion in virtue of
talking about the interpretant as being an "experience or observation". In
talking about the sign-object-interpretant relationships we are doing so in
the process of analyzing such things as experience or observation (or
verification) and it literally makes no sense to me put in that way. In
fact, that is the confusion that I see in much of what you have been saying in
this connection. The semeiotical terminology is properly used in
explication of such notions as that of experience, observation, verification,
etc. and therefore signs and interpretants cannot except confusedly be equated
with such things as observations or experiences or verifications. That
is the critical point I have been wanting to make of your thinking on this
particular topic, which surprises me because of the exactitude you so often
show in talking about Peirce's ideas. I attribute this to a mistaken
attempt to compare Peircean conceptions to yours while thinking in terms
appropriate rather to your own quite different kinds of categories. I
think you may have some valid points to make as regards what your own theory
is, but it is not the same kind of theory. There are, I think, different
conceptions of what categories are. For example, I don't think C. I.
Lewis's notion of categories is comparable to Peirce's, but I note what may be
confusions of that sort in some of the stuff said in some recent stuff on
Lewis in the Transactions.
Joe Ransdell
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