[peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" metaphor

[Charles F Rudder]

Ben, list,   Ben,   With this post which exhausts all I am incluned to say in this context, I too will probably "go quiet."   On Sat, 26 Aug 2006 18:58:50 -0400 "Benjamin Udell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: Charles, list,   I guess it's hard for me to let any remarks about my ideas go by without response, but I still am inclined, as I've put it, to "go quiet."   Charles wrote, > .... [I would say that Ben’s “Recognition” is included in (not outside) the Interpretant as an element of the Interpreter’s contribution to its determination.] ....   The recognition or recognizant, in the core narrow sense, is _defined_ as object-experience (of the acquaintance kind) formed collaterally to sign and interpretant in respect of the object; the recognizant is defined as something which, Peirce (usually) says, is not gotten from the sign and is outside the interpretant. So you're simply contradicting the definition.     I have said nothing that I see as contrary to what Peirce says about the role of collateral experience in sign processes.  In the situation where you saw smoke and went looking for a fire, seeing smoke functioned as a sign that you took as representing something other than smoke at at least two levels, a general and a singular.  Before you found and actually saw the fire, you interpreted seeing smoke (the sign itself, a sinsign, distinguishable from its objects and interpretants) according to a general rule (a legisign), something like, “Wherever there is smoke there is fire.” and according to a “singularization” of the rule something like, “With the smoke I presently see there is presently a fire.”  As Peirce points out, smoke would be uninterpretable as a sign of fire apart from your prior acquaintance with fire (and smoke also for that matter), but seeing smoke prompting you to look for fire and a particular fire was “mediated” by rules with which you were also already acquainted and apart from which you would not have “known” to look for fire.  I agree that a singular instance of seeing smoke and interpreting seeing smoke as a sign of fire occurs by means of collateral experience that would include “recognizing” smoke as smoke and not a cloud of steam or dust, fire as fire, etc. in which the interpretant of seeing smoke in its capacity as a singular sign played no part—outside, as you say, the interpretant.  But the collateral experience would also include having learned to act and acting as if a rule is true apart from which smoke, insofar as it is suited to function as a sign, could not be interpreted as a sign.  What I have been trying to say is that acts of interpretation which include recognition are semiosical, and that recognizing is an interpretant or included in interpretants of a sign or signs that are collateral to the interpretant of any particular sign.   Beyond the primitive perceptual event “seeing” a virtually meaningless “something,” any meaning that accrues to seeing something by means of which it is recognizably (a classification) and recognizable as (a singularization of a clsssification) smoke rather than steam (which for a young child it might not) is semiosical.  Apart from acting as if rules that are linguistic and/or embedded in habits are in some sense true or valid, neither you nor I nor anyone else seeing smoke would look for fire, and no particular instance of seeing smoke, following it to its source, and, sure enough, seeing fire, can “verify” that a rule of thumb like, “Wherever there is smoke there is fire.” is true.  What if you had been unable to find a fire before the smoke disappeared?  Would you have then concluded that your seeing smoke was an illusion of some sort?  Would you have concluded that the rule of thumb, “Wherever there is smoke there is fire.” is false?   I believe that you may be conflating Peirce’s distinction between signs and replicas of signs by criticizing his theory of signs in terms of experience and conduct mediated by signs together with sign replicas about which Peirce has relatively little to say.  I also believe that you are ignoring Peirce’s critique and rejection of the possibility of universal doubt—as if doubting were as easy as lying—in his discussions of the relation between doubt and belief.  In short, it appears to me that you are interpreting Peirce “nominalistically.”   Charles --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com