Bernard, list,
>[Bernard] A few precisions which my initial text had overlooked, all along
>your comments.
>>>>[Joe] The only thing that presently interests me about Ben's thesis about
>>>>verification concerns it as a claim made about taking it into account in
>>>>the basic category theory. When you broaden it to being about experimenal
>>>>procedure instead that broadens it quite beyond my concern.
>>>[Bernard] OK. I will try to answer Ben on the categorial aspect of the
>>>matter further. However my point was precisely that in order to don't throw
>>>too roughly verification into a category of its own, it is necessary to put
>>>it into its proper context. This context is I think the scientific method
>>>and in the same way as nobody would make of -say- the effects of a
>>>conception a category of its own, the same goes for verification. But there
>>>is something in Ben's argumentation that deserves interest, namely the role
>>>of recognition and experience in the flow of living signs as well as their
>>>involvement in the basic theory of signs. In short, I think that if the
>>>solution of the collateral experience does not consist in the invention of a
>>>new category, yet the problem remains.
>>>[Bernard] In a sense your response below (see after my message) shows that
>>>either you consider the problem as being concerned by the communication
>>>theory properties of scientific exchanges or you consider it as not being a
>>>problem at all.
>>>[Bernard] I strongly agree with you on the fundamental role of trust in
>>>recognition (and I read trust as Firstness: something which is as it is
>>>without needing anything else). The reason is that since "all evolution of
>>>thought is dialogical" a precondition for the dialogue can take place is
>>>trust. I often muse over the following passage from Peirce, which I think
>>>says just the same concerning the dialogue of our reason with the universe:
>>>[Bernard quoting Peirce] " Our Reason is akin to the Reason that governs the
>>>universe, we must assume that or despair of finding out anything. Now
>>>despair is always illogical, and we are warranted in thinking so, since
>>>otherwise all reasoning will be in vain" (NEM, Vol 3). In other words we can
>>>trust a familiarity, affinity of our reason with the world, and this trust
>>>is logical Peirce adds. The same goes for argumentation.
>>>[Bernard] Now the fact that the dialogue is supported by trust, the fact
>>>that as you are saying there is a normal presumption of credibility in human
>>>communication, does not give an account of the ways in which the dialogue
>>>itself develops: it is just a prerequisite for the dialogue to take place.
>>>Collateral experience is a dialogue between two signs: a sign of an object
>>>for an interpretant on the one side and another sign (which is nothing but
>>>the previous interpretant) of the SAME object on the other side. I say
>>>"another sign" because experience, as thought, is in signs
>>[Ben] Your scenario implies that a mind gets object-acquaintance from a sign
>>(the previous interpretant) to that same mind about the object. It's okay for
>>you to disagree with Peirce on that issue, but you should come out and say
>>so. (Do you, in fact, agree or disagree with Peirce about it?). However, as
>>far as I can tell, you're simply trying to use hidden semiotic reference
>>frame shifts as a legitimate basis for reasoning. You're saying, that
>>experience is mediated by signs, ergo a mind X's experience of an object is
>>mind X's sign of the object. But it's only for another mind Y, or for the
>>same mind X qua other mind Y, that the experience of the object may be merely
>>a sign of the object. Mind X's experience of the object is mind Y's sign of
>>the object. That happens often enough. It doesn't mean, willy-nilly and in a
>>blur of illation symbols, that mind X's experience of the object is mind X's
>>sign of the object.
>[Bernard] I don't know if Peirce saw the matter as I see it myself but I have
>not found in the sources something that contradicts my own idea of that.
>Nevertheless, I try to be more precise because it seems that you did not
>understand my point. The keypoint is that we are working here with a
>particular level of semiotics, the level of the evolution of signs in actu or
>semiosis. Thus the "dynamic" aspect of the relationship between successive
>actualized signs of the same object is essential. And I see the question of
>collateral experience of the object as another way of saying that you can't
>determine the identity of a moving body (the actual sign of some object) at
>the instant t without knowing its previous trajectory. To put it by means of a
>mathematical image, collateral experience can be figured by the partial
>integral of a curve to which the actual sign comes to complete with a "delta"
>(hence the phrasing "perhaps a much more developped sign" for the
>interpretant). It is true that to my knowledge Peirce does not say exactly so
>but the schema of integral and differential calculus is everywhere in his work
>when he is speaking of evolution. This view permits also to make room for two
>important topics that are not very elaborated in the work of Peirce. I am
>thinking to the role of memory which evidently is required in order for
>collateral experience to be active. I am thinking too of the social tenets of
>semiotics: collateral experience is not necessarily individual experience of a
>singular object. I see the whole knowledge written in books, conveyed by
>customs, myths and so on, as collateral experience of objects too. I think
>that this is a way to clarify the question you are posing: individual minds as
>well as individual experiences depend in part on social ones in my opinion.
I also think that individual minds and experiences depend on social ones, and
I've discussed it at various lengths, many times.
What you've said doesn't seem very clear to me. I guess you mean that one can
infer the presence of collateral experience from the trajectory of an
interpretant. This, of course, won't be an interpretant in a semiosis all out
in the open which the semiotician is actually examining. Instead, some sort of
veil has been placed over it and the semiotician surmises from its outlines
that there's been some collateral experience going on in there and the
semiotician obtains some measure for it from the trajectory. So your example
suggests that collateral experience exerts some semiotically determinational
influence on semiosis, like what I've been saying. Or maybe it suggests that
semiosis exerts its semiotically determinational influence on collateral
experience, like what I've been saying. Or maybe both, as I've been saying.
Indeed, one wonders why the recognition formed out of such experience should
not be considered part of the semiosis. One thing is for sure: the
semiotician's putting a veil on it doesn't mean it's not there doing its
semiotically determinational thing -- your example shows that it's involved. In
fact it means that the semiotician needs very much to remove that veil and map
the semiotically determination process. I mean, imagine if some early nuclear
scientist said, "we've proven that there's something besides protons in the
nucleus by studying just the proton trajectories. Ergo we don't need to include
any non-protons in our model of the nucleus -- just check out the proton
trajectories instead." Or: "The real reason that Pluto is not a planet is that
Pluto can be regarded simply as perturbances in the orbit of Neptune." Such
uses of Occam's Razor might impress the demon barber of Fleet Street.
The subject of integration and differentiation is certainly interesting in
respect to semiosis because those two operations are famously each other's
inverses. Now, if the given interpretant is like a curve resulting from a
differentiation, and the inverse direction is integration, then integration
should help us go back toward the pre-interpretant signs which could have led
to it, because that's what we get when moving in the opposite semiotic
direction from the interpretant. And in fact in doing so we get into where math
is concerned with counting, enumeration, measure, much like the formation of
signs intended more as occasions for interpretation than as culminations and
interpretants.
Also, when one looks for the coordinates of a point where a curve has a given
slope, this amounts to integration at a point, and one does this regarding
points of special interest on the curve -- where the curve is horizontal
(extrema), or where the curve intersects itself (i.e. a point where the slope
has as-if two distinct values), etc., and generally the topic is extremization,
which means that we're in the realm of forces, and sources of determination,
going shortest distances, etc. Thus this gets us to the semiotic object as the
determiner, the source, the _agens_, in the analogy.
The collaterally based recognition, in the analogy, will be like
differentiation at a point, since it's a singularization in that respect in
which the interpretant or the derivative function is a differentiation. So
there we can think of theory of limits, the "metaphysics" of analysis, ordering
of reals, etc. This is also the inverse of finding the point where a curve has
a given slope.
Most striking of all, is that:
- Extremization is especially involved in _many-to-many_ relationships
("equations" that aren't equalities).
- Integration involves _one-to-many_ relationships including especially the
antiderivative.
- Differentiation of a function involves many-to-one relationships, in fact
that's what differentation itself generally is.
- Limits in the context of ordered sets are especially involved with one-to-one
relationships.
Now right away one sees the one-to-one correlations between the first two and
optimization and probability respectively.
Deductive mathematical theory of information is usually not concerned with
continuous information (which as far as I know is an idea for which real-world
application hasn't been found but maybe I'm wrong), but it involves major
application of group theory, theory of calculation, which is about many-to-one
relationships the inverse of many of those studied in fields like enumerative
combinatorics. Actually information theory independently developed
group-theoretical principles and only later was it shown that the laws of
information are equivalent to some group-theoretical principles. I think that
this was in the late 1990s, but I can't find it on the 'Net anymore and my old
hard drive with the original references is ruined.
Deductive logic, too, seems generally discrete and downright finitistic, but
the most important pure-math applications in it are things like the
order-theoretic math-inductive proof of the validity of deduction (not that I'm
familiar with the proof) and lattices (which are 'pure' math as far as I know
and not themselves part of deductive logic).
For the time being, the above is not bad at all. Now look at the bigger picture
of correlations (not equations) emerging:
objectification ~ many-to-many ~ extremization, graph theory ~ optimization ~
inverse-extremizational processes (originative) ~ forces
representation ~ one-to-many ~ integration, measure, counting ~ probability ~
stochastic processes (scrambling) ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ matter
interpretation ~ many-to-one ~ differentiation, groups of ops ~ information ~ ~
cybernetic processes (unscrambling) ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ life
recognition ~ ~ one-to-one ~ ~ limits, order ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ logic ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
inference processes (establishing) ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ intelligent life.
Alternatives among many-to-many, one-to-many, etc. -- you can't get harder-core
than that.
>>>[Bernard] [To Ben's attention: you are probably familiar with second order
>>>cybernetics as stated by von Foerster that made a special status for the
>>>system's observer. I believed this theory for a long time but one of the
>>>main lessons I have learned from Peirce is that there is no such special
>>>thing as the observer or the recognizant: they just are signs like other
>>>signs].
>>[Ben] Where in Peirce did you learn that there is no such special thing as
>>the observer, the recognizant, the observation, the object-experience
>>collateral to sign and interpretant in respect of the object, etc.?
>[Bernard] By "special" I intended to say a "particular status" : observer,
>recognizant, "experiencer", thinking beings, etc, all are signs. This is a
>consequence of the formula according to which "all thought is in signs". There
>is a kind of washing brain to do when we encounter percian semiotics : signs
>are not in front of us , waiting for us to catch them. On the contrary we are
>locked up in signs because we are signs too. I used to think the matter of
>collateral experience in these terms: what happens when two signs of the same
>object follow one another?
>>[Ben] It would mean that he wrote a very late passage wherein he renounces
>>most of his previous remarks on collateral experience/observation, and argues
>>for some form of the radical revision of his conception of signs which such a
>>renunciation would entail. How would he revise his ideas about mathematical
>>diagrams and the importance of their observability and experimentability? One
>>can only wonder.
>[Bernard] I don't know what you are refering too. I would be surprised that
>Peirce renounced to something on collateral experience. As far as I understand
>the subject he did not develop this aspect of his sign theory, he just
>mentioned it in passing, not because it was not important but because it was
>not a priority in his agenda. This is an interpretation of mine for what it is
>worth.
What I'm saying is that your idea that the observer, the observation, etc., are
"nothing special" makes nonsense of most of what Peirce said about collateral
experience and that, in order for you to be right that this was Peirce's view,
he would have had to renounce most of what he said about collateral experience,
and nobody has found him doing that, and that furthermore, insofar as the
non-acquaintiveness of signs and interpretants about their objects can be
related to fairly deep considerations about the nature and purpose of signs,
such a "nothing-special-about-observation" view by Peirce would tend to entail
a radically different underlying picture of signs themselves, especially as
regards a sign's being (except in the limit case) other than the object yet
still almost the object. Anyway, this "sign, sign, everything's a sign" talk
keeps ending up dissolving logic into a wash of making things be whatever we
want them to be. It involves hidden shifts of the frame of semiotic interest
and reference, simply not keeping track of what mind has the sign or what mind
is in the sign, or whatever -- and it certainly won't matter what is "in" what,
thoughts in signs or signs in thoughts, if the semiotician won't keep track of
the correlates. I addressed this at length -- well, many times, but most
recently in my recentest post to Jim. You'll just end up sacrificing the
conception of the semiotic object. Come to think of it, it was you, a year or
two or more ago, who asked me about the _correlates_ of the "recognizant" or
"validant" or whatever I was calling it then. Indeed I had been somewhat vague
about how the recognition related to object, sign, and interpretant, certainly
vaguer than I am now.
>>>[Bernard] So we have two triads both under an actualized form. Starting from
>>>this several directions are possible:
>>>[Bernard] - stating that we have two communicating triads, which tends to
>>>make the problem fit into an independant theory of communication
>>>(independant from sign theory). It seems to be the way that Joe is
>>>suggesting but it seems to me that it lets open the question of how two
>>>signs can have the SAME object in common. Peirce did not address directly
>>>this question as far as I know but I think that he considered that this
>>>sameness was part of the sign definition (straight away from the New-List),
>>>so it is a part consubstantial with the logical doctrine of signs and not a
>>>part of an independant communication theory.
>>>[Bernard] -stating that two triads, it is one in surplus, and thus that's
>>>not the right amount. This is how I understand Ben's proposal of a special
>>>figure with fourthness. the weakness of making the sign's theory within its
>>>triadic character some provisional construct. Ben throws it on the fire.
>>>[Bernard] -sure I would prefer a third way :-) two triads can enter within
>>>another triad the role of which would be to unify the critical theory of
>>>signs with the rhetorical or methodeutical one. Peirce did not achieve that
>>>but it is not a reason for trying something like that.
>>[Ben] What you've done is contradict Peirce on collateral experience in order
>>to construct these two triangles in dialog with each other, and _still_ you
>>couldn't account for the logically determinational relationship which I've
>>been discussing.
>[Bernard] I don't understand what you are writing here....
I had said that "your scenario implies that a mind gets object-acquaintance
from a sign (the previous interpretant) to that same mind about the object." So
you contradicted Peirce in order to get those two triangles.
>>[Ben] I suspect that in various ways you and Joe are both trying to reach
>>through the conception of trust to things like in Peirce's example where a
>>person X trusts some of his friend's representation about a boat enough to
>>count it as his own (person X's) acquaintanceship with the the boat and
>>counts the rest of it as a representation about that boat. I've addressed
>>this question about the slack which allows learnability about the distinction
>>between interpretation and verification. I don't know where you could go with
>>this except to a rephrasing which would require the rewriting of various
>>passages in Peirce without changing the basic structure of the issue. You'd
>>end up crossing out "experience" and similar words where they appear and
>>replacing them with "really trusted representation," not omitting those
>>passages where Peirce so carefully distinguishes between even a forceful
>>index of the object and one's acquaintanceship with the object. I think it
>>would prove itself to be mostly a playing with words, but still an illuminant
>>playing. Supposing that you do it --
>>[Ben] It couldn't be done without recognizing that the idea of a basic trust
>>as a kind of human default setting is quite like the idea of a core of
>>experiences, _in terms of the question of how one extends them_ -- signs and
>>interpretants which are not of the "really trusted" variety lead beyond the
>>really trusted, and then semiosis goes and checks in terms of representations
>>which it can "really trust." (In fact one often does check in terms of things
>>which one regards as signs but still as trusted signs.) This in turn leads to
>>an idea of that which has been checked and holds up, and an idea of the
>>checked, tested, verified, which is not merely that of that which is "really
>>trusted," because it differs in structure and in logical quantity in a
>>respect which I've discussed in the past. Then looking back over the process
>>one sees that the verificational or "trust-ificational" structures run back
>>far and deep. One also notices that the automatic trust is itself an aspect
>>of the mind's character and thus amounts to a quasi-recognition reached not
>>by the mind itself but by the mind or quasimind of that process which
>>produced it, a process presumably evolutionary, not insofar as it must be
>>biological, since of course in principle it could be technological, but
>>insofar as advanced inference systems, presumably, very seldom just pop out
>>of the void or just suddenly assemble themselves from their components.
>>[Ben] Now, your statments that "It seems to me that it has in common with the
>>previous position the weakness of making the sign's theory with its triadic
>>character some provisional construct. Ben throws it on the fire." are a
>>roundabout way of saying that my position has the weakness of disagreeing
>>with Peirce. However, where you go very wrong is in saying that I "throw it
>>on the fire." It may feel to you like that's what you would be doing if you
>>thought like I do, but that's emotionalism. In fact, "throwing it on the
>>fire" would mean switching to dyadic semiology or worse. To the contrary, I
>>argue for the retention of the object-sign-interpretant structure and for the
>>_recognition_ that -- via the characterization of the interpretant and via
>>the Pragmatic Maxim and via the characterizations of sign and semiotic object
>>dependently on the characterization of the interpretant --the
>>object-sign-interpretant structure already is based, thoughout itself, on the
>>appeal to a fourth element, practically relevant experience which would tend
>>to support or overturn interpretant and sign with respect to the obect.
>[Bernard] This is important Ben. Because if you maintain the S-O-I structure
>as Peirce conceived it, it seems to me that it will be impossible to add a
>fourth element while maintaining its meaning (particularly the sign definition)
Since I've already made a number of arguments that it's not only possible, but
already there in pragmaticism and semiotics but suppressed in the triad
conception itself, I take it that you're begging off of offering an argument in
reply.
>>[Ben] It still remains unclear to me what you and Joe mean by "category
>>theory." Normally I would take that to mean theory about, first of all, the
>>cenopythagorean categories 1stness, 2ndness, 3rdness. But both of you seem to
>>be talking only about the object-sign-interpretant triad. This matters
>>because it is not clear whether you, and whether Joe, currently hold that
>>there is a one-to-one correlation between the cenopythagorean categories and
>>the basic semiotic elements, and whether either of you currently has a
>>definite view on the question at all.
>[Bernard] The phrasing category theory is perhaps not the best. Because it is
>not properly speaking a "theory". It is much more (to my sense) a founding
>principle grounded on an analysis and a revision of the kantian categories the
>justification of which relies on a basic assymetry in our capacities to think:
>the rules of prescission. In a sense the categories function as the basic
>axiom of the whole percian logic (my understanding one more time). As such the
>categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness not only rule S-O-I in this
>order but I think that they also rule grammar, critical logic and rhetorics in
>this order.This is this latter view that your Fourthness tends to dismiss:
>passing from the logical characters of the sign to its actual manifestations
>needs, according to your arguments, a change in the axiom. I think that it is
>an unnecessary luxury
Well, it certainly will be hard to convince people for whom it is a well
established axiom. I was a categorial 4-chotomist before I ever read Peirce,
and would be just as happy to argue at entirely a category-theory level -- I
don't mean just suddenly start up now after all this work on semiotic issues,
but you know what I mean. Actually, I've argued at a category-theory level a
number of times now during the past year. Yet the semiotic level interests me
not only because I consider the collaterally based recognition a particularly
strong issue, but also because it involves an issue which I earlier hadn't
expected to find in Peirce -- Peirce, to his great credit, regards minds as
looking critically at signs -- the semiology and semiotics which I'd read years
earlier tended to portray symbols as influencing masses of perfectly uncritical
minds, and that was an intellectual pet peeve of mine. People don't always
interpret signs well, and they fall into stereotypical interpretations, and
sometimes get badly fooled -- but -- the idea that they look at signs
uncritically is just ridiculous. The people whom I know in everyday life and
among whom I live are as driven a bunch of verification hounds as you could
meet. It's as if the energy which scientists put into the verification aspects
of their work, ordinary people put it into their personal lives. Well, Wyndham
Lewis once said that the art which artists put into their work, ordinary people
put into their loves and have little left over for "real art." Then to find
that Peirce had not actually built the verificational relation into the triad
-- well, it's not only about "fours" for me, this is an issue about which I
cared even before I started trying to classify by threes, then fours, then
sixes, even a bit of fives, till I found fours working rather well.
Best, Ben Udell
http://tetrast.blogspot.com/
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