[peirce-l] Re: The roots of speech-act theory in the New List

[Benjamin Udell]

Jim, list,   >[Jim Wilgoose] It is a little difficult to assess matters since I have been focusing on the NLC and you are looking more broadly at the corpus. You say you do it differently. Nevertheless, I will try to locate a problem area.    >[Jim] You say,   >>[Ben] The disparity of Peirce's approaches to (1) attribution and accident and (2) identity/distinction and substances (substantial things), is a serious flaw, and his approach to attribution and accident is better than his other approach.   >[Jim] In what way is there a flaw? In the NLC, a "pure species of abstraction" plays a necessary role in cognition.  Peirce's theory (in many ways a continuation of Aristotelian and Medieval psychology) commits to this abstraction, without which assertions are inexplicable. Peirce says it is discriminated and treated independently. In other words, the question is not whether blackness is in the stove essentially or accidentally but only what is required for assertion or the "applicability of the predicate to the subject." Are you using the term "accident" in the classical metaphysical sense or are you reflecting on the passage where Peirce says that "intermediate conceptions may be termed accidents" or neither?   I'm using "accident" in pretty much the sense in which I find it in Peirce. Peirce seldom mentions the conception of accident; basically, Peirce says the three categories 1stness, 2ndness, and 3rdness, can be termed "accidents" and thereafter we don't hear much about "substance-accident" issues. I'm not strong enough on Aristotlean or Scholastic philosophy to be able to say whether Peirce was departing from any tradition in flatly calling qualities "accidents." Of course, his definition of "quality" is not quite Aristotle's.   Anyway, the question is not about the essentialness or accidentalness of the blackness's being in the stove. The question is about _whether_ the blackness is or isn't in the stove.  It's not even about the ground per se or about that word "in." The question is WHETHER the stove is black -- yes, no, novelly, probably, optimally, if & only if..., etc. What is required for assertion or proposition or judging or even conceiving the situation is that the mind can apprehend whether the stove is, isn't, may be, might be, is 57%-probably, is if-&-only-if-it's-Thursday, would feasibly be, would most simply be, is, oddly enough, etc., etc., etc., black.   A mind which cannot conceive, or can only weakly conceive, of alternatives to the actuality with which it is presented, is no longer a mind, or is a weak or weakened mind. In people, it bespeaks brain damage. _Meaning and implication are in terms of such alternatives._  For instance, consider " '(p --> q)' == '((~p) v q)' == '~(p & ~q)' " and, indeed, consider it both in its propositional-logic aspect and in its 2nd-order aspect.   In Scholastic terms, I'm using "whetherhood" and "attribution-relation" in a sense similar to that ascribed to Avicenna's conception of _anitas_ which is a Latin translation of an Arabic term. The Latin word _anitas_ was coined by the translator from the common Latin _an_ which means "whether" and is used in the formation of indirect questions like "You know whether she is here." (It's quite English-like; neither "whether" nor _an_ is an adaptation of a conditional-formative "if"-word; _an_ also has a prefixive sense of "either" as in "ancipital" = either-headed in the sense of a two-edged sword (having two opposite edges or angles), and is also related to "ambi-")  However I see a lot more in "whetherhood" than the Scholastics seem to have seen. They were basically thinking of that which is represented by that which in logic is traditionally called "logical quality" (positive, negative). I don't see any of this as pertaining directly to whether the sentence is assertoric, acknowledgemental, deliberative, imperative, inquisitive, declarative, etc.   What Peirce says about attribution is, so far as I know, in terms of the predication of predicates of subjects, which is the interpretant's task. I'm not aware that Peirce in some passage actually says that this refers to the copula uniting substance with accident. So I've been left with the impression that, for Peirce, attribution is a representational relation and, in particular, an interpretive relation. So what we actually get is this:   1. quality |> 3. representation (includes attribution; imputation is a kind of attribution) 2. reaction/resistance (includes identifications/distinctions and the identicals/distincts)   You might ask, aren't the "identical/distincts" substances or hypostatic abstractions? But Peirce goes so quiet in such regards about substance that it was only recently through Joe's finding and transcribing Peirce's partial rewriting of the NLC in MS 403 (1893), "The Categories",  (see http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/ms403/ms403.pdf  or both http://www.mail-archive.com/peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu/msg01183.html (Ransdell to peirce-l July 20, 2006) and (for a correction) http://www.mail-archive.com/peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu/msg01187.html (Ransdell to peirce-l July 21, 2006)) that it becomes clear that Peirce retained (or at least strongly considered retaining -- Peirce didn't have it published) the categories of Being and Substance.   Now, I've tried so far to clarify issues of attribution, "whetherhood," etc., and how this is not just a question of whether the reference-to-the-ground is predicated as accidental or essential of a subject. But as to what is wrong with the way Peirce did it, and how it's disparate to do it one way with attribution and accident, and the other way with identification/distinction and the identicals & distincts, and why the better way is not to conflate the given pair, I'm not sure how to reply to you unless you pick apart the things which I've already said (in my Sept. 5 2006 to peirce-l, which didn't make it into mail-archive.com but is at gmane, http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/1373 ), possibly in light of what I've said about attribution or "whetherhood" above, if that's helped clarify something for you.   Appended below is more stuff that I wrote for this post but which doesn't seem to fit anywhere in particular but still seems somehow relevant.   Best, Ben Udell http://tetrast.blogspot.com/   APPENDIX.   I will say that I never saw an ounce of sense in the old Scholastic view that one got a judgment simply by combining concepts. "Brown horse" can be taken as a compound term. In some languages it's a sentence, but I take it that something contextual or tonal is added, something that conveys that one is expressing the judgment that some horse is brown, rather than expressing the composite conception of a brown horse. I used to think that the "there is" was the something extra, until I realized that even it could be represented as a conception one way or another, e.g. "[ExHx]y". Still that which is expressed by the existence functor and its transformations comes close to being that something extra. In normal speech, it does convey that something extra, so maybe what logic does is somehow bracket it, weaken it to merely proposition-strength force. Well, it shows us that the power is not just in the form and that the form should not be mistaken for the something extra which it represents. What really makes the difference is the kind of commitment made by the speaker in regard to the proposition and the credibility which the form receives through the speaker's living up to the commitment.   In discussing "whetherhood," I'm talking about whatever one might use to "modify" the copula along the lines of "positive" and "negative," i.e., "probably," "oddly," "if & only if...," etc. I tend to think of it as not being the same sort of thing as is involved in the "very" and "slightly" of "very red," "slightly red," etc., though maybe I'm being too narrow on the question. In terms of assertion, etc., having already said that there are really two kinds of copula and that both are needed, a third thing seems to be the copula as locus of representation of "mood" -- assertoric, acknowledgemental, deliberative, imperative, inquisitive, declarative.  What those moods really do is express the speaker's attitude, disposition to act, etc. They do link the content of the proposition with the speaker and the speaker's world. They are what take us from that abstracted form which is the proposition, to the "full-blooded" sentence. They are speaker-attitudes which the speaker represents himself/herself as having as _source_ of the sentence and in a sense as its semiotic object. (This is another reason why I say that the recognizant is a "second" object just as the interpretant is a "second" sign, and that semiosis produces objects along the way just as it produces signs.) The speaker gives the sentence's content some status in terms of not just of "true" in the sense of "positive" versus "negative," but in the sense of the content's _status in terms of legitimacy_ such that the speaker is disposed, not disposed, etc. to act on it -- to honor it.   "Accident" seems seems broader than "property," at least if "far from the noisy street" is an accident but not a property. Basically I take primary substance(s) as e.g. "this man," "this horse," this x or these xyz...w concrete singular object(s) _among still more_, i.e., such that their logical quantity is that of some singular(s) which isn't or aren't the universe; and I take primary accident as that which describes it (or them)and which, in its own logical quantity, is general as opposed to  singular but less general than the (mathematical-style) universal, i.e. special as opposed to universal, so I sometimes call it "general-cum-special."   Now, my being other than somebody else is not an accident/modification of me or of the other person or of me and the other person, much less is it the 'whetherhood' or attribution-relation of some accident/modification of me or of the other person or of me and the other person. "Two" is not "three" but anything can be one of two, one of three, etc.; still, two are not three, and, thereby, and through such imaginative 'instrumentation' as set theory, the world's variegation can in a sense be reproduced at the level of 'universals.'   Now, while I speak of modal realism as leading to greater attention to the copula in its attribution-related variations, I'm not at all convinced that modal realism is required for it. One can figure attributions, probabilities, feasibilities, etc., in terms of universe(s) or total population(s) and their parameters and structures, and in fact extensional definitions in terms of frequency and the like are common and often preferred. Yet this in turn can lead back into weirdness in terms of attempted big pictures. Those universes, embodying individually and collectively various _structures of alternatives_, are also the structures of the quantum branching in the Many Worlds Interpretation (as I've gleaned it to be, at least) of quantum mechanics. Anyway, the universe of objects is the logical quantity which is associable with attribution, and that is why I was so careful to distinguish the singulars "this man, this horse" as being taken as not constituting a universe -- they're singular _and_ not (collectively) universal. --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com