[peirce-l] MS 339.663f transcription on-line
I just now added the transcription of the 1909 definition of a sign in the Logic Notebook -- pages MS 339.663f -- to the copies of the MS pages http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/rsources/mspages/ms339d-663f.pdf It reads better than the version I posted to the list a couple of days ago because the pdf format can exactly duplicate Word format in a way that HTML format cannot, and that enabled me to show the cross-outs as actually crossed out though still legible. Also, this on-line version is more complete, as I transcribed material that I had omitted in the version posted for the reason I gave in that post, namely, because the additional material primarily concerns the question of whether one can know that one knows something (which is something that arises in the context of fallibilism), rather than the topic I was primarily concerned with when I posted it, namely, the conception of a sign as a substitute or surrogate for the object. Joe Ransdell [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.10.3/395 - Release Date: 7/21/2006 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] URL for Notes on Logic (MS 171)
Ben: The complete text from which that passage you were concerned with was taken is already available on-line in transcribed form at the PEP website (it was published in Writings 2): http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/v2/w2/w2_42/v2_42.htm There is a link to it from Arisbe, too. Joe -- Internal Virus Database is out-of-date. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.10.3/395 - Release Date: 7/21/2006 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: MS 399.663f On the sign as surrogate
I agree with you on this, Jim. I am wondering if Ben really thinks that there is any such cognitive acquaintance. I had thought he was simply misstating whatever point he was trying to make and didn't intend that. I am looking forward to his answer on that. Joe - Original Message - From: Jim Piat [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Peirce Discussion Forum peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu Sent: Friday, July 28, 2006 12:12 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: MS 399.663f On the sign as surrogate Ben Udell wrote: That signs and interpretations convey meaning, not experience or acquaintance with their objects, is not only Peirce's view but also the common idea of most people. For instance, most people might agree that expertise can sometimes be gained from books about their subject, but they will disagree that experience with the books' subjects can be gained from books. There is good reason for this. The expertise consists of conveyable information from books. The experience involves dealing with and learning about the objects of experience in situations with actual consequences. Even in math, when you stop to think about it, you notice a big difference between reading about math problems and working those math problems yourself. Dear Ben, Thanks for another helpful and interesting post! You seem to be saying that we can have two types of aquaintance with objects. Either we can experience objects directly without the mediation of signs or we can experience the meaning of objects (but not the entirety of the objects themselves) through signs. Before continuing I want to make sure I'm understanding you on this point. Does your notions of direct aqauintance with objects (unmediated by signs or the process of representation) provide one with knowledge of the objects meaning? Is it your view that even without signs (or the process of representation) that experience would be meaningful to us? Is it your view that that signs and the process of representation are (merely) tools for comunicating or thinking about our experience but are otherwise not required for experience to be meaningful? Personally I don't think Peirce meant that we can conceive of objects without engaging in representation. We may have aquaintance with objects in the same sense that two billiard balls are aquainted when they collide but this is not triadic aquaintance for the billiard balls and conveys no meaning to them. For me, all meaningful experience is triadic and representational. That one conception of an object is taken as foundational for a particular discussion does not priviledge that object as the real object but merely as the object commonly understood as the criteria against which the validity of assertions will be tested. Its as though the discussants were saying that the object ultimately under discussion is that one over there or the one described in this sentence or whatever -- but hopefully always one which all participants to the discussion have at least in theory equal access. The issue of what constitutes a collateral object rests less on the distinction between direct aquaintance vs aquaintance through signs but one of private vs public access to the object. A useful collateral object is one to which all discussants have equal access. The question being raised by collateral experience is really one of public vs private experience. The question is not whether the collateral object is known through representation or somehow more directly through dyadic aquaintance because (in my view) all meaningful experience (even so called direct experience) is mediated through signs. The difference between reading about something and doing it is not a matter of representational vs non representational aquaintance but between two different representations of the same object. There are folks who can read about pro football who can not play it and there are folks who can play pro football who can not read. Representation of experience is required for both activities. The common object represented is neither the football-done nor the football-read but the quality of football that is common to and inheres in both. Some of the habits acquired in mastering one respresentation or conception are not the same as required for mastering the other. I don't mean for these last two paragraphs above to leap frog your answers but more as guides to what is troubling me and what I mean by my questions. Thanks again for your comments, Ben. I am still studying them, but want to make sure I'm understanding you as I go. Making sure I understand your distinction between direct aquaintance and sign mediated aquaintance seems an important lst step. Jim Piat --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Internal Virus Database is out-of-date. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.10.3/395 - Release Date: 7/21/2006 -- Internal Virus Database is out-of-date. Checked by AVG Free
[peirce-l] Re: MS 399.663f On the sign as surrogate
Jim, list: I pretty well agree with the following two paragraphs. 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. 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. 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. We have only instances of signs of treeness, which are not emitted by trees, but which we learn to use as signs. Our information processing system rather favors abstraction. The psychologist George Miller has a delightful essay called The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two which toys with the research finding that our short term memory can only deal with seven items, plus or minus two, at a time. If you think about that, and how we process a sentence, such as The boy threw his ball into the forest where it rolled to the foot of a tree you have conclude that our dealing with concepts is not richly particularized. We really don't (can't) get involved in the particulars of signs; they exist as possibles, potentials of the processing, but not as actuals. That is, we may take for granted the ball was round, tree had branches, roots and leaves--possibly of the Oak type. I tend to think in terms of contextual potentials. For example, if I ask you if you've ever been to Siberia, and you haven't, you don't have to search your memory for the experience of not being there. It's simply not a potential of your information context. To speak of experiencing a tree as an object apart from semiosis seems to me to speak of a transcendental experience; the tree is not the source of signs, but the product of them. There are some very disciplined ascetics in the traditional Orient who lay claim to pure experience and I believe some of them. For the rest of us lay persons, a tree is the product of our use of sensory data in the creation of signs and constructs. We have to learn to use sensory data to have any meaningful experiences; even a purely aesthetic experience--should such a event occur--could never be purely sensory. It would be merely chaotic. No matter now effortless semiotics may seem, signs are a product of usage. So is experience to the extent that it is anything more than meaningless variance in some kind of sensorium. As for verification, it seems to me that is the heart of pragmaticism: verification occurs as we operationally determine that a diamond will scratch more things than it is scratched by. While that is a truth relative to the operation, within the operation it is an absolute. In my mind the pragmatic maxim means that we approximate truth to the point where whatever variances may occur make no difference to the operation performed. In other words, we get a consensus or a congruence good enough or close enough that the differences don't make a difference. That is certainly the case in communication; there is no better possibility. I think all our conceptions and knowledge of our experience is through signs. That, for us, all the world is signs. But I will concede that in certain situations for certain purposes some signs carry more evideniary weight (both literally and figuratively) than others. Not all signs are equally abstract. The sign that we typically call a tree in the forest is less abstract than the sign we typically call the word tree. The word tree has abstracted most of the form from the substance of the tree growing in the forest. To mistake one sign of a tree for another is a mistake we make at our own peril. But to suppose that reality is neatly divided into objects and signs of those objects is I think a mistake that Peirce was trying to correct. So called concrete objects are no more real than their abstract cousins. Nor vice versa. One emphasizes substance the other orm -- each has its place but there exists neither pure substance nor pure form. And ultimately both form and substance are conceptualized only through signs. The distinction between a sign and an object is a matter of usage not a distinction that by which god has carved up reality. One man's sign is another man's object. The distinction between signs and objects is closer to the distinction between verbs and nouns than folks suppose. It's a matter of usage. For some
[peirce-l] Re: MS 399.663f On the sign as surrogate
Jim, list, [Ben] That signs and interpretations convey meaning, not experience or acquaintance with their objects, is not only Peirce's view but also the common idea of most people. For instance, most people might agree that expertise can sometimes be gained from books about their subject, but they will disagree that experience with the books' subjects can be gained from books. There is good reason for this. [Ben] The expertise consists of conveyable information from books. The experience involves dealing with and learning about the objects of experience in situations with actual consequences. Even in math, when you stop to think about it, you notice a big difference between reading about math problems and working those math problems yourself. [Jim] Dear Ben, [Jim] Thanks for another helpful and interesting post! [Jim] You seem to be saying that we can have two types of aquaintance with objects. Either we can experience objects directly without the mediation of signs or we can experience the meaning of objects (but not the entirety of the objects themselves) through signs. Before continuing I want to make sure I'm understanding you on this point. Does your notions of direct aqauintance with objects (unmediated by signs or the process of representation) provide one with knowledge of the objects meaning? Yes and no. No: Direct and unmediated don't mean the same thing. There's lots of sub-logical or sub-semiotic stuff going on. I don't mean illogical, instead I mean, not inference-processing. We perceive directly, but there's lots of mediation by things -- dynamic, material, biological -- which we don't perceive. Likewise in conscious experience there are contributions by unconscious inference processes. If we order by principles of knowledge, principles of how (on what basis, in what light) we know thing, then experience comes first. When we analyze experience, we start breaking it down into elements whereby we explain what we do experience. We can break experience down into, for instance, dynamic processes (in which I've said in the past that we should look for the involvement of 'inverse' or multi-objective optimization), material stochastic processes, and vegetable-level information processes. In idioscopy, if we order by explanatory principles then we will put physics first, as usual. If we order by knowledge principles, we will put inference processes first (in idiosocopy this means the sciences of intelligent life). The maths are typically ordered in the order of knowledge rather than an order of being -- ordered on principles of how (on what basis, in what light) we know things, and structures of order and deductive theory of logic are usually considered more basic and foundational. This is the opposite of the situation in idioscopy. Anyway, recognition, interpretation, representation, and objectification are elements in a logical a.k.a. semiotic process. If we order by explanatory principles aka the traditional order of being, which corresponds to the order of semiotic determination, then we explain by the object. Yet there is more than objects in semiosis, and there is more than forces and motion in the concrete world. Yes: One can experience things (1) as semiotic objects and (2) as signs and (3) as interpretants and (4) as recognitions. So make that four kinds of experience instead of two. I don't really think of it as resulting in four _kinds_ of experience, though. One can experience things as being, respectively, (1) sources of semiotic determination, (2) conveyers/facilitators/encodings of semiotic determination, (3) clarifiers/decodings of semiotic determination, and (4) establishers/recipients of semiotic determination. It can be noted here that, when Peirce says that by collateral experience he does not refer to experience with the sign system itself, he is not saying that there is no such thing as experience with the sign system itself. The most thorough confirmatory experience will be experience not exclusively of the object but also of the signs interpretants representing it, and indeed one checks that which was the immediate object as well. One checks one's assumptions, premisses, everything that one can. If one could not experience things as serving in all the various elementary semiotic roles, then it would severely limit semiosis's reflexivity, self-accessibility, self-testing power, its capacity to develop higher-order and meta structures (semiosis about semiosis itself, etc.). I regard higher-order structures as the rule, not the exception, in semiosis. E.g., I regard sciences and maths as disciplines of knowing in or on what light or basis one knows things; affective arts as disciplines of understanding in what effects one feels things; political, military, and power affairs as arenas of deciding (or its getting decided) who or what gets to decide things; etc., etc. So one can focus on a sign and treat
