Joe, list, I think you've got it right -- the cognitive content rather than either the act of interpretation or the activity of interpretation. This distinction may get slippery, though, insofar as obect - sign - interpretant are agent - patient - act! Well, let's burn that bridge when we come to it. You may also be right that, whatever the optimal distinction, Peirce wanted to put a reminder that distinctions of possibly somewhat various kinds will be waiting to be made.
The cognitive content rather than either the act or the activity of interpretation -- The final interpretant is not approached at some universal rate or class of rates that invariably puts it off indefinitely into the future -- but may instead be reached (though the interpreter won't know for sure) already. What stretches invariably into the indefinite future is the _maximum_ time that it would take to reach the final interpretant -- that's an extremum, such that inquiry prolonged long enough is destined to reach the final interpretant "no later than indefinitely far into the future." It sounds unencouraging until we remember that the point of this is to bring research and truth into mutual definitional relation and that, as a brief about research prospects, it is considerably less pessimistic than the view which flatly forbids access to things "in themselves." An infinitely precise truth could be approached, as a limit, only over infinite time but, as Peirce said, we can confess inaccuracy and one-sidedness and call it a night. Eventually Peirce did refer to an "infinite community" of investigators rather than merely an "indefinitely" prolonged investigation. And it might actually mean something, too, to say that a given truth would take a higher order than lower-case omega successive finite non-infinitesimal periods of time -- that would be to say that the chances of our reaching it sooner were vanishingly small. This seems actually the case with undecidable mathematical questions, though Peirce somewhere talks about resorting to non-deductive inference in such cases. That may seem a stretch with some mathematical questions, but with questions like the consistency of sufficiently rich mathematical systems, it seems that some sort of inductive generalization is in fact how mathematicians come to such a strong belief in many of those systems' consistency, especially the ones proven to be consistent-if-arithmetic-is-consistent. I've argued on another list that such beliefs are probably best not regarded as "faith" unless we want to talk about statistics-based "faith" as well. Seems to me to water down the word "faith." But then what do I know, I'm not a mathematician. It comes back to me that I also said to Tom, that the point of calling it an interpretant is that it is another sign -- "interpretant" is short for "interpretant sign." "Interpretant" sounds like a thing, as "sign" does, rather than like an activity or an act. The thing / product idea (as opposed to act/activity ideas) is hovering in there, but the sign idea cuts through (I think) to the point, the point of cognitive content. It occurs to me that the same ideas apply to the difference between "representation" and "representamen." The sign is the representation but not the activity of representation or the act of representation or the holding or maintaining of representation, etc. Peirce must have really liked the word "sign" because he didn't need to make one of those coinages out of it. Now, looking at the Commens Dictionary, I find a remarks by Peirce about representation/representamen which is somewhat analogous -- close enough -- to your favored distinction between interpretation and interpretant. He speaks not of an "act" or "activity" of representing but of a "character" of representing. http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/terms/representamen.html 66~~~~~~~~~~~ "A representation is that character of a thing by virtue of which, for the production of a certain mental effect, it may stand in place of another thing. The thing having this character I term a _representamen_, the mental effect, or thought, its interpretant, the thing for which it stands, its _object_." (A Fragment, CP 1.564, c. 1899) ~~~~~~~~~~~99 66~~~~~~~~~~~ "... I confine the word _representation_ to the operation of a sign or its _relation to the object _for_ the interpreter of the representation. The concrete subject that represents I call a _sign_ or a _representamen_. .... (Lowell Lectures, CP 1.540, 1903) ~~~~~~~~~~~99 If a thing has character of representation, it is a representamen. By analogy, If a thing has the character of interpretation, it is an interpretant. So if I interpret, I'm interpreter and interpretant, indistinguishably, no? Distinguishably. I also represent, make claims, etc., and one can say in a vague way that I'm a sign that [fill in a belief of mine here] but usually we narrow it down to signs that I make and intepretants that I form. In some cases calling me a sign or interpretant is like holding up a huge sheet of paper with a pica-sized blue dot on it and saying, this sheet is an icon of the sea. It'd be a stretch but one can imagine situations, possibly comic ones, in which it would work. It occurs to me now that Peirce found himself able to say "intepretant sign" and that this was certainly much clearer than "intepretation sign," "interpretational sign," "interpretamentum sign," or "interpretamental sign" would have been. Of course, he could have said "interpretive sign." But "interpretive sign" might be taken to mean something which one interprets to be a sign, apart from its content -- the barest kind of interpreting! As when "constructive abandonment" means "construed as abandonment." Back when I first started reading about signs and interpretants, my initial notion was that the interpretant was some sort of translating -- and I thought, well the result is "just" another sign, what's different about the interpretant must be the interpretive action, which became, in my mind, the form or rule of the action, till the interpretant seemed low on content. This notion soon enough clashed with the things that Peirce was saying about interpretants. Then I thought in terms of specific mappings of some signs to other signs -- lots of such mappings, as between specific French words and specific English words. Then it occurred to me that these word-bridges are abstractions, in real life I'm crossing a given bridge in one direction. I start here, end up there. There, is the interpretant. If I want to "attribute" some of the "bridge" to the interpretant, I can do that too, if the movement from the pre-interpretant sign X to another sign or idea Y was, itself, the salient resultant sign or idea (which could still contain specific sign Y, viewed in the "perpective" of the larger interpretant sign -- so I ended up with a complex sign, and that's perfectly okay). But I'll never make the movement completely explicit either, so it's really just a matter of more or less and was such a matter all along. I think that's quite enough. I wish I could call it a night! :-) Best, Ben ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joseph Ransdell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu> Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 1:43 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: entelechy (CORRECTED) Ben says: During the discussions and arguments with Tom Short here at peirce-l last year, the subject of the term "interpretant" came up -- why would Peirce have wanted it? And why was it a good idea? I can't remember whether we distinguished those two questions clearly. Tom didn't think much of coining the term in order to distinguish interpretation as product (the interpretant) from interpretation as the activity leading to the interpretation as product. He said that context, syntactical differences, etc. were enough. I disagreed and argued that Peirce probably wanted an unambiguous word which would retain its univocality in translations and not overdepend on the literary abilities of the translators. Many languages do not have "the" or "a" etc. and other English tricks for differentiating senses -- Latin, for instance. I could not prevail. I argued also that calling it an "interpretant" tended to minimize the idea that it had to be a _human_ interpretation. Tom did like that idea. I don't remember whether anybody else had a strong opinion on such specific aspects of why Peirce would have wanted a different word than "interpretation." There were other and bigger arguments going on at the time! REPLY I think your account more plausible than Tom's. It is precisely the fact that context and syntactical differences are not enough to disambiguate the word that makes it important to do so in some other way in order to avoid the confusions to which it is otherwise liable. If ever a term needed to be under that kind of critical control, this is surely it. My take on the disambiguation is a little different than yours, though I agree that there is a need to recognize the distinction you have in mind -- the product of the interpreting act vs. the interpretation as act -- but I think the job the technical term actually performs in most uses is to distinguish the cognitive content of the interpretation from the interpretation as interpreting act. A parallel distinction would be, for example, the difference between belief as the believing vs. belief as that which is believed, or between perception as the perceiving act and as that which is perceived, and so forth. It is possible that it has both logical jobs, and its function is actually the more general one of signaling the need to disambiguate by distinguishing what would be of interest to the logician from what would be of interest to the psychologist but be impertinent to the logical account (as you also suggested, in effect) with their being a number of different forms the disambiguation might take depending on the particular logical purpose this serves in the given case. The reason I think of it primarily as distinguishing the cognitive content from the act as act is that this is the disambiguation required for my particular analytic purposes in dealing with semiosis in its most generic form. The distinguishing of the producing act from the product produced seems to me to be less generic, appropriate only to those cases where one can profitably identify something as being a product detachable in some sense from the producing of it, which may not always be appropriate. (I am thinking of a passage in the Charmides dialogue where Socrates is asking about what the virtue of sophrosune or self-control is, starting from his usual assumption that if it is a kind of knowledge then it is a techne or craft. Questions are then raised about what sort of craft sophrosune might be as regards what the results of its practice would be, and it is pointed out that some crafts produce material products, such that producing results in something that can stand alone once produced, but not all crafts are like that: the products of math, for example, are difficult to distinguish from the acts of the mathematician, games (also treated by him as crafts, like chess, I suppose) also produce something but is the product really different from the game itself? and so forth. This comparison is just intended as a suggestion that thinking of semiosis as consisting of distinguishable productive acts and products produced may be what is wanted for some theoretical purposes but it may not be a generically applicable distinction. My point is, though, that we may both be right because the reason for the use of a special technical term might be simply to provide a kind of standing reminder to be on the alert for the need to distinguish what pertains to interpretation as a person's act of interpreting and as something else, of which there may be several different things from which the act needs to be distinguished. That leaves it to context to appeal to in figuring out exactly what distinction is to be recognized, but reminds us that we have to do that. Tom's mistake is in not recognizing how important it can be to be aware that there is a distinction to be drawn. I see failure to be aware of this occurring quite frequently in the secondary literature, especially in connection with discussions of the final opinion, for example, where it frequently seems that it must never have occurred to the critic of Peirce's view that the destined final opinion is not some opinion hopefully occurring at some impossibly remote date but rather something that may already have occurred or might occur tomorrow since what is being referred to is not an act of opining but the cognitive content of such an act. Joe Ransdell --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
