[peirce-l] Diagrammatic and Dialogic
List, Besides the notions of sinsign, qualisign and legisign, I am also very interested in the notions of diagrammatic and dialogic. I have been reflecting on these notions for a while now, but actually think I need to know more about their true meanings. I am wondering whether the notions diagrammatic and dialogic are just synonyms, or whether CS Peirce did mean something different with both of the 2 notions. Maybe there is some good publication or text about this issue? I have to say I did not look at Arisbe website or another website yet. This issue just came up to me after some insight I got in some dream tonight J . Pfff this is getting bad J. Kind regards, Wilfred Berendsen The Netherlands --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.8.3/360 - Release Date: 9-6-2006 -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.8.3/360 - Release Date: 9-6-2006
[peirce-l] Re: Sinsign, Legisign, Qualisign
Bernard, list, >[Bernard] The view point from the first trichotomy emphasizes an order on the trichotomies. That's true. Yet this order is not the whole of the subject matter: it is only the order of the numerical sequence 1, 2, 3 but it does not account for the fact that into three, 2 and 1 can be found and the fact that into two, 1 can be found. So, developping the original Peirce's table could result into this alternative presentation to the one you gave below, this one being grounded on the second trichotomy: > icons -(in)- quality -(for)- rhema> icons -(in)- singularity -(for)- rhema> icons -(in)- law -(for)- rhema> indexes -(in)- singularity -(for)- rhema...etc.> symbols -(in)- law -(for)- rhema> ...etc.>[Bernard] And there is of course a third development grounded on the third trichotomy showing the structure of rhematic signs, dicent signs and arguments. I don't know what your'e doing in the list above. Anyway, various permutations are possible and I said that being able to transform is important. One masters diagrams by working with their transformations. That's how it is with math in general. How much of Peirce's table's structure does one really understand if one does not understand its intercovertibility with Joe's table's structure? I don't know why you think that I said that the order which I showed was the whole of the subject matter. You seem to be putting a lot of weight on the given permutation, as if it were a building rather than a diagrammatic transformation. >[Bernard] This is the reason why I asked for an explanation of the plural. You answered that Joe is the original author, I would be interested in his own view on this. From the point of view of structural forms which was my starting point, Joe's presentation is a composite of three joined subgraphs, each of which is a tree (in the Aristotelian tradition) while Peirce's presentation is a table equipped with an internal ordering relation. The main practical difference is that the former cannot display the forbidden combinations while the latter does. Joe's table did not display any forbidden combinations. Really, I think you are putting excessive weight on certain modes of tables. But none of them is so secure as to be tamper-proof. There is nothing to stop people from drawing Peirce's internal ordering relation differently when they shouldn't, any more than there is anything to stop them from adding combinations to Joe's table when they shouldn't. Nothing, that is, but accompanying discussions on top of such evidence of contraint as the reader can discern in the patterns in the given table. I think that Joe's purpose was chiefly expository. There is certainly nothing in Peirce's drawing which conveys a necessity that is somehow lacking from Joe's presentation. Peirce's table is more rule-formulative, since it's more concise, but it's not _that_ much more rule-formulative and, in any case, it's a presentation and can be altered to allow forbidden combinations just like Joe's presentation can. After all, isn't there some repetition in Peirce's table? Those crossing lines are repeated, "iterated." So Peirce's table is not perfectly concise and rule-formulative. Instead we just have to "notice" that the pattern is repeated. That should have bothered you already, from your viewpoint. Down the road which you're traveling, you are heading toward a place where Peirce's table won't seem short and sweet enough in its constraints -- it will be able to seem loopholed in the same sense in which Joe's table can seem loopholed. Likewise we just have to "notice" the one-to-one correlation between the columns and the rows of Peirce's table. Peirce's table exhibits this regularity so nicely that it's an advantage to his table. But this particular regularity is not expressly formulated as a rule, instead it's shown as if it just happened to turn up, maybe like a word in alphabet soup. Of course sometimes we like to discover patterns in their embodiments. Correspondingly, an introductory essay doesn't do well to be excessively abstract. If I were rewriting Joe's essay, I'd show Peirce's diagram and also keep Joe's diagram. But Joe doesn't toss graphics around as easily and even gleefully as I do. While Joe's graphics don't show tremendous computer skill, they show all the intelligent labor and concern for the reader's unhampered understanding which Joe also shows in his prose. I've seen, and seen into, plenty of "amateur" computer graphics and Joe's can't be beat at that level. >[Bernard] For example, the construct (see below) can't show that qualisigns - indexical - rhematic are prohibited while the Peirce's table shows it. That depends on whether you take Peirce's table as showing the only permitted ordering relations or as showing just some of the permitted ordering relations. It's quite unclear to me why, simultaenously, it should be presumed to sh
[peirce-l] Re: Sinsign, Legisign, Qualisign
Benjamin Udell wrote : I had already produced the second table (Fig. 3) when you sent the graphic of Peirce's own table. It's really just Joe's table, re-produced as an HTML table, and with the second column put into "standard" order (a, ab, abc instead of a, ba, cba) consistently like the other columns. The basic idea was to use less memory and make it easier for people to edit. Actually, Joe's graphic is small in KB but image files in emails tend to use more than their own filesize in KB. Anyway, Joe's descriptors in the first trichotomy happened to be plural nouns, and I merely followed along in that regard. Part of the reason for the colors is that they make the html table cohere better. In the html table, it's more difficult to make everything line up nicely. The colors help. The emphasis on the viewpoint of the first trichotomy helps emphasize that the three trichotomies are ordered (first trichotomy, second trichotomy, third trichotomy), ordered in a way which is embodied in the collective structure of ideas uniting the three trichotomies. I had known about this but not really focused on it before. Wilfred's question about qualisigns/sinsigns/legisigns became my occasion to really think about it. Here I've added examples to it, they're all from Peirce but I pasted them in whole-hog from James Elkins' "Problems with Peirce" http://jameselkins.com/Texts/Peirce.pdf which, despite the ominousness of its title, displays some real engagement with Peirce and anyway has a number of handy tables. Turned out he ordered them all-ascending too. The view point from the first trichotomy emphasizes an order on the trichotomies. That's true. Yet this order is not the whole of the subject matter: it is only the order of the numerical sequence 1, 2, 3 but it does not account for the fact that into three, 2 and 1 can be found and the fact that into two, 1 can be found. So, developping the original Peirce's table could result into this alternative presentation to the one you gave below, this one being grounded on the second trichotomy: icons -(in)- quality -(for)- rhema icons -(in)- singularity -(for)- rhema icons -(in)- law -(for)- rhema indexes -(in)- singularity -(for)- rhema ...etc. symbols -(in)- law -(for)- rhema ...etc. And there is of course a third development grounded on the third trichotomy showing the structure of rhematic signs, dicent signs and arguments. This is the reason why I asked for an explanation of the plural. You answered that Joe is the original author, I would be interested in his own view on this. From the point of view of structural forms which was my starting point, Joe's presentation is a composite of three joined subgraphs, each of which is a tree (in the Aristotelian tradition) while Peirce's presentation is a table equipped with an internal ordering relation. The main practical difference is that the former cannot display the forbidden combinations while the latter does. For example, the construct (see below) can't show that qualisigns - indexical - rhematic are prohibited while the Peirce's table shows it. I suspect that the invention of matrix calculus at his time and his own work with quaternions influenced his way of thinking the form of classifications. I never found a justification of this idea in the sources but I would be interested in the reflexions of listers if any. There is evidence that Mendeleiev chemical classification was a reference for Peirce and it was a table too. But as far as I can know there remains an enigma on the fact that Peirce invented suddenly the first trichotomy around 1903 though he had worked the two others in every detail for many years. Was not such an invention the result of the necessity of achieving a neat structure for sign classification? Another way of putting things could be to say that Joe's presentation is directed in a sense by a specific linguistic usage that requires in our so called indo-european languages to put things in the form Subject-Verb-Object(s). Thus the peculiar status attributed to qualisign, sinsign, legisign that become with the help of the plural gender the subjects of quasi sentences. I have shown above that there are two possible alternate forms. In fact I think that in the Peirce's presentation the terms like qualisign, index, ...and so on, are neither linguistic nor syntactical elements. They are just markers for places in a structure of relations, like letters in a geometrical figure. Now this fact does not prevent to define that which is marked by such markers. Ben, as regards to the discussion on the borromean knot and the fourth category, I did not intend to make your system enter into the figure of the borromean knot. I was using the latter as some kind of metaphor in order to inquire into the kind of relation that the 4th category (as you conceive it) could entertain with the three others. I had always supposed through your posts that you agree on the idea that S
