SUO: what the hell was CSP talking about?
| A sign is something,
| 'A', which brings something, 'B', its 'interpretant'
| sign, determined or created by it, into the same
| sort of correspondence (or a lower implied sort)
| with something, 'C', its 'object', as that in
| which itself stands to 'C'.
This, apparently, is the *definition* of 'sign' , that utterly
central notion of CSP's thought, as provided by CSP himself and
repeated on several occassions. Evidently he must have thought that
it meant something, but I am utterly unable to make coherent sense of
it or to think of a plausible example which it could possibly fit.
Here are some of the problems I face.
1. It seems to be circular, since it defines 'sign' in terms of
'sign'; the thing B is also a sign. Thus, in particular, this
definition would be satisfied if there were no signs in the world at
all. How do signs ever get started, as it were?
2. Leaving 1. aside for now, it has a second circularity, in that the
'correspondence' that A brings about between B and C is the same as
that which holds between A and C. However since we are told nothing
about the relationship betwen either B and C or between A and C,
there seems to be no place to start in trying to apply this, er,
definition. It doesnt constrain the meaning of the terms it uses in
any way.
3. The definition refers to A bringing about something. The only way
I can make sense of this would seem to involve A being an agent of
some kind, or at least something that can cause a process or event.
To "bring about" anything at all, something would seem to need to
*happen*; some change must be taking place; something becoming true
that was formerly false. And indeed, the definition seems to go on in
this vein: the change is the creation or establishment of a
relationship, a "correspondence", between B and C; the same sort of
correspondence that A has to C. So this seems to be saying that a
change happens in which some kind of relationship - let me call it R
- that initially holds between A and C is made to also hold between B
and C. Moreover, this change is brought about *by* A itself, and
moreover, it is done by A "creating" or "determining" B. Putting all
this together, it suggests the following kind of example. A potter
sitting at a wheel creates a pot. The potter (A) stands in a certain
relationship to something - say, is above (R) the floor(C) - and by
virtue of his creating the new thing (B), it is brought into the same
relation to C that A has to C; the pot, like the potter, is above the
floor.
OK, so far, so good. We seem to have an example that might, at a
stretch, be called the creation of a sign: the potter's creation
could, I guess, be said to indicate the floor in the same sense that
the potter does. But that is not what the definition tells us. The
sign is not B, the thing created, but the creator, A. In this
example, the *potter* is a sign. And at this point, I have some
sympathy with the crusty Harvard professors who refused to let this
man give a lecture on their campus.
But let me be patient, since so many people seem to think that CSP
was such a genius. No doubt I have got the wrong end of this
particular stick, and my example is fundamentally wrong-headed.
Still, with the best will in the world: the definition does say that
a sign (A) is something that *does* something: it 'brings' something
else into a 'correspondence'. And for the life of me, I cannot see
how anything that could reasonably be called a "sign" could actually
DO anything TO anything else.
I would welcome any enlightenment on where I might be going wrong.
Please keep your answers pithy, however, if you possibly can.
Pat Hayes
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