Re: SUO: what the hell was C S P talking about?
Pat,
One important point to remember is that P. said that anything and
everything could be considered a sign, including neural excitations
in the brain. What keeps that observation from being trivial is his
taxonomy of various kinds of signs.
Examples:
1. Qualisign: A simple sensory quality, such as red or hot.
2. Sinsign: An existing thing, which is a sign of itself, such
as a dog, a tree, or a person named "George W. Bush".
3. Legisign: A convention or habit, such as a rubber cone on the
street causes motorists to turn away.
4. Icon: An image that resembles the thing it is a sign of,
such as a picture, drawing, etc.
5. Index: Something that indicates its referent by some causal
connection, such as smoke means fire, a pointing weathervane
indicates the direction of the wind.
6. Symbol: Something that indicates its referent by convention,
such as a stop light or insignia on a uniform.
7. Rheme: A formal symbol that indicates a specific type of entity,
such as the word "telephone", which indicates a telephone.
8. Dicent Sign: A formal symbol that states a proposition, such as
a sentence in English or a formula in mathematics.
9. Argument: A sequence of dicent signs that expresses a lawlike
relationship (such as a proof in logic).
Some comments:
| 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'.
A, B, and C are different kinds of signs. For example #1 above,
the sign A would be some retinal stimulation, B would be some
neural excitation, which may be called a "percept", and C would
be another neural excitation, which may be called a "concept".
For example #2, A might be my cat Yojo, B would be my concept of Yojo,
and C would be the name "Yojo".
For example #9, A would be the symbols in a logic book, B would be
some concept of the symbols, and C would be the interpretation as
a logical argument in whatever kind of "thinking" occurs when a
logician reads a proof.
> 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.
P. wrote many pages about the relationships, how one sign brings
about another, etc. That definition is a summary of many, many
pages of explanation.
> 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.
The agent is the entity (human, animal, robotic, or whatever) that
interprets A as a sign of C by means of some internal representation B.
> 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.
That process of interpretation takes place inside of the "agent",
which in P's examples could be a bee or even a protozoan (they weren't
too clear about bacteria in those days, but he would have considered
them as suitable "agents" for at least the very simple kinds of signs
in examples #1 and maybe #2). Perhaps bacteria could have "habits",
as in example #3, but those would probably be inherited rather than
learned -- an example of species-level learning rather than
individual learning.
John Sowa