SUO: What the hell was CSP talking about?
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Doug,
Cf:
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/inquiry/fall95/awbrey.html
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg00729.html
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg00829.html
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg00894.html
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg04442.html
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg04529.html
Douglas McDavid wrote:
>
> Pat --
>
> My (limited) reading of Peirce has led me
> to the conclusion that he is talking about
> the mechanism of cognition.
This is a possible application of pragmatic sign theory
but it does not constitute a necessary limitation on it.
If you read the material that I have cited on this score,
I think that you will notice the characterization of logic
as "formal semiotic" and the emphasis that Peirce lays on
what he calls his "non-psychological" conception of logic.
There has been a lot of confusion about this, due largely
to the fact that many readers gloss over the very critical
distinction between the "non" and the "anti", and so I have
found it necessary to put quite a lot of preliminary effort
into highlighting the difference and tracing its practical
consequences. From many other discussions we know that
Peirce observed the classical distinction between logic
as a normative science and psychology as a descriptive
science. All in all, this way of divvying up the area
covered by the theory of signs leaves room for both
a descriptive semiotics and a normative semiotics,
not to mention encouraging a peaceful co-existence
between them.
> That is to say, I think he is talking about thought.
A pragmatic tenet is: "All thought takes place in signs."
The thing that makes this so non-shocking to pragmaticians
is that they fully recognize that their favorite definition
has been deliberately stretched to cover anything that might
conceivably occur in thought. Still, neither the theory of
sign relations, in general, nor its formal and normative
branch, namely logic, is constrained in its principles
by the actual facts and the empirical facticity of
human psychology, per se.
> He seems to be talking about the correspondence between
> things inside the mind with things outside the mind.
There are two critical concepts in Peirce's definition,
namely, "correspondence" and "determination", that have
to be understood in the sense that author employed them,
and this can be discovered by looking at what he writes
elsewhere about them. In particular, the meanings that
he had in mind, as can be gathered from this evidence,
are most acutely different from the ways that these two
words have been bandied about in various contemporary
discussions that one is likely to have fresh in mind,
say, in regard to "correspondence theories of truth"
or "causal determinism of information processes".
I will look up some passages and add them later.
> The interpretant is an inside-the-mind thing, ...
This is a "can be", but not a "must be" of the theory.
> which is essentially unknowable in any direct way (I cant *really*
> know what's going on inside your mind, but through whole sets of
> sign productions and interpretations we may come to some mutual
> satisfaction that our interpretants have lined up pretty well).
These "sign productions and interpretations" are all "interpretants".
> The sign is a representation of some outside-the-mind thing,
Again, maybe, maybe not.
The full name for "interpretant" is "interpretant sign".
Peirce, following a once-hallowed tradition of thought,
regards a "concept" as a special type of a "symbol",
which is in turn just a special type of a "sign".
> which is intended to create a correspondence inside-the-mind
> that lines up with a correspondence between the outside-the-mind
> thing and the sign that represents it.
The best reading for "correspondence" in this definition
is just the whole sign relation itself. Peirce explicitly
refers to it as a "triple correspondence" in several places.
At any rate, it is not meant to suggest a dyadic mirroring.
> I think that everything that John Sowa says in his response
> to you can support the reading that I just outlined. I think
> that much of Jon Awbrey's work on this list tends to invalidate
> my reading of Peirce.
The best way for you to resolve this is to deepen
and to extend your reading of the source materials.
> Jon seems to be talking about triads where all three
> parts of a triad are external representations. Sowa
> seems to support the conclusion that Peirce is talking
> about thought, where Awbrey seems to be saying that he
> is talking about representation.
One of the features of this formal approach, or what we
would more often today refer to as an "abstract" theory,
is that all of these worries about the moment to moment
locations of objects, signs, interpretants are entirely
incidental to the "form", id est, the isomorphism class,
pattern, shape, or structure of the whole sign relation.
The in-or-out of your mind question is an "accidental",
a secondary characteristic that gets "abstracted out"
of the "formal" question, which is all that is really
and truly of the "essence" here.
> It seems to me that if there is such a thing as essential triadicity,
> it comes about as a result of the existence of a mind, without which
> signs would be arrangements of molecules like any other arrangements
> of molecules, and not signs at all.
Irreducible triadicity is a formal, logical, mathematical fact,
not a psychological phenomenon. Yes, there might be a relation.
> Now, I'm sure I will very soon be informed,
> from all directions, and in no uncertain terms,
> about how completely I have misinterpreted CSP ;-)
Well, that is my best information, for now, at least.
Whether you are informed by it is a whole nuther bit.
Jon Awbrey
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