[Arisbe] Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry

[Jon Awbrey]

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Stan Salthe wrote (SS):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):

SS: I am saying that OxSxI are relations that,
    IF they are meant to be taking place in the
    material world, require a locus to carry
    the viewpoint that will be reflected in
    the interpretants.  That locus or locale
    I call the system of interpretance (SI).

On third reading, I begin to notice the theme
of "perspective, viewpoint, POV", a topic that
is of considerble interest to me, as one of the
aims of my own inquiry is to look into the question:
What is the geometry of spaces whose points are views?

JA: Now, it begins to sound like your SI is the interpreter?

SS: Well, I see 'interpreter' as being only a part of the SI, possibly
    only where the SI involves animals (some would say 'humans').

SS: One SI may interact with an object quite differently than another does,
    and the signs used in mediating these interactions will be different.
    Put (more importantly) another way, the mediation is not done by the sign,
    but by the SI, which helped to create the sign.

JA: I guess I could say that the sign relation L c OxSxI
    is the "medium" of whatever "mediation" is going on.

SS: Well, that sounds like a kind of idealism to me.
    That is, not rooted in the frictive material world,
    but a free floating relation which might alight where
    it will.

JA: By "medium" I mean the material whirl --
    I was not calling on Madame Blavatsky.

SS: I was not playing on words.  I mean that relations that could settle down
    anywhere in the actual world seem to me to be non-materialist.  Alteratively,
    they exist in the world of discourse, as tools that can be applied for analyses.

I am running into the usual sorts of problems that I always run into when
I try to discourse with people who like to label the world of discoursers
with this or that "-ism" and its corresponding "anti-".  I have not found
that this is very useful, and I have not found that Peirce fits very well
onto either side of these imposèd and supposèd 2-alities and 2-chotomies.
Indeed, I believe that it was largely from reading Peirce that I got my
present philosophy of "anti-ism-ism" plus "anti-anti-ism", if you catch
my drift.  If it were Peirce using the term "non-material" then I would
know to read him as meaning "Not Of Necessity Material", that is, using
the quasi-acronym "NON" as a functor of abstraction and generalization.
Applying this functor NON to the material would put us in the vicinity
of the formal.  Giving any thus-prescinded form a local habitation and
a name, for all the sake of making it live in memory and strutting it
out on the mind's many stages, would fashion it the character of what
we call, by many utter names, apotheosized, epitomized, hypostatic,
personified, reifed, subjectal, thingèd, or unwingèd abstraction,
and this is the variety of relation that I wot to be between the
"material in relation" (MIR) and the "relation in material" (RIM).
If you call that "free-floating", so be it then -- all the world's
free-floating now, and all of us sailors on its wine-dark seas.

JA: It seems that we have yet to converge on a sufficiently congruous collection
    of connotations for the term "formal".  I am hopeful that the fragment from
    Peirce that I posted under the heading of "Logic As Semiosis" will go toward
    explaining his sense of "formal" as "quasi-necessary", and also clarify the
    distinction that he observes between "logical" and "mathematical" reasoning.

SS: What I mean by formal is just that there is a form or framework that
    can be applied anywhere to analyze or understand situations.  That is,
    the Peircean triad, among other formalisms, can be used as frame for
    understanding situations.  It is a tool for making models.

JA: Well, it appears that everybody has his or her own definition of "form" these days,
    which tells me that the Latin intuition is likely the most apt, "forma" = "beauty",
    and thus in the eye of the beformer.  It is this very diversity that drove me back
    to Homer and Plato and Aristotle, and to cling like a bat to the tree of etymology.

SS: What I do, if I choose to notice such diversity instead of just using my own version,
    is to seek the intersection (which I create) among the various usages as one most likely
    to be close to what a discourse itself means.

Just go right on in that direction --
I'll meet you at the intersection
of Homer and Plato and Aristotle,
at the Cafe Bistro of Old Lao Tzu.

JA: Another thought.  I just recognized that the type of question being asked here
    is closely related to a standard question in pragmatic hermeneutics, as to the
    status of the interpreter vis a vis the interpretant, in deed, as it stands in
    regard to the entire sign relation in question.  Peirce's answer, which I take
    to be a critical insight, is that the full sign relation is the primary entity
    of our study, its bearing on interpretants being the next in importance, while
    the agent of the interpretive activity is what such agents proto-typically are,
    a hypostatic abstraction hypothesized to explain the phenomena of experience.

SS: Well, I think this places your understanding here well within idealism.

JA: I wish I were an ideal thinker, but I am far too fallible for that.
    I mean, I think in ideas about Ideas, but my ideas fall miserably
    short of the Ideal.  But maybe I should ask what you mean by your
    idealism?

SS: By idealism I just mean that concepts are being reified as players
    in the actual world.  Some go further traditionally and call idealism
    a system of thinking that starts out with concepts as primal players,
    as when Peirce begins evolution with (or in) Universal Mind (an idea
    I happen to like for my own reasons) ...

Okay, but you realize that Peirce's brand of "idealism",
if you insist on labeling it that, which I think will
tend only to confuse people more, is a variety that
excludes neither platonic nor pragmatic realism,
do you not?

SS: But I may be making an oversimple reaction to this statement.  In science we are
    used to looking at systems.  We habitually imagine them to be composed of, AND
    to be precipitated BY entities.  Here you seem to opt for relations as being
    primary.  I think scientists tend to see relations as relating pre-existing
    entities.  Here instead you seem to see entities fitting into, or even
    coming into existence under the guidance of, pre-existing relations.
    If semioticians wish to talk to scientists, these issues will have
    to be cleared up.  (I am not saying either way is incorrect,
    of course.)

JA: And where do you think that I learned this stuff, this POV, and how to think this way?
    I did not begin as a student of antique philosophies and only lately catch up in my
    reading to the 1800's.  It was in my "relativity and quantum mechanic" (RAQM) days
    that I was re-trained to think in terms of relations and reciprocant observations,
    and to see these bits of stuff flitting about the cosmos as congellid invariants
    from the sol of a crypto-pythagorean geometry: "All Is Numb, And Getting Number".

SS: Well, this statement does not alter my feeling that
    scientists and semioticians are not yet ready for
    each other.  Their root thinkings differ in some
    fundamental ways.

If soi-disant semioticians root their thinking in the thoughts of Peirce,
then they will discover, often to their surprise, that they have rooted
their practice in the practice of a scientist, through'n'through, and
I dare say like only a few that we have seen in fading "modern" times.
The problem I find is in getting "moderns", of whatever "discipline",
to do enough digging to know their roots and to do enough rithmetic
to evolve their roots.

Jon Awbrey

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