[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).

JA: On third reading, I begin to notice the theme
    of "perspective, viewpoint, POV", a topic that
    is of considerable 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?

SS: OK, so now we are communicating better on that.  So, then, it seems
    to me that POVs are distinct from the generalized triad, O-S-I, ...

I do not know why I have to keep explaining that I do not use
this form of language about "triads" to mean any thing other
than a single 3-tuple of the form <o, s, i>, which is only
a single element of a sign relation, properly conceived.
Any particular sign relation, from the extensional POV
that I am currently developing, is a whole SET of such
3-tuples, and it is as pointless to let onself become
fixated on a single 3-tuple, however generic, as it
would be to try and grasp the nature of a geometry
by fixating on a single triangle.

SS: OK, so now we are communicating better on that.  So, then, it seems
    to me that POVs are distinct from the generalized triad, O-S-I, which
    is movable from one to another POV, and so this triad is either just
    an analytical technique, or, (I just realized), more interestingly,
    a kind of structure (a deep structure in the sense of the erstwhile
    structuralists) that can be accesssed at many, perhaps most, locales.

Consequently, when you say something like "POVs are distinct from the
generalized triad, O-S-I, which is movable from one to another POV",
I simply do not have a clue how to interpret what you say, whether
you are referring to a whole sign relation L c OxSxI, which has
a lot to do with formaliszing POV's, at least, from my POV, or
whether you are talking about an isolated 3-tuple of the form
<o, s, i>, which is only one element of such a sign relation.

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: NEW RESPONSE BY SS:  Your "medium" here could be my 'structure'.
    In any case, the locale or POV locates a SI, which co-constructs
    the signs and constructs fully the local interpretants -- guided
    by the triadc structure.

I just do not understand this way of talking.

SS: 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.

JA: 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-".

SS: I don't see where I am bringing in -isms in this place,
    other than here using a short-cut to emphasize that
    I wish to consider the material world in particular
    (not the physical world, which is much greater, and
    less understood).

JA: 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.

SS: One reason may be that the major -isms in play today
    in the cognitive world were different from those
    in play when Charlie was playing.

A remark like this is the distinguishing mark of "modern" thinkers,
with all of their progressive fallacies intact, who imagine that
they can turn a dead eye with impunity to the modulus of their
own cyclic rhythmatic, and it is the predominant reason that
our culture keeps running in the same old circles, without
even knowing how old the wheels are.  Vide "tele".

JA: 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.

SS: That is why I realized that structures (deep structures, structural attractors)
    could be my locus for the free floating triad.  (I can foresee politics objecting
    to subsuming Peirce into structuralism rather than pulling the latter out of Peirce.)

JA: 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.

SS: OK.

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 ADDS: Basically, my 'formal' derives from Aristotle's formal cause.

Perhaps we will find time to explore that.

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.

JA: 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.

SS: The intersection is the locus of just the most general properties that
    all the definitions have in common, distinguishing what is most basic
    from what refects POV.  Characteristically, in my developmental style
    of thinking, I see these generals as being explicit models of the vague
    beginnings of the concept, out of which the various versions developed,
    acquiring idiosyncratic historical dress along the way.

I imagine that the intersection of "all" definitions will turn out be empty --
it is most likely asking too much to think that we can make everybody happy --
and so it becomes necessary to choose.  I tend to try and preserve anything
that is capable of making some kind of sense, but I tend to hold off those
positions that do not respect the grounds of their own project to meaning,
as they tend to whither themselves away in time.

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.

SS ADDS:  In light of the structuralist interpretation (above),
          I have little problem with this now.

YAI (yet another ism).
It is a curious habit
for a person who does
not trust 2-ary logic.

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) ...

JA: 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: OK.

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.

Your view strikes as a very ancient notion of science --
not that there's anything wrong with that, of course,
but for the danger of a methodological inconsistency --
but hey! we are many, we contain multitudes.  All of
this "stuff" about fundamental constituents of matter
being construed out of stuff like relational invariants,
group-theoretic symmetries, and conservation principles,
is the kind of "stuff" that I learned in my physics books
and courses, in the last century, not from H & P & A, if
maybe a little from LT.

SS: 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.)

SS ADDS: Most scientists are offended by structuralist talk as well.
   They acknowledge the behavior of structural attractors in dynamical
   equations, but do not, for the most part, imagine structural attractors
   as being of importance in the actual world.  This is because they want to
   see a mechanism (perhaps some physicists transcend this, basically pragmatic,
   limitation).  No mechanism, no phenomenon.

Another oldie but goodie from Aristotle.

SS:  As yet no cogent materalist model of structures has appeared,
     (but I think that it could be pulled out of current extensions
     of information theory).

SS: ... scientists and semioticians are not yet ready for each other.
    Their root thinkings differ in some fundamental ways.

JA: 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.

SS: Ths could well be true.  Peirce's texts do have a sense
    of a deep (and mysterious) generality-vagueness from
    which one might precipitate (under some expanded
    consciousness regime) much of what we know as
    distinct -isms today.  Good luck!

Thanks, I'll be needing that,

Jon Awbrey

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