[Inquiry] Re: Examples Of Inquiry -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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EOI.  Discussion Note 4

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JA = Jon Awbrey
TG = Tom Gollier

Tom,

Assuming that we'll eventually be able to sort out
the different senses of the word "diagram" as Peirce
uses it, let me take up your comments piece by piece.

TG: I'm looking at the sign and interpretant
    as "diagrams" such as are described at
    CP 2.227-228.

Here is the whole of CP 2.227, in two pieces:

| Logic, in its general sense, is, as I believe I have shown,
| only another name for 'semiotic' ([Greek: semeiotike]), the
| quasi-necessary, or formal, doctrine of signs.  By describing
| the doctrine as "quasi-necessary", or formal, I mean that we
| observe the characters of such signs as we know, and from such
| an observation, by a process which I will not object to naming
| Abstraction, we are led to statements, eminently fallible, and
| therefore in one sense by no means necessary, as to what 'must be'
| the characters of all signs used by a "scientific" intelligence,
| that is to say, by an intelligence capable of learning by experience.
|
| As to that process of abstraction, it is itself a sort of observation.
| The faculty which I call abstractive observation is one which ordinary
| people perfectly recognize, but for which the theories of philosophers
| sometimes hardly leave room.  It is a familiar experience to every human
| being to wish for something quite beyond his present means, and to follow
| that wish by the question, "Should I wish for that thing just the same,
| if I had ample means to gratify it?"  To answer that question, he searches
| his heart, and in doing so makes what I term an abstractive observation.
| He makes in his imagination a sort of skeleton diagram, or outline sketch,
| of himself, considers what modifications the hypothetical state of things
| would require to be made in that picture, and then examines it, that is,
| 'observes' what he has imagined, to see whether the same ardent desire
| is there to be discerned.  By such a process, which is at bottom very
| much like mathematical reasoning, we can reach conclusions as to what
| 'would be' true of signs in all cases, so long as the intelligence
| using them was scientific.  (CP 2.227).
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, 'Collected Papers', CP 2.227,
| Editors' Note: From an unidentified fragment, c. 1897.

I read this as a characterization of logic, which is
a critical reflection on signs, and thus a normative,
"quasi-necessary", or "formal" science, as Peirce
uses the words.  So there's a lot more going on
here at a reflective level than what we need
merely to define the sign relation itself.

| A sign, or 'representamen', is something which stands to somebody
| for something in some respect or capacity.  It addresses somebody,
| that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or
| perhaps a more developed sign.  That sign which it creates I call
| the 'interpretant' of the first sign.  The sign stands for something,
| its 'object'.  It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in
| reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the 'ground'
| of the representamen.  (CP 2.228).

This is another perfectly good definition of a sign relation,
provided that we take it with the necessary grain of salt that
is called for to season the sop of a psychologistic misreading.

I will tell you my personal way of understanding the "ground"
of a sign relation, perhaps on account of the fact that field
and gestalt theories were among my first loves in physics and
psychology.  The elements of all possible sign relations float
like dust motes in the air, or like iron filings on a plate of
glass, and the ground is that beam of sunlight or magnetic field
that constellates the patterned figures in the medium that we see.
Formally speaking, then, shown of all metaphor as much as possible,
the ground is just that constraint which picks out certain triples
and chaffs the rest.  In short, it is but an alias for the entire
sign relation as a subset of a cartesian product, L c O x S x I.

Jon Awbrey

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