[Inquiry] Re: Relatives of Second Intention -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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ROSI.  Discussion Note 3

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BB = Bill Bailey

Re: ROSI 1.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/002501.html
In: ROSI.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/thread.html#2501

Bill,

Given this lull in the b-ball action -- a longer lull for me than you! --
I think I'll take a break from piling up the relevant source materials
to answer your last remarks more fully.

BB: That's a very interesting passage, especially what Peirce calls
    the "logic of relatives".  I've been musing over what to call the
    early use of signs.  Back when I was a Navy Corpsman, I often had
    patients on the pediatrics ward.  Frequently, when I'd approach
    in a white lab coat to change the dressing of a very young child
    or infant, sometimes before the first touch the child would begin
    to cry.  These were kids who'd spent much of their lives in a
    hospital.  However, if I went straight to the ward from surgery
    in my scrubs, I'd often change the same child's dressing without
    a peep.  Scrubs became uniform of the day for me on that ward.
    One developmental psychologist suggested children cried in the
    barbershop because of the resemblance between the smock of the
    barber and the physician's lab coat.  It is indeed non-relative
    logic, as Peirce says.  The correlation between the white visual
    experience and the relevance is instantaneous and absolute.  Does
    that qualify as an index?  Icon?  Both?  Furthermore, the child's
    world is very unstable with frequent violations of expectations.

Funny, when I read your story I am more tempted to title it
"The Relativity of Perception" than to assign it any theme
about absolute immediacy.  I guess I am guessing that the
reactions of the child that we interpret as the child's
interpretants of the lab coat's whiteness are rather
more relative to the vicissitudes of the particular
child's prior experience than absolutely innate to
the constitution of the interpreter in question.
As a rule, we like to pretend that colors are
absolutely ummediated, associating categories
of 1-ness and 2-ness to the intension and the
pressing of their impressions, but even here
Peirce will say in some places that colors
are bad examples of immediate impressions.

Cf: MODI 3. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/002460.html
In: MODI.   http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/thread.html#2434

In part:

| Colour is sometimes given as an example of an impression.
| It is a bad one;  because the simplest colour is almost as
| complicated as a piece of music.  Colour depends upon the
| 'relations' between different parts of the impression;  and,
| therefore, the differences between colours are differences
| between harmonies;  to see this difference we must have the
| elementary impressions whose relation makes the harmony.
| So that colour is not an impression, but an inference.
|
| C.S. Peirce, 'Chronological Edition', CE 1, 515-516
|
|["On a Method of Searching for the Categories"], MS 133 (1866), pp. 515-528 in:
|'Writings of Charles S. Peirce:  A Chronological Edition, Vol. 1, 1857-1866',
| Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.

I'm going to take a meta-break -- not so fast -- to think about that.

Jon Awbrey

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inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
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