[Inquiry] Semiotics Of Misrepresentation -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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SOM.  Discussion Note 1

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TG = Tom Gollier

Re: SOM 1.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-April/002554.html
In: SOM.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-April/thread.html#2554

TG: Prior to the "dumbing-down" of IQ tests (and logic itself if we can
    draw some conclusions from Irving's discussion of Russell and Peirce)
    in the early 1900s, Lester Frank Ward defined intelligence as deception
    (both the ability to perpetrate and to recognize) and Peirce's syllogistic
    definition of intelligence as any going from A to B in order to get to C
    certainly allows the room needed for deceptions — i.e., if his logic is
    not reduced to something like Russell's.

TG: In short, perhaps it's a shortcoming of the various formalistic logics
    around today, of logic today, that it don't do so well with deceptions
    and misrepresentations.

Tom,

It may be that we use different diagnostic tests here.
To me the word "formal" means what my dictionary says:
"concerned with form" or "having to do with form", so
I think of the way that Plato was concerned with form
and had to do with form.  Peirce is rather strikingly
a formalist in this light.  The error of the indicted
approaches to logic is not the concern with form, but
really a particular type of nominalism, specifically,
syntacticism.  And the error of syntacticism is not
the concern with syntax, a having to do with which
we have to do if we want to deal with significant
problems, at any rate, but the error of confusing
the properties of signs with the properties of
objects.  In this connection, we may observe
that icons, for all their beauties and uses,
are especially susceptible to being set up
as idols, that is to say, icons on whose
frailer characters we have surrendered
the ability to reflect, rendering us
prey to all of the seamier seemings
of seeming semiosis.

Jon Awbrey

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