[Inquiry] Re: Attribute, Impute, Represent -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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AIR.  Discussion Note 17

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JA = Jon Awbrey
JP = Jim Piat

Re: AIR-DIS 15.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-April/002571.html
In: AIR-DIS.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-April/thread.html#2566

JA: Here I have graver doubts.  It still seems to me, on the
    strength of other definitions of the sign relation, that
    a sign can bear information about an object without the
    involvement of adjunctive icons or indices of any sort.

JP: Thanks for all the helpful comments.  All grist for my mill.
    But for now I'd like to just ask about your statement above.
    Would you accept a modified (perhaps less material) version
    that all symbols involve attributed icons and indices?
    I'm just trying to get a better sense of how far apart
    we are on this point.

Jim,

Got to pack it in for the day, so I'll just draw
this one last message off the top of the deck.

I'm not sure if I can figure out any time soon what
an imputant icon or imputant index would amount to,
but as far as I can guess right off I don't see the
necessity of anything like that following from the
more adequate definitions of a sign relation.

I really need to get back to the manuscripts running up to the
New List and the Logic of Relatives.  The New List especially
has a dearth of concrete examples, and so it really helps to
read its precursors for what little bit of extra application
one can find in them.

I do find it curious that people who will, at the drop of a hat,
any other day, soundly drub pragmatists like James and Dewey for
their residual bits of empiricism, naturalism, and psychologism
are now dredging up tons and tons of pitchblended material from
the empircial pits of grammar and psychology for what few traces
of evidence they think will weigh down their pan of the assay.
They fail to recall the very lessons that they have in other
times preached so fervently, that even if we say, for the
sake of the argument, that all of the semiotic animals
on a given planet cannot imagine thinking in anything
but images, that enumeration of empirical cases would
not prove a whit with respect to the necessities of
the question, whether all symbols involve icons.

Jon Awbrey

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