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

[Jon Awbrey]

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AIR.  Discussion Note 5

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BM = Bernard Morand
JA = Jon Awbrey

Re: AIR-DIS 1.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-February/002386.html
In: AIR-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-February/thread.html#2386

BM: Thanks Jon for these quotes that made me return to the source text from 1866.
    I am not sure that I had ever read it.  I discovered some additional elements
    that I can't resist to partake with the list because they give some water to
    Joe's mill (as we say in French) in his controversy with Tom Short, even if
    I feel uncomfortable with some of Joe's arguments, as it is the case with
    the icon supposed to be implied into the symbol for example.

JA: The English idiom is more often "grist for the mill",
    except for the good ol' boy, who may prefer "grits".

BM: Very nice story:  in French we have both the water and the grist
    possibly associated to the mill.  The grist indicates the idea
    that there is now some work to be done.  The water indicates
    the idea that the direction of the flow (of interpretants?)
    is oriented toward the mill or the ideas of the miller.
    And finally, going back to my dictionary I found that
    the phrasing "that's all grist to his mill" has to be
    understood as "apporter de l'eau à son moulin", that
    is to say just what you are writing.  Nevertheless
    I am beginning to see why the good old boy believed
    that the capriciousness of language had to be harshly
    reformed before being of any use in right reasoning :-)

Yes, we also have "run of the mill" to describe a mundane example, but that's
another story.  Maybe sometime you can explain to me what all this has to do
with the Red Mill.  Someone once told me that the French for "good ol' boy"
was "Gascon", but maybe my leg was being pulled without my awareness of it.

JA: I was led back to these passages because I had the impression
    of having read an early (pre-1865) usage of "imputed quality"
    in the sense that Joe was calling attention to in a later
    excerpt.  I haven't located that yet, if it even exists,
    but I did find these very illuminating transitional
    passages where Peirce is exploring the complex of
    connotations that involves the words "attribute",
    "impute", "represent", that would also involve
    words like "allege", "inform", "report",
    "repute", "purport", "purpose", "use".

BM: Yes, the point is revived in your later exchange with Jim.
    I was wondering while reading those messages whether the
    word "impute", qua variant of "attribute", was not aiming
    at some social or institutional aspect of the affectation
    of a character to the object.  Hence, the symbol is general
    in its mode of representation owing to the plurality of
    circumstances in which this very same affectation can
    take place.  This explains why the symbol is "a Sign
    which is constituted a sign merely or mainly by the
    fact that it is used and understood as such, whether
    the habit is natural or conventional, and without
    regard to the motives which originally governed
    its selection." (CP 2.307).

Yes, I think that this entire complex of words is all aiming at
the same thing, that a symbol is a sign that denotes its object
simply because it is interpreted as doing so.  The interpretant
can range from conventional to idiosyncratic, however, where by
"conventional" we generally mean that more than one interpreter
agrees to the meaning.

BM: So, the symbol is in a completely arbitrary relation to its
    object (the initial motives of its selection) and this recalls
    strangely the characterization of the linguistic sign by Saussure.
    The difference with Peirce is on the side of the interpretant of
    the symbol, the habit.  This is why I am reluctant to make room
    here for any iconic element which would imply the likeness,
    the agreement and not the arbitrariness, of the relation
    to the object.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge and through the mill
with regard to the words "arbitrary" and "conventional", and
I'm not sure we can resolve all the equivocal quibbles here.
It helps me to remember their etymologies.  The derivation
of "convention" I alluded to above.  The word "arbitrary"
actually means "relating to an arbiter", and "arbiter" is
just another word for "decider", "judge", "interpreter".
Again, all of these words point to the irredundancy of
a third parameter in the relation between two things
that is being decided.

BM: The word "quality" in the phrasing "imputed quality" seems to me
    synonymous with character, feature, or value but not with qualisign.
    This being clear, nothing prevents now to mix in complex concrete
    signs symbolic and iconic elements.  But this is another issue as
    you say yourself in your response to Jim:

BM, quoting JA:
 
JA: The ideal types of icons, indices, symbols may be 
    compounded with each other in each concrete sign, 
    but the axes of classification will be useless 
    if they are always confounded with each other 
    in the space of ideal coordinates.

BM: In fact there is a point which is always forgotten in such discussions,
    the point that it is a kind of language abuse to say that icons, indices,
    and symbols are signs.  They are just three kinds of relations of signs to
    their objects, the signs themselves being qualisigns, sinsigns, or legisigns.
    In case of the symbol it is simpler because it can't be anything else than
    a legisign.  But forgotting this point is forgotting the inprescindable
    character of the interpretant in the sign definition.

For my part, I think that we have to give up on the essentialist notion
that we are classifying signs according to some essence that they possess,
and realize once and for all that the proper unit of classification is the
entire sign relation, that is, a collection of triples of the form <o, s, i>.

As for the issue of imputed quality, I think we have to ask, "quality of what?"
But I will have to procrastinate delving into those grounds until another time.

Jon Awbrey

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