[Inquiry] Re: Sign Relations -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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SR.  Discussion Note 11

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Cf: Jon Awbrey & Susan Awbrey, "Interpretation as Action: The Risk of Inquiry"
    http://www.chss.montclair.edu/inquiry/fall95/awbrey.html

As Susan Awbrey and I pointed out in the paper cited above,
brute expereience and the outward clash are already present
in Aristotle's account of the sign relation, under the heading
of 'pathemata' or "affective impressions".  These are actually
the closest things to the objects of experience, of which signs
and concepts are fragmentary and shadowy derivatives.  Fudging
a little, it is possible to relate these affective impressions
to interpretant signs, with the understanding that less direct
signs, of the sort that we speak and write and cognize in,
are derived by a process of reflection on these impresses,
and that one mode of interpreting words and thoughts is to
return to the more concrete impressions as interpretants.
Thus there is a back and forth play between pathemata
and their derivatives that we may call "reflection"
and "interpretation", in some senses, respectively.

I do not know if there are any creatures who experience nothing but
the 2-adic clash in a stimulus-response fashion, but I'm pretty sure
that intelligence depends on reflection thereof, thus inserting the
mediating parameter of signs into the flow of experience.  In this
connection, we may note that, far from the passive determination
that marches from objects to signs in a stimulus-response fashion,
the pragmatic maxim is stated in terms of the reverse direction:
"if you do this, you will experience this".  This is critical
to transforming 2-adic reactions into 3-adic reflections.

Jon Awbrey

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