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

[Jon Awbrey]

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AIR.  Discussion Note 6

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BB = Bill Bailey

Re: AIR-DIS 5.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-February/002392.html
In: AIR-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-February/thread.html#2386

JA: 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>.

BB:  I'm glad to read that.  As a novice here I'm always worrying that I'm
     misunderstanding something.  There seems to be a great deal of concern
     here with sign types as if they were entities with specific attributes,
     but  I thought that was probably a result of having to name and talk
     about names in discursive language.

I've been dancing around this point for a couple of weeks,
as interpretive dance is not my number, and it's a tricky
pas de trois to highlight Peirce's categories in just the
right fashion.  For one thing, they almost seem to pander
to prodigiously a-priori essentialist prejudices, whereas
I'm sure, or relatively sure, that such an interpretation
was not his ultimate intention.  Nevertheless, the "-ness"
that ends the words "firstness", "secondness", "thirdness"
seems to invite a reading in terms of absolute properties.
About all I can say about that is:  "Don't go there!"

It is in principle possible to talk about arbitary-ary relations
in what appears to be intensional terms, since a quality is just
what is shared by the set of things that possess that quality in
common, meaning that every quality yields a set.  And if we pass
from natural kinds to arbitrarily artificial kinds, as we always
eventually must, then every set yields a quality, the quality of
belonging to that set.  But don't be deceived by appearances, as
a collection of j-tuples is a very different brand of thing from
a collection of k-tuples, for every j not equal to k.

By 1870, Peirce will be treating arbitrary-ary relations in terms that are
relatively balanced with respect to extensional and intensional manners of
expression, but prior to that he seems to favor the qualitative mannerisms,
and this misleads a certain fraction of his interpreters to think that all
we have to say about relations can be formulated in absolute monadic terms.

To a good first approximation, we could say that firstness, secondness, thirdness
are just what all 1-adic, 2-adic, 3-adic relations, respectively, have in common.
A better approximation could be obtained by adding the qualifier "genuine" to
the mention of relations, but trying to say what we mean by "genuine" tends
to slow things up too much at the outset, and it's a better strategy to
admit too many relations at the start and then sort them out later.

Jon Awbrey

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