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

[Jon Awbrey]

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AIR.  Discussion Note 9

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JP = Jim Piat

Re: AIR-DIS 3.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-February/002390.html
In: AIR-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-February/thread.html#2386

Jim,

Returning to your remaining points:

JP: In addition, however arbitrary we might imagine our choice
    of an object to serve or function as a symbol (be it a sound,
    scribble, gesture, or whatever), my guess is that there is some
    trace (however remote or subliminal) of inconicity and indexically
    in the object selected.  Well I'll go further -- seems to me the mere
    fact that symbols exist requires or creates a world in which everything
    can be interpreted -- which in turn requires that everything actually is
    or can become connected or continuous.

JP: Reminds me of a favorite Sartre comment from the closing pages of his 
    autobiography, 'Words'.  Summing up himself he says something like --
    So in the end what am I?  A man like all men.  Good as any, better
    than none.

JP: Such is the continuity of all symbols.

Briefly put, thing_1 is an icon of a thing_2
when somebody interprets thing_1 as denoting
thing_2 by virtue of a property that thing_1
and thing_2 have in common.  Notice that the
case thing_1 = thing_2 is not being excluded.
So the question is not merely whether things
have qualities, nor even whether one or more
things have qualities in common, but whether
a particular shared quality is being invoked
as the ground of the representation at stake.
A dually analogous remark applies to indices.

So, giving its due to the continuity of humanity between Hitler and Sartre,
which does nothing to deny the abundance of important distinctions between
the two of them, I'll choose another method than flipping a coin when next
I find myself at the bookstore or in the voting booth facing this spectrum.

Jon Arbitrary

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