[Inquiry] Re: Logic Of The Sciences -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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LOTS.  Discussion Note 5

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Bernard,

I will try to address your last remarks at a different level of detail,
as they call to mind some issues that I've been trying to tackle from
the beginning of this discussion.

BM: Yes, changing the pair early/late into precocious/experimented changes the 
    "connotation".  I don't see the meaning of shifting back from 1870 to 1865 
    proposed by Jon.  Is it the problem of sign / symbol ? (the symbol qua the 
    only kind of sign that logics would be concerned with?).  What I consider
    important with regards to the discussion with T. Short but with some other
    Peirce scholars as well, is that the conception of sign or representamen,
    while philosophically grounded in the New List, will remain the same until
    the end, even after it was passed under the control of the logic of relations.

BM: Representation is already defined in the NL as a triad S, O, I and such that I
    is in the same relation to O as S itself stands.  This makes the definition of
    the sign closed.  The condition I write after & was not added further in Peirce's
    life, it was already there in the New List as a logical requisite to be studied.
    The thesis of two Peirce, the one of the immediate object and interpretant and
    the other of the dynamical object, and two additional interpretants (for example)
    assumes most of the time, at least implicitly, that the requisite of sameness
    between S-O and I-O came later.  So, in the experienced man the precocious man
    was at work, I think.  This is tantamount to say that in the philosopher (young
    or old), the logician (young or old) was at work.  As regards to the New List
    I interpret this text as an agenda for future work, that is to say a large
    hypothesis (namely the prescission rules).  Time will render the hypothesis
    more and more plausible and this explain why the late CSP will consider this
    early work as his main contribution to philosophy.  But this is how I see
    myself the matter and I can be wrong.

I still get the feeling, when people talk this way about sign relations,
that we are talking past each other and looking at different constructs.
To me a sign relation is a 'set' of triples that is entirely arbitrary
except for satisfying, as a whole, the definition of a sign relation
in terms of certain constraints or indecomposable determinations,
and this brand of determination does not even make sense except
in the context of whole sets of objects, signs, interpretants.

The way I see it, a randomly chosen sign relation is something like
a cubic kilometer of tropical rainforest.  We may find this or that
relatively homogeneous subsample, like a swarm of bees that happen
to be generated from a single queen as their geneatrix, and here
we can speak of a portion of the given sign relation that forms
a natural kind, but all in all, the sign relation in general
is a congeries, not a genuine genus.  So Peirce circa 1865
is making what is a slightly ingenuous and even specious
assumption that representation must be a genus in any
genuine sense of the word, much less a summum genus,
except in an extremely rarefied and vacuous sense.

Jon Awbrey

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