[Inquiry] Re: Grounds And Respects -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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GAR.  Discussion Note 3

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JA = Jon Awbrey
JC = John Collier
JP = Jim Piat

Re: GAR-DIS 1.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/002447.html
In: GAR-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/thread.html#2447

In part:

JP: So, to relate this notion to those mentioned by Peirce below  I would also say
    that resemblance or likeness is not mere versimilitude but actual identity of
    form.  I would reserve versimiltude for approximate resemblance of form.

JA: Another question we have to ask in a context-relative way
    is whether Peirce is using -- or whether we want to use --
    the word "form" in a Platonic, Aristotelian, or more
    thoroughly modern physical way.  Hard to decide.

JC remarks:

JC: Indeed a tricky issue.  From a paper of mine:  Peirce refers to ideas as "to be
    understood in a sort of Platonic sense, very familiar in everyday talk", suggesting
    Platonism.  This can be replaced (relatively) uncontroversially with Locke’s notion
    of abstract ideas based in "partial consideration", or, in more modern and less
    psychologistic terms, as situations (Barwise and Perry 1983).  Peirce calls the
    interpretant, a relation in which the sign bears some variety of correspondence
    to its reference through the immediate object of the sign (ground), which is
    an "idea" corresponding to the object not in all its respects, but only under
    certain considerations (Peirce CP 2:2287, 1940, p. 275).

I think this is CP 2.228, "from an unidentified fragment, c. 1897",
but the text appears on p. 135 in my copy.  Here is the paragraph:

CSP: | A sign, or 'representamen', is something which stands to somebody
     | for something in some respect or capacity.  It addresses somebody,
     | that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign,
     | or perhaps a more developed sign.  That sign which it creates
     | I call the 'interpretant' of the first sign.  The sign stands
     | for something, its 'object'.  It stands for that object, not
     | in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which
     | I have sometimes called the 'ground' of the representamen.
     | "Idea" is here to be understood in a sort of Platonic sense,
     | very familiar in everyday talk;  I mean in that sense in which
     | we say that one man catches another man's idea, in which we say
     | that when a man recalls what he was thinking of at some previous
     | time, he recalls the same idea, and in which when a man continues
     | to think anything, say for a tenth of a second, in so far as the
     | thought continues to agree with itself during that time, that is
     | to have a 'like' content, it is the same idea, and is not at each
     | instant of the interval a new idea.
     |
     | C.S. Peirce, 'Collected Papers', CP 2.228 (c. 1897)

I think it's clear from this that Peirce does not equate sign with ground.
The sign stands for its object, "not in all respects, but in reference
to a sort of idea", and it is this idea that Peirce calls the ground.

JC: That doesn't directly address the issue of form,
    but it does suggest that if Peirce was talking
    about Platonic forms, it is a common sense way.

I would say that he takes the Platonic way to be the common sense way.

Jon Awbrey

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