[Inquiry] Re: Pure Symbols -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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PS.  Discussion Note 9

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BB = Bill Bailey

BB: It seems to me the issue of pure symbol is open to
    at least three different points of view.  One is the
    formal, which I understand to be purely theoretical --
    in this case what must be and must not be true in
    Peirce's theory of signs.  I assume there are no
    actual, concrete signs in this perspective, but
    only formal relations that can or can't be.

BB: A second point of view is the abstracted, the
    generalized usages of a culture or group.  Here
    the sign the signs are actual, the relations are
    the most conventional usages -- religious symbols
    are icons, "and" and "or" are conjunctions and have
    their "dictionary meanings".

BB: A third point of view is the descriptive, which necessarily
    involves both what is potential and actual in sign usage, and
    a sign's semiotic relations depends upon its situated usage.
    For example, after a child's labored explanation of tardiness
    to a teacher, the teacher's rising circumflex "And ... ?" would
    strike me as clearly indexical, as I think it might any wise child.

BB: In brief, I cannot understand how "and", "or", or "of" can be instances
    of pure symbols in a formal existence when they are actual linguistic
    signs whose semiotic relationships are derived from usage, whether
    situational or conventional.

Bill,

Some of the remarks that I made on another thread may be pertinent here,
by way of a general orientation to the manner in which I see theory and
practice intertwining with each other:

COS-DIS JA 113.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2005-March/002412.html

In particular:

JA: The critical feature that I want to keep in mind can be explained
    as follows.  We want to use sign relations as formal accounts or
    theoretical models of realistic semiotic phenomena.  Is is often
    useful to start out thinking in terms of interpretive agents who
    are "conscious" of certain things, who have a "representation"
    of certain facts, or more precisely, whose performance betrays
    or gives evidence of a certain competence, conscious or not.
    There is then a standard way of prescinding our account of
    the situation away from the irrelevant features of these
    interpreters, leaving a sign relation, say L c O x S x I,
    that summarizes what we, as "outside" observers, suppose
    is going on beneath the semiotic phenomenon in question.
    As long as we know how to translate from the "soppy"
    language of interpreters to the "non-soppy" language
    of interpretants, we needn't worry about using the
    sop of the interpreter as a hypostatic abstraction
    from the process in view.  It is in that spirit,
    then, and with that onus, that we can speak of
    what the interpreter actually has in mind,
    or behaves as if it has in mind.

JA: In light of all the above considerations, when we speak of
    signs serving as icons in a sign relation that underlies
    a semiotic process, we probably have in mind that the
    interpreter in question is aware, or quasi-aware, of
    a specific quality that the sign shares with its
    object.  Accordingly, we have to ask how such
    an explicit invocation of a specific quality
    should show up in the sign relation that we
    will use as an explanation of that process.

JA: In other words, it is not enough that we, the outside observers, can see
    some property or another that the object and the sign share, for any two
    things in the same universe share the property of being in that universe,
    and thus "could be" icons of each other to some degree.  There has to be
    some reason to think that a specific, non-trivial property is shared and
    that a quasi-cognition of this property is somehow evident in the action.

So, although it's possible, and for certain intervals of time even necessary,
to pursue theory in a formal, "let's pretend it's for its own sake" way, the
good of the whole exercise is ultimately to arrive at better descriptions of
actual, real-live, significant phenomena, including in this case language as
she's spoke.

But, and it's a big but, as they say, in order to do this many other things
are necessary.  It is necessary to make use of classificatory idealizations,
"ideal types", as some of the sociologists use the term.  How can the ideas
of points, lines, planes, massless point particles, or pure bureaucracies
be useful if there are no such things in nature or society?  Naturually,
we are already using these kinds of schematic ideals, and speaking of
them "existing" in some vague sense or another, whenever we speak of
icons, indices, symbols, terms, propositions, arguments, and so on.

The only question here is whether pure symbols exist in the
same sense that we are already speaking of symbols existing.

It was nice to have a quote from the Peirce's mouth, but that
is not the only way, nor even the most decisive way to answer
the question.  The necessary properties of sign relations can
be deduced from a proper definition of sign relations, and if
we cannot do that, then we probably don't have, excluding the
chances of a rich enough to be incompletable theory, a proper
definition yet.

In sum, there is a level of abstract form that we need to
deal with on its own terms, precisely in order to make our
grasp of logic more useful in practice.  At that level, the
ideas of conjunction, disjunction, and relative application,
that Peirce is suggesting by means of the words "and", "or",
and "of", have exactly the formal qualities that are defined
for them, and no others.  Now, I know when I use the symbols
"^" for conjunction and "v" for disjunction, that I will think
of the mnemonics that "^" looks like an "A" and "v" is for the
Latin "vel", and anyone who just read 'The Da Vinci Code' will
probably have a wealth of new associations for these forms, but
any resemblance to icons living or dead is purely co-incidental
to their function as symbols in logic.

Jon Awbrey

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