[Inquiry] Re: Questions Involving Pure Symbols -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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QUIPS.  Discussion Note 35

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JA = Jon Awbrey
JR = Joe Ransdell
MW = Merriam-Webster

Re: QUIPS-DIS 34.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-May/002721.html
In: QUIPS-DIS.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-May/thread.html#2602

JA: The way I see it 3rdness and 3-adic relations hold everything together
    without needing icons and indices as supports -- that would make about
    as much sense as putting training wheels on a tricycle.

JR: The simile is absurd:  let it persuade whom it persuades.

JA: Therefore, given the fundamental nature of 3-adic sign relations,
    iconic and indexical sign relations arise as reduced derivatives
    of genuine sign relations, the bits and pieces of Humpty Dumpty
    from which he cannot be put together again.

JR: As if someone has argued for deriving 3rdness from bits and pieces
    of 2ndness and 1stness!  Why do you resort to this sort of strawman
    argumentation if you have good arguments available?

JA: In other words, thirdness is the first category that has
    any real reality to it -- the others are but shadows of it.

JR: One could hardly want a better example of the rhetoric of rationalism
    in the sense of rationality conceived as detached from experience.

The notion that there are qualities without instances
or instances without qualities is what I would call
idealizations that are detached from experience.

JA: Qualifiers like "mode of apprehension" (MOA), "mode of presentation" (MOP),
    and "immediate", as it's used here, should warn us of the fact that we are
    talking about residual aspects of allegation and imputation, that is, what
    the interpreter thinks he/she is thinking about at the moment in question.

JR: I see in this continuing attempt to persuade us that Peirce's conception
    of the imputed quality is to be ignored, by talking as if all that Peirce
    means by "imputed" is what we would actually express more naturally by
    saying "putative", an indication that Jon is indeed worried about the
    implications of Peirce's introduction of that conception.  After all,
    it is he who insists on a close reading of the relevant passages,
    holding Peirce -- rightly -- to strict usage.  Yet he loses all
    interest in this and even goes out of his way, again and again,
    to work "impute" into his comments with the innocuous meaning
    he would prefer it to have.  I'll be returning to this in
    a day or two with the evidence to the contrary (most of
    which has already been made available but I will be
    updating that).

MW: Impute.
    1.  to lay the responsibility or blame for,
        often falsely or unjustly : to charge.
    2.  to credit to a person or a cause :
        to attribute
    syn.  ascribe, attribute, assign, impute, credit mean
    to lay something to the account of a person or thing.
    impute suggests ascribing something that brings
    discredit by way of accusation or blame.

MW: Imputation.
    1a.  attribution, ascription.
    1b.  accusation.
    1c.  insinuation.

For my part, I have never suggested ignoring Peirce's conception
of imputed quality.  I have merely noted that it has the quality
of an allegation that leaves the question of truth up in the air.
Failing to recognize this, and I'm sure that Peirce never failed
to mark it, leaves us susceptible to the surd of classical chaos
that so sulfuriously emanates from suffering non-beings to exist.
I suggest what seems clear to me from Peirce's development of the
concept, that arriving at an adequate definition of the vernacular
paraphrase "imputed quality" will depend on an adequate definition
of sign relation, and not the reverse.  In other words, the vaguity
of imputed quality is simply a way of invoking a 3-adic sign relation
in which the full set of 3 references cannot be reduced by prescission.

JA: Thus, the phrases "immediate object" and "immediate interpretant" really
    refer to ancillary descriptions, whether explicit or unexamined, that is,
    just more signs.  The best way to handle these is through the analysis of
    the sign domain S, once again invoking complex signs, rather than adjoining
    more dimensions to the 3-adic relation L c O x S x I.

JR: Actually, it is a matter of recognizing what is implicit in
    talking about "dimensions" in this connection to begin with.

That sounds like another way to say it.

JA: Now, I cannot say whether Joe is mainly interested in (1),
    but I know that what I am mainly interested in is not (2).
    Indeed, this smacks of the "syncat dodge" that we've seen
    nominal thinkers resorting to time and time again, and it
    is a fact that Peirce's most solid treatments of logical
    symbols do not resort to it, but present the denotations
    of logical symbols as real objects, no matter how formal.

JR: But why, one wonders, would Peirce have regarded
    diagrammatic signs -- which are iconic -- as so
    important in logical representation if symbols
    can do it all?   You really do have to have
    some explanation of this if you expect your
    view to be persuasive.

Since I am only saying that 'some' symbols do the task that
they are assigned to do without the aid of icons or indices,
and since I have never argued that the existence of primes
counts againts the utilities and virtues of composites,
there is nothing really to explain here.

Jon Awbrey

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