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

[Jon Awbrey]

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QUIPS.  Discussion Note 39

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AB = Auke van Breemen
JA = Jon Awbrey

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

Auke,

I continue to continue ...

JA: So what's at stake here?

JA: Well, I think Joe Ransdell expressed
    it rather well in another connection:

JR: Habit is what holds everything together in Hume
    much as 3rdness does in Peirce's thinking.

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.

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

AB: Well, looked upon from a cosmic scale I would say, under the assumption
    that animate mind did araise after the universe in which it is operative,
    it is more probable that that mind at the start followed its surroundings
    directly, only to be activated at the first distancing, so indices and
    icons are presupposed in all symbolic action.  Maybe one could say that
    animated mind arises the moment organisms are skinning themselves off
    of their surroundings, whenever that moment might be and whatever it
    might look like.

AB: So you are worrying about what it is that sticks it all together
    and in your opinion it is the (pure) symbol that is the glue and
    the source of  it all at the same time.  At the most you gave an
    expression of the glue, not the glue itself.  But apart from that,
    what is the glue without glueing?  Potential glue to be captured
    in a semi-rhematic way by an interpretant thought on account of
    its inability to exist in its own pureness?

Actually, it's not glue, it's hypostatic electricity.

AB: But let's not forget that I did not take a
    stance in the discussion, sympathy divided.

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.
    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.

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.

AB: At this point I regard the making of the difference of perspective
    in more or less common terms to us, thus a Peircean vocabulary, of
    greater importance than the place in the sign classification the
    different perspectives are going to be associated with after
    analysis.  Since you start with discarding the Welby work,
    the question remains whether your words on pure symbols
    can be found in Peirce under the heading of continuous
    predicates, that are associated with the immediate
    object in the Welby version of the Spec. Grammar.

Didn't get what you were saying here.

AB: I do not see the connection with nominalism.
    But maybe my reference to the Tractatus
    somewhere along the line did trigger that.

People, namely, most notoriously, nominal thinkers, who would eschew at almost
any cost committing themselves, ontologically speaking, to the existence and/or
reality of abstract objects, hypostatic abstractions, and formal constructions
like "information", among which we find the denotations of basic logical signs,
are prone to say that these symbols are "syncategorematic terms", that do not
denote any sort of objects in their own right but merely serve as connective
ligaments in the textual tissues of syntax.  If that's how some read what
Peirce is saying about copulants, then I tend to suspect some measure of
backsliding in their realism about abstract objects.

Jon Awbrey

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