[Inquiry] Re: Futures Of Logical Graphs -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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FOLG.  Discussion Note 32

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JA = Jon Awbrey
JR = Joe Ransdell

Re: FOLG-DIS 22.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-November/003176.html
Re: FOLG-DIS 23.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-November/003177.html
In: FOLG-DIS.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-November/thread.html#3167

Joe, Peirce List,

Comments interspersed ...

JR: Thus the use of the word "involves" as an intentionally vague description of
    the relationship in question is not necessary.  But it is nevertheless very
    helpful to be able to use it to describe that relationship in discussing the
    philosophical problem because it does in fact convey in that use -- even to
    you -- a sense determinate enough to be informative in understanding Peirce's
    theory of meaning ...

JA, correcting a couple of typos:

JA: If it were a "sense determinate enough to be informative", that is,
    if "determinate" involves being clear, and "informative" involves
    being informative enough, then I think that this inquiry would
    be at its end.  The fact that uncertainty remains is evidence
    that something about something is still unclear to someone --
    information being relative to interpreters, as you note --
    and I am simply proceeding on what presently seems one
    likely hypothesis about where the dust bunnies might
    be hiding.

JR: I thought I was making it sufficiently clear that I meant that it is informative
    enough about the problematics of his theory, i.e. about the dispute between us,
    to provide the initial basis for inquiry into and discussion about that theory.
    I contend that in his view symbols cannot perform their function as such without
    there being something involved that functions as an icon.  This is in conflict
    with your view that there are pure symbols which, according to you, are capable
    of functioning as such without the involvement of anything iconic.  It is not
    necessary to find a clear and explicit definition of "involves" or settle upon
    one in order to proceed further in the inquiry or dispute because Peirce does not
    himself require the use of the word "involves" to state his view.  The question
    at issue concerns the relationship of the symbol to the icon in semeiosis, not
    the meaning of the word "involves".  Of course something is still unclear about
    the matter.  But your focus on the meaning of "involves" as something problematic
    simply obscures what is actually problematic, replacing the need to look more
    closely at how he describes how symbols work with an impertinent digression
    into the meaing of a term which is not in dispute to begin with.

I think that I have clarified the conceptual --
not merely verbal -- issue a bit further in
the following two notes:

Cf: FOLG-DIS 26.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-November/003180.html
Cf: FOLG-DIS 27.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-November/003182.html

It's clear to me, at any rate, that both the word "involve"
and any number of its synonyms is involved in this question.

Moreover, it is precisely my concern with how symbols really work
that leads me to insist on one of the fundamental properties that
at least some of them exhibit, namely, the power to inform, and
therefore to denote and to connote, without the auxiliary of
icons or indices.

JR: Then, after dismissing my account of the relevance of this to
    Tom Short's paper on the grounds on the grounds that you don't
    recall much about that earlier discussion but that your "vague
    impression is that he was saying the usual thing about Peirce's
    course of development, based on the implicit assumption of most
    philosophical training in the 20th Century, to wit, that nearer
    to Frege is nearer to Truth, a faith that has all the more force
    whenit works unconsciously in people who would probably deny it",
    you go on to say:

JA: But I see no plausibility yet for the assertion that
    "the semeiosis process was conceived by Peirce, from
    early on, as being such that the symbolic aspect of
    semeiosis essentially involves the functioning of
    an icon presentative of the sense of the symbol".
    Indeed, I would have to diagnose that belief
    as a symptom of the unexamined faith that
    I adverted to above.

JR: No, I was never "trained" in the faith of Frege-worship.  My interpretation of
    Peirce is based on my study of Peirce's "New List" of categories of 1867 and the
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy papers of 1868-69 and his repeated and sometimes
    vehement insistence  in his later years that he was himself convinced of the basic
    soundness of what he was doing in that early period, which you supposedly have some
    respect for yourself, up to the point where he says things which you cannot take
    seriously, as in the categorial deduction where he derives the basic conceptions
    of the icon, index, and symbol insofar as that was pertinent to his purpose there,
    which was to use that distinction of sign types in his concepual founding of logic,
    where they are used to distinguish the three types of inference.  In your subsequent
    post you say:

JA: I agree that the first elements of Peirce's theory of sign relations are yet
    to be widely understood.  First among firsts, not to be categorical about it,
    would have to be the consequences of irreducible 3-adicity, consequences that
    fail to be duly cognized in the actual thinking even of those who will readily
    give a modicum of lip-service to the principle.

JR: I see no reason why the dependence of symbolism on iconic and indexical 
    signs should be thought of as putting the irreducibility of the generic 
    relation into question.  Symbols are not built up from icons and indices.

Actually, some symbols 'are' built up from icons and indices, even if it
always takes more symbols, the logical ligaments and connective tissues
of "not", "and", "or", "of", and their like to hold them all together.

But that is not the question.

The same form of recursion comes up in the New List, with respect
to the three types of inference.  If you say that all abduction
depends on deduction and induction, that there is nothing like
a basic or primitive abduction that does not call on deduction
and induction simply to do the duty that is proper to itself,
then you have ipso facto reduced the types of inference to 2.

JR: But you could perhaps explain that most effectively at the point where
    we are reasonably clear on precisely how the iconic (and the indexical,
    as far as that goes) is involved -- if you can tolerate that term until
    we are in position to determine its meaning further -- at which time we
    will certainly not want to find that we have inadvertently made such an
    unwanted reduction.

Unfortunately, the question, once begged, continues to go begging.

Jon Awbrey

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