[Inquiry] Re: Kaina Stoicheia -- Commentary

[Jon Awbrey]

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KS.  Commentary Note 3

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Re: KS 1.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-September/003063.html
In: KS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-September/thread.html#3063

Peirce List,

In the matter of Theory and Practice, Peirce begins by explaining the
difference between theoretical propositions and practical propositions,
which he couches in the terms of a semiotic or sign relational framework.
We come almost immediately to several problems of interpretation, coming
to a head in the following passage:

| In the first place, a sign is not a real thing.
| It is of such a nature as to exist in 'replicas'.
| Look down a printed page, and every 'the' you see
| is the same word, every 'e' the same letter.  A real
| thing does not so exist in replica.  The being of a
| sign is merely 'being represented'.  Now 'really being'
| and 'being represented' are very different.  Giving to
| the word 'sign' the full scope that reasonably belongs
| to it for logical purposes, a whole book is a sign;  and
| a translation of it is a replica of the same sign.  A whole
| literature is a sign.  The sentence "Roxana was the queen of
| Alexander" is a sign of Roxana and of Alexander, and though
| there is a grammatical emphasis on the former, logically the
| name "Alexander" is as much 'a subject' as is the name "Roxana";
| and the real persons Roxana and Alexander are 'real objects' of
| the sign.
|
| Every sign that is sufficiently complete refers refers to sundry
| real objects.  All these objects, even if we are talking of Hamlet's
| madness, are parts of one and the same Universe of being, the "Truth".
| But so far as the "Truth" is merely the 'object' of a sign, it is merely
| the Aristotelian 'Matter' of it that is so.
|
| C.S. Peirce, "Kaina Stoicheia", NEM 4, 238-239
| Also appears in "New Elements", EP 2, 303-304

At first it seems obvious enough that the Peirce who says
"a sign is not a real thing" is not the Peirce who speaks
as a Platonic or Scholastic realist, but one is using the
phrases "real thing" and "real object" in accord with the
more streetwise values that they bear in mundane parlance,
however pre-reflective and pre-critical those uses may be.
We may have some difficulty extending this street meaning
to the case of Hamlet's madness, but the problem does not
seem insurmountable in itself, as all the groundlings wot.

Read this way, Peirce is simply pointing out the familiar dual use of
the word "sign" to refer to a very concrete thing and also to a very
abstract thing, the relationship between the two being more or less
well treated in terms of the token/type relation.  Here the tokens
or replicas are awarded the titular honor of a cave-internal sort
of reality, whereas in other lights, more cave-external, it'd be
the types or the equivalence classes of tokens that are said to
be the real realities.  I think most folks know the variations
on this theme, all independently of the particular words that
are used to play it out, so I think it's safe to proceed on
the grounds of that prior understanding.

Jon Awbrey

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