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

[Jon Awbrey]

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FOLG.  Discussion Note 4

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JA = Jon Awbrey
JR = Joe Ransdell

Re: FOLG-DIS 3.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-October/003137.html
In: FOLG-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-October/thread.html#3135

Joe, Peirce List,

JR: In your message just previous to this you say:

JA: The duality of interpretation for logical graphs tells us
    that the empty medium, the tabula rasa, what Peirce called
    the "sheet of assertion" is a genuine symbol, not a species
    of icon or index, nor, as it has no parts, can it have icons
    or indices among them.  What goes for the medium must go for
    all the signs that it mediates.  Thus we have the case that
    Peirce in one place called "pure symbols", naming a sample
    of fundamental logical operators specifically among them.

JR: But there are several questionable things in what you are saying here.
    First, your idea that the sheet of assertion is an "empty medium", a
    "tabula rasa", fits poorly with -- seems on the face of it to be in
    flat contradiction with -- Peirce's characterization of the sheet
    of assertion as "representing the universe of discourse, and as
    asserting whatever is taken for granted between the graphist
    and the interpreter to be true of that universe" (CP 4.396),
    or when he says that "even the first writing of a graph on
    the sheet is a modification of the graph already written"
    (CP 4.431) or that it can be compared to "an undeveloped
    photograph of the facts in the universe" or, perhaps
    better, as a map (4.512-13).  Perhaps you can explain
    all this away, but who would want to place superior
    confidence in the extremely abstract reasoning that
    doing this would entail, when it would seem more
    plausible, on the face of it, to trust that
    Peirce meant just what he seemed to mean in
    the characterizations of the sheet of
    assertion just quoted and to assume
    that you are reading an abstractive
    move into what he is saying which
    is based on presuppositions of
    your own that is in conflict
    with Peirce's?

Here is a misunderstanding that can be disposed of quickly enough.
It's been so long since I thought of the tabula rasa as anything
but a plenum that I almost forget its Lockeian origins, and the
role as an argument stopper that it supposedly served in that
vintage bottle.  Not since the days when McLuhan revived the
old Peircean theme about the prior distribution of meanings
in the blank mind have we parroted that crustier doctrine
about the dichotomy between the medium and the message,
and so the tabula rasa, properly slated, is now more
reckoned a vote for than a veto of the innate idea.
This is, as you recall, all a piece with Peirce's
parallel critique of the Cartesian dubito, and
it's forgetfulness of all that it was never
aware of enough to doubt, and by a doubt
to say we end pretending and begin to
wonder truly.

But this must've been why those those three weird systems,
"the clean slate, the empty medium, the vacuum potential"
came to mind at the startup, as physicists have long time
passing ceased to view the vacuum as verily a being empty.

Jon Awbrey

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