Re: Interpreter and Interpretant • Selection 4

Re: Conceptual Graphs • Tom Gollier

TG:

Given your diagram of Dewey’s example, I don’t see how the event of rain can be the object (O).  The objects seem more clearly to be the air and the clouds which in their coolness and darkness are being taken as signs (S).  The event of rain is only included in this situation via the interpretant (I), the thought to the likelihood of rain.

What’s more, the ambiguity of this interpretant, being both a thought of the likelihood of rain and the object, rain, might be a clue to getting at the nature of the interpretant in general as we move along?

Tom,

The meaning of the word object in pragmatic thought is another one of those topics we keep circling back to.  There are more thought‑out thoughts I shared in my early days on the Peirce List, but since this very issue arose just recently in other discussions I’ll save myself a modicum of mental effort by linking to my latest attempts to clarify the point.

The object of reasoning is to find out …

If the object of an investigation is to find out something we do not know then the clues we discover along the way are the signs which determine that object.

People will continue to be confused about determination so long as they can think of no other forms but analytic-behaviorist-causal-dyadic-temporal, object-as-stimulus, sign-as-response varieties.  It’s true ordinary language biases us toward billiard‑ball styles of dyadic determination but there are triadic forms of constraint, determination, and interaction not captured by S‑R chains of that order.

Pragmatic objects of signs and concepts are anything we talk or think about and semiosis does not conduct its transactions within the bounds of object as cue, sign as cue ball, and interpretants as solids, stripes, and pockets.

References

• Awbrey, J.L., and Awbrey, S.M. (1995), “Interpretation as Action : The Risk of Inquiry”, Inquiry : Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines 15(1), 40–52.  Archive.  Journal.  Online (doc) (pdf).
• Dewey, J. (1910/1991), How We Think, D.C. Heath, Boston, MA.  Reprinted (1991), Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY.  Online.
• Peirce, C.S. (1859–1861), “My Life, written for the Class-Book”, pp. 1–3 in Writings of Charles S. Peirce : A Chronological Edition, Volume 1, 1857–1866, Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.
• Peirce, C.S. (1877), “The Fixation Of Belief”, Popular Science Monthly 12 (Nov 1877), pp. 1–15.  Reprinted in Collected Papers, CP 5.358–387.  Online.

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