Re: Interpreter and Interpretant • Selection 4

Re: Conceptual Graphs • Tom Gollier

Tom,

Another discussion coming to mind is one we had on this subject in 2016.  Once again I’ll save a measure of strain on my brain by reprising that here and picking up from that point.

Re: Peirce List • Abduction, Deduction, Induction : Analogy, Inquiry • Tom Gollier

I know we’ve discussed the various meanings of the word object which make sense in Peirce’s semiotics and pragmatism generally, so let me just link to a recent comment I found in my search for previous mentions.

Keeping that variety of meanings in mind, a few more words may help to clarify the reading from last time.

• There are of course the usual run of behaviorist, causal, stimulus-response theories of “signal processing” and “verbal behavior” that have enjoyed their popularity and never-say-die revivals from the days of Charles Morris to B.F. Skinner, but Peirce’s semiotics includes them as degenerate species of the more solid genre he had in mind.

• Peirce’s definition of a triadic sign relation is cast at such a level of generality that nothing in it prevents a sign relation from having intentional objects in its object domain

• To say that coolness is a sign of rain is a perfectly natural statement in English and I think it would be a more troubling narrowness to exclude it from sense.

• Semiotic objects are any objects of discussion or thought.  It should be obvious that we talk and think about future, imaginary, intentional, or “virtual” objects all the time.

• The fact that coolness might be a sign of many other things is exactly what calls for our peripatetic hero to abduce a hypothesis (rain?), to deduce a prediction (dark clouds?), and to test the prediction against further observations (look up!).  All of those features are why we chose Dewey’s story as an illustration of a full-blown inquiry.

Reference

It helps to read “object” in a fuller sense than we often do in billiard‑ball philosophies, as a lot gets lost in the translation from the Greek “pragma” from which pragmatism naturally takes its cue.  For a sample of that fuller sense see the following lexicon entry.

• πρᾶγμα • Liddell, H.G., and Scott, R. (1925), A Greek-English Lexicon (1940 edition),
  Perseus Digital Library.

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