Inquiry Into Inquiry

Re: Peirce List • Jon Alan Schmidt

When you ask a question about what something is, you are asking a question about its ontology.  But signhood is not a matter of ontology, it is a form of relation.

Re: Peirce List • Edwina Taborsky • Helmut Raulien • Neal Bruss

Here again is that budget of excerpts on Determination, mostly Peirce with a few others before and after his time, all of which I collected back when I was turning my hand to the cybernetic and intelligent systems engineering prospects of Peirce’s theories of information, inquiry, and signs.

• Collection Of Source Materials • Determination

Contemporary conceptions of determination and determinacy in mathematics, physics, computer science, and engineering are covered by the concept of constraint and generalize beyond absolute determinism to degrees and measures of determination, ranging from none at all to totality.

Re: Peirce List • John Sowa

Three-Headed Dogs and Triadic Sign Relations

Peirce’s “Sop to Cerberus” got tossed about quite a bit in our discussions across the Web this millennium.  Here’s a record of one occasion from the days when our discussions bridged over multiple perspectives, in this instance the Peirce List and its parallel Arisbe List, the French SemioCom, and the Standard Upper Ontology Working Group:

• “Sop To Cerberus” (21 May 2001) • Arisbe • Ontology

I have long connected this passage with Peirce’s much earlier “metaphorical argument” where he changes the addressee of a word — that to which it stands for something — from a person, to that person’s memory, to “a particular remembrance or image in that memory”, to wit, “the one which is the mental equivalent of the word … in short, its interpretant.”

• “Semiotics Formalization” (23 Sep 2000) • Standard Upper Ontology

As I read the long arc of Peirce’s work, the greater significance of the transformation he suggests at these points is not the shift from one type of interpreter to another, however compelling the consideration of life-forms in general as sign-processing agents may be, but the change of perspective that pulls our exclusive focus on representative agents of semiosis back to a properly relational point of view and the triadic sign relations that generate competent semiotic conduct.  But Peirce made this transformation early on in his work, and even more strikingly in its first trials.  Viewed in that light I think I share Peirce’s despair that its full impact has yet to be felt.

References

• Peirce, C.S. (1866), “The Logic of Science, or, Induction and Hypothesis”, Lowell Lectures of 1866, pp. 357–504 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. (1908), “Letters to Lady Welby”, Chapter 24, pp. 380–432 in Charles S. Peirce : Selected Writings (Values in a Universe of Chance), Edited with Introduction and Notes by Philip P. Wiener, Dover Publications, New York, NY, 1966.

Resources

• C.S. Peirce • Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension
• Information = Comprehension × Extension • Selection 18
• Interpreters and Interpretants

Re: Facebook Discussion • CJ

Yes, that’s the idea.

Descriptive semiotics needs formal models for describing any sort of sign-using conduct, whether conducted by humans, life-forms, machines, or sign-using systems in general.

Normative semiotics, also known as logic, inquires into how sign-using agents “should” use signs in order to achieve specific goals, for example, how to get a “true” representation of an object system.

Re: Semiotic Triangle • JC

Peirce being prickly as usual his distinctions all tend toward tri-stinctions and on this field he wields his trident:  Tone, Token, Type.

Here’s a link to a few pertinent passages:

• Tone, Token, Type

Re: Semiotic Triangle • Francesco Bellucci

I am still looking for a way to build a bridge between the different senses of complete and incomplete being used in this discussion but while that bridge is under construction it may help to say what I’m saying another way.

Signs do not do anything at all by themselves — except take up space in their media — they do not denote, or mean, or propose anything at all except insofar as they are interpreted to do so.

Of course we all speak of signs denoting this or connoting that, but that is just loose talk, elliptical or informal manners of speaking, which our practice and theory of semiotics has the task of rendering clear.

One way of carrying out the required formalization is to introduce explicit interpreters and to specify exactly what interpretant signs they relate to just what signs in reference to just what objects.

But once we’ve specified that much, it becomes clear we are simply specifying a particular sign relation for specified object, sign, and interpretant domains.  It can be a rhetorical convenience to keep the figure of the interpreter as a hypostatic abstraction or personification of the sign relation but all the information about the interpreter’s semiotic conduct is contained in the bare sign relation itself.

Re: Semiotic Triangle • JA • FB • JA • FB

Two different senses of completeness and incompleteness in regard to signs arose in discussion at this point, as illustrated by the following exchange:

FB:

“Socrates” for Peirce would be an incomplete sign ….  Signs (i.e. complete signs) for Peirce are propositions, not names (which are signs, but incomplete).

JA:

The proper unit of analysis and classification is the whole sign relation where and are the object, sign, and interpretant sign domains, respectively.  In that sense, one could say the individual sign is always incomplete until one specifies the sign relational setting in which it is conceived to have significance.

FB:

Some signs are incomplete because although they must refer to object and interpretant, they do not do so explicitly.  So a proposition is “complete” in regard to the object, but not in regard to the interpretant.  An argument is complete in both respects, a term or rhema in neither.

One factor in the divergence appears to be a difference in the context of application, whether signs are regarded in the light of descriptive or normative semiotics.  Another appears to be a difference in the level of analysis, whether the prospective completion of a sign is considered to be a sign relational triple or its degree of completeness evaluated in the context of a whole sign relation

I am using language that is common in the mathematical theory of relations, which itself got one of its biggest growth spurts from Peirce’s own logic of relative terms.  The concepts of relational domains, elementary relations (ordered tuples), and components or correlates of ordered tuples are all straightforward translations of Peirce’s own concepts.  And they do help very much, I would say they are of critical importance in applying the theory of triadic sign relations to practical settings in logic, mathematics, computing, and the sciences in general.

The basic ideas can be found in my notes on Peirce’s 1870 Logic of Relatives:

• Peirce’s 1870 Logic Of Relatives

Note. The following links afford a review of the discussion up to this point.
Re: Semiotic Triangle • JC • JA • JA • JC • JA • JA • JC • JA • FB • JA • JA

Peirce gives his clearest and most complete definition of signs and sign relations in the context of defining logic.  Here’s a link to a couple of variants:

• C.S. Peirce • On the Definition of Logic

There is more discussion in the following article and section:

• Sign Relations • Definition

The proper unit of analysis is the whole sign relation where and are the object, sign, and interpretant sign domains, respectively.  In that sense, one could say that the individual sign is always incomplete until one specifies the sign relational setting in which it is conceived to have significance.