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Directory:Jon Awbrey/Papers/Inquiry Driven Systems : Part 5 (view source)
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=====5.2.11.5. Of Signs and the Mind=====
=====5.2.11.5. Of Signs and the Mind=====
<pre>
In the process of trying to clarify my ID of inquiry, I worked my way back through several modern animadversions, credulous and critical at turns, to an original classical source for many of the ideas that are involved in it. In the process of attempting to understand this text, encountered as a foundation stone in the discussion of sign relations, I found myself invoking, almost reflexively, a number of distinctions, for instance, that between "figure" and "letter", as they are used to mark a manner of interpretation, and that between "form" and "matter", as they concern the content of an indication, and each distinction in its turn seemed to be necessary just in order to outline a sufficient indication of what I sense to be a proper reading of this text.
But the mere formation and the occasional invocation of these words, no matter how familiar the sound of them, is of little benefit to my reader if I cannot explain the sense of them, whether long established meanings or any new gleanings that I intend, and the instrumentality intended for these distinctions can be of little use to anyone unless I can say, with regard to each conceivable distinction, how it is made or how I make it. In accordance with this reflection on the making of distinctions, I am thus led to ask: Who makes these distinctions, and how are they made? Are they made before us, by us, or after us?
I think I began innocently enough, with no predominating desire either to dispatch or else to vindicate any particular line of thought, but simply to trace the effects of certain ideas, and this means tracking them down to their sources, in whatever places they are to be found, whether ancient or modern, as well as trying to deduce or to foresee their consequences in theory or in action, whether for good or for ill. And now this form of investigation, more like a process of divestiture, brings me to an array of questions that I have only the slightest clues how to answer.
All of the leads that I do have arise from noticing the things that are left still lying about, the remains of the case that led to the inquiry. This includes, beyond the intentional products of focal investigations, the artifacts of analysis that still disturb the development of a clear and complete picture, the circumstantial evidence that fails to fit my nearest approximation to the facts, and the incidental residues that are supposed to have their sole function only in servicing the machinery of method, and yet that seem to litter the grounds around my present site.
For example, it was among this array of clutter on the workbench that I first noticed the distinction between form and matter. It appears as an element or tool that I have been using all along without much reflection on its qualities. And yet there is nothing simple in the way it appears, on the one hand, as a constituent of construction, on the other hand, as an instrument of interpretation. And then, the moment I start to reflect on it, to become aware of the contingent facticity of the distinction, as if for the very first time, I find I must confess that I have lost all my formerly implicit faith in the trustworthiness, the unquestioned utility, and the ultimate validity of even this apparently innocuous distinction. There is nothing then to do about it but to begin again, to examine the worth of this now hypothetical distinction, to see whether the old trust in it can be reconstructed, whether a new justification for it needs to be devised, whether anything like it has to be entirely dispensed with, or whether alternative forms of distinction and even much different types of relation are required to take its place.
Is it conceivable that the proper application of these bits and pieces to themselves and to each other can lead to a reconstruction of the rationality desired?
For instance, consider the distinction between form and matter.
No matter what distinction forms the interest of the moment, there is that which discerns, draws, finds, follows, grasps, makes, sees, or seizes the distinction in question, an experimental agency that might as well be called an "interpreter", a "maker", or an "observer" of that distinction. With regard to any form of distinction, the agency of a "distinguisher" or a "former" is a role that seems to suit what the Greeks fairly often described, but just barely hinted at, under the name of an "entelechy". In general, this is a somewhat mysterious designation, stemming from a complex of terms whose various connotations are commonly translated as "actuality" or "reality", and often as "actualization" or "realization", seeming to suggest "actualizer" or "realizer" for the duty of this agent. Sticking more literally to its etymology, the function of an "entelechy" can be taken to mean "that which has or is its end in itself", and thus "that which exists for its own sake" or "that which is complete as it is". Whether the interpreter actively creates the distinction as it is drawn or passively discovers the distinction as it is traced is not yet the issue of interest, and I leave this matter to a future distinction.
The relevance of the distinction between form and matter can be traced, not solely by way of illustration, to another passage from Aristotle:
...
One should not let the phrases "tertium quid" or "third something" lead one astray, going so far as to think that an additional essence, a new kind of material, or a novel substance is implied, when it might be only a third way of being, mode of existence, degree of freedom, dimension of motion, or an extra role in a relation that is actually required.
To this seminal account of interpretation the pragmatic theory of signs adds an array of general and specific elaborations, equipping it with a fully developed corpus of formal, instrumental, and material features. Since the pragmatic line of development is in some sense an alternative track to what is usually called the modern line, the naive enlightenment, or the cartesian tradition, and yet shares many aims and basic methods with this still current mode of inquiry, it is necessary to distinguish these different trends, to detect their different impacts on the present scene, and to discern their different imports for the future of inquiry. The accidental, intentional, and specific differences that the pragmatic theory of sign relations, in its currently developing form, is able to deploy over and above the ancient account, along with the differential circumstances that exist in the context of its present day applications, are taken up next, starting with the most salient augmentations and the most significant extensions of its overall lines of growth.
Some of the most important general features that mark out the pragmatic theory of sign relations from its original material are instrumental in character and arise largely due to changes in the "technological base", formally speaking, between the ancient and the present times, that is, by innovations in the formal languages and the technical methods that are made available for carrying out the discussion. Three of these general instrumental features are taken up next.
1. In conformity with the modern facility for thinking of relations in general in extensional terms, as collections of ordered n tuples of domain components that belong to the relation in question, current versions of the theory of signs render it easiest to think of each given sign relation as a particular collection of ordered triples. Elements of a sign relation are called "elementary sign relations" (ESR's), and the data of each given element of the sign relation can be represented as an ordered triple, of the form <o, s, i>, that names its object, sign, and interpretant, respectively.
2. Among the other props on the modern stage, the pragmatic theory of sign relations can make especially good use of the bounteous "logics" of relations and "algebras" of relative terms that are currently available, as expressed in any one of several symbolic calculi with approximately the power of predicate logic. Indeed, many of these algebras, calculi, and logics of relations received their first "modern" formulations in the work of C.S. Peirce, and in the very process of trying to deal with the problems presented by the classical theory of signs. As it happens, this coincidence of origins and this parallelism of derivations may help to account for the appearance of a quality of "pre established harmony" that is presently manifested between the general subject of relations and the special subject of sign relations.
3. Developments in other fields in the intervening times have caused the prevailing paradigms to shift a number of times. For starters, the lately recognized inescapability of "participatory observation", and the multitude of constraints on knowledgeable action that the necessity of this contingency implies, that ought to have always been clear in marking the horizons of anthropology, economics, politics, psychology, and sociology, and the phenomenological consequences of this unavoidability that have recently forced themselves to the status of physical principles and tardily made their appearance in the symbolic rites of the attendant formalities, against all the fields of reluctance that physics can generate, and in spite of the full recalcitrance that its occasional ancillary, mathematics, can bring to heel. These cautions leave even the casual observer nowadays much more suspicious about declaring the self evident independence of diverse aspects and axes of experience, whether assuming the disentanglement of different features of experiential quality or presuming on the orthogonality of their coordinate dimensions of formal quantity, for instance, as represented by the aspects of particles versus waves, or the axes of space versus time. Features and dimensions of experience that appear as relevant or arise into salience at one level of action, exchange, or observation can disappear from the scene of relevant regard at other stages of participation and weigh imponderably on other scales of transaction. In relation to one another, aspects and axes of experience that appear unrelated just so long as they are considered at one level of interaction and perception may not preserve their appearance of indifference and independence if the scales of participation under consideration are radically shifted, whether up or down in their order of magnitude. As a result, the sort of consideration that makes a line of experience conspicuous as it falls on one plane of existence is seldom enough to draw it through every plane of being. In a related fashion, the brand of consideration whose bearing on an intermediate scale of treatment causes one to regard two features or dimensions of experience as "moderately independent" or as "relatively orthogonal" is rarely ever relevant to all levels of regard and is almost never enough to justify one's calling these aspects "absolutely independent" or to support one's calling these axes "perfectly orthogonal".
Next, I examine the more specific features of the pragmatic theory of sign relations, focusing on attributes that are augmented in the degrees of their development and that acquire a distinctive emphasis along with the extension and growth of this theory. These features happen to be material in character, that is, they concern the contents of individual sign relations, affecting the aspects of relational structure and the orders of relational complexity that become especially conspicuous from the pragmatic point of view. Two of these specific material features are taken up next.
1. Direct relation between objects and signs.
2. Irreducibly triadic sign relations.
A few more things can now be said about the conditions that are usually taken for granted in the theoretical use of sign relations. Although it is often the case that the structure of the object domain is marked for reconstruction, part for part, in the partition of the syntactic domain, as one says, in the "divisions" of its "quotient structure", or equally, in the structure of its "semantic equivalence classes" (SEC's), which are also called its "semantic orbits" (SO's), it is advisable not to imagine, except in the most abstractly artifical and the most purely formal cases, that an object is "nothing but" an orbit of signs. In every situation of concrete or practical interest, the object domain is something that has a real existence, one that is "independent of" the syntactic domain to some degree, and to a degree of qualified independence that can be specified, for example, as "absolutely", "moderately, or "relatively". That is, an object exists in a manner that is more or less "independent of" both the signs and the interpretants that are used to talk and to think about it, as one sooner or later discovers in any real case where one is tempted to ignore the implications of this fact.
But this explanation of the status intended for objects only serves to elevate into prominence the subordinate question: What is meant by the relation "independent of"? Outside the realm of mathematics, where the necessity has long been recognized of declaring one's "independence" in the form of an explicit and public definition, one that makes clear the sense of the term that one plans to uphold, this is an issue that still manages to incite an uproarious confusion of "obvious" claims and often just as "obvious" counter claims, each of which is just as insistent in what it attributes to the terms of its relation as the actual basis for what it considers "evident" is kept implicit.
One thing does appear certain, at least, once the issue is addressed: Whatever it means, and however it is qualified, the relation of being "independent of" does not mean a relation of being "not in relation to". After all, did I not just call this, with all due justice, a relation? Indeed, independently of all questions of independence, the very notion of there being a relation "not in relation to" is a self cancelling nullity. Perhaps the closest that one can approach to conceiving of relations like "not related to" or "not a relative of", in short, perhaps the simplest analogues or approximations to such a relation that one can devise are: "considered as not in relation to" or "treated as not in relation to", prompting the questions: "considered by who?" and "treated by who?", all of which goes to make it manifest that a triadic relation is the minimal support needed for any such brand of speculative relation.
In trying to reach a form of relation that is minimal in a certain regard, the analysis comes to a point where it is forced to reverse its direction and to synthesize a complex relation, one that possesses a higher arity than might be expected of a structure intended as a primitive rudiment. What is ultimately suggested is a triadic relation that formulates the idea of a "consideration", a "regard", or a "treatment". This involves an agent that acts as the overseer of the consideration, the regard, or the treatment in question along with a couple of other entities that fall in a dyadic relation to each other under this consideration, this regard, or this treatment. The way to treat this triadic relation as sparingly as possible, in regard to the level of consideration that is assigned to it, is to let the agency of this oversight ignore as much as it possibly can about all the relations that conceivably exist between the overseen pair, the couple of agents, entities, or objects that fall within its purview. Thus, the least that the overseer can manage to do is to mark a relation between the other two parties, without codifying, conveying, recording, or retaining any information about the particular kind of relation it is. At any rate, this is the best interpretation that I find myself able to contrive at present for "X regards Y as not in relation to Z".
The preceding analysis may appear to lead up to a trivial point, but the argument just recounted is formally identical to a demonstration that is basic to pragmatic thinking, namely, that "we have no conception of the absolutely incognizable" (Peirce, CP 5.265). Whether or not one wishes to say that there are such things as the "absolutely incognizable", we have no conception of them. Any concept that we do have cannot truly be a concept "of" them, that is, it cannot be held to be "true" of them, since this all by itself would amount in fact to making them cognizable. The idea that a successful conception is intended by its very nature to result in a true concept is critical and crucial in this regard. If one merely wants to point out the triviality that we can have false concepts of anything we please, for example, the false concepts that are attached to the verbal formula "absolutely incognizable", then it is easy enough to stipulate that we are likely to have false conceits and misleading concepts about very many things indeed.
Since the pragmatic theory of sign relations welcomes partial symbols and verbal formulas of every species of description as well as mental impressions, concepts, and ideas of every genus and level of generation into the same broad class of entities that it takes as "signs", the idea of an object that is not the object of a sign imparts a formal impression within its material that is identical, or at least indistinguishable in the structure of the relations that it suggests, to the idea of a relation that fits the verbal formula or the specious specification "not in relation to". A rigorous critique of these very ideas is required in order to prevent their specious impressions from flowering into malign oppressions that obsess both the mind and the spirit. The pragmatic critique of prior philosophy and the pragmatic theory of signs are intended, in part, precisely to address this task of "weeding out" delusive ideas.
</pre>
=====5.2.11.6. Questions of Justification=====
=====5.2.11.6. Questions of Justification=====