SUO: Re: What the hell was CSP talking about?
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Joseph Ransdell wrote:
>
> I agree entirely with your response to Doug McDavid,
> Jon, but thought I would just add that Peirce would have
> accomplished very little philosophically if his semiotical
> conceptions depended on a subjective interpreting mind independent
> of the sign relation itself that somehow brings it into existence.
> His semiotic is of special interest precisely because it aims at
> explicating the conception of mind rather than depending on
> a conception of mind indepedently acquired and based.
Yes, that is one of the very reasons that I have been so persistent
in trying to maintain the classical connotations and the established
definitions of the term "hypostasis", one of which senses has an acute
bearing on this question of which comes first, the sign-bearing process
or the bearer thereof, to wit, the usage of "hypostasis" to mean a form
of "personification". For it is through just such an abductive figure of
speech, by which one "makes the reach" to assimilate and to syncretize one's
brute experiences and impressions of the gradually externalized world, that one
initially hypothesizes, infers, or postulates the existence of one's personal ego.
> I think, in any case, it is clear from his early ambitions that are expressed
> frequently in Volume 1 of the new chronological edition that the import of the
> phrase "all thought is in signs" is to locate thought in the observable signs
> themselves -- such as, say, the signs on the screen right now (if you are
> reading this from the screen) -- as a relational property thereof, rather
> than thinking of signs as taking on sign-value because a mind somehow
> infuses them with meaning from its own "inner" resources.
>
> Joe Ransdell
> ransdell@door.net
For my part, I have nothing against admitting classes of signs
that cleave to the confines of the mind in a way that is well
nigh impossible to render them shorn of, but it is true that
we will not have much to do with these in a public clearing
until they are transmuted into forms that permit of sharing.
Jon Awbrey
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