ONT Re: New List & Classification of Signs
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Howard,
Let me see if I can explain in another way, one that will
incidentally connect up with the Semantic Web discussion,
why I do not think that you have so much as addressed the
question that was at issue in discussing Peirce's theory
of quantification, especially as it related to the index.
I did a Google search on the lexical item "x" yesterday and
it told me that it found 175,000,000 "hits" -- YMMV depending
on web traffic, the time of day, Google's web sweep cycle, and,
of course, the number will no doubt increase in the near future.
Google is not yet old enough to be case or gender sensitive,
and it/he/she is lacking in cognizance of most diacritical
and punctuation marks, for example, collapsing the series
x, 'x', "x", "'x'", ... into one big infinite tautology.
Here is just a sample of what I got on the first page:
It seems that "X" is the New York Stock Exchange monicker for
US STEEL CORP (NYSE:X), so I got a lot of stock-related links
that were too boring and complicated and ephemeral to bother
anybody with.
I got a lot of more entertaining links like these:
http://www.x-men-the-movie.com/
http://www.thexfiles.com/main_flash.html
And then there were tons and tons of links
to Microsoft X-Windows and Apple Mac OS X:
http://www.x.org/
http://www.apple.com/macosx/
I did not check to see whether any of these "hits"
implicated Ludwig or Karl, but since I am co-posting
this note to a Google-visible list, I can be pretty
sure that there will be one, at least, pretty soon.
Now, to rephrase in this setting the question that is
really at issue when we discuss the role of the index
in Peirce's logic, more generally, the indicial facet
and indicative function of language, a question that
I believe I can fairly say has yet to become so much
as visible to you, to judge by your responses, I can
ask it more concretely but illustratively this way:
What would Google Corp really have to do if it really wanted
to raise Google's "semiotic intelligence quotient" (SIC) to
the point where it could really "establish co-references"
in a half-way sensible fashion?
This is the type of question that is really at issue here.
To capture the gist of the example, it is a way of asking:
How, exactly, effectively, pragmatically, do all of these
blithe co-references really get 'established' in anything
approaching the intended way?
So far you have cast your remarks wholly interior to the species of
automatic/inveterate conventions of context or rules of the game --
hiding by the way a large number of unreflected and uncritiqued
assumptions -- that human beings play along with when they are
"gaming the play" or engaging in the piece of language theatre
that all the world calls the "predicate calculus", or one
rendition of it.
In continuing to hide away in this staged arena and its darkened theatre,
you are ignoring the task of examining its presuppostions, of making the
critical comaprisons between one play or one performance and another.
By insisting on translating everything into the one-eyed syntax and
the one-dimensional vision of first order logic, as you know it,
you are simply failing to see Peirce's logic at all, much less
examine it in anything like its due light.
If the readings from Murphey have shown us nothing else,
they have amply illustrated the kinds of distortions and
downright absurd spectacles that arise from trying to read
Peirce's logic through the goggles and boggles of Frege and
Russell. As a person who read Dodgson, Frege, Peirce, among
many others, in stereoptic parallel when I was first studying
logic in earnest, I can tell you that it is very good exercise
for the mind's eye to try and read each one's logic through the
goggles of the others, but it is totally short-sighted to throw
away all but one set of logical scopes.
A person who does read Peirce's logic with fresh eyes or
compensated vision will quickly learn the following sorts
of things: That three-quarters of a century before Quine
got self-conscious enough about logic to start appending
quotations to himself, Peirce had already developed the
theory of sign relations that had obsoleted in advance
most of the things that that tradition was putting out.
Jon Awbrey
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