Hi John: (01)
Thanking you in advance for an education money can't buy. A couple of
questions: (02)
JS > Basic classification of signs:
>
> * Mark — any pattern in any modality that someone
> or something is capable of perceiving.
>
> * Token — a classification of some mark as an instance
> of some type.
>
> * Type — a general pattern associated with some schema
> or rule for classifying and relating the marks in the
> environment. (03)
What's the relationship between Types and Tokens in Peirce's semiotics?
Mark seems a little like conception from "On a New List of Categories",
but not exactly. Are you making this easier for folks like me, or is
there a direct reference to mark in The Essential Peirce (TEP). I've
been browsing TEP for a few years now and it would be great to have a
mentor! (04)
> JS>> Incoming signals that impinge on our nerve endings are signs.
>
> BS> what are they just before they impinge? (05)
ok, I was going to say interpretant. I'm trying to understand the text,
but it seems like interpretants are "end of the line" conceptions. (06)
See On a New List of Categories, #10 (07)
"Now they are not brought to unity until we conceive them together as
being ours, that is, until we refer them to a conception as their
interpretant. Thus the reference to an interpretant arises upon the
holding together of diverse impressions, and therefore does not join a
conception to the substance, as the other two references do, but unites
directly the manifold of the substance itself. It is therefore the last
conception in order in passing from being to substance." (08)
*WOW* Whaddaya expect from a guy who can't spell his own last name.
That's it for this weekend, I need a beer! (09)
Any help would be greatly appreciated. (010)
--
Best wishes, (011)
Rick (012)
email: rick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
web: http://www.rickmurphy.org
cell: 703-201-9129 (013)
John F. Sowa wrote:
> Barry,
>
> Those are good questions, which bring out some
> important issues. First I'd like to summarize the
> terminology with two slides from a recent talk:
> ____________
>
> *Peirce's Semiotics*
>
> Any perceptible configuration of the universe may be
> interpreted as a sign by someone or something.
>
> Basic classification of signs:
>
> * Mark — any pattern in any modality that someone
> or something is capable of perceiving.
>
> * Token — a classification of some mark as an instance
> of some type.
>
> * Type — a general pattern associated with some schema
> or rule for classifying and relating the marks in the
> environment.
>
> Example: A mark may be a pattern of green and yellow in
> the lawn. The mark may be interpreted as a token of type
> Plant, Weed, Flower, SaladGreen, Dandelion, etc.
> _____________
>
> *Icon, Index, Symbol*
>
> All living organisms from bacteria to humans process signs.
>
> A sign may be characterized by the way the mark determines
> the referent:
>
> * Icon — according to some similarity of image, pattern,
> or structure.
>
> * Index — according to some physical relationship;
> e.g., immediate presence, pointing to something remote,
> or causally indicating something not directly perceptible.
>
> * Symbol — according to some convention; e.g., spoken words,
> written words, money, flag, uniform...
>
> Communication, memory, learning, and reasoning depend on signs,
> but most signs are not symbols.
> _________
>
> Given this terminology, I'd make the following responses
> to your questions:
>
> JS>> Incoming signals that impinge on our nerve endings are signs.
>
> BS> what are they just before they impinge?
>
> Anything that does not impinge, has not yet impinged, or is
> not capable of affecting our nerve endings is an undetected
> part of the environment. Using telescopes, microscopes, and
> other instruments, we can detect aspects of the environment
> that are beyond the reach of our senses.
>
> When I said "someone or something", I intended the something
> to be an organism that could be as lowly as a bacterium or
> some sort of humanly designed instrument that serves as an
> extension or a surrogate for our nervous system.
>
> As soon as those environmental features are detected by the
> nerves or instruments, they may be called "marks", which are
> the most basic signs. A mark does not become a token until
> it is interpreted as an instance of some type.
>
> JS>> What we call "objects" are the external projections of our
> >> internal constructions that have proved to be useful over long
> >> periods of time.
>
> BS> Were the unicellular organisms existing billions of years ago
> > already then objects?
>
> The organisms are the things that are doing the perceiving. The
> things that are perceived could be called by many different terms,
> including objects, processes, stimuli, etc. Since bacteria don't
> have language, they don't call them anything, but they classify
> the marks as tokens according to types, which we may call food,
> nourishment, poison, danger, threat, etc. By their behavior,
> we can observe the responses that indicate how they classify
> various stimuli according to the types that we identify.
>
> JS>> Different psychologists may have different theories and
> >> different terminology for the processes of perception, but
> >> what they're discussing is still signs and signs of signs.
>
> BS> Did we evolve from signs and signs of signs?
>
> Our bodies evolved from other bodies, but our minds evolved
> from more primitive sign-processing minds or quasi-minds of
> simpler organisms. A few million years ago, they were apes,
> which are extremely human-like except for linguistic ability.
> A few billion years ago, they were some sort of unicellular
> organisms, for which Peirce coined the term "quasi-mind".
>
> Peirce made the point that every thought, idea, concept, or
> percept is a sign and that the mind is a complex sign composed
> of the totality of all the simpler signs that flow through it.
>
> That, in short, is Peirce's solution to the so called mind-body
> problem: Instead of postulating an unbridgeable gap between
> an abstract mind and a physical body, Peirce developed a theory
> of the way physical sign tokens are classified by abstract
> sign types. The mind and its contents can be classified
> according to abstract sign types, but it and its contents
> are embodied in tokens of those types.
>
> John
>
>
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