Floyd Merrell
Purdue University
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Semiotica | 2005
João Queiroz; Floyd Merrell
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), creator of pragmatism, was a polymath. His contributions include such diverse areas of research as meteorology, experimental psychology, geodesics, astronomy, mathematical economy, philosophy of mathematics, theory of gravity, linguistics, history and philosophy of science, and the history and philosophy of logic (Fisch 1986: 376). In spite of the breadth of his academic purview, many Peirce scholars compress his work into the field of logic, which, for Peirce, was semiotic (Houser 1997: 1). There is some merit to this approach, since, according to Peirce, logic in its various forms includes all of the disciplines with which he was involved. Along with Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and David Hilbert, Peirce is considered one of the founders of modern logic (Lukasiewicz 1970: 111; Barwise and Etchemendy 1995: 211; Quine 1995: 23; Hintikka and Hilpinen 1997: ix). Independently of Frege, he developed the concepts of quantification and quantifying logic (Hintikka and Hilpinen 1997: ix; Quine 1985: 767, 1995: 31; Putnam 1982: 297). He was author of the terms ‘First Order Logic’ (Putnam 1988: 28), and ‘Trivalent Logic’ (Fisch and Turquette 1966; Lane 2001). He also anticipated Henry She¤er’s ‘Stroke Function’ by more than 30 years (W 4: 218–221; Houser 1997: 3); worked with what later came to be known as Claude Shannon’s correspondence between truth functions and electrical circuitry (W 5: 421–422; Gardner 1982); and developed a logical notation using topological forms (existential graphs) that anticipated hybrid systems of notation based on graphs, diagrams, and frames (Roberts 1973; Shin 1994, 2002; Barwise and Etchemendy 1995; Allwein and Barwise 1996; Hammer 1994, 1995). As if this were not enough, one of his most original contributions consists of his development of a logic of discovery based on the concept of abductive inference, as outlined by various scholars (Bernstein 1980;
Minds and Machines | 2009
João Queiroz; Floyd Merrell
How to model meaning processes (semiosis) in artificial semiotic systems? Once all computer simulation becomes tantamount to theoretical simulation, involving epistemological metaphors of world versions, the selection and choice of models will dramatically compromise the nature of all work involving simulation. According to the pragmatic Peircean based approach, semiosis is an interpreter-dependent process that cannot be dissociated from the notion of a situated (and actively distributed) communicational agent. Our approach centers on the consideration of relevant properties and aspects of Peirce’s pragmatic concept of semiotics. Upon developing this approach, we have no pretensions of our being able to present an exhaustive analysis of the differences between Peirce and other theoretical positions. Nevertheless, our contribution will serve to demonstrate how theorists contribute toward revealing certain fundamental ‘semiotic constraints’ that will be of interest and importance.
Semiotica | 2006
Floyd Merrell
Abstract We are all to a greater or lesser degree creative, and metaphor making is one of the most common channels along which the creative process flows. Three general theories of metaphor — comparison, substitution, and interaction — and three theories of creativity — mechanicism, organicism, and contextualism or holism — surface in the following pages. Peirces categories delineating the semiosic process, his concept of signs incessantly becoming other signs, and his insight regarding abduction, are brought to bear on these theories of metaphor and creativity, leading to the conclusion that both theories are a matter of overdetermined Firstness becoming under-determined Thirdness through nonlinear, emergent interdependent, interrelated interaction between signs and their makers and takers.
The Russian Journal of Communication | 2008
Floyd Merrell
This paper brings Lotman’s semiotic space to bear on Peirce’s concept of the sign with respect to broad cultural processes. Consideration of cultural processes in the Peircean mode calls for an extension of Lotman’s pair of terms, primary and secondary modeling systems, in view of Peirce’s notion of the sign as triadic. As a consequence of this extension, the premise in this inquiry has it that: (1) triadic signs within complex cultural processes are interdependent, interrelated and interactive, (2) triadic signs make up an interconnected, contradictory complementary convergent whole, which is inconsistent and/or incomplete, depending upon the cultural context, (3) inconsistency and incompleteness are of the nature of Peirce’s vagueness and generality respectively, the first being chiefly of the nature of the category of Firstness and the second chiefly of the nature of Thirdness, (4) the role of Secondness unfolds through acts of selection from the possibilities of Firstness, such acts of selection involving a separation of signs, their semiotic objects and their interpretants, (5) Thirdness renders signs general, yet generalities are almost invariably incomplete, given human fallibilism, hence the ‘final sign’ or ‘final interpretant’ is always out of reach, and (6) fallibilism breeds a tendency, within broad cultural processes, toward either (a) successive differentiation (or heterogeny) of signs, or (b) hegemony, dominance and subservience, and superordination and subordination.
Sign Systems Studies | 2010
Floyd Merrell
Three premises set the stage for a Peirce based notion of resemblance, which, as Firstness, cannot be more than vaguely distinguished from Secondness and Thirdness. Inclusion of Firstness with, and within, Secondness and Thirdness, calls for a nonbivalent, nonlinear, context dependent mode of thinking characteristic of semiosis — that is, the process by which everything is always becoming something other than what it was becoming — and at the same time it includes linear, bivalent classical logic as a subset. Certain aspects of the Dao, Buddhist philosophy, and Donald Davidson’s ‘radical interpretation’ afford additional, and perhaps unexpected, support for the initial set of three premises.
Semiotica | 2008
Floyd Merrell
Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio’s Semiotics Unbounded: Interpretive Routes through the Open Network of Signs (hereafter SU ) emerges from a tenacious, work-ethic oriented, and ambitiously designed disquisition on the sign and a response to various semiotic theories that were developed during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. At the outset I must confess that my problem is: How can I do justice to this massive volume in a couple of dozen or so pages? If a valid review there may be regarding SU, it can hardly be addressed to more than a handful of the various and sundry topics therein contained. So, it’s a piecemeal approach, the focus of which will be SU ’s critique of those lingering vestiges of the glottocentric, Saussurrean, code-based, bivalent logic-based theory of the sign.
Semiotica | 2005
Floyd Merrell
Allow me to begin with what will likely appear as an inordinately sentimental statement, though I hope to qualify it as this essay moves along: abduction dwells within us and we dwell within it whenever we are in the act of processing signs. In the most general way of putting this, the evolution of the human species and our own development — or lack thereof — are what they are by virtue of the cultural context within which we live and breathe, and this cultural context is what it is by virtue of the human species as a whole and ourselves as a minute and quite insignificant part of it. In a nutshell, we are all interdependently, interrelatedly, interactively in a process of becoming within the becomingness of our self-organizing world (Bateson 1972: 128–56). We learn about this very important aspect of our everyday living when Peirce tells us of an experience of the simplest sort:
Semiotica | 2011
Floyd Merrell
Abstract Mind has played the starring role in the Wests arts, humanities, and sciences, while an embodied notion of oneself, others, and the physical world has been customarily pushed under the rug. In view of radical new theories, methods and techniques that have emerged during the past century and a half, the notion of complementary, sympathetic co-participation, and its accompanying re-enchantment, merits attention. C. S. Peirce is at the crossroads between modernism, enchantment, and misplaced concreteness, on the one hand, and postmodernism and its attendant poststructuralism, on the other. His categories of feeling, sensation, and thought, and his triadic, all-encompassing concept of the sign, can help bring all facets of human creativity, concrete living, and understanding into a proper balance. Three coined terms — homogeny, hierogeny, and heterogeny — serve to elucidate how Peirces triadic vision can offer a middle path, a way of mediating between antagonistic modes of sensing, living, and thinking. This middle path follows traditional tenets of logic and reason — identity, non-contradiction, and excluded-middle — while at its fringes, it allows deviation — by way of process, inconsistency, and incompleteness (in concert with complementary, sympathetic co-participation) — from the rigidity that lies therein. Studies of feminist postures and various cultural processes in Latin America bear out the premise that a dose of conformity accompanying a tendency toward resistance can synethnically help keep broad cultural processes on an even keel, balancing mind and body, conflicting theories and methods and modes of living, and styles of reason and unreason in equilibrium.
Semiotica | 2009
Floyd Merrell
Abstract Peirces concept of the sign can be qualified in terms of inter-dependence, inter-relatedness, and inter-action, from icons to indices to symbols, from Firstness to Secondness to Thirdness, and with respect to sign generacy and degeneracy. This entails a contradictory complementary coalescence of signs, within a temporal-spatial flux and flow wherein everything is always becoming something other than what it was becoming. In this vein, the present article suggests that (1) topological models, (2) certain facets of twentieth-century science up to the present, and (3) avant-garde art — specifically, Cubism and the work of Mavrits C. Escher — when qualified by (4) a non-Boolean, non-linear, context-dependent, contradictory complementary lattice, which reveals (5) sign convergence and blending, or signs becoming signs, can offer (6) a synthetic account of the general semiosic process.
Archive | 2006
Floyd Merrell
We have Borges’s Funes, the “memorious” (1962a), that inveterate hypernominalist and hard-core realist for whom every perceptual grasp of aspects of his world was committed to memory in all its particulars as an autonomous atom of experience, and for whom at every moment what he perceives is fresh, spontaneously arisen, and as if entirely new. Funes’s problem is that he can forget nothing; hence he can not think, for to think is to abstract, select, forget almost everything in order to focus on some things.