Re: “On the Paradigm of Experience Appro priate for Semiotic”

* Comments on the Peirce List slow reading of Joseph Ransdell,
   "On the Paradigm of Experience Appropriate for Semiotic",
   http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/ransdell/paradigm.htm

Peirce List, CG List,

Without meaning to jump ahead of the slow reading, let me just give
a preview of coming attractions by way of justifying the time a few
of us have been spending trying to tease out the shades of meaning
in Peirce's concept of the formal.

JR: Let me now explain why I think the ideas of the empirical,
     the experiential, and the experimental can be disentangled
     from the complex of dubious distinctions and restrictions we
     usually associate with them, such that it is possible for us
     to regard all applied semiotics as empirical semiotics, which
     means, in effect, that the term "empirical semiotics" can cease
     to function as a term of contrast, and the semiotics movement in
     general thereby take a further step in the direction of unity. [8]

JR: Now let us note three ideas which are implicit in
     the ideas of learning from trying out or attempting.

JR: First, there is the idea of a certain possibility which is entertained
     seriously enough by the tryer to warrant actually making trial of it to
     see if there is any truth in it: in other words, there is implicit here
     the idea of a question to be answered, or a hypothesis to be verified or
     disverified.

JR: Second, there is the idea of something other than or external to the tryer
     and his/her hypothesis, something with a being of its own which may turn out
     to be in agreement with what the tryer is trying to do or is testing, but which
     may turn out to be obstinately other than the tryer anticipates it as being;
     something stubborn, autonomous, independent: in short, the root idea of the
     brute fact against which the hypothesis may be dashed and perhaps destroyed
     or modified.

JR: Then, third, there is the idea of learning which takes place in virtue of
     the trial, a modification of the learner and his or her ideas which results
     from the attempt, be it a success or a failure: the root idea of verification
     and disverification, not in the rarefied formal logical sense but rather in the
     more basic sense that the attempt will in fact tend to reinforce or to alter or
     to weaken the tryer's confidence or belief in the actuality of the possibility
     entertained and acted upon. [9]

We have the assertion that "it is possible for us to regard all applied semiotics as
empirical semiotics", in other words, the study of semiosis as a process of learning
to accept or reject hypotheses through concrete interaction with external realities,
as opposed to inference in a "rarefied formal logical sense".

Jon

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